When She Was Good

by Tristan Taormino

  Pulling away, she said, “My name is Sybil Forsythe. My husband bought this house for me in 1867, as a wedding present. I loved it too much to leave when I died. I’m so glad you came back here; it means you love it too. Well, either that or you love me too much to leave,” she said, giving Elaine a squeeze.

  “I do love it,” Elaine said. “I’m going to buy it.” Sybil seemed sad, as she moved back and looked at Elaine.

  “Look, I told you, I do love you; it’s not just the house that I want, it’s you too!” Elaine said. Her words didn’t seem to change Sybil’s expression.

  “It’s okay, I won’t buy the house if you don’t want me to. I can keep renting. I’m sorry. It’s your house; I know it’s yours. I promise I won’t take it away from you,” Elaine rambled on, apologizing to Sybil. She couldn’t stand to see the ghost so sad. Great, she finally started talking to Sybil and she had managed to immediately mess everything up.

  “Oh my dear, my dear. You won’t be buying the house. No, don’t look at me that way; I’m not mad at you. You asked a question earlier; do you remember? About seeing me in color.”

  “Yes, I remember. Why?” Elaine asked.

  “Why do you think you can see me in color now, when you couldn’t before? Take my hand, my love.” Elaine reached out and grasped Sybil’s hand. It felt solid.

  “You see, my beautiful Elaine, you’ve died now, too. That’s why you can see me in color, that’s why we can chat with each other.”

  “And that’s why you feel so much more solid to me?” Elaine asked. Strange, but she didn’t seem to be upset about dying. She was much more afraid of Sybil not wanting her anymore.

  “Can you feel how solid I am? You feel just as solid to me. All your sensations are heightened, aren’t they? Just think what lovemaking will be like now,” Sybil said, her lips curling into a “cat that ate the canary” grin.

  They watched the young woman lying on the bed. She was naked and beautiful. The two specters at the end of the bed embraced and lingered over a long, deep kiss.

  “Shall we?” Sybil asked.

  “Oh yes, let’s!” Elaine replied.

  Sybil took the right side of the bed and began sucking on the girl’s right breast while moving her hand down to finger her clit. Elaine took the left side of the bed, but lower down. She pushed her tongue into the girl’s pussy while pinching her left nipple. As the sleeping tenant began to moan, the ghosts’ ministrations became more zealous and insistent.

  NATIVE TONGUE

  Shanna Germain

  Everything on the menu is foreign to me. The waiter, who’s wearing a blue T-shirt with a bunch of words on it that I don’t know, don’t want to know, waits for me to order. The menu has a few words I know, too many for my liking—ceviche and coca light and burrito—but I skip those, pretend I haven’t seen them, and point only to the ones I don’t know.

  When the waiter leaves, I look out over the ocean and listen to the other diners talking in a language I don’t know. Their conversation washes past my ears, no different than ocean waves. There’s only one other white person in the place, and his Spanish carries the same musical roll and lilt of those sitting at the table with him.

  I love being in a place where I have no language. Sitting here at this open-air restaurant, waiting for Margret and not understanding a damn word, it’s heaven. There was a time when I thought I wanted to know every language in the world. That’s why I started working as a translator eight years ago. But now, I wish I could take that desire back. That’s the funny thing about languages, like learning to read. You can’t take it back. A word that you know can never become a mystery again.

  Believe it or not, of all the languages I know, one that I don’t know is Spanish. When you translate for a living Spanish is the least requested, because everyone knows it, so I never bothered to learn. And that’s why I’ve allegedly come to the least tourist-ridden beach in Costa Rica, to immerse myself in the Spanish language for three weeks.

  But in truth, I have come to meet my lover. Margret’s plane landed at noon, and barring unexpected delays or bad roads, she should arrive just in time to join me in the feast of whatever it is I just ordered. I’m dressed in a bikini swimsuit—black, to match my hair which I’m wearing in one long braid down my back—and a black and red sarong that’s wrapped around me like a strapless dress. It’s a sarong that Margret bought me last time I saw her, and I could tell from the light in her eyes that she liked the way I looked in it.

  The waiter sets down the beers I asked for—that was one thing I knew how to say. Brand names are surprisingly and sadly universal.

  He gestures to the empty seat with a flat palm. I don’t know if he’s questioning where the other half of my party is or if he’s asking if he can join me.

  “Soon,” I say, and I’m struck by my own desire to communicate even as I’m trying to leave all communication behind.

  When he leaves, I sip my beer and lean back in my chair with a sigh. I’m jet-lagged, but only a little, and the peace that the beer and the breeze and the lack of conscious understanding brings is amazing. I watch the ocean break across the sand. Out near the water, a woman in a swimsuit races the waves. She is the color of dark honey, tanned and toned against her off-white bikini. I am lost in pictures. I will my brain to shut off, to stop finding words for every color and movement and object.

  My bottle of beer is nearly gone before I feel hands tugging at my braid. The hands climb up the back of my head, and then down over my eyes. I bring my hand up to feel Margret’s thin wrist, layered over with tiny metal bracelets. They jangle when she pulls on my ear. And then she is slipping her arms around me, nearly choking me, to hug me from behind. She doesn’t care who sees, and wrapped in her car-cooled arms and her turpentine and lavender scent, I don’t either.

  Margret lets me out of her backward bear hug and sits across from me. She is long-limbed and reedy, with big blue eyes and shoulder-length curls the ruddy tint of cedar shavings. She grins at me, showing the little space between her front teeth that I love, and then tips the top of her beer bottle toward me. We click glasses, and then drink.

  “Margret,” I say.

  It is the only word, other than my own name, that can pass between us. Margret speaks only her native Dutch. Nothing else. That’s how we met earlier this year. She needed an interpreter in the States when her artwork was showing around town. Because she lived in Italy, I assumed she spoke Italian or French or even a bit of English. But no. As it turned out, she’d lived all over the world, but only spoke Dutch. A dying language, and one I didn’t speak a word of.

  Still, she was gorgeous. And her paintings were the same—landscapes so infused with emotion and light that you forgot they were just paintings of trees and clouds. She didn’t seem to think in words, only images. I found her another translator from our company, but not before I’d fallen for her. Hard. It wasn’t just her curls or that gap-toothed smile. It was the language, or lack of it.

  My partner, Helen, is a dictionary writer. Woman of all words, always the right word. In our house, every word has meaning, every word has weight, has to be picked over and examined, dead or alive, until it can be stored and measured and accounted for. “Good night,” is never just good night. It might be “Good night, I hate you” or “Good night, why won’t you feed the cat?” or “Good night, let’s fuck.” But it is never, ever just good night.

  Helen will say things like, “Did you know there is no word in the English language that is commonly used to describe a woman’s private parts?” even as I have my tongue or fingers in her private parts. Even as I bring those private parts to places that have words: wet and shudder and moan and orgasm.

  With Margret, there is no good night. There are no private parts. Well, there are private parts, but there is no worry over what to call them. There is just the way she puts her fingers to her lips and parts them for me. The way I dip my fingers in her as though she is the ocean. And there is the way she’s looking at me ri
ght now, blue eyes narrowed, her soft bare foot beneath the table, wrapped around the back of my calf.

  The waiter brings us plates of food: some kind of fish with crackers, little crab legs and calamari-like rings in a red sauce. When he has filled our table and pointed at our beers and we nod yes, Margret lets her hand rest on his arm for a brief second before he turns away. She says something in Dutch.

  I shake my head, but I can’t hide my smile, or the way her words made my insides feel. Only Margret would say something to a Costa-Rican waiter in Dutch and expect him to understand.

  After we stuff ourselves silly, feeding each other bits of seafood and slices of fruit, we go down to the beach. Margret shimmies out of her sundress, and for a few seconds, I open my mouth to tell her it’s not a nude beach. Which is a silly instinct, considering. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because she’s wearing a tiny bikini under the dress. Dark blue, only slightly darker than the ocean and the same color as her eyes. It covers her small round breasts in two triangles. Her nipples point in the triangles’ direct centers. I want to drag my tongue across the fabric like a cat.

  She takes my hand and tugs me toward the ocean. I drop my sarong to the ground on the way. We walk through the waves to the point where the water evens out. It is nearly up to our chins, but so calm that we can touch the sand at the bottom on our tiptoes and don’t get knocked over.

  Her sigh as she leans back into the warm water is one I recognize. It’s a sigh of pleasure. I join her as we lean back and float, our faces to the sky. There is no sound but the surf and, far off, the chatter of birds or people. It is hard to tell which is which, and so I tell myself they are birds.

  Floating like this, I wonder at how this can be, so many ways to love and I’m thankful there are no words to describe this kind of love or that one. It isn’t as though I don’t love Helen. I do. It’s just that there are too many words now. In the beginning, the words were stones we dropped into the water to walk on, to go the same places together. Now the words are stones that we carry in our fists, our arms always drawn back, ready to fling.

  Margret’s hand finds mine beneath the water, and I curl my fingers over hers. Already our skin is salt-sucked and wrinkled. Even so, I swear she’s the softest thing I’ve ever felt. I slide my hand up her arm, pull her closer to me. She laughs, and grabs my belly. The water pushes us closer, pulls us apart, and still, her lips find mine. Her silent tongue enters my mouth, touches all the places where we make words and soothes them as easily as the sea.

  When we are sandy and salty and wet as we can stand, we stand under the simple outdoor shower until the cold water makes us shiver. Then I lead Margret on the path up from the beach. Soon, we’re at the edge of the rainforest. They’re that close to each other, forest and beach and ocean, as though they’re siblings, sisters that couldn’t bear to live together, but couldn’t bear to be too far apart.

  Beneath the canopy of trees, we follow the path up and up. The sunlight makes stained-glass patterns as it passes through the leaves and vines and lands at our feet. Small brown and white monkeys swing from tree to tree above our heads, making oo-oo noises as they go. Margret reaches back and takes my hand and we walk like that, our footsteps crackling twigs, our breath puffing without sound.

  Tucked back in the woods, the hut I rented for us is just that—a hut. Open to the air around the top, with a plain hammock on the front porch. Inside, there is only the bed, and a tiny table. Margret doesn’t seem to care. She runs and throws herself on the bed so that the mattress shoots her back up in the air, sends her damp curls flying out in all directions around her. She pats the blanket next to her. Come, no matter what language you don’t speak.

  I start to lie down next to her on the bed, but she shakes her head. She makes a shimmying motion, her hips moving back and forth across the simple blanket. I tuck my thumbs into the sides of my bikini bottoms, wiggling my hips. Like this?

  She puts her hands to her lips and nods. I slide my bikini bottoms down, half inch by half inch, shaking my body with it. Compared to Margret, I’m curvy. My belly slides in above my round hips, accentuates the curvy ass that I can only keep in shape with daily bike rides. She seems to delight in my curves as much as I delight in her angularity.

  There is no “Am I skinny enough?” or “Are you sure you should be eating that?” There is only me, sliding my bikini bottom down over the wet and salty curves of me. There is only Margret watching from the bed, her lips parted, her own damp body soaking into the blanket.

  I slide the bottoms down all the way, step out of them. Margret runs her tongue across her bottom lip and waits. I unhook the back of my bikini top. There isn’t as much here to shimmy out of, so I just let it fall away. I’ve had my nipples pierced since I last saw her: two tiny blue stones hanging from each peak. Tiny blue stones that match her eyes.

  Her eyes get big when she sees them, and she puts her hand over her mouth. Then she rolls over on all fours and crawls across the bed toward me. She takes my hand and pulls me down, until I’m kneeling on the bed. When she leans forward, the smell of saltwater is everywhere. Then her tongue is on my nipple, round and round the nipple and the jewelry. Her warm mouth sucks. The piercings are newly healed, sensitive, but in a good way. Margret catches one between her teeth, and pulls up. My body reacts like she’s pulling on a string tied to my belly, the inside of my thighs. Everything pulls up with her mouth.

  “Margret,” I breathe. She smiles at her name, and then runs her mouth lower, down the flat expanse of my belly. When she hits my thighs, she rolls on her back and scoots herself under me. She uses her tongue to paint pictures up the inside of my thighs. Of what, I can’t imagine, but I close my eyes and see them as long, wide streaks of blue paint.

  I have shaved for her and for the ocean, short enough that when she runs her tongue along the hairs I know it must prickle her. She uses her tongue on my labia, then parts them, wiggles her way inside, slippery as a fish. Her tongue is a flat brush sweeping the inside of me until she hits my clit. Dot, dot, dabbing me. Her tongue there speaks to me without language. It is a promise of things to come, a press and release that feels as quietly natural as anything that has come before it. There was a time when Helen and I used our tongues like this, on our bodies, instead of against each other….

  I brush the thought away. Don’t want to think about that right now. Don’t want to have to find the words for it.

  I fold my body down until I can nestle my own tongue against Margret’s bikini bottom. She’s still working her tongue against my clit, but I try to focus. I slide her tiny bikini to the side to allow me access. I tuck my finger inside her labia. She is wet already, smelling of sea salt and musk.

  I slide two fingers inside her, loving the wet clutch of her, the way she moans into me. My thumb rubbing across her clit, I slide a third finger in. I fuck her like that, pushing so hard her tongue slides back and forth across my clit with the movement of her body. Through the wet fabric of her suit, her hard nipples rub my belly with the movement.

  Margret arches her back. Her tongue becomes frantic across my clit, and then she gives up and sucks me, hard, into her mouth. We don’t come together; she goes first, moaning as I dive into her with my fingers. It is this sound, the meaningless vibrations of her throat as she sucks my clit, that lets me follow her.

  The place we bring each other to, there are no words for that. No words at all.

  It is dark when the sound wakes me. Long and loud, like big trucks are driving over the roof of the hut. It takes me a second before I realize what it is. Howler monkeys.

  Margret lies awake next to me, her body rigid in my arms.

  “Was de hell?” she whispers. At first I think she’s speaking English, but then I realize it’s just one of those phrases that sound like its English equivalent. It still amazes me sometimes how similar languages are, even after hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart. Languages are a species like any other, I guess, each adapting to their environment, bu
t most still keeping their roots. Some even growing more and more alike over the passing years, despite every hypothesis that says they shouldn’t.

  I could say, “Howler monkeys,” but I know she won’t understand, so instead I pull her close to me. I say with my body, “It’s safe,” and then I kiss her so she’ll know for sure.

  But her mouth is set flat against mine, and her lips don’t open. She is letting me hold her, but she is not relaxed. The moon peeks through the open slats around the top of the hut, and I can see her eyes, big and wide.

  The sound comes again, closer this time, a big low howl that fills the hut and echoes all around us. If I didn’t know what it was, if I hadn’t heard howlers before, I’d be going out of my fucking mind too.

  “What is it?” Margret says again, and this time when I understand her, I think that I have suddenly absorbed a new language, like osmosis, while we slept. And then, in another heartbeat, I realize she is speaking English.

  She seems to realize it at the same time, covers her mouth with her fingertips. I let go of her, sit up on the bed.

  “Shit,” she says through her fingers. “I am so very sorry, Lilla. It was meant to be a surprise that I learn English. I ruin the…surprise.”

  Hearing her speak makes me feel like I am farther from home than just in another country. I am on another planet, an alternative universe where everything you thought you understood is reversed, a book that is read from right to left, bottom to top.

  For once, I can’t say anything. All those languages in my head, and I don’t have a word. Not one. She meant to surprise me, I see that now. It is a gift she has tried to give me, learning this language, something to bring us closer.

  But all I can see are her lips moving. Her tongue is forming words that I do not want to understand. I turn away. She comes behind me and puts her arms around me, but already her fists are closed tight, filled with words.