And If One Should Never Hear the Wave?
Sharon has a voice like my brother’s truck on gravel and tits like bags of heavy mayonnaise. Occasionally, one will graze my elevated foot as Sharon wheels her chair past my body: prone on a papered exam table, feet in stirrups, wrenched open by a speculum, bottomless.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, when I feel the texture of her waffled polo against my big toe.
“It’s no problem,” Sharon says, as if this happens all the time. Sharon knows exactly how far the exam table is from the counter behind her, and how much of her body can fit through the gap when the stirrups are pulled out from under the exam table, and someone’s feet are in the air. I get used to it, then, my toe pressing into her –– this kind of person to whom I can feel close.
Sharon picks up a tenaculum, slides it through the opening provided by the speculum, and bites down on the upper lip of my anesthetized cervix, moving my flesh into place so that my cervical mouth is in line with my uterus: one corridor.
Let me be clear: I don’t know how this works at the time it’s happening. What I do know is that Sharon tells me that she’s using a tenaculum to hold my cervix in place so that it lines up with my uterus. I imagine a tenaculum is some friendly little blunt-edged wand that could have been made with a miniature Bundt mold, giving my cervix a hug. A bit of rounded silicone at the end of a plastic stick, standing ready like a Mylar balloon. In reality, though, a tenaculum is a surgical clamp with sharp hooks at the end, and these sharp teeth bite into my cervical lip — which is also a new designation to me, “cervical lip” — as if to say, “I want you,” as if to say, “You’re mine,” as if to say, “Meet me at the Orange Julius in twenty, and we’ll go to the family bathroom for a good time.”
Sharon is installing my first IUD, and I’m terrified. I grab for the loose nylon edge of the exam table, my arm over my head as if in pirouette.
After Sharon pulls the teeth out of my uterus, she has to wait for my head to stop spinning before she lets me get up. I’m woozy, weary. It's a familiar sensation — a kind of vertigo I often get with stress — but this time, it’s got more girth. I’m held down in a different way by this level of faintness, as if this new plastic child, my IUD, isn’t in my uterus but is somehow sitting on my chest. Sharon gives me water in a paper cup, and I sit up on the exam table.
After a moment or two, Sharon asks, “Do you think you can put your pants on?” and I nod softly, in a small way, until she believes me and leaves the room. I put my pants on like a toddler puts pants on: thick-fingered, one foot through the loop on the ground, and then the other. Sharon comes back into the room and guides me out to the receptionist. In the waiting room, I pay my $10.00 copay. I see a friend who is, coincidentally, about to get her IUD checked, and I leave, unlocking my bike from the rack outside.
Then, I fly.
I remember Sharon calling my lightheadedness a “vasovagal response,” a “malaise” brought on by “some kind of stimuli.” IUD insertion is one such stimulus, which can cause the sufferer to pass out. The vasovagal response is actually the most common kind of fainting, and it’s mediated by the vagus nerve, which doesn’t actually descend into the vagina like you’d think but runs from the brain to the stomach and controls our feed and breed responses, two of our basic human impulses. The vagus nerve can also make you feel blazed out of your mind.
Although I didn’t faint after leaving the ob-gyn clinic, I did experience a wildly wonderful view of the world. I felt lightheaded, sure, but also free. Disassociated from reality, and swimming in a very clear pool of air. People in the world were lighter, happier. Everyone I saw made me glad. I walked into the local grocery store just two blocks from my apartment, bought a single piece of key lime pie in a plastic clamshell, walked it and my bike to the small hillside of a nearby park, and fell face down into the grass. I tongued gooey spoonfuls of lime custard into my mouth, a king in young clover. I closed my eyes and smiled into sleep. I suppose we can call this fainting.
When a person does faint as a result of a vasovagal response, it’s called a “vasovagal syncope.” A syncope is any loss of consciousness that results from a lack of blood flow to the brain, but the word also means the loss of one or more sounds or syllables in the middle of a word. Syllable-dropping. Sound-cutting. We do it all the time. It’s a quicker way for us to get from the start of the word to the end, without missing any meaning.Probably becomes prob’ly. Family becomes fam’ly. Memory becomes mem’ry. It makes the whole task of listening to another person faster and easier, maybe even more intimate. It lets us speak a new language and feel a different kind of word in our ears and in our mouths. Perhaps these things become a kind of secret language: words that are understood only by those willing to understand them.
A few months before the insertion, I told my boyfriend that I wasn’t so interested in the idea of an IUD. I’d been enjoying a life without hormonal birth control for the first time since I was eighteen, and I had some mystical sense that I was freer. Yes, it was more responsible to be on stable birth control if I was going to be having sex, and in that way, birth control was really liberating. But I also resented the idea of having to jump through all of the mental and physical hoops that birth control requires: hormonal mood swings; pain; cramping; chin acne; barfing; existential dread. And then, there was history: eugenics; the forced sterilization of Black women, Latinx women, Indigenous women in twentieth century America; survival of the fittest family; survival of the docile family; white women’s racism; poor women dying on their seventh pregnancies; actual coat hanger abortions; my mother’s three C-sections, “sliced from hip to hip;” the primacy of the birth canal; my Italian immigrant great-grandmother’s sisters pushing her down the stairwell so many times and the baby that came out anyway, and blind; the sheer number of times my family has told that story—at Christmas, at Easter, at birthdays, as a way to prove something to someone else, as a way to prove something to ourselves. All of this, just to feel safe from pregnancy. And no guarantee that I wouldn’t get pregnant, either: this, the ultimate fear.
The IUD would come out in five years, of course, and what about the time when it was in place? I couldn’t know for sure how it would affect me in the interim, and I was afraid of how the lingering subconscious memory of this foreign body could change who I am. Who I am feels precious, hard won, and not worth losing for the potential of uncomplicated sex, I thought to myself. I stood on this ground. I felt self-righteous, and I liked it.
“I’m not interested in changing my body for another person’s pleasure,” I said.
And yet, one morning, after consulting several friends about their experiences, I woke up believing that my fears were misguided, and that, frankly, the trusty protection from pregnancy was more valuable than the cost of any possible ramifications, anyway. I swallowed my concerns in the face of perceived rationality. I made the appointment while my boyfriend was on vacation, and when I told him about it via text, he asked me if I was sure.
“What you said about not wanting to modify your body for someone else really resonated with me,” he said.
I didn’t want him to walk me back from the decision — I’d already made it. I just wanted him to understand what I was doing — installing an intimacy shortcut — for both of us.
“At the same time,” he said, “I am interested in what this says about how you feel about me, about this relationship.”
Of course, decisions like these don’t really spring up overnight.
My parents got divorced when I was six, and as a child, my perception of the story was that my mom cheated on my dad — that her non-monogamy caused the split. There was finger-pointing all over the place; my mom accused my dad of cheating, he accused her of lying, she tried to call the police during a fight, he slammed her hand and the phone against the night table, he broke the phone and her wrist. After our dad left, my older brother would open the milk or the baby food or the peanut butter for my mother as she held our infant brother in one arm, the other in a cast. As the four of us hunched around the kitchen counter, I learned that our bodies could burden her as much as our bodies could help her. We were taught not to talk about it all too much.
My mother’s father, a drunk, deserted my grandmother and her three children when my mother was young. She wanted to be sure we had a relationship with our father, she said. This was important, she said.
As my younger brother grew, his face developed into a carbon copy of our mother’s. It was difficult to see in him anyone but her, as if the child was a product of her undoubtable loneliness, as if she had plucked him from her temple one Wednesday in January. But in that face, our father started to read not his ex-wife but his current anxieties. It was a fear he allowed to take root, and as the fear grew, he tilted toward me the resulting fruit.
“Do you think Bret looks like me?” my father would ask. “Sometimes, I wonder, you know, with the timing of the divorce, if my son is really my son.”
These were painful conversations when I was twelve, fourteen, sixteen. I had no answers for my father, of course, and the only answer I had for myself was, “Who cares?” Was my father’s ability to love me determined by my smile, which mimicked his? The wrinkles in my knuckles that grow closer to his own mother’s hands with age? If I smiled another way, would he have let me go?
Bret, it turned out, did care about these things. Bret wrote in a high school essay, “My parents never wanted me, I wasn’t supposed to be born, I’m not like my brother and sister.” My mother found it in his closet. “I feel like I belong somewhere else.” The common thoughts of a lonely boy cast in painful relief.
“Why would he write this? Doesn’t he know?” my mother asked me when I was in my mid-twenties, revealing new information for the first time. “I wanted to run away from everything after the divorce. But Bret? He broke my heart. I couldn’t leave him. He kept me from running,” she said.
In it, I heard: kept me from running away from you.
My stepfather left my mother when I was eighteen, another abandonment. Her and I sat around our in-ground swimming pool on a humid June western Pennsylvania night, the warmth of the water evaporating into mist in the dark. I asked him why he wanted to go. He explained at length about how he didn’t feel at home with us, even after twelve years. He blamed my mother for caring more about us than she did about him, for keeping us in two separate worlds. He blamed my mother for having an affair with the neighbor.
“She’s a whore,” he said, a meaningless castigation. “Plus — and I hate to say this — but when I look at your faces, I don’t see the faces of my own kids. You’re not mine.”
Hated to say it, and yet.
“That’s fair,” I said out loud, quickly burying the burning sensation in my neck. How long had he resented my face? How long had it spurred a sense of disinterest and lack of care in him? I remembered all of the strange, bewildering adults I had been asked to love and care for in my young life, how I was chastised or reprimanded if I couldn’t demonstrate affection and respect for someone new at the drop of a hat. It was a luxury of adulthood to abandon people, I realized. I’ve kept that thought with me longer than I’d like to admit.
It was around that time that I got on birth control pills for the first time, around that time that I started sneaking boys in through my bedroom window. About then that my mother started telling me, for the first time, that she was ever-ripe, always getting pregnant before she’d meant to. I recoiled, repulsed, believing it was something essential about her, that her fertility was her fault.
“And you’ll be that way, too,” she said.
A decade later, I was sitting in the car beside the boyfriend I got the IUD for. We were having a conversation about paternity, custody. Like everybody else I knew, he also came from a broken home, the most flaccid way of describing the fallout from divorce. How can you break something that was never there? Home was an ephemeral concept, I’d discovered. People always acted like the dust was supposed to settle, but that was a lie, too. Like my older brother, my boyfriend’s older brother had also started birthing babies with random women. We shared a sense of generational horror, and I spent a long time believing that we were working toward conceiving of relationships in a revolutionary way.
And then, just like that.
“Paternity tests: they should be mandatory at birth,” he announced in the car.
I shot him a look over the middle armrest. He was driving, staring through the windshield, apparently having decided on the purity of this measure so long ago that it became fact. His statement was a proposition that flew in the face of everything I had come to believe about him, about his sense of compassion, and I had a very hard time believing that he wasn’t just talking about me, about us.
“Why? You wouldn’t trust me?” I said.
The curve of his porcelain white nose seemed to grow more pronounced, his blonde eyelashes seem to disappear even more. Was he gripping the steering wheel tighter? Women get to choose who they have sex with, my boyfriend explained. Men should get to know whether or not a child is biologically theirs. Men should get to know whether a child is truly their legal and financial responsibility — or if the child’s face should be looked upon by someone else.
“Yeah, but, in those situations, so often — how is that kid gonna be taken care of? Like, isn’t that what’s more important? Plus, isn’t that so rare? Doesn’t it sound like a big stretch to cover what’s probably just a myth anyway?”
“And what? Run the risk of being the one person who gets taken advantage of? Ruin that man’s life? His finances? Because a woman wanted to trap him there?”
I fumbled trying to find more words. What internet hole had he fallen into? What sense of “belonging” and “ownership” was he proposing? Most of the time, this person was so full of caring, so aware of the weight and war in our social structures. I saw the faces of the men who had tried to own my brothers and me, the men who defined fatherhood as ownership, the men who had pulled away from us, the men who seemed to assume that — you know what, if you can’t be owned, you must be inherently fatherless. Barfing. Cramping. Dizzy feeling. Touch my toe with your tit again, Sharon. Closer now, and quick.
To me, there is a tender pulling in the deepest heart, or, rather, a tender string dangling in the deepest dark, which we pull only in a real emergency, only if we are truly sure that this is love. When I felt my muscles cramp in the passenger seat, I knew it was no emergency — just the IUD settling inside of me.
My mother is on the deck at night, wearing her glasses and smoking slim cigarettes, watching reality television on mute through the large sliding glass door frame. She hems and haws, butts out the ashes, as shards of other people’s lives reflect in fragments from the TV to the panes in her glasses. My mother says she doesn’t know how much this newest man, her third husband, is working out. They fight. They yell. They're so angry. There’s never any clarity about why.
What if there was a way to pin down this anger, these insecurities? To look at them with a scientist’s precision? To pull them apart with a probe? I get dreamy at the chance to pry open my frustrations. If these people can’t get to the bottom of it, maybe I could.
Instead, I am the one who tells my mother it might be worth it, this time, to stay in her marriage. That maybe there is something to it after all, that people do feel better when they decide to stick it out. I’m tired of seeing this cycle in her life, tired of watching her feel like a failure, watching her feel like she needs to bury the failure in another person’s body. I get dreamy about this, too: us all settling down, once and for all. Maybe if I could watch her do it, it would be easy for me to do, too.
Still, I know I’m not the most persuasive person in my mother’s life. Probably because she can read it in me, the way I’m just like her, the way I’m still searching her face for answers, for a model on how to get by in love. She knows the only wisdom I have here is what I got from her. In other words: I don’t know shit. She knows me so well that I imagine she hears it when I whisper inside my own head: if it were me, I would run.
Seth is a thirty-something postdoc from Dallas with a tattoo peeking out from under the rolled-up sleeve of his black button down. His sandy-brown hair is tied behind his head in a folded over bun. He doesn’t touch me, yet. His skin is tan and leathery, like mine but ruddier, not olive. We make quick eye contact, and in it, I see that his eyes are beady, though I can’t tell if they’re steady or mean. Seth hovers near me, moving things about, preparing the room. He tells me, softly, to lie back on the bed, and he covers me with a beige wool blanket. He is still standing but comes closer.
“It will be better if you turn your hips slightly away from me. So, to do that, you just roll your right hip under — there you go, that’s perfect,” he says, and begins to touch my naked calf.
I’m participating in a medical study for money. Seth is using a type of very thin, flexible wire, slid beneath the skin of my leg in order to find and stimulate my peroneal nerve. This is not a romantic relationship, but with the low lighting and the exposure, it feels intimate, erotic, even. I realize Seth goes through this procedure with several other people every day; I wonder if our experience together will be different for him, somehow different because of me. I am the kind of person who wants to make it that way.
The peroneal nerve that Seth is looking for is part of the sympathetic nervous system, which controls our fight or flight response. For half an hour, this Texan probes my calf, his tiny live end worming its way around in my musculature, trying to make contact with the nerve. This prodder, as Seth calls it, is only the diameter of your standard black sewing thread, but it is inserted into my leg through a kind of catheter, keeping my flesh wide in order that the probe might have free reign to do its work, to look for this buzzing but buried piece of me, to dip into the river of my most primordial biological response. Where do I keep my fight or flight? Seth wants to find it. I want to find it, too, want to know if I can sense anything that feels like me in that river, or if it’s just generations of fear and mistakes.
Here’s what’s weirder. The microneurography machine — the apparatus controlling this process — sends a constant stream of static electricity into my leg through that wire, and when the wire hits the more superficial nerves in my calf — the ones that control my toe movement — I feel a set of pins and needles run down my leg and into my feet. The machine is also hooked up to a speaker system, so not only do I feel pins and needles, but we hear them fill up the room, as well. Seth taps the length of my shin bone from my patella down into my foot, then he sweeps his fingertips across the thin bones stretching out to my toes. Together we hear a soft crackle and swish play out, like we’re tuning hollow radio static together, looking for a song whose melody we can’t place. This is the point of our little exercise: when the wire hits the peroneal nerve, when the wire dips into my river of fight or flight, Seth will hear the sound he wants to hear. I will hear the sound I want to hear.
“It’s like waves crashing on a shore,” he tells me, rote and distracted, wriggling that wire. I feel mildly confused at this prescription, because the sound of the radio-like-waves that Seth and I hear when he is in some nerveless part of my leg sound vaguely like ocean waves, at least to me. I ask about this.
“No, no — this isn’t it,” Seth says. “Trust me, I’ll know when I hear it.”
Time ticks, and Seth gets frustrated at the lack of submission from my nervous system. Again and again, he tilts the catheter in my leg, bringing more pins and needles, sometimes touching a new place in me that produces both a metallic feeling and taste in my mouth, like licking the end of a battery. More radio dust. More pins and needles, more yep, yep from Seth. Another swish on the bones to brush it all away. More of the storm. None of the wave.
I start to get frustrated now. If Seth can’t find my fight or flight response, how could I ever hope to examine it? And if I can’t examine it, how could I ever control it? And if I couldn’t control it, how could I ever, finally, dismantle it? We listen to the static, waiting for the wave. What does it feel like to allow ourselves to be happy? What does it feel like to stay with the soft terror of joy? So blinding, maybe, that we have to faint.
Suddenly something changes: a deep, hollow click bangs out loud and full through the speakers.
“Is that it?” I say. “Is that the sound we’re looking for?”
“No,” Seth says. “That’s just the sound of muscle tension.”
My mother is stressed again. This time, we’re standing in her kitchen in Pennsylvania in the summer. She’s wearing a bright orange bikini, which pops on her tan olive skin. I’m wearing a bright red bikini — hers that she let me borrow. It has metal eyelets and lots of ties. It’s more embellished than anything I would choose for myself, but when I wear it next to her, I feel just fine. We’re standing at the countertop, snacking on watermelon as a break from the sun. Two days ago, she got out of the hospital after a sudden bout of pain following her second spinal fusion. She’s had, now, seven spinal surgeries in my lifetime, her body reconstructed and repurposed routinely to keep her standing, moving, working.
“I look like The Bionic Woman, there are so many plates and screws and rods in me. Look at this X-ray!” She shoves her phone in front of my face. I see the pronounced curve of her spine, which tilts her torso to the right, the literal threads of six long screws puncturing the meat between her vertebrae, holding the curve in place so the bones don’t collapse further together.
“But the fusion is intact, they tell me. The fusion came out beautifully. The pain I’m having is this pain I’ve always had since I had you three kids. You know, when you’re pregnant, your bones, they deplete. They lose density. Your tendons stretch. And you know how narrow across the hips we are.” She draws a line from hip bone to hip bone, the place where I was lifted out of her, the distance that is the same distance in the same place on my body. “I’ve just always had this lingering pain in my hips,” she says.
I tell my mother how sorry I am, how horrible this all must be. I tell her how it seems so unfair, that she shouldn’t have to go from one pain-reducing surgery to another painful situation. She comforts me, tells me it’s all right. I feel guilty that she feels the need to comfort me, to remind me that nothing is fair. I tell her how happy I am to see her current husband taking such good care of her, because he is. She concedes: they've both been calmer lately. She circles back to her pregnancies, because when she thinks about bad husbands, she thinks about my father. My father, who has always been my dad, who fought my mother for custody of us when they got divorced, who has always requested equal time at birthdays and holidays, who always been, simply, my dad in my life. My mother tells me, again, that when she first got off birth control in 1985, she got pregnant so quickly that my dad was mad at her.
“He was mad at me for getting pregnant with him too soon, for ruining something for him, I guess.” She says it ironically, laughs to herself. I shake my head, take a step back. I’d been thinking about my mother’s stories about my father lately, about her broken wrist. I was thinking about the fact that my father broke my mother’s wrist when she tried to call the police to get away from him. I’d been having trouble integrating that image of him into the image of the person who cried over our Father’s Day cards. I was wondering if I had gotten something wrong.
“If it was like that, why did you want us to have a relationship with him?” I ask.
“Because he was your dad. And because I knew how it felt to not have a father, and I didn’t want you three to feel the same way,” she says.
I tell her: Mom, that takes so much compassion, though, so much patience. She laughs to herself again. I wonder internally at what that idea means to her: to be somebody’s father. Moving swiftly, she tells me, for the millionth time, how I was only her only planned pregnancy. How she was shocked when Bret came five years later. I nod along to the familiar notes of stories I’ve been told so many times they possess almost no meaning, except that they simply are, because my understanding of them has folded so neatly into my own identity, my sense of who my family is, and who I am within them.
But then, my mother says something I’ve never heard before. She dispenses the information as if she were always waiting to tell it to me, though I realize immediately that that could never be true.
My mother says this to me: “And yeah, he raped me.”
“What?”
She scoffs, and the words bounce back out. “Yeah, your dad raped me.”
I tell her everything I can think to say. Mom, I’m so sorry. Mom, that’s not right. Mom, that should never have happened to you, and it was never your fault. Mom, I’m so, so sorry.
She tells me it’s fine; that she’s had so many years to work through it, and it’s fine. I hug her. I hold her. I stroke the thickened tissue of her lumbar scar. She doesn’t cry. I kiss her hair. I can’t press her for details, so I don’t. And she doesn’t tell me why she said it.
I think about my brothers. Unplanned, she said.
For the next week, I sleep as much as I can. On the fifth day, I cry for the first time about it, but I don’t cry on any other days. I want to feel angry, I want to do something, but instead I am blank. I want to call my mother and ask her for more, but I stare at my phone and turn the screen toward the table. I want to call my father and tell him I know, but the notion that he’ll just deny it, that he’ll say she’s making it up, that he’ll say it didn’t happen like that is all too present. This, I reason, would both prove to me that it did happen and solidify something else monstrous about him. I tell this all to my best friend on the phone.
“You feel empty because you believe her,” my best friend says. “And your belief reveals to you something about the way that you think about your own story.”
“And what is that?” I ask him. “What is the thing that’s being revealed?”
“I don’t know,” my best friend says. “You’ll find out.”
Walking home one afternoon, I see a man on a second story ladder repainting the white window frames on a red brick house — an early prairie town structure, late 1800s Americana. As he climbs down, the length of the ladder wobbles under his weight. From where I am, a half block away, the ladder sounds like it’s making a hollow ooo — a metallic ball — what it sounds like when someone plays a saw with a fiddle bow. The house sits up on a wide knoll of green grass, in the middle of a circle of trees. As I walk closer, I realize the ladder is not making the sound, but rather, a recording is — a lilting flute in classical mode. No — even closer still and I understand that this is not a wobbling ladder, not a lilting flute, but a woman’s voice. It’s an aria piping through the open window frames, newly white and lined with blue tape, out to this singular man descending on the ladder rungs through air to the ground just twenty feet from where I am, idling for a moment or two to hear something familiar in a different way.
When we have sex for the first time with the IUD in place, it is different. He is different. He is the crest of a wave so heavy when it folds over, it drags me down and curls my body loose into the sand. His life sucks up all the air in the room, and I am underneath, giving him my breath, watching, waiting for the infinitely possible to expand between us. It can happen — it is happening. Is it happening to someone else? Because I am watching, I don’t feel quite there. No, I see: I am not the way he is. I am bored.
I feel like I have done something for which I should feel proud, given him something of myself that shows him what I think, that this thing we’re doing with one another matters — and that it matters deeply. I am hoping to reveal something about how I feel. That this is not a kind of freezing. Not a kind of fighting or flying. I want to think that this is a kind of high, the kind that love gives you, the kind that dilates your pupils and, eventually, other parts of you, but I am too aware of watching him, seeing him believe that I’ve done something that could really mean trust. If I turn my head to the left, I’m staring at myself in my bedroom mirror, but the way it’s placed, I see no eyes, only torso. The act in stereo, lumbar spine low and curving, looking up, wondering: is this what you’ve been searching for? Is this the shortcut you were searching for?
“This is going to take some getting used to,” he says, slowly, catching hold of himself before starting up again. And then, he asks the question whose answer I already know.
He asks: “Is this how it’s always going to feel?”
I bite my lip.
ξ
Brittany Borghi is an essayist and journalist working on her first book: an exploration of female rage, her mother's secret life, and what it means to understand the love you come from. She is originally from Zelienople, Pennsylvania, and currently teaches in Iowa.