The Melting Pot Read online

  V

  Your first visit to the doctor. You get dressed in real clothes and appraise yourself in the mirror—what admirable ankles. With a shudder you realize you are echoing a thought now terrible in its implications: No one would ever know.

  Out on the city streets you hail a taxi, since you cannot risk your new body’s being jostled or having to stand up all the way on a bus. The receptionist in your doctor’s waiting room is noticeably cool—no honeying today—as she asks you to take a seat and wait. When your name is finally called, a woman in a white coat leads you into a cubicle just off the waiting room and loudly asks your symptoms. Quite often in the past you have, while waiting, overheard the symptoms of many women, and now no doubt many women hear yours. As usual, you are directed to an examining room and instructed to undress and don a white paper robe. On the way you count the examining rooms. Three. One woman—you—is pre-examination, one no doubt mid-examination, one is post.

  When your doctor at last enters, he utters a cheery greeting and then the usual: “Slide your lower body to the edge of the table. Feet up in the stirrups please.” You close your eyes, practicing indifference. It cannot be worse than the worst you have already known. You study certain cracks in the ceiling that you know well and he does not even know exist. You continue to meditate on procedural matters, namely, that your doctor’s initial impression in each of his three examining rooms is of a woman naked except for a white paper robe, sitting or leaning on an examining table in an attitude of waiting. He, needless to say, is fully dressed. You contemplate him going from one examining room to the next; the devil will not have to make work for his hands. After the examination you will be invited, clothed, to speak with him in his office, and while you dress for this encounter, he will visit another examining room. It strikes you that this maximum-efficiency setup might serve equally well for a brothel and perhaps already does. This is a brothel surrealized.

  Your doctor says you may resume most normal activities, may even do some very mild exercise if you wish, but no baths and no “intercourse.” “Intercourse,” you are well aware, stands for sex, although if you stop to consider, sex is the more inclusive term. Does he say “intercourse” because he is unable to say “sex,” or thinks the word “sex” would be too provocative in that antiseptic little room, unleashing torrents of libido, or is it his indirect way of saying that you can do sexual things as long as you don’t fuck? This is not something you can ask your doctor.

  The last item of business is the prescription for the hormones. He explains how to take them—three weeks on and one week off, in imitation of nature’s way. He gives you several small sample packets for starters. At home, standing at the bathroom sink, you extricate a pill from its tight childproof cardboard-and-plastic niche, feverishly, like a junkie pouncing on her fix. Nature’s way. Now no more “sweats,” no more tears. Your new body is complete. What is this little piece of paper in the sample packet? Not so little when you open it up, just impeccably folded. In diabolically tiny print it explains the pills’ bad side effects or “contraindications,” a word reminiscent of “intercourse.” Most of them you already know from reading books, but there is something new. The pills may have a damaging effect on your eyes. Fancy that. Nature’s way? You settle down on the edge of the bathtub and go back to the beginning to read more attentively. First, a list of situations for which the pills are prescribed. Funny, you do not find “hysterectomy.” Reading on, you do find “female castration.” That must be ... yes indeed, that’s you. You try to read on, but the print is so terribly small, perhaps the pills are affecting your eyes already, for there is a shimmering film over the fine letters. Rather than simply rolling over into the tub, go back to bed, fully dressed, face in the pillows. No, first close the door in case the children come in. Many times over the past weeks you have lain awake pinched by questions, pulling and squeezing back as if the questions were clay, weighing the threat of the bony-footed woman pregnant with her own death—an actress summoned and stuffed for the occasion? part of a terrorist scheme?—against your own undrugged sense of the fitness of things. Now you have grasped that the questions are moot. This is not like cutting your hair, and you have never even had a tooth pulled. The only other physically irreversible things you have done are lose your virginity and bear children. Yes, shut the door tight. It would not do to have them hear you, hysteric, castrata.

  But of course the sun continues to rise, your center is hardly the center of the universe. Over the next few weeks you get acquainted with your new body. A peculiar thing—though it does not look very different, it does things differently. It responds to temperature differently and it sleeps differently, finding different positions comfortable and different hours propitious. It eats differently, shits differently, and pisses differently. You suspect it will fuck differently, but that you will not know for a while. Its pubic hair has not grown back in quite the same design or density, so that you look shorn or childlike or, feeling optimistic, like a chorus girl or a Renaissance painting. It doesn’t menstruate, naturally. You can’t truthfully say you miss menstruation, but how will you learn to keep track of time, the seasons of the month? A wall calendar? But how will you know inside? Can it be that time will feel all the same, no coming to fruition and dropping the fruit, no filling and subsiding, moist and dry, moving towards and moving away from?

  VI

  At nine weeks, although your new body can walk and move almost naturally, it persists in lying around the house whenever possible. And so you lie around the living room with your loved ones as your daughter, wearing an old sweater of yours, scans the local newspaper in search of part-time work. Music blares, Madonna singing “Like a Virgin,” describing how she felt touched as though for the very first time. Were you not disconcerted by the whole cluster of associations, you might tell your daughter that the premise of the song is mistaken, the very first time is usually not so terrific. Perhaps some other evening. Your daughter reads aloud amusing job opportunities. A dental school wants research subjects who have never had a cavity. Aerobics instructor at a reform school. “Hey, Mom, here’s something you could do. A nutrition experiment, five dollars an hour. Women past childbearing age or surgically sterile.”

  A complex message, but no response is really required since her laughter fills the space. Your older son, bent over the Mary Cassatt puzzle, chuckles. Your husband smirks faintly over his newspaper. He means no harm, you suppose. (Then why the fuck is he smirking?) Maybe those to whom the facts of life still apply can’t help it, just as children can’t help smirking at the facts of life themselves. Only your younger son, building a space station out of Lego parts, is not amused. Unknowing, he senses some primitive vibration in the air and looks up at you apprehensively, then gives you a loving punch in the knee. You decide that he is your favorite, that one day you may run away with him, abandoning the others.

  VII

  The tenth week, and a most important day in the life of your new body. Your doctor says you are permitted to have “intercourse.” If your husband is like most men, he can hardly wait. Proceed with caution, like walking on eggs, except that you, eggless, are the eggs on which he proceeds with caution. Touched for the very first time! Well, just do it and see if it works; passion will come later, replacing fear. That is the lesson of behavioral science as opposed to classical psychology. But what’s this? Technical difficulties, like a virgin. This can’t be happening, not to you with that hot little geyser, that little creamery you had up there. Come now, when there’s a will ... Spit, not to mention a thousand drugstore remedies. Even tears will do. Before long things are wet enough, thank you very much. Remember for next time there’s still that old spermicidal jelly, but you can throw away the diaphragm. That is not the sort of thing you can hand down to your daughter like a sweater.

  VIII

  Over the next month or two you may find your new body has strange responses to your husband’s embraces. Don’t be alarmed: it feels desire and it feels pleas
ure, only it feels them in a wholly unfamiliar way. In bed your new body is most different from your old, so different that you have the eerie sensation that another woman, a stranger, is making love to your husband while your mind, your same old mind, looks on in amazement. All your body’s nerve endings have been replaced by this strange woman’s; she moves and caresses the way you used to, and the sounds of pleasure she makes are the same, only her apparatus of sensation is altogether alien. There are some things you cannot discuss with your husband because you are too closely twined; just as if, kissing, your tongues in each other’s mouths, you were to attempt to speak. But you cannot rest easy in this strangeness; it must be explored, and so you light on an experiment.

  You call an old friend, someone you almost married, except that you managed in time to distinguish your feeling for each other from love. It was sex, one of those rare affinities that would not withstand daily life. Now and then, at long intervals, a year or more, you have met for several hours with surprisingly little guilt. This is no time for fine moral distinctions. He has often pledged that you may ask him for any kind of help, so you call him and explain the kind of help you need. He grins, you can see this over the telephone, and says he would be more than happy to help you overcome the mystery of the sexual stranger in your new body. Like Nancy Drew’s faithful Ned.

  You have to acknowledge the man has a genuine gift as regards women. From the gods? Or could it be because he is a doctor and knows his physiology? No, your knowledge of doctors would not bear out that correlation, and besides, this one is only an eye doctor. In any case, in his arms, in a motel room, you do rediscover yourself, buried deep, deep in the crevices of hidden tissues and disconnected circuits. It takes some time and coaxing to bring you forth, you have simply been so traumatized by the knife that you have been in hiding underground for months, paralyzed by any kind of penetration. But you are still there, in your new body, and gradually, you feel sure, you will emerge again and replace the impostor in the conjugal bed. You feel enormous gratitude and tell him so, and he says, grinning, “No trouble at all. My pleasure.” Perhaps you will even ask him about the effects of the pills on your eyes, but not just now.

  “Do I feel any different inside?” you ask. He says no, and describes in exquisite terms how you feel inside, which is very nice to listen to. This is not in your husband’s line or perhaps any husband’s—you wouldn’t know. After the exquisite description, he says, “But it is different, you know.” You don’t know. How?

  He explains that in the absence of the cervix, which is the opening of the uterus, the back wall of the vagina is sewn up so that in effect what you have there now is a dead end. As he explains, it seems obvious and inevitable, but strange to say, you have never figured this out before or even thought about it. (It is something your doctor neglected to mention.) Nor have you poked around on your own, having preferred to remain ignorant. So it is rather a shock, this realization that you have a dead end. You always imagined yourself, along with all women, as having an easy passage from inside to out, a constant trafficking between the heart of the world and the heart of yourself. This was what distinguished you from men. They were the walled ones, barricaded, the ones with such difficulty receiving and transmitting the current running between the heart of the world and the heart of themselves. It is so great a shock that you believe you cannot bear to live with it.

  Watching you, he says, “It makes no difference. You feel wonderful, the same as always. You really do. Here, feel with your hand, so you’ll know.” With his help you feel around your new body. Different, not so different. Yet you know. Of course, with his help it becomes an amusing and piquant thing to be doing in a motel room, and then it becomes more love, wonderful love, but you cry all the way through it. A new sensation: like some Kamasutra position, you wouldn’t have thought it possible.

  “At least you don’t have to worry about ovarian cancer,” he says afterwards. “It’s very hard to detect in time and a terrible way—”

  “Please,” you say. “Please stop.” You cannot bear hearing those words from this man.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s hard. I can’t imagine how I would feel if I had my balls cut off.”

  With a leap you are out of bed and into your clothes, while he looks on aghast. How fortunate that you did not marry him, for had you married him, after those words you would have had to leave him. As you leave him, naked and baffled, now, not bothering to inquire about the effects of the pills on your eyes yet thanking him because he has done precisely what you needed done. It will be a very long time before you see him again, though, before the blade of his words grows dull from repetition.

  IX

  Months pass and you accept that this new body, its torso ever so slightly different in shape from the old one, is yours to keep. Not all women, remember, love their new bodies instinctively; some have to learn to love them. Through the thousands of little acts of personal care, an intimacy develops. By the sixth month you will feel not quite as teary, not quite as tired—the anesthetic sloshing around in your cells must be evaporating. You resolve to ignore the minor nuisance symptoms—mild backaches, a recurrent vaginal infection, lowered resistance to colds and viruses. ... Now that the sample packets of hormone pills are used up, you are spending about fifteen dollars a month at the drugstore, something your doctor neglected to mention in advance. Would he have told you this, you wonder, if you were a very poor woman? How does he know you are not a very poor woman? Foolish question. Because you have purchased his services. The pills cause you to gain weight, jeopardizing the thin new body and the ankles, so you run faster every morning (yes, it runs! it runs!), racing nature’s way. One very positive improvement is that now you can sleep on your stomach. Your husband can touch you anywhere without pain. When he makes love to you you feel the strange woman and her alien nervous system retreating and yourself emerging in her place. You will eventually overcome her.

  And before you know it, it’s time for your six-month checkup. You do not respond to your doctor’s hearty greeting, but you comply when he says, “Slide your lower body to the edge of the table. Feet up in the stirrups please.” He does not know it, but this is the last time he will be seeing—no, seeing is wrong since he doesn’t look, he looks at the wall behind your head—the last time he or any man will be examining your body. There is nothing he can tell you about how you feel, for the simple reason that he does not know. How can he? Suddenly this is utterly obvious, and as you glance again at the painting of assorted tools, the fact of his being in an advisory capacity on any matter concerning your body is both an atrocity, which you blame yourself for having permitted, and an absurdity, such an ancient social absurdity that you laugh aloud, a crude, assertive, resuscitated laugh, making him look warily from the wall to your face, which very possibly he has never looked at before. How can he know what you feel? He has never attempted to find out by the empirical method; his tone is not inquisitive but declarative. He knows only what men like himself have written in books, and just now he looks puzzled.