The Write to be Shame-less

I chose this inspirational piece because of the vulnerability it shows, as well as illustrating the incredible ability that we all possess to be able to move on and grow through some of the most painful moments of our lives.  One of my favourite authors on this site...

 Jenny Appleseed (aka Laurie Boris)

Lives on the East Coast and writes about health and wellness, as well as fantastic fiction and mesmerizing memoir.

Blog page(s): http://jennyappleseed.pnn.com, http://laurieboris.pnn.com

Shame

I didn’t have a regular doctor back then, because I was young and felt immortal and didn’t see the need. Also, my health insurance sucked. Yes, I’d be covered if I stepped into the street and got hit by a pizza delivery guy, but for the regular stuff? As my father would say, “Well, pally, you’re on your own.”

So, on a cold Saturday morning in October, when the itchy, burning welts marched across my vulva like an army of fire ants, I knew where I had to go. I threw my journal and a paperback book into my knapsack. Then walked (very slowly) to Beacon Street and took the Green Line to the clinic at Coolidge Corner, where I was prepared to wait as long as it took in order to see the doctor of the day.

After I had (very slowly) undressed, submitted to a painful exam, (very slowly) dressed and met him in his nondescript office, he looked up from my file and said, “You’ve described your symptoms well.”

Schmuck, I thought. I live in this body. How could I not know every prickle and ache? Plus, when the first blister erupted, and the itchy bastard stung me every time I moved (I could have killed whoever invented jeans), I got out my trusty hand mirror to have a look.

It was not as I expected. Not a blister, like the ones you’d get from a bad sunburn. Not the angry red bump of a mosquito bite. This looked like a tiny head of cauliflower. An odd, but precious little thing. All by itself, it might have been fine. Eventually, it would heal. But I’d made the mistake of scratching it, probably in my sleep. And now it had bloomed into a garden of pain.

“Do you know what genital herpes is?” the doctor asked me.

I shook my head. Less at my lack of knowledge than at my lack of preparedness. A child of sex-ed instructors, I thought I knew everything. I’d seen slides of gonorrhea and syphilis. I knew about using condoms. I knew about the vas deferens and the prostate. I knew that the part of me that hurt like the fires of hell was the labia majoris, and wouldn’t my mother and the ladies who wrote “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” be proud? But herpes? As far as I knew, it was what you got on your lip, a fever blister, right?

Technically, yes, the doctor said. He described it, said it was called something different when it “presented” below the waist. He told me how the virus was transmitted from skin-to-skin contact, told me how to care for the outbreak, because the blisters were contagious. He gave me a brochure containing more information about how to handle future outbreaks. And how not to transmit it to future partners.

Each word hit me like a slap in the face. Future outbreaks? Future partners? Contagious? I could get this again? I was contagious? And if I was contagious, did that mean… no. My boyfriend, who I’d been living with for the past three years (who never had a single fever blister on his lip, at least that I saw), gave this to me? My throat felt like it was closing up. He…cheated on me?

The doctor asked if I had any other questions. Yes, I thought. Millions of them. But none that he could answer. Choking back tears, I shook my head.

At the receptionist’s desk I wrote my check and left. I stood frozen to the sidewalk in front of the clinic, while happy Saturday people bustled around me, oblivious.

I thought of what I was supposed to do next. I couldn’t go home. Even though he was back on the road, this time with a traveling circus (the year before it had been a ski lodge, the year before that, a beach resort), the idea of “home” felt like a joke. It was already a joke - a cramped, roach-ridden studio apartment we shared with a cat, two doves and a conure that crapped on everything but screamed its feathers off when locked in his cage. But now it felt even filthier. With one doctor’s diagnosis, everything that had been remotely romantic about living that way had been poisoned.

Then I saw the drugstore across the street. A card in the window promised a two-for-one sale on Halloween candy, so I bought a couple bags of those tiny pumpkins shaped out of candy corn goo, and stowed them in my knapsack. Instead of hopping the Green Line outbound toward my now tainted apartment, I got on the trolley going the other way.

When I got settled, I tore open the bag of candy pumpkins, and, while staring out the window, ate one, then another, and another. Stuffing myself was a kind of armor against the world. I couldn’t bear to look at anybody and feel them looking back at me. I was a contaminated woman. Typhoid Jenny. Not only had my (what I thought had been) loyal and loving boyfriend of three years slept with somebody else, but now I wore the physical scars of it. Even though it was hidden under two layers of clothing, I felt as if the entire world had seen what that doctor saw as I lay spread-eagled on his examination table. My cauliflower garden of shame.

I took the Green Line into town, and changed at Government Center for the Blue Line. I took the first train north to Revere Beach. The ocean had always brought me solace, and I felt pulled toward it as if magnetized. Even though it was a cold October day, and the wind blew, and the beach was littered with used condoms and spent hypodermic needles, with fossilized dog crap and cigarette butts, it was still attached to the ocean, and it was still good enough for me.

I got off the trolley and picked my way through the pale sand and found a place that was relatively free of anything dangerous. My gaze melted into the Atlantic. As each wave rolled in and rolled out, I willed it to wash me free of shame. I wondered how Virginia Woolf felt as she filled her pockets full of rocks and wandered into the surf. I wondered if I could do it.

I don’t know how long I sat in the sand, mesmerized by the water and the lumpy, gray-white clouds. But eventually, I saw him. A man, not much older than me, sitting atop one of the picnic tables at the nearby portico, his feet on the bench. He smoked one cigarette after another, the smoke almost indistinguishable from the sand and the sky.

Eventually, after the dog walkers and diehard Frisbee players went home, we were the only two on the beach, and we started talking.  We talked in that way of two strangers who find themselves in an odd place at an odd time. After all, who just sits alone on a cold urban beach at the tail end of October? At first we talked in generalities. Then he asked if I was seeing anybody. With my heart congealing in my chest, I told him I’d been living with a guy for three years.

His eyebrows shot up. “Don’t you get restless?” he asked, stubbing out his current cigarette against the top of the picnic table. He said he’d been living with a girl for four years, and he didn’t know if he could stand it anymore.

We chatted a while longer – nothing deeper than a quarter-inch or so below the top layer of contaminated beach – and he invited me back to his house, because he said it was getting cold (I was just starting to notice that) and because he makes really good hot chocolate.

I said yes. I didn’t stop to think about all the things my mother had taught me about going off with strangers. It just felt natural. Normal. We got in his car and no warning bells dinged in my head that this was something I shouldn’t be doing. After all, I didn’t know the neighborhood. I didn’t know where he was taking me. I probably should have been worried, but maybe in that same sense of being young and feeling immortal, or just wanting some human comfort, I didn’t think to question it.

He told me that she wasn’t home. He made hot chocolate and we stood at his kitchen counter. I warmed my hands on the hot mug – he really did make good hot chocolate. He told me he felt trapped in his current relationship and didn’t know how to get out of it.

I nodded. I felt trapped, too. But it was a trap of my own making. I tried to be the perfect girlfriend. I thought that’s how you got someone to stay with you and love you forever. By doing and being whatever he wanted. I bought his type of peanut butter, his type of bread. Everything was done his way. Now I wasn’t perfect anymore. I bore the Scarlet A of his infidelity. But I didn’t tell the stranger that.

When the gaps in the conversation got longer, I got nervous. His fingers played against the mug. Did he… did he think… I’d come here to sleep with him? And then it hit me like one of those gray, dirty waves. I was contaminated. I didn’t sleep with strangers, but even on the off chance that I wanted to do something spontaneous, either of my own accord or because I wanted revenge for my boyfriend’s cheating, I couldn’t. I was poisoned. And it wasn’t like gonorrhea or some “simple” sexually transmitted disease, where you could just take some antibiotics and it would be gone. I was contaminated forever. I felt filthy, and the itching, burning shame of it intensified between my legs.

“I need to get home,” I said.

He seemed genuinely surprised. “Are you sure?” he said. “I mean, we just got here.”

I thought about putting on my coat but realized I’d never taken it off. “Sorry,” I said. “But I really have to go.”

Considering the situation that I was in – alone in a man’s apartment in a neighborhood I didn’t know – I was lucky. It could have gone another way. I could have become one of those girls who simply disappeared. Instead, he grabbed his keys, and said, with no trace of malice, “Okay. Let’s go.”

He let me off at the Revere Beach T stop. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and wished each other luck. There was no kiss goodbye, and I never saw or heard from him again. I don’t even remember his name.

I went back to the place that was no longer home. I carefully washed and dried my flaming cauliflower lesions the way the doctor had described. And then I ate candy pumpkins until I made myself sick.