5. Tonsil stones. Do you know about tonsil stones? Well, let me ask you this: Have you ever coughed up a small white rock that, upon further inspection, smelled like the worst corners of the New York sewer system? If so, I’m sure you were shocked this came from your own body and you flushed it away and hoped never to think of it again. That was a tonsil stone. They form in the crypts of your tonsils, where food and dead skin and various detritus collect and ferment, creating the most disgusting thing your body is capable of producing (and that’s saying a lot). In addition to their unseemliness, they are also a source of infection and discomfort. I myself have the occasional stone and asked my doctor to inspect my tonsils, which he described as “teeming balls of disease.” And yet, when I asked about removing them, he seemed unconcerned. He said I would have to rest for two weeks and would lose at least fifteen pounds, which is not the way to deter me. How, I ask, can it be even remotely okay to have this happening in one’s throat? Will other people sense it and, in an apocalyptic situation, leave me behind to choke on my stones and die?
6. I live in fear of tinnitus. A constant ringing in my ear that will drive me mad, that will keep me awake and interrupt my conversations and even when it’s cured I’ll still hear its malevolent harmony. If I lie very still at night I can fully imagine it, a sound like a bug being boiled to death.
7. I am very scared of lamp dust. I have a serious problem with dust coming out of my lamps. Everything I put under my lamps is, within minutes, covered in a thick layer of dust. In related news, my left nostril is never not clogged, and once the ear, nose, and throat doctor sucked all the mucus out of my sinuses with a tiny vacuum and for three hours I felt a 45 percent spike in my quality of life until it refilled again.
8. I’m afraid of adrenal fatigue. This is related to chronic fatigue but not the same. Western doctors don’t believe in adrenal fatigue, but if you have a job and are a human, then any holistic doctor will tell you that you have adrenal fatigue. It is essentially a dangerous exhaustion that comes from ambition and modern life. I have it so bad. Please read about it on the Internet—you do, too.
9. The surface of my tongue is insane. It looks like a cartoon of the moon. It just can’t be right.
10. I’m afraid that I am infertile. My uterus does tilt to the right, which could mean it’s an inhospitable environment for a child who wants a straight-down-the-line kind of uterus. And so I will adopt, but I won’t have the sort of beautiful, genetics-defying love story that People magazine chronicles. The kid will have undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome. He will hate me, and he will nail our dog to a board.
MY MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER attended “green-and- white” camp. That was their shorthand for a respectable summer home for privileged Jewish girls whose parents were away on cruises, where the uniform consisted of crisp green shorts and a collared white shirt.
They described camp, which they attended for eight weeks every summer from ages six to seventeen, as a sort of utopia for little girls. Nestled deep in the woods of southern Maine, you roasted marshmallows and traded secrets and learned to use a bow and arrow. Even my mother, a teenager so sullen and ornery that she refused to eat dinner with her family, came alive at camp. At home she was angry, disgusted by her father’s vaudeville sense of humor and her mother’s careful attention to social mores. She hated her blond sisters’ attempts to fit in socially and her maid for needing money badly enough to leave her own family. But at camp she had a bunk of sisters, girls who understood her, girls who she waited all through the freezing, lonely winter to see. At camp she was able to express an enthusiasm and passion she never let her family witness. And when the summer ended, she was heartbroken.
When I was little I would lie in bed, drifting off as my mother told me tales: of color wars, canoe trips, and pranks galore. Of the camp mother, who roughly shampooed your head once a week and set your hair in curlers. Of undying friendship, a world where youth ruled and boys could not disturb the idyll. In my mind her camp stories have mingled irrevocably with the plot of The Parent Trap, lending my image of her long-ago summers a Technicolor flair.
When I was ten, we took a road trip to Maine to visit family friends and made a stop at the now-abandoned Camp Wenonah. From the passenger side I could see empty cabins, a tennis court with the net slumping toward the ground. My mother sprang out of the car with the same manic excitement that she must have felt every summer when her parents dropped her off. She’s been five-foot-ten since she was thirteen or fourteen, and I could just picture that same lanky body bounding out of bed in time for the morning salute and flag raising.
Now, nearing fifty and wearing the kind of straw hat that makes me want to kill myself, she walked us over a grassy hill to reveal a gray lake vista, forgotten wooden boats knocking against the shore. On this exact spot, she told us, was where they held the outdoor mixers with neighboring boys camp Skylamar. Over there, she thought, was the arts-and-crafts cabin, now just a husk of its former self. And suddenly, she was crying. I’d never seen her cry before and I stared, unsure of my next move.
“Stop looking at me,” she snapped. “I’m not a science experiment.”