Cousin Cindy doesn’t call much anymore. She’s working the Cheetah Club at night, and Diamond Dolls during the afternoon. Tonight, in that year before my father checks into rehab, there’s too much noise in the living room to sleep. My mother is gone—she’s visiting her own mother in Texas—and my father has invited his friends over. I can picture each one of them on the other side of the wall as they yell, the scene building as I listen: Voss, with hair so gelled it looks like a swim cap; Harvey, with his old eyes and young girlfriends; Brad, shaking his baby bags of pills and powders; Nikhil, who once swallowed a live goldfish. I hear their voices boom, a wild clattering of glass. Something is funny, just so funny, but I can’t make out what it is.
I want to tell them to keep it down. I want to tell them I have school tomorrow, remember, there’s a kid here. There’s a kid who never makes it to school because of whatever you’re always doing in my living room, which is mine, with my horse pictures hanging on the walls, my ribbons, my shoes kicked muddy across the carpet, my hermit crab loose somewhere in the couch upon which you are sitting.
I open my door and walk down the hallway toward the living room. This is against the rules and I know it—Do not leave your room past ten P.M., do not interrupt when friends are over, do NOT. The light in the living room is an adjustment, the smoke; I have to blink hard and fast to see. The friends are all sprawled on the couch, the carpet, burning cherries of Marlboros in their mouths, some with their belt buckles hanging. My father is passed out on the floor with an ashtray next to his head. Between two of the men on the couch, the back of a woman. She’s wearing nothing but a cheetah-patterned bra, a thong. She’s snorting powder off a flat, metal end of a lobster fork that another man is holding up for her. Her hair extension is loose, swinging by a platinum thread.
Hi, Cousin Cindy, I say, but she can’t place exactly who I am to her, where she knows me from, why I’m even here.
When I’m in high school, Cousin Cindy tells me and Grandma Sitchie she’s a cam girl these days. She keeps her toddler son in the other room while she talks sweet to men around the world, crawling toward the blinking light on her computer, pulling her straps down, waiting for the money. This is how she explains the new job over dinner. She enjoys telling our grandma the details.
That’s a whore thing to do, says Grandma. You should be more like your cousin, she says, just look at her. She looks at me. Cousin Cindy looks, too. Homely as a toad but not a whorish thing about her.
Thank you, is what I say.
If only I could combine the two of you—
We know, says Cousin Cindy.
Who’s the father of this kid of yours anyway? Where’s the fella? Isn’t he brown?
He’s Italian.
He looks like a terrorist.
I make bank with my cam work; I even bought a new body.
And what about your son, Cindy? Your SON.
Pass the butter? I say.
There goes Cousin Cindy again. She’s on her cam, eyes black and clouded over as frozen grapes. Tonight, she gives her shoes a plug over the cam, They’re comfy, and on sale!, spreading her legs into a V, holding her boots by the ankles.
Her name on this site is Beach Miztress. There are two columns beside the cam box, “Will Do” and “Won’t Do” (Pussy, Anal, Toys, Lesbian, Group, Dom, Sub, Dance, Private), and a scrolling chat box of usernames and cartoon coins.
Cousin Cindy turns her back to the camera so the chatroom men can watch as she unhooks her bra. She’s got a large cactus tattoo with neon colors above her ass, Desert Dream etched in cursive on the cactus’s arm because Cousin Cindy was born out there, in Arizona. She had a life, other than this one. A childhood on red sand; a stepfather who—it’s been said—hurt her for years in the dark. She was once just a girl who played with action figures. A girl with scabbed knees and teen idols sticky-tacked her wall, a kid who just wanted to get out.
Mr. Big, are you there? she says.
I’m here, I type.
You want to see me put this tentacle in my ass? She holds up a rubber Octopus toy with suction cups. She sucks on it for us.
No, I type. I want to talk to you about politics. Who was your favorite president?
That’s a whacky fetish you got there, Mr. Big. She stares right into the camera, pinching her nipples, looking confused.
Shut it with the politics, Mr. Big. Are you a fucking fag? The other men in the chatroom type furiously, one after the next.
List one favorite president, I type. One policy. Anything.
I’m t-t-t-thinking, Cousin Cindy stutters a bit—her nervous habit.
Can you not list a single president? You fucking moron?
I want her to be humiliated. I want her to pull a sweatshirt over her head, focus her pupils, snap her laptop closed. In this moment, more than anything, I want to see Cousin Cindy cry.
I don’t see why you care, she says, forcing a giggle. We’re not here for that!
She’s right! the men type. On with the tentacle, please!
Prove me wrong, I type. Just one.
Can’t it be enough, she says, looking straight through my screen, to be quiet and love you?