It made me angry. Furious. Who was she to be waited for? Who was she to have her purse held, and her preferences considered? I’d wanted him all these years, and this girl, she’d just arrived. That was all she had to do. Just show up, and he was hers.
That’s when I learned that beauty can make people love you, but it can make them hate you just as surely.
???
It’s Sunday night at six o’clock, and I haven’t spoken to Seth since he dropped me off twenty-seven hours ago. I don’t know where my parents are. They’re not home. No one is ever home. It’s like a mausoleum, our safe and lovely house, and even when we’re here it still feels like no one is, with each of us retreated to separate vaults—me in my room, Dad in his study, Mom in the kitchen or the laundry room or in her bedroom with the door closed. But tonight it doesn’t really matter where they are. All my energy is sent out of the house, down the street, and away toward Seth, wherever he might be.
I have no idea why we have this ridiculously huge house. Sometimes I click through pictures on my laptop of the “tiny house” movement, dreaming of having my very own dollhouse-proportioned home. The tiny houses are like four hundred square feet—smaller than my bedroom—so everything in them is necessary. There’s no room for anything extra, but that’s okay, because you have everything you need. You’ve got a two-burner stove, and a half-sized fridge, and a table with two chairs, and a place to sit and read. You’ve got a toilet and a shower. Upstairs there’s a sleeping loft big enough for a double mattress or maybe a queen if you splurge a little, but not tall enough to stand. And that’s okay because the sleeping loft is for sleeping, not standing.
A tiny house is tight and necessary and cozy-warm, womblike in its intimacy.
Our place is an entombment of waste and space and emptiness. No wonder my mother has lost so many pregnancies; no wonder my own heart feels cold and tight and lonely all the time. These aren’t human proportions, the vastness of our entry hall, the echo of our scrubbed-clean kitchen, the vast ceilings and smooth walls and processed air-conditioned air. There’s nowhere in our house to grab hold, to take purchase, to nestle and connect and grow. I hate it here, and every time I enter the front door I want to leave.
I try and try, but I can’t find him out there. I can’t feel him, connected to me. It’s a severed cord.
Thinking of the cord that no longer connects us brings back the image of that girl jumping, the stretchy rope that suspended her above the river, tying her to something.
And then I think of another cord, this one attached to a black-handled vibrator, the other end of it red and round and rubbery like an oversized clown nose.
I reach a blind hand up to the top shelf of my closet and I fish around until my fingers find the plastic bag, and I pull on it until Seth’s gift falls from the shelf and into my hand.
I sit on the floor near the foot of my bed and open the plastic bag, pull open the cardboard flaps at the top end of the box, and slide out the vibrator.
This is the only present Seth has ever given me. There was the coffee yesterday, and the times he’s bought meals for me, and that one time he picked a dandelion from his front yard when he’d walked me to my car.
The meals and drinks I’d chewed and swallowed, I’d digested, I’d turned into pee and shit. The dandelion I’d blown on, sending tiny white buds far and wide, destroying the flower even as I wished upon it that Seth and I would last forever, together.
All I have is this. Plastic and rubber and a long black cord.
I take the cord in my hand and untwist it. I push my thumb against the double-pronged plug until it hurts, and when I take it away there are two indentations in the pad of my thumb, as if I’ve been bitten.
Then I get up and close my bedroom door. I lock it.
The cord is long enough to stretch from the outlet where my bedside lamp is plugged in to nearly the center of my double bed. I push down my jeans and underwear, step out of them, leave them on the floor.
I sit on the edge of my bed and flick the switch on the side of the vibrator. The sound as much as the movement startles me—it hums loudly, embarrassingly so.
I switch it off. I find my phone and plug it into my stereo and start a song at random. It’s not the song that matters—I’m not setting a mood here. It’s the noise I need.
It’s an old song, recently rereleased—“I Wanna Be Your Dog.” I turn up the volume and yank back the covers on my bed, slide beneath them, and don’t restart the vibrator until it’s muffled underneath the blankets.
Between the closed door and the loud music and the heavy quilt, no one but me could possibly hear the angry buzz of Seth’s first and final gift to me. I let my knees splay open and find my slit with my fingers, the soft hooded nub at its apex, and I guide the red rubber ball against it.
My back arches and I hiss in a breath at its first wonderful, terrible contact. A jolt of pleasure shoots through me and I yank the vibrator away before placing it back against me, this time very gently.
It almost hurts, the hum, the buzz, the stroke of it, so different from the jet of warm water that pours from the showerhead, so different from the press of my own hand, so different from the wet lapping of Seth’s tongue.
It’s remembering Seth’s tongue that pushes me into the first orgasm, the sweet way he’d press it just there, right where I’m holding the rubber tip of the vibrator, the anxious, ineffective, hopeful lapping of his tongue. And I squeeze my eyes shut and my hips buck up against the vibrator, and my neck gets tight and my toes are stuck in a weird curled spasm, and I can’t tell and don’t care which way is up and which way is down, and the music is playing and I hear the words of the song and picture myself heeled at Seth’s side, a faithful pet, a happy dog, an obedient good girl who follows rules and gets rewarded. I’m hearing the buzz of the tool in my hand, and every part of me vibrates in a way that makes me forget my name, and I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care, just as long as this feeling persists, and I’m wound so tight that I might break like a thread, like a cord, like a promise, and then I do break, I break and I shatter and I’m lost in the vibration of my coming, and maybe I make a sound and maybe I bite my lip and my legs spread into butterfly pose and then fold up like wings and I fly, and then I shiver and it’s behind me, that pleasure. I’m back in my own flesh and my mouth tastes like blood.
I turn off the vibrator and it lays quiet in my hand.