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Every night before I go to bed I make sure that none of the knives is missing. I have thirty-eight knives: fifteen butter knives with silver handles, fifteen butter knives with blue handles, two meat knives, three bread knives, two butcher knives, and one knife that looks blunt, but is actually sharp as a rondel. I keep all of the knives in the cutlery drawer, away from the forks and spoons—just to be safe, really.

I count the knives each night before I shower. Before I squeeze my hair into a shower cap and wrap myself in a towel, I run downstairs and count the knives. I used to only check before bed, which I thought was enough, but then I saw Psycho and I realized that you can never be too safe. I check before I get into bed as well, long before I even think of pulling the duvet over my legs and wrapping my hair into a snake-braid.

I’m not afraid of being cut, stabbed, or shanked. It’s just that I don’t like surprises. I am afraid of the feeling that bubbles up like a radioactive fizz inside my chest at the first thought of surprise. For my tenth birthday, my mother tried to throw me a surprise party. She knew I didn’t like surprises, but she thought that maybe I would be so overcome with gratitude that I would, well, act “normally” for once.

She led me through the garage, her voice cracking with excitement. I walked into the house to find the lights dimmed and the shades drawn. It was quiet, but I heard the nervous pant of heavy breathing and thought it was a gang hiding in my living room with switchblades in hand, ready to rape me. We had just watched West Side Story in drama club, so I knew all about the dangers of gangs.

I pressed myself against the cool walls and squeezed my eyes shut; parents and friends exploded in a frenzy of pastel party horns and reams of tissue-paper streamers. I ran into my room.

Eventually the chicken tenders grew cold. My mother watched all of my friends leave the house toting the gifts I had refused to open lest the colorful paper conceal a dangerous surprise. Untouched boxes of Chia Pets and Ouija boards went back to dry rot on windowsills until they were re-gifted to someone else. From my window, I saw Jillian and Mika doubled over, laughing at some cruel joke. Their mood rings glinted in the sun.

That afternoon, my mother insisted that I get a pair of Jellies—then maybe Jillian and Mika would invite me over for a sleepover. Wouldn’t I like to paint my fingernails and stay up all night making friendship bracelets? I told her I preferred my Keds.

Outside my window, the girls walked down the road hand in hand, their mood rings a swirl of soft purples and blues. My mother walked up the stairs, her body heavy. I saw her shake her head in disappointment as she slid a melted rectangle of ice cream cake, the candle stubs dripping wax on the icing, through the barely open door.

* * *

After I watched When Harry Met Sally for the first time at fourteen, I decided that I would never find someone who could love me. Harry and Sally got into bed as easy as that—no knife counting, no lining up cutlery on the counter until each blade was parallel and only centimeters from the next. Sex had to be easy, not ritualistic.

The scenario played out in my mind every day. Quietly asking my partner to stop in the middle of sex, I would smile awkwardly, wrap myself in a cotton sheet, wipe myself clean of sweat, and tiptoe into the kitchen, count knives on the counter, then crawl back into bed. By then he would inevitably be snoring, back turned towards me, face sullen even in sleep. In the morning I would ask if he liked creamer in his coffee, and he would say that I knew damn well he only liked sugar. Quietly I would ask him not to snap at me; he would say, Well, maybe if we could just have sex for once, nice, uninterrupted sex, he wouldn’t be so goddamn tense. And I would suggest afternoon sex and absentmindedly pour creamer into his coffee. He would drink the coffee, be annoyed by the creamer, wash the cup, dry it roughly, shower, pack, and leave for good.

I was destined to be alone.

The irony of the phallic knives was not wasted on me. I also knew that no other girl my age counted knives. It was difficult for my family to talk to me about it. They didn’t want to embarrass me and close me up until I retreated to my room, where I would play endless games of solitaire with a deck of old casino cards.

My mother, ever-determined, decided to show me the problem. She had recently begun creative writing classes at the Jewish Community Center, and she was learning the “show, don’t tell” method. I was one of her characters; she was the omniscient narrator. One night she came home with a how-to guide on human body maturation—nearly three hundred pages of cartoon diagrams and accompanying descriptions. She left it on my bed, tucked under a pile of folded laundry.

I flipped through the pages and blushed at the huge cartoon breasts that stared at me like owls’ eyes from each page, attached to buxom women smirking at a joke that I still didn’t get. I shoved The Body Book between copies of The Jewish Book of Why and Moby Dick.

At dinner, my mother asked if I had found anything special on my bed. I thanked her for folding my laundry. I didn’t dare mention The Body Book. She pursed her lips and returned to her writing exercises. I don’t think my mother quite understood me. She believed that you could scare the hiccups out of someone, that all teachers should give pop quizzes; she liked haunted houses. She was never a bully; she just said that surprise was the spice of life. I tried to correct her once—variety is the spice of life—but she stared at me blankly. “Didn’t I just say that?”

That night I crawled into bed hoping shamefacedly that, one day, maybe a bosomed caricature of myself would be found wedged into the text in chapter six. But I doubted that any of the big-bosomed cartoon girls were counting knives.

* * *

In my sophomore year of college I almost slept with a boy named Gregor. His name was actually Margolis, but he called himself Gregor Mendel, like the geneticist monk who worked with pea plants. That was actually how he introduced himself: “Call me Gregor Mendel, like the Augustinian—but I’m from Georgia the state, not Georgia the country near Transylvania.” Actually, the real Gregor Mendel was not from Georgia, he was from Austria-Hungary. But I kept quiet.

I met Gregor in the café while we both were waiting for the rotisserie chicken, whose skin was still a shiny, pasty beige. By the time the chicken had browned, Gregor had scribbled his phone number onto a napkin and slid it onto my tray. On our first date we rode the subway to a park. We played twenty questions in an awkward attempt to get to know each other. For his last question, he asked if he could kiss me. I said all right. Then I asked if he had any knives in his dorm room. He laughed, grabbed me about the waist, and said, “Of course not. What kind of person keeps knives in a dorm room?” I smiled and let him hug me, but I didn’t know what to do with my arms, so I let them dangle by my sides. When he laughed I felt his hands patting my back, like I had done a good job.

By the time we returned to the campus it began to snow in little dandruff specks. I shielded my head with my hands because my hair tangles when it gets wet. Gregor smiled as he held the door open for me, and I stepped in. His room was tidy, his bed sheets folded into pristine angles, like sandwich squares, his books in ascending order on his shelf. He had no knives anywhere that I could see. He shut the door behind him softly.

“What do you want to do?” he whispered, pulling off his knit hat. I thought it was a stupid question, because we both knew why we were there, standing in the middle of his dorm room, alone and hot in our down jackets.

I said, “Too much description ruins everything,” which is a line from a very sexy poem I once read by a poet who went to a college that I used to dream of attending. It made me sound exotic and cryptic. I took off my jacket. He took off his scarf slowly, licking his chapped lips. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a leather wallet and his dorm key. He reached in again and pulled out a Swiss Army knife, with the corkscrew poking out like a broken thumb. There was a tiny rubber stopper against the tip so it didn’t cut his thigh. I stared at the little crimson knife.

“How many blades does it have?”

“Four, I guess. Yeah, four. A file, a clipper, a knife, a corkscrew. I got it in Eagle Scouts, for selling the most caramel popcorn tins in the troop.”

I nodded, and slipped my arms back into my jacket.

“Is everything okay?”

I nodded again, slowly, sort of sad that I had almost slept with a boy who carried around a Swiss Army knife—only marginally better than a switchblade.

“Gregor Mendel, I’m really sorry. I have to go.”

He stared at me, wringing his scarf in his hands. As I walked down the hallway he called, “What did I say wrong?”

It was a very quiet moment.

I walked back to my room and pulled off my mittens. I didn’t leave Gregor because I thought he had more knives hidden away in his rectangle drawers of plaid boxers. It was just that one Swiss Army knife had too many possibilities.

I prepared a cup of ramen noodles in a Nalgene with warm water from the sink. The water was not hot enough, so the peas were dry and crunchy. The noodles were too long, so I cut them with the one white plastic knife I keep hidden in my copy of The Collected Works of Emily Dickinson. I read somewhere that Emily Dickinson was also afraid of knives. She probably died a virgin.