If you’d like to discuss this matter further, I am available early next week. I take my job as an adjunct professor of English very seriously, and hope that we can clear up any remaining confusion. Coffee?
Sincerely,
Professor S
Dear Student G,
Thank you for the rose. I hope you didn’t pick it on campus.
Best,
Professor S
Little Girl
SHE SLEPT WITH MEN who only wanted to play Settlers of Catan. She slept with law students who had framed copies of the Constitution on their bedroom walls. She slept with sound architects, sound engineers, and the second baseman from her softball league. She hardly ever slept. Sometimes she took a pill, but often she lay awake next to a sleeping man, trying to read the Bill of Rights in the dark, then called a taxi and went home. She liked riding in the back of a taxi at night. It felt private, even with the driver up front. She liked recognizing the streets closer to her building, and she liked the deli where she sometimes went to get money to pay the driver. She’d grab a can of condensed milk, a hairnet. She wasn’t sure what for.
The men never called. They sent her smiley-face permutations and pictures of their cocks, but not one had called her since the year 2004. That man had met her at a flash mob in a department store, then looked her up in the last phone book the phone company ever printed. She had lived in a different building then, had withdrawn cash at a different deli, and needed a landline to communicate with parents who didn’t trust cell phones yet. She and the man dated for five months, but things never got as good as figuring out that he had found her in the phone book.
She slept with men who were sober for no reason. She found this more alarming than if they had once been alcoholics. She slept with recovering alcoholics, suffering workaholics, and a heroin addict who wanted them to have the same spirit animal. The heroin addict was writing a memoir about overcoming heroin addiction. Having a deadline for his memoir had stressed him out so much that he had started using heroin again.
Some of the men carried condoms in their wallets, like it was the fifties. It was not the fifties. One day, it would be the 2050s, and she would have to do this all over again in a retirement community. In between, she’d get married, get widowed. She’d miss him, but would be grateful for all the years they’d had together. Where was she going to meet her future late husband? At work? At work, she’d met an anthropology professor by the copy machines who called her “little girl” in bed. She was thirty-two. But he was even older. He didn’t like what she had been photocopying, a text by a continental theorist whose opinion of history most straight men considered misinformed. Her students handed in papers about the theorist’s work that began, “This story confused me at first.” She didn’t sleep with her students. They were too confused.
She slept with a man who didn’t keep any food in his house. He was a used-book dealer, and there were piles of signed first editions in his oven. Another used-book dealer had hair on the shaft of his penis and a panic attack in her bedroom. Used-book dealers, she decided, were the worst. She liked books, but she didn’t care about the edition. New things were okay with her. Everything got old soon enough anyway.
She slept with younger men. She didn’t really have a choice. Men her own age were busy going bald, acquiring bald offspring. Men her own age had jobs like “head of school,” “program facilitator,” and “lawyer.” She tried to be excited that the men she slept with were younger, but she was just as excited if they were older, or the same age. Her body acted the same no matter who touched her. It had been that way since college, when she’d slept with a man who didn’t take his sweater off during the act. She’d found it a nice break from skin. He had later transferred. Some of the men she slept with had studied abroad, some had taken time off, but all of them had gone. Her body valued education.
Her body valued her body. She took long showers, ate avocados, stretched while chanting in Sanskrit, and slept her way through the phone book. There was no more phone book, but she had names in her phone, first names only: Davids and Adams, Lukes, Sams. She’d get a message at night—What are you doing right now?—and go. What was she doing? Sometimes she didn’t know exactly who was messaging her and it would be a surprise when she got there: which David, which Sam. Some of the buildings had elevators and she enjoyed the anticipation on the ride up, the soreness on the ride down. What happened in between almost didn’t happen. She’d wind up back where she started, walk into the street, and hail a cab.
Schwartz, Spiegel, Zaveri, Cho
THERE WERE WAYS to touch Schwartz wrong.
If I pulled too hard, he would say, “Ow! Are you trying to pull my dick off?”
Everyone would agree that was wrong. Schwartz’s dick should not be pulled off.
If I pulled too soft, Schwartz would say nothing, maybe even lose the hardness, and the softness would be my fault. Then Schwartz would say, “Never mind,” and Spiegel would tell him, “Never trust a girl to do what you can do better yourself.”
So why bring us in? To do what you can do, worse?
The place to do it worse was here, in the absence of parents, at Geology Camp. Last year, I had gone to Space. The year before that, International Relations. The nerds stayed the same. In the sunny summer sun, they took measurements, reenacted diplomacy. I was small and eager, though I often forged my data. Some days I skipped Topography, claimed menstrual headaches, took puberty-enhancing naps. I was working toward a certificate in Stratification, which meant you got to handle plastic models of rocks not native to the area, but I had learned you could make yourself invisible to a science teacher making summer money by simply not showing up at the allotted time. After a while, they stopped calling your name, assumed you’d gone home.
There was no science at home, but there were also no boys. I wasn’t about to call my parents from Geology Camp’s one pay phone and demand they come get me. They believed that I was learning and that all learning mattered. It didn’t matter that the moon at Space Camp wasn’t the moon. On the night of our lunar mission, we lay in sleeping bags on a tennis court, ate dehydrated ice cream, walked around in slow motion. The real moon we ignored, or justified as the moon of a distant planet.
The oldest boys with the deepest acne wore the T-shirts of the colleges they planned to be accepted to. They called each other by last names only—Schwartz, Spiegel, Zaveri, Cho. They studied maps like we were actually going somewhere. They made jokes about cleavage, where rocks break apart. They made jokes about hardness, their own, calcite’s. It was unclear what any of them had touched or been touched by. Cho often spoke of “girls from home.” A possibility existed that there were girls from home whose reputations were so besmirched that they were willing to service a member of the National Honor Society, but I couldn’t imagine Cho unzipping for one. We all aspired to orgasm, but were afraid of our GPAs slipping.
Everything counted. We aced Sex Ed. We took up the clarinet, got too good for regular band, and hung out with the band teacher in a special class devoted to jazz. Spiegel brought his trombone to camp, Zaveri his tenor sax. I spent rest hour practicing my trumpet. The two of them could play backup. We’d call it an independent project, rack up extra credit at our respective schools.
Yet I wasn’t sure a camp counted. This was the beginning of a crack between where I then stood and where I would one day kneel. Most of these boys ruined their legs with the wrong sneakers and ankle-gripping socks, but through their basketball shorts I caught an outline of what I could learn. The edge of a Cornell tee brushed against a new pectoral. I liked the way Schwartz said “Feldspar” and the way he held a graphing calculator. It had weight in his hands.
“Can I borrow your calculator, Schwartz?”
He looked confused, then annoyed. Didn’t I have my own calculator? The calculators cost more than we had ever spent on a school supply.
“I lost it and I’m scared to tell my parents.”
Schwartz rolled his eyes. He w
asn’t scared of his parents. I shrugged (I was scared of mine), then poked his calf. That seemed low enough on his leg that he could mistake it for a mistake.
“I need this,” he said, catching on, poke-wise. “But there’s an extra in my cabin.”
“During evening activity,” I said, “they don’t take attendance.”
Schwartz took me to his cabin while everyone else was applauding the visiting fossil expert. The cabin smelled like incense, socks, spunk, the woods. Schwartz showed me a Playboy. He was showing himself the Playboy, but I needed to be a witness. The Playboy didn’t come with instructions for what to do with Schwartz after it was done with its job. Schwartz presumably knew.
“Is this alright?” said Schwartz, reaching up my shirt.
“Is this alright?” said Schwartz, reaching up my shorts.
I wasn’t sure why you were supposed to stop them. I wasn’t sure why you had to call them by their last names. It had to do with too many of their first names being the same name.
Schwartz did a couple of things wrong and then it was my turn. I wanted to ask about the skin. Did you pull the skin along the core of hardness, like a sleeve, or did you grab skin and core together as one?
My hand stayed in place. I didn’t ask Schwartz “How?” I wanted to already know. I didn’t want Spiegel to tell Schwartz that Schwartz could have done it better himself. Let Spiegel do it better himself, was my feeling. Schwartz had brought me here.
Schwartz put his hand over my hand, and started to move the pair of us. It wasn’t rocket science, or even rock science. It wasn’t an earthquake, but something began to move in me. Every test we studied for was nothing. This was the kind of test where they see if babies can breathe. Most of them can.
“David,” I said, “you can let go.”
The hand job worked. I didn’t own any lube then, though we could have used the lotion under Schwartz’s cot. I didn’t use his lotion, or saliva from my tongue, but soon my hand was wet with the infinite possibilities inside Schwartz.
He wiped my fist with a roll of toilet paper he had stolen from the bathroom. There it sat, above his bed, in case he caught a summer cold, or for nights when he had to do it better himself.
“The calculator,” he said. “I can’t find an extra. You’re not going to be able to do well without one.”
“This camp doesn’t count,” I said.
“Who told you that?” His shorts were back on his body, his feet huge in flip-flops. One day you were children together, the next day the boys had giant feet. Tomorrow Schwartz would be hunched over a magnifying glass, identifying crystal formations in closed-toe shoes.
“We just come here to show that we’re curious,” I said. “Nobody cares if we actually are. And I have a calculator.”
“You’re not like anyone in New Jersey,” he said.
I doubted this was true. Somewhere in Teaneck, in Fair Lawn, a girl like me was learning to stroke the college bound.
“You’ve never had a girl do what I did?”
“I lost my virginity at Oceanography Camp,” he said. “But not much has happened since then.”
“You’re not a virgin? Does Spiegel know?”
“Spiegel doesn’t know anything,” he said.
What We Bought
HE BOUGHT ME FLOWERS and a vase. He gave me the vase three days after he gave me the flowers. I don’t know what he thought would happen in the interim, maybe that I would just leave the flowers on the table, and the flowers would die there. He wrote, “Don’t forget to trim the stems!” so I guess he thought I would put the flowers in something, like a jar, which I did do, but the jar was not tall enough for the flowers, even after I trimmed the stems, so I had to go out and buy my own vase.
I bought the vase at a complicated store that also sold chrysanthemums and soap. The woman who owned the store tried to show me a vase that cost more than a hundred dollars, a heavy vase with flowers embossed on the glass. For a minute, I thought I needed a vase that cost more than a hundred dollars. Then I asked the woman if she had anything else. She started removing flowers from a cheaper vase. Maybe she had never sold a vase before.
By the time I got the vase from him, I already had a vase. It only cost twelve dollars. I don’t know how much his vase cost, but somewhere between twelve and a hundred. I’m going to guess forty. Later, I gave the vase he bought me to my aunt.
“This will look good in your dining room,” I told her. “Take it. I can’t look at it anymore.”
My aunt loved that I couldn’t look at a vase a man had given me. Giving her my vase made it seem like gifts from men happened to me all the time, or at least often enough that I would know what to do with one. I had gotten other gifts from other men: a parasol, a record, a box of tea. Those times, I had set the gifts down in the vestibule of my building until someone took them away. The parasol and the record went fast. The tea nobody would take. I watched it sit in the vestibule, next to the mailboxes, day after day. Finally, I brought the tea back upstairs to my apartment and threw it in the garbage.
My aunt told her dinner guests the story of the vase the night she got it, then told the story again a few more times before the vase and the story of the vase stopped being new to her.
Tips
THE COMFORT INN was across the street. But we were sleeping by the side of the road. The back of Mindal’s car folded out into a bed, and parked in front of her car was a motor home, where Arlo, our pimp, slept. He wasn’t a pimp in the traditional sense. He jerked off in front of a computer for money, and tonight we would join him, for more money, all to fund the decals for her car, the greens for our salads. “Camming for kale” was what we called it when we were clever, punning, hungry. Our tastes tended expensive. Mindal spoke of dumpster diving, but she never dove. She was still a girl from a gourmet suburb, same as me. We’d had homeroom together, drawn ovaries on each other’s binders. We’d refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, first to protest some invasion, and then, when the invasion had ended, more quickly than we’d expected, to protest the ongoing covert operations we knew were ongoing. Mindal’s mom got that radio station, the one where radical nutritionists had their own shows, told you to stop eating everything and get vitamin infusions. Once a month, Mindal’s parents took her to the city for an infusion.
“I feel terrific!” she’d say, a fourteen-year-old high on taurine and St. John’s Wort. “I feel alive.”
Now she needed to not have a job to feel alive, to have skin burnt because sunblock was full of carcinogens, and I wanted some of this life for myself, though I carried a mini sunblock in my purse and applied it whenever she went to pee in gas stations. I was less scared of the cam, though, had more groove when it came to unprofessional porn, which I had enjoyed on and off, as a consumer, for years.
Arlo was from somewhere north—difficult weather—mudslides, earthquakes, tornado warnings. He was sick of the moss. He was taking donations from anyone who wanted to see him naked in front of a tie-dyed sheet.
“Tips,” he called both the money and the men who gave the money.
“Whatever you ladies are comfortable doing,” he’d told us. “Tips will tip.”
“We’re comfortable making you dinner,” said Mindal, chopping greens. I was on garlic detail. The motor home was homey, had beaded curtains, a spice rack.
“Your place looks nice,” I said. I worried about Arlo sometimes. He was a bunch younger than us. He referred to women as ladies.
“It was my mom’s ride,” he said. “She sold it to me.”
“Does she know about Arlocumsalot?”
“She thinks it’s funny. My son the porn star.”
My daughter the porn star struck me as something that neither Mindal’s nor my mom would find funny, no matter what radio station they listened to. So far we had just licked his cheeks while wearing camouflage bikini tops, played the part of cam bitches in the motor home.
“We’re not on spring break,” Arlo clarified for those watching at hom
e, the working stiffs with wi-fi. “This is our lifestyle.”
“8inchinUtah wants to know: Have you two ever made out?”
“Can’t best friends just be best friends anymore?” asked Mindal.
Best friends couldn’t be best friends and earn anything from Utah. Back in her car, we debated if we could kiss each other on the lips, no tongue. She needed waterproof pants and a special kind of rope. Slacklining was another reason not to have a normal job. The slackers worked on oil rigs, trimmed weed, sold afghans, or, if they were really good, got sponsored by their own equipment. Most of them were men, or the girlfriends of men, but Mindal wanted to subvert the paradigm, or at least become a girlfriend.
Mindal led the crossings and I followed. I didn’t want the rope to break, or even stretch.
“It has to stretch a little,” she said.
She tried to explain how different types of rope worked, the advantages and disadvantages of the jungle knot, the money she was saving for a van, but I started zoning out when talk turned to her van. I turned it back to kissing.
“We can pretend we don’t know each other.”
“We’re cuter than most of the girls on the site.”
“Girls next door. He can say he met us next door.”
Arlo had met Mindal on a line in Moab, while I was still hovering one foot off the ground at Indoor Boulders. Now we midlined, sometimes high. Arlo’s sister grew medicinal strains up north, but Arlo had decided to be the sober child of addicts, so Mindal and I passed a joint in her car.
“He’s pretty judgy about drugs,” I said.
“He lets us use his bathroom. And his stove. He builds perfect anchors.”
“But we buy all the food.”
“It’s just until we make enough to line without him. Let’s just fucking kiss, okay? We know we’re not gay. Who cares what the internet thinks?”
The Bed Moved Page 10