A version of this essay appears in Sex and Single Girls.
Sandy asked the three of us to drip the grease from our pizza onto hers–she liked it extra-greasy. As I pointed my slice over hers (at just the right angle so as not to lose the cheese), Erica said, “it was incredible. Fantastic. Incredible. I don’t know what to say.” Erica rubbed her fingers under her eyes to smudge her teal eyeliner just so, then checked her work in a small mirror.
“I’ve been waiting all day,” Liz said. “I thought the lunch bell would never ring.”
Erica took a long sip of grape soda and sighed.
“Erica, you promised you’d tell me. You promised.”
Erica finally put down her soda and leaned in to whisper to Liz.
The four of us sat on a stoop near our junior high school. The way we sat–Erica and Liz on one step and Sandy and I below them–I couldn’t hear a thing. Except for Liz’s “oh my God, oh my God, oh my fucking God.”
“No fair!” Sandy held her pizza carefully, so that the extra grease wouldn’t run down her forearm.
Erica continued whispering.
Two years ago, in 5th grade, Erica had been a large and awkward girl. We all felt bad for her during limbo when her breast nubs grazed the broom handle (though she didn’t have a chance–I saw Jed and Sam lower the broom onto her breasts once, and that wasn’t very nice, but who was going to tell the teacher?) But now, Erica was practically one of Them–the popular girls who leaned against cars and smoked cigarettes after school, the girls who swapped strawberry lip gloss and friendship pins. Erica had ten friendship pins–safety pins strung with beads and fastened around a shoelace–and I only had one.
Erica looked down at Sandy and me. “Derek says that springtime brings the most wonderful smells.”
I smelled car exhaust, old piss and Erica’s hair spray. Maybe springtime brings the most wonderful smells to Little House on the Prairie, I thought, but not Manhattan.
Erica took a deep breath and smiled. “Do either of you girls know what finger fucking is?”
“What?” Sandy’s eyes grew wide.
Erica leaned down close. I smelled her grape soda. “It’s when he puts his fingers inside of you, you know…”
I didn’t know. Back in 5th grade Andi Benjamin’s mother came to talk to the girls about feeling ourselves inside. She brought diagrams and talked about taking extra time in the shower for the task. We laughed at her behind her back; the information was absurdly early and I at least had no intention of searching out anything so gross. But we were used to getting information early–and laughing. We all read Are you there God, it’s Me, Margaret in 2nd grade and Forever (with the penis named Ralph) in 4th. But Erica telling us about finger fucking in 7th grade wasn’t funny.
Erica studied her nails. “Derek says he needs to do that to prepare me…”
“I bet it hurt.” Sandy picked at her crust.
“Sure it hurt, but it was worth it. No pain, no gain…right, girls?”
The springtime sunshine suddenly seemed too bright. Three homeless men sat on a stoop across the street. I heard an ambulance rush down 8th Avenue.
I tapped Sandy on the shoulder. “Do you want the rest of my pizza? I’m not hungry anymore.”
After school, I walked home trying to imagine Erica and Derek. Were they sitting or lying down? Did they keep the light on? If not, how could he see? Which finger did he use? Did he put it in quick like a toothpick in a baking cake, or did he wiggle it around in there? I was curious, but I couldn’t shake that nauseous feeling that got me at lunch.
I hated the thirteen block walk home from school. My mother had gotten Section 8 housing the year before, so we moved from a sleepy, residential street in Brooklyn to a nameless neighborhood in Manhattan. South of Hell’s Kitchen, north of Chelsea, this new neighborhood stunned me with the number of men on the street. Lingering in doorways, pushing racks of fur down the street, ripping down old buildings, putting up new ones. They always had something to say.
Sexy Mama
You’ve got a fine ass
You know you want it
You know what I could do to you?
I imagined what they could do to me. I hated their comments, they terrified me. The comments became as natural as traffic lights and newspaper stands. I walked quickly, trying not to draw attention to myself.
A few months before Erica told us about finger fucking, I left the apartment to go to the subway station. Two men sucked air through their teeth as I passed. I kept walking. I crossed 8th Avenue and headed down a long block of crumbling office buildings and fur wholesalers. I saw a man watching me at the other end of the block. He bobbed his head up and down as if he were listening to music. It was only as I approached that I noticed he bobbed his head to the rhythm of my walk. It took 20 paces more to see that he was laughing at me. His gaze steady on my chest–my chest! His head following my breasts. As I passed him, he leaned in and whispered, “baby, let me tame those titties for you.” I was 12 years old.
And so it was that I got my first bra: not because Erica or Sandy or Liz had one, not out of excitement or because I wanted to act like a woman. It was because the men on the street let me know it was time. When I went with my mother to Macy’s to buy my first bra–Warner’s size 34A–I wasn’t looking for something satiny or soft. I was looking for armor.
After I got my bra, I learned that if I walked fast and hard, with a stern face, that some of the men shut up. Other ones said,
Hey baby, give me a smile.
Honey, what’s up your ass?
Bitch.
But the skills I learned to feel safe on the walk to school didn’t serve me well once I got there. The popular girls were all boy crazy, experimenting with Wet N’ Wild make-up, glitter nail polish and Sun-In hair lightener. Even though I went with Sandy and Liz to steal purple eyeliners from Woolworth’s, I felt ambivalent about making myself up. I wanted friendship pins, popularity. But I also wanted to rush back to flat-chested 5th grade.
When I walked with my friends–safety in numbers–we routinely chorused “fuck you” to men that cat-called us, barely missing a beat in conversation. But we never talked about how they made us feel. Now that I live far from that nameless neighborhood in Manhattan, I see that it was a peculiar environment, heavy with the threat of violence. The wrong place to get breasts. At the time, though, I assumed it was all my fault. The comments, the lascivious stares, the butt pinches. Without a way to make sense of the confused messages around me, I acted as if everything were perfectly fine, and, just like Erica, things would be incredible once I found a guy, the right guy.
My junior year in high school, I met Joey. He had soft curly hair and a lopsided grin. He talked about playing football, writing and his mother. He was leaving for college in a few weeks, and we said from the outset that we didn’t want anything “serious.” The first time he kissed me, in front of a Korean grocery, I hoped he wouldn’t know that I had never kissed anyone before. He tasted like Crest and French fries. If he noticed my inexperience, he didn’t mention it. I thought he was kind.
A week later we went for a walk through Washington Square Park. “Do you want to come over for a while? My mom will be away for hours.” He drew out the word “hours,” made it sound long as a day.
He had been telling me about his shoulder injury, how he had to give up football and everything. I knew that if I went to his apartment we wouldn’t be talking about torn ligaments and Ace bandages anymore. I hesitated, then said, “Uh, sure.”
“Great.” He kissed me on the cheek.
In his apartment, we sat on a white couch. He leaned over to kiss me. I’ve got to remember every detail, I can’t wait to tell Marcy, I thought. His cheek was rough with stubble. The couch smelled like dogs. The whir of the air conditioner covered the street noise.
“You’re really beautiful, you know that?” Joey eased my shirt over my head.
Marcy’s not going to believe this…
He reached around to unclasp my bra. “Is this OK?” he asked. I nodded and smiled. A closed lip smile that I hoped was both seductive and relaxed at the same time. A smile that said, “sure, no big deal.”
But then things started going wrong.
First, Joey’s fingers got caught in my bra straps and he scratched me. Hard. Then I kicked the coffee table and spilled a glass of soda on the floor.
But I’m sure those small fumbles would have faded away in the rosy memories of that afternoon if it hadn’t been for the biggest problem; the one for which neither Joey nor I were prepared.
I twitched.
Not graceful shudders or feminine shivers. No, these were full-fledged fish out of water jerks. It happened the first time Joey leaned down to kiss my breast. Without warning, I felt a strong tickle in my lower back, then my body lurched forward. My breast slapped him in the mouth.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry.” I felt my face redden.
“Wow.” Joey rubbed his lips. He tried touching my breasts, but after a moment I felt that same tickle in my back and then I twitched. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable lying down.” He put a pillow under my head and another under my knees. He kneeled down on the floor beside me. I tried to distract myself by looking at the irregular bumps on his stucco ceiling. Joey moved his hands around my neck and chest. Every time he touched my breasts, I twitched.
Joey, as I have mentioned, was a kind person and I thought it was really wonderful that he didn’t mention the obvious. That I had a very, very serious problem. Probably some sort of rare nervous disorder. Judy Blume never mentioned this, neither did Erica. In all of her movies, Molly Ringwald didn’t twitch once.
“Here, let me help you on with your shirt,” Joey said later. We drank Dr. Pepper and he talked about the differences between college and high school football. I sat on the couch and he sat on the floor, with his legs crossed. Then I left his apartment. We saw each other a few times after that, always outside. Even though Joey never mentioned my problem, I was relieved when he left for college a few weeks later.
The next year, when I was seventeen, I fell in love. Christopher and I met in ceramics class. At first I thought he was a freak. He was the only one who interrupted the teacher as he droned on about coil pots, raku and underglazes. In our first conversations, Christopher gestured wildly with his hands full of clay, making bad jokes. I rolled my eyes and said “ha, ha” in as much of a monotone as I could muster. But outside of school he calmed down. He told me that he hated school and that he spent his time studying China and Chinese. While the rest of my high school prepared to go to college, he prepared to move to Taiwan. This made him something of a rebel. He intrigued me.
When we eventually kissed, I prayed my twitch had gone away. We sat on the edge of Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. Kids played Frisbee and hackeysack in the middle of the field. I made it through the first kiss without incident. But as soon as he edged his hands near my chest, I felt the tickle in my lower back, like a thousand icy feathers. It gathered strength like a sneeze. The next moment, I twitched. The more I tried to stop it, the more spastic my movements became.
I felt more comfortable with Christopher than I did with Joey, so we eventually talked about it. We were house-sitting in Brooklyn for a married couple who lived in a converted a funeral home. It was an odd place. He was a rabbi and she was a ceramicist, they were both named Simcha (with different last names). We sat on their roof one night, looking at rows of brownstones and wooden water towers. We’d been kissing, my back and chest had been twitching and jerking as usual. I finally leaned back on my hands.
“It’s interesting,” Christopher said of my twitch.
“Interesting? What if it gets worse? Maybe I’ll start convulsing when you just look at me.”
“I might like that,” he grinned.
“I’m not kidding. I think it’s a disease or something.”
“Yeah, probably. I give you another six months.”
I gave him my best this is serious look and he stopped smiling. Taking my hand he said, “I’m sure it’s totally normal, really.” He took a sip of root beer. “Totally normal,” he repeated. “I bet there’s even a name for it. I’ve got it–The Seventeen Year Twitch!” He burst out laughing.
His laughter was contagious, so I looked away. He didn’t understand. Twitching wasn’t a joke. I wanted to sigh into sex, to have romantic heavy lidded eyes and a pliant, cooperative body. Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do?
The conversation about my twitching was one of the last we had before he moved to Taiwan. A few weeks after he left, I entered my own foreign country: college. The campus was small and green. I spent the first few months feeling like I lived in the middle of Central Park. Suddenly, everything I had taken for granted had disappeared. No great city, no neighborhoods, no babble of languages and foods. No men lingering on street corners. Students all seemed to walk in a daze from the dining hall to the library, from dorms to classrooms.
“You walk so fast,” people told me.
“I’m from New York,” became my stock answer.
“People move fast in the big city, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I didn’t tell them that I moved fast by instinct, to stay safe. My hypervigilance was misplaced at college. For the first time since I had gotten breasts, no strange men yelled about them. In the absence of constant harassment, I had the space to think about it.
I realized that I had learned to view harassment as an annoyance, something we dismiss with a swat of the hand, a roll of the eyes. When a man yelled “nice titties” or “fine ass,” my mother told me to ignore him. When men cat called her, she quickened her pace and grabbed my hand. She drilled me in safety rules: walk down the center of the sidewalk, so no one can snatch you into a building or car, never ask a man for help, ride next to the conductor in the subway…the list went on. I thought harassment wasn’t supposed to affect me any more than smog, traffic or garbage in the gutters. But of course it did. I began to consciously struggle with the contradiction of my intense attraction to individual guys with my distrust of men in general.
Meanwhile, I had come to accept my twitch, to some extent. In what felt like a tremendous bout of maturity, I understood that many people had, well, quirks. I had read Dear Abby throughout childhood and could draw solace from the husband who wrote in, complaining that his wife farted like a fiend every time they had sex. Or the woman who pulled her eyebrow hairs out, one by one, as she slept. My nervous miswiring wasn’t any worse than those ailments. I mapped my twitching trigger points and firmly guided guys hands away from them. I saw that the twitch lost its edge when the rest of my body was focused on pleasure.
But I still felt dramatically behind. Things would have been easier for me if I ignored the pressure to catch up to the other girls (or women, as we had mysteriously yet emphatically become in the summer between high school and college). Though I knew I wasn’t ready for sex, I didn’t feel confident enough in myself or my body’s timeline to hear sex-talk without feeling worried that there was something wrong with me.
We seemed to separate ourselves into two camps, those who had done it and those who hadn’t. Those that stood firmly on the other side spoke to us virgins with an authoritative nonchalance that both impressed and intimidated me. One evening, Becky studied her beer bottle and tried to make an accurate comparison between its size and the size of her boyfriend’s penis. She pointed high on the neck of the bottle and grinned. “You know,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “It got a lot better after about the hundredth time or so.”
A hundred times! It felt like Junior High School all over again. Except the conversations had come so disturbingly far from fingers. To swallow or not to swallow?
Sponge versus diaphragm. Was he good? Was he big? Becky told me not to stress about it, that one day it would happen to me too. Her tone, confident and patronizing as a baby-sitter’s, did little to settle my anxieties. Elaine didn’t help, either. My sophomore year she taped a few sheets of notebook paper into a large square and charted everyone who had gotten together. Intercourse wasn’t required to make the chart, so my name appeared on a couple of dead-end offshoots. Some people were like suns, with rays pointing out in all directions. At the end, Elaine discovered that practically everyone at our small college was connected sexually. “Even me and you,” she announced cheerfully.
The public nature of sex on our thimble-sized campus added to the pressure I felt. Secret flings couldn’t exist–someone was bound to spot you stumbling back to your dorm room in the grey pre-dawn hours, and people gossiped as freely as if they were talking about the weather. My freshman dorm had a room in the basement dubbed the “Fuck Room,” complete with a stained twin mattress, heavy beige curtains and a stale, vaguely sweet odor. I’m not sure how the information got disseminated, but we all knew who visited that room as sure as if a sign-up sheet were tacked to the door.
My junior year, I took a semester off and moved to Ecuador. I wanted to do “real work,” in the “real world.” I didn’t have a firm idea what either one of those things meant, but I knew for certain that college felt suffocating and decidedly unreal.
I moved to Cuenca, a small Andean city where I found volunteer work. The center of town had narrow cobblestoned streets and old buildings built in the Spanish style with ornate facades and wrought iron balconies. An enormous cathedral flanked the main plaza. Indigenous women with strands of golden beads circling their necks sold everything from avocados to hats to richly dyed sweaters. Men appeared suddenly by my side and, if I wanted, seemed ready to follow me for hours. I never relaxed with these instant male companions, though I often enjoyed their conversation. They didn’t harass or threaten me like the men I encountered in New York. One of the rare times men yelled after me was at the public university in Quito. I walked with another foreigner, a woman with pale skin and bright red hair. We heard the men behind us and quickened our step. But we soon realized that they yelled not about our breasts or butts. “Capitalist! Imperialist! Yankee go Home!” were their slogans.
In Cuenca, I volunteered on a drinking water and latrine project. I thought I’d finally get a break from the constant conversations about sex. But, as it turned out, there was no escape. The topic followed me as faithfully as if I wedged it in my backpack between my socks and Spanish dictionary.
I assisted Marta, a spunky 29 year old health educator. It soon became evident that she valued me not for my Xeroxing or filing prowess (which were prodigious). Nor for the speed with which I collated dozens of pamphlets titled WITH LATRINES, WE AVOID ILLNESS with a picture of a smiling man using the finished product with his pants around his ankles. Instead, it was my status as an American girl that proved valuable to her. Because she needed to talk about sex. And who better than an American girl? In all the movies, we do it early and often, right?
Our conversations were funny. I asked her questions about the indigenous communities we visited, she asked me questions about sex. She was dating a Peace Corps volunteer named Alan. He had green eyes and a “gringo laugh” and her mother thought he was improper and rude.
“You’re the only one I can talk about these things with,” she confided one morning as we drove to a remote community. She’d decided to sleep with him a couple of months before and was burning with the secret. She told me that it hadn’t hurt like she’d expected.
Marta raced her jeep over rocks and mud in the unpaved road. The dirt was a deep red, the sun was rose over sharp mountain peaks. A pair of dogs raced up to the jeep, barking and galloping alongside us, the wind pulling their hair back behind them.
“Men are like dogs.” Marta laughed, throwing her head in the direction of the dogs and snarling. The jeep swerved. “But American men, they are sweeter, yes? And bigger, I’ve heard, too.” She winked at me. Then, “It’s true that American girls do it early, isn’t it?”
I pretended that I didn’t hear her and turned my head to look at the red clay mountains and clusters of wildflowers.
“Sex,” she clarified, yelling now. “American girls all do it by the time they’re 15, right?”
“I guess so,” I mumbled. The dogs lagged in the distance, standing in the middle of the road with their tongues hanging loose.
“Guess so?” she repeated. Then, “you’ve done it, haven’t you?”
Was it a conspiracy? I wished my Spanish were weaker so I could slide out of the conversation with a few well-placed “no entiendos.” I thought about lying. But that might lead to a whole new level of detailed questioning. So I went with the truth. “No.” I looked at my fingernails. “No, I haven’t.”
Marta slapped her hands on the steering wheel. “I’m learning so much already.”
My inexperience was like a heavy coat I wore in the strong sun. My desires and fears bumped up against each other, leaving me just plain confused. In this muddled state, I came across Rodrigo.
We met at a party for a tiny museum on the banks of the Tomebamba River, in Cuenca. Ribbons of white lights laced the trees outside of the museum, casting windy shadows on the guests. Girls carried trays with small plastic cups filled with hot drinks that smelled like rubbing alcohol and cinnamon. I coughed each time I took a sip.
Rodrigo stood by himself, leaning against the outside of the museum and looking up at the sky. I thought he was beautiful. He had pale, flawless skin and raven black hair. He wore jeans, a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. He absentmindedly ran his hand though his thick hair. I downed a second drink (coughing less this time) and walked up to him. I don’t remember what I said to him–my pick-ups were awkward enough in English, let alone Spanish. We talked for a long time, leaning against the building. I listened to the rush of the river under the chatter of the other guests. It was a cool night and soon Rodrigo offered me his leather jacket. It smelled like leather and incense. I was giddy.
By the time he kissed me, two extremely long weeks after I met him, my entire body ached for him. We stood at a street corner and he reached over and brushed his lips across mine. I took his hand. Instead of walking me home, he led me to a small, deserted shrine on a hillside. Offerings of mandarin oranges, soda and cake sat on the stone altar. We found a dark spot and started making out in earnest. Every so often, Rodrigo would draw my attention to the sky, pointing out constellations I pretended I could pick out from the dazzling pin-pricks of light. It was only when we quietly stood up and brushed the dirt off our clothes that I realized I hadn’t twitched at all.
Although Rodrigo didn’t stand out physically (except for his great good looks), he was different from anyone I had met in Ecuador. It wasn’t only that he didn’t try to charm me with awful metaphors comparing my body parts to tropical fruits. He didn’t have a strong need to assert his masculinity, which I found shocking and incredibly attractive. He saw himself like a bird, perched on a branch high above the cultural world of his peers.
I was completely smitten. If the cliché “love is blind” is too extreme, something less catchy like “love is visually impaired” or even “love needs glasses” works. Because if my love had glasses, I would have realized from the outset that he was a bit odd. And I wouldn’t have been so crushed when we finally admitted that we weren’t going to ride off into the sunset together. But that’s a different story. Suffice it to say that when we met, I felt like I had finally found the true love that I had heard so much about. The kind of love that knocks you down like a strong wave.
“Wow, it still feels strange,” Rodrigo said one afternoon, running his hand through his hair. We sat on the banks of the river. Washerwomen stood shin-deep in the water, snapping sheets and shirts on the rocks before spreading them out to dry.
“Strange?”
“To have all this hair. I shaved my head for all the years I was with Krishna.”
I had a vision of orange robed young men trying to press thin books into my hands outside of the subway in New York. “You don’t mean Hare Krishna, do you?”
Rodrigo smiled, obviously pleased. “Exactly.” As it turned out, he was one of the very few Ecuadorians who rejected Catholocism to join the small sect of Ecuadorian Krishnas. He woke at 4AM to meditate, worked in their restaurant, and read the Bhagavad Gita from cover to cover. He eventually left because he found out that the local Krishna leadership was corrupt. “But I still subscribe to many of the concepts and ideas,” he said.
We walked from the river to the same hillside shrine where we first kissed. “I don’t want to scare you,” he told me in his slow and even Spanish. “But we were destined to meet.”
“Destined?” I played with an orange peel, releasing its scent into the air.
“That’s right. Because we knew each other in another lifetime.”
My eyebrows inched up my forehead and I bit my lip to keep from laughing. I must have inadvertently conveyed a look of deep interest because he launched into a long explanation, most of which I don’t remember. Then we started making out. I wanted to press my entire body against his. When he finally whispered, “you believe me, don’t you?” I nodded without hesitation.
My twitch sometimes reappeared, but Rodrigo didn’t pay much attention. “The body is merely a temporary home,” he reassured me. Though I honestly wasn’t sure what I thought about reincarnation, he demonstrated new and interesting ways of thinking about things. He never took mainstream culture too seriously. His concerns rested with genderless souls. This made him an ideal companion in a male dominated society.
A couple of months into the relationship, we took a twelve hour bus ride from Cuenca to Quito. A brightly colored statue of the Virgin Mary stood on the wall above the bus driver. Pasted next to the Virgin was a silver glitter decal of a bikini-clad woman with breasts hanging down like water balloons. Someone stuck two bumper stickers next to her. One decried the evils of mothers-in-law. The second showed a picture of a large screw attached to a pair of hairy male legs. The screw chased a donut shaped nut, attached to a pair of skinny women’s legs. The text read, “Please, please, not without oil!”
After about six hours of staring at the display, I was furious. “This is sick!” I told Rodrigo. He didn’t disagree. I went on about the conflicting messages about sex and soon I was telling him about my experiences with harassment as a girl in New York City. He responded with an incredulity that I have seen in “good men” many times since then and now find annoying. But on that bus ride I appreciated his respectful shock. I told him how growing up I thought harassment was a permanent part of the landscape and that changing the environment was something utterly out of my control. “But it can’t be. The climate in New York is wrong. And this bus is wrong.”
It was the first time I had told any of this to a man. I felt so grateful for his support that I overlooked the bizarreness of his comments. He explained that he coped with an insane society by practicing astral projection. He tried to fly his soul, kite-like, on the edge of the universe. But, he confessed, so far his soul had only made it as far as his kitchen. And then only on a few occasions, in the dead of night.
We still had another few hours on the bus, and the promise of launching my soul sky-ward did little to temper my agitation. So Rodrigo asked me to close my eyes and gently led me in a guided meditation, telling me to allow the roar of the ocean to carry my anger and unrest away.
The anger and unrest didn’t stay away for long. When I returned to college, I started learning about feminism. Feminist ideas were strong and wide. They took up space. Our culture fosters a climate of violence against women, feminists said. We must fight back, they said. I felt rage, and it felt good.
For the first time, I labelled the harassment I endured as a form of sexual violence. Violence! I began to draw connections between the men that hissed “nice titties” and my friends who had been raped. My experiences were on a continuum with sexual assault. From this vantage point, I began to confront my fears directly.
Around this time, the campus began to breathe more. My friends moved out of the dorms and off campus. The novelty of charting our classmates’ sex lives seemed to wear off and I began to care less about what other people thought of me.
Then, without warning or fanfare, the twitch disappeared for good. Along with acne, braces and teal eyeliner, it passed with adolescence. Seventeen year twitch indeed.. But was it merely an odd neurological quirk that randomly righted itself? Or was it something more?
Maybe it’s just that I’ve got to console myself that all of those jerks, lurches and tremors happened for a reason. That those teenage humiliations, when I was as smooth and as svelte as a carp on land, had a higher meaning. It’s a strong possibility. But life would be unbearable without the stories we tell to soothe ourselves. So here’s mine.
From Junior High through the first half of college, I felt pressure to be sexually sophisticated and savvy. I was supposed to let guys get close to me and touch me, and I was supposed to like it. Yet I saw men acting like would-be rapists every day on the street in New York. I didn’t feel in control of my body or the romantic situations I found myself in. Take Joey, in high school. I felt about as comfortable with him as I did during my first gynecological exam. But when my feet were in stirrups, I felt no compulsion to fool myself out of my fear. With Joey, I tried to trick myself into intimacy when I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t quite pull it off.
Bodies are strange, wonderful, awkward machines. Mine manufactured its own electric fence in an effort to keep me from harm. The twitches, lunges, tremors and jerks all tried to protect me. The reaction persisted until I felt safe and firmly in control when I was with men. It was like my twitch was trying to keep me in charge. In its own weird, weird way.
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