If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

by Julia Sweeney

Self-hate swelled in my breast.

  Mulan put down her fork. Her face was twisted in disgust. “That’s where humans make a baby, where you go to the bathroom? Mom!” Her voice was rising.

  “Yes,” I said, looking around conspiratorially. “I know.” I sighed. “It is weird. That part can take some getting used to.”

  “Gross,” Mulan mumbled.

  “Yeah, I know. As they say, it’s like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park. Terrible zoning.”

  “What?” Mulan said.

  “The thing is,” I went on, “that’s how we evolved. That’s where it all happens. And even though going to the bathroom and having sex are both in the same general area, they are actually totally separate.” I wanted to add, “Except for some people for whom it gets all mushed together psychologically, which is sad and creepy in my opinion but certainly not morally wrong, and is actually understandable given the proximity.” But that seemed to be getting ahead of the conversation, so I tried to change the direction slightly.

  “Like your nose and your mouth,” I ventured. “They’re both close to each other on your face, but you wouldn’t stick a bean sprout up your nose.” Mulan gave me a pathetic lower-teeth-revealing smile and grunted a charity chuckle. Then she got back to the topic at hand.

  “But Mom,” Mulan began again with laser-beam focus, “how can this ever happen? I mean, men and women, they can never be naked together.”

  “Well,” I explained, “when people are older—much, much older than a kid—when they are older and they both decide they want to, under certain circumstances, like if they’re in love with each other, well, then, they can be naked together.”

  “But how do they know when?” Mulan asked. “Does the man say, ‘Is now the time to take off my pants?’ ”

  We held each other’s gaze for a moment.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what they say.”

  To my great relief Mulan seemed content with that knowledge and began to eat with gusto. We moved on to other topics of conversation.

  Later, as we drove home, Mulan seemed unusually quiet. I glanced at her from time to time in my rearview mirror. She was sitting in the backseat, staring out the window. We were driving down Sunset Boulevard toward Vine Street and the sidewalks were filled with people.

  Suddenly Mulan laughed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Oh, Mom. You’re going to laugh so hard.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Mom, you can’t believe what I thought you said back at the restaurant. It’s so funny. I thought you said that the man puts his penis in a woman’s vagina—inside of it—and that’s how people make a baby. Isn’t that hysterical?”

  A pause.

  “That is what I said,” I said.

  “Oh,” Mulan said. Her face had turned from gaiety to seriousness. There was a long quiet time. Mulan stared out the window taking all this in.

  Mulan asked, “What if two people just walked up to each other on the street and started doing it?” Our eyes met in the mirror. Her eyebrows were furrowed and she broke our gaze and looked at some people standing outside Yogurtland.

  At this point, I decided the best way to approach these questions was to pretend I was Margaret Mead, or some dispassionate anthropologist discussing the mating habits of a particular tribe. “The human species is very private when it comes to sex. Humans are unusual in this way. They have sex in private.”

  Mulan asked, “What if you went to a party and there were a bunch of men and women and they all just started doing it? Would that ever happen?”

  “No,” I lied. “That would never happen. Because humans are so private.”

  My back stiffened. I realized it stiffened like my grandmother, my mother’s mother. I was reaching back, further back than my own mother’s discomfort and into the graves of the next generation of discomfort. The dead live.

  “Mom,” Mulan said gravely, “have you ever done this?”

  “Yes,” I said, flatly.

  “But Mom, you can’t have children.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Well, you never have to do that again.” Mulan sighed. She sounded relieved.

  After a moment I said, “Well, if you really love someone and you’re an adult, then you want to do it, even if you can’t have a baby.”

  Silence. Mulan stared out the window deep in thought. “But Mom, how can people do that? I mean, how do their legs go? You know, not everyone can do the splits.”

  Ah, the perspective of the proud gymnast. Mulan became somewhat fixated on the role of legs in sex. She could not picture how it was physically possible, even if someone could do the splits. Finally, I said, “Mulan, people figure the legs out. They just do.”

  “Oh,” Mulan said, taking this in. She quieted down and we got home. When we got out of the car, our cat Val was sitting in the front yard soaking up the last bits of sunlight. Val rolled onto her back.

  “What about cats?” Mulan asked. “How do they do it?” “It’s basically the same idea,” I said. “But how do their legs go?” Mulan wondered. “They, well, I think the male stands behind the female and . . . and . . . they just do, Mulan,” I said, exasperated, and disappointed that “They just do” was the best I could do.

  Once inside the house, Arden, delirious with glee at our return, jumped up and licked my hand. “What about dogs?” Mulan asked, having never considered the possibility before. “Same thing,” I said. “It’s basically the same thing for all mammals.”

  “But what about their legs?” Mulan asked again.

  “Look,” I said, now desperately tired of this subject, “I’ve lost my ability to describe it. Maybe we can look on Wikipedia or something and it will show us.”

  So we went to my office and got online. I googled “cats mating.” And of course, on YouTube there were thousands of videos. We watched a couple of them. Mulan was riveted. She moved her face closer and closer to the monitor.

  “Now what about dogs?” she asked. We watched a few dog videos. She put her hand on my arm.

  I had another moment out of time. Like when you’re in an accident, and time slows to a crawl. I could hear my own breathing as if I were suddenly wearing a space suit from 2001. Mulan’s hand seemed to be reaching out to my arm in slow motion: frame by frame. I believe I remember it this way because it wasn’t until then, until this small, intimate gesture, this gesture of familiarity and of safety, that I realized where I’d led us.

  “Mom, do you think there would be any videos of humans mating on the Internet?”

  I am a monster. An incompetent monster of a mother.

  I smiled and said firmly, “No. There would never be anything like that. Because humans are so private.” And then, “Hey, how about some ice cream?”

  Which of course was teaching her that when questions about sex get awkward, food is truly the answer.

  Later that night Mulan asked, “What about Roger and Don; how do they do it?”

  “I . . . , I don’t know,” I said.

  All right, I was thrown. I thought I would have more time between frogs and same-sex intercourse than just an hour or two. I was out of my depth.

  Mulan went to the bathroom and took a little longer than usual to come out. Later she said, casually, “I think I know how Roger and Don do it.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said.

  “Yeah. Mom, there’s another hole down there, where you also go to the bathroom. Maybe . . . you know, maybe they use that.”

  That’s my girl, my Mulan, age nine, inventing anal sex. Smart, inquisitive, problem solving, Spock-like in objectivity and with a total lack of squeamishness. Bless her heart.

  “Maybe,” I answered her, and shrugged my shoulders to indicate: see how casual and easygoing I am?

  “But Mom,” she said, “what about two girls? What about Jill and Eve; how do they do it?”

  “I . . . I . . . ,” I answered meekly. I was beaten.

  “Wel
l, why don’t you call Jill and ask her?” Mulan asked me.

  “Nah,” I said, pretending to be reading the newspaper.

  Mulan put her face a few inches from mine. She looked disgusted with me. “Mom, aren’t you even curious?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Fan Letter

  Dear Reader, I married him.

  —Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre

  About seven or eight years ago, I wrote a dramatic monologue and I performed it for more than a year in New York and Los Angeles. It was called Letting Go of God. Ira Glass, who produces the public radio show This American Life, asked me to record a segment for a show he was doing. When this show aired, I got hundreds of emails from people. They were flooding in, and it was hard to keep up with them.

  At the time that my segment on This American Life aired, I was working as a writer on the TV show Desperate Housewives. I would run into my office between story meetings and read a new flood of emails about my radio segment. It was thrilling.

  The subject line from one of the emails caught my eye: “Desperately Seeking Sweeney-in-law.” And the note said, “I am writing to you to propose marriage to you on behalf of my brother who doesn’t know I’m writing to you. I would propose to you myself, but I’m gay and I live in San Francisco so I don’t think it would work out between us. But I am proposing for my brother because his big deal-breaker with women is that they must not believe in God. They cannot be religious in any way. Everyone has their deal-breakers. That is his. When I saw your show, I knew you were the perfect woman for him.”

  The letter went on to inform me that his brother was a scientist who lived near Chicago. There was a picture and a phone number.

  It was a funny, really well-written letter. And the picture featured a handsome man. I read it to the guys in the office next to me, but I didn’t respond to it because—what was I going to say? All I wanted to say was “Hey. Great letter!” But I figured he’d say, “So, why don’t you call my brother?” I wasn’t going to call his brother who was a scientist in Chicago. C’mon.

  Then I went to New York, where I was performing Letting Go of God off-Broadway. One day, after a show, I was turning in my microphone to the sound guy when I ran into a woman coming out of the restroom. She had just seen my show. She wasn’t expecting to talk to me. She said, “Oh, my friend wrote you a letter several months ago, proposing marriage on behalf of his brother.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right,” I said.

  “I just want to vouch for those two,” she said, “I’ve known them for thirty years, since high school, and they are really funny. And smart. And Michael, the brother, he’s cute and you should write him.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said.

  “You should,” she said.

  “Maybe I will!” I said.

  “Do it!” she said.

  But I didn’t.

  Then, several months later, I was doing the show again in Los Angeles. I came out after a performance and a tall, handsome man was waiting to talk to me in the lobby of the theater.

  He said, “I’m Joel. I sent you a letter almost a year ago, proposing marriage on behalf of my brother.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right,” I said. “I’m sorry I never wrote him.”

  There was an awkward pause. I thought about a sort-of crush I was developing with an acquaintance, which I knew was a bad idea. I liked my life free of romance. So I said, “Maybe I will write to him.”

  “Well, don’t, because he’s an asshole,” he said.

  I was shocked. “Oh dear. Why?” I asked.

  “When he found out I wrote you that letter he got very angry with me. Even just today,” he said, “when I was driving down here from San Francisco, I talked to Michael on my cell phone and I told him he shouldn’t be mad at me because it was a good letter. And after you didn’t respond, I even read the letter in a creative writing class I was taking. I accidentally left the letter on my chair and the next week a woman came up to me and said she found the letter and she asked if you had ever written to Michael. I said no and she said that was great because she wanted to introduce him to her daughter! But when I told Michael this he got even angrier with me than he had been before. He was livid that I was doing this to him and he yelled at me. So I just had to hang up on him.”

  “Oh my goodness!” I said.

  “Not only that, everyone is mad at me for writing this letter. In fact, my mother is here visiting from Washington, D.C., and she just saw your show and now she’s over there on the other side of the lobby. My mother really thinks this whole thing I did was crazy,” he said.

  “I have to meet your mother,” I told him.

  I went over and met the mother: Norma. She was standing with a friend of Joel’s: Shyamala, who had also attended my performance. (In fact, it was really because of Shyamala that Joel was waiting for me in the lobby. After my show, all three of them had gone to Joel’s car, but then Shyamala realized she needed to use the restroom. They waited for her as she came back in the theater to use the facilities. Then, as she was leaving the lobby again, she noticed I was there talking to people. When she got back to the car, she insisted that Joel come back in the theater and talk to me. Norma thought it was nuts, but accompanied them.)

  That’s how I found myself talking to all three of them.

  Norma said to me, “You really shouldn’t be talking to us. I told Joel that you were going to call the FBI on him for stalking you. It’s so ridiculous that he wrote you that letter. I will say this, however: I would make a fabulous mother-in-law. I’m not the nosy type, and I don’t get involved in my sons’ lives at all. The most I would ever say to you is ‘cute skirt’ and by the way, where did you get that skirt?”

  Oh my God, I loved her. Not that I was looking, but she did seem like good mother-in-law material to me.

  I went home and found the email from the year before and I wrote to this Michael fellow and said, “Well, now I’ve met your brother, your mother, and your friend in New York. And I figured if you were half as charming as your brother I owe it to him, at least, to just say hello.”

  A few days later he wrote me back and the subject line was “I am mortified.” He said he had never known the true meaning of mortified until he found out his brother had sent me that email and included his cell phone number in it, which caused him to get very upset. He had hoped that the email had been deleted by some efficient assistant of mine. He was terribly sorry that his brother had bothered me like that. His email ended with no encouragement of any further emails.

  But I wrote back anyway. I said I thought it was fine, what his brother did. I told him his brother was really gracious and funny, and he shouldn’t be angry with him. Michael responded.

  I responded.

  We responded.

  We continued to respond.

  After several weeks I gave him my phone number. He called immediately. His voice was like a whisper. It was simultaneously maddening and sexy. Marilyn Monroe meets Christopher Lloyd. But I got used to it. I wanted to know more about what he did. I could barely understand it. His work seemed complicated and mysterious, which was frankly a big turn-on.

  But after a while, it seemed silly. I think I was just excited to talk to a scientist. What was seriously going to happen? A friend of mine warned against getting too wrapped up in emails. She said, “You never know about the chemistry between two people until you’re in the same room. There’s no way to know over the phone if this thing’s got heat.”

  I wrote Michael an email, attempting to dial things down. I wrote, “I don’t know about the emailing so much. Hey, next time you’re in Los Angeles, let’s go to lunch.”

  He wrote, “Well, I’m never in Los Angeles.”

  I wrote, “Okay. Well, see you when I see you, then.”

  He wrote, “I guess I could come to Los Angeles.”

  I wrote, “Sure, that’d be great. When?”

  He wrote, “I don’t know. How about tomorrow?”

  Wow. This
was very titillating and possibly frightening. I didn’t know if he should know my address. What if he was weird? Did clocking in twenty-five hours on the phone mean you really knew someone? That night he called and I said, “Hmmm . . . I don’t know if I should tell you where I live.”

  He said, “That’s no problem. Tell me a restaurant and we can meet there.”

  I said, “But you could probably find out where I live easily on the Internet.”

  Michael clicked away on his computer, “Are you on Arden?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I only looked that up just now,” Michael said. “I don’t think it should be so easy to find where people live. Complete strangers could find you.” He seemed genuinely concerned for my welfare.

  “Yes,” I said, as I rolled my eyes. “That would be so wrong if just anyone could find me.” I sighed, “All right, come and pick me up—I’ll wait outside with my scary dog.”

  I got off the phone and began to google myself to find my address. It was the easiest piece of information to get. I began to google friends’ addresses, including many famous people. Wow, their addresses were so easy to get! The only thing I could do to avoid Michael was to move, buy a place under a pseudonym, and then have all my mail go to a post office box. But I couldn’t do that retroactively, and I couldn’t do that in one day.

  The next evening, Mulan and I sat together on the front steps as Michael drove up in a rented convertible. Mulan’s eyes got big with excitement. At age six, she was already impressed by convertibles. Frighteningly so. He parked on the other side of the street. We watched him get out of the car. He was lanky and handsome. I liked how he moved.

  We all walked to the Los Angeles Tennis Club together, the three of us. And of course, Arden. I belonged to the club, only a few blocks away. They had a Friday night kids program that Mulan liked to attend. Michael and I dropped her off and walked the dog for an hour through the neighborhood.

  Michael owns a business that makes scientific instruments. My favorite story he told me that night was about fulfilling his biophysics PhD requirement to teach a class. Michael went to Harvard. His assignment, twice a week, was to teach a twenty-five-student section of a three-hundred-student lecture class. Michael found the whole idea of standing up in front of other people, talking, to be horrendous. Terrifying. He was filled with dread just thinking about it. He walked into his first classroom and faced his twenty-five students. Fear seized him. Taking one big, panicky breath, he began to talk, but then immediately turned his back to the students in order to write equations on the blackboard. He felt such relief, looking at the black slate, he didn’t turn around again. For the entire one-hour-long class.