Do Tampons Take Your Virginity?: A Catholic Girl's Memoir (3 page)

That bitch ruined my only chance to wear something fashionable.

1984,
AGE
11

Back in the old country, my grandmother Amalia was prone to hemorrhages. She suffered a prolapsed uterus with her third pregnancy. She was lucky, because doctors transported her to the island of Terceira, which was the only island that had a proper hospital. She had surgery to restore her uterus to the correct position. She lost vast amounts of blood and also lost an ovary during the surgery.

The physician told Amalia that she would not be able to bear another child. A decade passed. Then, while my mother’s family was still living in Portugal, my grandmother became pregnant again.

Only a single ovary and she still managed to get pregnant. The doctors pleaded with her to abort—that she would never survive the pregnancy and the fetus would be stillborn.

Grandmother refused the abortion and told the doctor, “I’m not killing my baby! If God wants us to go, we will go together!”

Amalia survived the pregnancy, but my Uncle Moses was born sickly. His hair was white and his skin was so pale you could see the blue veins under the skin. He was the lightest one in the entire family. In the end, they called him the “angel child.”

Moses would sleep between my grandparents, because they were afraid he would stop breathing during the night. His skin was covered with sores, either from poor nutrition or allergies. Moses would scratch constantly at his skin, crying out at night, “I’m itchy! I’m so itchy!”

At age two, Moses became infested with intestinal worms, which were common in those days. His immune system was already weakened, and he lost an alarming amount of weight. Grandmother tried dozens of home remedies, but nothing worked. Weeks passed.

Finally, Moses was bedridden, close to death. Grandmother was frantic. There were no doctors on the island. She found a local
Curador
(healer) that offered to give Moses a draft of poisonous herbs to kill the worms. But there was a question of whether Moses would survive the treatment—he was already so far gone.

That night, Grandmother made a secret pact with the
Curador
. If Moses died, they would say nothing, and no one would know about the poison drink. The
Curador
gave Moses the drink, and Grandmother stayed up all night watching him.

My grandfather left the house afraid, and went to the church to pray. That night, praying on his knees, grandfather promised to slaughter his finest bull and give away the meat if Moses survived.

Moses made it.

A few months later, Grandfather kept his promise to the Virgin by slaughtering his prize bull. Moses and Grandfather rode from house to house on the back of a donkey cart filled with the meat. Moses handed out the paper-wrapped parcels to everyone in the village. It was thanks for a miracle.

My uncle Moses would later emigrate with the entire family to the United States. As children, we were close, because he was only eleven years older than me. My grandmother would go on to have another child, a daughter named Diana, two years later. Another miracle birth. After Diana was born, the doctors performed a complete hysterectomy on my grandmother and the pregnancies finally stopped.

Moses picked on me as if I were a younger sister. I was jealous of him—he danced disco really well. Moses was wild and funny, the opposite of my younger brother. Moses also had the balls to call my father an asshole.

I loved him.

So one day, I decided to give Moses a gift.

Moses had a giant glass fish tank in the backyard behind his house. The fish tank was green with algae and held dozens of yellow goldfish. The goldfish just lived in there... out in the open. I don’t know if the tank was ever cleaned.

One day, I fished out all the goldfish in the tank and put them in a white bucket filled with clean tap water. I scrubbed the fish tank clean with a heavy-duty scrubber. It took hours, but it was sparkling clean! I refilled the tank with water and put the fish back in. Whew! It was a big job, but the tank looked lovely! I knew Moses would be so pleased.

When Moses came home from school, he discovered the clean fish tank and called me.

“What did you DO?” he screamed.

“Do you like it? Surprise! I cleaned the fish tank!” I squealed.

“They’re all dead!” He slammed the phone down on the receiver.

I was so startled—I didn’t believe him. I ran over to Grandmother’s house.

Moses was telling the truth. All of his fish were bobbing on the surface, as dead as leaves. The shock, coupled with the chlorine in the tap water, killed them all. Moses was so angry, he just dumped everything into the garden. The water, the dead goldfish... everything.

The fish tank stayed empty. I would go to my grandmother’s backyard and stare at it. My uncle, a snotty teenager, teased me mercilessly about the goldfish.

“You killed them! I never asked you to clean anything! You’re a BRAT!” he would say.

I hated that empty fish tank. It was a symbol of a failed kindness: a constant visual reminder of my stupidity. It hurt all the more because I loved Moses and all I ever wanted to do was impress him.

Eventually, I went over one day after my uncle had left for school and I kicked it to pieces. When they asked me about it, I said that my little brother had thrown a rock at it and it shattered.

Everyone knows that Catholic girls only come in two flavors:

1. Virgins

2. Whores

Virginity was a big issue in my family.

Father, after sowing his wild oats with an untold number of American sluts, was determined to find a virgin bride. He succeeded when he found my innocent mother, who was a model Catholic.

Our local parish priest told my mother in no uncertain terms that she should run away from my father as fast as her feet would take her. She wouldn’t listen. Mother married him anyway in a huge Catholic wedding. She was twenty-seven and Father was thirty-two.

The problem with twenty-seven-year-old Catholic virgins is this: if they’ve made it that long without losing their virginity, chances are they detest sex.

Growing up, I could never understand why Protestants believe that the Virgin Mary didn’t
stay
a virgin. Their primary argument seemed to be that it would be impossible for a woman to be married and not have sexual relations. I always thought this argument was ridiculous, because my mother and grandmother would have gladly lived out their entire married lives without any sex at all. Don’t get me wrong—they both enjoyed having children. But if they could have chosen a virgin birth, I’m certain they would have jumped at the chance.

Most Catholic men search for virgins, and then are deeply frustrated when they discover that these poor women are terrified of their own vaginas and even more terrified of a man’s penis.

During my mother’s childhood, my grandmother Amalia dutifully explained the inherent wickedness of intercourse to her impressionable young daughters. Grandmother also was quick to inform her girls that, although sex was a wifely duty, there is no reason why they should have to enjoy it, and in fact, it would be better if they just lay there and took their punishment stoically.

Mother told me that she had never seen an adult male penis before her wedding night, but she knew what it would look like because she had changed her younger brothers’ cloth diapers.

With my father’s long search for a virgin a success, the newlyweds went off to Portugal for their honeymoon.

Father took photos along the way, and I could tell from the “before” and “after” wedding photos that my mother had NO IDEA what she was in for. She looked completely demoralized in every picture that was taken on the honeymoon. Father didn’t bother making my mother’s first time pleasurable, or at least not terrifying. He was a rutting boar and destroyed any chance that my mother would ever enjoy sex.

When I got older, Mother told me that she despised sex, that it was painful and she only did it because it was her wifely duty. She suffered from vaginal infections because Father used Vaseline as a lubricant. He kept it right by the bedside, on the nightstand, although I didn’t really understand what it was for until I was a teenager.

Mother didn’t submit quietly every time. There was a lot of non-consensual sex going on at my house. The pleading and occasional screams behind closed doors gave it away.

On more than one occasion, I ran to the bedroom door to stop the obvious abuse (I didn’t understand it was spousal rape until my late teens). This interruption resulted in my father coming out and giving me a swift kick. But my father was always careful not to leave real marks unless it was a weekend, because, like I said, I had a big mouth and he knew I’d tell people at school that I’d been beaten.

I used to lie awake at night listening to my mother plead with my father to leave her alone. I heard a lot of begging and slamming of doors. Eventually, Mother would concede and I heard the bedposts pounding against the bedroom walls. The bed was old, so my father balled up two socks and slipped them over the bedposts to muffle the sound, but it was still pretty loud.

When I was in junior high, I asked if I could come home for lunch, because I was being bullied at school. My father refused, because he would come home at lunch to rape my mother. Without us there, Mother would scream and Father could still force himself upon her without any disruptions.

Mother finally begged my grandmother to come over during lunch so he would stop. After that, Father would come home and stare through the sliding glass door. If he saw Grandmother sitting at the table, he would shake his fist at the two women and curl his tongue in anger. Mother was terrified, but Grandmother was never afraid of my father. Grandmother would stay for a few hours, until we kids got home, and then she would go back to her house. This happened at least three or four times per week—enough to give Mother a reprieve.

When Mother was being particularly stubborn, Father forced her to stay home while we all went to church. I didn’t understand that her refusal to have sex was the reason, but one day, Grandmother tearfully disclosed that’s what was going on. Mother loved going to church to pray the rosary. I remember her sitting in the living room, all dressed up in her Sunday best, and my father announcing that we were all going to church without her. My brother and I were puzzled, but Mother would just sit silently and sob.

Close to the end of her life, I think prayer was her only pleasure.

My father did everything he could to make her life miserable. It was like watching the slow death of a flower, as if he poured a drop of weed killer on her every day. In the end, she was nothing but stems.

1984,
AGE
11

When I was a kid, I snooped at other people’s houses. I would ask to go to the bathroom and then I would look through all of the cabinets—not just the medicine cabinet, but also the vanity cabinets and any bedroom drawers I could sneak open quickly. I wasn’t trying to steal. I was looking for pornography. I was sexually curious even at a young age, probably because my parents never talked about it.