Torch Song

Torch Song is a book written by Anne Roiphe about the life of a 18 year old girl living with her family in New York in the early 1940's. One Christmas Eve the girl becomes unwell and her strict German nanny has just the answer to make her healthy again .... a large soap suds enema. I read this book a long time ago and gave the book away, but not before scanning the part about the enema ordeal. It is described so well and is in such graphic detail that the consensus of opinion is that it is actually autobiographical and not fiction. I have copied and pasted it below.

Enjoy.

We walked down the avenue past the Brick Church, whose doors were shut. The morning shadows cast strange shapes on the side streets. Burglar-proof iron bars shone in the clear sun. Pigeons roosted and cooed on the little grass islands in the center of Park Avenue. "1 wish we had some bread to give the birds as a Christmas present." "Nonsense," said Gretchen. "Those birds with their dusty feathers just spread disease." Later on we saw a doorman sweeping a dead gray mottled shape, feathers flying, into a dustpan. "See," said Gretchen, "they're diseased." I started to run over to look at the dead bird. I wanted to see if its eyes were open or closed. "Stop that," said Gretchen. "Walk like a lady, don't run like a pack of devils were chasing you." My legs felt tired from walking. "I'm tired," I said. Her lips tightened. The wrinkles in her face pulled taut, expectantly. "Maybe you are getting sick," she said. " All right, let's go home." We got to Ninety-second Street. A doorman opened his door. "Merry Christmas," he said. "The same to you," said Gretchen. "The same to you," Irwin and I echoed. There were at least four of us alive on Christmas morning. Near our apartment building we met Elsa and Peter, also walking in the near-empty streets. The two women stopped and the familiar warm glow of German swirled like a May breeze above our heads. Peter held Elsa's hand. I could barely see his face beneath the muffler. His cheeks were red. "What did you get for Christmas?" I asked. "Everything," he said with a sigh. I knew what he meant. Some- thing unknown was missing. We shifted foot to foot. We got tired of standing still, but we didn't dare run on the street. We wanted to go home. My brother arranged it with a long continuous hacking cough that turned into that familiar wheeze as if a fetus were imprisoned in his chest, unable to work its way up the throat to begin some kind of life. Now unbuttoned, at home, I felt Gretchen feel my forehead. "Warm," she said. "Ach, der liebe Gott," she said, not without a trace of gentleness. "You are coming down with something." I felt panic. "No, no, I'm fine," I said, but already I knew germs were invading my body and I would in a few hours' time be in bed with worse things to come.

In bed in my pajamas I waited for the rituals to begin. My mother stood in the threshold of the door and waved. She wouldn't come into the room because there was no sense in her catching whatever it might turn out to be. Gretchen brought me a glass of orange juice and a cracker, and put them on a table beside the bed. "On Christmas too. Even on Christmas." She shook her head as if the injustices of her position came down like snowflakes resting in her hair. She carefully put Vaseline on the bulb of the thermometer. "Turn over," she ordered, and obediently, accustomed as I was to the endless matter of fever, I lay on my side, one leg bent at the knee. Quickly she found the small opening and I felt the smooth invasion. A shiver of anticipation went through my body and Gretchen pulled the covers over me for the sake of modesty, decorum, and warmth. She stared at her watch. "I told you yesterday," she said, "not to stand around after your bath. I told you the slightest chill carries with it sickness. Who knows where this will end? Do your ears hurt? Your throat?" I felt a dryness in my throat, but I wasn't sure if it was sore or not. "Maybe," I nodded. "Of course," she said, "you forgot your muffler. You went to school last week without your muffler and I told you that was dangerous. When my sister was just your age she got strep throat and was sick for eight weeks with a burning fever that we all thought would surely take her to God. Just when my uncle was starting to nail together a box for her little body, our prayers were answered and she recovered. But who is there to pray for you?" She shook her head again. The covers were quickly pulled back by her sure hands, nails short and scrubbed, smelling always of soap, moving about my body with the authority that comes from repetition. The thermometer snatched away, I felt my anus contract in relief and regret. But the red line, the line I could never see, no matter how hard I squinted and twisted the thin glass, showed 100. A possible disease, a contagious childhood illness. It was, thank God, I reassured Gretchen, not after all the season for polio. "Yes, but you need to be cleansed now before the fever builds. We may be able to prevent this from becoming anything serious."

I lay in the bed unable to protest, trying to think of pleasant things to distract me from what was now certain to come. I stared at the Christmas scene on my bureau - the deer and the skier and the little houses like Gretchen's village in Bavaria, I thought, where her mother was making cookies in the kitchen, waiting for her daughters in America to come home. Gretchen came out of the bathroom wearing a rubber apron over her starched white uniform. Gretchen did not like girls who cried, even 18 year old ones. And the tears that might have been flowed inward to form a secret river that, like the Mississippi and the Colorado, would one day suffer seasonal floods. I closed my eyes when I saw the familiar brown bag with the long hose and the white nozzle in Gretchen's steady hand. "Not on Christmas, not on the Lord's birthday," I tried to deter her, but health was more important than holidays, and besides, Gretchen knew that the angels were applauding, a chorus of hallelujahs was echoing around her dedication to this little corrupt, unbaptized Jewish child who Jesus himself knew picked her nose and did other unmentionable things. A young lady hardly worthy of such good care, but each human soul must accept its destiny. Those were the eternal laws and Gretchen was never a subversive. "Take off your pajama bottoms, " she ordered, "and fold them on the chair. " As I did that she spread a white rubber sheet on the bed and I felt each moment frozen in ice, time at slow motion, as I lay on my stomach, my backside unprotected, naked, trembling with involuntary contractions and spasms that had already begun out of memory and habit. I felt as if a thousand eyes were staring down at my opening. My opening, which I could no longer cover by any means whatsoever. I saw the jar of Vaseline opened and the white nozzle dipped quickly in the jelly, and I pulled away to the wall, not quite daring to turn over, just as later I would open my mouth to the dentist while pulling my head as far away as the headrest would allow. "Over in the middle," she ordered, and I came, meek and exposed as if I were in the center of a ring of Indians looking for scalps, or my bottom were made of the very precious mineral the mad scientists wanted. My bowels were my treasure and I was powerless to protect them. "What's the matter with you?" said Gretchen, pulling me nearer her. "Do you want the fever to worsen, you want to get complications of the liver or the brain?" "No, no." I wanted to be well and have my mother come into the room with a book or a puzzle as she might when the contagion had subsided. "Now then," said Gretchen, holding the rubber bag high for maximum flow and pushing the white nozzle through the tight rejecting muscles of my anal wall. The outside force was stronger and resistance useless. Greased and glistening, the nozzle with its multiple holes reached into my body, resting just beneath the small beginnings of my uterus, the tiny indications of my ovaries, the mystery of myself that belonged to the nozzle and the hose and the hand that held the bag of water and never belonged to me, impaled now on the bed, like a butterfly on a pin. A moment of rage. If I were a witch, a wild animal, if I were a vulture, I would pluck out her eyes, and my beak would snatch at her genitals, till she was a bleeding hole. A bare moment of rage quickly overcome by an ecstasy of pleasurable sensation that rocked the entire nervous system, into the mouth, the ears, the roots of the hair, pleasure that contorted the entire body into a scream of rejection: "Take it out, take it out, stop it," a scream ignored by Gretchen, fulfilling her duty, standing above me impassive like the Statue of Liberty, holding a bag of water instead of a torch. The Statue of Liberty which had welcomed my grandfathers to this country - "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. " And after the moment of unbearable pleasure so violent I might be set on fire, the strong thumb released its hold on the stream of water and the water flowed into the colon, like a flood in a tunnel. Nothing inside could escape drowning, and then came the pain of pressure, the pain of my fear, the pain spread from my colon to my stomach to my vagina to my ears and my throat and the top of my head and I was only a spasm. " Please, please," I screamed. "Help me, help me," though I knew my protector and torturer were one, and the thumb would come down again on the hose. For a second the pain would stop and then it would start again. "1 have to go, I really have to go," and I could feel the now brown water backing out, dripping between my thighs. "Not yet, not yet," she would say. " A job worth doing, is worth doing right, " and again the thumb would come off the hose and the water would flow. What if I burst like a balloon and my insides blown to smithereens? "Stop!" I would scream as the pain mounted. I cried. "1 don't like tears," she said. "By now you should be used to this. Nothing to carry on about like that." I watched the bag out of the corner of my eye. Implacable, she would not stop till there was no more water in that bag at all, till the hose itself had been drained inside me. "1have to go!" I would scream, but she never would believe me till the last drop had disappeared inside my violated body. Then she would release me, pull the nozzle out. For a second I would feel relief and then the spasms would increase in intensity. What If I didn’t get to the toilet in time? I was I humiliated by the wet drippings that slid onto the rubber sheet. I stood up, but the pain, the pressure made my legs shake. I slipped to the floor. "Hurry up now," she said, "get right to the toilet. " I could see the brown liquid trickling down my legs. It must not get on the carpet, not on Christmas, I knew. I crawled and pulled myself into the bathroom, up on the cold clean toilet seat, and exploded out the brown water, a volcano of waste matter, a sickly sweet noxious gaseous smell. The pain subsided and I rocked myself back and forth, shivering from cold and sweating at the same time; I waited for what I knew was the second wave of water deeper down, higher inside me, spasms that seemed to make me want to vomit from the pain and another explosion-the world turning into earth- colored pools, mud and rain and the dangerous wastes mixing in the white bowl like the first days of creation, before the amoeba, before the paramecium, when the entire globe was swirling dirt. At last the pain subsided. I sat quietly, dazed, on the seat, disgusting, repulsive, foul-smelling. I rested above what had been in my bowels, glad that it could no longer make me sick, urge my fever higher, spread new germs and complications through my blood system. I wanted to trail my fingers in the bowl, to touch, to bring to my mouth what had been mine, soon to be flushed away to join the cosmic rot from which new life, not my life, would spring. Gretchen had somehow saved me. I called to her. "I'm done," I said and she came. "Clean yourself," she ordered. I could see from her face how unpleasant it was in the bathroom with me. I used paper after paper. "Don't waste it. Use each piece thoroughly, " she insisted. She was at the sink, cleaning the nozzle and the bag, putting it away for next time. Remnants of the wet brown mud stuck to my bottom, got on my fingers and under my nails. She ran warm water in the tub and ordered me in. She bathed me, soaping every crevice, using the bristles of the nailbrush on the mouth of my sore anus. She dried me and put clean pajamas on me and a bathrobe and my pink slippers with fuzzy pompons, and I was shining inside and out. I was exhausted and somehow happy. It was over, and if my temperature went down tomorrow it would not have to be done again. "Back in bed," she said. I could tell she was pleased with me. She had forgiven me for crying. I had, after all, made it to the toilet. "Gretchen," I said, "couldn't we keep the Christmas scene up just one day after Christmas?" She hesitated a moment. A special softness came over her face. "Just one day," she said, "just this Christmas. I don't promise for next year." I loved her then, she was my protector, my universe was bounded by the compass of her moods, by her memories of the hardness she had endured as a child. I loved her as my savior who would not let me die, who saw to it that I ate and was clean and clothed, and who nourished me at her dry breasts, even if in fact she hardly ever touched me, except for cleaning purposes. She had knitted mittens for me with little blue flowers marching across the knuckles. She had made me a cap to match, and I knew, I trusted she would always do her duty. She was that kind of woman. My brother came to the door. "Read to me, Gretchen," he said. "I'm tired of being alone." "Don't come in here," she shouted. "You don't need to catch another thing or you'll be carried away to the Lord before the spring thaw. " My brother stood uncertain in the doorway. "I'm coming, " said Gretchen, and I knew as always she would leave me for him.

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