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“Of course,” I said bravely, “but maybe you’d better give me a few pointers.”
Thus began our first “date,” and my life would never be the same.
∞∞∞
Ever since I sprouted a hormonally erupting hourglass figure in the tenth grade, I’ve been trying to navigate through the emotional shoals of the male psyche. There was the lascivious trumpet player in the high school band who, in my dreams, had pinned me down under the bleachers; in reality he barely knew my name. There was the camp tennis instructor with those great tanned muscles. There was the first college boyfriend who loved my body so much that he would forget to call for weeks on end.
There was the perfect Dr. Right, over a research summer in Boston, whose ego was in total focus while his uncentered penis produced an unpleasant car-wash spasm of semen, which he generously shared with a whole host of Slavic fashion models.
And of course, there were plenty of older married doctors who couldn’t keep their surgical hands above the operating table.
But sex had to take a backseat (at least when I wasn’t fending off a boyfriend while splayed out in a backseat) to my career.
As I started my clinical training, I was starting to get a bit cocky about my prowess as doctor-in-training. This was the “big leagues,” and the stakes were higher now—falter on one procedure, vocally complain about the long hours, piss off a mentor, and my future could be downgraded to a lower tier of residency.
Or at least it felt that way.
There was always the pressurethat had started from childhood. Become a doctor and reap all the good things in life: material success, happy family lifestyle, societal adulation.
I knew I’d be intimidated by the aggressive white-haired cats in surgery, but my mastery was evolving. I could bag the big game by outperforming these blowhards. I believed that young women like me were harbingers of a new breed of physicians. The big cats were going to have to share this jungle.
But finally, after being almost a nun through most of medical school, I methim, the ultimate him,Amir Hadid. This should have been the answer to my prayers in bed at night (hands lowered below midriff), after all the bad boys with emotional shortcomings that I had rejected.
I won’t lie. My dreams gradually gave way to drudgery. I couldn’t wait to get out of medical school and become a real live doctor. That was, until,heshowed up. My tall, strong, Arabian prince—the star of those fantasy Casablanca nights, the squad leader who helped me not only survive the relentless military-like days, but actually enjoy them.
He was my new life. But I came from a Jewish home, from a culture far different than his. So I kept him a secret, like that inside pocket of my white coat no one knew about, the one for tampons and antidepressants, the female medical students’ survival kit.
But eventually a time bomb would hit the trenches, and all things secret would be exposed...
2. Webberworld
My life seemed predetermined.
My European-born grandparents emigrated to America after the war and brought along only their unfiltered anguish from the unbearable atrocities they suffered during the Holocaust. Myconception was the eventual product of one of history’s greatest traumas, industrialized genocide performed on a scale that had never been perpetrated before.
They had lost everything—close relatives, most of their possessions, all of their self-esteem.
Thus, any and all pleasure cells were, by design, to be rendered extinct in their heirs. My parents were given the role of enforcing the almost-military discipline.
My mother’s default position on a weekly basis was always “I told you so,” even when I had no idea what she had told me that was relevant to “the issue” at hand. (And there were always plenty of issues when two headstrong females clashed.) My father was a very successful physician, but his storehouse of empathy was exhausted by his patients while the love for his wife and daughter seemed to dwindle daily.
It all comes back to me in a torrent of sadness: between my father’s inaccessibility and my mother’s continuing disapproval, there was never a normal childhood. I realize that, somehow, I’d skipped all the conventional emotional stages of growing up.
Meanwhile, for all its external opulence, my home was like a prison for me.
Mockingly dubbed Webberworld by our neighbors, it was my mother’s pride and joy, an obsession into which she poured all her love and devotion.
As spoiled as it may sound, I hated growing up in this 10,000-square-foot mausoleum with its cold brick-and-stone edifice teeming with pretentiousness.
Our backyard boasted a Japanese garden bisected by a pathway that culminated in a fairy-tale-inspired gazebo. There was a waterfall feeding into a swimming pool, and a tennis court that had been erected on a promontory jutting out over a man-made lake.
In my childhood fantasies, closing my eyes for a moment, I would picture the epic barbecues my family would host. The town’s glamorous elite would congregate in our backyard as in aTown & Countrycover, while tuxedo-clad waiters passed around finger sandwiches andcanapés. My father and the mayor would work a massive kitchen-sized grill, producing prime sirloins and ribs.
Webberworld would spell newfound popularity, with the high school kids clamoring for an opportunity to have chicken fights in the luxury pool. The gazebo was the backdrop for my potential make-out sessions with the star quarterback—
Then I would open my eyes. It never happened. The pool parties, the barbecues, the make-out passion, the whole Gatsby scenario. I would have given anything to go back to the more modest gatherings reserved for our old, lived-in house. In the place of senators, celebrities, pretty popular girls, and football players were...woodchips, the kind that my father, Milton, liked to lay down on the weekends.
My mother promised, “Your father and I will have guests when the landscape is finished.”
