I learned to masturbate the summer after third grade. I read about it in a puberty book, which described it as “touching your private parts until you have a very good feeling, like a sneeze.” The idea of a vaginal sneeze seemed embarrassing at best and disgusting at worst, but it was a pretty boring summer, so I decided to explore my options.
I approached it clinically over a number of days, lying on the bath mat in the only bathroom in our summer house that had a locking door. I touched myself using different pressures, rhythms. The sensation was pleasant in the same way as a foot rub. One afternoon, lying there on the mat, I looked up to find myself eye to eye with a baby bat who was hanging upside down on the curtain rod. We stared at each other in stunned silence.
Finally one day, toward the end of the summer, the hard work paid off, and I felt the sneeze, which was actually more like a seizure. I took a moment on the bath mat to collect myself, then rose to wash my hands. I checked to make sure my face wasn’t frozen into any strange position, that I still looked like my parents’ child, before I headed downstairs.
Sometimes as an adult, when I’m having sex, images from the bathroom come to me unbidden. The knotty-pine paneling of the ceiling, eaten away like Swiss cheese. My mother’s fancy soaps in a caddy above the claw-foot tub. The rusty bucket where we keep our toilet paper. I can smell the wood. I can hear boats revving on the lake, my sister dragging her tricycle back and forth on the porch. I am hot. I am hungry for a snack. But mostly, I am alone.
When I graduated and moved back in with my parents, the bed sharing continued—Bo, Kevin, Norris—and became a real point of contention. My mother expressed distress, not only at having strange men in her house but at the fact that I had an interest in such a thankless activity. “It’s worse than fucking them all!” she said.
“You don’t owe everybody a crash pad,” my father said.
They didn’t get it. They didn’t get any of it. Hadn’t they ever felt alone before?
I remembered seventh grade, when my friend Natalie and I started sleeping in her TV room on Friday and Saturday nights, every weekend. We would watch Comedy Central or Saturday Night Live and eat cold pizza until one or two, pass out on the foldout couch, then awake at dawn to see her older sister Holly and her albino boyfriend sneaking into her bedroom. This went on for a few months, reliable and blissful and oddly domestic, our routine as set as any eighty-year-old couple’s. But one Friday after school she coolly told me she “needed space” (where a twelve-year-old girl got this line I will never know), and I was devastated. Back at home, my own room felt like a prison. I had gone from perfect companionship to none at all.
In response I wrote a short story, tragic and Carver-esque, about a young woman who had come to the city to make it as a Broadway actress and been seduced by a controlling construction worker who had forced her into domestic slavery. She spent her days washing dishes and frying eggs and fighting with the slumlord of their tenement apartment. The conclusion of the story involved her creeping to a phone booth to call her mother in Kansas City, a place I had never been. Her mother announced she had disowned her, so she kept walking, toward who knows what. I don’t remember any specific phrasing except this closing sentence: She wanted to sleep without the pressure of his arms.