I was paying for it. The weed he gave me started to even things out, but I estimated that we had only smoked a hot spring’s day pass worth of weed so far.
Smoke? I mimed. I lit an imaginary bubbler.
A woman put her finger to her lips, though we were not talking. Maybe the Original Mantra was “Shush.” I judged her breasts as revenge, but they weren’t bad by naked hot spring standards. In the southern part of the state, bodies were tanned and injected to perfection, but here in the north, where we bathed, bodies relaxed and gave in to an idea of perfect acceptance. Signs advertised workshops to reclaim powers long forgotten. People banged drums in the parking lot, unlocked childhood trauma in sacral tissue, painted their penises with raspberries.
I checked out his penis—not hard. This was also what dating was for, to see the penis at rest. It rested out of politeness to the naked strangers, so as not to disturb their patented water massage techniques, or maybe it rested out of guilt. I didn’t understand the mechanism of control behind the penis, though I respected it. I didn’t understand the mechanism of control behind Catholicism either, or behind any of the Eastern religions represented in the hot spring course packet.
We found a clearing in the woods, known around here as the Garden of Peace. He produced a bubbler from its velveteen satchel. We smoked under a Navajo quote. “Thoughts are like arrows: once released, they strike their mark.”
“More like Garden of Cultural Appropriation,” I said. This was one of the phrases you got to keep if you had not dropped out of college.
“Cultural appropriation,” he said. He tasted it on his tongue, added it to his worldview. We were sitting on a rock naked. I felt like a tutor with a promising student at the beginning of time.
“A lot of those Native quotes are made up,” he said.
“Everything’s made up,” I said.
He edged closer to me on the rock. This was my favorite kind of sex, sex based on being impressed. We kissed like we’d been kissing for days, like it was important, like something bad would happen if we stopped.
He lifted a condom out of the velveteen satchel. I checked the label to see if it was flavored. He’d bought a variety pack by accident and some of the condoms smelled like strawberries. Even high, I refused to accept a flavor in my vagina. A condom should be condom flavored, not try to appropriate fruit. Things should be what they were. But what were they?
“It’s coconut.”
“That’s not okay.”
He looked for another one, then dumped out the whole satchel. Soon we were surrounded by condoms, the ones that stimulated, the ones that delayed stimulation. One, suspiciously, promised “a swirl.”
“I’ll just blow you,” I said.
I fell back on the blow job when flummoxed. The guys I hadn’t really dated hadn’t really minded, but this guy, this grower, he wanted to connect. He wanted eye contact, he wanted smiles.
“This is nice,” I kept saying.
Like a hooker, eye contact and hand-holding had become a bigger deal to me than sex itself. Except I wasn’t paid not to have feelings. I had broken my own spirit for free.
“Look at me,” he said, while I was sucking him. Had Gretchen maintained eye contact throughout? Were two and a half years of fellatio eye contact the reason he had left her in charge of his crop at a crucial moment during the weed harvest while he went on tour in central Oregon with his bluegrass duo?
I looked at him. But there was someone coming up behind him. The guy from the front desk ducked under a dream catcher and grabbed my grower’s shoulder. I pulled my mouth off the penis like I had tasted something lychee flavored. I couldn’t stop being naked, so I laid one arm across my breasts and fanned the other hand over my crotch.
“The guidelines were clearly stated at the front desk,” he said. “I’m sorry, man, but you and your lady friend are going to have to leave the Garden of Peace.”
“We’re very sorry, sir,” I said. “Would you mind if we still used the tubs?”
I made eye contact with the guy from the front desk. Suddenly I was good at eye contact. Something was bubbling up in me, my upbringing. We had paid for day use. I had never been kicked out of anything. The guy from the front desk had only the authority of being the lone clothed person here.
After Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, could they still use the tubs? Biblical scholars were divided.
“We’ll be good,” I said, trying to stick out my tits while keeping them covered.
“I can’t know that,” said God. He had seen a lot of tits.
“We paid for day use, sir,” I said. “I paid.”
I was trying a new biblical approach—Eve with earning power, Eve without shame. Now Adam (formerly Jesus) stood, newly flaccid, walked away from the rock, and began flipping over Tibetan prayer flags on a string at the edge of the garden. He was either too stoned to be embarrassed or was so embarrassed that he was pretending to be extremely stoned.
“Alright, I have to get back to the front desk.” Our interloper ran his fingers through the side of his head that still had hair. “The tubs are open for another half hour, so please be mindful of the other bathers.”
God left us in the Garden of Cultural Appropriation.
“We get to stay!” I said. “In general!”
“I’m going to pay you back,” said the grower. He was putting the pipe away. He was gathering Trojans.
I waved my hand as though money was no object. I wanted to stay in general.
“As soon as Rob gets back from Hawaii,” he said. “I’ll be able to get it to you then.”
“What does this have to do with Rob?”
“He owes me three thousand dollars.”
“Jesus. You lent him that much? What’s he doing there?”
“He’s apprenticing with craftsmen who make ukuleles.”
“No doubt he’ll have the money, then,” I said. “Maybe when Rob gets back, he can tell us whether tropical-fruit-flavored condoms are big in Hawaii.”
The grower muttered something about the variety pack being on sale.
Had I been brought up to be a jerk? Now I had a new number in my head, the amount owed me as a percentage of what Rob owed. It could be an SAT question. The thought stayed in my head as we dipped back into a pool with wrinkle-tanned old people in excellent health. Be us, their bodies seemed to say. Our penises only work intermittently, but our hearts are full.
My tits were going to fall. My eggs would dry up, or run out. I didn’t really know what happened to eggs. I wondered if Gretchen had run out. I wondered if Gretchen had had an abortion, and then I knew she’d had an abortion. That’s what couples went through together in order to hate each other later for the right reasons. That’s why he didn’t know about the plain condoms. They were a secret for people who used birth control consistently.
We still had three days left together. I thought of asking him to drive me to the airport. I’d leave him enough money to get him home. The airport was four hours away, though, and changing my ticket would be another fee. But going back with him had costs, too—dinner, gas, condoms, lube. Maybe we’d get egged again.
How much did a ukulele cost? I wanted to be someone’s girlfriend, not their creditor. What would Jesus do? Would Jesus lend a friend three thousand dollars? Of course he would. Would Jesus’ girlfriend ask for two hundred dollars back? This wasn’t my culture.
He wrapped his leg around mine underwater, then opened his mouth to speak illegally.
“Just be a little patient with me,” he said.
That wasn’t my culture, either. I could cultivate patience, lean against his chest in a tub of hot volcano water, silently workshop my anger, learn more about Rob’s craftsmanship. Or I could go. I couldn’t decide which would be a bigger deal.
Phyllis
A FAMILY filmed themselves, but only on vacation.
The grandchildren have the Super 8 reels transferred to digital. They watch with their grandmother Phyllis.
“Everyone was a
lways swimming,” say the children. “Grandma, you had a body.”
“I was quite thin,” says Phyllis.
Phyllis isn’t fat, just old. Phyllis lifts weights at a gym called Midtown. She is the oldest person at the gym. They feature her in the gym’s newsletter, Alive. Midtown is not in the real Midtown. The gym is in upstate New York, and so is Phyllis.
—
THE FAMILY never films themselves moving, but they move, farther and farther up the state, because of the father’s job, until the mother, Phyllis, says she won’t move again unless it’s in a box. The family stays still. Then the father, Eugene, dies. Phyllis, a social worker, advances to therapist. Eugene doesn’t leave much and she needs to earn to pay the mortgage, to foot the gym bills, to afford her therapist scarves.
Phyllis goes to self-esteem conferences in Canada. She stands on the Great Wall of China. She makes friends on an elder tour in France, where the guide holds up reproductions of Monet’s “Water Lilies” in front of real water lilies, to prove Monet was there.
Phyllis brings back dolls you can’t get in the United States anymore. She brings back visors that say “Galapagos Islands.” She brings back Swedish chocolates, Portuguese tiles, Oaxacan skulls. She brings back tiny Peruvian finger puppets, and makes you wear them.
Phyllis redecorates. Buddhas appear where there had hitherto been no Buddhas. Mirrored wallpaper gets torn down and replaced with mirrored walls. Phyllis needs to see herself in every direction. Picture Phyllis.
Phyllis is a shrink, but she is also shrinking. Osteoporosis does not stop her. She builds muscle, replaces hips, replaces cars.
Phyllis’s hair starts brown, but soon an upstate colorist convinces Phyllis that red would be fun. Upstate, red means fun.
Phyllis’s hairdresser dyes Phyllis’s daughter’s hair red from the same color swatch. Her daughter lives nearby so her children can attend the schools that Phyllis’s taxes make great. Phyllis can’t tell her son to dye his hair red, too, because he is a man and because he doesn’t live upstate anymore. As a young man, this son took out a road map of the United States and drew a circle with a five-hundred-mile radius around the town where Phyllis lived. He put states in between him and Phyllis, several mountain ranges, a river.
Phyllis warned him: If he goes, the family will forget him. Not one of them will recognize his face when he comes back for a visit. “Mark?” they’ll say. “Who?” If he goes, it will kill his sister. It will kill his father, who is already dead.
“I guess I’m only the mother,” sighed Phyllis, at the airport.
Phyllis’s son lives the rest of his life outside the radius. He studies Mark Twain (his favorite Mark), the Impressionists, and a staggering amount of biology. He beds the women of Boston, Toronto, Tel Aviv, weds a woman of Rio de Janeiro, puts his children in a New Jersey school system. He films his children with a VHS camera. They’re in bathing suits. They’re going to visit Grandma Phyllis. Video cameras get smaller. Grandma Phyllis gets smaller. Then Mark’s life starts ending. This too gets filmed. The family’s in a fancy restaurant with a waterfall because why not? What are they saving it for? Someone films the waterfall.
Phyllis belts, “Mark needs hospice care” into the phone to her daughter, brags about how she has correctly predicted organ failure before: Eugene’s colon, Bernice’s kidney. Now this. She remembers her sister Bernice on dialysis, Bernice gone, Bernice nothing. What luck to have a nephrologist in the family. What luck. Phone calls.
The nephrologist is Phyllis’s daughter with the same red hair. She lives five minutes away from Phyllis for thirty years. A quick car ride in case of emergency. They know each other’s alarm codes. The alarms call the police. But that never happens. Nothing happens except Phyllis letting herself into her daughter’s house and punching the code before the end of thirty seconds. Phyllis has the keys.
Phyllis can’t sleep. She keeps the radio on all night, watches musicals about riverboats, state fairs. She is having insomnia from the 1940s. She has lost a husband, a father, a sister, a son. Her mother, Elsie, is a story for another day. Elsie was a health-food nut before it was the custom, in addition to being regular nuts. She snacked on seeds and turned out to be right about red meat. Now Phyllis eats chocolate, only chocolate—chocolate-flavored rice cakes, chocolate éclairs, chocolate-shaped Freud (a gift from a patient), and she can’t sleep. At 4:30 a.m. she drives to Midtown, treads the elliptical, handles the lady weights, gossips about her grandchildren, the careers they refuse to have in spite of doing well in their respective school systems.
Then Phyllis, too, dies. They run an obit in Alive. Personal trainers testify to her indomitable spirit.
F = ma
THE WAY THEY CHEATED was with calculators. Half the questions on the tests came straight from the homework. One boy figured out the answers and put them in the other boys’ calculators in exchange for friendship. The boy who knew the answers was very short, almost as short as me, a short girl. He had to shave every day starting early, though—he was that kind of short. I’m the other kind, the kind that had to shave late. I did everything late. I’m still waiting for a lot of things to happen to me.
The blind man lived near me. He was my neighbor. I would see him walking home in his suit and cane. He wasn’t totally blind. He could see a little bit. He graded our tests on a large-print screen. One letter, one number, took up the whole screen. I went into his office after I failed the first test and saw my answer up there on the screen, big and wrong.
The boys would meet at the house of the boy who knew the answers, and they were all boys. I was the only girl in the class except for a girl who didn’t talk. The blind man thought I was the only girl in the class. He told me there were a lot of smart boys in that class and I would have to work extra hard to keep up, but I knew that there was only one smart boy in the class and he was giving the other boys the answers. So I left the blind man a note. I don’t know how he read it, if he had a magnifying glass or if his wife read it to him, but the next time we weren’t allowed to use those calculators.
The boys who weren’t smart failed. They didn’t cry. They groaned boy groans and gave the smart boy a wedgie. He took the wedgie and went to MIT on a scholarship. I began to cheat using tiny scraps of paper. I made new friends.
Rate Me
THE AD SAID “I will rate your vagina,” so I sent it in. It got a two. Warts.
They sent it back with the warts removed. At a doctor’s office, uninsured, the procedure would have cost an arm and a leg. I sent those in, too. My raters shaved my legs and spray-tanned them. They won’t tan anymore in the real sun.
My face got a four point five.
My second face got a six. My raters rated my parts in a converted strip mall by the sea. They hung up a sign that said “Rate Me” over a sign that had said “Oceanside Shoe Repair.” Also, it was more than just rating. They laid cool cloth across my brow, extracted blackheads, taught me that my armpits might be expendable. They trimmed split ends. They dyed my hair.
“Who needs armpits, girl?” I said to a man applying foil packets to my head.
“I’m straight,” he said.
“Can I ask you out, then?”
“I’d prefer you didn’t do that,” he said. “My last date with a face was a disaster. A nine, but when she climaxed, a low seven.”
—
WHAT CONSTITUTED PERFECTION? Nobody at Rate Me would explain. They sent back my arms with a long rubric—softness, muscle tone, strokeability. I had low squeeze factor, a weak hug. My rater advised practice with friends or family members before I advanced to hugging members of the gender that scared me.
—
MY FEET actually had a good shot at a ten, though the toenail fungus was a problem. I treated the yellow nails with a polish, prescribed by the famous in-house doctor, Dr. Rater. Dr. Rater had founded RateMyMD, and Do You Think I’m a Hypochondriac??? Girls with lupus, fibromyalgia, questionable freckles, gathered in a former sporting goods warehouse, eyed the
white coat, grew new moles on the spot. Dr. Rater made a show of not taking advantage.
—
MY VAGINA couldn’t break five. I consulted with a vulva adviser, who told me, “I haven’t seen this much bush since I went to uni.” He wasn’t Australian, either. He was Something American, his ancestors had once peddled shoes, and he wasn’t afraid to hurt a client’s feelings. Body hair in unwanted areas was an easy fix, according to Rate Me’s brochures. Rate Me eschewed razors and wax—too messy—and went straight for the latest in radiation hair removal. When I got my vagina back from them, rated, irradiated, they’d put it in a satin box with a note telling me that I was now eligible to dine with other top-rated members, and a gift card that said “Ratings Addict.”
—
“WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?” asked my friend with self-confidence.
“I want to improve,” I said. “I want my vagina to improve.”
She didn’t bother handing me a vagina mirror or making me read a self-confidence book. She had too much confidence for that. If we’d been reversed, and she’d been sending her nose to get evaluated, I would have gotten her a book, talked to her about talking to someone besides me.
“I need therapy,” I said. “But without insurance, I can’t really afford it.”
“You know you’re great,” she said in a depressed voice. “You should stop worrying about your pores and start reading again.”
“I read. My pores are enlarged, but I read.”
“I read, too,” she said.
—
YOU COULD USE A GIFT CARD for a plasty. Rhinoplasty. Labiaplasty. The surgeon’s catalog showed ten after perfect ten. Puffed labia were yesterday’s labia. Today’s labia dipped in. A group of raters resigned over the gift cards. They left a note tacked to a kiosk that said “Plastic surgeons are BUYING your raters off. Those of us who went into the rating profession to let women know the truth about themselves are disgusted and saddened by the corrupt influence of these so-called doctors. To that end, we must bid you sevens adieu. We’re starting a company called Natural Ratings for women who find beauty in the way they were born but still want to be a better version of themselves for the sense of well-being being better brings.”
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