Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married

by Heather McElhatton

  “I thought it was something about honesty.”

  She makes a face at me. “You know, I can’t figure out if you’re funny or just . . . stupid.”

  “Little from column A,” I say, “little from column B.”

  “Jennifer, you’ll never get permission for anything. But you’ll almost always get forgiveness if you look fabulous. Screw honesty! Men want to believe we’re sexy naturally. Trust me, Brad doesn’t want to know you’re getting your anus bleached or your pussy steam-cleaned.”

  “I don’t even want to know that.”

  “Jen, you have to start taking charge. If you don’t keep your ship in shape, Brad’ll row off with some little dinghy, and don’t give me some bullshit about it not being fair, life’s not fair and nobody asked you to be here, so shut up and just wax your damn pussy.”

  “Wow.” I nod at her. “That should be a bumper sticker.”

  “Jen, you need to play this game if you want to stay in it. Plus, do you know how hard it was to get you this appointment? Medi-Spa isn’t even taking new clients right now. The waiting list is two years long. Do you really want to wait that long before you look fabulous? More important, does Brad?”

  “Okay.” I look at her and I take a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Cristal hands me what amounts to a work order form and I sign away seven grand. It’s terrifying. Brad’s gonna hate this. Unless of course bleached anuses are really his thing.

  Time will tell.

  I get my first procedure done that day. A skin technician studies my face, a giant eye swimming overhead like a huge squid staring at me through a thick clear plate of magnified glass. Then a team of nurse-technicians and skin specialists go to work on me. They start with deep cleansing and move merrily along to Dermaplaning, which is exactly what it sounds like. They use a blade to scrape your face and peel the top layer of skin cells off.

  Then I get microdermabrasion and a chemical peel, where “mild acid” is spread on your face and allowed to set, burning off unwanted layers of your epidermis. After that is fractional resurfacing. They use a powerful laser to zap unwanted freckles and age spots. I’m concerned when I see smoke rising from the zap-it gun. The doctor says smoke is normal.

  What is not normal, apparently, is hair. Hair is only allowed in two places on the female body: the scalp and, to a minimal degree, the eyebrows. All other hair is unwanted, unseemly, unsightly, and embarrassing. Every crack and crevice must be as soft and bald as a baby’s butt. This is accomplished by using a gruesome battalion of red-hot lasers, which feel like lit cigarettes being pressed onto your bare pudenda. I’m told the burning sensation usually remains for mere minutes . . . but sometimes it lasts for weeks.

  Next stop: anal bleaching. Population: one. I have to get up in a gynecologist’s chair and put my feet in stirrups so the nurse, Brunhilda Von Rough Hands, can daub cold bleaching solution on the old “chocolate starfish,” which is a name she finds unamusing. Maybe that’s why she warns me about the bleach solution feeling cold . . . but not about it burning. When the searing white-hot sensation hits me, I yell at her to stop. Actually I yell, “Starfish is burning! Starfish is burning!” She says not to worry. It’s a normal situation.

  I contend to the jury . . . it is not a normal situation. At all.

  I get my vaginal steam bath next, figuring I should get all the paid violations over with. But I quite enjoy it. You squat on this ergonomic rocking-chair thing and position your hoo-hah over a big steaming bowl of boiling tea. It’s pungent stuff, some blend of mugwort and wormwood, which sounds like a British crime-fighting duo to me, or a medieval venereal disease. The tea also smells like hot chimp feces, which is pretty uncool, but I fall asleep in the chair and afterward, my pussy feels like it’s been to Las Vegas. Best of all, the steaming plumps the whole package up. So Brad will feel like he’s trying to jam a watermelon into a pudding cup.

  Finally I meet the Tin Man himself, a silent Polynesian doctor with a perfectly bald head. He uses injectable fillers to plump up the lines around my mouth and give my lips and cheeks a lift. He recommends liposuction for my belly, butt, and legs. I say no thank you. That’s a major medical procedure and I’m not ready to wrap my brain around that yet. He just nods politely and says, “Your brain might not be ready for liposuction, but the rest of you is.”

  He gives me prescriptions for Lunesta, alprazolam, and Trimexa, so I can sleep at night, chill out during the day, and lose weight 24/7.

  Better living through pharmacology!

  I meet Christopher for lunch and he starts squirming when I tell him about all the procedures at my spa visit. Especially when I tell him I had my yacht club steam-cleaned.

  The thought of it makes him want to retch.

  “It was awesome!” I tell him. “You don’t know, you don’t have a yacht club.”

  We call vaginas yacht clubs and penises yachts, because Christopher suffers from acute icky-word syndrome. If he hears a really icky word, he seizes up in these painful cringe-flinches that take chiropractors and/or new Armani couture purchases to undo. We keep icky words chipper, like, “That sailor had a seriously small yacht. More like a dinghy. He could’ve moored ten of them side by side at the yacht club and still had room in there to wave a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.” We name specific yachts and yacht clubs. I named my yacht club Mother Teresa and Christopher named Jeremy’s yacht Farfel. He named his own yacht King Filippe Roheim III.

  Christopher and I go shopping. With Addi and Ellie’s encouragement and Brad’s corporate credit cards, I begin to buy more clothing than I’ve ever owned cumulatively in my life. As the girls say, I’m worth it and Brad’s good for it, so why not get it?

  Suddenly my enormous walk-in closet seems terribly small.

  The overstuffed racks and packed drawers are brimming with shimmer and glitter and silks and satin and faille. Oceans of cashmere, supple folds of charmeuse and chamois. Twinkling crystal, amethyst, and pearly peridot buttons. Colors I could eat with a spoon. Almond, oyster, apricot, pearl. Custard, dusty rose, violet, and hickory. Even the names of these designers sound like faraway kingdoms, exotic places you’d like stamped on your passport. “Now boarding for Versace, Prada, Cavalli, Balenciaga.”

  In the ongoing effort to fit into these works of art, I join an expensive gym in the warehouse district called the Sweatbox. Hillcrest has a gym, but according to Ellie nobody works out there. They work out at the Sweatbox, with “the best trainer in the world,” a big muscle-bound man everybody calls Big D. I make an appointment with Mr. Big D and go to the gym wearing my awkwardly new pink and white workout togs. I feel like a prostitute named Candy Cane. The girl behind the counter at the gym is wearing an official orange and gray Sweatbox sweatsuit. “You want Big D?” she says. I nod. I’m obviously a special client. “Okay . . . well, I just saw him outside,” she says. “Just go down the hall and out the door by the vending machines.”

  “Is there a locker room where I can freshen up?”

  “Absolutely!” She hands me a shiny chrome credit card, which opens the security door to the VIP clientele locker room, which looks like a futuristic lounge or intergalactic nightclub. It has chrome walls, glass benches, and blue glass floors that look like liquid and are lit from below. Inside my space-age, bacteria-free, antimicrobial, self-ionizing metal locker is a complimentary orange and gray Sweatbox towel and mini bottles of Sweatbox-brand shampoo, conditioner, and “moisturizing salve.” I have no idea where to put the salve. There are also complimentary orange flip-flops for the shower, a pair of orange plastic sunglasses for the tanning bed, and a big jumbo orange plastic water bottle that says GET SWEATY AT THE SWEATBOX. All items are labeled eco-friendly, animal friendly, and BPA-free.

  After changing into my workout clothes, I follow the hall and go out the heavy metal door by the vending machines. Outside, in the brilliant winter sunlight, a large black man wearing a sweatshirt that says SWEATBOX is sitting on a folding chair eating an orange in the sun. “
Hey!” I shout. “You Big D?”

  He turns and squints at me. “Yes, ma’am!”

  I come out and we shake hands. I thought it would be freezing out here, but it’s nice and toasty; there are outdoor heat lamps running overhead. A few of the other trainers are out there having a smoke break, which charms me. I sit down on a chair next to Big D and tell him a little about myself and what I hope to get from training. I tell him about my general concerns and specific problem areas, my milk-udder arms, my pear-shaped butt, my persistent muffin top. He shakes his head when I’m done and takes out another orange, which he slowly begins to unpeel.

  “You gotta get rid of that microscope, baby.”

  “Microscope?”

  “Don’t nobody look good that close up. You keep looking down, you always find trouble. Just look up at the sky, let your mind set on a cloud. Now, take a deep breath. Let your mind loose. Shake out your arms and legs. Just get up. Jog in place.”

  “Jog in place? You mean, now?”

  “Sure, go ahead if you want to. Just keep it light and keep your head up. Stay with that cloud. It’s all about how you feel inside. Like that. How you feel?”

  “I feel . . . good,” I say, running in place. “I feel really, really good!”

  “That’s it,” he says. “Just remember Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! That mean to me, be heavy but feel light. You can’t listen to what other people tell you about yourself. No, sir. You read in the paper that true north is moving?”

  “Wh . . . what?” I’m feeling a little winded now.

  “True north. Magnetic north. Where every compass in the world s’pose to point.” He pulls out an old battered army-green compass and holds it in his palm. “Everybody in the whole world including Jesus and Einstein said true north can’t never move. Never ever. Guess they forgot to tell old true north. Ha! ’Cause he movin’! Nobody can tell him nothing now! He got a style now. You know what else that means?”

  “No . . . I . . . I . . . don . . . don’t.”

  “True north moves, that mean every map they ever was in the world before now is wrong. Dead wrong. You see? Those old maps can’t getcha where you wanna go no more! Need new maps, young lady, and that’s where you and me come in. Why you stop runnin’?”

  “Water.”

  “Well, all right. Don’t take too long now, they gonna say we havin’ a tea party.”

  “Sorry . . .” I quickly cap my water bottle and get back to jogging.

  “Whole lotta men been telling people how to get places with the same maps. Only if those maps is wrong now, then those mens is wrong. And that means don’t nobody get to tell you how to go now. You go your own way. See? Who says you got a fat ass? Who tole you that?”

  “Well, nobody, but I have eyes and I can see what my ass is supposed to look like in magazines and on television and—”

  “Maps!” he bellows “All maps. All dead-men maps. I told you . . . they done now. So you don’t use them peepers to go peepin’ on dead-men maps. You hear?”

  “I hear.”

  “Get yourself lost that way. See here, I’m looking at my compass, and it is pointing me to true north. I take a map out, it tell me to go the other way. I got to hang to my own compass to get where I’m going. You see? You got to hang to your compass to get where you wanna be. You don’t listen to the rest of ’em. If they is no maps that tell the truth no more . . . we is one thing.”

  “Wh . . . What’s that?”

  “We is free.”

  12

  Faux Halcyon

  Christmas slaps us like a sharp wreath of holly right in the face. It seems like it was summer yesterday and now Christmas carols are droning and ho-ho-ho-ing everywhere you go.

  You can’t even pump gas without hearing them and you start feeling rage flowing inside you. Then you feel bad that you’re so damaged you hate Christmas carols, and your anger ebbs as you convince yourself these tin-eared tunes aren’t a premeditated attack, they’re just what the healthy people like to listen to. But then “Frosty the Snowman” comes on and your rage flows again. This shit happens every year! This is manipulative! This is brainwashing! This is America—forced joy should be illegal! It goes like this all season, your rage flowing, then ebbing . . . then flowing again . . . then ebbing . . . then flowing, flowing, flowing . . . and somewhat ebbing . . . flowing!

  Keller’s loves Christmas. Products we sell year-round get slapped with a red bow and 15 percent price hike for the season. The lobby is decorated from deck to halls, from Candy Cane Lane to a huge hanging wad of papier-mâché mistletoe. We have a big Rockefeller Plaza–type Christmas tree in the rotunda, right next to the special-needs shoe collection. Santa Claus, who is being played by Lenny this year, sits there on his throne for ten hours a day. Lenny wanted to make some extra money. He’s endlessly patient and will let kids sit on his lap for as long as they want to. Even the moist ones.

  The helper elves are supposed to promote special deals and hurry kids along; they say stuff like, “Okay! Time to go, Johnny! Santa must go shampoo his reindeer with specially formulated Ultra-Prell, now available in the pharmacy!”

  Not many special deals get mentioned when Lenny’s there, and nobody rushes the kids. If they do, they usually do it only once. If an unwitting elf says, “Okay, time to go, Johnny!” Lenny will calmly set the child down, stand up, and immediately drop character, even though Johnny’s still right there. He’ll get right in the elf’s face and say, “What is your Goddamned problem, huh, hotshot? Trying to rush Johnny off, huh? Well, guess the fuck what, numb nuts! That little motherfucker will sit on my fucking lap until the Goddamned cows come home if he wants to! Understand? Because I am motherfucking Santa Claus! Hear me? And no elf steps on that! You just bought yourself a time-out in the Cookie House, elf! Go get in the Goddamned Cookie House!” Then he’ll calmly return to his seat, plop the bewildered child back on his lap, and say, “Ho ho ho! What’s next on that Christmas list of yours, Johnny?”

  Meanwhile the banished elf will usually trudge off. Although I’ve seen one or two try to open the door of the Cookie House, which is just a prop gingerbread house used just for decoration. It has no working doors or windows, it’s just a big box decorated with Styrofoam candy canes and lumpy mounds of snow that they set over a yellow light so the windows glow. Lenny thinks it’s the elves’ break room.

  It’s a good Christmas. The lines at Keller’s grow delightfully long, and the managers all report high numbers. Sales are good. Best of all, the Christian Lambs of God have decided to invest generously in Keller’s and they’re shipping job lots of merchandise to our loading docks from all over the world, so everyone’s in a festive mood. Plus Ellie and Addi spread delightful gossip about me with their girlfriends who shop at Keller’s, and suddenly when I go to the store, I’m greeted with a new respect, even from the cosmetic girls, who say things like, “I heard your husband bought you a diamond bigger than a walnut!” and “A little bird told us Mr. Keller is taking you to Paris!”

  It’s all untrue, but I confirm every rumor with a sly smile.

  Not everyone is smiling at me. Christopher summons me like a bishop down to his lair and points accusingly at the Olya doll boxes lined up against the wall. The Prophets of Profits at CLOG Industries are pushing a Russian peasant doll for Christmas, Olya from Olkhovka. Unfortunately she’s not a big seller. Dressed in loosely stitched, tattered clothes and with gray strips of glued felt for shoes, Olya the peasant girl is supposed to incite warmth and sympathy in others, but even kids know a doll with acute depression when they see it.

  “These dolls are from some toxic waste dump!” Christopher says angrily.

  I shush him. “Christopher, I know you’re upset but keep your voice down. The CLOG guys are in the store today.”

  “Where?”

  “They’re tied up in meetings. Don’t worry about it.”

  He demands to speak to them and I tell him that’s not going to happen.

  “
Then you ask them,” he says. “You ask them why these dolls have hazardous-material warnings hidden behind the shipping labels, just like the Angel Bear boxes.” He peels off a sticky-backed shipping label, revealing yet another large yellow diamond with a black skull in the center.

  “Great.” I sigh.

  Christopher snorts. “Great? Sure. Have a very merry plutonium Christmas.”

  I tell him I’ll see what I can do.

  Meanwhile there’s an avalanche of holiday parties to go to. Since Brad usually has to work, Ellie and Addi escort me to cocktail parties, dinner parties, charity auctions, club functions, museum receptions, wine tastings, fashion shows, theater premieres, and symphony balls. Addi hosts a charity auction and fashion show at her house every year for the cancer society. I go over to help her. Two hundred guests are due in an hour for cocktails and a fashion show and storm clouds are gathering over her Excelsior mansion. Downstairs, close to a hundred staff people, caterers, sound and lighting technicians, event planners, valet parking attendants, models, hair and makeup artists, and jewelers buzz about the place.

  A transparent Plexiglas runway has been installed a half inch beneath the water in the indoor swimming pool for the event—and for local designer Johann Johansson. “If there’s a blizzard, I will tear my Goddamned hair out,” Addi says from the styling chair in her master bathroom, where a makeup artist puts on the finishing touches.

  The two-hour event involved a three-day production that began by laying a wooden floor on the snowy lawn and pitching an 1,800-square-foot tent above it for cocktail hour. The big top houses a bar fully stocked with top-shelf liquor and Veuve Clicquot champagne and a kitchen area where Christafaro’s catering staff whips up thousands of canapés and servings of caviar. As arrangements of white hydrangeas and roses from Larkspur & Co. are placed on each cocktail table, guests begin to trickle in—and the snow begins to flutter down. Just before the fashion show begins, a woman in a sparkly black dress uses her strappy high heel to drag industrial floor mats over the stone steps that lead guests from the tent into the house.