What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reservations about saying she didn't like Walt Whitman's poetry, even though our freshman-year literature professor had made Whitman's work central to the course. When I told her one day as we were walking out of class that I admired her honesty, she smiled, said something about how most literature professors had more hot air in them than substance, and walked off to wherever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sitting alone in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next two months or so, we met a couple of times per week at a table in the back corner of the Rainy Night House Café, where we sat for hours drinking tea, eating bagels, and talking.
One afternoon, just as we were getting up to leave, Maria said she'd been given a bottle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I would come to her room that evening to help her drink it. She was already several glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up, our talk turned to a subject we'd never before discussed, love and relationships. We circled the question of our own budding involvement warily, letting it drop in and out of the conversation, each of us waiting for the other to risk saying, or doing, something first. Then Maria asked me, "Richard, do you like your body?"
"Yes," I answered, more because I couldn't imagine saying no than because I'd ever really thought about it, "why?"
She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, "No, I mean do you really like your body?"
"Yes," I said again, but before I could ask if she liked hers as well, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, "Are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?"
Confused, and beginning to feel a little threatened, I allowed a small edge of anger to sharpen my voice, "What are you talking about?"
Maria smiled to herself, put her hand warmly on my knee, and said, "You know, do you think you measure up physically?"
Finally I understood, or at least I thought I did. As I imagine most young men do at one time or another, I'd taken a ruler to my penis to see if it was "big enough," though the only standard I had to compare myself to was the, as I remember it, average nine-inch penis of the men who appeared in Penthouse's letters. I did not "measure up." I won't deny I sometimes wished to be as big as the men I read about, but I also neither understood nor fully believed the relationship the letters in Penthouse asserted between the size of a man's penis, the pleasure he was able to give his partner in sex and/or the desirability she saw in him in the first place. Frankly, the idea that penis size could matter so much seemed as absurd to me as the life-or-death matter breast size so often seemed to be for my male friends when they talked about the women they were attracted to.
Yet here was a woman, clearly interested in me sexually, who wanted to know how I felt about the size of my penis. Looking back, I can smile thinking that perhaps her question was an honest one asked at precisely the wrong moment. At the time, however, all I felt was confusion. At least implicitly, Maria's question shifted the subtext of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. Anything I said—yes, no, maybe, let's find out—was a picking up of the gauntlet she'd thrown down. On the other hand, to say nothing was probably to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her. So I decided to turn the tables. "I don't know," I said. "Do you measure up?" I asked her.
Maria's face changed immediately. The gently mocking anticipation with which she'd been waiting for my response vanished, and she searched my face with eyes that were suddenly sad and deeply suspicious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn't find, what she was looking for, and then, so softly that I almost couldn't hear her, she said, "Sometimes."
Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, trying to recapture the easy banter from earlier in the evening, but Maria was suddenly unable to look me in the face, and when I finally stood up to leave, all she did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sitting. We saw each other on campus a few times after that but never said more than hello, and Maria only had once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to understand that she didn't want to talk to me again.
When I went home at the end of the semester, I told my mother what had happened and I asked her to help me understand Maria's behavior. Her answer only confused me more. "The size of a man's ego," my mother said, "can be measured by the size of his penis." To illustrate her point, she told me a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she'd gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, having had enough, loudly, so that the people around them could hear, offered him the following challenge. If he had a "baseball bat" between his legs, she'd be his for the night. If he didn't, he should just leave her alone. The man protested that he'd "never had any complaints," but, my mother said, she slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn't, enough said.
Needless to say, the man walked away.
"Only small men," my mother's tone suggested this was her final word on the subject, "say that size doesn't matter."
While my mother's statements about men and penis size, and the story she told me to illustrate her point, are easy enough to understand as an expression of her anger at men, not only could I not imagine at the time what she was trying to tell me, but even now I have difficulty holding onto a logic she might have used to explain how what she said was an appropriate answer to my question. Did she think she was in some way siding with Maria? And if she was, what did she thing she was siding with Maria against? Did she think of her story as a cautionary tale, a warning not to be a man like the man she had rejected in the bar? Or did she intend her story as a reality check, a way of telling me that I was already the man in the bar and I just needed to be honest about whether I measured up to what certain women would require of me? Or maybe it was all of these, or none of them; maybe my mother was not paying attention to the fact that I was a young man looking for guidance and just wanted to share what she thought was a funny story, almost as if I were one of her girlfriends, I don't know, but as I am writing this three scenes from when I was a teenager come back to me:
One: My mother standing in my bedroom doorway, her hand still on the doorknob she turned without knocking first. I am frozen in naked profile in the center of my room, trying desperately with my hands to hid my morning erection.
Two: Some time later, though I don't know how long, leaving the mall with my mother, I tell her I want an organ for my birthday. "Why?" she asks. "You already have a fine one of your own."
Three: It's Thanksgiving or Passover, one of the holidays when my family gathered at my grandmother's house. We're sitting at the table after dinner. "Next time," my mother is laughing—but the smile on her face is a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder—"Next time, tell your father you don't have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap." I am sixteen, just home from a visit to my father in Manhattan, and I have just shared with my mother his first and only attempt at a father-son talk with me about women and sex. Walking from the restaurant where he'd taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train home, he'd put his arm intimately around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine, and asked, "Do you have a girl friend?" I told him no, which was a lie. "Well," he responded, "you will soon, and once you start dating, you're going to run into situations you won't know how to handle." He moved a few steps ahead and turned to face me, searching my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. "I just want you to know you can call me."
"I know," I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could've known that I'd already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn't know and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. "What does he think he's going to teach you, anyway?" she asks, letting her smile loosen into a softer, more conspiratorial grin. "You probably know more than he does already." She laughs again, and this time I laugh with her, more because it is what I think she expects than because I think what she's just said is really funny. Something in her tone makes me uneasy, though I am not quite sure how to name it yet.
The conversation continues, and my mother—I don't remember precisely how—comes back once more to the image of the steel jockstrap, and I realize what it is. My mother does not want me to grow up to be like my father, not just in terms of the character traits she finds so objectionable in him, but in terms of his body as well, which there is nothing I can do to prevent. I am, I am becoming, I will be, physically, sexually, a man, and she and I will have to face each other across the unbridgeable span of that difference for the rest of our lives. The enormity of this thought, however, is more than I can bear and so I push it away from me, and I laugh again at whatever she says, as if I am completely on my mother's side, but somewhere inside me I am sure—though I will not presume now to say that I was right about my mother's feelings in this—that even though a man is what I have no choice but to become, a man is precisely what my mother does not want me to be.
