Essay

Tantamount, or the vasectomy

Essay By William Steffen
Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher

In 2019, I found out that my mom’s breast cancer had spread to her brain. 

The doctor showed us a CT scan of her mind and we saw all these little white blobs that weren’t supposed to be there. It looked like a Rorschach test, a symmetrical skull full of calcified, dehydrated thoughts with no place to go. The bones of memory. Clouds, maybe. Amoebae, eggs, globs of mayonnaise. Things newborn. 

Tattoo idea #1: Part of your brain drips down your neck disguised in a snail shell, its antennae tracing an interstate of arteries. 

If you had told me in September of 2019 that I would still be playing Scrabble with my mom in September of 2021, I would not have believed you. But there we were. My mom’s hair grew back after her radiation therapy, but it was not the same. It looked like she had survived an electrocution. A bolt of lightning. After two and a half decades of on-again-off-again state-of-the-art chemical and radiation treatments, her hair was shock white, like Christopher Lloyd’s in the Back to the Future movies, but more synthetic. Sometimes, I would imagine her driving around in a 1984 DeLorean, which I suppose is preferable to the truth—that my mother will never drive again. 

The pandemic struck a few months after my dad got his right knee replaced. The doctor who had done the surgery told my dad he had never seen a knee in such bad shape. “I broke a saw in there,” he said. 

That same surgeon dropped dead from a heart attack a few months later. My dad seemed disappointed that he would never get to show him the shape of his left knee (the shape of a paperclip after you try to straighten it without succeeding). 

About a month after he was sent home to teach the rest of his semester at the University from his basement office, my dad was sitting on a stepstool, scrubbing the floor of the bathroom when the stool fell out from under him. He fell a matter of inches, but it was enough to break his hip. 

When I arrived at the hospital shortly after his emergency surgery, he blinked at me through heavily sedated eyes and asked, “Did you see how clean the floor of the bathroom was?” 

“Sure, dad,” I lied. “Whatever.” 

“Then,” he exhaled, resting his head on the pillow and closing his eyes, as if for the last time, “it was all worth it.” 

And he slipped into unconsciousness. 

A few weeks later, while he was learning to walk again in the street with the help of my older brother and a walker, he fell and broke his other hip. After another emergency surgery, a blood infection, a major spinal surgery, another infection, a neck surgery (which required three months in a “halo” that had to be bolted into his forehead), yet another neck surgery, and months of rehab, he was finally able to drive again. Things were getting back to normal. 

I had been visiting my parents in my hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, every week between my mother’s new diagnosis and the outbreak of the pandemic. After that, I tried to visit less, for fear of spreading the virus to my immuno-compromised parents. But my dad couldn’t seem to keep himself out of the hospital. By some miracle, everyone made it to April 2021 and got vaccinated without catching COVID-19. 

I tried to limit my visits to once a month after that. I wanted to check in on them to see how they were doing. I also wanted to see my mom because I wasn’t ever sure how much time she actually had left. She was forgetting things more often. She would ask me the same question three times. She would call me by my brother’s name—but to be fair, that was something she had been doing our whole lives. We are, after all, identical twins. 

Sometimes, she would forget where she was. 

But she still insisted that we play Scrabble every time I visited. And she could still beat me, even with her brain in the shape it was in. I didn’t even let her cheat. Sometimes she would try to spell words at a right angle, spawning two different words in two different directions at once. Often, she would put the letters on the board upside down. But she could still come up with some game-winning words. 

Qi, using a double word score adjacent to two different I’s. 

Repeater. 

Welder. 

Indemnify.

Prolong. 

Raven. 

Soapy. 

Brunches, on a triple-word tile. 

Tattoo idea #2: Seven scrabble tiles on your forearm. They’re all vowels, and it’s your turn. In your palm is an hourglass, and all the sand has run out. 

Sometimes, my dad (who claims he really was struck by lightning when he worked at a Florida airport as a much younger man) would play with us. My dad and I would drink gin and tonics and chatter about academia, while my mom summoned words from somewhere in her cobwebbed noodle. 

2021 was the year my mother-in-law’s eyes turned yellow and she died of cirrhosis, the year three more of our chickens were carried off by a fox, the year before my wife’s stepdad was found floating in his heated pool days after his dog had gone hoarse with barking. 

That time I visited my parents in September, their pantry had become somehow infested with grain moths, or Indian meal moths—Plodia interpunctella. Plodia, meaning to clap; punctus, meaning annoyed or vexed. A fitting name, especially because the best way to kill them is to simply clap them out of existence, or rather, into a dirty mess all over your palms. The bugs danced around the kitchen, butting in and out of our conversation, as we studied the board. “It’s your turn, mom.” 

I had spent that afternoon cleaning out the pantry, placing traps, hanging fly paper, throwing out old food. Opening jars of things that hadn’t been opened in years. Reading expiration dates. Blowing dust off soup cans. I began to learn to think like the moths. If I was a moth, where would I hide? Where would I lay my eggs or fuck my husband? How many moths does it take to screw in a lightbulb? The main nest seemed to be coming from a half-eaten bag of walnuts that looked sticky. Bingo. But the larvae and the spider-web-looking footprints of these moths were everywhere: inside unopened bags of rotini. Inside the plastic wrapping of a half eaten bag of graham crackers. They lived in the cracks between the shelves and the back wall of the pantry. The eggs clung to the inside of a bag of quinoa—or maybe it was just quinoa. But I threw it in the trash can just the same. Just to be safe. 

Tattoo idea #3: Two moths go at it inside of a light bulb. They are fucking each other’s brains out. They are both on fire, and the light they give off is exquisite. It would be best to put this one directly on the scalp, and then to let the hair grow over it, until a receding hairline or an impending cancer treatment peel it back to show that the light is still on. 

In the garage, I found even more moths in an old garbage can that was full of birdseed. 

“Bmood? That’s not a word, mom.” 

She took a minute, then looked back at her letters. “It is so a word,” she countered, full of unwavering confidence. 

“Use it in a sentence,” I prompted.

“You and your brood better not be rude or the mother of your brood’ll be in a bad mood.”

“Do you have an R?” 

Mom checked her letters again and showed me that she did. She rolled her eyes, and I replaced her M with her R, and I counted up her points. 

My dad clapped his hands gently, pathetically, like a man who has earned permanent nerve damage in his left hand and will probably never play the guitar again. “Did you get it?” my mom asked him. 

He looked into his hands, disgusted with what he saw there.

“Will you get me a washcloth?” 

I stood up and handed him a damp towel. He wiped the insect from his crooked hands. 

“Did you get it?” my mom asked again, still waiting for an answer. 

“Yes ma’am.” He avoided eye contact. 

“Are you still going to physical therapy?” I looked at his hands. 

“Twice a week,” he answered. Then he started to laugh. “I went in today, and everyone said hi to me. ‘Hey Lloyd! What’s up, Lloyd!’ I swear to God, I’ve had so much physical therapy this year that you know what I said today? I said, ‘Everybody seems to know my name around here. It’s like I’m in an episode of Cheers. You people might as well start calling me ‘Norm!’’ Everyone laughed at that,” he contended. I chuckled too. 

“Whose turn is it?” my mom asked, annoyed. Interpunctella. 

“Mine.” 

“What did you end up putting down, Em?” 

“Brood,” she said, rolling her eyes again. 

“Brood. Oh, okay. Brood. Brood. You know, Will, we love seeing those pictures of Oscar on your insta-face. Insta-face? What’s it called, again?” 

“Instagram.” 

“Instagram! I can never remember the name of that thing.” He tried to snap his fingers.

“Instagram. We just love seeing him. You know, he looks just like you did when you were three.” 

“I know,” I said, scanning the board. Now it was my mom’s eye that began to wander, following the trail of some celestial bug that only she could see.

“Are you going to have any more children, do you think?” my dad asked, sipping from his glass of gin. 

I sighed. “Well, since you’re asking, I’m actually thinking of getting a vasectomy.” It seemed like as good a time as any to tell them, if one is ever to share such information with one’s parents. 

My dad looked at me, then looked at my mom. “TMI,” he said. 

It was my mom who applauded now, singularly and definitively. When she looked into her hands, she could see that there was nothing in them. Then she crossed her arms and stared back at the board like it was her turn again, even though it wasn’t. 

* * *

Tattoo idea #45: The word “tantamount” on your scrotum when you chicken out of getting a vasectomy. Or maybe just the abbreviation TMI, since it’s fewer letters. 

I don’t have any tattoos myself. Nor do I have anything against them. I suppose I’ve seen my share of do-overs and drunken mistakes, but I have also been downright enchanted by some of the tattoos I’ve encountered. For example, my wife once bumped into Bud Cort, the actor who played Harold in Harold and Maude, one of my all-time favorite films. She made him sign his name on her back in a sharpie, and the next day, she marched into a tattoo parlor and made it permanent. He has a very unique signature, to say the least. 

I have a friend from high school who got a big stegosaurus painted right across her chest. When she wears tops with plunging necklines, the reptile’s head emerges from her bosom. I have another friend from college, Topher, who has the word “ones” tattooed on his back. Once, during a long drive home from an ultimate frisbee tournament, I asked him about it. He told me he didn’t get to choose the word, but he did get to choose the legible font, size, and where it was placed on his body. He told me he volunteered to be one of the “words” of an author named Shelley Jackson, who wrote a story called “Skin.” Although the story is only 2,095 words long, it is (still, apparently) being published “exclusively in tattoos, one word at a time, on the skin of volunteers.”[1] 

“The idea is that she wants to have a relationship with her words,” Topher told me between sips of coffee, doing about eighty-five on the New Jersey Turnpike in a rented van full of sleeping frisbee players. “She wants to go to their weddings, their funerals. She wants her words to inhabit the world, to live and die, not just sit there on paper.” 

I have also heard some great ideas for potential tattoos, which I have even considered for myself. 

#85: A spinach can on the bicep, like so many Popeye cartoons. 

#9: The order “tickle me” along the arch of your foot. 

My hurdle with tattoos has always been that I could never commit to the idea of having something stay put on my body forever. 

The difference—and there is a vas deferens between a tattoo and a vasectomy—is that tattoos memorialize, vasectomies obliterate. The one is a mark of a life lived—the date of a friend’s death, the small footprint of a miscarriage, an inside joke between ex-lovers, a bug crawling into or out of your belly button, a cigarette burn in the shape of a kiss, a dark red ribbon on the back of each thigh, a mushroom sprouting out of an ankle, an arrow through a heart pumping on the bicep; the other is the shutting not of a door or even of a coffin but the shutting off of a faucet, a spring from which life bubbles. 

Tattoo idea #69: The three-lined blackletter syllogism: “All men are mortal./ Socrates was a man./ Therefore, all men are Socrates” in dubious, double-helixed battle with a giant, comma-shaped sperm, which twists, serpentine around the text. The text is huge, covering your entire chest or back maybe. The sperm is grizzled and has the seasoned face of some Bukowski Nolte lovechild, a spray of five o’clock shadow, a scar, an eye-patch, and one or two features of an ex-clown. The sperm bears a tattoo herself on her scaly side, which must also be legible. It reads: “Ain’t no gism like the silly-gism.” 

The reason I wanted a vasectomy was not clear to my wife. You’re thirty-two years old, she reminded me. What if we decide that we want another child? 

Here’s another way in which tattoos and vasectomies are different: only one of them makes you think about all of the horrible ways your family might break apart or be destroyed. If you already have children, the hardest part about getting a vasectomy might be that it forces you to confront a horrible hypothetical reality. My wife never said any of this out loud—the way my doctor or my therapist did. But I could tell she was thinking it, or that she was trying to avoid talking about it. 

What if one of our children dies? 

What if, during an innocent game of hide-and-go-seek in the parking lot with your son, he leaps out from behind a car just in time to get run over by a minivan? What if you drop your kids off at summer camp and then get a phone call that your daughter drowned in the pool because the sixteen-year-old lifeguard who was watching her was still hungover from a night of heavy drinking and had fallen asleep for a minute? What if your son manages to swallow a battery, or finally figures out how to climb onto the counter and wiggle open the wrong bottle of pills that look an awful lot like tic-tacs? What if one of them gets stuck in the ice chest? Locked in the trunk? What if they are swimming in a lake and one of those brain-eating amoebae you keep hearing about wriggles into their ear canals? 

What if both of our children die? What if you wrap the car around a tree with everyone inside? What if they grow up just a little bit and go to middle school and get shot by a classmate because guns still don’t kill people in the future, only unaddressed mental health issues do? 

And while you are busy thinking the worst thoughts you can think, why stop there? What if your wife dies? 

The implication behind the question what if your children die—after you get a vasectomy? is that it is supposed to make you feel unsure. As with Job, the loss of your children could mean that they will someday be “replaced” with more children of your own making, or God’s, depending on how you look at it. In the story of Job, there is also the implication that the children who make up your second family will be just a little bit better than your useless goddamned dead kids ever were. 

* * *

“Gravo? Gravo’s not a word, mom.” 

“Gra-vy,” she drawled through rows of teeth, as though I had misheard.

“Do you have a Y?” Or an E? 

She had the Y. Double word. 

My dad clapped his hands. Not to kill a bug this time. It was in unmalicious applause. Plodia. 

I regarded a moth newly landed on the umbilical fly paper that hung from the ceiling beside the kitchen cabinets. They died pretty quickly on that stuff. Their wings would disintegrate as they tried to crawl away, and then their spindly legs would become immortalized in the sticking place. Some landed on them right side up. Others were trapped with their legs swinging outward, kicking helplessly against a widening gyre. 

Tattoo idea #133: An umbilical cord winds from your belly button to a small fetus growing over your appendix. The fetus is in the middle of a faint spider’s web, and a malicious looking Shelob is descending from a thin strand connected to your nipple. 

“Whose turn?” My dad asked, finishing his drink. 

I put up my hand, still performing word alchemy in my head. Nickel. Necktie. Nectar. Lincoln. I stood up to get another splash of tonic from the bottle on the counter. My head was beginning to swim.

Tattoo idea #103: A shiny copper penny on each eyelid. Both are heads—or tails, depending on how you look at them. 

“Dad, where did Lincoln go to college?” 

“He didn’t go to college.” He set his glass on the table like he wanted me to pour some more gin into it. I put the tonic back on the counter and got the gin. 

“He didn’t go to college?” 

“He did not go to college.”

“Is there an echo in here?” my mother pondered. 

“Then how’d he go to law school?” I asked. “If he didn’t go to college?” 

“That’s not how it worked back then,” he said. “Woah, there,” stopping me with his crumpled paw. 

“What do you mean?” 

“You could just work for a lawyer and study under one. Then when you were ready,” he held out a lime, unable to squeeze it on his own, “you could take the bar. Robert went to law school, though. Harvard, I think.” 

I pinched the lime over his glass and he used his gnarled pinky to stir. I looked back at my words in utero. Nocturnal. Nuptial. Nefarious. 

“You know,” my dad continued, sitting up and getting closer to the table now, “when Willie died—” And that was a sure sign that my dad was getting tipsy. It took much less alcohol for him to become inebriated after his year of emergency surgeries. He had shed about thirty pounds over the course of the year. But even when he was in his prime, you could always tell when he was getting jolly by how he started to talk about Abraham Lincoln like he was a close family friend who hadn’t written in a spell.

“When Willie died, Lincoln spiraled into a depression. And when Robert enlisted, Lincoln had to pull Ulysses Grant aside and ask him if there was some kind of glorified desk job he could give him where he wouldn’t be in danger of being shot.” My dad removed his glasses and seemed to wipe a tear from his eye. “He just couldn’t go through with that again. Boy. Not again.” 

“How did Willie die?” I asked, snatching the life from a moth in my closed fist like so many snowflakes. My dad had a brother named Willie, my namesake, who died when he was only five. But he knew I was not asking about that Willie. 

“Whose turn is it?” Interpunctella. 

“Mine. Sorry.” Nipple. Noxious. Loon. 

My dad put his glasses back on and took a drink. 

“Typhoid.” 

* * *

Another time, my mom put a “D” on the end of the word “tire” for a measly six. But it was only after my dad looked at her letters, told her she could do it, and then did it for her.

My mother’s “tired” started my wheels spinning. Of course she was tired. But what was she really trying to communicate? What was she tired of? Years of battling a disease that came out of nowhere?

I’ve always wondered how my mother got cancer. Maybe it was genetic and couldn’t be helped. Maybe the cause was environmental. She was born in 1950, after all, back when they used to spray children with chemicals to kill mosquitos.

There are three types of mosquitos common to the US. Aedes mosquitos, like Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, have black and white markings on their bodies and legs. In ancient Greek, aedes is the word for “unpleasant”; the prefix “a-” (without) combined with the word “hedys,” meaning “sweet,” yields a word that in Latin can also mean apartment, room, house, abode, or dwelling. It is also the word for temple, shrine, or tomb. They are invasive, which means they were brought here from somewhere else (aegypti presumably, though not necessarily). A. albopictus (unpleasant, in black and white) were brought to the United States by the used tire trade. One would be hard-pressed to find a more suitable abode or dwelling for mosquitos than a used tire. Suitable, because getting water out of a tire is a bit like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube. Suitable too because used tires, the discarded feet of human transportation, remain vehicles even after they have become improvised shrines to the unrecyclable circle of life. Aedes mosquitos are vehicles for dengue virus, West Nile virus, yellow fever, chikungunya, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, and more recently Zika. 

Tattoo idea #37: A lonely, child-sized mosquito sits on a tire-swing, dangling from a tree branch on your thigh. She gazes thoughtfully into her reflection in a puddle on the ground. You think that she is looking at herself. Actually, she is looking for her children. 

Tattoo idea #85: A tire fire lights up your back, the smoke rises menacingly in green and black plumes. When you are upside-down, it is clear that the smoke is in the shape of a giant mosquito; its syringe of a mouth probes your shoulder for a taste. 

Culex mosquitoes, such as Culex pipiens, the common house mosquito (or “piping gnat”), also carry diseases such as West Nile virus, encephalitis, and filariasis. Anopheles mosquitoes, like Anopheles freeborni (named after Stanley B. Freeborn, the first chancellor of UC Davis) and Anopheles quadrimaculatus (meaning “square-spotted”), are known to spread malaria. Anopheles is the Latin word for “unprofitable” or “useless.” These disease-spreading mosquito genera were all targeted by the insecticide campaigns of the 1950s. Between 1945 and 1975, the US dumped 1.35 billion pounds of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (also known as DDT) onto American crops, American farmland, and American children. These were the same years the US military dropped 32,557 tons of napalm (whose name derives from its two primary ingredients, naphthenic acid and palmitic acid, and whose name denotes a sticky fire too noxious for even Hades, burning at temperatures north of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) on Korea—but on Japan before that and on Vietnam shortly after. These were the same years the US dropped 20 million gallons of Agent Orange (the shorthand for an herbicide made of a combination of 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, which targeted the waterways of enemy and civilian territories) in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. These were the years the US tested some 800 atomic and nuclear weapons (and used two in Japan) in the Marshall Islands, Pacific Ocean, and in the continental US, with benign codenames like greenhouse, ivy, teapot, wigwam, Argus, nougat, fishbowl, hardtack, roller coaster, whetstone, and latchkey, sending tons of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. 

Tattoo idea #74: A teapot on your buttock pours a stream of ivy down your leg in long steamy tendrils. The streams pool at your foot, where a small mushroom cloud begins to blossom. 

By the time it occurs to you to ask whether as a child she was ever sprayed with DDT, which accumulates in fatty tissue like radioactive ash in the Bikini Atoll, like islands in the sea, she does not remember.

* * *

“Is it common for men to want to reverse the procedure?” 

My doctor was either tired from working a long shift, ready for his lunch break, or just fed up with answering the same questions from men like me who didn’t seem to know what it was that they wanted. The doctor looked at me from behind two masks as he pulled on his second latex glove. Then he got onto one knee, like a man who knows where to put a ring, how to make a cut, with what amount of pressure. 

“Drop your pants, please.” 

“I’m just asking for my wife. She wants to know if there are…options. Like freezing sperm. Stuff like that.” 

“You can freeze your sperm if you want to,” he said, staring into my genitals. 

Before I knew it, he was yanking on my testicles like he was a shoeshine who hadn’t gotten a tip all day. Then he was standing up and taking off his gloves. 

“You can freeze your sperm if you want to,” he sighed, “but you need to arrange that ahead of time, and I believe you have to pay for the storage. My advice would be: don’t do this unless you’re one hundred percent sure.” He tossed the gloves into the garbage and put his hands on his hips. 

“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. What’s the recovery time like? I’m supposed to come in on the Friday before Columbus—Indigenous People’s Day weekend. Will I be able to go back to work by Tuesday?” 

“You might be a little sore on that Tuesday, but as long as you rest up over the weekend, you should be fine. There are guys who walk out of here and go right back to work the same day. But we advise people not to do any heavy lifting and to keep icing it. You may experience some swelling. What do you do?” 

“I’m an English professor.” 

“You should be fine then.” 

“How long until I can. . .” 

Come, night. Come, Romeo. Come, thou day in night.

“It usually takes a few weeks to know for sure. We would want to see you back in a month, but we also want to make sure you ejaculate twenty times before then. We would not recommend you have sex until we get a chance to test your semen.” 

“You hear that, honey?” My wife was on speaker phone so she could hear everything I was hearing. She made a noise of acknowledgement. The doctor was quiet for a time. 

Then he said: “Listen, if you are having doubts, you should probably discuss this matter further with one another. It’s not impossible to reverse the procedure, but it is complicated and there are risks.” 

“When’s the latest I can pull out?” 

Without missing a beat, he answered: “Right before you come, but we’ll charge you for it.” He stood to go. “If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. Otherwise, we’ll plan to see you on the tenth.” 

When I got home from the doctor’s office, I could tell that my wife didn’t want to talk about it again. And neither did I. We didn’t need to talk about it anymore. A week later, I called the office and canceled my appointment. I think I finally understood what she meant when she said it was just too much to think about right now. Up until then, I had kept pestering her to think of the advantages. Think of the sex. No more giving our money to Big Condom! Plus, we’re just twenty orgasms away from not having to worry about your slippery body being a big leaky cauldron of fertility all the time! 

But that is not it. That is not it at all. It wasn’t until I came home from the doctor’s office that I finally understood everything that she didn’t want to talk about. Mommy-brain. Cancer and Gemini. That your brain is an even more fascinating organ than your testicles are, and at least twice as heavy. That your body is a poem you have not even started writing yet.

Tattoo idea #300: A frame from the 1954 Fellini film, La Strada. The actress Giulietta Masina plays Gelsomina, a poor woman who is purchased by Zampanò, the strong man, played by an abrasive and indominable Anthony Quinn. She tries to make herself useful to him and his act, but he is only ungrateful and reproachful in return. When she is delighted by a clown, Zampanò grows angry at her mirthfulness. And when they encounter the clown by chance in the road—la strada—Zampanò kills him, crushing Gelsomina’s spirit at the same time. But before that, she makes a child laugh by pretending to be a tree. 

You don’t have to explain it. 

Call your brother, a professional artist, and have him draw Gelsomina imitating that tree for you. 

Then get it tattooed on your back. 

1 http://www.ineradicablestain.com/skin-faqs.html According to the website, the project was launched in 2003. When the website was last updated (on April 10, 2010), the project had “published” 553 words, but had received over 10,000 volunteers.

William Steffen is an associate professor of English at American International College in Springfield, MA, where he teaches courses in literature and creative writing. His fiction has been featured in Last Girls Club, Empyrean Literary Magazine, and Deal Jam Magazine. He lives in Holyoke, MA, with his wife and two children.