Читать книгу My Body Is a Book of Rules - Elissa Washuta - Страница 15

For eight years, the teachers at my Catholic grade school stuffed my skull with anything that would fit, starting with phonics (kindergarten), then quickly pressing in the history of the Revolutionary War (first grade), the corporal works of mercy (second), long division (third), Lenape history (fourth), human reproduction (fifth), cell biology (sixth), and sentence diagramming (seventh). My dad’s Catholic school education had been structured but thorough, and my parents wanted to place me in a setting where my growing brain could absorb multitudes.

Our teachers challenged us to retain as much as possible. Our brains were empty vessels with stretchable walls. Every day, I was sent home with a backpack so heavy that I developed chronic back pain at age eleven, and my doctor suggested that I carry my textbooks in a rolling suitcase, a proposal I rejected. I didn’t need help becoming any more of a freakish nerd than I already was.

In seventh grade, my best friend and I filled a notebook with nasty comments about our classmates and teachers, and a mean girl discovered it. I apologized profusely to the teachers and vice-principal. My parents, teachers, and the vice-principal agreed that after seven years at the school, I still couldn’t fit in, so it was in my best interest to move on. I always say I got kicked out of Catholic school, because it sounds better than the truth: I had to throw in the towel because nobody liked me.

I failed while I excelled, learning the Ave Maria, Angelus, Apostle’s Creed, and Nicene Creed by brain but not heart, because at some point, I became devoted to memorizing sex tips from Cosmopolitan. My impure heart ached, not for the Lord, but for something even glossier than prayer cards. Cosmo was full of good tips I needed to know about if I was going to be good in bed and worthy of love. I knew that sex could happen at any time, with anyone, and I had to be ready to please any man who might have me. My glasses saw through the atmosphere. Children, we were told over and over, are little lambs, are vessels, are innocents not yet spoiled by the world. As a child, I was charged with the task of keeping my soul pristine as I grew. Around me, I saw fiery souls, angry souls, souls already dying. Mine began to oxidize as it touched the stale New Jersey air.

THE COMMANDMENTS I PICKED UP ALONG THE WAY

QUESTIONS FROM COSMO THAT STARTED TO SEEM IMPORTANT WHEN I WAS TWELVE, EIGHT YEARS BEFORE I LOST MY VIRGINITY

1.I am the LORD your God. You shall not have strange gods before me. 2.Sister Agnes is always right and premarital sex is always a sin, because human bodies are made to advance God’s will through making families. 3.You will never snag a husband if you don’t know what to do with his dick. You learn this at twelve but still do not know anything else about dicks. 4.When it comes to your guy’s penis, remember three things: If it’s small, say it’s the perfect fit. If it’s average, say it’s huge. If it’s huge, he’ll already know, but he’ll still love hearing you say it anyway. 5.Say this: You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised. Great is your power and your wisdom is without measure. 6.Too many women can’t admit when they’re wrong, so letting him know when he’s right, no matter what the topic is, will score you major points with him. 7.Penance requires the sinner to endure all things willingly, be contrite of heart, confess with the lips, and practice complete humility and fruitful satisfaction. 8.If you have to ask him if he enjoys giving you oral sex, then you have your answer: he doesn’t. He might enjoy it more if he knew you’d be going down on him in return. 9.Touch him “down there” just like this (see illustration), touch his nipples, don’t forget his sack, try out his nerve-packed pleasure button (ask first), use ice, blow, suck, not too cold, not too hot, put your thumb Q. My guy wants me to tie him up. Exactly what do I do once he’s bound to the bed? right on that and your index finger right over there, make an “S” motion, make a kissing motion, a whispering motion, try humming, try ninety degrees, forty-five, show him your body, make figure eights or circles with your hips, squeeze your PCs in rhythm, let him see you, smell good, look good, do your squats and lunges, lose your love handles, watch basketball with him, do your Kegels, smile, look like you’re having fun, make guacamole for the game but remember that a cup contains a whopping 367 calories, be as casual as possible, definitely don’t forget his sack. 10.Men want a woman who loves sex and isn’t afraid to sample new things. Men want you to be open to experimentation in the bedroom when they suggest it, but they don’t necessarily want you to initiate wilder moves. Proposing anything that may appear choreographed can give them the impression that you’ve tried doing that with lots of other guys. 11.God is love; has an unlimited capacity for love; loves all, even sinners; answers all prayers; forgives; beckons; never plays games; never plays rough; asks for faith; has no form that you can see or touch. Nothing you can do can make God stop loving you. 12.Know that you are only here for one thing: God created everything for man, but man in turn was created to serve and love God and to offer all creation back to him. 13.Have faith.

Q.My boyfriend likes it when I touch his butt during sex. Should I go further? Q.My dude wants me to talk dirty. Where do I start? Q.My guy often spanks me when we’re going at it. Does he want me to do it to him? Q.My boyfriend has joked about threesomes. Do you think he wants to try it out? Q.How come men always want to try anal sex? A.You’d better do what he wants, or he might dump you. Q.Am I normal down there? Q.Will I become loose if I have too many partners? Q.If I don’t have sex for a while, will my vagina tighten up? Q.Am I the right size? A.Your smell is normal, unless you smell like fish, garbage, carrion, perfume, douches, meadows, or insecurity. And there is no right size for your va-jay-jay, unless you’re so loose he can tell he’s not your first, even though he knows he’s not your first. Better do your Kegels: five sets of one hundred daily. Do them while you’re cooking. Meanwhile, stop worrying: insecurity is such a turn-off. Focus on getting him hot instead. Q.And what about him, is he normal? Q.Is it weird for his penis to be darker than the rest of him? Q.What if it’s curved? Q.Are his balls too small? Q.He’s kind of veiny, does that mean something? Q.How many erections per day should he be having? Q.Why is he less hard sometimes, does that mean he’s not into me? Q.Is he too small? Q. Is he too big? Q.Why are his balls so big? A.A. It’s all normal, and even if it’s not, you had better not say anything. Q.My boyfriend wakes up with eye crusties. Why? A.He may be sleeping with his eyes open. You can help by assuring him you aren’t going to judge his manhood in his sleep. Before you go to bed at night, get on your knees beside the bed, fold your hands, and tell him he’s the best, the biggest, the hottest, the smartest, the most symmetrical, the least veiny, the most average-balled, the biggest-dicked, the most virile, and that crusty eye problem should be gone in no time. Q.When I’m feeling all alone, where is God to help me? Q.Why won’t the guy I’m seeing call/text me back? A.God is everywhere. Your guy is probably sick of you or fucking someone else. Back off and you might be able to win him back. A(2).Or, you could back off, forget about him, and win your dignity back. Q.But that’s really fucking hard.

Sister Agnes, my sixth-grade teacher, shocked us into absorption and repentance. She told us she loved having her period because it was a gift from God. She projected hand-drawn fetuses onto the pulldown sheet over the blackboard. Every day of sixth-grade religion class, we took Bibles off a cart and readied ourselves for random Sword Drills (our Bibles being our swords in the fight against sin) during the lesson: she would call out a book, chapter, and verse, and we would look it up. The first to find the passage would read aloud. I desperately wanted to be fastest and read God’s words back to Him. I was good at learning and memorizing. I was afraid of judgment coming, first from the Lord, then from the men, and I did what I could to prepare myself. I studied and waited for the afterlife. My belief in Christ and the Virgin pressed against every fiber of my green plaid jumper as I grew.

When I was in grade school, my confessions always came out the same. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was a month ago. I fought with my brother and disobeyed my parents and I took the Lord’s name in vain. Penance: say some prayers. Absolved. I was generally honest in confession, but I never wanted to tell the priest that I made my Barbies have sex with each other (sometimes girl-on-girl, even) so I left that out. My last confession took place ten years ago. I have broken most of the commandments many times, as have most adults I know, but I haven’t killed, haven’t stolen, and in my mind this makes me a good person. But to God, I am not good.

The Old Testament bursts with a magic we had to accept as true. I learned to expect the formula: an angel appears, a child is born. This one must not cut his hair. He will save the Israelites. He plans a strategic marriage, part of the plan of the Lord, and is attacked by a lion on the way to propose. Of course he kills it; he is Samson. He flies into rages. He gives away his bride like a heifer. Hip and thigh, he slaughters the Philistines, kills more later with a donkey’s jawbone. Samson smites, Samson rules, Samson leads Israel.

And then another woman. This one wants to know his secret. Don’t they always, the people you get with? Want to know your secret, I mean, want to know what got you all fucked up and angry. Samson, stronger than I am, won’t tell. So Delilah binds him to the bed with bowstrings. But how can a woman like Delilah tie down a man like Samson? With her charms; that’s how she coaxes out his secret. She has a servant cut his hair. The Philistines burn out his eyes. When they enslave him, they emasculate him. Then his hair grows. He’s out for blood. He shakes the pillars of the temple and dies with the Philistines when it crumbles. God said to do it. Love thy neighbor? Slaughter thy neighbor. And what of Delilah? She did it for money. As good a reason as any. Temptress, snake, bitch. Whatever. She got paid. She got out alive.

Sister Agnes knew all the good prayers. A few times a week, she took us to the tiny in-school chapel to pray in place of a religion lesson. We would pray out loud together for a while, and then in silence. Sister said that already scripted prayers, like Hail Mary or Novenas, were the best, because whoever wrote them knew exactly what God wanted to hear. The Our Father was penned by Jesus himself, so you knew it was a real winner. I had a hard time staying conscious in that stuffy room, on my knees. One day I came so close to passing out, but I knew God would be displeased with me if I sat back. My best friend whispered, “Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Like the Bush song.” I never quite passed out in there. Back then, God loved me so much.

The four great virgin martyrs of the early Church are Lucy, Agnes, Agatha, and Cecilia. I always pictured them as slender-faced women with flaxen hair, their bodies swallowed by yards of cloth, their tiny, crushable features lit up by circular halos stationed behind their heads. Each saint looked exactly like any other, and their stories were difficult to distinguish, too, each one blending astounding piety with unspeakable violence: repeated failures to chop off Cecilia’s head, the de-breasting of Agatha, the piercing of Lucy’s eyes with a fork. Agnes, at age twelve or thirteen, was dragged naked through the streets of Rome to a brothel, where she was to be de-virginized so she could be lawfully executed according to Roman policy of the day. Some say she grew a coat of hair as she prayed, a heavenly defense mechanism; others say the men who attempted rape were blinded. An attempt to burn her at the stake was unsuccessful. The beheading, however, worked.

While I learned so much about girls who died with their virginity intact, I never heard a word about male saints’ virginity. In the Catechism, nuns’ virginity is called for, while priests are asked only to be celibate—virginity isn’t mentioned. Christian history is peppered with virgin martyrs who appeared after the Roman period, such as Joan of Arc and Maria Goretti, known for their unique stories. Sister Agnes was obsessed with Maria Goretti, the little saint who was murdered at the age of twelve by a young man whose advances she had spurned. Maria Goretti was to be a model for us girls: die before you open your legs and disappoint the Lord.

Sister told us a story about her guardian angel. Once, when Sister was a young woman, not yet a nun, a man followed her into a gas station bathroom. Her guardian angel made him disappear, somehow. I imagined her with long, dark hair and jeans, with a happier face, maybe even makeup. I imagined what she wasn’t really saying:

Her new life was the product of a furious twisting, a repulsive stroking of thighs. The shadow of a man’s hands rose up the bathroom stall door as she struggled with the lock and tried to breathe. Years later, hidden behind a convent’s brick walls, embraced by the arms of her new vocation, she kneeled on the maroon tile floor with a bucket and rags and scrubbed. She learned to avert her eyes with humility, begged God to make her selfless, closed her eyes and felt her spine roll under the world’s sorrow. She memorized chaplets and novenas but could not turn away from the stare of the angry eyes that penetrated walls. In her room—a cell, they called it—she asked God to take her in her sleep.

Maria Goretti, born 1890, martyred 1902, patron saint of rape victims, was, alongside fetuses, Sister Agnes’s object of most intense devotion. When Maria was twelve, as she sat on the veranda of a barn at her parents’ farm, some neighbor boy of twenty tried to get her to bring him to her bedroom. Of course she refused. So he dragged her, he tried to rape her, she fought, he stabbed. Fourteen times. Then he left. She bled out, but not to death, not quite; death came the next day in a hospital bed. Last words: she forgave the guy and prayed that God would, too. The guy went to prison for thirty years. Maria’s mother lived to attend her daughter’s canonization. The rapist became a Franciscan. He died with a picture of Maria on his nightstand.

Sister Agnes said we were supposed to live by Maria Goretti’s example. We were supposed to cross our legs, clamp them shut with steel; we were supposed to guard our chastity with our lives. It made sense. My body was a book of rules, my heart the spine, my skin plastered with pages. Written on each one was the text that held the world together. Do not steal. Do not lie, swear, disobey. Do not get angry. Don’t even let your thoughts go bad or the poison will fill your veins. Above all, do not fuck.

When the nuns found out I was Cowlitz Indian, they offered me Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks, as a spiritual guide. I knew nothing more than that she was holy and that I was to ask her to speak to the Lord on my behalf. On prayer cards, she was rendered with deep honey skin and delicate, anglicized features. Behind her twin braids shone the circular halo that adorned the heads of all saints. She was Indian and I was Indian, so the nuns thought I would respond to her. They never told me about the smallpox scars that disfigured and half-blinded her, Mohawk accusations of sorcery and promiscuity in response to her conversion, or her self-mortification practices that included whips, hair shirts, iron girdles, and beds of thorns. Kateri—no, Catherine, post-conversion—could withstand up to twelve hundred self-induced lashes at a time. Prolonged fasting brought clarity. Hot coals brought her closer to God. While Kateri’s bloodletting had once taken traditional Mohawk forms, Jesuit priests supplied all the instruments of self-ravage that a good Catholic girl might need to purify her dark Native heart.

In 1680, at the age of twenty-four, Catherine died a virgin. The old Kateri was long gone, and miraculously, so were the scars that had once marked her face, now perfectly pale.

I could not pray to Kateri Tekakwitha. She seemed more like one of my Native American Barbies than a saint. With her braids and ethnically confused features, her prayer card image reminded me enough of myself that I found it impossible to venerate her. Kateri could not be trusted to do any better than I could with my desperate implorations to the Lord.

Prayer is not a satisfying outlet: you talk to God, God doesn’t answer; you have to have faith that his plan is in action, and you pray some more. I used to pray to saints instead of God because if I didn’t get what I wanted, I could blame heavenly miscommunication. I prayed novenas to Saint Jude, patron of hopeless causes, asking him to make the cross-eyed boy I loved love me back. It never worked. I was like a before girl in a teen movie, gangly with bad bangs and glasses, no concept of style, no sense of how to present the new body I was sprouting. The boys joked about my undesirability, one telling me that another had dedicated a love song to me on the radio or was going to put a note into my locker later. The nuns promised that in heaven, we would eternally appear as we had at our hottest in life, but I ran out of patience. I lost faith sometime near the end of sixth grade. God had so many people working so hard to make him happy that I knew he wouldn’t miss me when I was gone from his flock. Anyway, the nuns had told me that Jesus loved me unconditionally, so I wasn’t worried about making any effort to try to snag him.

The summer after seventh grade, I bought my first pair of black plastic, modified Buddy Holly glasses, a new wardrobe, and makeup, ready to reinvent myself and broadcast a message to my new classmates, who didn’t know the bookish girl I had been at All Saints Regional: you don’t know me, but I am very freaking cool.

To be a sinful woman is to be a whore. The New Testament never says so, but Mary Magdalene has a reputation. Woman’s sin is sexual. So, even though there is no biblical evidence of Mary Magdalene’s sluttiness, we believe that it is so. Mary Magdalene and Jesus were tight, leading scholars to speculate. All that we know about her is what we place into the marginal white space in the New American Bible. Even if she wasn’t a prostitute in life, she sure is a hooker now: see The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar, and The Passion of the Christ. Mary sits in heaven with her hair down past her shoulders, among the girls whose breasts are just beginning to grow, whose hymens still guard the span of the chastity they died for. Mary lived to see her body break and heal, to change over years, to become immaterial. She lived to see God die. In heaven she feels no need to cross her legs at the knee.

Mary of Egypt, patron saint of penitents, is likely the slut earlier Catholic scholars confused with Mary Magdalene. Just as Mary Todd Lincoln shouldn’t be confused with Mary-Kate Olsen, Mary of Egypt was a separate woman from a different time with a different agenda. I never learned about her in Catholic school—maybe because she wasn’t important, maybe because keeping track of so many women named Mary was too much to ask of schoolchildren, maybe because she made it okay to sleep around as long as penance eventually comes. Born around 344, died around 421, Mary moved to Alexandria at age twelve and started sleeping around. She didn’t fuck for the money, she said; she wanted it, loved it, couldn’t get enough of the cock. So she went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. It was an anti-pilgrimage: she wasn’t looking for salvation, she was cruising the pilgrims. Something happened—visions, forces—and she repented. She crossed the Jordan River to live like a beast in the desert. When Saint Zosimas found her, she was naked, more animal than human, clairvoyant. She could walk on water. I try to explain this away with what I know: petit mal seizures, maybe, because I can’t believe in superpowers. Zosimas left and returned to find her dead. With the help of a passing lion, he buried her.

In 1 Kings and 2 Kings, Jezebel, Phoenician queen of Israel, is manipulative, scheming, idolatrous, and powerful, but never a slut. Like Mary Magdalene, she has become a slut in our eyes millennia after her story first emerged, but since she worshipped Baal and never the LORD God, her redemption can only be secular and feminist: she was so strong she made her husband’s knees buckle, made pagans of the Israelites. A woman only has power to make a nation of men fall if she has evil, a force stronger than nearly anything, working through her. Somehow, when she was turned from Bible story to pure myth, she became an adulteress who turned the Israelites into sexual deviants. Mary Magdalene’s sin was personal; Jezebel infected a nation. What a woman! I thought. Sister said, “Pray against the spirit of Jezebel.” Each night, I said a rosary in bed, counting pearls, sometimes following it up with the Angelus, even though I knew that prayer was only said at certain times of day, hoping that nobody would mind. Afterward, I would try to think happy thoughts, as my dad had told me to do when I was afraid to sleep, and then I’d try a Regina Coeli or Salve Regina, and more happy thoughts, but eventually, I ran out of happy thoughts and rote-memory prayers, and I thought of regal Jezebel, and of Mary Magdalene hanging with God and the boys so easily, and I’d sometimes drift off thinking that someday, I could wake up being a woman who rules the world.

As my primary and secondary school years passed, and I counted the hours until college, my longing turned to acute craving, to something like a nutrient deficiency I could feel in my body. In high school, I would finally take on a boyfriend. Jake and I dated for three years, into college, but he wasn’t my perfect love, even though he often gave me flowers, gifts, and handmade cards. We regularly professed our love for one another, and at first, I did mean it, but at sixteen, I wasn’t prepared to keep meaning it for so long.

In that virginal space, in which my flesh had no saintly reason for abstinence, my desperation took the form of a sort of ugly love medicine. I longed to touch someone whom I really wanted. I had my opportunity to lose my v-card to Jake, but I just couldn’t do it—he had become too much like a family member. I still thought I meant it when I told him I loved him, but it was a kind of love that even the nuns would have been comfortable with.

Eventually, when I was a college sophomore, I summoned up the resolve to break up with him. I knew it would hurt him—worse, because I was his world, in a way that I could no longer handle. He asked for a two-month extension. I considered it, at first, but then let myself go. By then, my limbs fit my torso, my haircut fit my face, and I didn’t need to study Cosmo’s glossy secrets to trick boys into liking me. I wielded phenomenal powers. I went too far, too fast; knew too much, too soon. A few years later, curious friends and even boys whose hands were wedged between my waistband and pelvis would ask me, “How many have you had?” as if they wanted to see whether I was okay to drive. It was a question of the very young adults, those who want to know how their numbers measure up. Mine began to feel like a statistical outlier, eventually, because I had been so terrified of the burden of sainthood, the pain of my torment, and I tried to lance my wound, but I cut deeply, and, calling it sacrifice, calling it progress, kept cutting.