Barbara the Slut and Other People (9 page)

•   •   •

I asked Chad if he could start sending someone from Making Love to work some of the shifts, like he had originally promised. He did, and I got Sundays off. On those mornings, Danny and I slept in and went and got eggs Benedict and talked about whether we should get a Newfoundland or a mutt. I wanted a little tiny dog that would sit in my lap all the time. I imagined bringing her to the store. I imagined that I owned it and instead of sex toys it sold something else, like maybe cheese, or actually maybe dog toys. Danny wanted a Newfoundland because his family always had Newfoundlands. Those dogs don’t live for very long so his family had had a lot of them, and they were all named Boomer—Boomer the first, Boomer the second, et cetera. Danny could somehow tell them apart, and he choked up at the thought of each one.

•   •   •

Now that I was back at Desert Hearts, I realized how different the stores were. At Making Love, the boy toys were front and center—butt toys, cock rings, and what I was sure was more lube than even the city of San Francisco could use. The backdrop was leather accessories, bondage accessories, a sex swing, porn, and in one corner, the lesbian and straight stuff, just in case.

At Desert Hearts, the space was so small that everything was kind of front and center, but it was the books you saw first. Sometimes people looked at them if they were too nervous to head right for the good stuff, which must have been the books’ purpose, but no one ever bought them.

I obviously didn’t know what lesbians wanted, but I didn’t think we needed the books to make it a classy place. I thought we should send a more affirming message like,
You don’t have to pretend to look at these books
. If it were up to me, I would have had one shelf around the store, vibrators on one long wall, harnesses on the short wall, and then dildos on the other long wall, and maybe lube by the register. Very minimal and chic. Kind of like a nice jewelry store, but with softer lighting.

I think I would have done without the sex machine. It was basically a motorized dick and when you plugged it in, the dick flew in and out of the console. It was four hundred dollars and it took up a lot of space on a shelf at the back of the store. On Friday nights drunk women would come in and ask me to turn it on. There was one group that came in almost every week. It was four or five women and they always looked like they had been drinking since noon, and they almost always got out of hand and I had to kick them out. I thought one of them liked me. Her name was Lucy and she hung out by the cash register and didn’t ask questions about any of the merchandise, which I thought was smart. She was my age and pretty and I probably flirted with her more than I should have, but I was bored.

One week she was distracting me, talking about how she could show me around the city if I wanted. She was saying we should go to this restaurant called Carmen’s, if I like Cuban food, which I do, when I looked up and saw the loudest woman, a tiny blonde with a pixie cut and huge boobs, on top of the shelf and on top of the machine, pretending to use it. The other women were laughing hysterically.

“Okay,” I said. “Time to go.”

She didn’t get down and I had to go over and pull her off the shelf with Lucy’s help.

“I want it so bad!” the little blonde said as she was getting down.

All her friends laughed again but I didn’t think she was kidding.

•   •   •

The next time Pam came in to bring more custom harnesses, she quizzed me about what lesbian bars I liked to go to. I wasn’t ready, so I told her Nadeen worked too much and we didn’t go out.

“You’ve never gone out to a bar,” she said.

I tried to think if I had heard of any. “No,” I said. “Not yet.” I asked her what bars she recommended for our next free night and she squinted at me and said she didn’t know but she thought maybe the younger women went out in Bernal Heights.

“Thanks,” I said.

•   •   •

I didn’t know if Nadeen worked too much, but Danny did. He stayed late almost every weeknight and went in for full days on the weekends. I tried to be cool like I was when we were in school, when he would disappear for weeks at a time and then come back to me only to pass out cold for another week.

One morning I woke up and Danny hadn’t come home, and as I was leaving for work he came in. He looked like the old Danny, two bruised eyes and a shadow beard.

“I am so sorry,” he said.

“Oh baby,” I said. I hugged him and kissed him on his eyes. “Can you go to sleep now?”

“No,” he said, “I just need to take a shower and change my clothes.”

“Shit,” I said. “Want me to take a shower with you?”

“Not now, babe. I’m sorry.”

He got in the shower and I made toast for him and left.

•   •   •

The less Danny slept, the more I did. I started getting into bed when I got home and sleeping twelve or fourteen hours until I had to go to work again.

My dad kept calling to harass me. He thought I was lying about the store. On one call I told him it was a lesbian sex toy store, and on another call I gave him the name and the address and told him to look it up if he didn’t believe me. On another call I offered to send him a pay stub. On another call I told him I was trying to get pregnant. I knew I shouldn’t antagonize him, but I couldn’t help it. He seemed so far away, now that I was in San Francisco and he was in Los Angeles, and now that my bank account was no longer attached to his.

It wasn’t a total lie that I wanted to get pregnant. Danny and I were planning to work for a year or two, get married, and then have kids. But I was becoming more and more convinced that sooner would be better than later, so that I could have some company.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about sex, which I guess was inevitable. I wanted to have it more than ever, and I was having it less than ever. I started using the toys by myself. I had never even really masturbated before, but now I did it almost every day. I mostly used the Eroscillator and a gold glitter dildo, which had a retracted foreskin but no veins or balls. I also purchased another vibrator called a Rock-Chick, which was U-shaped and which you were supposed to rock in and out. I hadn’t been able to get the hang of it, which was what Pam told me to tell customers, that they just needed to get the hang of it. Now I knew that was a lie. Something was anatomically incorrect. So I gave myself a refund, and I marked them down from $39.99 to $19.99. Pam was very excited when I called Chad and told him we were out. But she didn’t restock them, which confirmed she knew they were no fun. We also sold out of some 99-cent bullet vibrators, which I had marked down from $4.99 when I realized that all of their batteries had leaked acid.

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.