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.