The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition by EVE ENSLER “The Story of V-Day” copyright © 2001 by Karen Obel The vagina monologues / Eve Ensler.—Rev. ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-375-50658-6 v.1 1. Monologues. 2. Vagina. 3. Women. PS3555.N75V3 2001 812’.54—dc21 00-043844 Villard Books website address: www.villard.com Book design by Caroline Cunningham For Ariel, who rocks my vagina and explodes my heart FOREWORD by Gloria Steinem I come from the “down there” generation. That is, those were the words—spoken rarely and in a hushed voice—that the women in my family used to refer to all female genitalia, internal or external. It wasn’t that they were ignorant of terms like vagina, labia, vulva, or clitoris. On the contrary, they were trained to be teachers and probably had more access to information than most. It wasn’t even that they were unliberated, or “straitlaced,” as they would have put it. One grandmother earned money from her strict Protestant church by ghostwriting sermons—of which she didn’t believe a word—and then earned more by betting it on horse races. The other was a suffragist, educator, and even an early political candidate, all to the alarm of many in her Jewish community. As for my own mother, she had been a pioneer newspaper reporter years before I was born, and continued to take pride in bringing up her two daughters in a more enlightened way than she had been raised. I don’t remember her using any of the slang words that made the female body seem dirty or shameful, and I’m grateful for that. As you’ll see in these pages, many daughters grew up with a greater burden. Nonetheless, I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function other than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?) Thus, whether I was learning to talk, to spell, or to take care of my own body, I was told the name of each of its amazing parts—except in one unmentionable area. This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of the school yard and, later, against the popular belief that men, whether as lovers or physicians, knew more about women’s bodies than women did. I first glimpsed the spirit of self-knowledge and freedom that you will find in these pages when I lived inIndiafor a couple of years after college. In Hindu temples and shrines I saw the lingam, an abstract male genital symbol, but I also saw the yoni, a female genital symbol, for the first time: a flowerlike shape, triangle, or double-pointed oval. I was told that thousands of years ago, this symbol had been worshiped as more powerful than its male counterpart, a belief that carried over into Tantrism, whose central tenet is man’s inability to reach spiritual fulfillment except through sexual and emotional union with woman’s superior spiritual energy. It was a belief so deep and wide that even some of the woman-excluding, monotheistic religions that came later retained it in their traditions, although such beliefs were (and still are) marginalized or denied as heresies by mainstream religious leaders. For example: Gnostic Christians worshiped Sophia as the female Holy Spirit and considered Mary Magdalene the wisest of Christ’s disciples; Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddhahood resides in the vulva; the Sufi mystics of Islam believe that fana, or rapture, can be reached only through Fravashi, the female spirit; the Shekina of Jewish mysticism is a version of Shakti, the female soul of God; and even the Catholic church included forms of Mary worship that focused more on the Mother than on the Son. In many countries ofAsia,Africa, and other parts of the world where gods are still depicted in female as well as in male forms, altars feature the Jewel in the Lotus and other representations of the lingam-in-the-yoni. InIndia, the Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali are embodiments of the yoni powers of birth and death, creation and destruction. Still,Indiaand yoni worship seemed a long way from American attitudes about women’s bodies when I came home. Even the sexual revolution of the 1960s only made more women sexually available to more men. The “no” of the 1950s was just replaced with a constant, eager “yes.” It was not until the feminist activism of the 1970s that there began to be alternatives to everything from patriarchal religions to Freud (the distance from A to B), from the double standard of sexual behavior to the single standard of patriarchal/political/religious control over women’s bodies as the means of reproduction. Those early years of discovery are symbolized for me by such sense memories as walking through Judy Chicago’s Woman House inLos Angeles, where each room was created by a different woman artist, and where I discovered female symbolism in my own culture for the first time. (For example, the shape we call a heart—whose symmetry resembles the vulva far more than the asymmetry of the organ that shares its name—is probably a residual female genital symbol. It was reduced from power to romance by centuries of male dominance.) Or sitting in aNew Yorkcoffee shop with Betty Dodson (you will meet her in these pages), trying to act cool while she electrified eavesdroppers with her cheerful explanation of masturbation as a liberating force. Or coming back to Ms. magazine to find, among the always humorous signs on its bulletin board: IT’S10 O’CLOCKAT NIGHT—DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CLITORIS IS? By the time feminists were putting CUNT POWER! on buttons and T-shirts as a way of reclaiming that devalued word, I could recognize the restoration of an ancient power. After all, the Indo-European word cunt was derived from the goddess Kali’s title of Kunda or Cunti, and shares the same root as kin and country. These last three decades of feminism were also marked by a deep anger as the truth of violence against the female body was revealed, whether it took the form of rape, childhood sexual abuse, anti-lesbian violence, physical abuse of women, sexual harassment, terrorism against reproductive freedom, or the international crime of female genital mutilation. Women’s sanity was saved by bringing these hidden experiences into the open, naming them, and turning our rage into positive action to reduce and heal violence. Part of the tidal wave of creativity that has resulted from this energy of truth telling is this play and book. When I first went to see Eve Ensler perform the intimate narratives in these pages—gathered from more than two hundred interviews and then turned into poetry for the theater—I thought: I already know this: it’s the journey of truth telling we’ve been on for the past three decades. And it is. Women have entrusted her with their most intimate experiences, from sex to birthing, from the undeclared war against women to the new freedom of love between women. On every page, there is the power of saying the unsayable—as there is in the behind-the-scenes story of the book itself. One publisher paid an advance for it, then, on sober second thought, allowed Eve Ensler to keep the money if she would take the book and its v-word elsewhere. (Thank Villard for publishing all of women’s words —even in the title.) But the value of The Vagina Monologues goes beyond purging a past full of negative attitudes. It offers a personal, grounded-in-the-body way of moving toward the future. I think readers, men as well as women, may emerge from these pages not only feeling more free within themselves—and about each other—but with alternatives to the old patriarchal dualism of feminine/masculine, body/mind, and sexual/spiritual that is rooted in the division of our physical selves into “the part we talk about” and “the part we don’t.” If a book with vagina in the title still seems a long way from such questions of philosophy and politics, I offer one more of my belated discoveries. In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place—where males give birth. Though this comparison was new to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it’s all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body. Since then, I’ve never felt the same estrangement when entering a patriarchal religious structure. Instead, I walk down the vaginal aisle, plotting to take back the altar with priests—female as well as male—who would not disparage female sexuality, to universalize the male-only myths of Creation, to multiply spiritual words and symbols, and to restore the spirit of God in all living things. If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respecting step along the way. I thought of this while watching little girls drawing hearts in their notebooks, even dotting their i’s with hearts, and I wondered: Were they magnetized by this primordial shape because it was so like their own bodies? I thought of it again while listening to a group of twenty or so diverse nine- to sixteen-year-old girls as they decided to come up with a collective word that included everything—vagina, labia, clitoris. After much discussion, “power bundle” was their favorite. More important, the discussion was carried on with shouts and laughter. I thought: What a long and blessed way from a hushed “down there.” I wish my own foremothers had known their bodies were sacred. With the help of outrageous voices and honest words like those in this book, I believe the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters of the future will heal their selves—and mend the world. CONTENTS Foreword by Gloria Steinem Introduction The Vagina Monologues V-Day Join the V-Day Movement Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION I am not sure why I was chosen. I didn’t, for example, have girlhood fantasies about becoming “vagina lady” (which I am often called, sometimes loudly across a crowded shoe store). I could not have imagined that I would one day be talking about vaginas on talk shows in places likeAthens,Greece, chanting the word vagina with four thousand wild women inBaltimore, or having thirty-two public orgasms a night. These things were not in my plans. In this sense, I don’t think I had much to do with The Vagina Monologues. It possessed me. I see now that I was a prime candidate. I was a playwright. I had for years written plays based on interviews with people. I was a feminist. I had been violated sexually and physically by my father. I had exhibitionist tendencies. I have been known to outrage, and I longed with all of my being to find a way back into my vagina. I don’t really remember how it began: a conversation with an older woman about her vagina; her saying contemptuous things about her genitals that shocked me and got me thinking about what other women thought about their vaginas. I remember asking friends, who surprised me with their openness and willingness to talk. There was one friend in particular who told me that if her vagina got dressed, it would wear a beret. She was going through a French phase. I definitely do not remember writing the piece. Simply put, I was taken— used by the Vagina Queens. I never outlined the play or consciously shaped it. As a matter of fact, the whole process was totally off the record. I interviewed women about their vaginas while I was writing my “real” play. It was my partner, Ariel Orr Jordan (who, I am now convinced, was somehow on the payroll of the Vagina Queens), who got me to take it seriously and helped me conceive the piece and make a plan. But even then, to some degree, The Vagina Monologues has never really been any of my business. I show up. I exercise to stay in shape. I drink plenty of power mocha cappuccinos. I try to stay out of the way. Here, for example, are some of the mysteries: I was never a performer. It did not occur to me that I was actually performing The Vagina Monologues until I had been doing it for about three years. Before this point, I felt merely as if I were telling very personal stories that had been generously told to me. I felt strangely, and at times fiercely, protective of these women and their stories. I could not move when I was telling the stories. I had to remain seated in a high-back stool, with a place to rest my feet. It was like climbing into a spaceship every night. I had to speak into a microphone, even in places where I could easily be heard. The microphone functioned as a kind of steering wheel at times, an accelerator at others. For the first years, I needed to wear stockings and heavy boy shoes to perform the piece. Then later, once my director, Joe Mantello, got me to take off my shoes, I could only do it barefoot. I had to hold 5-by-8 cards in my hands all through the performance every night, even though I had the piece memorized. It was as if the women I had interviewed were made present by those cards, and I needed them there with me. Vagina stories found me, as did the people who wanted to produce the play or bring it to their town. Whenever I have tried to write a monologue to serve a politically correct agenda, for example, it always fails. Note the lack of monologues about menopause or transgendered women. I tried. The Vagina Monologues is about attraction, not promotion. Many things that have happened in the life of The Vagina Monologues seem completely surreal and at the same time completely logical. Here are examples: Newspaper Headlines: THAT GIRL GOES DOWN THERE (Marlo Thomas in TVM) MAYOR’S WIFE TALKS DIRTY (Donna Hanover’s decision to be in TVM) Red boas on the front page of six London papers the day after V-Day at the Old Vic—newsstands in Britain look like the vagina sea. TV: Kathie Lee Gifford chants the word vagina with Calista Flockhart and her studio audience on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. David Letterman tries to say vagina, but can’t. Barbara Walters confesses on The View that she was embarrassed by TVM and thought it was strident. She later recants. CNN does a ten-minute special on TVM and never mentions the word. Dharma’s and Greg’s parents are buying tickets to TVM on an episode. Vagina Occurrences: Glenn Close gets 2,500 people to stand and chant the word cunt. Tovah Feldmanstern was denied the right to direct TVM at her all-girls progressive high school, so she directs it independently. A woman rabbi sends me a hamantasch and describes its vaginal meanings. There is now a Cunt Workshop atWesleyanUniversity. A woman brings her uterus to the theater to have me sign it. A young man makes and serves me a vagina salad for dinner with his parents inAtlanta,Georgia. Bean sprouts are pubic hair. Roseanne performs “What Does Your Vagina Smell Like?” in her underwear for two thousand people. She makes up her own lines, one of them being: “What does your vagina smell like?” ANSWER: “My husband’s face.” Alanis Morissette and Audra McDonald sing the cunt piece. Women and men faint during the show. It happens a lot. Always at the exact same place in the script. People bring and send objects—vagina products: vagina glass hand sculptures, clit lollipops, vagina puppets, vulva lamps, cone-shaped art pieces. There is a huge vagina cake inLondonat the V-Day party and no one can cut it. Hundreds of sophisticated partygoers eat mauve vagina cake with their hands. The clit is auctioned off and Thandie Newton buys it for two hundred pounds. The Vagina Monologues opens and is published in over twenty countries, includingChinaandTurkey. V-Day has an impossible time raising money from corporations. Even companies that sell vaginal products refuse to associate with the word. Women call up for tickets to the “Monologues”; men ask for tickets to the “Vagina Chronicles.” The punk ticketseller tells women that if they can’t say it, they can’t come. A young corporate woman bursts into my dressing room to tell me she really isn’t dry. It’s a lie. Two older Israeli women rush my dressing room inJerusalemand hug me while I’m naked. They don’t even notice. A seventy-year-old man in a trance walks into my dressing room unannounced after a show to tell me that he “finally got it.” Two months later he brings his girlfriend back with him and she thanks me. Midwives storm the dressing room to thank me for finally appreciating bodily excretions. A drag queen performs TVM on closing night. Vagina miracles, sightings, and occurrences. They go on. The greatest miracle, of course, is V-Day: an energy, a movement, a catalyst, a day to end violence toward women—born out of The Vagina Monologues. As I traveled with the piece to city after city, country after country, hundreds of women waited after the show to talk to me about their lives. The play had somehow freed up their memories, pain, and desire. Night after night I heard the same stories—women being raped as teenagers, in college, as little girls, as elderly women; women who had finally escaped being beaten to death by their husbands; women who were terrified to leave; women who were taken sexually, before they were even conscious of sex, by their stepfathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, mothers, and fathers. I began to feel insane, as if a door had opened to some underworld and I was being told things I was not supposed to know; knowing these things was dangerous. Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. I do not think I am being extreme. When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet. You force what is meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative, and alive to be bent, infertile, and broken. In 1997, I met with a group of activist women, many from a group called Feminst.com, and we formed V-Day. As with all the mysterious vagina happenings, we show up, we do the groundwork, we stay in shape, and the Vagina Queens do the rest. OnFebruary 14, 1998, Valentine’s Day, our first V-Day was born. Twenty-five hundred people lined up outside the Hammerstein Ballroom inNew York Cityfor our first outrageous event. Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Marisa Tomei, Shirley Knight, Lois Smith, Kathy Najimy, Calista Flockhart, Lily Tomlin, Hazelle Goodman, Margaret Cho, Hannah Ensler-Rivel, BETTY, Klezmer Women, Ulali, Phoebe Snow, Gloria Steinem, Soraya Mire, and Rosie Perez joined together to perform The Vagina Monologues and created a transforming evening that raised over $100,000 and launched the V-Day movement. Since then there have been stellar events at the Old Vic inLondonin 1999, with performers including Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Melanie Griffith, Meera Syal, Julia Sawalha, Joely Richardson, Ruby Wax, Eddi Reader, Katie Puckrik, Dani Behr, Natasha McElhone, Sophie Dahl, Jane Lapotaire, Thandie Newton, and Gillian Anderson. In 2000, V-Day was celebrated inLos Angeles,Santa Fe,Sarasota,Aspen, andChicago. In three years, V-Day has happened at over three hundred colleges, with performances of The Vagina Monologues directed and performed by students and faculty. All the productions raise money and consciousness for local groups that work to stop violence toward women. The Off-Broadway production of The Vagina Monologues will raise nearly $1 million for V-Day. Subsequent productions around the country and the world will support the movement as well. At this point, the V-Day Fund is supporting grassroots groups around the world, where, in several cases, women are fighting with their lives to protect women and end the violence. InAfghanistan, there is RAWA, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a group devoted to liberating women from the terrible oppression of the Taliban. There, women are not allowed to work, to be educated, to go to the doctor, or to leave their house without a male escort. There, women are being buried under their burqas without any protection from rape or murder. The V-Day Fund is helping RAWA educate women in clandestine schools, documenting illegal executions, and building a women’s movement. InKenya,Africa, we are supporting Tasaru Ntomonok (Safe Motherhood Initiative), part of Mandeolo—a project that is stopping the practice of young girls being genitally mutilated by introducing a new coming-of-age ritual without the cut. Recently, we were able to buy them a red jeep so they can travel more easily from village to village as they continue the education and prevention. InCroatia, we are working with the Center for Women War Victims, which through our support will open the first rape crisis center in the formerYugoslavia. The center will also be able to train women in Kosova and Chechyna to work with women in those countries who have been raped and traumatized during the war. V-Day is working in collaboration with Planned Parenthood to implement within their already existing programs a strategy to prevent and end violence toward women. The list goes on and on. The miracle of V-Day, like The Vagina Monologues, is that it happened because it had to happen. A call, perhaps; an unconscious mandate, perhaps. I surrender to the Vagina Queens. Something is unfolding. It is both mystical and practical. It requires that we show up, do our exercise, and get out of the way. In order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered. It’s an obvious idea, but like a vagina, it needs great attention and love in order to be revealed. THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES I bet you’re worried. I was worried. That’s why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas—a community, a culture of vaginas. There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them—like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there. In the first place, it’s not so easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman who told me she was too busy; she didn’t have the time. Looking at your vagina, she said, is a full day’s work. You have to get down there on your back in front of a mirror that’s standing on its own, full-length preferred. You’ve got to get in the perfect position, with the perfect light, which then is shadowed somehow by the mirror and the angle you’re at. You get all twisted up. You’re arching your head up, killing your back. You’re exhausted by then. She said she didn’t have the time for that. She was busy. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women. I talked to older women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. At first women were reluctant to talk. They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn’t stop them. Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one’s ever asked them before. Let’s just start with the word “vagina.” It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: “Hurry, Nurse, bring me the vagina.” “Vagina.” “Vagina.” Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It’s a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct— “Darling, could you stroke my vagina?”—you kill the act right there. I’m worried about vaginas, what we call them and don’t call them. In Great Neck, they call it a pussycat. A woman there told me that her mother used to tell her, “Don’t wear panties underneath your pajamas, dear; you need to air out your pussycat.” InWestchesterthey called it a pooki, inNew Jerseya twat. There’s “powderbox,” “derrière,” a “poochi,” a “poopi,” a “peepe,” a “poopelu,” a “poonani,” a “pal” and a “piche,” “toadie,” “dee dee,” “nishi,” “dignity,” “monkey box,” “coochi snorcher,” “cooter,” “labbe,” “Gladys Siegelman,” “VA,” “wee wee,” “horsespot,” “nappy dugout,” “mongo,” a “pajama,” “fannyboo,” “mushmellow,” a “ghoulie,” “possible,” “tamale,” “tottita,” “Connie,” a “Mimi” inMiami, “split knish” inPhiladelphia, and “schmende” in theBronx. I am worried about vaginas. Some of the monologues are close to verbatim interviews, some are composite interviews, and with some I just began with the seed of an interview and had a good time. This monologue is pretty much the way I heard it. Its subject, however, came up in every interview, and often it was fraught. The subject being HAIR You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair. Many people do not love hair. My first and only husband hated hair. He said it was cluttered and dirty. He made me shave my vagina. It looked puffy and exposed and like a little girl. This excited him. When he made love to me, my vagina felt the way a beard must feel. It felt good to rub it, and painful. Like scratching a mosquito bite. It felt like it was on fire. There were screaming red bumps. I refused to shave it again. Then my husband had an affair. When we went to marital therapy, he said he screwed around because I wouldn’t please him sexually. I wouldn’t shave my vagina. The therapist had a thick German accent and gasped between sentences to show her empathy. She asked me why I didn’t want to please my husband. I told her I thought it was weird. I felt little when my hair was gone down there, and I couldn’t help talking in a baby voice, and the skin got irritated and even calamine lotion wouldn’t help it. She told me marriage was a compromise. I asked her if shaving my vagina would stop him from screwing around. I asked her if she’d had many cases like this before. She said that questions diluted the process. I needed to jump in. She was sure it was a good beginning. This time, when we got home, he got to shave my vagina. It was like a therapy bonus prize. He clipped it a few times, and there was a little blood in the bathtub. He didn’t even notice it, ’cause he was so happy shaving me. Then, later, when my husband was pressing against me, I could feel his spiky sharpness sticking into me, my naked puffy vagina. There was no protection. There was no fluff. I realized then that hair is there for a reason—it’s the leaf around the flower, the lawn around the house. You have to love hair in order to love the vagina. You can’t pick the parts you want. And besides, my husband never stopped screwing around. I asked all the women I interviewed the same questions and then I picked my favorite answers. Although I must tell you, I’ve never heard an answer I didn’t love. I asked women: “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?” A beret. A leather jacket. Silk stockings. Mink. A pink boa. A male tuxedo. Jeans. Something formfitting. Emeralds. An evening gown. Sequins. Armani only. A tutu. See-through black underwear. A taffeta ball gown. Something machine washable. Costume eye mask. Purple velvet pajamas. Angora. A red bow. Ermine and pearls. A large hat full of flowers. A leopard hat. A silk kimono. Glasses. Sweatpants. A tattoo. An electrical shock device to keep unwanted strangers away. High heels. Lace and combat boots. Purple feathers and twigs and shells. Cotton. A pinafore. A bikini. A slicker. “If your vagina could talk, what would it say, in two words?” Slow down. Is that you? Feed me. I want. Yum, yum. Oh, yeah. Start again. No, over there. Lick me. Stay home. Brave choice. Think again. More, please. Embrace me. Let’s play. Don’t stop. More, more. Remember me? Come inside. Not yet. Whoah, Mama. Yes yes. Rock me. Enter at your own risk. Oh, God. Thank God. I’m here. Let’s go. Let’s go. Find me. Thank you. Bonjour. Too hard. Don’t give up. Where’s Brian? That’s better. Yes, there. There. I interviewed a group of women between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five. These interviews were the most poignant of all, possibly because many of the women had never had a vagina interview before. Unfortunately, most of the women in this age group had very little conscious relationship to their vaginas. I felt terribly lucky to have grown up in the feminist era. One woman who was seventy-two had never even seen her vagina. She had only touched herself when she was washing in the shower, but never with conscious intention. She had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two she went into therapy, and with the encouragement of her therapist, she went home one afternoon by herself, lit some candles, took a bath, played some comforting music, and discovered her vagina. She said it took her over an hour, because she was arthritic by then, but when she finally found her clitoris, she said, she cried. This monologue is for her. THE FLOOD [Jewish,Queensaccent] Down there? I haven’t been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with Eisenhower. No, no, it’s a cellar down there. It’s very damp, clammy. You don’t want to go down there. Trust me. You’d get sick. Suffocating. Very nauseating. The smell of the clamminess and the mildew and everything. Whew! Smells unbearable. Gets in your clothes. No, there was no accident down there. It didn’t blow up or catch on fire or anything. It wasn’t so dramatic. I mean . . . well, never mind. No. Never mind. I can’t talk to you about this. What’s a smart girl like you going around talking to old ladies about their down-theres for? We didn’t do this kind of a thing when I was a girl. What? Jesus, okay. There was this boy, Andy Leftkov. He was cute—well, I thought so. And tall, like me, and I really liked him. He asked me out for a date in his car. . . . I can’t tell you this. I can’t do this, talk about down there. You just know it’s there. Like the cellar. There’s rumbles down there sometimes. You can hear the pipes, and things get caught there, little animals and things, and it gets wet, and sometimes people have to come and plug up the leaks. Otherwise, the door stays closed. You forget about it. I mean, it’s part of the house, but you don’t see it or think about it. It has to be there, though, ’cause every house needs a cellar. Otherwise the bedroom would be in the basement. Oh, Andy, Andy Leftkov. Right. Andy was very good-looking. He was a catch. That’s what we called it in my day. We were in his car, a new white Chevy BelAir. I remember thinking that my legs were too long for the seat. I have long legs. They were bumping up against the dashboard. I was looking at my big kneecaps when he just kissed me in this surprisingly “Take me by control like they do in the movies” kind of way. And I got excited, so excited, and, well, there was a flood down there. I couldn’t control it. It was like this force of passion, this river of life just flooded out of me, right through my panties, right onto the car seat of his new white Chevy BelAir. It wasn’t pee and it was smelly—well, frankly, I didn’t really smell anything at all, but he said, Andy said, that it smelled like sour milk and it was staining his car seat. I was “a stinky weird girl,” he said. I wanted to explain that his kiss had caught me off guard, that I wasn’t normally like this. I tried to wipe the flood up with my dress. It was a new yellow primrose dress and it looked so ugly with the flood on it. Andy drove me home and he never, never said another word and when I got out and closed his car door, I closed the whole store. Locked it. Never opened for business again. I dated some after that, but the idea of flooding made me too nervous. I never even got close again. I used to have dreams, crazy dreams. Oh, they’re dopey. Why? Burt Reynolds. I don’t know why. He never did much for me in life, but in my dreams . . . it was always Burt and I. Burt and I. Burt and I. We’d be out. Burt and I. It was some restaurant like the kind you see inAtlantic City, all big with chandeliers and stuff and thousands of waiters with vests on. Burt would give me this orchid corsage. I’d pin it on my blazer. We’d laugh. We were always laughing, Burt and I. Eat shrimp cocktail. Huge shrimp, fabulous shrimp. We’d laugh more. We were very happy together. Then he’d look into my eyes and pull me to him in the middle of the restaurant —and, just as he was about to kiss me, the room would start to shake, pigeons would fly out from under the table—I don’t know what those pigeons were doing there—and the flood would come straight from down there. It would pour out of me. It would pour and pour. There would be fish inside it, and little boats, and the whole restaurant would fill with water, and Burt would be standing knee-deep in my flood, looking horribly disappointed in me that I’d done it again, horrified as he watched his friends, Dean Martin and the like, swim past us in their tuxedos and evening gowns. I don’t have those dreams anymore. Not since they took away just about everything connected with down there. Moved out the uterus, the tubes, the whole works. The doctor thought he was being funny. He told me if you don’t use