The Pisces
Page 12

The saleswomen all said I looked amazing, and I liked their enthusiasm. I liked the attention and it made me high. Now I didn’t even care how the date with Adam went. Just getting ready for it felt like something to live for, some net in my life that caught me and strained me out of the ooze. It was as though some wonderful future event were being extended backward in time. The future event needed only to exist so that I could have this excitement and anticipation now.
Next I went to a fancy makeup shop and bought some lipstick to match my hair color, a matte crimson. The women there treated me like an interloper and gave me strange stares. I think I talked about my date too much. I kept mentioning the tech exec and Santa Barbara so they would think that I was rich enough to be there. But they never smiled. Was I not supposed to talk to them? Could you only talk to some women about imaginary dates, while others could smell your reality the moment they looked at you?
The final touch was a bikini wax. I went to a dive—some shithole where they said they could take me right away. I was just going to do the sides, but when the waxer—a bosomy woman named Kristina—saw my vagina, she started yelling.
“Too much hair! Too much hair!”
“I know! What do you think I should do with it?”
“Me? I say take it all off.”
“Ha, no way,” I said.
“Okay, fine. I take some off. I show you. Just lie back.”
I lay back on the small pillow covered in paper. The room was cold and the ceiling was covered in what looked like big pee stains and mold.
“You have boyfriend?” she asked. “What he think of hair?”
“No,” I said. “No boyfriend.”
“Ah, see!” she said. “I will fix that. Relax.”
I felt her spread on the wax. It felt too hot, but I didn’t know how warm it was supposed to be. It felt like my right labia was burning. She blew on the wax a few times with frenetic movements.
“One, two, three,” she said.
Then she ripped. I felt like my vagina was a tree, its roots being torn out of the ground. It was an ache, a tearing, and a burning all at once. I wanted to kill her.
“Oh my God!” I yelled.
I looked down. There was my full bush with one giant chunk missing. The area was pink and had a few tiny dots of blood. My crotch looked like a furry mouth with one pulled tooth.
“Darling, lie back. That was nothing.”
“No!” I said. “Don’t do it, please. I’m done. I’m done.”
“I can’t leave you like this. You’re going to go to mans like this?” she asked, pointing to my torn-up vagina.
“I don’t care!”
“I go gentler,” she said.
I didn’t know what to do. We were sort of fighting. I was pushing her hands away and she was applying the wax. With the second strip I started to cry.
“This is fucking insane,” I said.
But I let her do my lips, which felt like she was searing off my vulva. I couldn’t believe that other women did this. Who were these people? Then she did my asshole, which she said she had to do, because it was “carrying around stink.” I’d been carrying around stink for thirty-eight years.
When I got home I lay down with Dominic and held a package of frozen edamame to my vagina. I hated everything. Now the dress, the lipstick, even my hair color seemed stupid. I realized I didn’t care about any of this stuff, even the dress, which I had loved. It wasn’t about the dress. It was in the acquisition of the dress that there had been beauty.
I thought about different kinds of happiness. There was the happiness I felt in all of the adrenaline of running around, a crazed happiness. This was a different happiness from the quiet peace of just being with Dominic. I kissed his ear.
“Sorry I get so distracted,” I said.
He sniffed at me. Suddenly I didn’t want to go out with Adam anymore. I fell asleep with the edamame defrosting on my vagina.
But the next morning, my excitement—that sense of purpose—was oddly restored. I woke up to a text from Adam that said,
see you tonight gorgeous.
There was something about the morning of a date that tricked me. It tricked me out of the haze of being alive. Or perhaps it tricked me out of the sadness of knowing that one day I would die. It punctured the nothingness. Now I felt passion and love for everything.
12.
Back at group, the word of the day seemed to have shifted from unavailable to triggered. In the safe space of Dr. Jude’s crap-filled office, everyone, it seemed, had recently been triggered by something.
For Chickenhorse it was an escalation of the issues with her landlady. Apparently, the harassment had increased and was now becoming a question of abuse. Chickenhorse’s landlady had entered her apartment without her permission, while she was showering, no less, and had brought her little son with her. When Chickenhorse exited the shower, she was shocked to find a three-year-old boy and his teddy bear. She screamed and accidentally dropped her towel. Now the landlady was accusing her of unseemly behavior toward her son. She was given a thirty-day eviction notice.
“My inner child is triggered, because I no longer feel safe,” she said, looking particularly chicken-gummed. “But I’m having trouble getting in touch with my anger. I’m scared I won’t have a place to live, so instead of fighting back I’m trying to be ‘good’ and begging the landlady to let me stay. But I’m the one who has been victimized!”
The group cooed and soothed, letting her know it was not her fault. Was anything ever our fault?
I wanted to tell Chickenhorse that she probably just needed to get laid. Why wasn’t she dating again? Maybe it’s because Dr. Jude’s version of dating, “conscious dating,” sounded boring as shit. You were supposed to call and check in with a friend before and after every date, no texting more than once a day, no sex outside of a monogamous relationship. Maybe Chickenhorse didn’t think she could follow the rules. She seemed very Fatal Attraction to me.
Sara, over a large bag of Calimyrna figs, recounted the tale of how salsa dancing had suddenly turned dangerous for her.
“It brought up all of my body-image shame,” she said. “When no one chose to partner with me, it triggered my insecurities over the way I look. Then a man finally did choose to partner with me and I found myself getting high off of it, wanting more from him, the way I always felt with Stan. It was unsafe.”
Now Sara was filling her Stanless days and nights by attending an “Opening the Heart” workshop down the street in Santa Monica.
But Sara’s heart already seemed pretty open to me. How much more open did she want it to get?
“We’ll see how it goes,” she said. “Already I feel a little triggered by it, because some of the women at these workshops end up pairing off with the men. It’s as though they become a couple for the week. But this has never happened for me. Where is my workshop boyfriend?”
Dr. Jude reminded Sara that she wasn’t cleared to be dating yet anyway.
“I know,” said Sara, glumly biting into a fig. “But it would be nice to know for once that I could have a workshop boyfriend if I really wanted.”
Brianne’s son had found a girlfriend, and this was hard for her.
“It’s triggering for me, because it means I’ve been isolating a lot more,” she said from under her wide-brimmed hat, face covered in a chalky substance that I guessed was zinc. She looked like she was wearing a clown mask.