Talk Vomit

By Sarah Denaci

One night, my parents were awakened by my brother Matt’s desperate screams. He was four years old, and I was not yet born.

“AHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” little Matt yelled. “AHHHDFLKDGGGHHHHHHH.”

My parents stumbled into Matt’s room and switched on the light. My mom, dark-haired and petite, wore a purple velvet robe zipped up over her floral nightgown. My dad’s bright red hair, ungelled, resembled the upright red comb of a cartoon rooster. He slept in tighty-whities, but, hopefully, he had thrown his seersucker robe over the whities before he entered the scene. 

Matt had hidden himself completely under his bedcovers, holding the top sheet taught over his munchkin body and head. Besides that, nothing looked out of the ordinary.

“Hey bud,” my dad peered down at the trembling bundle. “What’s going on?”

“Did you have a bad dream?” My mother sat down on his bed.

Matt poked his head and torso out of his duvet and sat straight up.

“AGHHGHLHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” He pointed out the window. “AHHGHHHHGHHH.” 

My parents’ gaze followed the direction of my brother’s finger. They saw only darkness and the vague outlines of an expected tree. My mom rubbed the quilt-covered lump of Matt’s knee. “I don’t see anything, honey. What do you see?”

Matt paused to catch his breath before the final yell. “A GIANT PENIS! THERE IS A GIANT PENIS OUTSIDE THE WINDOW!” He dove back under his covers.

My dad addressed my mom by the nickname he still calls her even though they’re no longer married. “Beanie, is there something you’d like to tell me?”

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My mom tried to explain the story by offering that, at the time, Matt was learning the names of his body parts. But if that were the reason for his nighttime outburst, it’s much more likely—given their prevalence in everyday sight and conversation—that he would have noticed a giant elbow skulking in the moonlight or a moody earlobe hiding underneath his dresser. Really, we all tacitly understand, the event marks the first appearance of Matt’s brilliant insouciance, his capacity to shock and awe without even trying.

\\\

Our teachers didn’t hold such an uncomplicated view of Matt. When they would call out names on the first day of class, they would pause at mine.

“Denaci?” they’d ask, “Matt’s sister?” Their rigid posture conveyed contempt, fear, resignation. 

I’d nod hesitantly, longing to denounce them as nitwits. Anyone with taste, I knew, would have welcomed and admired my brother’s jokes, his spontaneity, his (I had just learned the expression from a Jeeves and Wooster novel I had stolen from his room) joie de vivre. 

My parents agreed. In eighth grade, when my brother’s stunts were boldest (marketing brassieres for a home economics assignment, turning in a blank piece of paper in English and inviting the teacher to ‘consider the void’, attempting to unionize his math class) and the teachers the least patient, his teachers summoned my parents for a conference one midwinter night.

My parents staggered into the house afterward, looking pale and fatigued, as though they had just run a marathon or attended a friend’s autobiographical one-man show. My dad was still wearing his work clothes, and my mom had changed into one of her “good sweaters.”

“That was really bad.” My mother set her purse down on the counter. “They all sat around us, fighting to talk. It was like a military tribunal.” 

My brother and I remained paralyzed next to each other on the couch. I looked at the kitchen clock, wondering when they would notice it was past my bedtime. We didn’t know when they would start yelling, or at whom. 

“But, you know,” my mom walked into the living room and leaned down to kiss us hello, “I think really they’re all just mad they’re not as funny as him.” 

“He was always funny,” my dad laughed. “He was funny from the beginning.”

My dad noticed envy twist across my face.“You,” he said by way of consolation, “always wanted to be just like him! Always loved watching him!”

I wondered how something so true could make me feel so belittled.

How to explain all this to my small-minded teachers? I couldn’t, because, as they would inform me, beaming, some weeks into our relationship, I “was the exact opposite of my brother”— shy, compliant, boring.

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The only teacher who didn’t loathe my brother was Mr. Corvin. Tall, handsome, and an avid reader of The New York Times Magazine, he was also the only adult in my suburban Pennsylvania town who wore clothes that fit properly. On the first day of Advanced Placement Economics, his eyes lit up when he read my last name off the roster. 

“If you are anything like your brother,” he recorded my attendance with a quick check of his pencil, “we are going to have some very interesting discussions!”

I smiled hopefully.

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Beginning in middle school, I had carried a tiny black notebook around with me everywhere I went. Whenever something strange happened, I would write in my notebook, taking care to ensure my pen audibly scratched the paper. The writing itself was fun, but even better was the sense of mystery I imagined it gave me.

One morning early in my first semester of Econ, I finished my batch of supply and demand graphs early and turned my attention to the book I was reading, a Sicilian mafia novel. After a few paragraphs I stopped, awestruck by a sentence about the bruised quality of the sky and copied the sentence down in my notebook. It was exactly the kind of thing I should be writing, whenever I got around to doing that. 

“What’s that?”

I looked up. Mr. Corvin had shown up at my desk. How had I never noticed that my seated eye level was the same as the crotch level of a perfectly-heighted man? I’d have to record this incisive observation in my notebook later.

“It’s my notebook!” I said, “I mean, obviously. But I carry it around to write down lines for poems and other… ideas for art.” 

“Oh!” he said, “that’s very interesting, Denaci!”

I glowed with pride at how he called me by my last name, as if I were my brother. This notebook was finally paying off, causing handsome men to ask me questions about myself, forcing them to consider my interiority made exterior through the act of writing. Just thinking this thought, I felt like a young Julia Kristeva. (In that moment I vowed to actually read her later).

“May I ask,” Mr. Corvin added, “what kind of art you make?”

The question was earnest, but it felt like an attack, given that I hadn’t made any since middle school art class.

“Well.” I closed my notebook slowly, without looking at it, as if I had nothing to hide. “I hope it’s …funny art.” I didn’t know quite what I meant by that, but I hoped the phrase’s ambiguity would shield me.

“It’s funny,” Mr. Corvin paused, unsure whether he should acknowledge the repetition of the words, “you say that. My friend from college just unveiled a conceptual art piece called ‘Daily Bread.’ It’s a giant paper maché toaster. When you press the handle, women’s breasts pop out the slots.” He chuckled, then became suddenly serious. “My friend is a woman. It’s a comment about,” he cast his eyes skyward, hoping to remember something it commented on that didn’t contain the word ‘sex,’ “a lot of things.”

“Yes,” I said, “it certainly is.”

\\\

One late April afternoon, Mr. Corvin approached me at my locker at the end of the school day.  

“Sarah.” His voice was grave. “I need to talk to you about your newspaper interview.”

Nervous, I closed my locker quickly and picked up my backpack in case I needed to flee. My dad had already gotten angry with me about this interview.

The city paper had called my house the week before about a county-wide poetry contest that I had won. The interview heralded the beginning of what I assumed would be a long life of me, a young beautiful Literary Luminary, pronouncing witticisms to periodicals worldwide.

“Do you have a favorite poem?” the woman had asked after the opening pleasantries. Her voice sounded broad and smart, like she wore architectural glasses and prepared espresso at home.

“Yes!” I said. I figured I must.

“Well,” she said, “what is it?”

“Uh,” I twirled the telephone cord around my fingers and watched my terrier hump his tiny stuffed hedgehog, “Oh! I can actually recite it for you.” 

There was one I told to everyone. I say “told to” because, really, it was more of a joke, but it was written by a famous contemporary poet. Reciting it would serve as a kind of literary manifesto, something the biographers could point to later as evidence of my preternatural humor and depth.

“It’s by A.R. Ammons, and it’s called ‘Their Sex Life.’” I cleared my throat.

“Oh!”

“Yeah!” I said. “So it goes: ‘One failure.’ Linebreak. ‘On top of another.’” The phone line was silent.“It’s a verbal pun and a visual one. Get it?”

The woman assured me she did.

This exchange had wound up printed in the paper the next day. My dad didn’t read the paper, but his colleagues did. He confronted me about it during the drive to our weekly pizza lunch.

“You’re a sixteen year old girl!” A blue sports car cut him off, and he banged on his horn. “Couldn’t you have just said something about Shakespeare?”

I shrugged. Really, this was my dad’s fault. He hadn’t sent me to the kind of school —  sweatery, private, in New England, with dramatic coming-of-age moments next to a duck-strewn lake — where they’d teach me to recite the boring metered sexless stuff.

But why would the sex poem upset Mr. Corvin, I wondered, looking over at my busted up locker. I wasn’t his daughter. And Mr. Corvin didn’t seem like a prude. Especially not in the comprehensive fantasies I had concocted involving me, him, and the titty toaster.

“What you said I said,” he continued after a few moments had passed, “it’s extremely offensive. And I never said it.”

I turned my attention to the grid pattern on his button-down. I had thought all the lines were blue, but they were actually blue and dark grey.

“Oh! You mean about poetry being novels for people with ADHD?” I had repeated this insight to the reporter lady to explain my passion for micro-poems.

“Yes.” A student bumped Mr. Corvin in the shoulder with her lacrosse stick. He stepped closer to the lockers and lowered his voice, “I never said it, and I would never say that. That is not what I think about poetry. And I am not flippant about people who suffer from ADHD.”

My friend Tyler had told me Mr. Corvin had said this while we were eating erotically oversized hoagies in Princeton. He thought the line was brilliant, and so did I.  At that time, all of our friends were writing poems and pretending to read them. And, most of us were at some stage of an ADHD diagnosis, so Tyler hadn’t deemed Mr. Corvin’s alleged remark offensive, just explanatory. Plus, Tyler was one of Mr. Corvin’s favorite students. And my current love interest. I never thought to question the statement’s veracity.

Mistaking my panicky silence for contradiction, Mr. Corvin continued: “It’s true you didn’t mention me by name, but I am the only economics teacher at your high school.” He grabbed the top of his head with both hands. “And people know that!”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “It’s true I never heard you say it. I guess I shouldn’t have repeated it without checking with you, or something.” In all the author interviews I read, they were always quoting trusted mentors. Did they confirm the quote with all of them before having anything printed? Was this what publicists were for? I didn’t see how my four hundred dollar honorarium was supposed to cover all that.

 “No, you really shouldn’t have,” Mr. Corvin shook his head, “I’m not even going to ask who told you that lie, but I am going to ask that you write a letter of correction to the paper.”

I was impressed that Mr. Corvin didn’t try to make me tell. One of my parents’ cardinal rules was no snitching. My dad had explained that this was what set Italians apart from other white people, that we didn’t rat each other out. If my brother or I did try to snitch on the other, my parents promised, the snitcher would receive “the same punishment, only worse.”  But Mr. Corvin, even though he was a WASP, didn’t seem to believe in snitching either. Even as I watched him squirm angrily, his fantastic erotic potential only increased.

“Okay!” I nodded eagerly. Something about all this, him ordering me to do something, the something being writing about him, titillated me. “I’ll send the letter of correction off tonight.” 

Mr. Corvin thanked me and left.

A few weeks later, between periods, I walked into his classroom and up to his desk and explained that I knew the letter was never printed, but that I had written and sent it, and that once again I was sorry for my actions. He thanked me coldly and said it wasn’t my fault that they hadn’t printed the letter, that it was a low-quality newspaper anyway, did I remember that time they consulted a psychic about the year ahead and put her findings on the front page? I nodded and laughed weakly, worried too much jollity would seem inappropriate. 

\\\

This whole Mr. Corvin hating me now thing was too embarrassing to tell anyone, especially Tyler. Plus I had more important stuff to tell him.

That Saturday I drove with my friends Joe and Colin out to Colin’s parents’ beach house down the shore. Besides swimming, eating hoagies, and burning marshmallows over a bonfire, the purpose of our trip was to see a band called the Gaslight Anthem play at Asbury Lanes, a bowling alley cum (ha! I never tired of that one!) punk rock venue. The show was great, we returned home tired, and soon I found myself alone in a guest bedroom at two in the morning, squinting at myself in the wide oak-framed mirror hung over the dresser. 

I looked pretty good, I decided. My hair wasn’t that frizzy, and my shorts were just tight enough. It would have been better if I could have turned around and shown my butt shape, but the front of my sweatshirt was the thing I needed to highlight. I jutted my hip out, sucked in my cheeks, flipped open my phone, and pressed the center square button to take the picture. 

Once I heard the artificial shutter sound that indicated the picture had been taken and saved, I squinted down at the screen. Luckily, the flash splotch had landed on the upper right section of the mirror. I scrolled through the menu to the share option and selected Tyler as the recipient.

“This is the shirt I got u,” I texted.

I waited a second.

“But in a bigger size ;)” I added.

Not able to bear the suspense, I threw the phone onto my bed, watching it bounce and snap closed. Turning back towards the mirror, I jutted my hip in the other direction and wondered if that would have been better.

I heard a muffled vibration and turned around. The phone’s outer screen glowed greyish green. I threw myself down on the bed. The glow faded from the phone screen, and I flipped it open.

“Hi” was all it said

“Hi,” I texted back.

“I dreamed about u just now,” Tyler texted.

“Ur not gonna believe this, but me 2,” All the liquids in my body were heating, gurgling, reddening.

“Yeh?” he said.

A minute later he texted again: “i was eating u out.”

I rolled triumphantly on the bed, inhaling the cedar smell from the potpourri on the nightstand, wondering who to tell about this and when. A guy giving a girl head at my high school was unheard of. I felt iconic, feminist, powerful, like the main female character in a movie both men and women jerked off to.

“Me 2,” I texted. And then: “lol i mean i was giving u head.” 

He texted back a smiley face. Immediately I regretted my revelation, realizing that I had lost all power.

\\\

I brought the sweatshirt to school the next week. Tyler and I met before first period in a hallway near the cafeteria where we knew no one would see us. He thanked me with a one-armed side hug.

At the end of the day, while I put my books back in my locker, I saw, far down the hallway, Tyler walk, sweatshirt in hand, up to Mr. Corvin. Tyler held up the sweatshirt and stretched it taut between his arms so Mr. Corvin could see its front. Mr. Corvin craned his head closer, nodded his approval. Of what? I wondered angrily, there’s no way an old (he was nearly twenty-eight!!!) man like him could know about this very cool and underground punk rock act.

 The two of them walked off together, talking about who knows what. Probably not about how Tyler was the one who repeated the ADHD slander-quote. Or about how Tyler wanted to eat my private parts. It’s probably something much more offensive and annoying, I thought as I pulled open a plastic-wrapped donut with my front teeth, like sports or the best way to oil a car, or parts of a car, or whatever it is you oil.

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 The room was a luminous white, with huge windows that looked onto a bright lawn. A small wooden podium faced a few dozen mostly filled chairs. My mom, dad, and I (my brother was away at college) sat in the second row smiling proudly.  Despite my invitation and repeated text message reminders, Tyler had not shown up to the poetry award event. A woman wearing various layers of burgundy approached the podium.

“I am so excited,” she beamed, “to introduce the first place winner. Not only does she have an uncommon facility for language, but she also possesses a stunning emotional,” she made a face as if tears were gathering in her eyes although no wetness came, “…bravery.” 

My parents looked over at me curiously. I had many laudable qualities—obedience, generosity with stuff I didn’t care that much about, wanting others to like me, baking well—but bravery had never numbered among them. In fact, I was something of a coward, particularly in the emotional sense.

“Her courage to share the deepest secrets of her immigrant family is, quite frankly, breathtaking.” The woman gazed at me with pity and admiration. My parents’ expressions changed to outright confusion, bordering on suspicion. On each side, our family had been here for at least three generations. And as far as they knew, all of their secrets remained definitively buried, especially from me. 

“Sarah,” the woman simpered, “it’s an honor to invite you up here to read your work. And I would love it if you began with ‘Patrimonio.’”

My dad’s eyes widened till you could see the whites around his pupils. Usually, this was accompanied by a string of profanities, but because we were in public, all he could do was throw up his palms to the ceiling in the classic motion of a Red Sauce Mafioso. If only he could have known what a mistake that was.

I walked slowly up to the podium and reshuffled my papers (I had been planning on reading a poem I had written about springtime and 1930s cinema that I hoped would impress Tyler with its ‘intellectual sensuality’.) I gulped and began:

“You’ll love it: / My grandfather was a con man, or,” I winced, “so my father tells me.”

My father’s chest heaved with rage. He looked at my mother, who was grinning.

My poem went on to describe the grandfather buying multiple handbags for his various mistresses, selling shares of the Brooklyn Bridge as well as nails from the Holy Cross, counterfeiting money, and ultimately fleeing to Canada, where he got involved in the oil business. All, it claimed, while dressed in the same “lurid suit.”

My dad managed to contain himself until we were in the car.

“Dad—” I said.

“—Your grandfather,” he shoved the key into the ignition and twisted it as though it were into my eye socket (this was how he had taught me to defend myself in case of potential rape or kidnapping), “was a TAX COLLECTOR. He was deeply involved with his Presbyterian Church and his homeowners’ association, and never once did he cheat on my mother.”

My mom started to laugh.

“It was a dramatic monologue for English!” My voice was high and whiny, apologetic yet defensive. “We had to write them after we read Robert Browning!” I paused, “Do you even know who that is?” He continued huffing. “It was a COMMENTARY about the portrayal of Italians in cinema.”

My mom howled. 

“Plus,” my dad ignored my mother and me and jerked the car out of the parking space, “you used the past tense like he’s dead. He’s still here, living in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. But I can’t send him this slander!” He flicked on his blinker and turned onto the empty country road. “He’s never even been to Canada!” He pronounced this last part as if traveling to Canada were itself an indictable offense.

“Dad!” Now I was indignant. “It’s not my fault that judges of a poetry contest don’t understand the difference between author and narrator!”

My mom stopped laughing for a moment. “She’s got a point there, Dave.”

My dad scowled. “Well, I still don’t know what I’m going to give to Dad. He also probably doesn’t understand,” he adopted a falsetto, “the difference between author and narrator.”

Matt called me the next day. Dad had called him in a rage.

“Wow,” he said. “That was a good one. I could never have imagined pulling one on Dad that way, but you really did it.” 

I felt both proud and deeply misunderstood.

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I’ve often considered stealing my brother’s giant penis story and transposing it to my life. Little Sarah wakes up screaming, calls her parents into her freshly painted yellow bedroom. They ask what’s wrong, she hesitates, screams more, then finally admits she saw a GIANT VAGINA OUTSIDE HER BEDROOM WINDOW.

But there are so many problems. Did I know the word vagina when I was four? I don’t think so. Could the vagina wear clothes? Probably not. The garments would have to be strange and triangular or odd and circular. Where would the vagina’s eyes be? Would she be waxed smooth or let her hair crinkle roughly about? What fast food do vaginas even resemble? 

It’s a grotesque, impossible image, and when I try to think about it, I feel doomed.