by Abby Norman
“Don’t do back exactly what I’m doing. Change it up a little,” he said, settling back against my bed. Great, I thought. It’s improv. He noticed my hesitation and thought for a minute, then tried a different tack, using a language in which we’d already established our mutual fluency.
In the end it was his more technical illustration—a slightly clunky analogy using thermodynamic stability—that, surprisingly, helped.
Then, somewhat inexplicably, geekily aroused, I joined him on the bed. My shirt came off first, and I had not been wearing a bra—a decision which, as a then-single woman with chronic pain in the middle of July, I don’t have to justify to anyone. It did seem like altogether too quick a reveal to me, but he wasn’t disappointed. I blushed severely, a full-bodied rosiness that may have been warm and lovely, but also panic-inducing. No one had ever seen my breasts before, let alone touched them this way. I wasn’t yet accustomed to interpreting the type of unspoken communication that occurs in these situations, and I briefly considered asking for some kind of verbal reassurance, but I couldn’t figure out how. I rightly assumed that something like, “Are they breasty enough?” would have ruined the magic. Instead, I tried to commit to the immersion learning experience.
Max’s lips discovered the shoreline of my collarbones, his hot skin warming my face. His hands found my abdomen, his fingers climbing the lattice of my ribs, then slipping down to my lower pelvis with its slow healing scars. He was gentle, but moved with what I now understand was practiced finesse. He knew where he was going even if I didn’t, and while I had a passing feeling of disappointment in myself for not knowing everything, I also recognized that it was an important exercise in trust. And a gentler side of me pointed out, of course, that there was a first time for everything. And some firsts were big, and the only one you got.
I had expected that if he put anything inside me—finger, phallus, what-have-you, it would hurt. Not necessarily because I had pain there to begin with, or because of all the painful pelvic exams in my life. I’d just grown up, like many young women do, being warned that “the first time hurts.”
I OFTEN WONDER IF MY early sexual education may have, in a way, set me up for this fate. I was in the fifth grade, and there were two teachers: both female and in their late fifties. One of them was gregarious and open, and framed the conversation with multiple exclamation points: exciting!!! The other was gravely serious, probably a little repressed, and thoroughly mortified.
Take a wild guess as to who ended up teaching the girls.
While the laughter of the boys echoed from the classroom next door, the lot of us poor prepubescent females sat squirming in our seats as our long-faced teacher struggled to even utter the word “vagina.” Hillary and I sat trying to reconcile what we thought we heard as “Velveeta,” and I became increasingly frustrated that the boys were having a grand old time with their sex ed, and all I was feeling was embarrassed and guilty about something I didn’t even understand—an emerging theme in my life.
At recess, we congregated on the playground’s grassy knoll, forgoing our usual co-ed kickball game to debrief on our Very Important Lesson. While the boys alternately squealed and threw themselves head-first down the hill as they echoed their teacher’s decree of “Sex is greeeeeat!,” we girls sat at the top of the hill compulsively plucking blades of grass by the fistful. The boys ran around with their newly minted swagger, their sexual enlightenment, their permission for pleasure, and we blushed at the realization that, while we supposedly had been gifted with invaluable information regarding the mechanics, we hadn’t been told a thing about how sex should feel, or why anyone would want to do it. Aside from the obvious: having a baby.
The boys, in short, had emerged from their side of the classroom double doors equipped with almighty knowledge to which the girls were not privy. Now, with Max, I once again found myself in a situation where men somehow knew more about what was happening inside of my body than I did. But this time, I was quite literally positioned to discover, and perhaps claim, my sexual power. I was electrified. Even the tickling sensation on my back from my own hair—which I had let grow long, too lazy to cut it—was a full-body awakening.
Max and I didn’t have intercourse that night, but the sexual exploration we did undertake hurt—and deeply. Starting in my pelvis and rising up into my chest, everything ached for days afterward, and I accepted this as normal. No one had ever prepared me for anything different, so I wasn’t terribly worried about it. And, pain aside, it had all been rather dramatic and interesting. I felt rather dramatic and interesting myself.
The next morning, after he left, I rolled over to face the empty bed, and my blood-stained sheets, and the throbbing pain, and the lingering scent of him on my pillow, and suddenly I was spooked. Had I done something bad? Was it supposed to hurt that much? What did it mean that he had touched me that way, that he’d slept in my bed, our limbs tangling in the night? I rolled over and stared at the ceiling for a long time, wishing I had someone to talk to about it.
More than that, I felt that I had experienced a little magic. I suppose I wanted someone to tell me it was okay.
Later that week, when I had my session with Jane, I told her the story from start to finish, practically on a single breath. I felt like I was in confession, and somehow telling someone these things, even though she wasn’t saying anything, made it real.
I looked up at her, catching my breath, and then, I started to cry. “I don’t know what’s happening,” I said, laughing through my tears.
“This is falling in love,” she said knowingly. “It’s a gift—not him, but you. You’re going to learn so much about yourself.”
“And it’s okay?” I asked meekly, reaching up to wipe my eyes.
“Yes, it’s okay,” she tutted, a bemused glint in her eye. “It’s wonderful.”
I studied her face for a moment—something I rarely did. It was my tendency not to look at her very often, if at all, during our hour-long sessions. She had, years before, told me in a therapeutically relevant manner that she had been widowed fairly young. Her grief had been carefully compartmentalized, much to her credit, but it still glistened behind her eyes like an eternal flame. To realize, in that moment, the depth of her grief also required me to acknowledge the depth of the love she’d known. I wondered if I was on the precipice of knowing that kind of love myself.
Our session was over, so I stood to leave. She stood, too.
“I’m so happy for you,” she said. At first, I thought she meant she was glad to see me having a semi-age-appropriate experience for once in my life. And maybe she did mean that. But I also think she meant that she was happy, maybe even a little bit proud, that I had been brave.
I smiled, tears still blurring my vision.
Then, overcome by a strange joy, I hugged her.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER MAX and I started dating, I came down with a horrible case of strep throat. This was a fate that has befallen me with alarming consistency my whole life. I probably should have had my tonsils out, if they still do that. Even when I was little, one bout of strep would make my tonsils swell up for months, giving me the voice of a beleaguered, grisly old woman who smoked a pack a day. This particular bout was no different.
I fell ill over the weekend and knew I’d need to go to the emergency room for a throat culture and some antibiotics. I’d had strep so many times in my life that all it took was a specific feeling in my left ear canal, and I knew I was headed for the full-blown thing. I never have minded being a patient when it’s something like strep. Doctors like it when the problem is easy to diagnose and fairly uncomplicated to fix—and who can blame them? They’d do a throat swab. It would be positive for strep. I’d get antibiotics. I’d push fluids. I’d get better. Max was working, and I had quickly become too feverish to safely drive, so his father offered to take me.
I’d only just met Max’s parents, Simon and Maggie. The four of us had gone to dinner and played Scrabble. I would later learn that I’d won them
over by playing the word “trove.”
Simon was a quiet, rather serious man with excellent taste in hats. When he asked me questions, I felt a bit like I was at a job interview. That actually worked well in my favor, as I’d always been more confident in those types of professional situations than in the improvisation of casual discourse. And I loathe small talk.
Maggie was older than I’d expected. My mother had had me young and still hadn’t hit menopause—Maggie, then, was closer in age to my grandmother. We had immediate common ground, though, as she had been a dancer in her youth, and it showed. She was quite fetching: lithe, graceful, and almost disarmingly kind and conversationally affable.
Simon was a bit more restrained, though not altogether humorless. So, on the day he accompanied me to the hospital for a strep test, I was a bit taken aback when he offered to let me crash on their couch until Max got out of work. I was too exhausted to politely protest, and as I fell into a fever-stupor on their couch, he put on a kettle and offered a piece of satisfied wisdom from their sunny kitchen:“You’re in the right place. Just be sick. You don’t have any other responsibility.”
I must have felt at least a little bit safe, because I fell into a deep, febrile sleep. I was roused from it an indeterminate number of hours later, when the house around me had grown dark. Maggie was gently nudging me, a thermometer in her hand.
“Sorry to wake you sweetie, but I’m worried,” she said, and she did sound worried, which I found almost comical, because I was so unaccustomed to being fussed over. She brushed her cool palm against my forehead and stuck the thermometer in my mouth, then proceeded to ask me if I’d rather sleep upstairs, in Max’s bed or their guest bed. I moaned. I could hardly keep my eyes open, and I was afraid that if I tried to move, I’d fall right onto the floor. The couch was actually pretty cozy—and I’d slept on enough couches in my day to know.
“You can stay right here, as long as you’re comfortable,” Maggie replied, which meant that my non-answer had conveyed the right sentiment. The thermometer beeped and she took it out of my mouth as she asked, “Do you want something to eat? Or some tea maybe?”
“I might take some tea later,” I croaked, my fear of being impolite finally overcoming the shards of glass in my throat. “Thank you.”
As I drifted back to sleep, listening to his parents tutting away nervously in the kitchen, hearing the screen door smack as Max came in, feeling him lift me from the couch a moment or so later, I remembered what he’d said to me in the car on that night he’d introduced me to them: “They’ll love you. They’ll make you a part of this family. You have to be ready for that.”
I wasn’t. And like everyone else who had tried to love the darkness out of me—neither were they.
SHORTLY THEREAFTER, I LOST MY virginity to Max in a sunny corner bedroom on borrowed sheets with a higher thread count than I felt I deserved. Not in the least because I knew that eventually, if not at that particular moment of penetration, I would bleed on them.
I had been instructed throughout my life—by older women, by books, by society—that I wouldn’t enjoy my first time, but that gradually sex would get better, so I should just stick it out. It was true that the first time was painful, but because I had been anticipating that, I wasn’t particularly surprised or disappointed. What did surprise me was that, despite the pain of penetration, I really liked everything else sex involved, the vast majority of which was brand new to me.
For one thing, I had a great deal to learn about penises: I was at first rather embarrassed by the fact that I had seen precious few of them in my life before the opportunity arose to put one inside of me. I had not watched the requisite porn as a teenager (which would have been an especially difficult feat to manage when I was sleeping on people’s living-room couches), and therefore I found the need to ask a lot of questions. It’s always been my nature to be fascinated, and it seemed reasonable that my sexual awakening would present as good a time to be astonished as any.
Max was patient with me. He’d “been with other women,” as he put it—something that seemed impressively classy coming from a twenty-year-old—and I suppose he figured he’d seen enough vaginas to have seen them all. Not that I asked: I was too enthralled by the concept of a scrotum.
He subtly took the lead when penetration became imminent. I don’t know exactly how this was decided, but I’m sure it involved some kind of definitive, practical statement from me. Something to the tune of, “AFFIRMATIVE: I’m sufficiently lubricated and aroused for this consensual sexual activity. PROCEED.”
I remember thinking it felt like having your hand slammed in a car door. The pain was a deep ache, like a dull pinch, that resonated in my pelvis. My belly clenched, and I guess I made some God-awful noise, because he immediately looked down at me, a heaving breath away from a stilted apology.
I swallowed hard, tears pooling in the corners of my eyes and sliding down my cheeks as I smiled, telling him I was fine, to keep going. I had expected it to hurt, and it had hurt.
The problem was, it never stopped hurting—but it took me at least the first year of our relationship to admit that it was painful, that something was wrong.
At the end of that summer, Max and I moved in together. By then, I’d explained my situation, and although I wasn’t going back to Sarah Lawrence, I was determined to do something with myself during the fall semester when Max went back to school. I had some money saved up, and so long as he was enrolled in school, his parents were helping him some. I tried to take a few classes at one of the other universities in the college town where we lived. I had also tried to start taking dance classes again. But my health continued to decline, and neither of those things, despite my best efforts, worked out beyond the first semester. Incidentally, Max ended up hating the program he was in. We were happy with each other but not with what we were doing, so we moved back to the town where we’d met, where his family was, so that he could figure out what he wanted to do next. I was left to figure out what I could do next.
Despite the pain that I continued to experience with intercourse, I fell in love with the intimacy of it. I had never spent so much time being physically close to another person. In our new little apartment, we slept in an overpriced queen-sized bed (our first joint purchase), and he was an incredible space heater at night. I loved sliding my feet between his calves to warm them up (which he didn’t appreciate, I’m sure, but he’d still roll over and embrace me in his sleep). If I woke suddenly, some forgotten terror clawing at my guts, I would immediately calm upon realizing he had his arms around me, that I was safe.
On Christmases, we went to upstate New York with his family, and they were the best Christmases of my life. We’d sleep on a teeny tiny air mattress in a spare bedroom, and Maggie would pop her head in to wake us up on Christmas morning. One year, when we sleepily stumbled out for breakfast, she remarked that when she’d opened the door, we’d been asleep with our faces about a centimeter away from each other, and she didn’t know how we could possibly sleep like that. But then she and Simon exchanged something of a knowing glance. They sighed in unison, as though they had both remembered, for a split second, what it felt like to be in love for the first time. Maggie did know—she’d just forgotten.
Years later, after Max and I broke up and I kept the apartment, I would examine the bedroom in the early morning hours, contemplating the loss. For a long time afterward, the air in the room felt stale and I kept it dark, the shadows of the creases in the sheets where we had once lain intertwined, staying in crumpled stillness. I liked the boneyard quality of the room—it suggested perpetuation. When I finally couldn’t stand the scent of him hovering anymore, I opened the windows, even though it was the dead of winter. I could practically see my breath in front of me, and the sheets were icy against my skin. When spring came, the room and I thawed, sunlight penetrating the window and cutting diagonally across the bed, making it appear as though it had been split right down the middle. It hadn’t felt that way.
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nbsp; I had never experienced the freedom of physical touch before Max—sexual or otherwise. And I only realized after he was gone that it was the nonsexual intimacy, the nonsexual physical touch, that was ultimately the most healing. The sexual element, though, gave me a vital education of my body that would prove to be invaluable later on. The knowledge that intercourse was intolerable because of disease became an answer to a question I hadn’t found a way to ask.
As the years passed and my illness only got worse, my body seeming to be continuously giving up the fight, it wore on both Max and me. We were only kids. Kids who had fallen into passionate love for the first time. It was, in its way, absolute magic. But most magic is about sleights of hand and misdirection. Ours, in the end, was no different.
Max had brought with him a family: two parents who were perhaps a little overprotective, but fundamentally good, and willing, and loving. No family is without its darkness, and mistakes, and loathing. But when there’s support, and affirmation, and love, to balance the suffering out a little, you manage. In retrospect, I think my relationship to Max’s parents—which was at times more complicated and emotionally wrought than my relationship with their son—provided the most lasting lessons.
The first year we were together, we went to Simon and Maggie’s for the week of Thanksgiving. On one of those evenings, he went off to visit some of his friends, and I stayed behind, because I didn’t feel well. I don’t think he was too disappointed—we both understood that we needed time to be with our friends separate from one another, and I wasn’t going to harp on him about where he was, or what he was doing, or who he was with. First, because I trusted him. But second, because I had a lot of other stuff on my mind and didn’t want the responsibility of “mothering” him.
