Secretions
by Paula Bomer
Arion Toles
Untitled, 2010
People love it when a beautiful woman self destructs. Like a tiger in a cage or a bug under glass people point, but don't touch.
—Juliana Hatfield, "There's Always Another Girl"
I miss all the secretions. Secretions are intimacy.
I was cleaning the lint from the dryer the other day and I licked my fingers and then swirled the lint off. It’s a habit I’ve had since I can remember and occasionally I get self-conscious of it. A wet finger works better, but wouldn’t a normal person wet their fingers with water from a sink? I’m usually alone in the laundry room, so it’s not like anyone sees me use my saliva to remove the lint. And yet, we all have people looking over our shoulders, even if they’re not there. When I did it the other day, I felt I had a wonderful, dirty secret. I felt connected to my mother, to her Austrian peasant self.
All the ghosts. My mother wouldn’t blink once if she saw me use saliva to remove dryer lint. There are all these passages to growing away from our parents, in particular a daughter separating herself from a mother. As a small child, I remember my mother licking her fingers and holding my head, wiping her saliva finger into the corner of my eyes. I would draw away, but she held my head steady. “You have shmutz”, she would say, removing a hard yellow kernel from my inner eye. When did that end? I am not sure, but it did.
Everything ends. The good, the bad.
I used to think love was forever. It is not in my case.
Shame is a powerful thing. I read an interview with a writer who wrote a memoir about quitting a drug addiction. She said, “I was addicted to shame”. I love the idea of getting off of drugs, but I’m not sure about shame. Shame defines us, shapes us. I am not willing to give up shame, and the delight of doing things that are shameful.
When my first son was born, I fed him. One thing he liked when he was around six months old was yogurt. Usually, I was alone with him when I fed him. When I spooned the yogurt into his mouth, he would move around as babies do, and yogurt would get on his face, on his cheeks, I would lean in and lick it off his face. It felt right. I think it gave me pleasure. But what I know for certain and remember with clarity was being shamed for it. I was visiting my mother-in-law, and I was feeding my son at her kitchen table. He got some yogurt on his face. I leaned in and licked if off his cheek, and continued feeding him. She was standing near me. “You know, you could use a napkin,” she said in absolute disgust. Complete disdain. Then she threw a napkin at me.
I can’t remember if I ever licked his face again.
I was disgusting in someone’s eyes. I was disgusting in the eyes of the one woman I wanted to win over at that time in my life.
I never did.
Here are some things that disgusted me. Eating my placenta. Didn’t want to do that. I didn’t even like looking at the thing after I shoved it out of my vagina. I thought it was gross. Disgusting.
I loved nursing my sons. My fluids going directly into them, making them live, and nothing is more animal than that. But breastmilk pumping? I hated it. The machine on my breast, elongating my nipples and squeezing the milk out of me? It made me feel like an animal in the worst way. Like a caged animal. It made me feel ugly,. I was living in a three story walk up above a pizza shop on Prince Street in Little Italy, in New York City. I sat in my tiny kitchen full of rage and pain and disgust the pump hurt my breasts so much, but nursing my sons didn’t. There was a window near me, a small window that looked out into a sad courtyard. I tossed the breast pump out the window.
I hope it’s still there, rotting. No one cleaned that courtyard—dirt, germs, people’s tossed out things that contained fluids. I hated that breast pump. I was vulnerable. I’d just had a baby and had just turned 27 and I spent most of my years alone with that child. And that walk up sucked.
I miss all the secretions. I miss the intimacy. I miss that part of being an animal, the vile sharing of bodily fluids.
After I was served papers and sued for divorce, I was walking away from the lawyer’s office on Third Avenue in Manhattan and a bus was coming toward the intersection. I stepped forward, wanting to end all the horror of my rejected intimacies. After that moment I thought of my sons and thought, no one wants their mom to kill herself. So I called Jessica. She said, while all the wet, dirty tears poured out of my face, “you will never go to that lawyer alone again.”
And I never did.
Jessica divorced me. She did all the wheeling and dealing. She had a notebook and a pen. I had neither of those things. I would cry. Snot would drip from wet, filthy face. She sat there, dry and clean, and talked to the lawyer. This went on weekly for many months. I would often walk to a window in his office and through eyes semi-blinded with watery tears, look at buses on the street below driving down Third Avenue. I couldn’t listen to Jessica and the lawyer talk.
Often, after she was done talking to the lawyer, I would ask her to go to a steakhouse with me. I love steakhouses. I love the animal act of ripping my teeth into a large piece of meat. Like a tiger eating a baby antelope. Jessica would daintily have a small soup. I was worried the lawyer didn’t like me. I asked Jessica, “why doesn’t he look at me? He won’t make eye contact with me.”
Jessica said, “men don’t like it when women cry.” I think she then said, “it makes them uncomfortable.”
Saliva. Snot, tears, breast milk. Disgust. Shame. Look away!
I miss all the secretions, all the intimacy, all the wet sloppy kisses, the greasy stink of my lovers’ armpits, the damp, smelly cocks, the smell and taste of my babies. I miss the animal in all of you.
Paula Bomer lives and works in New York City
