Condom: A Personal Essay

By DAISY ATTERBURY

Feb­ru­ary 26, 2010

“Daisy,” my dad said one Sun­day. “I need to talk to you.” He had the look he gets right before he agrees to go to a din­ner party—his I-don’t-know-what-I’m-getting-myself-into face. As he fished some­thing out of his pocket, I got a squirmy feel­ing in my stom­ach.  Maybe the cita­tion for my car acci­dent had come in the mail.

He held out his hand like a round, pink shell and I stared as his fin­gers drew back to expose the pearl: a con­dom.

I come from a fam­ily of Vagisil Christ­mas orna­ments.  Gar­dasil mag­nets dec­o­rate our fridge. One low point of my life was in eighth-grade Eng­lish class, when I whipped out a pen and Ellie Beck­ett, who sat to my left, shrieked, “It says VIAGRA! Your pen says VIAGRA!” Most par­ents don’t send their chil­dren to school with drug com­pany para­pher­na­lia, or inter­rupt din­ner table con­ver­sa­tions with penile diag­noses (via con­fi­den­tial phone calls). My physi­cian par­ents missed the boat on normalcy.

Even though I’d known since I was six where babies come from—after receiv­ing a thirty-minute “sperm” and “egg” expla­na­tion at the break­fast table—my dad still found it nec­es­sary to hold the Con­dom Talk. I think he looked upon it as a rite of passage—for him, not for me.

My par­ents had regarded my entire ado­les­cence as one drawn-out sex talk.  They’d inject facts into unre­lated ban­ter as if this was the only col­lege prepa­ra­tion spiel of any impor­tance. When my friends were around, I dreaded the moments my par­ents would slip into Doc­tor Mode. My dad would, out of habit, slide embar­rass­ing infor­ma­tion into gen­eral con­ver­sa­tion: “Hey Leslie, how are your folks these days?  Only three per­cent of cou­ples using con­doms cor­rectly dur­ing the first year of use expe­ri­ences con­dom fail­ure. Is your dad still work­ing on that house?”

Our fam­ily spe­cial­izes in covert oper­a­tions.  My mom vis­its our neigh­bor to “check in.”  (His Erec­tile Dys­func­tion Dis­or­der causes him stress, I once over­heard.)  My dad hides pre­scrip­tion drugs in his top bureau drawer.  A hard drive in the liv­ing room hosts the coital con­fes­sions of my small town.  It’s quadru­ple pass­word protected.

“Daisy,” my friend Jan­ice once said.  “Hey, um, can I talk to your mom about some­thing?  It’s pri­vate.”  My doc­tor par­ents knew all about Janice’s boyfriend andthe preg­nancy tests she’d taken the night before.  They’d got­ten the blow-by-blow of the evolv­ing rela­tion­ship and the play-by-play of con­dom slip­page.  I, how­ever, only got the out­line.  They always know and I always almost know.

I could tell that the con­dom had been out of its pack­age for sev­eral min­utes, because it was curled in my dad’s warm palm like one of those fortune-telling fish.  Mov­ing head:  jeal­ousy. Mov­ing tail: indif­fer­ence. Curl­ing sides: fickle. Turns over: false.  It didn’t move and I couldn’t remem­ber what that meant, so I looked up at my dad and raised my eyebrows.

He asked me to come and sit with him on the couch for a sec­ond, so I shuf­fled with my hands in my pock­ets while he strode with his hand out­stretched.  He seemed to be prof­fer­ing the con­dom to the flow­ered uphol­stery.  As we sat, he tipped his cupped hand in an attempt to drop the con­dom onto the square of couch between us. It stuck to his palm.  After a vio­lent but futile shake of the wrist, my dad had to peel off the con­dom with his other hand. It was then that I remem­bered about the fortune-telling fish.  Motion­less:  dead one. I didn’t say any­thing. I looked up at my dad and almost caught his eye, so I jerked my gaze down instead. There it was. I stared at the con­dom as I would stare at road kill: hor­ri­fied, but unable to look away. I laughed nervously.

“Do you … know how to use one of these?” My dad said, ges­tur­ing at the translu­cent worm. I’m pretty sure that that’s what secret agents in movies say—about handguns.

“Yeah?” I shot back, though it wasn’t sup­posed to come out as a ques­tion. I shifted my posi­tion on the couch and the wooden legs creaked under us.

“You know that you’re sup­posed to leave room—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Ok,” he said.

There was a long pause.

My dad opened his mouth as though he was going to say some­thing more, but then clicked it shut again. Then he bent down and pulled a giant box from under the couch; he must have planted it there ear­lier. I didn’t even want to imag­ine what else Costco sold in bulk, because this was the biggest crate of con­doms I had ever seen. On the label, a pic­ture of a man hold­ing a woman in his arms was under­scored by the word “SPERMICIDE.“

I was so stunned by the size of the box that I didn’t hear my dad’s exit line. I looked up. He squeezed both pink fists at his sides and slouched out of the room.

I looked down at the Dead One in the shadow of the Condoms-In-Bulk tower. Curl­ing my knees to my chest on the sofa, I felt like a patient who had received a misdiagnosis.My par­ents talked to friends’ chil­dren and children’s friends, con­cen­trat­ing on the inti­mate details of strangers. But I won­dered what they guessed about me. In my house, sex was quantified—millions of sperm, one egg. Some­times the very nature of their job was like a giant pro­phy­lac­tic, pro­tect­ing them from the truth.

Daisy Atter­bury is a senior in Yale Col­lege.