22 The Meadow very premise behind them. Religion-wise, I only know that my mother always had great admiration for Quakers and the Amish and Laura Ingalls Wilder—notions of wholesomeness, that, I think, centered around the idea of well-behaved children and beautiful, handmade quilts with which to cover their genital-free bodies. Doing her impersonation of a modern, open-minded, TV-type mom, she sat on the edge of my bed and performed what some people might consider a comforting smile. “When a man and woman sleep together,” she said, “the penis goes into the vagina.” She added something about sperm and eggs and ovaries, but my mind was already whirring. I fell into a great quandary trying to figure out how a penis could “go” into a vagina while their respective owners were asleep. I was particularly confused by the way she said, “The penis goes.” It gave the distinct impression that penises did things on their own, without their owners’ consent or encouragement. The penis goes to the grocery store. The penis goes to a matinee. The penis goes to the vagina. Who knows where it’ll go next? But how does it “go?” I wondered. Does it detach? Does it fly? Does it grow legs like a fish emerging from primordial ooze? I wondered if the hapless penis knew where it was going, or if it simply wandered around until it bumped into something, perhaps a vagina. As my mother droned on about who-knows-what, I reasoned that the detachable-flying-penis line of reasoning seemed untenable, so I came up with a second theory. In order to unite these particular organs while in the land of nod, the man and woman in question would have to fall asleep without underwear, lying close together, then thrash around so much in their sleep that his penis happened to slip inside her vagina. Highly unlikely, I thought. In fact, it now seemed a won-
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