Unwifeable(8)

We arrived at the local hospital the next day, and a bald male nurse coldly took my inventory.

“Sexually active?” he asked, staring down at his clipboard.

“No,” I said. “I’ve never even really kissed a boy until the other night. It was my first time.”

“So you are sexually active,” he said.

“I guess,” I said.

“History of STDs?” he asked.

“I—no, that’s why I’m here,” I said. “I want to make sure I’m okay.”

“Well, you might not be,” he said, looking up.

I’m sure he thought he was doing a good deed by scaring the shit out of yet another slutty teen, but I was not his target audience. I didn’t need any more scaring.

“Am I going to die?” I asked.

“We’ll find out,” he said. “You just don’t know if you have AIDS until we test you. You can’t just go around having sex without consequences.”

He walked away, leaving me shell-shocked.

Meanwhile, my uncle was actually dying of cancer. My dumb teenage conception of death was proving to be as brilliant as my conception of sex. It happened. There was no going back. He was forty-one. He was gone.

Returning home to San Diego after that awful summer, I didn’t tell anyone until I found myself in therapy—with a hip thirty-something woman named Janet. Filled with plants and copies of Sunset magazine, her office felt so safe, and she was so kind to me. I asked Janet if I could tell her a secret, but I made her promise she wouldn’t tell anyone. It had to be just between the two of us. She agreed.

“Something happened to me,” I said, “this summer when I was in Oregon.”

I described in detail how I’d lost my virginity. It felt so good to get it off my chest, and I felt protected. But our next session, Janet was more serious than usual.

“Listen, Mandy, I know what I said, but one of the bounds of my profession is that when something illegal happens, it’s my duty to report it, and I’m not going to tell the police, but you absolutely have to tell your parents,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I felt the wind knocked out of me. I cried. I begged her not to make me. I was so angry. Opening up had been a mistake.

That night, I told my parents what had happened. I couldn’t stop crying. I wanted them to see how bad I felt.

“Were you drinking?” my mom asked.

“Yes,” I said.

They were both silent.

“Say something,” I said. “Say something, please!”

“I’m disappointed in you, Mandy,” my mom said.

My dad was just silent.

I felt so sick. So unprotected. So unworthy of protection in the first place. I ran into my room and hid underneath my comforters. I wanted to disappear. Just vanish from the earth and not ever have to deal with anyone’s judgment again.

That event, and the butterfly effect around it, set off a sneaky domino-like psychological course that affected the rest of my life—and even my career.

Do you disapprove of me?

Do you think I have something to be ashamed about?

I’ll give you something to be ashamed about.

All my fears felt confirmed. I was bad. I made men do bad things. I should be sorry. It was something I needed to destroy about myself. I should be able to see that.

There is a certain comfort in destruction. You know the outcome at least.

“Rockefeller Center!” The subway conductor’s voice pulls me out of ancient history.

The F train jerks to a stop. The battle will have to continue another time. No time for fighting the demons of the past. Time to be someone else entirely.



* * *




OVERWHELMED WITH THRILLING stimuli everywhere, I take in my new normal: human rush hour on crack, in the form of people speed-walking through the underground tunnels of Manhattan’s nerve center. I make my way up to the tenth floor, drinking my coffee, determined to make new memories. My Post ID is swinging around my neck; I realize no one else wears them around the office, but I don’t care. I’m too proud of the Lois Lane fantasy I am now living.

“My friend!” I cry with glee at seeing Katherine hard at work in our shared office/coat closet.

“My friend!” she says back.

Katherine helps encourage me that working for a daily is like riding a bike: You just have to climb back on. (Even though it feels like ancient history to me, I know that my clips from working at dailies—the Washington Post, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the Des Moines Register—aren’t so long ago.) She also gently tolerates my not-very-well-contained near-constant freak-outs about my body, my health, and my life in general. You see, the Divorce Diet is great for guys fetishizing me as somewhat approximating the shape and feel of a model, but it is not great for my actual health.

Thankfully, I am very busy. Work assignments come just as quickly as they go, twelve and twenty inches filed here and there on end-of-the-year best-of lists, new hot spots to visit in the city for the holidays—all of which I treat with the importance of Watergate. That is, in between making light conversation with Katherine about the excruciating details of my divorce/parents’ remarriage/new city/new roommates/new job/hypochondria.

“I don’t look like I’m dying,” I ask by way of small talk. “Right?”