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Not to worry, says Gwen. “Allow me to demonstrate.”
You can add cocktail sauce, “if you’re a boor who likes hookers and cigars,” she says in her husky instruction. She instead opts for a few drops of mignonette.
Then: “It’s like making love to the ocean.” The two women hold eye contact as the plaid-clad Gwen instructs Ratched to open her lips, brings the brimming shell to the woman’s mouth, and tips it over.
“Now swallow,” she says. And we all obey.
Once I had taken a cold shower after seeing this vignette from the Netflix series Ratched, I was able to think again. And what I thought was that perhaps there was something more to the interaction and its impact across Twitter. The women lived in California in 1947 when queerness could cost one her job, if not her life. They feared even holding hands or sitting too close in the same car. But within the same world, they could engage in oyster porn in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
My own acquaintance with the oyster started off memorable—hot and vulnerable, in public, and somehow profoundly intimate. The oyster covers most of your face when you eat it, and it’s usually alive when you do. It can keep a secret. In it, there is something uniquely unspoken between the eater and the eaten.
It is rare to have a bond so private with something you eat, so selfish in its indulgence, and, perhaps because your eyes flutter close as the plump oyster slips into your mouth—so impervious to public perception.
I never say never, but I have trouble with the initiation.
That day, however, my college orientation group and I settled around a wobbly table at a restaurant tucked in one of those colonial side streets. It was one-dollar oyster hour. THEY AREN’T GONNA EAT THEMSELVES was chalk-scrawled in lemony yellow on a sandwich board next to me.
When the server brought out a tray of shaved ice, my peers looked on, nonchalant and delighted. I slipped on a facade that I too, was well-acquainted with the mollusk. I wasn’t about to give an arbitrary group of strangers at my liberal arts college the benefit of knowing that I—the only Indian girl I had seen on campus thus far—would be performing the act for the first time.
I snuck peeks at the nice girl with a Chanel handbag and a minimalist balayage. Her name was Lily. When she introduced herself—a screenwriter’s daughter from Los Angeles, studying marketing—in a drawl, leisurely and low, during one of our earlier icebreakers, I wanted to hear more of her talk; I wanted her to hear mine.
Sat across from Lily at the restaurant, I felt moved to follow her lead and grab a shell. The little fork.
Then I tossed my neck back to let the crustacean slide into my mouth, a brief, brisk flash of vulnerability washing over me. I returned eye-level to our table—an Olympic swimmer finishing the race, coming up for air.
Despite the oyster’s cool taste, I felt warm, and then feverish because Lily was looking at me. Her symmetrical eyebrows were raised ever-so-slightly. And just like that, I knew she knew—it was my first time.
I had just eaten an oyster. I was ready to own a name-brand purse. I was prepared to study marketing. I sat up straight and placed my palms on the table.
And as I bathed in the minty glow of whatever this was, I reached for another half shell. As though I had done it forever, my fingers squeezed a lemon wedge onto the little creature staring at me. The small fork loosened him from his shell.
This time, I tasted it. Like a melting pat of minerally, nippy butter bursting in the back of my throat. Mind you, it could have been terrible and I wouldn’t have stopped eating. Lily’s eyes crinkled as she grinned at me, gesturing to her mouth. Some of the briny liquid had trickled out the corner of my lips. I caught it with the back of my hand as it formed a droplet on my chin.
She transferred before I ever saw her again. But on that September evening, as everyone else chatted about, I’m unsure what, in those furtive moments, I knew she’d keep my secret.
The thrill from the evening—Lily, the oyster, Lily’s eyebrows—didn’t leave me for hours, even days. I thought of it that night, sharing a cigarette with my new roommates, feet hanging off the dock, hovering over the crisp, toxic Charles River. I thought of it throughout my first journalism class, the memory intruding as we went around in infinite introduction loops. I thought of it weeks later, while drunkenly fooling around with a boy after one too many swigs of green apple vodka.
Something about the discovery of the oyster’s flesh, the patience needed to harvest it from its shell, and the fortitude required to enjoy it, feels intrinsically feminine.
“An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life,” the food writer M.F.K Fisher says in her enchanting 1941 book Consider the Oyster. She pays tribute to its cool oddness; the eternal, environmental perils it copes with to survive; its ability to satisfy while hardly filling you up.
My memory of that first time—over six years ago now—echoes that special frisson of noticing your femininity. And indeed, as Fisher describes, even as it gratifies, it leaves you with the unshakeable feeling that there’s so much still unexplored.
Over the years, I’ve become more confident in my oyster-tasting prowess. I had an especially brackish one at a rocky beach in Rhode Island. I had seven in Maine while watching a lighthouse at dusk. Four in Bushwick, Brooklyn this summer on a crowded sidewalk as a friend’s sharp elbow jabbed into my side. And a jarringly sweet one in Southern California after being pummeled thoroughly by a frigid tide.
Last winter, my girlfriend Shelby and I drove from Massachusetts to North Carolina trying to make sense of what we were doing with our lives. We met in college my sophomore year.
Mile four-hundred-and-something, puffy eyes met puffy eyes. Shelby tapped to the radio’s Rocking Around the Christmas Tree on the steering wheel. It was difficult not to smile when I looked at her, golden hair everywhere. She snapped off half of the double dark chocolate Milano cookie I had just slipped in her mouth, and, gaze trained on the road, leaned over and snuck it in between my lips.
University had come to a close and everything else, uncertain and terrifying, lay before us. But in small moments like these, it felt almost manageable.
One dawn, on the overcast south shore of Virginia, she and I pumped gas. We hadn’t talked for hours, coming off the type of quarrel you have with someone you’ve been with in a metal box for tens of hours. Our eyes met over the roof of the car. She tilted her head, softening. We rounded the bumper and kissed. But then we noticed three broad-shouldered silhouettes standing in the distance. Watching. We let go like we’d touched a hot pan.
We were strangers to this town. We shouldn’t be so lax, we said as we drove off.
That night, we had dinner at the only open restaurant on Chincoteague Island in the off-season, by the water. The low ceiling on its top floor felt at once claustrophobic and safe. Like second nature now, I plucked an especially small oyster from its shell and flipped it around. When I squeezed the lemon, it singed a cuticle on my thumb and I winced. Shelby sipped a local stout and zoomed in on the Maps app. I resisted the urge to reach across and wipe the drop of beer in the corner of her lip.
Instead, I passed her the prepared half-shell, and her mouth turned up into a slow smile.
My First Time Eating an Oyster Was an Act of Queer Intimacy
In this personal essay, writer Isha Marathe writes how her love of oysters grew alongside her queer identity. For her, the act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness. And there’s no better example of that than her first time.I.
In a head-in-the-clouds seaside restaurant, all noir and glass and storm, a waiter places a tray of green, pearly oysters between Nurse Mildred Ratched and her colleague, Gwendolyn Briggs. Ratched looks on, unsure what to do with these watery creatures.Not to worry, says Gwen. “Allow me to demonstrate.”
You can add cocktail sauce, “if you’re a boor who likes hookers and cigars,” she says in her husky instruction. She instead opts for a few drops of mignonette.
Then: “It’s like making love to the ocean.” The two women hold eye contact as the plaid-clad Gwen instructs Ratched to open her lips, brings the brimming shell to the woman’s mouth, and tips it over.
“Now swallow,” she says. And we all obey.
Once I had taken a cold shower after seeing this vignette from the Netflix series Ratched, I was able to think again. And what I thought was that perhaps there was something more to the interaction and its impact across Twitter. The women lived in California in 1947 when queerness could cost one her job, if not her life. They feared even holding hands or sitting too close in the same car. But within the same world, they could engage in oyster porn in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
My own acquaintance with the oyster started off memorable—hot and vulnerable, in public, and somehow profoundly intimate. The oyster covers most of your face when you eat it, and it’s usually alive when you do. It can keep a secret. In it, there is something uniquely unspoken between the eater and the eaten.
It is rare to have a bond so private with something you eat, so selfish in its indulgence, and, perhaps because your eyes flutter close as the plump oyster slips into your mouth—so impervious to public perception.
II.
I had my first oyster in Boston, days before I started undergrad. I had steered clear of them because I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about their texture. I have trouble when mayonnaise jiggles, when the hard skin on chicken feet has to be peeled off the gelatinous cartilage.I never say never, but I have trouble with the initiation.
That day, however, my college orientation group and I settled around a wobbly table at a restaurant tucked in one of those colonial side streets. It was one-dollar oyster hour. THEY AREN’T GONNA EAT THEMSELVES was chalk-scrawled in lemony yellow on a sandwich board next to me.
When the server brought out a tray of shaved ice, my peers looked on, nonchalant and delighted. I slipped on a facade that I too, was well-acquainted with the mollusk. I wasn’t about to give an arbitrary group of strangers at my liberal arts college the benefit of knowing that I—the only Indian girl I had seen on campus thus far—would be performing the act for the first time.
I snuck peeks at the nice girl with a Chanel handbag and a minimalist balayage. Her name was Lily. When she introduced herself—a screenwriter’s daughter from Los Angeles, studying marketing—in a drawl, leisurely and low, during one of our earlier icebreakers, I wanted to hear more of her talk; I wanted her to hear mine.
Sat across from Lily at the restaurant, I felt moved to follow her lead and grab a shell. The little fork.
Then I tossed my neck back to let the crustacean slide into my mouth, a brief, brisk flash of vulnerability washing over me. I returned eye-level to our table—an Olympic swimmer finishing the race, coming up for air.
Despite the oyster’s cool taste, I felt warm, and then feverish because Lily was looking at me. Her symmetrical eyebrows were raised ever-so-slightly. And just like that, I knew she knew—it was my first time.
I had just eaten an oyster. I was ready to own a name-brand purse. I was prepared to study marketing. I sat up straight and placed my palms on the table.
And as I bathed in the minty glow of whatever this was, I reached for another half shell. As though I had done it forever, my fingers squeezed a lemon wedge onto the little creature staring at me. The small fork loosened him from his shell.
This time, I tasted it. Like a melting pat of minerally, nippy butter bursting in the back of my throat. Mind you, it could have been terrible and I wouldn’t have stopped eating. Lily’s eyes crinkled as she grinned at me, gesturing to her mouth. Some of the briny liquid had trickled out the corner of my lips. I caught it with the back of my hand as it formed a droplet on my chin.
She transferred before I ever saw her again. But on that September evening, as everyone else chatted about, I’m unsure what, in those furtive moments, I knew she’d keep my secret.
The thrill from the evening—Lily, the oyster, Lily’s eyebrows—didn’t leave me for hours, even days. I thought of it that night, sharing a cigarette with my new roommates, feet hanging off the dock, hovering over the crisp, toxic Charles River. I thought of it throughout my first journalism class, the memory intruding as we went around in infinite introduction loops. I thought of it weeks later, while drunkenly fooling around with a boy after one too many swigs of green apple vodka.
III.
Some 164,000 years ago, deep in some murky cave, someone cracked open a purplish rock, snaked their tongue in, and sucked lightly. Out trickled some sandy bits, probably. Nothing substantial, but the promise of it. They stretched their tongue further in—wriggling—until it grazed the suspect meat of a bivalve.Something about the discovery of the oyster’s flesh, the patience needed to harvest it from its shell, and the fortitude required to enjoy it, feels intrinsically feminine.
“An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life,” the food writer M.F.K Fisher says in her enchanting 1941 book Consider the Oyster. She pays tribute to its cool oddness; the eternal, environmental perils it copes with to survive; its ability to satisfy while hardly filling you up.
My memory of that first time—over six years ago now—echoes that special frisson of noticing your femininity. And indeed, as Fisher describes, even as it gratifies, it leaves you with the unshakeable feeling that there’s so much still unexplored.
Over the years, I’ve become more confident in my oyster-tasting prowess. I had an especially brackish one at a rocky beach in Rhode Island. I had seven in Maine while watching a lighthouse at dusk. Four in Bushwick, Brooklyn this summer on a crowded sidewalk as a friend’s sharp elbow jabbed into my side. And a jarringly sweet one in Southern California after being pummeled thoroughly by a frigid tide.
Last winter, my girlfriend Shelby and I drove from Massachusetts to North Carolina trying to make sense of what we were doing with our lives. We met in college my sophomore year.
Mile four-hundred-and-something, puffy eyes met puffy eyes. Shelby tapped to the radio’s Rocking Around the Christmas Tree on the steering wheel. It was difficult not to smile when I looked at her, golden hair everywhere. She snapped off half of the double dark chocolate Milano cookie I had just slipped in her mouth, and, gaze trained on the road, leaned over and snuck it in between my lips.
University had come to a close and everything else, uncertain and terrifying, lay before us. But in small moments like these, it felt almost manageable.
One dawn, on the overcast south shore of Virginia, she and I pumped gas. We hadn’t talked for hours, coming off the type of quarrel you have with someone you’ve been with in a metal box for tens of hours. Our eyes met over the roof of the car. She tilted her head, softening. We rounded the bumper and kissed. But then we noticed three broad-shouldered silhouettes standing in the distance. Watching. We let go like we’d touched a hot pan.
We were strangers to this town. We shouldn’t be so lax, we said as we drove off.
That night, we had dinner at the only open restaurant on Chincoteague Island in the off-season, by the water. The low ceiling on its top floor felt at once claustrophobic and safe. Like second nature now, I plucked an especially small oyster from its shell and flipped it around. When I squeezed the lemon, it singed a cuticle on my thumb and I winced. Shelby sipped a local stout and zoomed in on the Maps app. I resisted the urge to reach across and wipe the drop of beer in the corner of her lip.
Instead, I passed her the prepared half-shell, and her mouth turned up into a slow smile.
