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“What happened to you out there?” Laura asked the next morning, smugly satisfied with herself, but extremely disappointed with me.
“I’m sorry, Laura. It’s been a rough year. I have no more room in my cardiac chamber for boys.”
Laura got my drift and tried to recover. “Can you at least promise me one thing? That you’ll take care of your own business? I mean, a sexless life is no life at all. Self-pleasure is a good outlet during the fallow times. That little button within the pearly gates has eight thousand nerve endings. Remember, babes: in tough times, there’s no place like home.”
Although she had freaked me out, Laura had also piqued my curiosity. Later that afternoon, I slinked self-consciously into the tiny spare room I had come across in the bungalow, dimmed the lights, gathered a few props, lit two votive candles, and dressed in the long silk teddy I had bought to wear for Alex on Valentine’s Day. Ceremoniously, playing both parts, I eased one strap, then the other, off my shoulder, allowing the teddy to slip to the floor. I poured body oil into my palm to caress my legs and arms. Uh-oh, the giggles—my laugh almost blew the candles out; I felt like a schoolgirl playing a kissing game in a closet. How would I initiate the process of touching myself for the first time at the age of twenty-five?
I lay down on my bed, spreading my naked oiled legs wide open.I poured more oil on my fingers and gingerly explored my shape-shaven but full bush—soft and secret, hiding the entrance to the cave—until I found my clitoral hood, the fold of skin protecting the jewel. “Oooh,” I gasped, unprepared for the rush of feeling—an intense sensation that rippled down my body. Whoa, this was new. I must have been dating amateur explorers, incapable of discovering, homing in on... My. Most. Important. Part.
Staring down at the space between my legs, I was able to see my own clitoris, a shining pink stone. Narcissistically aroused by this visual, I encircled my clit over and over again, as if tracing the stone’s setting with my fingers, never directly on it—too intense. Yes—intense. A faucet released inside me, a puddle formed. Then I felt a tickle in the groin, like the beginning of a sneeze—I was on the edge, but just—couldn’t—quite—get—there... Argh!!! A standstill... I rubbed the stone, fast and flat, and—Oh my god!My left leg tremored uncontrollably while the right leg remained still. I floated on my bed, spent.
But the itch didn’t fully resolve, so I went for round two, aiming for the multiple orgasms I had read about inCosmo. I began the rhythmic search a second time... The second climax was almost immediate, even more intense than the first.
This little clitoris was literally a ball of specialized erotic nerves. Each angle, each spot, produced a slightly different orgasm. I repeated...eight more times, growing closer, closer to... what? The point was,Iwas driving...and a stick shift, not an automatic. I had control.
In psychiatry, they say that masturbation is healthy and normal but can become a problem when it interferes with a patient’s daily function. I was in trouble. Masturbation felt so fucking great, I was afraid I’d feel a spell coming on during class and have to excuse myself to do it in the bathroom stall. My new habit never got to the point of dysfunction, but I did masturbate frequently, sometimes with porn... something about those strangers, those forays in anonymous rooms. Determined to visit every last erogenous zone, I traveled and traversed that triangle, an autocratic diplomat.
Back after my first session in the bungalow, I picked up the phone and dialed Laura.
“Hey woman. I just discovered the Holy Grail,” I dished to Laura.
11. Infinite Rounds
Beginning the clinical years was a milestone in med school that marked the end of insufferable long lectures and rote testing. Our third year was the true beginning of actual patient care. Entering the wards at Westport’s City Hospital was like stepping into a foreign country, complete with its own language, customs, behaviors, mannerisms, and overall dictatorship formed by senior physicians.
The clinical years entailed rotating through various hospitals, and City was my first, starting with internal medicine, to be followed by surgery. Dressed in blue scrubs, we rounded the dank, urine-scented halls in mini-armies. As in war, the other side was objectified. Patients were identified not by name, but as “forty-five-year-old male with jaundice”; “twenty-seven-year-old female with paranoid delusions”; “thirty-eight-year-old female with breast cancer.”
Dr. Gross, a short brown-haired attending physician in glasses, led team rounds that first day. In an extended morning we covered thirty patients: five miserable hours of collecting miserable data on miserable people who no longer seemed human. To them, it was all of life; to me, it was a litany of minutiae and whining and wiping patients’ asses.
Rounding and rounding and rounding. Where was the psychological boost from caring for people? For two years I had busted my butt to memorize every spare part and every possible hiccup of the human anatomy and physiology to provide better care.
Now I was realizing on the first clinical morning that sick people are often elderly, needy, psychosomatic, and generally unpleasant. Patient care meant patience care. This was as boring as sitting in perfunctory lectures. When would we get a coffee break? Was my watch broken? The hour hand seemed to be stuck.
Finally, when my endurance was stretched to a state of madness, we stopped and stood between Room 203 and Room 205, feeling like zombies without pulses. I needed a break.
“Does there exist a tear in the space-time continuum where we get a break from rounds?” I whispered (apparently too loudly) to a bordering student.
Dr. Gross glared at me, unamused. “Quick lunch, then afternoon rounds,” he announced. We would wolf down a sandwich, count down from ten, and start the game again. There was no time for indigestion or release of same. It was like the arbitrary divider at the grocery check-out, where one customer blends into the next.
Internal medicine was a core rotation. To be accepted into an elite surgery program, I would have to slay this relentless, interminable beast.
That evening I felt depressed, pacing aimlessly around the threadbare furniture in my student apartment. Was I going to spend the rest of my days carrying a clipboard to keep track of patient statistics, or was I going to actually practice medicine that mattered? Then I did the unthinkable. I walked to the tiny kitchen counter, lifted the phone and dialed the one number that had been ingrained since childbirth.
“Hi Rory.” My father answered gruffly, annoyed per usual that I had interrupted his paperwork and patient phone calls.
“Hi Dad. I’m on internal medicine, and I need your advice.”
“Advice? Sure, Rory.” He perked up. “What can I help you with?”
Milton Webber was not the easiest man in the world to talk to. Growing up financially insecure, he felt that providing for his family monetarily was the cornerstone of fatherhood. He couldn’t express empathy, emotion, or unconditional love. Milton loved his family, but he loved one thing even more: his cruel mistress, money.
I spent many a long, freezing New England night studying at the kitchen table in the virtual dark, heat on its lowest setting (my father’s attempts to save every penny), re-living his childhood memories of being dirt poor. Milton was industrious, creative—like his parents, a survivor. As a kid, he’d learned how to empty out a parking meter with a paperclip to pay for his lunch, a large meatball sandwich on rye from Hersh’s Deli. But later, as a successful doctor, he didn’t need to beg, borrow, or steal. He had attained the highest honor for a New York Jewish street kid, but his fears... his fears prevailed, his love obscured by his nerves.
There had always been an impenetrable wall between my father and me. Tears made him uncomfortable, and as a kid, I’d learned not to cry to him even when I was heartbroken, tortured. Between his inaccessibility and Simone’s dictatorial style, being a little girl was near impossible in my home. But now I’d stumbled upon a whole new way of relating to my dad—talking shop. Would he finally love me? See me? Respect me?
We talked for two hours, an unexpected gift, and during this rambling conversation we covered the pressures and joys of being a physician. The repressed childhood anger toward my parents still simmered beneath the surface. But this shoptalk opened the airwaves, and I found myself respecting for my father for having been there and completed the same tedious training.
He had gone through what I was going through and had come out the other side.
