The Pisces
Page 17

On the way home in the car, I kept checking my phone but he didn’t message me right away like Adam did. I kept turning my ringer off and on. Did I want to be notified? Did I not want to be notified or just be surprised? What if he never texted me again? When I got home, a pile of what looked like brown soft-serve ice cream was waiting for me on the kitchen tile. Dominic had shit on the floor.
18.
The following night, tired of waiting, I texted Garrett.
I had fun last night
I waited to hear back, carrying the phone with me from room to room. There was no response. I felt like Dominic’s pile of shit. Was he really going to ignore me? I had gotten a weird feeling after our kisses, that I had suffocated him or seemed too interested. I texted him again.
Would you want to hang out again?
And again:
Hey, sorry if I seemed too eager or something.
And again:
Ok I’ll leave you alone now
I went outside to the beach. I saw a girl bike by on the boardwalk. She had long hair to her ass and was wearing a tiny black skirt and a hot-pink crop top with her stomach showing. I thought to myself, You little slut. I didn’t think it in a mean way but as a celebratory thing. I wanted to be her in that moment. She seemed like such an independent slut. I bet she never waited for texts, just fucked guys like Garrett all the time, casually. Surfer boys who looked like Theo the swimmer too, probably. I bet she never got attached. I wanted to be like this girl, not dependent on anyone else to be okay. Slutty, but an island. She wasn’t pretending to be content without anyone while secretly wallowing in misery. She genuinely didn’t give a fuck.
I walked over to the rocks to see if Theo was there, but he wasn’t: only the waves. It was still probably too early. I waited a few minutes and wondered if he was mad at me for talking about my dating life. Was he jealous? That couldn’t be possible. I wasn’t even sure if he liked me. Still, now I was being ignored by two men. This felt worse than only being ignored by one, like the hole in me had gotten bigger. Maybe the more men you put in it the more stretched it became. Maybe Claire had been wrong.
But suddenly a text came through. It was Garrett.
fuck you this Sunday?
My heart jumped. It was brazen, not exactly romantic, but it was clear that he wanted me. I felt as though someone had suddenly injected me with good drugs. In an instant the world had gone from black and white to Technicolor again. I began walking back to the house, smiling.
ok yeah
good he wrote. have you heard of the Shalimar?
YES, I wrote back.
I had no idea what it was.
Good. i’ve always wanted to fuck there. wear lingerie and I’ll fuck you in your sweet little pussy and asshole
I’d never thought of my pussy as little. Maybe it was big. What if I had a huge pussy? Also, my asshole? I had never had anal and it seemed terrifying to me. I knew, through all of the butt songs the kids listened to on campus, that the ass was a big thing now. Apparently everyone was eating each other’s assholes and putting things in them. But then why did he want me to wear lingerie? It seemed kind of retro, not contemporary at all like anal. Now that I thought of it, though, anal sex was a timeless act. The Romans all fucked each other in the ass. I felt like I didn’t know anything. But also I was excited.
what color I asked.
It was like I had become a puppet. I just wanted to please him.
Black bra black panties. and garters. meet me in the lobby at 1 pm
All of my underwear was white and kind of threadbare. I had never been a sexy-lingerie kind of girl. It never went with my aesthetic. Also, I had a propensity for yeast infections. Whenever I wore anything other than cotton there were issues. So I called Claire.
“I’m going to be having sex…at a hotel…he’s getting a room for the night…the graphic designer, not the chimpanzee one. He wants me to wear lingerie. Do you know where I should go to get something cute? Victoria’s Secret?”
“Victoria’s Secret? You’re joking,” she laughed. “That’s faff. Let me take you somewhere good.”
I skipped group and met her in Brentwood at a place called La Boom Boom. Immediately I could tell it was way out of my price range: a hybrid of Mercedes-keyed tight-bodied moms in yoga pants and potential porn stars. You couldn’t tell who were the moms and who were the porn stars, but they all definitely had money. Who were these women buying lingerie in the middle of the day? I guess this was what everyone did in L.A. The place reminded me of being inside a black-and-pink birthday present. The walls were pink with black velvet stripes and there were little pink chocolates on a table. I ate some.
“Come on,” said Claire. “Don’t be scared.”
“How much do you think this stuff is?”
“Just go in there,” said Claire, pointing to one of the little pink changing rooms. “I’ll bring you stuff. What size are you?”
“I’m a 32 B on the top last time I checked,” I said. “But barely. I have no idea what I am on the bottom.”
I tried on bra after bra, various panties with little slips of paper in each of them to keep them fresh for whoever bought them. I imagined other women’s vaginal juices on the paper. It nauseated me a little but also made me feel like I was part of some kind of ritual, a lineage, like Sappho’s all-female cult of Aphrodite. Claire and the saleswoman were the priestesses. They made it a party. The saleswoman was named Bridget and was a GMILF, a hot grandma type. They cooed over me, telling me I had a nice ass, cute little breasts, that I looked great in everything. Claire even slapped me on the ass. I liked the way they encouraged me, babied me even. With my mother dead, and Annika away at college, I’d never had that type of tactile feminine love as a teen. I’d pretended I didn’t need or want it. I told myself that I was lucky. As a single parent, my father wasn’t home much and I was free. I had zero curfew, no rules. But my longing leaked out in other places. It was in my love for Sappho, the divine feminine. I craved that nurturing, to be swallowed up in the arms of Aphrodite herself, rocked and held. But I was afraid to ask women for it, afraid they would die on me or reject me in some other way. So I looked for it in men who could not give it.
But Claire and Bridget were heaping it on me voluntarily, without me even having to ask. They brought me more and more items: black lace bra with pink satin underneath, black lace thong, bra with leopard straps and black cups, black mesh panties with brown satin insert, demi bra, push-up bra, sheer lace bra with no underwear, black crotchless panties.
I continued to soak in all the attention, the ushering of my transition from woman to whore. But after forty-five minutes of the fashion show, I began to get overwhelmed and hungry. What were we doing? There was a nothingness we all thought we were staving off, using the bras and panties as little lace shields. But now the nothingness was creeping in again and only I could feel it. Bridget’s compliments became annoying. What a fake. She didn’t really want to mother me and she didn’t think I was sexy. She just wanted to sell lingerie.
I asked her straight up what some of the items cost, then began to sweat. $120 for a pair of underpants? $250 for a bra? Now it was too late. I was in too deep. We had become family of a sort. I would feel ashamed not buying anything.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Claire. “I’ll buy them for you. As a gift. A welcome-to-fucking gift?”
I wondered where she got all of her money. She didn’t seem to work. I guess the ex-husband had given her a cut in the divorce. Maybe alimony.