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Recently in Salon Health & Body

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Historically significant tampons
The Museum of Menstruation sustains the flow of knowledge in a little-known field.
By Mary Roach
[09/10/99]

A true fish story
Fish breath may be the only side effect to the latest antidepressant.
By Michael Alvear
[09/09/99]

Urge
Missing women, mysterious men
Nancy wonders who her real friends are.
By Tracy Quan
[09/09/99]

Laugh track
Someday doctors might be replaced by Marx Brothers movies.
By Susan McCarthy
[09/08/99]

Urge
Natural selection
If Allison is still "giving up" the hooker's life, why is she still giving it up?
By Tracy Quan
[09/07/99]

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Lauren asked me what I wanted. "A book about insects," I said. Then, remembering that she considered my interest in insects to be "unnatural," I quickly added, "or a space pen." The ink in these pens continues to flow in zero gravity. You can write with them while standing on your head. I did not often stand on my head, but I thought that I just might if I had a space pen.

I gave Lauren candlesticks made out of cement. "Well, well," she said, setting them down with a thud, "aren't they lovely."

I unwrapped what I initially mistook to be a swollen thumb. Its rubbery flesh, however, was not the color of skin. Rather, it was the unhealthy pink of a No. 2 pencil eraser. This color reminded me of the teacher's lounge, and I immediately became aroused. I've never been in a teacher's lounge, but I've always imagined it as a place where the blondest and prettiest of my instructors felt free to shuck their clothing and have sex with whomever was not busy chain smoking or writing vindictive comments on my homework.

"This is no space pen," I said, waving the long, rubbery shaft at Lauren in a threatening manner.

"It's a vibrator," Lauren explained carefully. She clutched my arm and looked pleadingly into my eyes. "Use it."

Find more on women's sexual issues at the drkoop.com Women's Health Center.

My life was complicated enough without bringing a vibrator into the picture -- a picture that was beginning to resemble the more naughty illustrations found in religious tracts. Old Testament stuff. Freed Israelites behaving badly in the foothills of Mount Sinai. Dancing girls in short nighties, eyes agog with sin, rubbing up against golden oxen. Moses tossing his hands up in disgust at the whole sordid business.

I was romantically involved with two people and I was having sex constantly. My lovers were divided neatly into two categories: One was a man and the other a woman. Despite this simple organizing principle, however, I found it difficult to keep track of who I was having sex with at any given moment. Sometimes I'd reach for a sex organ that simply wasn't there, leaving me baffled and a bit miffed.

The only sex-free zone was in my bedroom at my parents' house. I had recently moved in with them after being chased from another state by the peeved husband of my former lover, a microbiologist whom I had captivated with my command of germ theory.

My girlhood bedroom remained much as I had left it -- a shrine to my troubled adolescence. The walls were plastered with mementos from proms where I had narrowly escaped date rape and posters of pop stars who couldn't quite keep their tattered shirts buttoned. "They're so smooth," an ancient baby sitter once said, standing an inch away from the wall, examining the boys' furless chests through bifocals.

On the desk was a framed picture of me grinning wildly as I accepted a "Just Say No" Leadership Award from then-first lady Nancy Reagan. According to my high school principal, a man who compulsively sniffed his fingers, I was nominated for the award because "you've never been caught smoking in the bathroom." The next step in the process, he explained, was to take a series of self-awareness classes. These classes, I soon learned, were merely exercises in humiliation that could only have come from the mind of a Republican wife. They were obviously designed to send me racing for glue fumes.

Shortly before I flew to Washington to accept the award, I sat on a bathtub watching my peers snort cocaine off a bidet. Occasionally, someone would lean against the bidet's lever, sending water shooting upward. My friends would madly run their noses across the bidet's rim before the tide washed away the powder. After each episode, Jimmy, whose mother had installed the bidet after taking a French class at the community college, sternly lectured against the hazards of leaning on the lever. The rest of the group, their hair matted with mist, would nod seriously in agreement.

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