Barbara the Slut and Other People Read online

  In my sex toy stupor I also bought a butt plug for Danny, although I was doubtful that he would want to try it, or that we would ever be home at the same time again. It was black-and-blue marbled silicone, very masculine, and I was prepared with a speech that Chad gave me when I worked at Making Love about how straight men have prostates too.

  • • •

  One day I was cleaning the store and trying to decide what toy I wanted to try next when I heard Pam’s bike outside. My heart started beating faster, but then I remembered I was cleaning and I was wearing a work shirt and both of those things were good. I wiped down the next shelf and put the pocket vibrators back, and saw Pam looking through the window. I waved and she came in.

  “Hi Pam,” I said.

  “Hi Brenda,” she said. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh good,” I said. “Just cleaning.”

  “Great,” said Pam. “I just wanted to tell you that we’re having a little birthday party for Chad at Making Love on Friday night. Bring your girlfriend.”

  Since it was a command I said, “Okay.”

  “What’s her name again?” said Pam.

  “Nadeen.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “She’s gorgeous,” I said, remembering seeing Nadeen around campus and in the dark in her twin bed. “She’s half black and half Native American.”

  “You know, you don’t look gay at all.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “I guess I’ve always been pretty feminine,” I said. “Although I have always wanted to cut my hair.”

  “Really,” said Pam.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I won’t give you my whole sob story about my dad, but now that he’s not supporting me anymore I feel like I can finally do it.” I was starting to feel like I was telling the truth.

  “It’s liberating.” Pam smiled at me for the second time since I met her. “It really is.”

  • • •

  By Friday I still hadn’t come up with a plan. I searched Facebook for any friends of friends who lived in the Bay Area and looked like they might be half black and half Native American, and planned to offer them money or an Eroscillator, but I couldn’t come up with anyone. My next best idea was to bring the cash deposit to Making Love, tell Pam that I couldn’t stay because Nadeen was in the hospital with a ruptured spleen, and then start crying. I wondered if it was suspicious that “spleen” rhymed with “Nadeen.”

  On the way to work on Friday I got a haircut. It was sort of an impulse decision. I rode by the hair salon every day, but never thought anything of it. Now, faced with losing my job due to my inability to produce a girlfriend, I stopped and went in and asked a punky-looking girl to cut it all off. I didn’t know why I cared if I lost my job, but I did.

  “You sure about this?” said the girl.

  “Yes,” I said. “I need to look gayer.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Can you do one thing?” I said. “Can you cut the front first and can we take a picture?”

  “Fine.”

  She started cutting from the top of my head and I watched the pieces fall to the floor. She cut quickly, breathing like she was sleeping.

  She gave me a perfect mullet. The back was so gross and long. She took pictures from a few different angles and gave me back my phone. It was like I was looking at pictures of someone else. I sent Danny the best one with a message that said, “You owe me $100.”

  I watched in the mirror as she cut the back.

  “Can you make it shorter?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “I’m freaking out,” I said.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  Soon the rest of the hair was off of my neck, and my head felt very light.

  I opened my eyes but she told me to close them again. She put something that smelled good in my hair and told me I could open. My hair was longer than I had wanted—to the bottom of my ears with sort of side-swept bangs. But I looked like a new woman, and that was exactly what I had wanted.

  “Do I look gay?” I said.

  “You look gayer,” she said.

  • • •

  I was practicing my look of panic for when I told Pam about Nadeen’s spleen when Lucy and her drunk friends came in to play with the sex machine.

  “Can you show us how that machine works?” said the little blonde.

  “Whoa,” said Lucy. “You look great.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I went to go plug in the machine.

  “I’m sorry that this is, like, a routine,” Lucy said when I sat back down behind the register. “Wow, you look really good.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I don’t really mind stopping by here,” she said, biting her lip.

  I wanted to look at the ceiling and pretend I hadn’t heard her, but I forced myself to look her in the eye and smile. “Listen, what are you doing later?”

  Her eyes got bigger. “Nothing,” she said. “Going dancing with these winners.”

  “Would you want to come to a birthday party with me? It’s at our other store, in the Castro.”

  Now she was beaming. “I would love to,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and nobody was doing anything bad to the sex machine, so I couldn’t kick the women out. Mercifully, Lucy rounded up her friends and gave me the sweetest smile on the way out.

  “I’ll meet you here at ten,” she said.

  • • •

  I tried to decide if there was anything else I wanted to buy before I got fired. I had most of the things that might have been useful to me, but I rang up a couple of bottles of lube for when I used my dildo, or for when I hit menopause in twenty-five years.

  Lucy showed up at ten of ten, alone and smiling. My heart sped up a little. I put the money in the deposit bag and moved my bike to the storage room. We got a cab, and on the way to the Castro I asked Lucy questions and when she tried to ask me anything I cut her off with more questions. She was a nutritionist who specialized in HIV/AIDS care. She lived alone, except for her dog and her four cats, in the Sunset. She wasn’t a hoarder, people just kept dumping cats on her. One of the cats had feline HIV and she thought it was funny but not really funny that she had to develop a special diet and cook for him. She was from Texas, her parents were Catholic but they loved her anyway, she’d gone to another of the Seven Sisters. She said all of her gay friends were either married to each other or not gay anymore, and I said most of mine weren’t gay anymore.

  When we got to Making Love she smiled at me and we went in. It was mostly Chad’s friends, who were his boyfriend, an old white guy, and a lot of similar couples—gorgeous, sinewy men of color and their older, rubberier, whiter boyfriends. Marc was standing in front of the register, pouring himself some champagne. “What the fuck!” he said, and gave me two kisses.

  “This is Lucy,” I said. “This is Marc.”

  They said hi.

  I saw Pam staring at me from the video section and realized that my plan might work.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Lucy.

  “Wow,” said Pam when I got to her. “You did it.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “Okay, well,” she said. “Anyway. That’s not your girlfriend.”

  I tried to look guilty. “No, it’s not,” I said. “She had to work late, again, like every night, so. This is like the thousandth time she’s canceled on me. I’m never dating a corporate lawyer again.”

  “So who is that?”

  “That’s Lucy.”

  “I see,” said Pam, and smiled at me for the third time ever. “Be careful. Everybody finds out everything around here.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I went back to Lucy, who was looking at or past the case with the cock rings.

  “Hey, sorry. My boss. I’m kind of scared of her.”

  She smiled. “No worries.”

  I poured mys
elf a glass of champagne.

  “So,” said Lucy, “what about you? Where are you from?”

  “I wasn’t done questioning you!” I said. “So, where are you from?”

  Lucy laughed. “I already told you, the Lone Star State.”

  “Oh right,” I said. “Where did you meet your friends?”

  “At work, actually,” she said.

  “Really,” I said.

  She laughed. “Yeah, they’re different there. They keep it pretty professional.”

  Estelle came up behind Lucy.

  “Hey,” I said. “This is my friend Lucy.”

  “Hello,” said Estelle. “Brenda, Marc would like to see you in his office.”

  “His office?” I looked around and saw Marc sitting in the sex swing at the back of the store.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said. Estelle laughed her deep laugh.

  I looked at Lucy. “I’m fine,” she said.

  I went back to Marc. “Yes?” I said.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “A haircut.”

  “I told you to get a faux hawk.”

  “Maybe next time,” I said.

  “But what the fuck is that?” He gestured toward Lucy.

  “Nothing.”

  “Where did you get her?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t get her from the store.” He stared at me. “Oh my god, Brenda!”

  “What? I don’t know anyone else.”

  “I could have set you up with a loaner.”

  “Shh,” I said. “Can we talk about this later? Or never?”

  “Oh, we will definitely be talking about it later.”

  Chad had his shirt off and he and his friends were dancing. I walked through them back to Lucy and Estelle.

  “So where did you two meet?” said Estelle.

  We looked at each other and Lucy smiled. “Through friends,” she said.

  “Cool,” said Estelle.

  When it got hot and unbearably loud inside the store, Lucy and I went out and sat on the stoop.

  “So,” said Lucy. “College sweetheart?”

  “No. Grad school sweetheart,” I said, wanting to give her something.

  “What did you go for?”

  “Law,” I said.

  “Law? By grad school you mean law school?”

  “Yup.”

  “What are you doing here, then?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  We sat in silence for a minute and Lucy smiled at me.

  “What about you?” I said. “College sweetheart?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “You know,” she said. She told me they moved to San Francisco for the girlfriend’s job, they got a dog, they found a cat in the garbage. They were going to play “Here Comes the Bride” twice at their wedding, once for each of them. Then the girlfriend started spending a lot of nights at the office, and then it turned out she was coming home during the day to sleep with their downstairs neighbor.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Lucy.

  While we were both thinking about her story, Pam came out of the store and put on her helmet. I put my head on Lucy’s shoulder and smiled at Pam.

  “You girls have fun.” Pam got on her motorcycle and rode away. I picked my head up.

  “She is kind of scary,” said Lucy. She took a breath. “You probably want to make a run for it, hearing all this crap.”

  “It’s really fine.” I didn’t want to make a run for it, but I did want to go home and see Danny.

  “I’m still mad,” she said. “Isn’t that crazy? I’m mad at my ex but I’m even madder at that girl. I didn’t think I had it in me, but if I heard that she died I would honestly be glad.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You are so freaked out right now. You can honestly leave me here, I won’t be offended.”

  “I’m not freaked out,” I said. “It makes sense.”

  “It does? My friends think I am seriously unhinged.”

  “Then they haven’t been cheated on.”

  She turned to me. “Have you?”

  “No. But my dad cheated on my mom.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s fine. She’s better off without him.”

  We sat quietly for a minute and then Marc came out and yelled, “Birthday cake!”

  Everybody inside seemed significantly drunker.

  “Okay,” said Lucy, “we either need to do shots or get out of here.”

  “I should actually probably get home,” I said.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, “me too.”

  We cut pieces of cake and watched Chad’s boyfriend feed him, which was sweet, even though Chad was dripping with sweat and seemed to be on something other than alcohol. He was flexing his pecs to the beat of the music while he was taking bites.

  Lucy called two cabs and we ate our cake slowly until we heard the cars honk. I waved to no one in particular and we left.

  Outside Lucy said, “I really had fun.”

  I looked at her and smiled. “I did too.” But suddenly it felt like we were standing too close to each other, so I looked away.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Lucy opened the door to the first cab and motioned for me to get in. I took a step forward and she put her hand on my back. The warmth of her hand spread up to my scalp and down my legs. Maybe it shouldn’t have felt like that, but no one had touched me in weeks.

  • • •

  At home I turned on the light in the bedroom, and Danny sat up and said, “I’m awake!”

  “Babe,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”

  “Hm,” he said and sunk back into the pillow.

  I got into bed and pulled Danny’s arm over me. He snuggled closer and kissed my neck.

  On Saturday morning we woke up at the same time and Danny wrapped his arms around me. “Where were you last night?” he said.

  “At Chad’s birthday party at the store,” I said. “I didn’t know you were going to be home.”

  “I got home pretty late.” Then he startled. “Oh my god!”

  “What?” I said.

  “Your hair.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, “my hair. Didn’t you get my text?”

  “No, I didn’t get your text.”

  “I got a mullet. I got a mullet for you and you didn’t even check your phone.”

  He touched the hair on the back of my head. Then he lifted up different sections and let them fall.

  “How does it look?” I said.

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  I put my head in his armpit and my hand in his boxers. He laughed and tried to pull it out, but I held on for dear life and quickly got him to the point of no return. I climbed on top of him and he slowed down to wait for me.

  Afterward I wanted him to do what he used to do on Sunday mornings, which was go down on me until he was ready to go again, but instead he said, “I’m starving. I can’t remember eating anything yesterday.”

  We took separate showers and then walked to brunch and waited forever and finally ordered our eggs Benedict. Danny complained about some other first year whose wife had a baby months ago but who was still taking all this time off and not billing nearly enough hours. I guessed that was some kind of explanation, either for me or for himself. I told him about Chad’s party, minus the part about Lucy.

  “Do you honestly like working there?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “Okay, well, I want to say one thing,” he said. “Whatever you want to do, I will support you. But you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to work. I know you think you have to but you don’t.”

  “We need the money,” I said.

  “We don’t need the money,” he said. “And even if we did, that job wouldn’t help.”

  “Tha
t’s not very nice,” I said. “What would I do if I quit?”

  “Whatever you want,” he said. “Volunteer for legal aid.”

  “That would make my dad happy,” I said.

  “Is that why you’re doing this? To make your dad unhappy?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you doing it?”

  “It’s not my fault I can’t get a law job.”

  “You’re not applying for law jobs.”

  “I applied for two,” I said.

  “You don’t even want a law job.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Come on, babe, I want you to be happy. You could quit. We could get a dog.”

  “Well if we’re going to get a dog, we might as well get a baby,” I said, sort of joking but sort of not really.

  “Ha,” said Danny. “Let’s start with a dog. A little rodent one like you want.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  • • •

  On Monday I went to work with my head spinning. I wondered if I should quit, or if Pam was going to fire me first. I was giving myself a neck massage with the Hitachi Magic Wand when my dad walked through the open door and then walked right back out.

  I followed him. He looked smaller and older than I remembered. At first he just sputtered. Finally he managed to spit out, “Brenda.” Then more sputtering and then, “I thought this was another one of your goddamn jokes.”

  I didn’t have any words.

  “Turn that goddamn thing off,” he said. I realized I was still holding the vibrating Magic Wand and that the cord was what had prevented me from getting farther outside. I switched it off and put it on the floor inside the door.

  “I tried to tell you it wasn’t a joke,” I said.