Names I Call My Sister

by Mary Castillo

  “Not necessarily. But, whatever. Okay, 800 numbers will bill your credit card. You have to be careful not to get bilked. But according to some of my old pals who are still doing phone sex work as a side job, the most reliable numbers these days are the 10XXX numbers.”

  “What’s different about them?”

  “Well, most of them are located in Canada, so there isn’t a language barrier problem. They are per-minute services, but—at least what I’m hearing—the 10XXX services are highly experienced and professional. You can generally rely on them to deliver…oh my God, I can’t believe I’m talking about this.”

  “Just tell us,” Wyatt said.

  “Okay. In a nutshell, if you want explicit, hardcore, reliable, and professional, use the 10XXX.”

  “What kind of line did you work on?”

  “A 900 service. We also had a psychic hotline in the company. But really, my experience wasn’t that exciting.”

  “Is it fair to say you don’t consider this bombshell about your past as hot news?” Wyatt asked.

  “Wyatt dear, it’s no news,” Cristy said in an overly patient and condescending tone. “Half the women in my MBA program worked for the stupid phone sex lines. Thousands of women all over the country do it. Housewives, professionals, students. We take our earnings to build fantastic, fulfilling lives, while the guys who called us are probably still living in their mothers’ basements.”

  Laughter permeated the studio. Even the producer was laughing, which bolstered Cristy’s confidence. She waited for it to die down. “It would be news if, say, the First Lady had worked on a phone sex line, but me? Who cares? I’m a twenty-seven-year-old, single, small business owner. That’s it.”

  “And yet the media has been trailing you all week.”

  “All hype, no substance,” Cristy said. “They’ve been hounding me because of you two, anyway. For goodness sake, I own a coffee and yarn shop. I’m a knitter. And I’d rather wear sweatpants than anything sexy. That’s who I am. All through school, Marisol was the popular, outgoing one. I was the shy dork, and very happily so. The part-time phone sex job was a way to make a lot of money quickly, period. I didn’t love it. I wasn’t particularly skilled at it. But overall, your listeners should know that it’s so totally yesterday.”

  “I hear you. But I still want to know what it was like,” Wyatt said, almost whining. “I’m sure our listeners do, too.”

  “All righty, then. Got your notepads ready? In my limited experience, these guys—callers—paid by the minute. Almost six bucks a minute for—”

  “That much?”

  “No one ever said they were smart. Anyway, they paid that much for, basically, dirty talk.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like whatever turned them on. The direction each call took was up to the individual caller. We didn’t start in until the guy said something to set the tone. I mean, different people are turned on by different things. There wasn’t a script. To lay it right out there, our sole job was to flatter each caller into staying on as long as possible, and we did that by keeping up the conversation they wanted to have. Think about it, sixty minutes? That’s over four hundred bucks.”

  “And how much of that did you get?”

  “It varies across the industry, but I worked for a fair company, and no, I will not name it. But we earned fifty percent of the call time.”

  “Two-hundred-some-odd bucks an hour for a part-time job?” Wyatt whistled. “That’s some cash!”

  “Hello! Which I was trying to tell you on Monday,” Marisol said. “Cristy’s experience was the positive argument against your contentions that all sex workers are sluts or addicts.”

  “Right,” Cristy said. “The money’s the whole point, Wyatt. I wanted to earn enough in a year to put a hefty down payment on the building that now houses Simplicity, because I fell in love with it the minute I saw it, but I was in college, you know?”

  “And did you?”

  “You bet. I was able to put down half and still have a chunk of capital for the business. It’s the reason I was able to launch Simplicity and make it a success at such a young age.”

  “Good for you, woman!” Predictably, Wyatt steered the conversation back to the racier aspects. “And so, they’d call, and you…?”

  Cristy rolled her eyes. “We asked what each caller wanted and went from there, dragging it out however we could. It was easy. I mean, the callers will picture you however they want to, and they’ll hear what they want to hear. Who you are on the other end is utterly irrelevent.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you called a sex line, wouldn’t you picture yourself talking to the busty blonde from the ad that prompted you to call in the first place? Lingerie, lust, the whole shebang?”

  “Stop, you’re killing me.”

  Cristy nodded. “Well, here’s some reality slush to dump over your head. I’d say ninety percent of the time I was wearing ratty pajamas with my hair up in a towel and zit cream dotting my face. And there was no lust or arousal on my end, believe me. The woman at our company who made the most money—”

  “How much?”

  “I’d estimate about three hundred grand a year.”

  “Man, I’m in the wrong business,” Wyatt mused.

  “Anyway, she was a single mom, fifty-four years old, and weighed close to three fifty, not that her weight matters at all, because she was beautiful inside and out. But it’s a sad fact about our culture that most people lust after the thin and fit. Anyway, she had four kids in college at the same time, and honey, she was living in style. All because men believe what they want to believe, and sister knew how to talk the talk. I adored that woman. She kept the job in perspective for a lot of us newbies. She even helped us amp up our ‘fantasy voices.’”

  “More power to her,” Marisol said. “That is what I was trying to tell you, Wyatt. He never listens to reason,” she added to Cristy.

  Wyatt mulled it all over. “So you can honestly say you weren’t into it or the callers, eh?”

  “God, Wyatt, that’s such a guy question.”

  “That’s his specialty,” Marisol said.

  “I’m a guy!”

  “Do you really think a woman could be turned on by some guy spending a ton of cash to jerk the gherkin while talking to a stranger who, sad but true, couldn’t care less about him?”

  “Well, maybe you weren’t turned on by every caller.”

  “Try none of them. Know what I used my call time for? Studying. Believe me, even my least favorite class, statistics, was more interesting than these calls. They were so tediously predictable. We barely had to pay attention. Throw in an ‘Oooh baby ’every now and then, and you’re golden. Here’s me: ‘I’m touching myself right now, thinking of you, Horace,’ and inside my head, ‘Crap, I have twenty pages left to read before tomorrow. Could you hurry up?’ Callers never could tell the difference.”

  Marisol laughed. “I’d kill for a tape of that.”

  “I’d kill you if you had a tape of it,” Cristy told her sister before turning back to Wyatt. “The absolute only turn-on was the money, and I made a lot of it without ever having any live contact with anyone. Phone sex is safe and pretty chaste.” She shook her head in pity at Wyatt. “I suppose you think the strippers who shimmy in your face are into you, too, huh?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “News flash, Wyatt, the strippers think you’re a toad just like all the other identical toads who drool while they dance. They just want your money. Half of them have girlfriends. And I’m not talking the shop-and-do-lunch kind of girlfriends, either, if you get my gist. But, hey, the theory of most sex workers is, as long as you guys are gullible enough to hand over your money, we women will be more than glad to take it. You’ll be getting screwed, but not in the way you’d hoped.”

  “Harsh words from our guest, Cristy Avila, folks.”

  “True words. I banked on the callers’ big egos. Strippers bank on men’s big egos. We all did. In
the no physical contact sex-for-money world, women have always had the upper hand.”

  “How about all you strippers out there giving us a call in the studio. Is Cristy Avila telling the truth here? We’re going to find out, right after this.”

  Wyatt went to a song, then cued up a commercial to run after it. “You’re doing a great job, Cristy.”

  She smirked. “I’m surprised you’d say that, what with me kicking your ass all over the airwaves.”

  He grinned. “Whatever works. You know me—I’m a ratings whore with the best of them.”

  After the brief break, they went back live. “Cristy, on a more serious note, we hear some men have been bothering you this week,” Wyatt said.

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  Marisol gave her an odd look. “So I guess it’s a good thing the company kept thorough logs of every single caller, isn’t it?”

  Cristy opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  “I mean, didn’t you tell me you had a list of names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal data on every single guy who ever called you? Kind of like how a call girl has her book of regulars?”

  Surprise zinged through Cristy. So that’s what the note had been about. “Oh, yes,” she said, transitioning easily into her sister’s lie. “And, since I’ve been having a little trouble, it’s already been turned over to the cops. So my message to those guys is, nice talking to you, now leave me alone to run my business. You wouldn’t want your wives, girlfriends, mothers, or whoever finding out how you spent your holiday bonus, would you?”

  “Cristy,” Wyatt said. “You’d actually do that?”

  “Darn right. If they’re messing with my business, I have no qualms about messing with their lives. And my business is not phone sex. It’s Simplicity. A place for knitting, conversation, friendship, and the best coffee and baked goods in the world.”

  “There you have it. And we’ll be right back after this.”

  “Do I ever love seeing Wyatt put into his place,” Marisol said as the newest hit from one of the pop divas played.

  Cristy took a long drink of water, then shared a squinty-eyed smile with her sister. “Don’t act like you’re off the hook. This whole fiasco was your fault, and my hour’s not over yet.”

  “Hit me with your best shot, sis. I deserve it.”

  From the producer’s booth came, “And you’re on in five, four, three, two…” The red lights came back on.

  Cristy glanced at the producer, realizing she hadn’t felt nervous for a while now. Wow. Calls trickled in. A few strippers gave total support to her, as did women from all walks of life. Their favorite call had come from a timid minister’s wife. She admitted, with some embarrassment, that she’d thoroughly enjoyed the show. And if she’d learned one thing from it, it was that she wished she could charge her husband for sex, since it was usually of the “Brace yourself, Effie” variety. That way, she said, at least she’d have the cash to buy a new pair of shoes now and then.

  When Cristy got to the point where she felt like she’d set things straight enough, she decided to switch gears. Cliché or not, paybacks were a bitch. “Wyatt, have we sufficiently beaten the dead horse now? I’d like to talk about a different topic.”

  “What Cristy wants, Cristy gets. Lay it on us, babe.”

  “I want to hear from anyone who, like me, has a clueless but allegedly well-meaning sibling who manages to humiliate you constantly. He or she exposes your secrets, talks when shutting up would be the smart route. I mean, honestly, people, how do we keep from killing them?”

  “Oh, great,” Marisol said, but with a smile. “Fine, come on, callers. 303–555-HOTT.”

  Almost instantly, every single phone line in the studio went berserk. The whole metro area wanted to bash their big-mouthed siblings, it seemed. Ah, vindication.

  “Now that,” Cristy said, pointing to the stacked calls, “is newsworthy.” She had such a great time commiserating with callers and dissing her sister, sixty minutes passed before she even thought to glance at her watch. Sure, a few of the callers brought up the phone sex, but it was either to tell her they wished they knew how to do it or to congratulate her for her ingenuity. Not a single negative caller was sent through.

  By the end of the hour she felt confident that Denver’s media was kicking themselves for wasting a full week outside Simplicity. Even better, Marisol and Wyatt had been knocked firmly into their places. This radio stuff wasn’t anywhere near as bad as she’d thought it might be. And her life didn’t suck as much, either. Now if the show had succeeded in scaring off the perverts, life could truly be normal and happy again. Her segment ended, and the producer, Wyatt, Marisol, and even Diego stood and applauded. All she could do was grin.

  Chapter 11

  Cristy hadn’t known what to expect at Simplicity after her appearance on the radio show, but it turned out to be a blessedly normal Friday. No news vans lurked. No unwelcome photo takers popped up. No strange men came in at all. Her regulars sat around the center table stitching and bitching like nothing had ever happened. Best of all, Simplicity’s sales set a record high, especially on the café side. Poor Lola was working like a slave just to keep up with demand, but they needed it after the disastrous week.

  By six o’clock that evening the shop had closed, although the regulars still sat in the front room knitting. Diego had disconnected his surveillance equipment and abandoned his watchdog duties to sit in the kitchen with Lola. Cristy found them laughing when she walked in. She smiled. “Wyatt and Marisol weren’t kidding when they said I’d be old news almost immediately.”

  “Definitely,” Lola said. “It’s been a great day. But, damn, you women sure eat and drink a lot. I’m pooped.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Cristy said. “I’ll clean up.”

  Lola gave a little grimacy smile. “No offense, but I don’t want anyone else in my kitchen. It’s a deep-seated control issue that I’m just not willing to abandon.”

  Cristy raised her hands. “Say no more.”

  “Is the place officially closed for the day?” Diego asked.

  “Yeah.” Cristy sat on one of the tall bar stools. “I mean, the girls are still here, but we’re locked up.”

  Diego nodded, then stood. “Unless you disagree, Cristy, I think my job here is done.”

  Unexpectedly, her heart squeezed. She swallowed, and went for the casual tone. “No, you’re right. I think we sufficiently scared the creeps away. But thanks for everything. It really was…nice that you were here.” Nice? What was she, some kind of pinafore-wearing milkmaid? Jesus. It was a wonder she’d ever made a dime in the phone sex biz. “Don’t be a stranger. We might even let you join the center table if you promise to knit.”

  “We’ll see about that.” He leaned down and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, then crossed to Lola and did the same to her. “Keep up the excellent work, ladies. It was a pleasure.”

  “I can’t really echo that, but we were glad you were here. And for God’s sake, next time rent a hybrid.”

  “Will do,” Diego said with a laugh.

  And then he left. Just like that.

  For a few moments Lola and Cristy sat in silence. The voices of the regulars drifted in, and behind that, the sound of the Hummer rumbling away from the curb. Cristy felt empty.

  “It’ll be weird without him here,” Lola said.

  Cristy tried to be the voice of reason, even though her words rang false in her ears. “He was only here four days.”

  “I know. That’s what makes it so awful.”

  For some strange reason, Cristy found herself on the verge of tears. She stood and shook her hair back. “I think I’ll just go finish up with the girls and give them the gentle boot. It’s been a long week.”

  Cristy schooled her features to hide her melancholy before entering the main room. Lisa, Racquel, Allegra, Alma—each woman deserved nothing but smiles from her for all the support they had given her this week. Her affection for them felt like a h
and-knit cashmere blanket around her heart.

  To her surprise, however, no one was knitting when she walked in. Each woman sat in her normal spot around the table, but their yarn and needles had been stowed in favor of…wine? Three uncorked bottles sat in the middle of the table, breathing, and everyone besides Allegra had a glass waiting to be filled.

  Cristy stopped short and studied their expectant faces. “What’s this?”

  “Have a seat, honey,” Alma said, gesturing to the empty chair at the head of the table. “We’d like to talk to you.”

  Her heart started to pound, but she sat. Had she done something to hurt or offend them? She clasped her hands in front of her on the table and made eye contact with each woman in turn, stopping with Alma. “I’m all ears.”

  “Wine?” Alma asked.

  Boy, did she need it. “Actually, I’d love some.”

  Racquel poured wine all around and surprised Allegra with ice cold sparkling cider so she wouldn’t feel left out.

  “The thing is, Cristy,” Lisa said, “we really enjoyed your radio appearance this morning.”

  “Oh.” That was it? “Well, thank you.”

  “And we were glad to be here for you all week, when things were crazy,” Allegra said. “Just like you’re always there for us.” She smiled shyly.

  Had she failed to thank them fervently enough? Cristy splayed a hand on her chest. “Ladies, you have no idea how much that meant to me. I should’ve made that more clear. I mean, I can’t even repay you.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, honey bunch,” Alma said, her tone determined and strong.

  Cristy tilted her head quizzically. “I don’t follow.”

  “Which is why we’re going to explain this payback situation to you as we see it.” Alma sniffed and straightened her back. “You see, we’ve talked, and we all agree it’s just plain not fair for you to possess all those juicy phone sex skills and not share them with us.”

  Huh? “Oh, Alma—”

  “No. We’re serious.” She held up a hand. “None of us want the job, for goodness sakes, but—”