Essays
First We Have to Learn to Love Ourselves
The funny thing about my relationship with my grandmother is that despite the hostilities that inevitably arise between us, the older I get, the more like her I become. I thought women were to supposed to turn into their mothers as they age, but not me. I've skipped a generation to cut to the chase of acting like I'm eighty-six. It's not that I want to, it's that I can't help it. Maybe it's a biological connection, maybe just a subverted impulse to feign a biological connection. Regardless, I've weaseled my way into habits and circumstances so as to effortlessly mimic her behavior: I live alone and I own a laughable number of house plants. I've named them all after characters in my favorite romance novels — Trent, Montgomery, Jacqueline — and on lonely days, I talk to them. "Good morning!" I'll say. "Is Trent thirsty? I think Trent is thirsty!" I call myself fat, harass the mailman about lost catalogues, subsist largely on canned sardines. I eat most of my dinners alone while watching reruns of Designing Women. I'm confused by I-pods."
Also, I'm an avid masturbator. I mention it because my grandmother is also an avid masturbator. How do I know? My brother Sam told me. How does Sam know? He was with our neighbor Brian Epstein, when Brian Epstein found her vibrator.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY PATH TOWARDS AVID MASTURBATION
(my grandmother's history will follow and in so doing, address the aforementioned vibrator)
It all started with a young man named Randall Buckwald. I was a virgin until I was sixteen and, while I managed to learn the distinction between an orgasm and impromptu urination before then, I was still convinced said orgasm would result from sex. But then I met Randall. And Randall changed everything. An aspiring dancer, he transferred to my high school from Minneapolis during junior year, and the first time I ever saw him, he was on the high school baseball diamond performing a series of ballet stretches. There he was, all 5 feet and 4 inches of him outfitted in a leotard and tights to accentuate the musculature of his emaciated thighs. Well, lucky for me I was born with a nose made for sniffing out potential partners — those lucky few who fall within the narrow confines of my league — so when I saw him, I thought, "He will have you. Make him yours."
I accomplished the task easily enough through a series of cafeteria lunches in which we sat side by side at an otherwise empty table. We discussed ballet, the virtues of Alanis Morisette, and what it was, exactly, that the letters F.U.P.A. stood for.
"This part here," I said, and flirtatiously placed Randall's hand atop my lower abdomen.
F.U.P.A., for those unfamiliar with the term, is an acronym referring to the bulge of a woman's gut that lies just above her pelvis. The non-emaciated, non-personally trained amongst us often have one. I had one. I have one. At my thinnest, mine looks like the faint beginnings of a baby bump, at my heaviest, like I've stuffed a living baby down my pants. One day in French class my neighbor Brian Epstein said, "Yo, Barron! Nice F.U.P.A.!" to which our teacher, Madame Cohen, replied, "En Francais, s'il vous plait!"
So Brian said, "Salut, Barron! Vous avez une F.U.P.A. tres belle!"
Unsure if F.U.P.A. as a noun, should be masculine or feminine, Madame Cohen asked Brian what it was. "Qu'est-ce que c'est, F.U.P.A.?" she asked.
"Fat Upper Pussy Area!" he answered.
Feminine, apparently.
I explained what F.U.P.A. meant and Randall, seemingly comfortable to have his hand atop it, said, "Well, I like it, frankly. I think it's cute."
It was the sweetest thing he could have said, and I was smitten. If I had had my way, I'd have tied a bow around his head and shrunk him down to troll-doll size so he'd fit neatly in my pocket, so we could be together always.
Companionship, a F.U.P.A. not just accepted, but adored. These were all wonderful aspects to our courtship, but we still only made it three months. Sex was the thing that eventually tore us apart. Randall? figuratively. Me? Literally. Randall may have been short, but he had feet long as a baby and wide as a paper-back book, and suffice it to say that when he — at 5"4 — disrobed, he looked like the front-half of an elephant: two legs, one trunk. The sight might have struck another more experienced woman as having hit the jackpot, but to me it only looked suspicious. Intriguing, yes, but in much the same way I might find a hand-gun intriguing: it's new and different and so, sure: it peaks my interest; but if I'm not careful, it'll kill me.
Two months into our courtship, I agreed to try and have sex with Randall because he'd agreed to go see 'Jerry McGuire' in the theatre. I'm easily aroused by men in form-fitting bottoms (football players, cyclists, ballet dancers; this proclivity contributed to my initial attraction to Randall, I'm sure) and so the constant shots of Cuba Gooding Jr.'s peach-shaped rump convinced me to throw caution to the wind. The results were disastrous. Once we got down to business, Randall worked with alarming speed, exercising less control than a diuretic infant until I lost all feeling in my lower half and, eventually, control of my bladder. You'd think relieving yourself on another person's pubic hair would free you from the responsibility of having to have sex with him again, but no. Randall was sixteen and determined. He was not to be placated with bases 1 through 3.
"Let's just try it one more time," he'd plead. "Just once. I'll be quick, I swear."
"I know you will," I'd say, "but speed is not the issue. The issue is that now when I pee, it feels like a colony of fire ants have built a village in my crotch."
I thought my answer was wonderfully clever and funny but Randall only found it irritating, and one month later he dumped me for a young woman named Lillian Freebaum. She was a 5"11 colossus of a dame, a high school sophomore with hips of such impressive girth, they could've stopped traffic. (And more to the point, harbored a vagina the size of a land-fill.) It hurt to see him move along so quickly, but it also got the wheels turning: I'd learned real-life sex was as much fun as a staph infection — sure, I'd had a pee, but that was an action born from pain, not pleasure — and that contrary to my opinions expressed in The Porn, sex had failed to alleviate the feelings that inspired me to write it in the first place. So what was I to do? Hungry people eat. Tired people sleep. And in a manner as instinctive, a young lady knocked on the head with the realization that sex with a pan-handle of a unit incites a fear of death long before it does an orgasm, she intuits that what she ought to do is take matters into her own hands.
So that's what I did. I masturbated so excessively for seven days that on the eighth I awoke to find my right hand paralyzed. Palsy-like. It was stuck in the pose one might strike to hold a grapefruit flat against her F.U.P.A.. Maybe this should've worried me, but it didn't: I knew why it was stuck, after all. And seeing as how every member of my family had our own electric toothbrush, I also knew that I had other options.
My mom was the one who got scared. She noticed me fumble my cereal spoon over breakfast.
"You're eating like a baby," she said. "What's wrong?"
My mother is a diagnosable hypochondriac who perceives any changes in her body and the bodies of those around her as the obvious onset of Cancer or A.I.D.S. Or maybe a stroke. In describing physical symptoms to her, you must choose your words carefully lest she fly off the handle and run you through a slew of biopsies and MRIs.
"I'm fine," I said. "My wrist just hurts a little."
"Move it."
"What?"
"Move your wrist. Move it around."
I told her I couldn't. The color drained from her face. She ordered me into the car. "Why?" I asked, but she'd already turned away and run to the foot of the stairs so she could scream to my father who was upstairs on toilet. "I'M TAKING SARA TO THE HOSPITAL!" she screamed.
My mother's never been good in a crisis and my father's way of handling that has always been to prove he's worse. He stumbled towards the staircase with his pants around his ankles. "WHY?!" he screamed. "WHAT'S WRONG!"
"STAY CALM!" she shouted back. "NOW PULL UP YOUR PANTS AND LISTEN CAREFULLY: SARA'S HAND IS FROZEN.... FOR NO APPARENT REASON!"
I'm of the opinion that my father wasn't born a hypochondriac, but after thirty years of marriage to my mother, thirty years spent assessing a garden-variety headache as a rapidly expanding brain tumor, it's a mindset he's absorbed. "OH GOD!" he cried.
"I'M SURE SHE'S FINE!" she carried on, "I'M SURE SHE'S FINE. BUT SHE COULD HAVE HAD AN ANEURSYM AND I DON'T WANT TO RISK IT. WE'RE GOING TO THE HOSPITAL. YOU GET SAM TO SCHOOL!"
I hadn't had an aneurysm. That's what a dashing emergency room internist by the name of Dr. Rasheedwa told me after running a series of tests at my mother's behest. "So now we've got to figure out what is wrong," he said afterwards. "Have you done anything strenuous with your right hand recently? Anything out of the ordinary?"
Sporting my F.U.P.A. and saddle-bag arms, I must've looked like the most likely candidate in the world for chronic masturbation. Dr. Rasheedwa must've known the score, but that didn't mean he'd want to talk about it. Not with me, and not with my mother, and so he started throwing bones. "Do you play tetherball?" he asked, "Or piano? Do you do a lot of typing?"
"Yes!" I exclaimed. "Typing!" This option sounded plausible. "That must be it! I do a lot of typing!"
Dr. Rasheedwa nodded happily along and diagnosed me with Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Then he fit me for a wrist brace and told me I'd have to wear it for a month.
To quote my friend Jim, a morbidly obese aspiring opera singer I'd meet years later waiting tables — a young man who's never done well with the ladies and who, as a result, has mastered any and all nuances to 'the craft,' as he calls it, of self-gratification — "once you go 'whack,' you never go back."
Once one knows how to masturbate, one must masturbate.
I, for one, could not agree more. If you're like me and you don't figure out masturbation until you're seventeen, the discovery is a revolutionary and spectacular gift. So to have it suddenly ripped away c/o a debilitating wrist brace, this is horribly traumatic. Like giving a six-year-old a puppy, then shooting said puppy in the face. Awful. Unfair. And in some sorry twist of fate, my Oral B went kaput later that same week, and my mother took her time replacing it. There were the other ones lying around of course, but using my mom's or dad's or brother's struck even me as selfish and grotesque. Oh! And to be clear, I'm not ambidextrous. I use my left hand for waving. And that's it.
Over the course of the next three weeks that I had to wear the wrist brace, I became so unimaginably irritable that my parents chose to stage an intervention.
"You're so angry!" cried my dad. "Just talk to us! Please! Just tell us what's wrong!"
"Is it drugs?" my mother overlapped. "Pot? Something worse? Are you projecting your anger at Randall onto us?"
My mother has an amazing knack for wearing people down. She interrogates exhaustively to make the truth less daunting than the prospect of more questions. "Do you resent me for working when you were a child? Do you feel I withhold? Envy your brother? How are your grades? Has your father not loved you enough? Is this your way of distancing? Would you like to see a therapist yourself?"
"NO!" I finally cracked. "I CAN'T MASTURBATE WHEN I HAVE THIS WRIST BRACE ON, OKAY?" and I brandished it at her. "Jesus. Just leave me alone."
"Oh," said my dad.
"Well," said my mom.
We sat in awkward silence for a moment. We left it to my mom to be the one to cut it.
"Well," she repeated several seconds later, "at least none of us have cancer." This much was true. Just a horribly awkward dinner ahead of us.
MY GRANDMOTHER'S AVID MASTURBATION
(A.K.A. THE VIBRATOR)
So six years ago, my grandma broke her hip. Unable to care for herself, she spent a month in a nursing home over the course of which she called my mother six times a day. For thirty-one days. She'd need a new robe, different hand-soap, scotch tape. She'd be angry with a nurse or the limited food selection in the cafeteria. It was around day nineteen that the phone calls got my mother acting suicidal.
"I can't take it anymore," she'd say. "I can't go on. What's the point? I'm so tired."
My brother Sam had just arrived home from his freshman year at college, and he was the one to come to her rescue. She still had to answer all those phone calls, but the actual doing of the errands — the picking up and dropping off of sweaters, playing cards, extra-large bottles of Windex — all this was left to Sam. He agreed because he was deeply addicted to marijuana, and as a result he'd stay mellow in the face of life's more aggravating aspects: patchouli oil, hemp jewelry, angry senior citizens. These were his 'sure, whatever' years. Ask him a question, any question, and he'd tell you, 'sure. Whatever.'
Will you set the table? "Sure, whatever."
Mow the lawn? "Sure whatever."
Take a 12-pack of Ensure to grandma at the nursing home? "Sure, whatever."
He was too stoned for anything to bother him.
One afternoon our neighbor Brian Epstein spotted Sam as he was heading for the car, and asked if he could join him on his errands. "Yo Bro!" he yelled across the yard, "Wassup? Where you goin'?"
Sam's older now — he kicked the pot addiction and few battle scars remain besides a half-dozen Phish c.d.s and an unwavering allegiance to Thom's of Maine deodorant — so now he understands the importance of steering clear of suburban Caucasians who toss a word like 'Bro' or 'Wassup' around; now he knows these types are good for nothing but a date rape charge. But Sam wasn't always so wise. On this occasion, he let Brian come along.
"I have to pick up a pack of Ensure at my grandma's house," he said, "and take it to her nursing home."
"Can I come?" asked Brian. He knew marijuana would be on the itinerary.
"Sure," said Sam. "Whatever."
Brian Epstein is a young man whose talents begin and end with his knack for making other people uncomfortable (see: making reference to my F.U.P.A. in French class). It's what he does to get attention. So once he and Sam had successfully loaded the Ensure into the trunk of the car, Brian racked his brain to figure out what he could do to make the situation intolerable.
"Bro," he said, "before we go, we got to find your granny's dildo! You know she's got one! Grannies gotta jerk it too!"
This is an awfully forward thing to say. But like I said, 'awful' and 'forward' are Brian Epstein's specialties.
Sam didn't know how to respond. So he said 'no,' — "No, Brian. I don't want to find my grandma's dildo," — but Brian ignored him and bounded up the stairs to her bedroom. According to Sam, this was the point at which Brian started speaking in a whiny falsetto so as to effectively personify the dildo's voice. "If I were a dildo, where would I be?" he trilled. "I bet I'd be near the bed so grandma wouldn't have to walk too far to find me!" He inched towards her nightstand. "I bet I'd be in the nightstand!"
Brian reached into the nightstand and found a tube sock. He turned the tube sock upside down, and a vibrator fell out.
"Oh, god," said Sam. "Why me?"
He may have been stoned and apathetic, but circumstances this dramatic warrant a reaction. Conversely, Brian was delighted. Flushed with joy and the adrenaline of having intuited correctly, he yelped with pride and grabbed the vibrator up off the floor.
"En garde!" he shouted. Like it was a sword. Brian entertained himself by chasing Sam around the house with it until his mother texted to remind him that they had to be at synagogue by 6.
"Gotta bounce," he said to Sam. "Let's head home and I'll holler at you later."
Sam and I find different aspects of this story both wretched and surprising. Sam finds it wretched that he saw our grandma's vibrator. I find it wretched that Brian Epstein applies the verb 'bounce' to his suburban person. Sam was surprised that our grandma owned a vibrator, I was surprised that owning said vibrator hadn't calmed her down. And there was also a hopeful aspect I attached to the situation which I think didn't resonate for Sam. I felt hopeful knowing a woman's body still wants a vibrator once she's over eighty. I may not be the most ambitious person in the world but I've got goals, and that's one of them: I'd love to see my hot-pocket keep popping for another sixty years. I was inspired by my grandmother's physical needs and desires. Infact, I admired them. I admired her. I'd swallow the fate of FM radio and canned sardines, I'd engage my plants in conversation and shoulder the burden of a solitude I fought with Delta Burke, if it meant I'd get to be like her once I got old.
Wow. I never thought I'd say that. But when masturbation's on the line, I guess I get a little crazy.
Copyright © 2008, Sara Barron.