Sugar in My Bowl (25 page)

We saw each other a few more times after that. Perhaps fittingly, the last time I saw him was at my mother’s memorial service.

We all know, in some abstract way, how our parents’ sexuality inflects ours; but we often talk about it obliquely, laughingly invoking Freud and taboos, or keeping such thoughts for a therapist’s office. My parents’ story was a romance in the classical sense, but it was also, from another perspective, a romance novel, steamy, lewd in intervals. If it had had a different ending, it would have seemed more troubling, but because it had the right kind of ending—they lived happily ever after, sort of—it became a romance. As it got told, collectively, in its fragments over the years, the story is bittersweet. They are found out and forbidden to see each other. My father loses his job at the Catholic school; my mother is sent to the public school. She applies to college as a junior and is accepted to Barnard. She elopes with my father—yes, elopes—joining him in New York in an apartment against the wishes of her parents. My mother is sixteen or seventeen, I am not sure. They are always evasive on this point. Never mind that the marriage might be said to have erased the crime. One day—“it was a beautiful day, the most beautiful day you could imagine,” my mother told me two months before she died—my mother’s father was driving to work when he had a heart attack. A few minutes later, he was dead.

My mother told her mother she didn’t have to get married. Her mother said: No. You are going to get married—here in our backyard. The wedding pictures are square black-and-white photos with crimped edges. My father is—for once—in a suit, his hair at an awkward length, curling strangely around his ears. My mother is beautiful in a white lace dress and Spanish veil.

It seems to me that all these intersections, of romance, of love, get at something larger than just my family’s story. They get at a kernel of a truth about how quickly the role of love and sex shifted in young women’s lives. At seventeen, I was frightened of love because I found it potentially limiting. At seventeen, my mother was excited by love, because she found it expansive, eye-opening. It brought her out of suburban New Jersey and into Brooklyn and Barnard in the 1970s, at a time when young writers and artists were first congregating in the borough. She had children and became an educator. I feared that love would hold me back. Like many liberal-minded women of my generation, I thought it was my birthright to be sexually free in my twenties. The frames we came to sex and romance with led us to make radically different choices. Who knows if either was better; the point is just that we make choices, and then we live them out. That is life. Volition is really only a small part of the whole.

It was harrowing to see M. in those weeks near my mother’s death. Perhaps that’s why I wanted to. To remember what it was to be sixteen trying to become adult, to see sex as the gateway to an adulthood just out of reach—and to remember the grace of falling in love, of finding a person who took me “somewhere I have never travelled, gladly,” much as with my father my mother went somewhere she had never traveled, gladly—to Brooklyn, to a world of Szechuan food, drafty brownstones, painters and writers and teachers, conversation and children.

It is of course discomfiting to write this account. These words still feel too frontal to me, too unironic, too cerebral to capture the dark spaces and silences, the night hours that shape our ideas of need. Putting into words any theory about my mother and myself is to turn the complexity of our experiences into a single narrative, rather than the loom of fine threads it is. As I finish, it occurs to me that perhaps that’s why Cummings writes “somewhere I
never
travelled.” Desire, love, these are places we cannot map and fail to return from, so that they live within us below the surface: our Neverlands.

Skin, Just Skin

A Dramatic Triologue

Eve Ensler

(To be performed by Three Women)

WOMAN
1:     Sometimes it’s so can’t stop

Take off shirt

Undo belt

Clumsy

You do it

No, I’ll do it

Undo bra

One more hook

Strip down

WOMAN
2:     Sometimes it’s all about

Skin just skin

Just the way skin

WOMAN
3:    Oh God, sometimes it’s like mouth on mouth

Teeth

Tongue

Have to

WOMAN
1:     Sometimes

It’s accidental

You thought you were friends

And this current

Turns into one week

In a small hotel room in East Berlin.

WOMAN
2:     Oh, nice. Who was that?

WOMAN
3:    Sometimes it’s

About watching

WOMAN
2:     Or being watched

Undressing in front of him

In front of the big window

WOMAN
1:     Sometimes it’s you putting a hand

On yourself

And him watching

And Rome watching him

Watching

WOMAN
2:     Sometimes

It’s a crowded boat filled

With cheering tourists

On the Adriatic

As you’re both caught there

Naked humping in the sand

And you don’t stop

WOMAN
1:     You didn’t stop?

WOMAN
3:    Sometimes it’s scuff marks on the off-yellow carpet

In the posh South Kensington apartment

WOMAN
2:     Sometimes it’s a dare

Forty-five floors up

Mouth on him

In a building that once existed

And he comes by the time

WOMAN
1:     Oh God, I always dreamed of doing that

WOMAN
3:    Sometimes it’s driving on the mad

Italian speedway at a thousand miles

Your face buried in his jeans

WOMAN
1:     Sometimes it’s a melting hot

Summer day and you’re passed out

In the afternoon

And you wake up with his rugged face

Between your legs

WOMAN
2:     Sometimes it’s a work night

And you get home early

And you take a bath

And undress

And play with yourself

Lying there casual and stark naked

On the bed

And you’re on your knees before she remembers

It’s been a hard day

WOMAN
3:    I didn’t know you were with women . . . when was that?

WOMAN
1:     Sometimes it’s the twenty-nine-year-old thin boy

From the village

With the curly black hair

Who comes to your summer house

On the edge of the sea

And kisses you and you know it’s August

And you’re suddenly not fifty-four

WOMAN
3:    Sometimes it’s a song

WOMAN
2:     Or a joint

WOMEN
123:  Or too much chocolate

WOMAN
1:     Sometimes it’s only chocolate

WOMAN
2:     Or birthday cake at midnight

Because one of you is married

WOMAN
3:    No, you didn’t

WOMAN
2:     I didn’t. I wanted to, but I didn’t

WOMAN
3:    Sometimes he just says do you mind

If I kiss you and it occurs to you that you don’t

And you end up with your mouth on his for eight hours and

The sun comes up

WOMAN
1:     Sometimes you wake up and he’s inside

You and your body is more aroused ’cause it’s

So early and you’re so

Sleepy and nothing has ever felt like that

WOMAN
3:    Sometimes it’s that window

Wide open in Montauk

And it’s so bright you’re

Only wearing sunglasses

Looking out

As he takes you from behind

Sweating and screaming out

WOMAN
2:     And sometimes

It just happens in Portugal

For the first time in seven years

You find each other

And you’re not afraid

WOMAN
1:     Sometimes it’s the hysteria that comes

After he has been that deep inside you

And the crying is a way of coming

WOMAN
2:     And sometimes

It’s riding him like a bronco

WOMAN
3:    Or humping her like you’re about to get there

WOMAN
1:     And sometimes it’s the three of you in a hot tub

And you end up entangled not knowing

Whose hair whose mouth whose hand

WOMAN
2:     And sometimes you dress up

And they take it off you

WOMAN
3:    Sometimes it’s hardness

WOMAN
2:     It’s softness

WOMAN
1:     It’s grabbing

WOMAN
2:     It’s refusing

WOMAN
3:    It’s dangerous