Every month, the boy had an interview with his father. His father wrote down their conversation and made a list of goals to accomplish. The father wrote, “Have homework done every day by five. Get above 90 percent on the next math test.” And always, “Read the Bible.”
Once, the boy’s father talked about being in graduate school. He opened one of his mile-thick textbooks filled with diagrams and equations. He had a pad of paper on his knees and he drew what looked like a sports play, with arrows and circles and squiggly lines.
The boy moved his chair so he was looking at the shapes from the same angle. His father wrote “Meiosis” in block letters, then “woman” next to a large round circle and “man” next to one of the squiggly lines. Then “sperm” and “egg.” He wrote these down in no apparent order, and then he described the flagellating sperm swimming up a woman’s fallopian tubes to penetrate the egg. The boy’s father used many words that the boy didn’t know: mitochondria, flagellum, TK inhibitors, implantation, zygote. The father drew more pictures: the egg halved, then quartered, then grew into a bunch like grapes or a cluster of frog eggs.
The boy understood that this was how every human being started, the proliferation of two cells dividing. But the father forgot to explain
the sex part, how the sperm and the egg got to be in the same place at the same time, and so for years the boy thought the sperm flew out of the man and through the air to where it entered the woman and multiplied like cancer.
—excerpted from “Seven Little Stories About Sex,” Boston Review, March/ April 2010.
Read the complete piece
here.
Eric Freeze is associate professor of English at Wabash
