W
hile in the grocery store, my daughter revealed to me that her teacher recommended she begin wearing deodorant, that her body was changing and, as a result, so were her smells.
However, I impulsively refused her request for a stick of antiperspirant.
It was my first experience with group nudity, and it terrified me.
I found it disconcerting, the suggestion that, at the age of ten, my daughter was beginning to stink, but then I remembered myself at her age.
At least twice a week, after gym class, because of my own changing smells, I was required to shower.
It was my first experience with group nudity, and it terrified me.
But the other boys in my class, many of them young athletes, didn’t seem aware, and they frolicked and wrestled in the nude and openly talked about David (who had already sprouted thick, black tufts of pubic hair around his disproportionately large penis) while the gym teacher stood and watched, clipboard in hand, checking us off, one by one, as we showed him our bars of soap, and only after we had thoroughly washed (he claimed to time us with his stopwatch) were we allowed a towel to wrap around our naked bodies.
Before then, the only other boys who had seen my genitals were the few who had asked to suck me off, as well as the one who demanded I urinate into his mouth, but they had been the closest of friends, whereas these were almost complete strangers, and besides, the last time that had happened was nearly two years prior…the first time was when I was barely older than my five year old son.
I suddenly envied my daughter’s innocence, something I couldn’t remember ever possessing.
That post-lapsarian stink had always hung close to my skin.
