“Can’t she get pregnant any other way? You know, like, what if they kissed really hard?”
“Nope,” David said with a smirk. “The penis has to go in the vagina.”
David’s father was a doctor.
“How does it do that? How can it get in?”
“It gets hard.” David couldn’t hide a broad grin.
“Hard? Whattya mean? Like a pencil?”
I knew I had a penis. I never knew it got hard. And vaginas? I never saw one of those. All I knew was that they were where the penis should be and older ladies had hair on theirs. The same for dicks. I never called mine a penis. A hard penis—whatever that was—going into a vagina. I never thought about that. But now being told that’s how my parents had me was the worst thing I ever heard, even worse than seeing the udders on the old lady next door whenever she bent over.
“Do women have balls, David?”
“No, idiot, women don’t have balls. They have ovaries.”
I tried not to squirm.
“You see, they’re on the inside. They’re like balls in a way. You just can’t see them.”
No one had to tell me that girls were different, but this put them in a new, horrifying light. Balls on the inside? Didn’t it hurt? Why didn’t they limp? I thought of Rhonda Itzkoff, Eve Polan, Mary Gagliardi—the girls in my fifth-grade class at P.S. #30. How could they live with such backwards plumbing? How did they pee?
“Mom, I heard Mrs. Kaufman was pregnant.”
“Who told you that word? Don’t ever say that word. You better not let your father hear you say that.”
All I knew was that Alan’s mom was pregnant with a baby. He told me he was hoping for a brother.
“But Alan said it in front of his mom.”
“That’s disgusting. Don’t say that word ever again.”
But that’s how the subject of sex was on Bronx River Road in 1970: don’t ask, don’t tell. Unless you’re David Epstein, then you tell everyone. I could ask Dad, but that was a tricky proposition. He could either answer with a backhand, or put me on his lap and give me all the gory details. Or worse, treat me to one of his lines: “You know Chrissy, you spend nine months getting out and the rest of your life trying to get back in.” Maybe, I thought, this had something to do with the balloons he kept in his night stand.
Asking my older sister was out because you didn’t talk to your sister about this stuff. Besides, she had a vagina too, I think. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking about her internal testicles. That left my brother—seven years older than me and already working in Manhattan. Again, a touchy choice as older brothers invariably are. Who would answer? The kind, elder mentor who always looked out for his baby brother, or the sadist who’d threaten to hang ovaries over my bed at night?
Turns out fate lent a hand. He worked at RJ Reynolds—one of the big tobacco companies at the time. They held their annual Christmas party at the Playboy Club on 59th Street. I didn’t hear him come in that night, even though we slept in the same convertible bed in the living room. That morning, I spotted all of the booty from the night before—a dartboard with a Playboy Bunny pointing to the center, a Leroy Neiman Femlin ashtray, and underneath, a magazine. I knew about Playboy from the newsstands, but never saw one in the flesh. Now I was holding it: December 1970—a blonde wearing only a Santa hat, her arm cradling her ample significant others.
“Nice, huh?”
Busted.
I threw it down, trying to get as far away from the charms of Miss December as I could.
“Calm down. Calm down. It’s just a chick.”
He brought the magazine closer to me and opened it up, whisking past the pieces by James Baldwin and Norman Mailer until he came to the main attraction. He let the center pages fall down. I was face to face with Carol Imhof—Playmate of the Month—and her unmentionables.
“You know what that is?”
I had to say something or he would tease me every night until one of us got married and left home.
“Hair?”
“No shit. I mean, what’s underneath.”
“Oh, a vagina.” I said it the way you would ask for the latest edition of Action Comics at the candy store.
“You better not let Mommy hear you say that stuff.”
He was right. If she nearly decapitated me for “pregnant”, I didn’t want to find out what “vagina” would bring.
“David told me.”
“The doctor’s son? Smartass. Did he tell you how babies are made?”
“Yes.” I told him everything David said, hoping for a “no way” or “he’s crazy” that never came.
“Did he tell you what happens to the woman if she doesn’t get pregnant?”
“You mean it gets worse? Worse than the balls on the inside?”
“Oh yeah, it gets much worse.” He looked like Dracula about to make his mark.
“Blood. Lots of it. And they feel sick for a week. It’s awful.”
“Oh God,” I thought. They were bleeding and no one could fix it.
I never truly got over the blood thing.
Patrick Carella writes fiction and creative nonfiction about family, memory, advertising, obsession, and the strange dignity of American life. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso. His work has appeared in Wicked Shadow Press, CafeLit, The Gorko Gazette, and is forthcoming in BULL, Hobart, and Eunoia Review. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife and their pit bulls, who remain unimpressed by literary publication.
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Website: www.patcarella.com
Featured photo by Pavel Danilyuk (Pexels)
