They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

  “So you haven’t orgasmed with Andres?”

  “No,” Maria said, a little taken aback. She thought Rocky hadn’t been paying attention when she’d mentioned it at the newsstand. “Well, maybe once? I don’t know. The sex isn’t good. I think I’m doing something wrong.”

  “Hmm.” Rocky looked at the seat in front of her. The shiny yellow cover of Cosmopolitan peeked out of the sleeve like a child peeking into his parents’ open door.

  “Do you have any suggestions?” Maria had grown accustomed to Rocky playing the role of sex connoisseur. Rocky told Maria she’d had sex during the summer after eighth grade, before her first year at Bell Seminary. By the time she was sixteen, she said she’d already tried everything—at least, mostly everything, Maria suspected. Some things were a little too embarrassing to ask about and confirm.

  “Well—are you able to do it yourself?”

  “Like if I can make myself orgasm on my own?”

  “Yes,” Rocky said, not having blinked.

  “Then yeah. I do every time with Bob.”

  Rocky uncrossed and recrossed her legs. Bob was Maria’s nickname for the ivory lipstick-shaped vibrator that Rocky had bought her. Just like her birth control, it was a recent acquisition. Rocky had called Maria one morning and told her to meet her that day in the West Village. Maria had been intimidated when they paused outside the store with three descending steps leading to the entrance, but Rocky strode inside with confidence. She navigated expertly around the neon-blue dildos and handheld toys that looked like they were made of the same material as the jelly sandals Maria used to wear in elementary school. But when Rocky picked Bob up, an egg-shaped piece of plastic no bigger than a shot glass, Maria was disappointed. It didn’t come with bunny ears or cat whiskers or a ribbed-for-maximum-pleasure shaft, and there weren’t even exotic words printed on the box, labios mojados or el gordo—tantalizing with images of men in leather thongs. It wasn’t an exciting color; it was colorless, really, bleak and miserable in comparison to the Sanrio cuteness of the Jack Rabbit, and so meager and small when held hand to hand with the waterproof, quadruple-speed Hulk.

  “This is the one you want,” Rocky promised, and Maria said nothing. She watched as Rocky placed the package on the counter and asked for a pack of double-A batteries.

  But it was only because of Bob that Maria learned that sex had been holding out on her. It started as a peculiar tightness that surged from the insides of her thighs to the very top of her pelvis, and soon she was straining almost as much as she did in phys ed class whenever they were forced to lift weights. The discomfort stung, it burned down to the bone, and even though Maria couldn’t register it as anything other than pain, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. So intense was the sensation that she switched the vibrator off a number of times before she decided she had finished, and even then, she hadn’t been sure of what exactly had happened, only that the bathroom mat was drenched beneath her, and Maria no longer had to pee. For minutes she sat there, with Bob clasped in one hand, and hoped nobody had heard her. “Whoa,” she mouthed audibly, and when nobody came out to knock on the bathroom door, Maria remained on the floor, scrubbing the mat with balled pieces of toilet paper, grateful that she had the sense to try out the toy when everyone was asleep and there were still hours until morning during which a wet thing could become dry. She never doubted Rocky again, at least not when it came to sex, and when Rocky told her to go to the clinic, Maria instantly obeyed.

  “Why don’t you use Bob with him?”

  “Is that what you do with Matthew? Have Matthew and Maserati met?” Maria laughed as she imagined the buttoned-up boy from the all-boys Catholic high school whom Rocky sometimes invited over to her apartment. She imagined him examining Rocky’s vibrator, his big blue eyes widening, and then turning into a terse little squint like they did the only time Maria had met him. He had frowned at their plates of french fries at Patrick’s. He then taught Maria the phrases “refined carbohydrate” and “highly processed food.” Sometimes those phrases rankled in her mind now, like charms from a wristlet, like the Tiffany hearts engraved in capital letters that were so popular at school.

  “They have,” Rocky said, breathily. “Anyway, if you’re unsatisfied, I’d say to bring Bob into it. Keep going at it, even if he’s already done. Remember,” she said, and then paused to mouth the word sex before continuing in a normal voice. “It’s for women, too.”

  “You’re right,” Maria said.

  Rocky’s face tore into a smile. The ends of her mouth reached up toward the lights of the cabin that instructed them to keep their seat belts on in preparation for landing.

  “I know,” Rocky said.

  Moments later, Maria stood to pull her bag from the overhead compartment, but the flight attendant beat her to it. As the pilot and flight attendants muttered cheery goodbyes and the girls walked off the aircraft, she considered what Rocky said. Sex was to be enjoyed, sure, but it was Rocky’s suggestion to give Andres a tutorial of Bob that gave her pause. She knew it’d be impossible to explain to Andres that she owned a vibrator, never mind tell him that she was sexually unsatisfied. Even that word—unsatisfied. He’d call her a slut, like Ricky had. Somehow Rocky was able to reconcile these things—namely, having sex and enjoying it—but Maria knew she couldn’t, and her Bob would never meet her Andres. In all of her life, she was used to this separation of things, and it was at Bell Seminary where she first saw the wisdom in the fragmented whole, how two things were sometimes better off when they were kept at a distance: Rocky and Karen, Bell Seminary and Queens, now Andres and Bob. Andres had already told her the first time they had sex that he didn’t believe she’d been a virgin. You didn’t even bleed, he said.

  “Rocky,” Maria said as they raced down the hallway toward the gate, giddy from regaining their ability to run after so many hours trapped in their seats. It was good to be on land again, to take in air that was freshly circulated. Maria emptied her lungs with a long sigh, and when they stopped at the concourse, Maria stood close to Rocky and lowered her voice. “Do you think it’s possible to tell when someone isn’t a virgin? Like is there something about them—physically—that other people can see?” Maria brought her hand up to her lip and tore at the skin. “This morning, my mom asked if I’ve had sex yet.”

  “Your mom asked you that?” Rocky’s eyes darted across Maria’s face, like she was trying to look at all of her at once. Little wrinkles like stitches appeared between her eyebrows, as if she were trying to figure out a difficult math equation. “My mom would never ask me that.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Maria said. “My mom isn’t cool like yours.”

  Rocky didn’t answer, but the look of concentration wasn’t gone from her face. Maria wondered if she’d said something wrong. Rocky’s lower lip quivered and her face was blanched.

  “Rocky?”

  Rocky leaned toward her conspiratorially.

  “They say when a girl’s legs get fat in the thighs, you can tell she’s having sex,” Rocky said. “But I think that’s stupid. My thighs aren’t fat!”

  Maria resisted looking down at her own legs. There was no space between her thighs like Rocky’s, and no matter how lightly she stepped on the ground, her legs always rippled like a seismic wave.

  Beyond Rocky’s shoulder, Rocky’s mother came toward them, down the carpeted gate. In her long maxi dress, the pleats swayed as she brought one calf in front of the other, and Maria saw now that the pattern wasn’t just oblong shapes, but a series of intricate white feathers. On her wrist was a single gold bangle, no wider than a spaghetti noodle. Rocky’s mother was slightly dizzying to look at. She gave off an ethereal air that made her seem more like a cutout from a magazine than a real, breathing person. Her crêpe de Chine silk and chunky sunglasses made her impervious to categorization. Rocky’s mother belonged in a genus of her own, and as Maria watched her approach, the wheels of her luggage pattering on the carpet so softly, Maria knew Rocky wouldn’t notice.

 
“Your mom,” Maria said.

  Immediately, Rocky ceased speaking, but she didn’t turn around. With a grin on her face that looked deadly, Rocky walked forward through the concourse, past the glittering newsstands, ignoring the moving walkways and barging toward ground transportation. Maria hurried to follow, listening for the footsteps of Rocky’s mother, unsure if they’d lost her. As if she were only floating behind them, she didn’t make a single noise.

  CHAPTER 10

  At the hotel reception desk, engulfed in a half dome of bronze ceiling carvings, Maria stared out the glass doors at the enormous fountain shooting spires of water into the desert sky. The trio was splitting up.

  “One for me and one for you,” Rocky’s mom said, handing over a miniature envelope containing the room key card. “Just make sure you’re back to the hotel by midnight.”

  Maria watched with awe as Rocky’s mother went into the elevator with the bellhop, their bags stacked atop one another on the elegant brass-handled dolly. She wore her hair in a stylish bob. Even in the parched heat, Rocky’s mother wore a jacket lined with faux fur. Maria wouldn’t have known it was fake if Rocky hadn’t already told her that her mother refused to wear anything made from real animals’ skin. “Your mom is unreal,” Maria said as the elevator doors closed. Maria and Rocky were alone now in the immense Vegas lobby. On the walls, they saw their images reflected back at them in a clean shade of gold.

  “She’s so cool.”

  “Stop fucking saying that,” Rocky snapped. The pupils of her eyes had thinned. “I get it. You don’t have to say it every five seconds.”

  “It was a compliment.” Maria shrank. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, it’s annoying. So stop it.” Rocky walked toward the enormous revolving glass doors. She pushed with her flat palm, and even though Maria could see they would both fit in one turn, Rocky had charged ahead. Maria waited for the next rotation to jump in.

  Outside, Maria wasn’t prepared for what she was seeing. Not only was the sun brighter than she’d ever seen it in New York, it also left so much more exposed. As she crossed the curb, past the hotel’s winding esplanade, where cars kept dumping passengers and zooming off, her mouth hung open in awe. Women in pink feathers and elaborate headdresses walked topsy-turvy around the curb with eyes that stayed fixed like porcelain dolls’. Outdoor casinos and their boozy patrons poured onto the street. Stands that looked like they should sell pretzels and hot dogs exclusively sold piña coladas. Everywhere, something was glittering or lighting up, and people walked around with sixty-ounce plastic cups that looked like they should be filled with soda but were filled with alcohol. Strangest of all, hordes of men were gathered on street corners, slapping what looked like business cards on their wrists and whispering things that Maria didn’t understand. When one of them handed her a card with a picture of Jean, a woman wearing a bra that was clearly three sizes too small for her, Maria understood.

  Everything, Maria thought, was laid bare here. Everything screamed to be looked at. It was so different from New York, where people always looked away. When people got into fights, you kept moving. When people passed out on subway staircases, you stepped right over them. Here in Vegas, people took their time, stopped in the middle of the street to glance up at billboards, to banter with girls with airbrushed faces. The heat rose up as if she were standing directly on a rock, and Maria felt like she could see right through it, with none of New York’s blurry humidity to obscure the view. She was dazzled by the grotesque facades, the semblances of places she had only seen in photos and knew existed elsewhere in the world—the Taj Mahal, the vast Greek coliseum, and most endearing of all, the New York–style town house. Maria and Rocky looked one way and looked the other, over and over again, with nothing to discourage them except their own shyness. Eventually Maria’s eyes started to burn.

  “I brought an extra pair,” Rocky finally said when she saw how Maria’s face had folded into a million wrinkles, like the petaled layers of a rose. She handed Maria her sunglasses. They were circular and purple, a translucent violet, with delicate golden rims. With the sunglasses on, Maria’s face opened up again, and she felt a tremendous relief. In one minute she was right in the furnace, and in the other, she was peering at it through the oven door. Even a minute later, when the oversize frames started to slide down her nose, Maria thought she would never take them off again.

  Maria snapped photos as Rocky paraded in front of ivory sculptures, as she crossed the boulevard’s elevated bridge. The sun made everything clear in the frame and made Rocky small in the glittering sky. How everything was so static and plastic was conveyed tenfold in the pictures she took, and later, when Maria would upload the files to her computer, Rocky would comment on how much it looked like she had been standing in front of a green screen—the contours were so strangely defined. But Maria also noticed something else in those photos, which was that they were all so flattering. She noticed how Rocky’s hair always fell at the perfect angle, how she didn’t have to bring her hand to her hip and jut out her elbow so that her arm wouldn’t expand. There were so many things Rocky had—and now here was another thing. The simple luxury of knowing that no matter which way you looked at them, Rocky’s arms looked great.

  When they got back to the hotel room, it was only nine, well before Rocky’s curfew, but the sun had made them exhausted, and after walking the Strip at least three full times, they didn’t know what else to do. On the street, they had collected an impressive number of escort cards, and now Rocky held the whole stack in her right hand as they entered the suite.

  “Where’s your mom?” Maria kicked off her shoes, following Rocky’s lead. Then she remembered how Rocky had reacted earlier in the lobby. “Actually, whatever.”

  “She said she was spending the rest of the day at the spa,” Rocky said.

  “Oh,” Maria said, not wanting to interrogate further.

  They went toward their side of the suite, across the hallway from Rocky’s mother’s bedroom. On one of the queen-size beds, Rocky arranged the stack of cards as if dealing a game of blackjack. But since both sides featured photos and prices, and sometimes a different girl on each side, Maria thought of it more like flipping coins than playing cards, both heads and tails equally as interesting to look at—and at fifty-fifty, just as likely to be played.

  “Let’s call one of them,” Rocky said, looking down at the nude girls sticking up from beneath her knees.

  “Yes,” Maria said. “You do it.”

  Rocky dialed the number into her cell phone as Maria looked on nervously. If there was someone best positioned for breaking the rules, it was Rocky, who didn’t have to worry about keeping her grades above a certain average in order to keep her scholarship money. She waited as the phone rang.

  “Kara?”

  “Hey there.”

  Rocky threw her phone down so violently that Maria was convinced she had broken it, and as she leaned over to pick it up from the corner of the mattress where it had landed, she looked at the screen to see if it was still intact. She pressed down on the red button with the telephone icon, just to make sure the call had ended.

  “It was actually Kara!” Rocky could hardly get a word out, the laughter was bubbling out of her nose. “Seriously! It was actually her!”

  Maria was nonplussed. “What else were you expecting?”

  “What do you mean?” Rocky glared, the smile gone from her face. “As if you would’ve ever called her!”

  Maria tried to suppress a giggle, but it was too late. Rocky saw her opening and took it.

  “What were you expecting?” Rocky imitated Maria in falsetto. “You’re an asshole, you know that, right?”

  Maria was laughing now, her hand over her face to shield her eyes. She knew Rocky was right; it was a dare, one that Maria hadn’t expected her to act on. Rocky was still shouting when a pillow smacked against Maria’s raised elbow, and then, a few seconds later, another one against the side of her head.

  “I would’
ve called, too,” Maria lied. Finally, she picked up the pillow that hit her last and hurled it as hard as she could in Rocky’s direction. “But you’re the one who wanted to talk to a literal whore.”

  The pillow flew about a foot above Rocky’s head and crashed into the wall, where it grazed the bottom corner of a mounted painting that hung to the right of the bedpost. As the painting trembled on its axis, crawling up the wall from left to right in deliberate, furious movements, Rocky and Maria looked on like statues. When the painting finally stopped shivering, Rocky whipped around toward Maria. Her face—pretty, bare, her mouth open with words to come tumbling out—filled Maria with such an acute feeling of dread that she felt all her organs rise up to her ears, pushing themselves onto the lungs, which had tightened together like a set of balled fists.

  “Lucky,” Rocky said. “You would’ve owed me a thousand dollars.” Maria kept her gaze on the painting that she nearly unhinged. It looked like a bad imitation of a Monet.

  “There’s no way that thing is worth a thousand dollars.”

  “You’re right. More like five or ten.”

  Maria looked away from her friend, from the painting, and her gaze fell on the other side of the room. Outside the window she could see the glare of billboards from the fronts of hotels, black silhouettes of buildings against the purple night, rooms with curtains drawn. Maria tried to imagine Kara, her crotch spilling out of her G-string, answering Rocky’s phone call with one hand while she shaved her ankle with the other.