Airing the Drying
Laura Hulbert
Word Count 1516
“Vaginal atrophy,” the gynecologist says in a neutral reporter’s voice, and the speculum chimes faintly as she sets it down. My grimace makes a guttural sound. Her ponytail bounces winsomely. “Nothing to worry about. Perfectly natural when you age.”
“Oh, we all have that,” a friend tries to reassure me. I hope others are spared the image of the pinched balloon knot of an old woman’s mouth. I wonder if orgasmal attrition is another classic symptom of aging that no one talks about. Or is it my own personal idiosyncrasy? It’s just a little snap of a cough, like clearing my throat before unmuting on Zoom. Fireworks was such a stupid cliche, but it did capture the time-lapse component of an orgasm back then. Not actually fizzling into separate points of light; more like hearing your echo become increasingly loud as you headed deeper into a cave.
While I was still a long-legged kid skipping down the sidewalk, I developed “the best breasts on campus”. I had a boob squeezed by a passerby on Hicks Street. I had a boner banged against my butt every time the #2 train lurched, and a spidery hand scuffle between my legs on the A. I was barraged with unwanted attention.
When I turned 15, construction sites were to be avoided. Offers of rides home from some dads were to be declined at the end of a babysitting job. It wasn’t fair that my anatomy dictated people’s responses to me, no matter how baggy the shirt or loose the jeans. I can truthfully say that I hated it, every minute of it.
And yet now that I garner scant attention, I feel a tug of remorse. It’s like watching a helium balloon drift up into the sky. Tied around your wrist, it’s a nuisance to walk home with; in your room, it’ll just shrivel and drop; yet the idea of losing it forever knocks the wind right out of you.
The first time I had an orgasm, I had no idea what happened. I just felt really good, like when my sister did crack-the-egg on my head and tickled her fingers like the gooey egg white over my temples. It was an afternoon of a solar eclipse. That’s how I knew no one would be home. Their eagerness to burn their eyeballs afforded me an opportunity to sneak a dirty book from under my father’s side of the bed. It was on page 59 that I was engulfed in a feeling of well-being. I heard roller skates clicking over the cracks on the sidewalk below. Someone else had ignored the solar eclipse, but they hadn’t had the past and future tenses erased from their consciousness. Or had they? Was this just a once-in-a-lifetime experience? Would I go back to meticulously extracting paper shreds from the spiral coils of my notebooks as if this had never happened?
Thinking the magic was particular to page 59, I tried to recreate the effect of the day the sun was eclipsed. Ultimately, I succeeded, though not on page 59 this time. In short order, I went from naive to expert. An early bedtime afforded me hours of experimentation with my body's responses to imagined scenes involving my humanities teachers. It led my English teacher to ask more than once, “Cat got your tongue?” when I was replaying one of his romps. It led my desk mate to comment, “Woah, that looks alive!” as my overworked EIP tendon spasmed in my forearm.
Other girls’ mothers acknowledged the menstruation milestone like it was a good thing. When I had a rusty smudge in my underpants, I didn’t know what it was. Something about the discovery felt like it should be kept secret. But finally, worry won out, and I called my mother into the bathroom. Before I even took down my pants, she looked pained. “Oh honey, you got the curse.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. I hadn’t read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Judy Blume hadn’t yet written the book about Margaret. My mother outlined what would happen each month without tying it to the possibility of pregnancy. That would have freaked me out. I was still playing with plastic babies whose heads had to be held at just the right angle to get their eyes to close.
How I could have been so ill-prepared for changes in my body? Consider that benign neglect was the fashionable parenting technique in the ’60s. And in school, there was none of the current blue state interest in health education. To be proactive, I would have had to ask questions. I would have had to know there were questions to ask. Even if we’d had the internet, how would I have known what search term to use? I can get a little paranoid about this issue. Maybe the secrets weren’t just harbored by our parents to keep us ill-informed. They were part of a larger clandestine operation to keep females out of control.
There was the week in high school where I wore my bathing suit under my clothes in the hopes it would elicit my late period. Didn’t it seem like I always got my period in my bikini? I went so far as to bring urine to a teen clinic for a pregnancy test. I didn’t know they’d ask for the sample there, so I peed into an empty mayonnaise jar and stashed it in the back of the fridge until I had time after school to go to the clinic. Could you even get pregnant from ejaculate on your thigh?
No. But it turned out that you could get HPV from having sex with a boy with a perforated penis. This guy could put a pencil through a hole in his drooping foreskin. My housemate giggled as she asked clarifying questions. “So, he’s got a Number 2 in his pee hole?”
I explained again. “The pencil doesn’t go into his urethra; it goes through a space in his excess skin.”
Honestly, since much of this sex stuff seemed weird, this oddity didn’t really stand out to me. The fact that a penis could just boing to attention like a jack-in-the-box was strange on its own.
HPV landed me at the gynecologist on a quarterly basis. Because I was pretty cavalier about nudity and had a high pain tolerance, I was a model patient. The medical residents at the clinic would crowd into the little exam room for my cervical biopsies. The soon-to-be doctors in their bleached white coats would nod solemnly as they filed past my gaping vagina. One guy who didn’t have facial hair yet actually bent and leaned in. I swear I felt his name tag graze my foot as he straightened up. The irony wasn’t lost on me: I, who’d been left in the dark about all bodily things, was now the spotlighted specimen for others to learn from.
These are not happy memories, so why do I feel such a sense of loss recalling these times?
I miss the power of sexual desire that propelled me, a shy girl, to whisper in a boy’s ear at a party that I wanted to sleep with him. I miss the feeling of being overcome. I circled the column of fish at the Boston Aquarium while my supposed boyfriend issued a running commentary on the features of this or that chordate. I had no idea what he was saying, my focus being his salty pheromone trail, my damp thighs rubbing slickly against each other. It took an inhuman level of restraint not to push him against the tank and probe his teeth with my tongue.
Would I wish that back if it meant giving up my current homeostasis? Do I yearn for the near suffocation of an anxiety attack? For a public display of patience run amok? Another opportunity to unleash on bewildered little children that “I am about to lose it?” In all honesty, no.
But now I know there are secrets. And I can’t help scrutinizing the people I pass. I assess their sexual activity from the density of the air they displace. I think I can tell who has the night-time ritual of back-scratching and head rubbing while those who are still capable of intercourse seem to glide frictionless down the sidewalk. It’s odd how the ads regarding senior sex have to do with erections. Isn’t half the problem the dry gulch of the aging vagina? Why doesn’t that issue get equal airtime?
When my psychiatrist asks about changes in my health, I tell her all that comes to mind is my twice-weekly use of Estradiol. She is adamant that this is not a feature of ill health. It’s an important enough point that she asks me if I understand. She makes me repeat her. “It’s not a sign of ill health.” I embellish further, “A dry vagina.” But even if it’s not a sign of ill health, it is a change in health, right? Can we just agree that it’s alright to air this stuff?
Laura is an elementary school learning specialist and author of two books for preschoolers: Who has These Feet? and Who Has This Tail? Her short stories for an older demographic have appeared in TulipTree Review and Imitation Fruit.