The ag teacher noticed that I seemed a bit shiftless, and offered to let me tag along and help with the animal husbandry class on their trip to the local stockyard. It was a small class of boys, all wearing tight Wranglers and cowboy boots, and (against my better judgment) I took a deep breath and said, “Why not?” as I nervously climbed onto the small bus. I looked like a Metallica roadie who had been won by Willie Nelson’s tour bus, but the guys did their best to make me feel at home, and seemed quietly impressed that I’d volunteer to come along for the trip. It wasn’t until we actually arrived at the stockyard that I realized we were there to learn about artificial cow insemination. The teacher suggested that I help him, since my arms were smaller and so “it would be less uncomfortable for the cow.” I wasn’t entirely sure what constituted “helping,” but it became clearer as he rolled a shoulder-length rubber glove up my arm. He slapped an open thermos of semen in my hand, and sucked it up into the turkey baster.
This is probably the point when I should have just run, but there was something about the way he was staring at me that made me stop. It was the look of a man waiting for a girl to run screaming so he could have a good laugh at her expense. Or possibly it was the look of a man who wondered how he was going to explain to the lunch lady that he had to give her daughter all that semen, because she was the only one around who could fit in the arm condom. Hard to tell. But either way, it seemed as if he expected me to bolt, and I’ll be damned if I was going to be judged by a man who carried semen around in a thermos.
And that’s how I ended up shoulder-deep in a cow’s vagina, squishing out the semen baster as a bunch of teenage boys looked on. It was the closest I’d ever come to doing porn. Suddenly the cow’s vagina tensed unexpectedly and I realized that my arm was stuck. I screamed involuntarily. The teacher panicked, thinking that the sudden contraction was an indication that the cow was going to sit down quickly, and told me to pull out my arm gently, because if the cow sat down it could break my arm. This was disconcerting, both because it sounded painful, and also because “I broke my arm in a cow’s vagina” is not something you ever want to have to explain to anyone. I yanked my arm out, and the cow looked back at me in disgust. And that’s when I realized that I no longer had the turkey baster.
This is the point when I’d like to say that I gritted my teeth and said, “I’m going back in,” with the focused determination of Bruce Willis from that movie I can’t remember the name of. The one about Armageddon. (Editor’s note: Really? It’s called Armageddon.) But instead I took a deep breath, held my head up with what little dignity I could muster, slowly peeled off my glove, and walked away. No one called me back, probably because none of them could find an elegant way to say, “You left your turkey baster in that cow’s vagina.” Or possibly because they realized that the first one to speak up would probably be elected to take my place. I’m assuming someone went back in to retrieve the turkey baster (for the cow’s sake, at least), but I don’t know, because I didn’t stick around to see. Instead, I walked off and waited until the rest of the class finally showed up. I was braced for the teasing to begin, but it never did. The guys looked a bit pale and shaky, but laughed at one another as they made bovina jokes, and my ag teacher patted my back reassuringly as we got back on the bus.
We returned to the school just as my sister was walking out of the gym from pep-rally practice. She was still dressed as Wally and was waving her tail feathers with panache. She saw me and slowed down to walk beside me toward the school, and as we walked in silence I realized that we could not have been a more awkward-looking couple. “What’s up?” she asked carefully. “You look weird.”
“I took your advice about trying to fit in,” I said in a voice calmer than I would have suspected.
“And?” she asked.
“And I got my arm stuck in a cow’s vagina,” I replied, staring off into the distance.
Lisa paused momentarily, and glanced at me with what I assumed was a look of disappointment. Or possibly shock. It was hard to tell when she had that bird head on. Then she walked on beside me, staring stoically into the surrounding cotton fields, as if a response to my statement could be found there. “Well,” she said, pausing to find the right words. “That’ll happen.” She said it with a quiet sense of dignity, as if a small, wise Morgan Freeman were inside the bird costume with her, feeding her lines.
“I almost lost an arm,” I added conversationally, a slight hint of hysteria creeping into my voice. “I almost lost an arm inside a cow’s vagina.” It was a slight exaggeration, but at this point I was almost daring her to call me out, as I had begun to regard a fair amount of this as her fault.
She nodded carefully, her beak bobbing up and down, seeming determined to keep up a normal conversational tone. “Inside the cow’s vagina, you say? Well, that’s just . . . that’s fascinating,” she said, in the same way someone might remark that the weather was about to turn cold, or that horses lack the ability to vomit. “So”—she paused—“it’s possible you might have misunderstood my advice.” I glared at her. “But still? These are the moments high school memories are made of, right?” She held up her wings and did what I’m assuming was her best version of jazz hands. “Yay for memories?” she said weakly, and somewhat apologetically.
And then I punched her.