Donna Schecter Still Has Her Way With Words

I HADN'T seen my mother without makeup in decades, not since her ERA campaigning in the late 70s, early 80s. She was earthy then: a smart-mouthed liberal with a stolid weakness for domineering or aloof Sephardic men; a young two-time trophy wife with no obvious plastic surgery. Now three marriages later and standing at my door because of some mysterious transgression committed by her current husband, she was disturbing in a satiric sort of way. As she pointed at her suitcase, indicating that I should bring it in for her, the skin of her cheeks was drawn back tightly-spotty and blemished like a carpet decorating some mode of public transit. Her lips were too full for a human head still attached to its body. Plus, she was worn down and faintly jaundiced from a one-hour flight and pair of fifteen-minute cab rides, which had her at my door by noon. "A disaster, Linda," she said, cueing me that she needed to be consoled. I was sensitive and consoling her was the one thing I was good at.
That was the only reason she was crashing the first day of my first week off in years.

I KNOW I am sensitive because my mother told me so-constantly, like it was a problem. And it was. Whenever those words came out of her mouth, they loitered in my mind, lingering into my sleep, giving me realistic, terrifying dreams where I did unconscionable things to assorted authority figures-like fellating them or stabbing their feet with blunt cooking utensils. And when I awoke, I felt terrible all morning and sometimes well into the afternoon. And if I did something wrong in my waking life, it was worse. I'd hear my mother's words instead of my thoughts and feel the need to apologize and apologize. And rarely did the person remember the instance that I was apologizing about. "Linda, it's fine. I didn't even note the sarcasm in your voice," my friend might say. And I, certain of my responsibility to make amends even from a very young age, would assure them, "Well, that doesn't make it right. And I'm sorry." And, like the shampoo instructions say, I'd repeat and repeat until done. But who can tell when something like cleaning is really done? I, for one, can go on washing my hair over and over again forever.
Is there really any harm in a desire to make things incredibly hygienic?
I know there is now, of course. Namely it points to disconcerting issues of compulsion and overcompensation. But I was a child then and hadn't yet learned how to forgive myself for how overly deferential I was at times. To be even more "meta" about it: Guilt was how I clenched to a sense of power that I never really had. Even as a child, I constantly flooded my thoughts with the fallacy that things could have been different.

AS I tried to find the handle on her suitcase to wheel it in, I had to trace my evaporating ambitions for a moment. For months I'd fixated on my first real break as adult without clients or school; I'd even cancelled my therapist for the week, which concerned her because I'd never done anything so certainly. It was a week I could spend alone, wandering downtown San Francisco during the daylight conjuring ethnicities of people I'd never met and then turning a corner to find a museum celebrating that exact ethnicity's cultural heritage. Something you could never do where I grew up, the San Fernando Valley, where cultural heritage only lowered property values.
Just for once I had wanted to know what I would do if I could do anything. My To-Do List had formed anything into basically three things: 1. Get lucky. 2. Attempt to go for a walk around some trees. 3. Lose ten pounds of water weight. With my mother there, all three were impossible, ridiculous and essentially selfish wastes of time, as far as she was concerned, except the weight loss and only because that could lead to a shotgun marriage to a doctor (who was preferably both Jewish and Agnostic; we both agreed on that).

MY MOTHER's suitcase was impossibly heavy, as if she'd brought enough liquids to last her a month. While I tried to find the proper angle to get the thing mobile, she wandered through my house attempting to find my stereo to kill the volume while scanning for any mess, any undergarments left out, any decorating faux pass. Not that she needs actual flaws. She'll invent her own, even though she is color-blind. "Brown, blue what's the difference?" she might say. "It still looks like it's from a Taiwanese brothel."
"Am I supposed to sleep on this couch?" she shouted back at me, implying in her tone that she was using the word "couch" loosely. To her the prerequisites for the word "couch" include A) costs over two thousand dollars and B) utilizes the hide of some dead animal.
"We can have the front desk send up a bed," I answered back with a snapping sound. Instantly my sarcasm released chemicals that swamped tightness and displeasure throughout my nervous system. Years on both sides of the couch had left me with a small reflex defense, the pathetic sameness of my childhood. I wanted to curl up into the fetal position and cry.
That I didn't was my victory for the day.

IT WAS an easy day to find the highlight for. After my mother said my carpet didn't match my drapes and listed nine or ten other specific faults (recycling the same insults from previous visits and appropriating things I remember Joan Collins saying to Linda Evans on Dynasty), we spent every second of remaining daylight inside, watching the E channel and ordering Chinese from the same restaurant twice (first we got white rice, then brown; suddenly, she was on a diet). She didn't move from my favorite corner of the couch, and, thank God, didn't once ask if I was seeing anyone (no) or how much weight I'd gained (twelve pounds). Instead she counted how many times I applied Chapstick to my lips and occasionally apologized for visiting, which extracted my escalating reassurance and apologizes in return. And mostly, she just repeated the same "sad facts" over and over: menopause, especially in its concluding stages, was a nightmare for her, deviously mentally and physically painful in a way I could never appreciate in my youth (condescending narcissism); it must have been designed by a male god to punish the female body for its obvious advantages (Feminist paranoia); her husband was a snake, but the only man in the world who interested her (trite histrionics); and as he got closer and closer to receiving his massive inheritance from his mother, he became more and more interested in other women (greed/ hurt); at first it was tolerable, but as it was becoming more public, it was too humiliating to use it just as an excuse to pilfer his bank account (petty larceny/community-property).
Finally as Gray's Anatomy was about to start, she got to her point. I had to press mute. "He brought some slut to the Schecter's grandson's Bar Mitzvah," she admitted, like I'd beaten it out of her. "Said it was his assistant. Like telemarketers have assistants! We were fighting about why we'd been fighting so much, so I'd gone to the house in Indio for the weekend. But that's no excuse. He shows up anyway, with a woman who looked like she had semen-like makeup caked all over her huge fish-bowl-shaped bosoms. That's an exact quote. Donna Schecter still has her way with words. She's still in advertising. Or is it market research?" As she paused to sip her can of Diet Coke, which she had hold at a strange angle to make it jibe with her lips, the name Donna Schecter reminded me that there were women who adored my mother, dozens of them. Women who followed her up stairs to continue conversations with her. Any of them would be proud to be consoling her. But my mother wasn't willing to be consoled by peers. She'd been betrayed too many times by women far less attractive than her. Any vulnerability she showed could be used against her in the game of life.
Whereas I was her tar pit where she could dump her dirty laundry and never see it again.
She set the can down and continued her story as McDreamy chased some new woman through the rain into a commercial. My mother had found out about her tragic humiliation, which she didn't even get to witness, over the phone, and it nearly gave her an epileptic fit, she claimed, though she neither has epilepsy nor knows what it is. So, she stayed in Indio for weeks. There, she was decorating a theoretical third home in Maui with items from the Home Shopping Network and savoring her anger, letting it settle, slowly like a bouquet of those nice kinds of aluminum helium-filled balloons you can't just stick in the trash. She had nearly forgiven Stephen when she woke this morning to drive back to the Valley. A man was scheduled to remove the cottage cheese from the ceiling of their Encino home.
That's when she found out what real humiliation is.
"Pablo walks in and tells me that our check didn't clear. Stephen doesn't even have sixty-five hundred dollars to his name. He couldn't even buy a Ford Fiesta," she said. "This poor, little Mexican man, Pablo, has to ask me for cash before he can start work." She called up the bank and learned that the money wasn't pulled out in a lump sum. It'd just slowly been drained throughout the year by the both of them and wouldn't be refreshed until his trust fund paid out around the first of January. "That was the last straw. I had to send Pablo away, his dozen children starving a week before Christmas because of Stephen. No wonder people are Anti-Semitic." She stopped to shake her head, emphasizing that this was the most obvious indignity of her situation. "I decided right then that I'm not looking at that diseased ceiling another day. I'd rather sleep on your bed." And she nodded, reminding me that I'd be sleeping on my "couch."

SHE NEEDED her suitcase by my bed-for medical reasons she wouldn't disclose-and that required some real ingenuity. My loft is ten feet about the ground, in a part of the heavens I call the Lindosphere, and I can barely get up the ladder while holding a book. So I looped some belts together and connected it to the suitcase's handle. Then I climbed up and had her throw one end up to me. After twelve or thirteen failed throws-most of which she barely got over her own head-I caught the strap and pulled, using the railing for leverage, misplacing several lesser important vertebrae. The whole time she's cursing me for living in a loft, telling me that I should have just become a Communist submarine captain if I wanted to live a celibate life in appalling conditions. As I struggled in my tug-of-war between gravity and good sense, between her possessions and my palms-which seemed like it might begin tearing apart at my lifelines-there was a point when she was standing right under the suitcase. Each wheel would have taken out an eye or an ear, probably both. No court in the world would have convicted me. I imagined testifying that despite her home-shopping spree, she was suicidal and had stepped under the luggage to stop the pain. But I yanked and wrenched and got that Armani piece of crap over the rail and then let it drop.
"Careful. Careful! Now, make sure it's on the right side of the bed, please."
"That's where the wall is."
"You'll figure it out. Do you still have those Ambiens I gave you?"

RIGHT BEFORE we officially went to bed, my mother had positioned herself at the edge of my loft to look down. I think she was even staring at me, something I don't think she'd ever done before. I don't know how long she was at it before I looked up and caught her.
The jutting, diagonal, not-to-code wood rails were holding her back from the edge, her bright blue eyes apparent even in the soft light-which I'd worked to for months to get just right in case I ever had sex in my house with the lights on. I vowed that no man would ever see my pores opening and closing in real time like some strange plant that ate bugs-which is how they looked in most florescent 150 watt light. "Can I get you something?" I asked when the thought of her observing me became too much.
"She's going to die soon, you know." She was always Stephen's mother. A woman who breathed every breath to deny my mother what was rightly hers.
"You've said that for three years. You said it at your wedding."
"I had a dream. A very real one, except she died of tuberculosis, which doesn't usually happen anymore, I know. But I feel it. She won't make it another year."
I could see her crossing her fingers. "I can't imagine how much you'll miss her."
She laughed. Her first laugh and smile of the visit. She wiped it off her face. "When it happens, you'll never have to work again, Linda. Well, you can't stop right away, but after probate and all that. You can go half time then; we'll see how it goes. It'll be four cruises a year for us. Barcelona," she said, with a perfect Spaniard's lisp. "You know that, right?"
I wanted to say that I liked working. I liked being a psychologist. It was actually meaningful and rewarding unlike selling houses and insurance and the millions of things she sold when she actually had to work. But it was too stock. I imagined her laughing at me being so serious. And that would be terrible. "I'll get the lights," I said.

THAT NIGHT I was woken up every hour or so by her angry moans, as she crawled down the ladder to use the bathroom-or the high-pitched sound of her raving into her phone, leaving messages for Stephen. As I sipped from my sports-bottle of water to down the ibuprofen capsules that I prayed would help me get back to sleep having given up my last Ambien, I listened to meandering, sermonizing voicemails that would be erased before they were ever heard by anyone but me or the NSA. That was lucky for her, really. She was beyond inappropriate.
Only torture victims or cable-television mobsters should sprinkle their discourse with words like pierce, stab, eviscerate or butt-fuck. But, the most disturbing thing about her tirades were how they were followed by increasingly desperate pleading appeals delivered in a wispy, lispy baby voice she'd never used in my presence before, even when I was a baby. It was a mesmerizing study in strategic bipolarity. If she were in my care, I knew exactly the Psychopharmacologist I would refer to her: Dave, my nearly ideal man, who specializes in wealthy children with ADD and dual-diagnoses. Unfortunately my ideal man was so married with children that he'd even begun sympathetically developing breasts, which were, cup-size by cup-size, detracting from his idealness quotient. But he still had a tiny, cute Christian nose and was remarkable at getting marginal people functional, whatever shock to one's biology that entails. My mother once told me once that if I was able to prescribe drugs, we might have a real relationship. Then she volunteered to pay for my medical school-if I could get in.

THE NEXT morning, I woke up before her. As I tried to figure out how I ended up thirty years old, alone and vacationing at home with my mother, I studied everything in my apartment item by item, recollecting how each came to be part of my life. I remembered the store I'd visited when I should have been studying. The ecommerce website I wandered on to when I should have been writing. The layaway plan that made no sense. It all made me realize how much I liked the realm that I adorned for myself. My Oriental lamps, my cute Russian doll moisturizer dispensers, my ironic doilies. Everything commented upon by framed French and German posters from John Hughes films. All the subtle individuations that made me "me" made me proud.
I felt in some ways I was colonized country, which had rebelled democratically and embraced egalitarianism. Despite our alterity, we still paid homage to our old former queen and stayed in the Commonwealth out of tradition and reverence for a civility and continuity. We could never completely sever colonial formality, mostly because we knew the details of our Queen's three most excruciating divorces and two bankruptcies. We didn't want to be one of the bad colonies that abandoned her and denied her a royal visit in distressing times. Especially since our Queen had paid for our undergraduate degree and the deductibles on our last three car accidents. And I knew that deep down, below our similarly lobed ears and wide shoulders, I couldn't be more different than her. She was a restless sleeper, a snorer. A codependent, to be pop-psych. A Demagogue, to be political. An emotional failed-state, to be honest. I told myself that her visiting me should only reminded me that I must be proud. By not becoming her, I'd foiled her only once, but really over and over again in the same way. And if I weren't a psychologist, that was as much of a victory over her that I could ever expect. But I needed more.

MOVING AS silently as possible, I opened my laptop. I turned on my Instant Messenger. No one was on, and there was no one I wanted to talk to anyway. I had a bad habit of befriending very happy, sweet women who I could only stand in very short doses. Like some sort of emotional Diabetes. I decided that the best thing I could do was make plans for the day and see if my mother would even consider them. So, I went to my bookmark for "Knowland Park."
Knowland Park is a local natural wonder I'd been neglecting like a recurring image of a filthy, frightful character from childhood lingering in the scenery of my dreams. It had the finest collection of native trees in the area. If I were going to ever be close to a tree, it would be there.
I'll admit that I have an irrational fear of bark. Not so much of looking at it-I'm OK with that, from a distance, at least-but of touching it or being close enough to touch it. I think it's the varieties that nauseate me. Some is rough, some thin like paper, some puffy like Styrofoam. It all sticks to trees improbably, like disease. (I believe that as a child I had dreams where I was covered with bark, but my therapist suggested I might be fantasizing that to make my struggle more ingrained in my being.) When I see bark in pictures or films, I always have the urge to strip it off, piece by piece. If only I could remove it without touching it. To be honest, trees are like a real-life monsters to me, which is ridiculous. Especially since they are the lungs of our earth, and everyone else loves them in this inhuman, unconditional way. (My therapist said I identify with trees. Getting to close to them would be getting too close to myself, seeing the "me" below the layers I put on to protect myself from society/ my mother. At least, that's what she said the last time it came up. The first three times she suggested allergies.)
I don't blame my mother for my phobia, but she never helped. When I started school, she claimed I had a rare skin condition and forced me to wear gloves to class, which I took off as soon as she was gone, of course. Her concern was based on some reality. My skin chapped easily, so easily that my mother insisted that my pediatrician test me for leprosy. "I'm doing the test right now, Ms. Glass," he said, glaring at my mother. "She doesn't have it." He said I just needed to drink more water and moisturize. But my mother remained suspicious, picking up odd scraps on the floor and accusing me of shedding flesh all over her home.
But I wasn't looking for revenge for all that. I've learned, or rather, trained not to be vindictive. I'm corrective, so my mother visiting-no matter what her reasons were-was to help me face Knowland Park. Cosmically-in the construct of a collective unconscious or whatever- even she knew it. I just had to remind her, or tell her. And telling is always the hardest part.

MY MOTHER ended up sleeping till noon. By then I'd written down the directions to the park, stuck them in my pocket and moved on to check out every local man on every Internet personal site I belonged to. Even the Jewish one. Each site was such a dismal catalog of rejects, it was heartbreaking that I only had three messages, all from the same guy, a high school shop teacher who wore '80s nerd glasses. We'd spoken on the phone with late one Sunday night when I couldn't sleep. It might have even turned into phone sex; I don't remember. It was late.
I decided that I needed new pictures more than anything. My current pictures were from a wedding I'd attended three years ago in a dress that inadvertently looked shockingly similar to the bridesmaids'. Besides presenting me as seven or eight pounds heavier than I was even now-
when I was incredibly swollen-the pictures suggested I thought large earrings were still reasonable. Plus, I had a glint in my eyes that said, "Avoid me and all forms of love, please." And though it was an honest and altruistic suggestion, it wasn't helping me get me laid. And that was what I really needed badly. Some good, safe sex. I shuddered to think that if my mother wasn't there I might have been so desperate that I ended up at Craigslist, answering ads of men who posted no pictures at all. That was unhealthy behavior; even the local news said so.
I was writing a message to a very bookish engineer who only listened to radio rock from the 90s. He was thin and not so handsome-not in the classical, symmetrical sense. But, he said he didn't like sports, twice, on his profile. That's how low my standards were. I was about to hit send when my mother's phone rang. She jumped out of sleep. Pounced is probably a better word. Instead of grabbing the phone, she knocked it to the floor. She tumbled out of bed-questioning the construction of my loft-and somehow sent her phone off the ledge into the air then down to the couch. The whole time, her ringtone-an appropriation of Donna Summer's "Love to Love You, Baby"-blared on. As it landed, I slapped my laptop shut. "Answer it!" she screamed.
And before I could move, she screamed, "Don't!"
That was followed quickly by, "Fine! Answer it."
Stephen's voice was so calm that it instantly reminded me why he was in my all-time top three of my six stepfathers. "Hey, Lindy," he said. He has a nickname for everyone-usually some form of truncation followed by an affectionate y sound more than an actual metonymy.
"How are you?" I asked. And we chatted like civilized adults as my mother climbed down the ladder, grunting like a defeatist, middle-aged, female King Kong.
When she was finally standing over me, she said, "Give that to me."
"She wants the phone," I said to Stephen, turning away from her like an abused child.
"I'm sure she does. You going to give it her?" he asked, as my mother's head pulled back and cast her stare forward at the same time.
"We're having a great time. We're going to the park today," I said. She was yelling now.
Laughing at the ruckus in the background, Stephen said, "She'll stab you if you don't hand it over soon." And he couldn't have been enjoying life more.
"Take care," I said handing, or rather, allowing the phone to be snatched from my hand.
She clutched it to her breast and ran into the bathroom like I might chase her.

"YOU, MOTHERFUCKER," I could hear her say from inside the bathroom instead of hello. "Do you know what hell you've put me through? No. No. No, I won't. No, fuck you. OK, fine. FINE! Tell me. Christ, stop whining, just tell me." She listened for three minutes. Then she said "No!" maybe four dozen times. "Oh. Oh. Ok. Ok." A pause. "Tell her I'm coming, please." She finished the conversation with a deflated, "Christ, what time? God. I'm on my way."

WE HAD to move fast so mother could make it to her hairdresser in Encino before five, but it wasn't an accident that getting her suitcase down from my loft from ended with a sad bang. A solid, loud thud which made my mother jump but didn't damage the bag, unfortunately. Nor was I unintentionally quiet as she rushed me, threatening to call a cab any time I paused to think.

FREUD COMMITTED suicide. That, perhaps, is something they should tell you before you read his billion pages on the human mind and how it's divided, how it works, how to help it if you can. It doesn't change any of the words, but perhaps a reader would be well informed by knowing that Freud had cancer of the mouth, a cancer that was all but certainly caused by his passion for cigars, which were sometimes cigars. And after suffering ten unsuccessful surgical attempts to remove the cancer, the author of Mourning and Melancholia convinced his doctor to end his suffering with a lethal dose of morphine.
I, myself, would have liked to known. And that's probably just because I'm sensitive. But really, they should consider putting that at the front or the back of his books, right under his standard picture, which makes him look all handsome and intellectual and sexy, especially for an older Jew. Maybe they could just put a hint or a sly allusion to prevent people like me from finding out the hard way when it's much, much too late.
But maybe people wouldn't read him then. Like suicide is contagious. That would be the worst. Just more excuses for people to remain oblivious. So, it may be better as a secret. One of those secrets-like tax loopholes for the rich-that are just barely hidden by life to prevent people from getting too bogged down or just giving up. But personally, I believe that people have the right to give up. It's something I pride myself on. It's just a part of being sensitive.

WHEN I wouldn't speak, she couldn't stand the closeness of being alone together and silent in a car. I could tell, by where she was staring, that she wanted to turn on the radio, but she knew the rule. It was one two rules neither of us had ever broken: Only the driver touches the radio (The other was that an ex should never, ever be mentioned by name). But just sitting there, with my imaginings of her thoughts louder than anything, was unbearable. So eventually I gave in.
"Cortez the Killer" was on and on and on and on. Neil Young said, "What a killer!" and a two-minute guitar solo started. Right then we entered the tunnel and a static was rising up underneath from the radio's poor reception that made the entire thing so strange and agonizing that it was perfect. My mother only could tilt her chin to her shoulder and try to negate everything that was going on around her. But it couldn't work because they were playing the whole song. That was the difference between living near Los Angeles and living near San Francisco, I decided. Near San Francisco they'd play "Cortez the Killer" in its entirety on the radio. Like most of my deepest convictions, it was a thin theory based on what I assume was an anomaly, but it was something. I finally had some reason to explain why I liked living where I did. I turned the radio up and my mother winced, digging her chin into her skin. And as the static nearly overtook the song I was clearly able to see my true feelings, maybe for the first time in my life. They were just sitting inside me waiting to be noticed. Like a big girl at a dance.
I was sad; sad about my mommy leaving, and I hated myself for it. I had no other plans, nothing I wanted to do alone. I wanted her to stay. I needed this insane woman-this psychic vampire, or rather psychic organ stealer, who could reach into my body and remove my heart without getting blood on her hands. I would rather live on my couch than alone. It made me three times sadder to know that her leaving making me sad wasn't just pathetic-it was past the crust and the gas of being pathetic and the very core of being pathetic itself. I was as ill as her or anyone. I was worse. I was a nerve abruptly exposed then placed on a speed bump for my mother to roll back and forth on. I don't know if I was crying, but I think I was chewing my lip, which is my tell. If my mother sees that, she knows tears and snot will follow. I felt her scan me with the corner of her eye. "You're fine," she said, over the static, over the song and over everything.
"I don't want to be alone," I said, with a sharpness that shocked me-and her, I'm sure.
She sighed. Like she knew this was coming. "You can meet someone at temple," she said. It would have hurt less if she had slapped me. "Julie Schecter's cousin met her fiancée at temple. She's nineteen. She's heavy too."
I turned the radio off and reached into my pocket to pull out the directions I'd written down. I unfolded them in my lap and neither of us said a word until we passed the huge dirt brown sign that had the words Knowland Park carved in to it. Carved in deep, round letters like some act of nature itself.
"If this isn't the airport, you should know that I will call the police on my own daughter."
"Go ahead," I said. "I bet that will speed things up." My voice was hoarse and mucus-y from suppressed tears. I parked in the only empty spot, ignoring the Handicapped sign. "Give me five minutes, please." I said. "Just walk with me while I touch one of them." I couldn't look out the windshield. They were everywhere. The trees. Everything about a tree just stares at you.
"What did I do to you as a child to make you hate me?" she said.
I opened my car door, barely remembered to grab the keys and got out. With my head down, I walked toward them, the trees-my nose fighting the oppressive, fecund smell with out breaths. I kept moving, praying she was behind me. When the dizziness became obvious, I was under leaves. They were rustling above. Under me, dirt was formed into repulsive little mounds by roots that were growing in microscopic ways every second. I was so close to the tree's trunk that my steps become miniaturized; I barely sustained forward motion.
"If I get a divorce," I heard my mother say behind me. Standing beside my car and not touching it, her voice was raised, but still painfully calm. "What do I do then?"
I turned my head to her.
Concrete and open doors surrounded her. Families were too busy smiling at each other to stare. Even with her puffy scowl, my mother looked a million times more welcoming than any tree. As I swiveled my body back toward her, I kicked up some dirt, which formed a little dust cloud that I had to run away from before it settled on me.
She'd won again. Or I'd given up. It didn't matter; there wasn't any difference.

I WANTED to drop her off at the BART station.
I wanted to say, "You can get there from here. Figure it out." But I couldn't. I turned the radio off and just drove, trying to ignore her applying blush to the unnatural contours of her face with the seriousness of a mortician. I tried to not notice anything except exactly how far the next car was in front of me. I followed all the signs. I found her airline and waited for the porter to come get her bag from my trunk. My mother was about to turn and walk into the terminal when she decided to come say goodbye. I rolled down the window. The heavy zoom of planes and all the rustle of the hurried cars and mumbling people were almost comforting as I anticipated her words. She leaned in. She looked nearly normal. She looked younger and better than me, actually. "I always forget how sensitive you are," she said, with a hint of compassion.
I bit my lip, and instantly my mother was as serious as she's ever been in her life.
"She's having an impromptu Hanukkah party this evening. Some big announcement. The biggest Hanukkah announcement since, 'That fucking oil is still burning.' If I'm not there, nothing matters anymore. All kinds of things that I won't bother explaining. This was no time to take me to a park, my dear." Cars were pressing up behind me; security people were waving their arms. I nodded like I understood. "But I," She was looking for a word. Maybe "love."
But instead she said, "I'll call you."

AS I drove home, I weaved in and out of traffic like a madwoman and wrote my personal ad in my head. It was going straight to Craigslist. The "No-Strings-Attached" section where people wrote things like, "I'm looking for two hot hung black or mixed guys that don't mind that I'm on my period." The section where one of my clients had met their current boyfriend-an ex-heroin addict who was only good for one thing, it seemed. Just sex. He needed hours of it to soothe his withdrawals or the pain of sobriety or to just to cum because of the meds he was on.
The title of my ad would be "Woman Seeks Nerdy Guy for Nature Walks and Sex." It would begin: "If you don't answer this ad by saying you don't normally answer these ads, you probably shouldn't answer my ad. I'm looking for a bookish man. A botanist would be best. If you can take me to see some trees, you'll get lucky. I promise. Your pic gets a slightly bloated and somewhat recent pic of me."
I thought of all the things I hated about my own words, especially the word "lucky."
I sat with it for a second and realized that I just didn't think that getting me meant getting lucky at all. But I had to change that. I had to pretend. Fake it till you make it, like they say.
Because if I didn't feel that way, who ever would?

8:11 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

The Same Smile

"Failure has always sounded better." –Bright Eyes

On a college campus, even the groundskeepers have newish, clean shoes.
Somehow Ed's shoes were always dirty, crusted like bread, though he barely walked at all and always on concrete. And when he did walk, his uneven rhythm amplified any unexpected sound. He'd have to just stop to get his bearings and let a tour group pass. If a leaf blower turned on, he'd have to find a bench.

He'd feel better if he could stop thinking. If only the thinking part of him had been removed. But it'd grown. And it swelled and produced a puss of reasons why he didn't belong anywhere anymore, especially in a Zen Sitting group. And there was only one reason he did: Therapy. And not the free VA therapy with the government's version of a school nurse, a guy who wore an eye patch and called Ed Fred even after he'd been corrected him twice. Religion was a "suggestion" from his real therapist. The therapist his dad was paying for out his retirement money. Paying heavily, spitefully; a punishment and constant reminder that the son hadn't listened to his father or logic or even his mother. He'd just signed up for the Army one week after 9/11 like some big hero. Now every week for at least fifty minutes, he'd sit and stare at Dave. Dave, a middle aged man with a worried forehead, a former Episcopal minister. He wasn't supposed to know that, but Dave played golf with one of his dad's friends at the club. And Dave would stare at Ed as he wandered through words that reminded his brain how he should feel about not thinking the one time thinking really mattered.

Then after all that, Dave would look at the clock and say, "So, what we got planned this week?" The plan never changed. He was home, and his leg was still in Iraq along with his sense, his friends and his decency, his sanity. All these things he didn't even realize he had when he brought them there. Now he was constantly taking inventory of what he had left—even though the inventory always led to the same looping images: faces, the whiteness of hands, waking up for one second in a hospital bed on a plane, hoping you were dead. Once it started, he had to shut himself down with an Ambien or two each night just so he wouldn't do a terrible thing, or a series of terrible things. Because even if he did, everyone would blame Iraq and Bush and the War. And he'd just blame himself.

He circled the Sociology building for five minutes. Everywhere, blond girls in pairs chatting. Eyes orbiting, sweatshirts flopping, shorts rising. Ankles bare or in bright white socks, puffy like gauze about to sop up some festering wound underneath. He was trying to decide which entrance would put him closest to the right door, furthest from a stilted gaze, a prolonged reading of his limp. And no stairs. The stairs were the worst, clinging to hand rails like an eighty-five year old woman. He just wanted to give up.

That was his only hobby now: giving up and going home. Nothing else felt good.
So why Zen? Why didn't he just become a ninja, a Friar Tuck, a Dalai Lama? It all seemed as likely. But his Economics TA was a nice guy, smart and calm, no agenda. A micro and macro kind of guy who never salted examples with politics. You could trust him, if you wanted to. And when he brought up that he helped lead the campus' Zen Sitting group, casually in conversation during his office hours, Ed thought, Cross religion off the list. It was something Dave told him to try; somewhere he could meet people, make friends or peace. And Zen wasn't church, there'd be no old man preaching at him like he knew for sure how all debts were settled. Whether the Zen people might want him wasn't a concern for his therapist; they weren't paying. But he'd try, even though it was advice like this that convinced Ed that his shrink—even if he'd been in Vietnam and since earned framed paper after and framed paper—didn't understand him or what it's like to be fucked in both the body and the head, really fucked. But religion was on the list. Two steps before drugs, mind drugs, and he wasn't going to give into that until he'd failed at everything else twice, at least.

His TA was cross-legged on the floor when Ed opened the door. Fuck, he didn't even think about that. Logistics. How the fuck was he supposed to do the lotus position. He was anatomically forbidden from being a Buddha. He tried to take back his step, but his TA's puppy-tilt smile made that impossible. The smile jumped up, and when it was close to Ed, it said, "Let me get you a chair, man." Man, a familiar word. More familiar than anything he'd said in class in five weeks. Something about that made it already worth coming, at least for a second.

"Is that cool?" Ed asked, staying with the familiar.

"Totally. Totally," the TA said twice, ethereal and enlightened sounding. Could "totally" be a mantra? He pulled a chair off a stack of them in the corner and said to someone something like, "Ed needs this." And the someone nodded so understandingly that it would have confused Ed if he didn't already think of Zen as being something beyond compassionate. Something both smart and gentle and harmless in a way that other religions had given up for borders and oil.

There were five or six other people in the room. All chubby, white, balding, tucked-in, except for another kid who could have been Ed if Ed were still Ed and not a fraction of Ed. That kid had a smirk. Ed remembered his own smirk, something he relied on before he realized what it really meant. It was his smirk that a girl had written a note to him about in eleventh grade. Tiny penmanship, punctuated with hearts. His smile made her want to melt, which was good, it seemed. She called it his smile, but he knew. It was a smirk. Life will wipe that off your face, his dad told him once when he came home at six in the morning drunk. Right again.

Once the TA set out the chair the rest of the guys formed rows. One next to Ed's chair. One directly across, facing them. The tallest, baldest guy was the leader, senior to the TA. He had a bellish, gongish thing in his hand and posture that emphasized his big-toe-shaped belly. "Are we all here?" he said, looking around smiling. There would have been a cruel joke to his question if he had any idea what Ed's jeans were hiding. But as Ed limped to his chair he could tell the guy was oblivious to all that. Zen, really. Whole.

"Are we all here?" was just an allusion to a philosophical uncertainty for everyone else.

The leader said, "My teacher Roshi once said, the one thing that's definite about religion is that a thousand years from now historians will look back and tell us we were all worshipping tribal gods." Everyone laughed. Ed traced his mind for the joke. "So let us find the tribal gods in our mind tonight. Just give them a quick look, say hello, see how they're doing and do nothing about it." He went on to explain how it would go, how to count breath, how to return to breath when the mind wandered, how to sit like someone was pulling a string from the tip of your head, how to last twenty minutes of silence and meditation on that silence. Watch your mind. Watch your mind. So many "how-to"s that Ed instantly felt better. He could just think about all that. Procedure. The things he needed to get right. Head being pulled up by a string? Easy.

The leader was ready to hit the bell when the classroom door opened and a girl from Ed's section half-bowed her way in. He had seen her talking to the TA after class, twirling her straight blond hair, but he assumed it was about grades or homework, anything else. But she was here, the sleeves of her sweatshirt only revealing the tips of fingers, tan, tiny fingers. Maybe she had a therapist too. The TA stood up in one swift motion and guided her directly across from Ed. But to the floor, of course. "Welcome back, Becca," the leader said. And she nodded, her hair lilting against her neck into designs, a fancy frame.

Despite where his eyes immediately went, he wasn't a pervert, he told himself. His therapist had agreed, twice, nodding with his mouth trained neither to smile nor frown, forehead still worried. It was just that a girl like that changed his circulation, gave him a phantom limb. And it wasn't just him. A picture of her could get a guy to sleep ten nights straight. Maybe even a hundred, even when sleep was impossible. If every pretty girl would just pose for one picture, one picture of her doing something that no guy could ever imagine himself, she could shorten a million nights. She had no idea what'd it would mean to somewhere else in the world. He'd even send them to the enemy. A propaganda barrage. Counter-insurgency through the crotch. Would they fight if they could sleep through the night? A girl like that had no idea the good she could do. She could stop things she couldn't imagine. And now she was just sitting in front of him, folding her legs into one complete tangle, jutting her head up as if a string tugging at it.

The bell sang out, lasting longer than any pleasant sound he'd ever heard before, and it was time to breathe and count. Think about thinking about nothing without thinking that you are thinking of nothing.

A minute takes forever when it matters. His drill sergeant said that the longest fight that an average civilian (his exact word was "pussy") had ever even been in, with fists and feet and that clumsy shit, couldn't have lasted much more than a minute. It was probably closer to twenty seconds. And when they say the battle lasted days, they mean it happened in bits of minutes or in seconds over days. The rest is hiding/seeking. Walking down a street, eyes over both shoulders or driving in circles the same way, just waiting for the right moment, not even a real measure of time. A moment was all it took for one explosion to take one leg and two men. A moment that lasted longer than the twenty years before.

If people wanted to kill, they could ruin time. That was the power.

He tried every rule of about he remembered: return to his breath, focus on the numbers without seeing him, but all he thought about was the place where the silicon hit his strangeness of his stub, where new leg began. He didn't have to notice it if he didn't want to, but it was something to play with, something to remind himself he wasn't Zen. He really sucked at this. At meditating. Why wouldn't he? He couldn't even keep his eyes down to the floor; they wandered, taking in the clean faces around him. He wanted to know what it looked like to do it right; how the mouth became calm enough to look like it belonged on a face. How a forehead relaxes. They all shared this quiet he'd never had. Never. Maybe it came with losing your hair. But the smirky kid had it too. When he was done examining the guys, he tried to not do it, but his eyes won and he was just staring straight at Becca. Her eyelashes fluttering like some wind was coming out her eyes. Like her eyes were little ponds that someone was skipping rocks on. Where was his mind? Didn't he have an ounce of control? He looked down. The gray speckled floor, the tiny, shaven pieces of carpet. It hadn't even been a minute, he knew. Nineteen minutes to go, a million lifetimes. He looked straight up and saw Becca's eyes, open and on him. And she smiled. And glanced down before he could react. Should he have smiled back? Could he?

He couldn't stop himself from looking now. Was she just smiling because of the chair? Did she know about his leg? He'd only told the TA, but maybe they'd talked. They could be engaged for all he knew. "You know Ed, hun? Just back from Iraq." Just, like 2004 wasn't years ago, like each day hadn't lingered into blobs of hours he'd only lived through.

Her eyelashes stopped moving. Somewhere else in the world that would have been a bad sign, but it just meant it was working for her. She was meditating. How did it feel? Could she really forget who she was for a second? Why would she want to?

It was just obvious now, he was studying her, memorizing her. Putting her in with the other girls in his mind. The ones he'd touched. But she'd be the first, the first one since he'd been back. The first he hadn't grown up with. But he'd never meet her parents. He'd never know a sweet girl like her again. Not in this new life. This was a life for whores if there ever was one.

She opened her eyes again, but kept them down. Could she feel some sort of static from him? Was he ruining it for her? She looked up. The same smile.

He looked down and then right back at her because he couldn't not. She was still looking at him. Revenge? Trying to get the others to notice them so they would kick him out? Was she as bored as him? It hadn't even been three minutes. Not close.
And she kept staring, meditating on him.

For some reason, for no reason, he traced his hand down his pant leg to his knee, what should have been his knee. He pulled demin into his hand, fought to get a handful. Then pulled and pulled until he revealed the fake sock inside his stuffed shoe; pulled and pulled till he knew the chrome of his supposed leg was showing.
Almost like he could feel the air on it. Or the light.
Her eyes rolled down to it then back to his. Again she gave him that same smile and nodded as she did. Her eyes went right back to the floor as her head rose and her back straightened.

Breath snuck in. He felt his head being pulled up, as if by a string, and one-by-one his breaths became easier to count. He could count and think if he wanted to. He could count and wonder: How am I going to get out of here as soon as this is done?

Easy, his breath told him. He was in a chair. He'd just stand. And leave.

5:41 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Love Scene in an Apartment Building Hallway

"If we make it to the third date, let's have sex."
"Fourth or fifth, depending on how you kiss."
"I kiss like springtime."
"And that's how?"
"Sweet. A bit cool at first, but kind of scorching at the end."
"None of that sounds any good."
"It has to sound good too."
"It would help."
"What else would help?"
"Don't act too interested. But always call back."
"Should I take notes?"
"Apparently."

6:31 AM - 0 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Revenge is a Bitch

Lot liked Sodom.

His daughters couldn't agree. Their new home was a difficult thing to explain to his younger daughters, whose prolonged purity was preserved by keeping them inside, avoiding the marauding gangs and public rapes that had become more and more common. Still they got at least twenty minutes a day outside. Every day at dawn, Lot walked them to the river to do their business. "Everything has a bad side," Lot explained to them, as he walked them back to their home, which to them was prison that must have been ordained by the gods. But there had already been a flood, and if God was so go against what was going on in Sodom, he could smite it down in seconds, or in forty days of very bad weather. And he hadn't. "So, look at the bright side. You have plenty of time to sew."

And his daughters agreed. Agreed if that's what their silence meant.


Lot was sinking into his own body against the gates of Sodom, smoking and waiting for the sun's final show of the day when the two strangers approached. They didn't look angelic, necessarily. If he hadn't seen them wander up and ask him they'd found Sodom, he would have been a bit suspicious. There was something in their swagger that suggested danger. Something about their skin that was too clean. But if there was one thing he knew from his uncle Abraham was that messengers from Yahweh could come in almost any form at any time. Thusly, Lot asked them if they would like to stay in his home.

"No, thanks," the taller angel said. "Such a beautiful night. I think we'll just sleep in the city square."

Lot laughed for a while. The thought of letting a couple of Angels find out what Sodom was famous for made him weak with contradiction—uncomfortable, hysterically amused and repentant at once. He tried to find words but laughs came instead. The strangers almost wandered off when finally he got out, "Whatever you wish, but first you must dine in my home."


As they set bowls in front of the guests, his daughters looked at the Angels coyly, almost suggestively. That was the problem with purity, Lot thought. It makes everything suggestive. It nearly even made his wife, a blob of ruddy flesh who sat in a chair all day and night eating plates and plates of diced pomegranates, seem flirtatious.

But his daughters were glad to have guests, they kept saying, and served with glee, intent on making the visitors overcome by fullness and drunkenness. Like any good hosts. As they all feasted on flat bread and soaked in wine, the conversation was fluid. The strangers wanted know everything there was to know about Sodom, and, boy, did Lot and his daughters have some stories.

The strangers laughed through each one, adapting the sense and rhythm of family quickly. And after the laughs died each time, one of the angels said, "Yahweh was sure right about this place."

And Lot noted that reference to Yahweh each and every time. So, I was right, he told himself as he became more and more drunk since he tasted the wine but left the food for his guests.

Lot was telling the tale of a visiting troupe of performers who came to Sodom to celebrate the Half-Moon Festival. They ended up granting a performance that their bodies would never forget. It was a rancorous story, filled with na..ve statements from the actors who said the wrong things from the beginning to their end. At least the wrong things to say when one was visiting Sodom. "We end with our beginning," was a well remembered line. So, it was through laughter they heard the knock at the door. It snapped harsh and loud and the silence that followed was even worse. Everyone looked at each other like explanations might help. Even the Angels seemed wary.

"Let me get that," Lot said, trying to smile.

Everyone nodded very quickly.

"I'll get it," Lot said to himself, as he walked to the door.

As he stepped outside, Lot decided it wasn't worth counting how many were there. Probably thirty, but five would be enough. Far too many, actually.

"Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them to us so we may know them," the leader said. He had some strange colorful drool coming off his lip. Some impossible mix of every fluid one body could make.

Now, Lot had to think fast. That was fine. He was a fast thinker. He'd moved to Sodom on a whim and now he could fix this with instinct. He just knew it. "Please my brothers, do no harm. Forget the strangers," Lot said. "Take my daughters, they are still as untouched as they sky."
Groans shot out of every mouth in the mob. The idea was beyond distasteful. It was almost offensive to them.

Lot continued over the waves of sound, "To these men do nothing, for they have come under the shadow of my roof-beam."

"Step back!" the leader said, "You newcomers, always the first to judge. We'll have to teach you a lesson."

The crowd pressed in to Lot. Things were getting very uncomfortable, until Lot felt the door of his home open behind him. Some Angelic force in the form of the strangers' arms pulled him inside and shut the door fast.

"Whom do you still have here?" the taller Angel said. "Your sons and daughters and whomever you have in this city, take them out of this place. For we are about to destroy it in service of the Lord."

"Wait, wait, wait," Lot said. "Don't overreact. These men mean no harm. If we could instruct them in the Lord, they'll be just as decent as you and me."

The Angels said nothing, but Lot followed their eyes to a knot in the door where the head of an uncircumcised penis was trying to drill its way in.


As light began to spill through the night and the crowd that had been at his door had wandered off to fornicate and sleep in various corners of the square, Lot emerged from his home to find his married daughters and their husbands. As they shook off sleep and heard his warning, they laughed. Something about Lot made people laugh, and the more serious he became, the more humor he caused. "Get out of this place, the Lord is about to destroy it."

"Just like pomegranates will turn your skin red, Lot. I'm sure. Let us sleep."

And they left his warnings at their door.


When he arrived back home, the Angels said, "Flee for your life. Don't look behind you and don't stop. Flee to the high country or else you shall die."

This was bad news for Lot. "You have shown such kindness to a humble servant. But I cannot flee to the high country." The thought made him shiver. The cliffs. The caves. He wasn't an animal. "How about Zoar. It's a nice little town nearby. No gangs. Nothing to displease the Lord."

The Angels shook their heads at each other and then rolled their eyes, which became stuck in an upward gaze. "Alright," the taller Angel said. "You may go to Zoar. But go fast for the Lord's work will not be done until you are there."

"Right!" Lot said and began to gather his things.


And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord from the heavens. He overthrew all those cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew in the soil. And Lot's wife, who suddenly remembered she had left something in the fire, looked back. She turned into a pillar of salt.

Far away, Abraham looked down on the smoke of these cities where his God could not find ten righteous men and sighed.


As Lot and his daughters wandered into Zoar, their eyes were met with fear and halting accusations real and full just from the gaze of the inhabitants. As a crowd began to form, Lot whispered to his daughters, "Maybe a cave isn't so bad."


That night as Lot slept, the elder daughter whispered to the younger, "Soon there will be no men left, except him." She pointed to his snores.

"So, we shall be without child forever?"

The elder sister nodded. "Unless," she pulled out a jug of wine, all that remained of their kitchen. "Unless we give him wine to drink and lie with him." She rose poured a goblet full and set about to wake her father, who was flat against the floor, so he could sip. And he sipped for he was sad at all that had been lost. And he sipped until his mind was so at ease that he gave his daughter a child. And the next night with his younger daughter he did the same.

And they each bore a child. The elder's child was named Cheney. And the younger's Bush. And they are the fathers of men we know today.

Parts of this are excerpted from Robert Alter's translation of Genesis.

7:11 AM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

WHEN I was a child, I did exactly one cute thing.

WHEN I was a child, I did exactly one cute thing.

During the summer of my tenth year, I attended an acting/fat camp on the campus of a local community college. One Wednesday during an extended improv activity about a hijacking on an airplane in which I played a screaming baby, the crew of a game show that no one remembers now filed into the back of the classroom to observe us. After we were done with the exercise, they applauded and the instructor had us to line up shoulder-to-shoulder and smile.

Somehow, from the entire herd of round, wide-eyed, hungry girls there, they only chose only me to interview on camera. The more attractive girls, the ones with loving, complimentary parents or with stage presence or only one chin to lose, were aghast, and so was I, really.

I almost wet myself constantly as this incredibly handsome, bearded man sat me in a director's chair and spent half an hour asking me a million random things. Extended Free Association, basically. One of the last questions was: Do you believe in God?

I wasn't sure, of course, but I knew I was Jewish so I said yes, sadly (this was before I realized, of course, that religion is the Will to Fascism itself). Then he asked what I believed in and out of nowhere I said, "I believe in sherbet."

Everyone around me..the bearded man, the cameraman, and the acting coach/ dietician who only chose me play babies, farm animals or singing furniture..laughed in a manner that I can only call hysterically. I blushed like a cherry tomato and let out a tiny trail of pee as I folded into myself trying to laugh along.

And when they showed that exact clip on TV, the studio audience laughed warmly in complicity. As my tiny, chubby image processed the shock of adult reinforcement, it turned red and turned into itself. Then the crowd's laughter became applause even cheers.

As we watched it on our old-fashion-projection-big-screen TV..which made my face look like a battleground of a war between primary colors..I prayed for my mother to smile. But she had no reaction at all. She wasn't even really looking at the TV. After the episode ended she snapped the power off with the remote and walked away.

Before she left the room, she turned to the wall and thought for a while.

Then she said, "Ice cream is not a religion," and left the room.

10:32 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Thank You Attending My Seminar

I appreciate your focus. I know that a lot of you right now are sitting here and may still have some of those old familiar feelings like, "Hey, I still need to pee." And believe me, in ten minutes, you will never have that worry every again. I'll get to that whole thing in a minute. First, let's talk about attitude.

6:36 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

One misplaced truth

can be worse than a thousand thoughtful lies.

6:35 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

In High School, I Was Sexually Desperate

IN HIGH school I was sexually desperate. I had one male suitor. A friend, really. Charles. He had a huge head of curly brown hair that looked like some sort of prickly bush that might grow in the desert during the Jurassic period. You could have lost coins or your keys in there. The barber needed to run a metal detector across it before he started cutting. Whenever his hair came up in conversation, which it did often since he was in such unrelenting pain about it, Charles would say, "Wait till everyone else is bald, I'll have my revenge. I'll get back at all those fucking assholes." And the moments he spoke like that, thorny and filled with hopeful spite, were the only times when he was actually attractive to me.


We tried to have sex, often. He couldn't really maintain an erection for longer than a minute, which was fine since he never once made me wet. It was such a joke that when my mother forced me to the gynecologist to get on the pill I asked the doctor if an impotent male could make someone pregnant. My doctor grimaced and said, "If a penis gets anywhere near your vagina, this is probably for the best." As he said it, I noticed he was leaning his penis toward my vagina.


One night Charles came over after my mother had locked herself in her bedroom. My mother and stepfather at the time, it was either the end of David or the beginning of Neil, didn't care what I did as long as I was around for her birthday and holidays to take pictures. I'd been in my room watching St. Elmos Fire on VHS and experimenting with playing with myself, using techniques from a book I found in a living room drawer. I'd been reading a few pages at a time and had finally gotten to the good part. It was the last scene of the movie..where everyone is hugging and fighting and such..when I found the information I'd been looking for my whole life. Suddenly playing with myself became less play and more work, in the sense that it felt adult and satisfying. Hence I was entirely prepared for sex that night.


Charles sat down on my bed and said he wanted to try something. I sat on my hands, wondering if he could smell what I did. "OK, what?"


He'd brought it up, but still I had to nearly beat the actual disclosure out of him.


"If you meow, it will help," he finally said.


I meowed.


He twitched a bit. "I mean during."


"Really?"


He closed his eyes and moved his chin up and down very slowly.


"How did you figure that out?"


"Let's just try." He must have found some book of his own.


But it worked.


This is what it's supposed to feel like, I told myself, as his fullness reached into places where no man had boldly gone before. It's supposed to be like this all time. It's supposed to hurt and feel good. But even the hurt should feel good.


"Keep meowing," he said, when I got too into it. "Please."


For no reason, I decided to hiss. And I hissed like crazy right in his ear, which just made him cum. He came so hard that overtook him, drawing liquid from every cell in his body. And as he writhed, I kneaded his back with my nails and mewed a bit like I was in feline heat. And when he realized I was doing that, it was like he came again. He shook and finished with little sputter. A deflating balloon letting out the final peep of air.


The next morning Charles followed me out of my room right past my mother in the kitchen. She sipped her coffee and just said, "There had better not be any animals in this house."
I wanted a lobotomy right then, but I still saw Charles out. And he bowed to me. I guess he was filled with all sorts of masculine instincts from his first successful sexual experience.
It was cute, but, for some reason, as soon as he turned away I was ruined. I thought about what my mother had said and cried. And cried. I cried so hard that I went straight to my room for days, only venturing out to eat and shit.


After that, I couldn't speak to Charles without crying. So we gave up on each other after trying the cat thing only seven or eight more times.


I still think about poor Charles sometimes. I hope he still has all his hair.


I'd love to see a picture.

2:36 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

My Type

Her messages were always the same. Something like, What the fuck are you doing here, Scott? I was here first. Get the fuck off this site. Then they became emphatic, as if I were forcing her hand. This isn't fair. You need to let me live my life.

Even in her picture, she looked deranged. A wild woman with black olive eyes who didn't hesitate to push her cart into your leg to hurry you out of the supermarket.

This was not the behavior I expected from someone on eHarmony.

The facts were that her personality type said she was a "natural caregiver," a perfect match to my "churlish child" result. And we lived 800 miles apart.

I never wrote back. What was I going to say?

Hi, my name isn't Scott.

1:54 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Girls Love Ski Instructors

She had duct tape on her ankle in anticipation of a blister that would last weeks after this fifty-hour vacation was over.

It was a girls' weekend. The first one since Keith moved to a new time zone, the official end of their on-and-off relationship that had ended for the first time two Junes ago.

And now she had her own ski instructor while her friends all did the bunny slopes-- hoping that someone cute would help them up and they could cut the day short. Her own instructor that would definitely get her back to intermediate slopes that she could handle when she was twelve. An instructor she would definitely sleep with if he was attractive at all.

"Just wait there," the girl from the lodge had told her, pointing area around the water fountain where she was now.

And when the instructor tapped her on the shoulder--shaking her out of a daze, which had completely occupied with the constant pressing her heel into the uncomfortable squishiness immediately below--she kind of melted. Felt her cheeks flush and blush and almost burn so obviously that she wanted to do anything she could to hide it, even whistle. Like that made sense.

"Hi, I'm Ken. You ready?"

She nodded and squished her heel one last time before the day began

2:28 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment