That Takes Ovaries! (11 page)

Finally I told her: “It’s okay to let go, to die. You have done all you can.”

Ultimately, this is what dying mothers need to hear. I have had to say these words to more than a dozen.

Some want to know
exactly
how to say good-bye to their kids, but again, these things can’t be scripted by others. So Lisa and I discussed together how she would tell her children that she was going to die now—that she would be gone from their (physical) lives forever. She decided to hold each child and say, “Remember that I love you, always. Even though I am not here.”

When women ask, I pray with them. Sometimes I shed tears with them. I try to stay in my social worker role, but in order to remain present, truly present, I occasionally have to cry as we
talk. Now that I am a parent, too, I can’t help thinking about my own little boy and what his life would be like without me.

I feel sad but also confident when I finally say to a woman, “It’s okay to let go.” Somehow I manage to say it with total certainty, because these women
are
ready to die. They’re just waiting for somebody to speak the words that will allow them to move on.

It’s hard to explain how I have been able to do this work day in and day out for ten years. The original commitment I made to the work was strong. It transformed me personally and spiritually. And even with the hardships that can sometimes come, in the past decade I have never once questioned my initial decision. I know this is what I was put here to do. The best I can say is that God has given me the ability and the courage to be with women at the end of their lives.

Finally, women and girls can define their own sexuality. They are able to say no when they want to say no, yes when they want to say yes,
and
do the asking—leaving it to the cutie they spot on the other side of the room to respond.

Historically, women’s bodies have been a real site of oppression–from sexual assault and inadequate health care (including restrictions on reproductive choice) to being told how to act, how to dress, whom to love. Make no mistake: The battle isn’t over yet. But during the past few decades there’s been a revolution regarding women taking an active role in sexual matters.

Traditional norms dictated that a woman be modest. She was the leg-crossing, no-saying figure who was the main obstacle to a sex act. When she finally did get sexual (after incessant pressure), it was always with a man, never a woman, and she was to react and respond, never instigate. It took guts to be an openly desiring female because being a sexual girl meant being a bad girl. She’d be discounted, ostracized. No longer “pure,” she’d fall on the other end of the spectrum labeled “slut.”

These traditional norms are still present in some women’s lives. But now the norms have morphed into a confusing mixed message, because in today’s multimedia-based culture the so-called slut is actually promoted (though in real life she is still punished). She is the scantily clad,
just-do-me
-looking, hypersexualized young woman revered in ads, movies, magazines, and music videos. No longer the obstacle to sex, today’s girls and women are supposed to personify it; according to the media images, they are to look attractive, lusty, and be sexually available at all times for the men of the world. Women have learned to accept being on constant display. Worse, what is considered attractive is defined for them by the fashion and media industries. A woman’s value depends on whether her looks meet the industries’ definition–and how much male attention she gets.

From women being told they are not supposed to be sexual, to being told they should be more sexual, our sexuality has been played like a Ping-Pong ball in a game of table tennis. So the truth is worth repeating: A woman’s body is her body, and it shouldn’t be pushed around by anybody else. We all need to be in command of our own selves. We all need to make our own sexual decisions.

That is what the women and girls in this chapter are doing. They break the bounds of both the older and newer norms. They do this by choosing for themselves. They have the courage to revel in their sexiness, uncross their legs, and instigate erotic acts–at their own initiative, on their own terms, and with whomever they choose. And they also adamantly refuse to let others see or use them as sex objects when they don’t particularly feel like being one. They are redefining for themselves (and us!) the concepts of beauty, sexuality, and what is considered an acceptable loving relationship. These women-on-top are taking charge.

I’m being sullen, bitchy, and a really bad sport.
Who talked me into this anyway?
It’s 7:00 in the morning and I’m watching four thousand shiny, happy people doing jumping jacks in the park. I seem to be one of the few who have avoided the contagion of this touching community spirit, this thousand-points-of-light, or whatever it’s called these days. It’s our citywide, one-day-a-year volunteering event, and all I can think is, “If any one of you spills my coffee, if any one of you even threatens to touch my coffee, the carnage begins.” That’s my community spirit.

Actually, I do know why I’m here. I’m sick of my life. I want to meet new people. It’s just my luck they put me in a group with an entire fraternity of business-school students. Thanks. Thanks very much.

Eventually they send us off to paint the office of a housing project. And I admit that as I start to paint, I’m getting into it. There’s a kind of Zen to dipping the paintbrush in the can just deep enough, then sliding it across a window sash, holding it at the perfect angle so it passes smoothly along the edge of the pane without touching it. They’re blasting the radio, and even though the music sucks, it’s appropriate for this activity: “Shiny happy people, shiny happy people painting, shiny happy people painting walls…”

There’s one guy here who seems a little different from the others—pleasant, good-natured, with a functional mind and a healthy distaste for venture capital and investment banking. I talk to him for a few minutes during lunch and try to muster up some sexual interest just for the heck of it, but he’s a bit too tall and gawky for me. Still, he does have kind of a nice mouth.

As the afternoon wears on, the shiny people start to lose interest in their well-meaning community ideals, leaving their paintbrushes to atrophy in the trays. They sit around gabbing about stocks and bonds. I’m still caught up in the meditative
aspects of painting, so when the job is done and all the masking tape peeled away, I’m not quite ready to go. I start collecting the brushes and trays left by my spoiled coworkers.

As I’m walking around gathering tools, I run across my friend from lunch, who has donned a bandanna to keep the paint out of his hair. I don’t know why, but a little bell goes off in my head and my internal Cupid—or Dionysus more likely—says, “Hey, this guy looks kinda cute with that thing on his head.” Uh-oh.

I take the brushes and trays into the bathroom at the end of the hall. Starting to wash the brushes one by one in the sink, I try not to get paint all over myself, but it’s hopeless. So I dump everything in the tub, turn up the water, and plunge my hands wrist-deep into the mass of gloppy paint. Running my fingers between the brush bristles I develop a true appreciation for the texture of latex: smooth and viscous, it slides over my hands like a skin of wet silk. The bandanna guy is still nestled in my mind somewhere and there is a tension building between the thought of him still working down the hall and the feeling of slippery paint on my skin. Quickly, I rinse my hands off and bolt out of the bathroom. Now I’m on a mission.

I look in each of the rooms to the right and left of the hallway, but I don’t see him. The idea is firmly planted in my head now, and if I don’t find him, or if he resists me, I don’t know what I’m going to do. When I get down to the end of the hall and there’s only one room left, I turn the corner.
Okay. There he is.
I’m ignoring every shoot of trepidation, though they’re sprouting faster and faster.
Keep moving,
I tell myself as I stride over to him.

“You’re not shy are you?” I say.

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

“Come with me.” I grab his hand and pull him back down the hall.
This is the longest hall I have ever been in.
“Come on, hurry.”

We get into the bathroom and I close the door. He is looking at me as if I’m insane, but he’s also smiling. I immerse my hands deep in the thick paint in one of the trays and smear it all over my fingers and wrists. Then I grab his hands and work the paint all
over them, between his fingers, across his palms and partway up his arms. He’s grinning at me as his fingers start to move, smoothing and kneading the paint into my hands. We step closer and he envelops my mouth with his. Our tongues explore and slip around each other as our fingers slide and entangle. Hurriedly, I undo his shirt buttons, take more paint into my hands, then smear it over his chest. He slides my shirt up, pushing my bra above my breasts, and we crush against each other, rubbing and smearing the slippery paint all over ourselves. He reaches to get a handful of paint and massages it smoothly onto my breasts. I bite his lower lip just as there’s a banging on the door: “Anyone in there?” We freeze, on the edge of bursting out laughing.

“Yeah, just a minute.”

We lunge at each other’s mouths, and with them glued together, try to adjust our clothing over our sticky skin and the drying layer of paint on our chests. Now we are laughing, trying to maintain as much oral contact as we can while turning the taps on full blast and washing our own and each other’s hands. We straighten out, step back from each other, and look down at our bodies, shaking our heads. We’re a mess. Our clothes are stuck onto us rakishly and there’s paint all over them. “Oh well,” he shrugs, and I open the door. We walk out as nonchalantly as we can manage under the gaping stares of the future masters of industry.

My parents’ backyard in the suburbs is big enough to fit a tennis court and a swimming pool. Fortunately, they never built either one, which meant that one summer night in 1998 there was plenty of space for a big yellow and white striped tent, tables and chairs for about a hundred people, and a small tent just for me, The Author, to sit under and autograph copies of my book. A book of erotica. That night I signed a copy of the book for my godmother, my uncle, my mother’s tennis instructor. It wasn’t a place I had really expected to end up.

I started writing about sex when I was a teenager, when I dreamed of being a writer, and also, well, some other things adolescent girls dream about. I wrote sexy stories about celebrities, weird sci-fi tales of procreating aliens, and hormone-ridden scenes involving people I had crushes on. I never showed them to anyone. At the time, I figured I’d grow up to write something “respectable” and socially acceptable, like science fiction or literary fiction, and that all the sex stories were just a phase I was going through. I knew many people in society would consider erotic fantasies to be the least important of all possible topics I could explore in my writing, and some would outright condemn it.