“My dad’s a saint,” Chandra answers, her eyes filling with tears.
“But marriage to a saint—what’s that like? Saints can drive you crazy. My mother accused my father of verbal assault, which wasn’t exactly true, but still—saints have their ways.”
“I wish I could go home,” Chandra whispers.
“But Daddy’s a saint, so you can’t. A saint would never understand what happened to you. At least our guys weren’t angels. Politics teaches you to be a realist. All your illusions about helping anyone get stripped away pretty fast, until nothing’s possible but your own pleasure.” Monica chews her cornflakes.
“No, our moms did well for themselves, marrying respected professional men like oncologists,” says Chandra. “Where’d we go wrong, getting mixed up in politics? What are we, the world’s only Jewish shiksas? Marrying the President? A congressman? What kind of ambition is that? And you, with the tennis players, and firemen. Is that any better?”
“It’s a start,” answers Monica.
At night they often lie on Chandra’s futon in the closet, talking. Chandra feels more comfortable here than she does on Monica’s bed with the vibrator lurking underneath, but suddenly one evening Monica drops something furry and pulsating just below her rising belly.
“Oh!” says Chandra in surprise as she struggles to sit up, but Monica pushes her shoulders down.
“Relax,” she croons. “I want to try this out.”
Chandra puts her hands down and strokes a fur even slicker than her own.
“It’s fake mink,” Monica explains. “No cute little animals were snuffed to make this baby.”
Chandra opens the flap of the fur purse, feels inside, finds the pouch for the batteries, finds the switch, and turns it off and on again, up and down. When she starts to feel a glow in her cunt she gets nervous and turns it off.
Monica strokes the purse, then slowly slips her fingers under Chandra’s shirt and up the slope of her belly, which rises like a mountain growing out of her. Monica is amazed to think that a child floats in there. She runs her fingers up the fine line of fuzz rising from Chandra’s pubic hair to her belly button, following the curve of the dark line that has formed in the skin beneath. Chandra is letting that hair grow back, though she still shaves her legs and underarms.
“Your creep doesn’t know what he’s missing,” Monica murmurs. “You are beautiful.” Monica’s fingers edge up over Chandra’s belly button, which is starting to stick out now like a cork in a wine bottle; tenderly she fingers it, then slides down the smooth slope of her side and back to her pubic mound.
“I’m not into this,” says Chandra.
“Neither am I,” says Monica, working her fingers into Chandra’s moist cunt, then sliding them across her clit. More than anything else, she feels curious.
“Why does everything feel fuller now?” Chandra murmurs, as though this were some sort of medical examination. “My whole crotch feels swollen all the time, like I’m always turned on, even when I’m not. And I’m really not right now.”
Monica notices she sounds a bit breathless. She sits up and spreads Chandra’s legs, to have a better look at her cunt. Beneath its furry covering are lips so purple they almost seem dark brown, and what she can see of the interior looks richer and heavier than her own light pink. She stares, half expecting to see a tiny baby slide out. With her hands on Chandra’s swollen sides, she feels a fluttering, as though doves were trapped in there.
“It’s moving,” Chandra explains. “It seems to like this.”
Monica puts her tongue to the tip of Chandra’s purple clit, experimentally, because she’s really not into this, either, and is surprised to feel an almost electric jolt shoot through her, down to her own little clit, which throbs even though no one is touching it. Chandra lies still, not breathing, which worries Monica.
“Keep breathing for the baby!” Monica orders, running her fingers up and down Chandra’s inner thighs while circling her clit with her tongue until Chandra shivers and inhales deeply, her belly surging.
Earthquake, thinks Monica as her own insides tremble. We’re just two California girls sharing a good old earthquake. Her hand massages Chandra’s stomach until all is quiet in there.
Monica wants to turn around, thinking, Why not? Her mouth is as good as any of those guys I fool around with—but Chandra’s belly is in the way, and Chandra definitely isn’t going to be into sucking her anyway, so she puts her fingers to her own cunt, sliding its moisture over her clit, and breathes in unison with Chandra. Monica thinks of the big creep, as she always does at such moments, and knows that Chandra, her eyes closed tight, is thinking of her little creep, who would only suck her after every hair was waxed off. Monica licks Chandra’s soft hair just to prove she’s better than him, and feels Chandra’s belly contract at that moment, feels the flickering throbs of Chandra’s clit with her tongue as she comes.
Monica lies with her ear to Chandra’s belly, to see if she can hear splashing inside as the baby swims, but all is quiet. Her fingers keep sliding around her own clit until she comes, too, but Chandra, snoring lightly now, doesn’t notice. After a while Monica sleeps, dreaming that she hears the baby hum inside Chandra like a small whale.
Chandra takes the vitamins Monica brings her, on the advice of her father, who is at least a doctor even if he’s not an obstetrician, and watches her diet. When Monica flies out to California to visit her father, to prove she’s not the one who’s pregnant, Chandra stays alone in the apartment. She’s developed the habits of a person in hiding during a war—sleeping all day and walking at night. Some nights she even goes outside and walks the streets around the apartment building, relieved that the few people she passes don’t notice her, even though her face is sometimes on the front page of all the newspapers. Where is she? the headlines ask. Even Chandra isn’t sure she knows anymore. The air in the city at night is clear and moist, as though the weight of darkness has pushed all the oil and dust down into the pavement.
Inside, she stands in Monica’s closet looking out the tiny window at New York’s skyline glittering and flickering through the dark. She’s not afraid because she doesn’t think she’ll need Mike’s doctor friend, whom Monica keeps pushing her to see. Everything seems simple: the baby will just come out and be there, unlike its father.
Monica brings old textbooks back from her father’s library, books on obstetrics and labor and delivery from a course he took in medical school, and she studies them intently. Even if Chandra isn’t interested, Monica wants to be prepared. Mike’s doctor friend knows a midwife whom Monica consults, a woman named Starbright.
“Call me anytime,” she says. “I’ll just come over to talk, to check her over, or deliver the baby. Whatever she wants. Birth is a natural process.”
“Thanks,” says Monica, but she can’t stop worrying.
For Chandra and Monica there is no future because their future is already in the past. Who could do better than having the President lick her twat? Unless it was a congressman doing it. All they have to look forward to is one anticlimax after another.
“I’m really not into this,” groans Chandra when Monica crawls onto her futon her first night back from California. Still, she doesn’t move as Monica licks her belly, from popped navel in a circle down to her cunt, which smells and even tastes like a fresh oatmeal cookie.
Besides Mike and Bob, Monica has other boyfriends whose names Chandra doesn’t even know. One is a skinny guy with a guitar who seems to be giving Monica music lessons in exchange for sex. Monica plucks away like a good student, and sings a song she wrote:
Caught in a love drive-by
Spray of bullets in my heart—
Should have been red roses
Oh why did we ever part?
How long can I bleed like this?
Forever and a day.
Try and make me stop—
I’ll blow your head away.
The boy applauds. “I love it,” he says. “You’ve got
that country sound down, but it’s so urban!”
“That’s me, city eastern via L.A., ” says Monica.
Chandra longs for a cigarette, though she doesn’t smoke, especially now—just one cigarette to make the little boy go away. But Monica takes him into her bedroom, shutting the door so Chandra can’t watch.
One night when Chandra looks out her window, things have changed: there’s a hole in the lights of the city. Something’s missing from the skyline, but she can’t remember what. She feels cold, as though something more than summer is coming to an end. When Monica finally comes back, it’s noon the next day. Her eyes are swollen and her nose is red.
“Well,” she says, her voice husky. “Neither one of us is ever going to be on the news again. We’re free. Look.” She turns on the television, but Chandra doesn’t want to watch. Instead she stays in her closet and looks out her window as smoke rises from the gap in the skyline.
The next morning it’s still gray and smoky on the horizon where buildings once stood. Monica leaves early. She does volunteer work now, to help the victims, she says. Bob the fireman is missing and presumed dead. “His poor family,” she says, her voice at the edge of a sob.
The skinny guitar boy hasn’t been heard from, either, though possibly, like Chandra, he just decided it was time to disappear. Mike drops by every evening but doesn’t stay, and when he leaves, Monica crawls into bed in Chandra’s closet, where they lie together, curled around the baby.
“Everything’s changed,” Monica whispers to Chandra. “We’re what’s left over. We’re safe now, safe,” she sings like a lullaby, her lips pressed to Chandra’s belly.
Chandra doesn’t believe in change, which is why she stays home when Monica goes out to do what she can. Still, Chandra stays up all day now, turning on the television often enough to know that she and Monica and their guys no longer matter.
She cooks dinner for Monica and whomever she might bring home, usually Mike, but often a fireman or two, firemen who aren’t Bob, though they knew him and still hope to find him as they search for bodies in the ruins of the collapsed buildings.
“He was there when it happened,” says one of them, a guy with dark, curly hair whom Monica watches with eyes that seem to possess as they caress, letting Chandra know that he’ll be next in her bed.
Chandra calls herself Sandy now, and no one questions that, or her presence in Monica’s apartment. The city is full of refugees. She’s cut her hair short and her face is as round as her belly. She’s becoming someone else.
Fascinated by the talk of searching for bodies, she bursts into the conversation: “Someday they’ll find a body and say it’s mine.”
Everyone at the table looks at her.
“I am officially missing,” she explains. “I might have been in one of those buildings. Or anywhere, in another city. But when they find me, it won’t be me they’ve found, because I’m here.”
She puts a protective arm around her belly. She hasn’t thought much about the baby for the past few weeks, except when it occasionally kicks her ribs. It’s her only family now. She feels removed from her old family in California, the people to whom she’ll never return, and distant, too, from the baby’s father, whom she thinks of now as its non-father. When she notices the curly-haired fireman looking at her while Monica watches him, she blushes and looks down at the lasagna she’s made for their dinner.
Monica is offended. “There are people who really are dead,” she says. “You aren’t missing, you’re right here. You could go home anytime.”
“Not anymore. I’m not who I was,” Chandra/Sandy murmurs to her plate, feeling herself dissolve, feeling she’s invisible, even to those beside her, eating the food she’s put on Monica’s table.
“Hey,” says her new fireman friend, running a hand through his thick dark hair. “We all have our reasons for wanting change.”
Monica looks away from him, stuffing a chunk of sausage into her mouth.
What will happen? For this evening, Sandy will take the curly-haired fireman into her closet. He’s married, he has three kids, he makes love to her rising belly with a sort of worshipful admiration that almost makes her giggle. He says he loves pregnant women. His tongue massages her belly button, then finds its way down the slope to her cunt, which he licks as clean as he licked the dinner off his plate. She puts her hands over his furry back while he rubs his hairy legs against her smooth ones.
He worries she won’t be able to get up off the futon on the floor, but she shows him how easily it’s done, rolling onto her hands and knees, then standing up, panting only a little.
“It’s excellent exercise,” she tells him. “Pregnant women go to the gym to learn to do this. I’ve seen them.” She lies down again, snuggling her face into the fur of his chest.
Monica, in her bedroom with Mike, has become the voyeur now, paying more attention to the sounds from the closet than to her own. What will become of this new person, Sandy, and her baby? She still worries about them, but senses they won’t need her. Like everyone else, she wonders what became of Chandra.
Monica will work as she always has. Volunteer work can turn into a career—she wouldn’t be the first to use the Red Cross as a stepping stone to teaching or law or even politics. She’ll be in the news again because she needs to explain herself to protect her future, to show people she’s just like them before she disappears for a time. She might be seen occasionally, perhaps on the street with a boyfriend, laughing, licking an ice cream, her tongue circling around it to catch melted drops of chocolate.
Sandy, on the other hand, will be someone you see out of the corner of your eye, the girl with the baby, the woman playing football with her ten-year-old or driving to work, a woman so much like you that you’ll never notice her. The group that sat around the table, complete in itself before dividing into separate bedrooms, or leaving to continue rescuing whoever can still be saved, will be gone by morning. Only Sandy, about to be born, to change into someone she would never have planned to be, will stay a few more days before she leaves to become the woman no one will ever find because she is everywhere.
TARA’S STEW
Michelle Bouché
TARA ENJOYED MAKING HER DISPLEASURE known to the entire household. How dare they hire someone else to cook in her kitchen! She banged the shiny pots as she put them away, slammed the smooth metal of the icebox door, and glared fiercely at anyone who paused at the doorway. For the last five years she had owned this kitchen, loved it back to radiant life after the old cook had allowed grime and decay to build up around the edges. She’d nourished the family, too, brought them back to vibrancy after years of bland heavy food had caused their taste buds to surrender.
She remembered the day back in 1952 when she’d decided she would rule the Beaumonts’ kitchen. Serving dinner in her crisp black-and-white maid’s uniform, she overheard the Missus announcing her decision to pension off the old cook. Tara spoke up right at the table, surprising everyone—including herself. The Missus agreed hesitantly. Some vague reference was made to a trial period. Tara just smiled and squared her solid shoulders, confident she could engage them in her passion for sumptuous food and flavors. Later, walking home in the light of a full moon, she thanked the spirit that had prompted her to ask for her heart’s delight.
She threw away the hated black-and-white maid’s uniforms and spent two weeks’ pay on three new, sparkling-white chef outfits with matching linen aprons. Then she proudly marched into the kitchen and conquered it. At first it was reluctant to yield to her fierce and loving care, but within a month the place glowed with new life. Pungent herbs grew in the window boxes; warm fresh bread cooled on the racks, and mysterious concoctions bubbled on the stove. These aromas contrasted sharply with the clean tang of bleach and lemon. The family, never before inclined to linger in this realm of the servants, took to finding excuses to dawdle there, to breathe deeply the now-magnificent air, rich with basil and cilantro, orange zest and seared meat, and sumptuous coffee la
den with milk and cinnamon. But her stew was their favorite dish. They always took seconds, not caring if they suffered for their gluttony. Hearty yet tender, the stew was exquisitely delicious. Many a night the women complained that they would have to let out the waists of their dresses.
Despite their grumblings, they couldn’t help but indulge themselves at her table. Keeping Tara happy became important. They humored her by painting the kitchen a dazzling white and even put in a fan that twirled from the ceiling, diffusing the luscious smells throughout the house. When Mr. Beaumont rewarded Tara with her own little cabin behind the big house, she smiled and waltzed her rounded figure gracefully through the kitchen, dancing the dinner into a pirouette of tastes to excite their palates.
That night she’d stood outside the door of her new house, reveling in the light of the full moon. Tara opened her nightgown up so moonbeams could caress her breasts as she whispered words of thanks to the beautiful orb shining down on her. It filled her soul. The waves of light beat in time with her heart. She wept as she seldom allowed herself to, magnificent tears of joy, grateful to the family for fulfilling her secret desire.
Since then she’d continued daily, weekly, monthly to tease out the tangiest of flavors, the juiciest of fruits, the most succulent recipes to feed her family, as she thought of them.
And now, for the young Miss’s big party, they had betrayed her, cast her aside.
The Missus, obviously flustered, had called her into the parlor to talk about the menu. This surprised Tara, since the Missus usually liked to sit at the little table in the kitchen, sipping her sweet dark coffee and reviewing Tara’s plans for special occasions.
Tara refused to sit in the unfamiliar territory and instead leaned against the doorframe, her arms tight over her ample bosom.
Best of Best Women's Erotica Page 3