Dot patted Justine in the center of her long scar.
“I know, darling,” she said. “Really, though, that's a perfect situation. For
you.
Practice on him. When you're ready, of course. Fuck him with your eyes shut and just think about what
you
like, what makes your tonsils buzz like sour apples. Then shuck him.”
“Whatch'all doing in there?” called Lou from the kitchen.
Justine froze.
“Justine, whatever she tells you,” said Lou, “is a fiction. Don't listen to a word she says.”
“Play, Lou,” Charlotte grumbled, to which Lou responded by giggling happily. He had clearly trumped somebody, finally.
“So you triedâ¦,” said Dot, leaning in to Justine, quieter now.
Justine tried to thaw. What if they
had
heard?
As though she'd read Justine's mind, Dot said: “I promise they can't hear us. Now, you were saying?”
“I tried imagining things,” whispered Justine, almost into Dot's ear, “but nothing really comes up, you know.”
“When do you do this?”
“Well, you know⦔
“When you're sorting oysters?”
Justine paused for a moment to analyze and decrypt the euphemism.
“Ohmygod.”
Dot cackled.
“Sorry, child. That was crude. Go on.”
“Um, yeah⦔ She could not think of a euphemism, though she was sure she knew one or two. “When I'm⦠The finger. Ing.”
“Diddle
is a useful all-around term.”
“I close my eyes, and there are these heads. Without faces. And bodies. Not dead bodies, just people, naked, but⦠blank. I can't tell what's where. Where my mouth is, and what it's kissing, or licking, or what it is that's in it, is it a, you know, penis, and if it is, whose, and then I think even maybe it's
mine.
And I can't even tell what or even
where
my, um, vagina⦔
“Cock
and
pussy
are current.”
“â¦pussy is, I can't really see it, or if it's even
mine
or not. It's weird. I get lost in it, all this flesh. I try to put Troy's face, or Rogers'sâanother guy at schoolâbut they disappear. There's just black hair and pink bodies. I can't tell sometimes if my fingers are my own, or someone else's, or even fingers at all. Then I think maybe I'm just watching someone else, or other people, but they're darkened or blurry or I can only hear them. It's scary and makes me feel pervy. And it makes me feel crazy, too, like I should be back in ASH. Sometimes it makes diddling not fun, even though I do it, like, ten times a day. And I feel so ashamed and guilty when I⦠orgasm.”
“Come
is universal, though spelling is at issue.”
“I cannot believe I'm saying all this. Never told any of this stuff even to a shrink.”
“What do you think about that?” said Dot.
“I don't know. What do you think about what I said? Is there something wrong with me?”
“Sounds like you're not getting enough.”
“Do you think I should let Troy have me?”
“I think you should order him to. And I think you should tell him exactly what you want. Even if you can't name what that is. Just grab his hand or cock or ass or nose and
put
it where you want. Fill the holes that demand filling, boss him around. Bite if you want. Use tools, bad words, stuff from the pantry.
Use.
Don't worry what he thinks. He's a virgin; he'll be a spent casing in ninety seconds no matter what
you
do. And guilt is good when it comes to sex, so welcome that.”
Justine was coal under a bellows. She wanted to go get Troy right now.
“I don't think Livia would think you're a very good influence.”
“Surely not. But I'm not advising you to charge the boy for your services.”
Dot smiled, and looked down at Dartmouth. She grabbed a handful of his loose skin and gave it a squeeze.
“So, uh,” said Justine, “what did you used to charge?”
“When I was fourteen, anything I wanted. I got a hundred dollars once. For a
kiss.
This was 1955, let me remind you.”
“Fuck,” said Justine. She wanted to say it again.
“Granted it wasn't just a peck, a kissing-booth smack. The man, a certain now-dead poker player, Sandy Cagh Whipple, down from the Jacksboro Highway, fresh off a win, had a tongue like an electric pork tenderloin. He took twenty minutes, came three times, and left nary a square inch of my upper GI unmapped. 'Druther of fucked him for twenty bucks.”
“That's what a⦠that's what sex cost?”
“Back then that was high. Nowadays they charge a hundred or more for a straight fuck, I've heard. Other stuff a lot more.”
What other stuff?!
“So,” said Justine, smiling, trying to produce a saucy glint in her eye, “did you have a pimp?”
Dot seemed to flatten and recede, as though her body remembered all at once how ill and helpless it was.
“Not until I was around thirty. Then a man took me over. Barkeep in Texas City.”
“What did you do?”
“I hated him, that's what.”
“No, I mean⦔
“I know what you mean. I had to give him pussy for free, whenever he wanted it, and he kept everything I earned.”
“Everything? How did you live?”
“He bought everything he thought I needed. Pills, panties, bus fare, beans and rice, beauty parlor, booze. But no cash. And nothing that could be turned into cash.”
“Szplug!” shouted Archibold from the kitchen.
“This all just started one day?” said Justine.
“Mmm. He thought I owed him for something. He threatened me. He threatened to hurt Lou, too, if I didn't stroll for him.”
“Soâ”
“So why didn't we just leave? We did, but separately. We had a little
fight, next thing I know he's gone. I left right after. It was a good bit later that Lou came down and found me in New Orleans. We were free of Kelly Miller, and I was doing fair, but Lou was in a bad way.”
“Do you think the bartender is still after you?”
“Kelly? I don't think he'd go looking, but if he came across me, I'd be in trouble. I'll tell you this, I'll never go anywhere near Texas City ever again. Even Austin feels too close.”
“I hope you⦠I hope he⦠I wish he got AIDS, not you.”
“You and me both.”
“Maybe he did.”
A loud slap from the kitchen.
“Lou,” Charlotte said, “please do not throw your cards down. It's childish.”
“Dammit,” said Lou. “I hate pinochle.”
“It's because you aren't any good at it,” said Livia, giggling. “You only like what you're good at.”
“I'm good at checkers and I can't tolerate checkers.”
“Checkers is the chess of the unpunished,” said Archibold.
“What does that mean, Archibold?” said Lou, his voice rising. “You employ English words and English syntax, yet you cannot communicate. I sure hope my daughter can sort out your knotty babble.”
“Dishes, wishes, Corningware lies,” said Archibold.
“Rhubarbrhubarbrhubarb,” said Lou.
“Don't excite him, Arch,” said Livia. “He's very exciting.”
An uncomfortable instant of silence, then Livia added: “Excita
bull
, I mean.”
“Nothing knotty about that,” said Charlotte.
“Homophone,” said Archibold.
“Or that,” said Charlotte. “Deal, Lou.”
“What the hell's going on?”
“Archie, let's go record shopping, c'mon,” said Livia.
“Couple more hands.”
Justine and Dot scritched and scratched Dartmouth and listened to the
ftch
of cards and
kck
of bottles on Formica brighten the next room.
In the window through the yellowing curtains the sun fell behind the magnolias toward February the fifteenth.
February 2004
Upon Campbell Brodsky's death, at age fifty-five, in late August of 2002, he left an estate worth nearly half a million dollars to his wife, Brenda Lathers Brodsky, who quickly liquidated the house and moved into a room in a rented duplex, where she began to accumulate rare sixties and seventies rock posters at approximately the same rate as an undiagnosed cancer spread through her body. Upon her death, less than a year later, she bequeathed her estate of $443,990.59, in cash, to her only child, Marcia Brodsky, twenty-six.
Marcia's mourning comprised forty parts shame, thirty parts guilt, ten parts therapy, five parts crying, four parts extra sleep, and one part shoe-amassing. The shame derived from the stellar credit-card debt she'd accumulated, the guilt over not using the inheritance to pay it off, the therapy to deal with the guilt and shame, the crying a response to therapy, sleep the only escape, and shoe-shopping the best of the worst of it all.
In late February, at Last Call, the Neiman Marcus outlet store on South Lamar, Marcia was hit with an idea, a way to emerge from this orphan dark, a way to escape guilt and shame and all else attendant to lugubriosity.
The idea had come quickly. The idea had come with a magnificent sneeze.
Marcia had just slipped on a powder-blue suede Blahnik with a fake-rubidium heel that had been marked down from $850 to $399 to $199 to $89 to $39 minus 50 percent, when she happened to glance up at the window display, which featured two mannequins, a woman and a man, each half dressed, trying on each other's shoes. Though the female mannequin was provocativelyâalmost obscenelyâposed, it was not lifelike at all. It did not radiate; it was just a bronze-washed bone-hard injection-molded ball-joint doll arranged like a preteen in a Balthus painting.
The male mannequin, though, was different. He seemed real. As though he could move on his own. Walk. Hug. Do things. Many things. Special things.
And so Marcia Brodsky sneezed. A certain kind of long-forgotten sneeze. Then again. And again, again, all of them face-clenching sinus-reamers, right there in the
6½â7½
aisle. It had been quite a while since she'd sneezed like that. It was a naughty sneeze, the rare kind of sneeze she sneezed only when she'd just been awakened from psychosexual dormancy by a sudden and powerful erotic notion.
Her first such sneeze had been in seventh grade, in the school library, when she observed the outrageously adorable Ty Fishflag deposit an armful of
Goosebumps
es in the book return slot. Her second had been that night, in bed, thinking about Ty. The sneezes, a quick series of keen, wet barks, woke her fatherânot easily done, as Campbell Brodsky was given to profound sleep. Thereafter Marcia sneezed so often and with such lustihead that she was sure that everyone, from her classmates to her teachers to her father and mother, must know that she was not just another mild junior-high-school shadow with cedar fever but a hair-trigger freshet of inappropriate passion.
The phenomenon disappeared as quickly as it had come, shortly after she saw Ty and the new girl from Australia, Jessamine, slow-dancing to “Stairway to Heaven” at the last school dance of the year. The sneezes resumed, for one glorious day, when she happened upon an old ten-gallon fish tank while going through a closet of her junior-high-school junk during the Christmas break of her sophomore year at Vanderbilt. It wasn't the tank that got her started, though; it was what was inside: a small black compressor that, when plugged in and properly installed, was designed to oxygenate the water in the fish tank by means of a steady stream of air bubbles; this selfsame box, when plugged in and properly manipulated, would quietly buzz in such a
way as to create thumping orgasms.
The naughty sneezes stopped on the last day of vacation, when she came downstairs from a particularly fruitful session with the compressor, only to find that her father had passed away while peacefully napping in front of an Oilers game. Ever since, naughty sneezes were rare, and when they did happen they were rather dry and atonic.
But not this one. Marcia glanced at the mannequin again and expelled another shuddering yawp. She kicked off the Blahniks, picked them up by their Mary Jane buckles, dropped them into a box, and jogged toward the checkout counter, one eye on the mannequin. “Set me free,” she mouthed in his direction.
Freedom to Marcia meant finally discharging the roughly $425,000 in credit-card debt that had been swelling without apparent upper limit ever since she'd received her first card, a Visa with a $20,000 limit, when she was a freshman at Vanderbilt. She never told her father, a tax accountant, how quickly she cashiered those first five digits of credit on shoes, penny stocks, and quarter horses. She never told her mother how copiously the new credit offers came in; how stupefyingly high the interests rates could leap when she missed a payment; how chilly was the atmosphere of serious debt. Mercifully, both Campbell and Brenda went to their graves never knowing the shame of a financially irresponsible child.