The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [85]
Then it came to her. “Oh my God!” she said. “Oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-it!”
She ran to the door and locked it. Then, thinking better, she unlocked it and ran back to the bed, where she got the foil package and the box and took them both into her bathroom, where she could lock the door without arousing suspicion. She lowered the lid of the toilet and sat down.
Madeleine had never seen a condom package before, much less held one in her hand. She ran the ball of her thumb over it. The implication of the shape inside stirred feelings in her she wasn’t quite able to describe. The lubricious medium the condom swam in was both repellent and fascinating. The circumference of the ring frankly startled her. She hadn’t given much detailed thought to the extent of the male erection. Thus far, boys’ erections were something she and her friends giggled about and mostly didn’t mention. She thought she’d felt one once, during a slow dance at summer camp, but she couldn’t be sure: it might have been the boy’s belt buckle. In her experience, erections were occult occurrences happening elsewhere, like the bulging of a bullfrog’s throat in a distant swamp, or a puffer fish inflating in a coral reef. The only erection Madeleine had seen with her own eyes belonged to her grandmother’s Labrador, Wylie, which had rawly emerged from its fur sock as the dog maniacally humped her leg. A thing like that was enough to keep you from thinking about erections forever. The distasteful nature of that image, however, didn’t blot out the sheer revelatory nature of the condom she now held in her hand. The condom was an artifact of the adult world. Beyond her life, beyond her school, there was an agreed-upon system no one talked about, whereby pharmaceutical companies made prophylactics for men to buy and roll onto their penises, legally, in the United States of America.
The next two items Madeleine took out of the box were part of a novelty set, the sort that issued from vending machines in men’s rooms, which was where Alwyn, or more likely Alwyn’s boyfriend, had probably gotten it along with the condom. The set included: a red rubber ring studded with wiggly stalks and labeled “French tickler”; a gag made of blue plastic consisting of two moving figures, a man with a hard-on and a woman on all fours, the lever of which, when Maddy moved it back and forth, caused the half-inch stud to prong the woman doggy-style; a small tube of “Prolong” cream, which she didn’t even want to open; and two hollow silver “Ben Wa” balls that came with no instructions and looked, frankly, like pinballs. At the bottom of the box was the strangest thing of all, a thin miniature breadstick with black fuzz stuck to it. The breadstick was taped to a three-by-five card. Madeleine brought it close to her face to read the handwritten label: “Dehydrated Prick. Just add water.” She looked at the tiny breadstick again, then at the fuzz, and then she dropped the card and shouted out, “Gross!”
It was a while before she picked it up again, touching the edge of the three-by-five card farthest from the fuzz. Keeping her head back, she reexamined the fuzz to confirm that it was, in fact, pubic hair. Alwyn’s, most likely, though possibly her boyfriend’s. It wouldn’t have been beyond Ally to go to that length of verisimilitude. The hair was black and curly and had been clipped and glued to the base of the breadstick. The idea that it was possibly a guy’s pubic hair revolted and excited Madeleine at the same time. But it was probably Ally’s, that weirdo. What a funny, crazy sister she had! Alwyn was completely strange and unpredictable, a nonconformist, a vegetarian, a college war protester, and since Madeleine wanted to be some of these things, too, she loved and admired her sister (while continuing to think