Original Sin

Christians are born with original sin, Jews with original ignorance. I know this from my best friend Joy, and the teacher at Hebrew Day. And they were told by ministers and rabbis. Joy goes to Catholic school so maybe it was a priest. In nursery school they taught us the same things and we were in playgroup and girl scouts together where all the songs and stories were the same. In grade school, suddenly, everything is different. Joy's my first and only Christian friend and I pump her for details about everything. It's something to talk about while we're supposed to be playing neighbors in our parents' yards.

I’m six and it’s fall in Ohio and Moreh Rosenbaum is teaching us the joy of straight sex. She holds up a discreetly illustrated picture book and waves her arm slowly so everyone can see the crayon-box colored pictures. Sex is something a man and a woman do together when they love each other very much, and they don't do it with anyone else except each other because it's so special. And the parts of the body that they have sex with are the parts that make a baby. When the man is inside the woman he makes an egg inside her, and it grows in her belly. The woman's belly gets bigger and bigger for 9 months while the egg turns into a baby and then it is born. She turns the page and shows us a picture of a pudgy baby squeezed up inside a tube. There are simple illustrations of the insides of women and how they are different from men. I know about how the outsides are different already -- in nursery school everyone shared one doorless bathroom stall and if you had to go it was better to be in line behind a group of boys because 2 or 3could go pee very quickly all at once, and girls went slowly, one at a time and drip drip drip. The baby in the pictures can't go pee at all until it is born because there's no boy or girl parts to go with. Then it wears diapers while the penise or vagina finish growing--that's when the baby gets potty-trained. Those parts start growing in the hospital right after the baby is named, and on the next page the baby is clearly on it's way to being a stand-up pee-er; the parents have a new baby boy.

It's the '70' and the new brown baby is now clamped to his mother's breast. The baby is nursing, we're told. At least, I think nursing must have come up because of the nipple question. In class participation. There were prizes for knowing the right answer during class participation; little erasers that smelled like fruit and plastic cars and kosher bubble-gum. The first time I can remember raising my hand in class was to answer a question about nursing, and the teacher used some unrepeatable embarrassing grown-up word like nipple or areola and everyone but me looked at the floor. No competition for my poorly socialized hand in the air, and I explained, with minimal lisping, how babies drank milk from their mama's nipples which were the pointy things on breasts which only women had and that men did not have babies because they didn't have breasts to feed them with. I kept talking the way you do in nightmares to distract attention from whatever everyone was staring at me for doing wrong or to delay them laughing at me and I still wanted to get it right and I kept going waiting for the teacher to nod and throw me a little square of Bazooka Joe and the meatloaf smell was suffocating and the sandwich my mom packed for lunch expanded up into my windpipe, greasing the back of my throat as I kept speaking, wondering what the milk babies drank would taste like and if it was different for every baby according to their favorite flavors like manna was or if it all tasted the same like meatloaf did no matter whose mom it was from and my voice trailed out on the third repetition of the word 'breast' and no one nodded or threw gum.