This is a long song, almost five minutes, but it’s not even halfway over and I’ve already come. I want to unplug the vibrator and put it away. I want to lie perfectly still in this spot for a hundred years. I want to disappear. I want to scream.
I don’t do any of these things. Instead I flick the vibrator’s switch back on, I grip the black handle tightly, and I press the nose of it against the center of me. The next orgasm hits almost at once, more of a tsunami than a wave, and I’m overcome and lost in it. When the crest of it passes, I don’t turn off the vibrator, I don’t take it away. I shove it more firmly against me, and I squirm beneath its relentless hum. I force myself to come again and again, until the pleasure morphs into punishment, until I ache, until I lose count of how many times I’ve come and how many ways I’ve lost Seth. The orgasms are a seething ocean, each cresting atop the one before, and they drag me back and away, like an undertow.
When I was fourteen, my mother and I traveled together to Italy.
I wasn’t supposed to go with her. My father was. They had planned the trip together as a second honeymoon, to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary. For months, travel brochures and packing lists had littered the dining room table. Mom had changed her laptop’s screensaver to a picture of the Basilica. She got their passports out of the safety deposit box and researched the Euro and compared places to stay and transportation and restaurants. She pulled out her old language books from college and reviewed Italian verb conjugations.
Then, twelve days before they were set to leave, a week before my final days of middle school, I came home to find the dining room table bare again, polished and still as glass.
Mom’s car—the Prius I would inherit—was in the driveway, but the house felt echo-empty. The quiet hum of the air conditioner, the clicking of the clock, and my own breath.
“Mom?” I called. “Hello?”
No answer. I took a soda from the fridge and drank it standing at the counter. Then I pulled open the recycling bin to throw away the can, and there it was—my parents’ trip, all of it, the travel brochures and the packing lists and even the passports. In the garbage.
I set the can on the countertop. I looked around, then back down at the pile in the trash. I couldn’t leave it there. It was a mistake, it had to be. Maybe there was a new cleaning lady who had thrown it all away by accident.
I pulled it all out of the bin and stacked it neatly on the counter. Then I threw away my can. Then I didn’t know what to do.
I stood there at the kitchen counter with one hand on the stack of papers. No cleaning lady would throw away passports. I knew that.
“You’re home.”
I gulped, startled by my mom’s voice, feeling a surge of guilt about the papers, even though I hadn’t been the one to throw them away.
“I found these in the trash,” I said. “I didn’t throw them out.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Mom said. “You wouldn’t do that.” She took the papers from where they lay and knocked them together against the countertop, even though they were already perfectly straight. Her dark hair fell in waves around her face. Her hair was hardly ever down. And I saw that she wasn’t wearing lipstick.
She looked up from the papers and smiled at me. A tired smile, not a real one. “It was stupid of me,” she said. “I threw them away. I was just coming down to pull them back out of the trash.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
She held the stack of papers against her chest. “You can’t just throw away a passport,” she said, as if I didn’t know that, as if I’d been the one to put them in the recycle bin.
“Mom? Are you all right?”
She sighed and went over to sit at the kitchen table. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just disappointed. Your dad has to cancel our trip.”
“Oh,” I said. “Why?”
She looked at me appraisingly for a moment, like she was trying to decide if I could handle the truth. I stood straight and tried to look smart, hoping she’d see something in me that inspired her to confide in me. But she must not have seen what she’d been looking for, because when she answered, it was just one word, and a lie—“Work,” she said.
“Oh,” I said again, and I turned to leave, tears stinging my eyes.
“Nina,” she said. I stopped, but I didn’t turn back around. “Do you want to go to Italy?”
???
And that was how I came to find myself missing the final days of middle school, missing the good-bye party and the yearbook signing and the graduation ceremony. “It’s just silly anyway, isn’t it?” was the way Mom put it, and suddenly it did seem silly, all those things I’d been looking forward to doing. It seemed silly and childish. And it was clear to me that Mom’s need to leave for Italy immediately was greater than my desire to do all those silly things. So she changed the name on Dad’s reservation to mine, and moved forward our departure date, and within twenty-four hours I was flying across the country and then across the ocean.
It wasn’t until three hours into our flight that I realized that I hadn’t seen my father before we left, and that I hadn’t said good-bye.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful young princess whose parents, though united in marriage, were divided in worship, as her father the king was a worshipper of the old pagan gods and her mother the queen was a Christian. Like her mother, Dymphna followed the teachings of Jesus Christ, and with her womanhood new upon her, she vowed her eternal chastity to her Lord in Heaven.
But shortly after Dymphna’s consecration to Christ, her mother died. Though Dymphna found solace in prayer, her father did not. As days turned to weeks, his closest friends and advisors began to worry about his destructive sorrow, and they determined that he should remarry. The king agreed, but only if they could procure for him a bride who might resemble his dear, dead wife.
But none could be found that came close to matching his wife in beauty, such was her distinction. None, that is, but for her daughter, Dymphna, whom her father decided he would take as his bride, as no one else would do.
When Dymphna heard of his terrible plan, she fled from her castle with her confessor, Saint Gerebran. They ran and hid, and when Dymphna felt they were at last far enough away to be safe, she began to dedicate herself to helping the poor in the land where she had taken refuge. All was well for some months until the king found them. Immediately, he ordered that the priest’s head be cut off, and so it was.
“Daughter,” he spoke, his own sword heavy in his hand, “there is no call for your death this day. Return to me, and become my wife in your mother’s stead, and together we can rule.”
But Dympha refused, and as she lifted her chin in defiance, her father spied the long milky path of her neck, and his desire twined tight with his rage, and his sword, which had been limp at his side, rose high and mighty into the air.
And he fell upon his daughter, and his sword impaled her neck, and her head rolled free to where her confessor’s rested, her eyes turned heavenward, toward where her soul had gone to live happily ever after.