Sex Object (6 page)

I pray you, do not fall in love with me, For I am falser than vows made in wine.

—Rosalind,
As You Like It
, William Shakespeare

MY FATHER HAS A STORY THAT HE LIKES TO TELL ABOUT THE TIME
he died. He was working at his father's laundromat—one of a few small businesses my grandfather opened over the years—when he fell into a vat of cleaning fluids and the fumes overcame him. But before he knew it, he was unconscious and saw a tunnel and light ahead of him. It only stopped, he says, when my grandfather saw him there and pulled him by the back of his shirt out of the container. He says it felt like he was traveling backward until his eyes opened.

My dad's name is Phil but when he's in Woodstock, New York—where he and my mother built a house from the foundation up, just the two of them—he goes by Philie.
Philie Lama
we call him, the Italian-American Buddhist who goes to meditation workshops but might blow up if you ask him to lower the music or go to a different restaurant than the one he likes.

My parents have always left out a lot when they speak about their childhood, but the violence comes out in dribs and drabs. Rumors of my father throwing a man through the window of a
bowling alley for beating up his younger brother. Of my mother hiding from her drunk father and handsy uncles. Of shoplifting (my mom) and of being beaten near to death by a group of boys from a rival neighborhood (my dad). Of why you shouldn't trust cops. My cousin told me once about my father catching a thief in our house and chasing him down the block with a hammer. I don't know if he caught him or, if he did, what happened next.

My parents married when my mother was seventeen because they were in love but also to get away from their families, who had disappointed them in ways big and small from the time they were young. They moved across the country from Queens to Washington in 1966—taking a bus the whole way—so my father could look for work at a Boeing factory. They didn't stay for long.

My aunt, my father's sister, was married and had four children by the time she was twenty-one years old with a man who was taking too many drugs and seemed to be suffering from a mental illness to boot. He was my father's friend. He sounded bad on the phone, my father said, and so they came home to visit and check on him. When my dad walked into the house, one of the children had an odd look on his face and said something about Daddy being in the basement. When my father walked down the stairs, he found his friend, his brother-in-law, hanging there. He doesn't talk about what he looked like.

And so he and my mother stayed in Queens, to help with the children, who were all under seven years old at the time.

They stayed even as my cousins grew up and my family started to move to Westchester to get out of the neighborhood. Instead of leaving the city, my parents bought the foundation of a house in Woodstock, in upstate New York, from a man who couldn't continue building it. He had broken his back trying to take down one of the barns on the property; there were two of them, both over a hundred years old. The man made the mistake of disassembling the structure while still inside. It crashed down around and on top of him and so he sold the house as it was, with a set of blueprints that my parents spread out often on our table in Queens.

We started driving up every weekend, every summer, for years until my parents finished building their house. My father did the plumbing, my mom the wiring. They had a friend, an artist, collect rocks from Esopus Creek nearby and build a beautiful if a bit off-kilter fireplace. My sister and I would pee outside, help to carry the wood planks for the upstairs floor, and climb up a ladder—before we had a staircase—to our bedrooms, which were right next to each other.

After a few summers it was done, but thirty years later you can still see the remnants of my parents' mistakes. The light switches are a bit too low and in strange places. You get hot water by turning the spigot to the right, not the left. Sound carries everywhere. There is no room where your voice won't be heard.

My father wanted desperately for me to succeed and I wanted desperately to please him, to be the shining example, the proof, of how far he had come. When I did something right,
something good and smart and worthy, his praise was effusive, all-encompassing. Mistakes, though, were never simply screw-ups. Any failure was a sure sign of an inevitable downward spiral. Doing badly on an exam was not just one test grade but evidence of a slippery slope down to where he and my mother felt they resided. The consequences of my not succeeding were ripe to him in a way that I could not understand.

So when I nearly failed an economics class my junior year of high school, he started screaming soon after he saw the report card. He brought me out to our backyard and pointed to a large, empty black pot that had once held a small tree inside of our house.

He told me to pick it up and when I said it was too heavy he got close to my face and screamed that if I did not pick up this plant pot, if I did not hold it in my arms, he would beat the shit out of me. And so I picked it up.

Don't you dare fucking drop it
, he said. And so I didn't.

I stood there, shifting the weight of the pot from one arm and a lifted knee to the other, sweating and crying.

Our yard—two hundred fifty square feet of uneven concrete—doubled as a parking space after my parents poured cement on the curb to make a ramp and built swinging gates that opened up to the street. It was a not-so-legal last resort to stop our car tires from being stolen and the windows smashed. For a while before that we had a car that my parents bought for $110 because they figured if it got stolen it was no big deal. It got stolen.

A cherry tree grew out of the lone space of dirt at the cracked intersections of concrete. My parents had planted it when I was a toddler, not expecting much, but it just kept growing—its branches reached over the gate so fully that people walking by could pluck off cherries without breaking their stride. Every year my sister and I watched for the cherries—the greening of the branches, then the white flowers, then the fruit—and fought over who would climb highest on the ladder to pick the “best” ones without any bruises.

The tree started producing more cherries than my parents knew what to do with—one or two hundred pounds a year—so my father filled brown paper lunch bags up with them and gave cherries out to neighbors, shop owners, or anyone who stopped to look at the tree.
You like the cherries? Take a bag!

My father joked that the shade from the tree, which reached over onto the sidewalk, made it “romantic” for the men who parked there with prostitutes. Once, though, when a cabdriver was getting a blow job as we were walking outside one Sunday afternoon, my dad started beating on his car hood.
Get the fuck out of here! There are kids here, get the fuck out!

I had been holding the plant pot for a little over an hour, I think, when my father walked out of the sliding glass doors and yelled for me to put the plant pot down and get into our car. He drove for a short bit and parked in front of a large factory building that took up almost the whole block. It looked closed down, but the windows were propped open with phone books and sticks. He told me that it only took a few mistakes to end up
working in a place like this. That if I didn't take advantage of all that he and my mother had built for us, I could slip, easily, into something else.

And so I did my best not to fail at things, but when I inevitably did I worked even harder to cover those failures up. I knew my dad loved me but I also knew he loved my successes just as much. That they filled something up for him that I could not on my own.

It was for the same reason, I imagine, that my father talked me out of every waitressing and bartending job I thought about getting throughout college and in my early twenties. He told me that it was easy, when you had real money in your pocket, to just quit school because the alternative was so seductive. The part-time jobs I had in the mall or at his store selling older women clothing and lingerie, I suppose, seemed less dangerous to him.

And though I couldn't imagine a future in which I would quit school to wait tables—it was so far from the reality my parents had carefully cultivated for me—for them, for him, it was just one bad choice around the corner. But my family and aunts and uncles and cousins were made up of waitresses and butchers and a few people who worked in offices because my uncle—the only person in my family to have gone to college, night school in Queens for years—got them the job. I didn't see anything wrong with that, with being like my family, but I knew to my parents there could be nothing worse. That these were not con
sidered acceptable choices. I knew that what I did, what I accomplished, was not just about me. Maybe not at all about me.

And so I did what I was supposed to do—embody the things my parents had wished for themselves, sometimes even against my better judgment.

DURING A SUMMER TRIP AS A CHILD TO VISIT MY GRANDFATHER
and step-grandmother in Florida, my father made a mistake. We were going to the beach every day, and on one of the mornings the sand was littered with the blue and white puffed-up corpses of jellyfish of varying sizes.

I was a good swimmer but the sheer number of the dead bodies on the beach scared me, and I didn't want to go in the water. My father tells me that he took me on a long walk that day along the beach, telling me about how important it was to go ahead and do things even when you're afraid. That I didn't need to worry so much, that I should go in. That there were no jellyfish in the water. And so I swam.

I was only in the water a few minutes, of course, before I felt a stinging on my leg moving up my thigh. When I came out on the beach my leg was bright red and swelling and I yelled at my father that he promised I wouldn't get stung.

It made for a good story for my classmates when I got home though, and the jellyfish—which I had never really seen, just felt—got bigger every time I repeated the story to a new friend.

THERE SIMPLY CAME A POINT WHERE THE KNOWLEDGE MY
father had wasn't enough to help me anymore. It happened around high school, I think, when my parents couldn't talk to me about my homework. Later, when it came time to research schools and apply to colleges, in a way I was worse off with them than I would have been on my own.

Their advice was based entirely on what they wanted so badly for me rather than what was possible. And because I wanted to please them so much, I didn't fight hard enough to tell them anything other than what they wanted to hear.

That's how I found myself taking tours of colleges completely out of my reach—schools like Wesleyan, where my father wanted me to go so badly that he had me visit twice, the second time to have an informal interview with a student leader who might recommend me. I mumbled and blushed my way through our conversation—I had never met a person close to my age who spoke so much like an adult.

In the end, they were satisfied when I decided on Tulane over a handful of other decent colleges that had accepted me. Despite its distance, when my parents saw the campus buildings and ivy and grass, it looked to them the way they imagined colleges were supposed to look, and so they were happy and proud.

When my father had a heart attack during my winter break a few months later, he made me promise as the doctors worked on him that I would stay in college. I went out to the parking lot and smoked a cigarette. I was already on academic probation, hardly going to class, and knew that I could not tell him.

All of my successes were his successes, but all of my failures were mine alone and I didn't want to sit with that thing by myself. And so I said nothing. I went back to school, but not to classes, and told my parents I would not be going back my sophomore year. They convinced me to drive to Albany, New York, where I enrolled as a nonmatriculated student at the SUNY there and moved into the dorms for transfer students, small rooms with metal-frame twin beds and a tiny square refrigerator under the window. Even there, I couldn't quite get it together.

I met boys and drank often, skipped class and lied to my parents. It took me two years to find my footing but I managed, just barely, to graduate. I couldn't bring myself to go to the graduation ceremony so I went to the smaller informal reception for English majors, wearing a spaghetti-strap dress rather than a graduation gown. We drove to Woodstock later that afternoon with my then-boyfriend to celebrate with a dinner.

A few years ago, my parents realized they couldn't afford to stay in our house in Queens but that young hip families would pay a lot of rent to live there. And so they moved into a small apartment in Astoria that used to be mine, their furniture cramped into the tiny rooms pushed up against the walls. Around the same time, the cherry tree in our yard started to die, disease crawling up the trunk, resulting in fewer and fewer cherries. They didn't tell me when they chopped it down—I saw the hacked stump when I dropped by one day to peek over the fence to see what the house looked like without us in it.

It looked smaller than I remembered.

THE COUCH DOWNSTAIRS WAS THE BEST PLACE TO HOOK UP. THE
open, no-walls setup of our house may have given my parents the feeling that nothing
that
bad could have gone on under their noses after they went upstairs to sleep, their bedroom right above us. But the benefit of living in a loftlike space with your parents is that you can always see them coming.

And so the couch in the living room became the place that I would “watch movies” with boys late into the night, my head on the side of the couch that could look up the open staircase to watch for any movement above.

The first time I had sex, though, it was in a small room in a walk-up apartment in a three-family building in Park Slope, Brooklyn. My boyfriend Jay's parents worked until early evening so we always had the place to ourselves after school. After it was done—fish-printed boxers put back on, a Gap red hoodie slipped back over my head—Jay wrote our initials in a heart and the date on the underside of a shelf that hung over his bed so that only the person who was lying on it could see.

We went to his house most days because Brooklyn was closer to our school, which was in Tribeca, than my house in Queens was. We took the F train to 7th Avenue and 9th Street and walked a few blocks out of the way when going to Jay's house because there was a group of boys from the neighborhood that kept robbing and hassling him on the way home.

His best friend and my best friend introduced us; their families spent summers together at the same colony in upstate New York. I was thirteen years old and a freshman and I didn't understand what a summer colony was but thought it sounded rich. He was a junior and fine looking but awkward in the way that all sixteen-year-old boys are—he had braces and hair parted down the middle that was a bit floppy but the supreme confidence of someone much cooler. He tagged mailboxes and subway walls with graffiti, or a sticker with his tag already scrawled across it in black marker if he needed to be fast.

I BECOME A MASTER IN THE ART OF UNDER-THE-PANTS HAND
jobs. I think of them as a distraction from the months-long campaign from Jay on why we should have sex (mostly because he doesn't want to be a virgin when he turns seventeen years old). Besides, seeing so many penises on the subways, limp and ridiculous looking, does not make me keen on looking at his up close. The idea that someone I love actually has one seems kind of appalling. So I do all I can to hook up and be a good girlfriend without facing it.

I expect to feel different after sex but don't. Even the act itself is somewhat underwhelming. Just painful, mostly. Jay's friend calls in the middle of it and laughs when he realizes what is happening on the other end of the line. I ask Jay to hurry up, over and over, because I want it to stop. It gets better, eventually. A few times later.

Beforehand, as it becomes clearer that I am finally going to just get it over with already, I go with Jay to a clinic that I found out about through a friend—a place where I can go and have my first gyno appointment and get birth control pills without its showing up on my parents' insurance. The exam itself isn't as unpleasant as I thought it would be—I am mostly just glad that it is a woman doctor—and they give me six months' worth of birth control pills for free. All I have to do, she says, is come back again and she would give me more for a few dollars a pack. I feel adult, but shamed a few months later when my then-twelve-year-old sister tells me that my mother had found the pills and started weeping immediately. She had always told me to go to her if I wanted birth control, that I could talk to her about it, and I am thankful that I had realized it had always been a well-meaning lie.

Jay always seems concerned about where I was and whether I was lying about where I was. Once, when we are supposed to meet somewhere downtown but the trains were delayed and I couldn't find a working pay phone to beep him, he accuses me of making up the train delay to cover for the fact that I was late. And probably somewhere else, he thought. His cousin tells me
that Jay had planned to tell me that he called the MTA and that they told him there was not a train delay to see how I reacted. To catch me in a lie. I don't know why he decides not to.

For Valentine's Day, he gets me a beeper. The translucent blue pager comes in a tie box wrapped in tissue paper and filled with candy hearts with cute phrases on them. This way, he says, he could always be in touch with me.

We fought a lot, and so when I go out to a club with my friends in midtown in my sophomore year, I make out with a boy on the dance floor who goes to Bronx Science. He is just an okay kisser but a lot nicer than Jay. Taller, too. We talk on the phone for a few weeks while he tries to convince me to break up with my boyfriend. We do break up, a few weeks later, and I try to lead Jay to believe that this is his idea.

I continue to go out with my Science friends on the weekends, smoking pot behind their buildings before we take a cab to the “club”—a Chippendales during the week that switches over to a teenage party on the weekends. My parents allow me to go if a friend or a friend of a friend is “promoting”—a fancy way of saying you get people to show up and your name goes on a flyer. I can stay until midnight or one a.m., when my parents drive over to pick me up a block away so no one sees me get in their car.

Jay calls me to tell me about sleeping with another girl and that all he could think about the whole time was how he had to pee. I tell my Science boy that I can't be his girlfriend, that we are just “seeing” each other, but I still meet his mother over dinner one night on the Upper West Side.

Once Jay found out about the relationship, whatever it was, things changed quickly. He wants to get back together desperately. First he broke into my locker and left an envelope with “Lies . . .” scrawled across it—in it was every note or letter I'd ever written him. When that didn't work he'd break in and leave flowers or—one time—a blown-up picture of himself with his arms outstretched. When I finally agreed to take him back he made me bring in the mix tape that the boy from Bronx Science had made me. He stomped on it with his foot until it cracked, then pulled out the tape from the cassette.

I met Jack two and a half years later, after Jay left for college and started dating a girl with a lip ring who recorded a message for his answering machine that sounded like she was having an orgasm:
Jay . . . isn't, oh my god, here right now, yes yes . . .

Jack was the most beautiful guy I had seen up close. We meet in Saugerties, New York, at a barbecue where he is grilling in a tank top and jeans, all muscles and smiles, with a shamrock tattoo on his shoulder. It is his twentieth birthday and at sixteen I am the youngest person there, but I am also from New York, which seems to even the disparity out. I cannot stop staring at him.

We don't speak at all, but the following day he calls me to ask me to the movies—the first time I've been asked on a proper date—and I am thrilled. I don't remember what we see but after the show he drives me home and we sit on my parents' couch in their house in Woodstock and we talk until two a.m., until finally he kisses me. I only have a month left upstate before
my senior year starts, and so we spend every day together and within a week Jack tells me he's in love with me. I tell my parents he is eighteen.

My father is horrified by Jack, who does not go to college but instead works the desk at a gym near his house, taking on occasional clients as a personal trainer. He asks me what I see in him and I respond, giddy,
Have you seen him?!

Jack is six foot three and chiseled—like in a movie star or stripper way. He let me take shirtless pictures of him in the shower, hand up against the wall, posing. A few months before we met he got head shots so he can try to model or act. He works out for hours every day. Because we are in love he decides to move in with his father, who lives in Queens, to pursue whatever career these photos might bring.

Before we leave Woodstock that summer to go back to New York, though, my mother—after going through my backpack—finds a small pipe for smoking pot and a few condoms. She says she wants to take me for a walk to talk about sex but I refuse. She screams that no one will ever want to marry me if I keep having sex with boys. When she grounds me, I realize it is for the condoms and not the marijuana. She denies it. She says we'll keep the grounding a secret from my father, and I'm not sure if it's because he'll be seriously mad and she's protecting me or because he'll find my offenses mundane and she's protecting herself and her authority over me.

Back in New York, I bring Jack to every school dance I can, every house party. My guy friends, scrawny in comparison, are
impressed but a little afraid of him when he gets drunk and belligerent. One night when I have a party at my house he punches a screen out of an upstairs window. On another night he fills the tub up and holds his head under the water until I agree to stop fighting with him.

To an outsider, a sixteen-year-old girl dating a twenty-year-old man seems like a bad idea. It mostly is. But Jack was naïve, and I was more in control than he was. And though he gave me my first taste of hard liquor (Goldschläger) and towered above everyone I knew, I was thrilled by him. I remember noticing the outline of his body the first time he got on top of me—huge and muscular—and thinking that this is what fucking a man is like. There were no scrawny arms or adolescent halfhearted facial hair, just girth.

One time in his room, though—an enclosed patio that his mother turned into a bedroom for him—the sex feels different. When I go to the bathroom afterward, the top half of a condom falls out from inside of me. My dancer girlfriend takes control and tells me she will call around to doctors about a pill she heard you can take after sex to make sure you don't get pregnant. She calls it
postcoitus medication
so when I go to the doctor that my friend found for me, I write the same thing in the space where it says
Reason for visit
. It is the first time I have had a male gynecologist and I start to panic until I realize that he is going to have the nurse stay in the room the entire time.

The medication makes me throw up a bit, but I am otherwise fine, and Jack cannot believe that I pulled this off by myself.
After about seven months of dating, though, he stops calling. He doesn't show up at my house when he says he's going to. Despite my bluster to friends about having a trophy boyfriend I am devastated when, finally, he tells me over the phone that he wants to break up. That the attraction was just physical and there is nothing really beyond that.

My friends, being kind, help me to make a list of the reasons it's actually excellent news that he doesn't want us to be together, including that he shaves his legs and testicles, uses women's deodorant, and won't give head. We spend the day—senior cut day—on the Columbia University campus uptown, pretending to be students and smoking pot. After we're as high as we want to be we go to Tom's diner on the corner of 112th Street and Broadway and order fries and mozzarella sticks.

I spend the rest of the school year, my last in high school, smoking pot and hooking up with friends of mine—though no one seems quite as adult or good-looking as Jack. On the day that our yearbooks come out I notice that my girlfriends have taken out an ad together, congratulating each other and posing with each other in a box that takes up a quarter of the page. Soon after a male friend tells me that they've planned a trip to Europe together for the summer before college and asked people not to tell me about it because they thought it was better that way.

So I work at my parents' store in Queens and pack up my bedroom that used to be a closet.