An Annotated Ontogeny of Sex & Shame

“When saints call themselves sinners, they are not so wrong.”

― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 

Age Six 

You are in a car with your parents—it is small and red and forces you all to crouch close together. You are driving somewhere sunny and green and endless. It's a great day. You cannot think of a better day. What a perfect day! you keep saying over and over again. When you arrive at the green pasture, your parents cradle each hand, occasionally lifting you so that your feet dangle above the ground, surrounded by other children whose parents are cradling them the same way. Everyone is happy and your smile reaches higher than you ever have on the swing set. You don’t think you can ever go  higher. The green pasture is mottled with blue— baby birds that scurry around everywhere, on their own little walks with their own parents in their own little concentric circles. You see the other children kiss them, hold them, claim them as their own and decide upon the same for yourself. You grab two that are especially small and soft and blue and bury them into your chest. You cannot wait to surprise your parents when you get home, show them how good you did, show them how you picked the two bluest birds.

In the car, on the way home, your parents are bubbling over with praise—What a good girl! Our perfect baby girl! Our good girl who never brings us any trouble!, unlike the other children who begged and pleaded and wore down their poor, tired parents into taking a bird home. You feel the smaller of the two flutter against your chest. This tiny flutter makes your tummy drop the way it drops when you swing down.  

The cramped car, once filled with love, begins to percolate inch by inch with dread. You grow catatonic as your parents drone on with praise, knowing that soon you will be found out, knowing that soon that which has just been given to you will be taken away. As your heart thuds, the bigger of the two buries his beak into it. Like you, they are growing restless.

You know what needs to be done.

You grab a blue bird, soft and warm and fluttering still and swallow it whole. You want to cry as you feel your teeth snap and grind its tiny bones down but your mouth is too full of feathers to scream. You leave nothing behind. Your parents drone on lovingly, stingingly, as your throat grows so hoarse you are afraid you will choke. Still, you quiet your breath, preparing yourself once again to do what needs to be done. You grab the smaller, softer one that now looks you in the eye.

You wake up screaming.

Ages Fifteen through Twenty

You’re late. You woke up late and the list of errands you have to complete mounts and collapses in your head like a sand dune. You stuff a flimsy plastic bag full of everything you think you need and it begins to sag under its own weight. Big and unwieldy, it collides with every wall in your way, announcing your arrival, announcing your disarray. The whole world is a market, whose anodyne wares you begrudgingly accept as your own. As the day goes on, more bags are ladled onto your arms, now long and thin like a curtain rod, stretching endlessly to make space for the nameless goods. The bags all sag under their own weight, and you begin to sag under theirs. When you get home, you collapse with the bags that have 

begun to feel like overripe fruit leeching off your rakish arm. You all coalesce into one big rag pile, a garbage heap in need of disentanglement, of order, of liberation So you begin picking apart this dune as swiftly and fruitlessly as a gust of wind—undoing the disarray only to recast it in a different spot, in a different shape, in a different shade. And then you begin again.

From underneath this heap, something whimpers. At first, you cannot tell what it is or where it is coming from, muffled under this cascade of cloth and limb and styrene you call a home. But you keep digging, and it emerges: small and shrivelled and afraid like a burdock burr. Your dog. You forgot you had a dog. You can’t remember the last time you fed it and now, in your palms, grey and panting, it looks like it could crumble like chalk. Hurried, you grab its neck and force it under the faucet that carves a stream in your home, hoping that water will undo what you have done. But its tongue proves to be too brittle and its limbs are as solid as the water you beckon it towards. You shake its body with grief. You scream in your dream.

The heaps in your mind begin to form and collapse again, like the paltry sighs of the dog's  chest, like the paltry sighs of your own. How could you have let this happen again?

Age Twenty Two 

You are trapped in a Norman Rockwell painting, only half erased. You are wearing a full circle skirt and a half apron, in prints like gingham or tattersall. You are stirring away in a bakelite kitchen embellished with every appliance in the catalog, but something feels wrong. The lights are too bright and the floor is slanted and so you are in a battle with the ground that seems to keep slipping underneath the stem of your heels. The kettle on the electric stove is roaring, weeping, sweating and you are afraid it is going to burst.

Instead, the doorbell rings like thunderclap, and you tremble like a rain cloud. On your doorstep, on the muddy Welcome mat, is a wrought iron perambulator hiding something cold and wet and shivering in a swath of cloth. In a flash, you know somehow that He was Yours. 

Under the sheets, he is ugly and mangled like an intestine. Aborted and deformed. He does not look like your husband, or really any man you know, but you cannot be certain because you cannot bring yourself to look at him for too long. He emits a low, punctured wail and does not stop and this makes your stomach ache in a way that causes the rest of your body to contract, pushing all your organs into your throat. You go on stirring in a state of terror as his wail embalms the kitchen in something waxy and unmistakable.

The doorbell rings again— it is your husband home from work, wearing his suit and face like  a wrinkled paper bag. You tremble like a rain cloud all over again. He sits down on the  kitchen table and you scoop some peas onto the plate along with the bleeding meat. Your mouth is full of organs so you do not eat, or talk. You try to swallow them but you do not have the stomach for it. You mean to say something, but you cannot find the words to explain that which is inexplicable to even you. Instead, your mouth opens and closes like you are kissing, or gasping for air. 

The kettle still roars. Your husband drags his polished fork over the pyrex plate, puncturing his peas one by one, over and over again. The creature goes on wailing in that same low, indelible way that makes you want to blow your brains and does not stop. It is only then that you realize then that He is yours alone, that He was always yours alone. You take Him to bed.