Bleeding Heart.

When I first saw the blood it was spread in a neat pool on white cotton fibers, dying the formerly pink-cheeked flowers of the fabric a muddied garnet. The florescent bathroom lights cast a fuzzy counterfeit glow on the inky red, and as my breathing had stopped temporarily I could hear their faint but tense buzz radiating off the bulbs. I sat there for a moment, just staring at my stained underwear. I was eleven. I was a woman.

I was wearing a Speedy Gonzales pajama shirt at the time, in which Speedy leaned enthusiastically against a jar of salsa that would have been taller than he, had it not been for his sombrero. He beamed up at me, and I stared at his cartoonish colors of the green and red and yellow and brown so long that they started to blend together in an uncultivated flurry of pigment. But a rodent-infested tint trip was more agreeable than admitting to myself that things were going to be different from there on out, so I stared.

I was alright, but stunned. It was a bit like being in a fender-bender. It’s no big deal, but it’s novel in the moment, it’s prickly and embarrassing, and for some reason you can’t remember what to do, though you’ve been told a dozen and a half times. Pull over, alert the authorities, exchange insurance information with the other driver. But no one tells you how to fill in the awkward gaps, like what to talk about with the other driver while you wait for the police to come. And so I found myself there on the toilet wondering the same thing. Gently place a feminine napkin in the crotch of your panties. Replace every three or four hours. But I had more questions, things that we hadn’t covered in fifth grade sex ed. Could I get up and walk? Would I track blood all over the house if I went downstairs to raid my mother’s cabinet of maxi pads? I wasn’t even sure if my mother was home – what if she was running to the dry cleaners, or worse, at Saturday sorority meeting for the morning and I was left sitting on this toilet for the remainder of the day?

Finally, as with most things in my life, I got tired of worrying about it and decided to take action. It occurred to me on my pilgrimage downstairs that I might have the mortifying moment of running into my father, who was a fixture in his forest green wingchair reading on Saturday afternoons, but quickly decided that should that happen I would probably just have to say the word period and he would part from me like the literal Red Sea I had left in my panties.  

I pulled my underwear off and left it crumbled on the linoleum floor like a wounded soldier and went to find my mother.

She was home, luckily, and doing laundry. She was stuffing sodden yellow towels into the dryer when she saw me standing there, and the moment she looked up at me I reverted back to my most basic, child-like instinct: I cried.

“What’s wrong?” she gasped, and clutched the dryer door in expectancy. I was crying a lot these days so she never knew quite what to do.

“I think I started…my period,” I sobbed.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was calm but unusually high-pitched and guarded, the way she always sounds before she knows she has to talk someone down off the ledge, that someone typically being me. “Okay. Well, we need to get you some pads, then. Look under my bathroom sink and there’s a bunch in there. Just strap one into your underwear.”

My eyes blurred with tears and my shoulders heaved.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’m scared to…wipe.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m bleeding!”

“It isn’t a cut. You’re just shedding your lining because you don’t need it. It doesn’t hurt. I’ve been having a period for twenty years and it’s never hurt me. It feels just like when you normally wipe. Just a little messier.”

I stood with my legs spread equal distance with my shoulders, afraid that if my vagina touched too much it would cause insufferable pain. My nose started to run and I felt transfixed by own sheer abhorrence of myself. I was nothing more than a bleeding, snotting, weeping human body. I had never seen so much blood come out of me. I wasn’t exactly an “outdoorsy” kid, preferring instead to read up on youth-friendly encyclopedias on the heroic escape of the Jews in Europe during World War II, so while the neighborhood children were busy cutting their legs on street pavement skateboarding, I was inside trying to finish the novelette I started about a young Jewish woman fleeing the Nazis on the hand-me-down Tandy my father had lugged up to my room. The most blood I saw came from when I would cut myself on the dictionary pages I kept by my computer trying to look up heroine and sprinklings of Hebrew words. Word processing was still in its archaic days.

Perhaps knowing this, my mother sensed that I needed a little more guidance before I could come to terms with mopping up my own blood. “Let me get you a pad,” she said gently. “Just go upstairs and I’ll bring it up.”

I waddled my way up the stairs, moving like a cartoon cowboy in chaps with exaggerated, wide steps. I got back on the toilet and waited for my mother. While I sat I stared at the black and white checkered pattern of the bathroom floor, making shapes with the tiles in my mind. I had just fashioned a face of a billy goat when I heard my mother knock at the door.

She opened it a crack and handed me a pad encased in a bubblegum pink wrapper. “Do you need new undies?”

“Yeah,” I croaked.

She moved next door to my room. The sound of her opening the door, which had an odd tilt that announced any movement of the hinges, sliced through the air, and in a quasi-dramatic sentimentalism, perhaps one that I have not lost to this day, I thought, The last time I heard that door swing open, I was a different person. It had only been twenty minutes prior but it felt like I had missed out on something, an innocence in opening your room door and thinking it would be just like any other movement on any other day, but it had been my last moment of blissful ignorance. Just like my first car accident when the tow truck driver shut my driver side door the state trooper had pried open, the ring of finality cut my ears: Well, the last time you shut that door, this hadn’t happened. Things were different. Did you even hear it then? No, I had not.

My mother handed me my underwear, a pair of yellow ones with blue paisley. They were my favorite pair and I didn’t want to risk bleeding in them but something in me was too overwhelmed to say so, and I took them anyway.

“Put them on and slide them up,” my mother encouraged. “Then you can see where you’re putting the pad.”

I slid them up my legs, which were covered in a fuzz of small dark hairs. I knew how to shave my legs but had yet to learn how to keep up with it very well, as it was an involved process of drawing bathwater and lathering with soap and trying to lean in close enough to see where my pink disposable Lady Bic was headed, not to mention the nicks I received when I rushed. It was embarrassing to feel them, like I should have stayed in the habit because it was the womanly thing to do, and I was just a kid with hairy legs, bleeding in the middle.

“Okay,” my mother directed, “Now just peel the bottom off and center it on your underwear.” I stripped the white plastic from the bottom in a long, slow motion, and it curled up like a centipede towards my pinched fingers. I placed it gently on my favorite underwear and smoothed it down. It crackled underneath my fingers.

“And that’s it!” my mother shrugged. “I brought some wet wipes up so you can clean yourself real good. You can keep this up here. I have another package downstairs.” She handed me a plastic container the color of a robin’s egg filled with powder-scented wipes. A baby beamed at me on the front of the package. My mother hadn’t had a baby in the house for a good five years, but was so used to having them around when my brother was born that she continued to buy them for their multi-functionality such as cleaning her hands, wiping off make-up bottles, and swabbing her daughter’s twat.

She shut the door. “Let me know if you need help,” she called, and I heard her walk down the carpeted steps with almost inaudible thuds.

I pulled a baby wipe from the package and it hit me with a punch of artificial scent, like crushed flowers and Hostess Sweet Sixteen powdered donuts. I put it to my vagina and jumped from its clamminess the moment it made impact with my skin. My eyes started to well up again, this time from frustration of not being able to wipe myself, the most basic of training to become a full-fledged human being, and my annoyance with having been on the damned toilet for half an hour grew from exasperation to rage; and suddenly, I had wiped with the icy baby wipe from back to front, and there before my eyes was a smear of ruby, my first triumph. There would be days that my period beat me, of course – I would still have to go through sixth grade where I bled through my jeans and onto the chair of my desk in English class, and even at 25 I would mess up a boyfriend’s favorite pajama bottoms with my poorly-placed pad. Learning to work a tampon would be years in the making, and would even include a surgery to manually break my hymen. But before I would be sixteen lying in my bed, towel underneath, trying to work a Tampax in with deep breaths and a slow-pressing finger on the trigger of the applicator, I had this moment, the time where I was eleven and wiping my tears and learning to clean up my own accidents. I stood up, flushed the strange bits of myself, and walked back to my room to turn the computer on. It would be a good day to work on my novelette, to pour out my heart in a story of a young woman running through the woods to escape her would-be captors; she had left her menorah candles blazing in the house, and was running towards the boats that would smuggle her quietly but gloriously away from harm, my soul on the pages, bleeding effortlessly.

Freshly Pressed.

I’ve started a micro-blog. It’s heavenly – a place for weird quotes, fanciful postings, musings, and mini-tales. Lots of media, and a great format (Penguin books? Oh, HELL, yes.). If you ever wondered my opinion on word choices or are simply aching to see a Camera Obscura video, have yourself a visit: http://onehelluvadame.tumblr.com/

Secret Geek.

I’m walking up to my apartment when I’m greeted by the mailman. 

“Hello,” he says, and looks me up and down under the brim of his mailman pith helmet in a rather suspicious way because it is 11 in the afternoon and I am dressed in a cut-off sweatshirt and what are clearly men’s pajama bottoms. My hair is entwined in a way that can only come of one having not showered for more than 24 hours, so oily you could grease a cookie pan with it, and what follicles aren’t matted to my head are flipping out in a fashion that could only be replicated if I somehow managed to nest half a dozen vampire bats on my scalp. I’m wearing a pair of metallic gold snake-skin high heels. Topping off my tasteful look is a pair of “Faux-Bans,” as Ricky would call them, which I bought at Walgreens and are perfectly suited for blocking the sun, which I have not seen much of in the last 15 or so hours.

“Hello,” I answer back, and try to hide the fact that I’m carrying my clothes from the night before, but the mailman spots my yellow cardigan in my hand and his face melts into its most bemused countenance.  

He thinks he has me figured out. Girl in her mid-twenties walking back to her apartment in the afternoon, make-up smeared, hair a mess equals a sleazy one night stand, probably with a guy she met down at the Cantina on Colley, someone who told her that he was an investment banker when he really worked at a call center behind a strip mall on the boulevard. The mailman reserves his judgment. We’ve all been there. He had a few phillies himself, back in his younger days when he was more limber. So he doesn’t disgrace me with, “Rough night, eh?” or “Looks like someone was out late!” but shuffles some mail in his knapsack, and taps a catalogue in his hands as he strolls to the apartment building next door.
But he doesn’t know the truth.

I’ve been out late. I’ve barely slept. And I’ve been with boys. But what I’ve been doing is an activity so humiliatingly sexless that I have a hard time admitting to myself what I’ve gotten into the last couple weeks.

I’ve totally been playing video games.

The whole thing just kind of snuck up on me. I never owned a video game system as a kid – my father denounced video games when I was growing up, not because they were particularly violent or gratuitous in his eyes, but because they were expensive. “All these goofballs playing video games all day – you know how much money that costs?” my father would sigh. I deeply feared being viewed as a “goofball” in my father’s eyes, which, to this day, is a kiss of death in regards to any time he might have for you, so I subconsciously filed video games somewhere in my cerebral cortex in a mind-folder labeled DEEP SHAME. It took me years to realize that my father just had a deep-seated fear of having to buy endless consoles, games and accessories for his two children, particularly when his eldest (moi) had an uncanny knack for breaking anything she touched. This never intimidated my brother the way it did me, but by the time he had acquired his Playstation and all the necessary trimmings I was out of my parents’ house and still under the pretense that video games were for people who had nothing better to do with their money.

Then I met Adam.

I suppose it all started when Ricky and I decided to paint our lascivious Christmas ornaments (see “Shameful Plug”). While we plucked away at our creations (the Godfather ornament, for moments when you just want to say, “Here’s a severed horse head.”), Adam was the attendee at Color Me Mine. Former CMM alum ourselves, Ricky and I quickly struck up a rapport with dear Adam as we were coming in frequently and asking him what color we should paint our mermaid ornaments’ areolas. So one night, when we’re all out together getting sushi after a hard day of fastening 3D clitorises onto clay vaginas with teeth (“V for Dentata”), Adam mentions that he’s a bit of a gamer, and asks whether we’d like to join him for a round of said gaming.

“You guys should totally come over and play Rock Band,” he tells us.

I laughed politely, nodded, and stuffed a salmon roll in my mouth, which was a non-oral signal for, “Fuck no, nerdling!”

But Adam was persistent. Each time the group of us hung out, Adam would continue, “When are you coming over to play Rock Band? I just bought more juice for the fog machine.”

“Can’t tonight,” Ricky would say. “Lots of schoolwork.”

“Tampon shopping,” I would shrug.

Finally, since Adam didn’t buy that we were having our period every night, we ran out of excuses. So Ricky and I find ourselves on the front porch of Adam’s house for what has been dubbed a Night of Gaming.

Adam greets us at the front door with, “Are you ladies ready to rock?” He leads us down into the darkened basement of his house, wherein is set up a chamber of plastic instruments and three fog-covered figures seated at a firm 90-degree angle on the couch, presumably because they are serious about their performance level when strumming fake chords on “Enter Sandman.”

“These are some friends of mine,” Adam says, and points to each of the erect figures. “Sean, Josh, and Brian.” The threesome looks over at us, and with narrowed eyes assess that we 1.) are female, 2.) have breasts, and 3.) that we couldn’t tell the difference between an Xbox and a moderately advanced toaster oven. When their song ends, the three of them scurry like beetles to the pool table, where they remain for the rest of the night. Occasionally they glance over at us, trying to access how and why a couple of chicks have crashed their Dude’s Night In.

“Sorry, they’re not really used to seeing like, girls,” Adam tells us.

“Noted,” Ricky says.

Adam sets up the game. Ricky takes drums, and I take the microphone. I would like to take this moment to thank my parents for paying for opera lessons for so many years, and I want them both to know that even though I decided not to go into singing professionally, I have utilized their investment well by kicking mad ass at any karaoke-related endeavors, which quasi makes up for my senior year of college where I would sing to my roommate Fletcher while he used the bathroom (he claimed it relaxed him and led to better expulsions) but that is another story entirely.

My first taste of pixilated glory was scoring a 98% as the lead singer on Rock Band, and like an addict, I wanted more. I have vivid memories of Officer Priest, our D.A.R.E. instructor, standing in front of our fifth grade class giving us stern warnings about smoking pot and how that leads to crack addiction which leads to prostitution which leads to Horrific Death, but I don’t recall him spouting any warnings about plastic instruments. I blame the system, really.

“Do you guys want to try Fleetwood Mac?” I ask, already selecting “Go Your Own Way” on the song menu. “Let’s take it from the top.”

It helped that Adam had a great set up. The basement was lit with tube lighting, giving it a feel as whimsical as Christmastime. The couches were a cheeky burnt orange and perfectly broken-in. Adam would make a vat of banana pudding, the kind with vanilla wafers, and scoop it out for us in chilled glass bowls the color of Murano glass. There was plenty of beer, and if you were tired of video games, the pool table was awaiting.

My comfort with Rock Band is what got us through the door of Game Stop, where Adam introduced us to an extensive array of video games. “Yeah, there’s football ones, a lot of war ones,” Adam lectures us with the same tone that you might tell a group of seven-year-olds how to make a baking-soda volcano, “and you can even find some girl ones, like you know, exercise things.”

“What’s this?” I squealed, picking up a box labeled Fairytale Fights. On the cover was a batch of cartoonish fairy tale characters engaged in battle – I’ve always liked weird spins on traditional stories – and I placed it in Adam’s hands. “RENT THIS.”

Perhaps to fearful of my pending rage upon being told no, Adam rented it.

I think every woman has had this universal experience: you end up on a guy’s couch while he and his roommates/friends/homoerotic acquaintances have some sort of video game match, and you could be deep-throating a banana topless and no one would notice. It builds up a mammoth exasperation towards gaming consoles and the men that play them. So no one was more surprised than me that we locked ourselves in a basement and played Fairytale Fights for four hours.

There was one level in particular that Ricky and I found captivating: the Beaver Boss. The Beaver Boss is an enormous beaver you have to beat up while you float on a raft: he beats you with his tale, chops you with enormous front teeth, and vomits on you. It’s breathtaking. Adam was kind enough to let me and Ricky play by ourselves, knowing full well that he would put us to shame if he participated in the bloodbath, but shouted directions whenever possible. “Watch that tale!” he’d gasp. “Laura, you’re about to be vomited on!”

Finally, at nearly midnight, we beat The Beaver Boss. Ricky and I put on controllers down and collapsed on Adam’s orange couch, unmoving for twenty minutes. “I feel like I should have a cigarette,” Ricky says.

On the drive home, I get a text from Ricky: I can’t stop thinking about that beaver.

I text her back: Me, neither. Let’s do it again tomorrow.

 I would get off work from the paper and call Adam. “Your house?” I would say. “Beaver Fight?”

“I’ll be waiting,” he would say. “It’s called Fairytale Fights, by the way.”

“Just have the banana pudding ready,” I would say, and hang up the phone.

Not even bothering to go home because that would cut into our precious beaver time, I would pick up and Ricky and we’d stay at Adam’s until 2 or 3 a.m., then fall asleep on his couch. I would wake in the morning and slink out of his house, lipstick smeared from the fabric of his throw pillows. Then I would shower, put on more lipstick, and walk into work like nothing out of the ordinary at all was happening. Then when I sent the obituary page for its final proof, I would be out the door to do it all over again. It felt oddly sordid, like I was living a lie that no one would believe. I was the Larry Craig of gamers.

The night I came out as a gamer was the night Adam made me an Xbox Live gamer tag. “It’s just a way for people to see what you’re doing, and you can play games with other people if you want to.” Sensing my hesitation, Adam added, “You can make an avatar, too. They have lots of cardigans to choose from.” And I was sold. We selected my gamer tag – Maula Deen – and I made my avatar. She wears a yellow cardigan but I was disappointed there was no way to make her breasts larger.

I’ve tried other games – Halo, for instance. I designed very fetching fuchsia armor but was killed off three minutes into my first game. I feel as though I would do better if a giant beaver were introduced into Halo, but as far as I’ve researched Microsoft currently has no plans to release such an edition.

I suppose I could say that I’ve learned to escape the blind prejudice I had against gamers – that not every woman who likes Xbox also wears Anime ski-caps with felt kitten ears, that it’s possible to enjoy video games because they give you time together with your friends, people who have seen you lipstick-smeared and swearing at a pixilated beaver but who love you anyway – but what I’ve really learned is, I fucking love killing beavers.

“What happened to you last night?” my boss will ask me when I come into work bleary-eyed.

“Oh, you know,” I say vaguely. “One of those nights.”

“God, to be twenty-five again,” she sighs.

“Yep,” I agree, and rub chamomile balm under my eyes, the same eyes that have seen the magic of a Christmas-lit basement, the expression of unrelenting joy on the faces of true friends, and The Beaver King himself.

Boys I’ve Kissed.

I was driving past Omar’s Carriage House when I glanced at the side parking lot and remembered that I had kissed someone in the sixth parking space from the street.

It was a kind of startling realization, mostly because I hadn’t been overly sentimental that day – in fact, I had just come from Machismo where they serve burritos the length and width of a moderately sized human infant, so I was in the process of digesting my honey-wheat-black-bean-rice-mushroom-corn-mild-salsa baby bump when The Kiss came back to me. He was a Naval officer dressed as John Oates, I was the gypsy in the passenger seat of his Mini Cooper. It was 11:32 on Halloween night. We had just come from the party upstairs in the adjacent apartment building. As we walked to his car he adjusted his wig, originally a Lionel Richie hairpiece knock-off, and I clutched my cheap black Party City gypsy dress in the hand that wasn’t clutching my glass of equally cheap Merlot.

He turned the heat on in the car and we talked about whatever came to mind: where we went to school, how surprisingly smooth the interior of the Mini Cooper was – Did you know you can add stickers to the inside that say ‘Eject Button’?

Yes, I heard that somewhere. Very cute.

He was an only child. I was a fan of old postcards with faded script on the back – GREETINGS from Niagara Falls! He liked Feist. I had never been to Turkey but would like to go. He owned more than 10,000 songs in his MP3 library, most of them illegally. I could sing arias in the shower but was always afraid of disturbing the neighbors.

And then there’s that wonderful silence.

I put my wine glass in the cup holder and it tilts so suddenly and severely that we both gasp and reach for it, hovering over it like seagulls until we see what it does; but it pivots at a 55 degree angle and stops gently, its shift lulled by our anxious stillness.

“It says specifically no wine glasses, you know,” he teases, and points to a sticker above the cup holder that has a wine glass with a line through it.

“Well, aren’t there all kinds of stickers in this car?” I retort, and suddenly his lips are on mine and I can feel the hair of his faux mustache on my face which is absurd but so breathtaking that I don’t even mind. The spotlight of Omar’s Carriage House, probably installed to ward off city opossums and vagrants, is shining through the windshield, washing our faces in steaming fluorescent blue.

I will have more first kisses and there had been plenty before, but this one was the one that I was in my head as I drove past Omar’s Carriage House and it occurred to me that the world is just filled with places I’ve kissed boys: street corners of Norfolk, the backseat of my mother’s car (long since totaled), the rented living room of a Ghent apartment while the Christmas tree stood watch at the window, in the middle of Piazza San Marco at night with the lights of cafes blazing in the darkness, a hay maze, and a pool in Disney World once, and countless more that I only need be reminded of somehow. And so if I’ve kissed boys in a hundred places, then surely everyone else in the world has littered the streets, houses, reception halls, public and private schools, docks, hoity-toity French restaurants, dorm rooms, post-1950s constructed offices, and back alleyways with love of some kind. The whole world is ablaze with memories and we drive along on the pavement like everything his ho-hum, old hat, when really, it is electric.

And then it occurred to me that someday, I will not kiss boys. My hair will be a dry white and while I might like to dream that I will be cruising the world, going to ports in the Caribbean and having the tanned waiter take pictures of my husband and me eating brass-red lobsters, more than likely I will be walking down the halls of wherever I have ended up, either wondering where it all went or wondering where it’s all going to, not unlike today, only I will not kiss boys. I will have kissed all the boys I will kiss. Things will well up from the memories I’ve buried underground, tapped by silly, insignificant things: a USC bumper sticker, someone mentioning Heart of Darkness, a yellow and maroon scarf hanging in a storefront widow, the smell of Polo cologne. And there they are, boys who by that point are long married or divorced after cheating on their wives or barely speaking with their children or sitting catatonic on the porch of a nursing home or whose obituaries are lining the litterpan in someone’s kitchen. To someone else they are a husband or a father, but to me, they are scraps of a life that I had when I was young and doing off-putting things like drinking Merlot in parking lots dressed as a Romanian, never thinking there would be a time other than this one; it’s selfish in its way, merely remembering them as placeholders, but I like to think that if I do it fondly enough, it counts as genuine love of some kind. And I do love them, these warm faces and twitching lips who helped make the world right for the moment they connected their mouth to mine and the moment I remembered better things, these bookmarks, these heralds of exquisiteness, these boys I’ve kissed.

Pictures as my Mother Sees Them.

A Few of My Favorite Things.

Quaint Ghent apartments with Charlie Brown trees 

Cheeseballs by Gordon make you fall to your knees

Corey and Molly and their BFF rings

These are a few of my favorite things

A spread of cookies – Soraia, the eater

Is classed up by donuts I bought at the Teeter

“Santa’s Lil Helper” vibrator and the joy it brings

These are a few of my favorite things

Hot Nuts with a plastic tambourine was a feature

Molly was dressed like my Kindergarten teacher

Jones family photos as stately as kings

These are a few of my favorite things

Going to Cruzers for Ricky Astley song selection

 Gordon and Laura: Christmas sweater perfection

Tambourine solos by Scot while Ricky Jones sings

These are a few of my favorite things

When there’s no Hot Nuts

Or no Yuengling

Or no joy to be had

I simply remember Scot’s interpretive dance

 

                        And then I don’t feel so bad.

Shameless Plug.

Christmas really sucks cock sometimes.

Making you an offer you can't refuse.

I think what really did me in was Christmas 2004. It’s what made me realize that the holidays are a time of disappointment. I fully blame this on my ex-boyfriend, Mark, who – upon assessing my personality and my love of books, decor, interesting nicknacks, music, flowers, clocks, picture frames, anything with a Jane Austen quote, funky magnets, gloves, coffee mugs, vases, sock monkies - decided what I really needed in my life was a plastic purse light. What is a purse light, you may ask? It’s a glorified flashlight in the shape of an egg that swings from a plastic clip that you attach in your pocketbook. It was bulky and unusable and totally shiteous and when I tried to use it there was a 75% chance it wouldn’t even work, just blink on and off until it eventually blew out altogether. I have a vague recollection of smashing it repeatedly against the sidewalk with my foot, but my memory is hazy – I tried to block out whatever bits were left of the purse light fiasco.

So ever since then I have tried to find an avenue that would leave me a little more fulfilled. Present giving was fun; I even liked decorating a Christmas tree. Something was still missing, however, and I never knew quite what it was.

Until this year.

Why, yes, that IS a cigarette she's smoking.

Ricky and I were spending time together, being appauled as usual by the Christmas offerings of obese snowmen and gingerbread men who appear to be high on mescaline, when we started discussing some ornaments we’d really like to see on our tree. For starters, nothing Christmas-themed. And as we knocked around ideas, we realized that 1.) we used to work together in a pottery shop that offered stoneware clay, 2.) we both rolled, cut, fired and painted said clay for store displays, 3.) there was a place down the street called “Wine and Cake” hobbies that sold all manner of cookie cutters we could use, 4.) we could fashion our own ornaments and even sell them if we were so inclined, and 5.) we could do this while drinking rummed-up eggnog in our sweatpants, which, I don’t know about you, but remains my favorite state of doing anything.

So Ricky and I got to work.

10 cent Rides ornament with Gordon The Professional Model.

What we came up with was this: a Godfather horse head, a legion of slutty mermaids (one with an anchor tattoo), shirt-torsos of lumberjacks, hippie men, and truck stop dudes, ugly trout, and of course, the creme de le creme: THE VAGINA DENTATA (I took the liberty of providing the link to Wikipedia that may explain this to anyone who never took a medieval literature class to explain what that is exactly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagina_dentata).

They are all listed on a page over at Blogger.com:  http://dirtybirdandsaltyfish.blogspot.com - I’m a big fan of WordPress for straight-up writin’, son, but it’s annoying as shit to put pictures on this thing, which is why I only add them when I’ve turned 25 or just been to Gingernuts. Blogger.com is a little kinder for photo media.

If you actually want to purchase an ornament, you can check out Etsy:  http://www.etsy.com/shop/stasche. Even if you’re not into ornaments, they have a ton of cool handmade items from sellers across the country, and a couple international artists, too. Very balling website.

Thus concludes my shameless plug. But if I didn’t show you my penchant for tasteless Christmas ornaments, I would be doing both of us a grave disservice.

Feeling Testie.

This is so sweet you could diabetes just looking at it.

 My parents raised me and my brother to be thoughtful, compassionate, rational people, which is why I am glad they can’t sense that I’m at a truck stop at 10 p.m. playing quarters and being ogled by truckers who are trying to assess whether I’ll give them a blowjob for $20 and a case of garlic-herb tenderloin they’re hauling in the back of a Gwaltney truck. 

My brother Taylor, on the other hand, is at home outlining his aerospace engineering notes for his midterm the following week.

Taylor has always been the obvious choice for the exemplary offspring of my parents, as he’s been in far less trouble: never has Taylor flooded his car on the streets of Norfolk, making my father throw on his Eddie Bauer sweatshirt and old loafers and race down 464 to find his child shivering in a fire station, nor has Taylor had to “slip in the back” of a family member’s funeral because he was an hour late; Taylor has never snuck out of the house to meet suitors who threw pebbles at his window, nor has he consumed so much vodka that he was too drunk to keep the toilet lid from falling on his head, causing a near-drown in stale toilet bowl water and Aristocrat vomit; and as far as I know, Taylor has never slept with someone at a Halloween party because he liked that they came dressed as John Oates.

Taylor, for as long as I can remember, has lived a structured and regimented life. His room is unsettlingly middle-aged for an eighteen-year-old: it’s done up in blues and brushed silvers and furnished with old records that my father kept in the garage which are now arranged in a diamond-shaped grid on his largest wall, and a vintage French racing print hangs above his bed. He has a book shelf filled with gadgets and manuals and pictures from family trips to Venice and New Orleans. Even his food habits are unfussy. For lunch, he packs a piece of bologna between two slices of Mary Jane white bread, no mayonnaise, no mustard, everything slipped into an unmarked brown bag that made a curt rustle when slipped into his backpack. From 6 to 8 p.m. he outlines his chemistry notes. At 9 p.m., his girlfriend since his Freshman year of high school calls, just like she has since they were fourteen, and they talk for an hour about movies and computers and classes and probably things that seem convoluted at eighteen that will straighten themselves out years later. He got a job at ODU, where he has a full engineering scholarship, transcribing software; he recently converted a textbook entirely into Braille for a blind student, completing a months-long transliteration in a matter of days. The boy is brilliant.

So when my mother calls me and says, “Dad just took Taylor to the ER,” naturally, I panic a little. Because if Taylor is in the ER, it’s not because he was drag racing or spitting bits of cigar onto known gang members; it’s because something horribly out of his control has happened.

 “He’s okay,” says Mom before I have time to convulse. “He’s alright. His – it’s his balls.”

I stop.

“His balls?” I say.

“I came home from church and he was lying on the couch writhing in pain with an icepack on his crotch. I knew he felt really horrible because he didn’t even care if I saw his thing-dinger. That’s not usually something he shows his mother.”

“Well, what did you do?”

“I Googled ‘testicle pain’ and it said that he might have something called a testicular torsion. Basically his balls got twisted. And if you don’t correct it within a certain amount of time, he could become infertile. He’s alright. I’m sure we caught it in time. I just want to get him to a doctor.”

“I’ll be down there in a few,” I tell her, and start to throw on clothes, whatever I can find, whatever will get me out the door and to the car and in the waiting room of Chesapeake Regional Medical Center.

While rushing around, I put on a pair of tan Totes socks, which, oddly, they issued me at the hospital at my last surgery – a thought that makes me stop in my tracks. Taylor and I, vastly different for the whole of our lives together as siblings, do have one thing in common: a genetic predisposition, something reprehensibly engraved in our chromosomal make-up that, at the age of eighteen, we both have to have our genitals operated upon.

It goes a little something like this.

As a high school senior, I suspected that my hymen was not only fully intact, but that my hymen was iron-clad; I managed to ascertain that this was most definitely the case after trying to complete the seemingly impossible task of having sex with my high school boyfriend, John, who wanted very badly to lose his virginity after the senior banquet, and was met with extreme disappointment when his seventeen-year-old penis, stiff as a plank, would not slide comfortably inside my vagina. Slathered in spermicidal lubricant, I winced in anguish while John tried to work himself inside, lovingly whispering various encouraging phrases such as, “Why isn’t this working?!” and “Do you think your Dad is going to come home?” Finally, John gave up, defeated by my USS Merrimack vagina; it was a humiliating loss for the young man who wanted so desperately to be the first member of the Hickory High School drumline to have gone all the way with a woman, and an awkward state of affairs for me, as well: I had an unusable vagina. All the equipment was there; it was just sealed up, a sort of genital trust fund that I wouldn’t be able to tap into until I was eighteen, when I finally got the nerve to tell my mother that nothing – absolutely nothing – would fit inside my twat.

Of course I said it much more gently. “Mom, I can’t get a tampon in,” I tell her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I can’t get tampon in.”

“Are you putting it in the right hole?”

“Uh…yeah. I mean, I’m pretty sure…how many holes are there down there?”

“Well, start from your asshole and then move forward; it’s the first one you come to.”

I disappear into the bathroom, and following my mother’s strict directions (this was 2002 and long before GPS systems were standard), was still unable to manipulate a Playtex into my womanly cavern. I come back out and announce, “No dice.”

My mother looks up at me from her Oprah magazine and frowns. “Really? Well. I guess we’ll have to get you to a gynecologist. It’s time you saw one anyway.”

My gyno, aptly named Dr. Hammer, examines my vacuum-sealed genitals and tells me that yes, indeed, my hymen is abnormally rigid, and that they will have to perform a hymenectomy before further complications have the chance to arise. This is devastating news for my father, who realizes all but too soon the kindhearted gift the Lord had bestowed upon him as a parent. “A solid hymen. It’s every father’s dream. Like a built-in chastity belt.” He sighs heavily and looks back down at the crossword as he tells me this. “I don’t see why we can’t your first husband to handle it for you, but your mama insists we take care of it now. Damn insurance is too good sometimes.”

The day of the surgery comes and my mother drives me to the hospital, where I will be having an outpatient procedure to slice my hymen in three separate areas and then sear the carvings shut, thus allowing mobility while keeping everything intact; making my hymen, essentially, a doggie door. I lay on an operating table in a haze of anesthesia, waking up to find myself newly stripped of an intact vaginal mucous membrane.

When I am wheeled back to a hospital room, my mother is waiting with the pair of tan Totes, which, kneeling, she slips on my feet. “I can see everything from down here!” she exclaims, cocking her head into my crotch. “Looks like they shaved you.”

I think about this as I drive to the hospital. How strange that two seemingly healthy young adults would both have such bizarre issues with their most intimate of body parts; then again, I suppose that if there’s one thing we aren’t in the Watkins family, it’s shy about our bodies and their various functions. It seems somewhat fair that if it has to happen to someone, it should be to a family that is comfortable talking about sexual organs than say, a group of siblings at a Mormon compound in Eldorado. But still, I am annoyed. There are many men who deserve to have their testicles twisted – repeatedly. Every hour on the hour, even. There are some men who deserve to have their testicles revoked altogether. But not my brother. Not the guy who makes me mini pizzas when I come to visit for the afternoon, or who records our rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that we sing in the car on our way up to Richmond every Thanksgiving. Guys like Taylor – guys who aren’t dicks to their girlfriends, who still say “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir” to their parents even when they’re far past the age they could get in trouble for not saying it, who stay up late outlining chemistry notes for their midterm – don’t deserve the pain of twisted nuts. They deserve tiny medals to wear in their tweed jackets. They deserve an open bar. They deserve full harems.

I walk into the hospital and hear my mother. She’s upstairs in the surgery waiting room, but her voice is echoing through the main lobby. “…just took him in and that’s all we know…” It sounds like she’s on the phone with someone, probably my aunt. My father is leaning over the balcony. He spots me and beams, then waves me up. “Take the elevator!” he calls. “We’re to the left.” He doesn’t look worried, but that’s typical of my father in these situations. My brother and I have always said that my father has an amazing amount of luck, starting from his time in Vietnam where he managed to dodge being the only one not blown to bits while on patrol, to meeting my mother and convincing her to run away with him, to having two children whose only genital trouble came from improper functioning and did not involve shitting out his illegitimate grandbabies from one-nighters with people from New Jersey. He wiggles his eyebrows at me as I pass under him. He’s hoping his luck will hold.

My parents and I sit in the waiting room. We’re the only ones there. My mother is trying to talk quietly on the phone to her brother, but her voice carries like a fog horn in an otherwise stagnant hallway. “Well, it’s called a testicular torsion,” she says, shaking one crossed leg over the other. “And it means that his testicles are wrapped around when they shouldn’t be.” After extensive fact-checking on Google, my mother likely knows more about the condition than Dr. Woo, who, my father informs me, is performing emergency surgery on my baby brother’s sack as we speak.

“It was funny,” my father tells me while we sit, “they were wheeling Taylor into a ward where they had more room, and the doctor told me it was the ward where the ‘psychiatric’ patients were kept. And I told him that was appropriate, being that my son was a nut case.” My father has always been one to diffuse a situation with puns. It’s a slightly unbearable but welcomed comfort.

Mom is now off the phone. We are all silent, thumbing through books that we’ve brought, and I wonder if my parents are secretly afraid that my brother is not going to be able to have children, meaning that the burden of grandchildren birthing is going to weigh heavily on my shoulders. There is a silent agreement between the four of us that Taylor’s children will likely be Nobel Laureates and mine will patent something like a fart machine.

More than that though, is that Taylor and I have always functioned brilliantly as the yin and the yang: the cool head and the excitable ball of nerves; the logistics and the fantasist; politeness and crudeness. So sitting in the waiting room, I am feeling a little lost, because my personified antonym, my baby brother, may be in trouble, and I don’t like it. I want him to have comfort foremost, but I want for him more than anything to have options, be it to have children or to travel the world or to be perfectly content in a room of blues and silvers for the rest of his days, because if anyone has earned the right to a life they most want, it is Taylor Watkins.

Dr. Woo comes to the waiting room and shakes my father’s hand. “He’s fine,” the doctor says, and takes a seat across from my mother. “Surgery went well. He’s resting now.” He pauses and leans toward my father, as though this part is meant for the men in the room, “His testicles were actually twisted around three times.”

“How did it happen?” my mother asks, and I send up a silent prayer that the doctor does not answer, “OVER-MASTURBATORY STRESS,” or “BLOWJOB TRAUMA,” because I truly don’t know how much more my mother could take knowing that both of her children are sexual depraved, but the doctor instead answers, “It could really happen at any time or any place – nothing causes it. Basically his connector that is supposed to stop it from happening was too narrow so that did him in. It could have been just the way he turned. There’s no rhyme or reason.”

“But you caught it in time?” my mother asks.

“Yep,” says Dr. Woo. “He’ll be just fine.”

I had brought a book for Taylor to read in case he had to stay overnight, which he did. Male doctors are pretty watchful when a dude’s nads are at stake, probably a clause in the Hippocratic Oath. Taylor is out like a light and I have to be at work early in the morning, so Dad offers to take the book to Taylor for me when he comes to. He hands me a pen. “You should inscribe it.” This is a tradition in our family when books are given.

I scrawl in the front cover: Dearest Taylor, I would never be so insensitive as to make light of a serious situation such as a testicular torsion, but I do happen to be inscribing this with a Uni-Ball pen. Funny how fate works out.

Taylor informs me two days later that my comments are humorous but unappreciated.

When I finally see my brother in person, I take care that the first thing I say to him be in the spirit of empathy and consideration.

 “Please can I write about your nutsack?” I ask him. “Please say yes, please.”

“Of course,” my brother sighs. “Once you’ve had a dozen different doctors handle your bits in a period of only a few hours, you tend to feel alot less shameful about it.”

Taylor checks to make sure his testicles are still intact.

The worst part, Taylor claims, is having to pee but not being relaxed enough in his nether-regions to do so. “I sat for an hour-and-a-half trying to get something out,” Taylor tells me, “and finally I put on ‘The Daily Show’ and let Jon Stewart work his magic. I was laughing and pissing within minutes.” Taylor is contemplating writing an e-mail to Mr. Stewart thanking him for his assistance.

I’m driving home and thinking about my brother. Taylor is my confidant; he’s known about secret boyfriends, drunken humiliations, and my brief addiction to Xanax, all of which he absorbs without scathing judgment. “Maybe you should rethink that,” is a favorite phrase of his. Usually these conversations take place in the guest room of my parents’ house where I stay when I sleep over five times a year: once at Christmas, once to take my parents to the airport for their annual vacation, and three times reserved for nights that I become expressively hysterical over men or money or sometimes both, and flee to the consolation of my family’s shelter.

Those are the nights that Taylor will come sit by my beside in a room my mother painted sage, which is a soft gray in the glow of the tableside lamp, and tell me not to worry so much. “You’ll be alright,” he says, barely above a whisper, and a cynical part of me questions how a man so young could assure me of that, but a larger part of me, the part that is happy to be sleeping with my parents’ room directly below and Gus the cat curled at my feet and my brother leaning back on his arms in a blue sweatshirt, believes him, because not only is he brilliant, but he is strikingly honest.

So when he says, “I love you, La,” he says, and turns out the light, I know he means it. He isn’t showy about his affection, nor is it misplaced. It’s simple and solid and it’s there. And it makes me love him more than anything else he does.

Taylor shuts the door. I hear his footsteps creak to his bedroom, and when  the house finally falls quiet, I send a silent thank you to whomever it was that decided we would be siblings, because I know how lucky I have it, and if I didn’t - I would be completely nuts.

Fool in the Rain.

The first murmurings of the Nor’easter came on a shadowy Wednesday morning, when, upon waking, I heard for the first time in many Ghent mornings, no birds; however, as it was 5 a.m., my first thought was less, “How very peculiar to hear none of the swallows whistling their tunes in the willowy treetops this November morn!” and more along the lines of, “Motherfucker, it is so fucking early. FUCK.” So I head to the bathroom for my morning extrication of urine and to poke my eyes with a mascara wand so that I could at least feign a state of consciousness for my part-time work at the bageldashery, then drive to Yorgo’s contemplating why I have chosen a job to supplement to my income that includes being awake at a time where I used to go to sleep.

Then a hot policeman comes in that morning and I remember exactly why I chose it.

“Supposed to be a storm coming,” Officer Blue Eyes tells me.

“Oh?” I say, handing him his coffee and squeezing my breasts together simultaneously.

“Nor’easter, they’re saying,” he says. He brushes my hand as he takes the paper cup from me. “So you be careful out there. Aren’t you by Stockley Gardens?”

“I am,” I say.

“Well, watch the flooding,” he says. “They say it’s going to be worse than Isabel.”

During Hurricane Isabel, I was trapped with my parents and my brother without electricity for three straight days, and the only thing we had to do entertain ourselves with at night was play instruments around  a crude fire we had fashioned out of five Christmas-themed Yankee candles; since the piano was too big to drag into the room, I had a harmonica, my brother had a mouth harp, and my mother was blowing into a jug; so there we were, your typical suburban middle-class family playing Ozark instruments with the living room smelling like a sickening, diabetes-rearing mix of Gingerbread Dream, Christmas Cookie, Home for the Holidays, Christmas Tree, and Festival of Lights (my mother, a lifelong liberal, bought the Jewish candle in an attempt to be multi-cultural). Deep into the night our neighbors likely heard the brassy hum of harmonica, though at least the harmonica had a little soul to it, as well as volume modulations; my brother’s jaw harp had one decibel level, a discordant BOING! BOING! BOING! BOING! My mother’s jug-playing was worse. Unable to muster the abdominal breaths it takes to make a drinking jug hum, my mother just vocalized, “HOOT! HOOT! HOOT! HOOT!” over my brother’s BOING! BOING! BOING! and my own amateurish harmonica stylings. We sounded like a camp of tone-deaf cowboys.

My father was so depressed by the whole scene that he retired to the bedroom at 8 p.m. “One hurricane and we’re the goddamn Yokums,” he said, shutting the bedroom door behind him.

“It couldn’t be worse than Isabel,” I tell Officer Blue Eyes, who has been waiting patiently for his Everything bagel during my ‘Nam-like flashback.

“Just be careful,” says Officer Blue Eyes.

When I go into the newsroom that afternoon, reporters are bracing themselves for the big weather story. The editors rush back and forth in front of the Obituary Desk, which is on the main drag of the newsroom, which means that not only do I get the gossip from people who think no one is listening as they’re walking by on the phone (“The doctor said to apply it directly to my scrotum every day for six to eight weeks.”) but I also get hit with the journalistic mood as soon it strikes.

“Traffic reports, school closures, road conditions,” one of the editors says. “Make sure we have people on it.”

When I get back to my apartment that night, I flip on the news. “Brace yourselves!” the weatherman says. I listen to him babble on about cold fronts and April to November and something about flooding, but I forgot my dinner at work that night and I’m making cous cous and barbeque chicken, and as I have one chicken breast left, it is something in which I must devote my full brain power to, lest I burn it and have to Multi-Grain Cheerios for the third consecutive dinner that week. The weatherman carries on, business as usual, unconcerned that I’m not paying more attention.

In bed, I can hear the beating of soft water against the window pane, and I think of Kathy’s Song and the voice of the weatherman, and they are all combining into a drowsy ode, I hear the drizzle of the rain, a macro-scale storm along the East Coast, like a memory it falls, it’s a low pressure area, soft and warm, continuing, thriving on converging air masses, tapping on my roof and walls and I am fast asleep.

I wake up and it is pouring. The walkway to my apartment that once resembled a Venetian pathway now resembles a canal and leaves litter the ground like a sopping Oriental rug. I switch on the news again and an anchorman is standing knee-deep in water in a residential area, presumably dead cars parked along the curb s behind them. “This may look like a river, but’s not!” says the anchorman. “It’s a motherfucking STREET!” He doesn’t say the “motherfucking” part, but by the astonishment in his voice you can tell it’s implied.

I decide to move my car to higher ground so it does not flood, because even if I had the money to add on another car payment, I do not have the energy to deal with Jeremy, the hair-greased laden guy who sold me my Nissan, ever again. “This car has subwoofers,” he had told me on the car lot, brushing my arm with the sleeve of his poly-fiber aqua shirt.

“What the hell is that?” I had asked.

“They’re in the trunk,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows at me. “I won’t even charge you extra for them.”

I open my closet and get my pink paisley goulashes out, something I bought three or four years ago because I was convinced I couldn’t live without their bright whimsy, and now I am grateful for my tendency to impulse buy rainwear. I strap them on along with a pair of water-resistant pants and a few layers under a sweatshirt. My feet have become accustomed to high heels so when I begin to walk in my rainboots my brain doesn’t quite know what to tell my legs what to do. “Alright,” my brain channels. “Let’s try to walk! Left leg, move out at a forty-degree angle to the side, then come awkwardly back in! Nice. Right leg, you try. Good job, guys. Now do that for two miles.”

I start my car and drive it to the EVMS parking garage, then begin the trek to The Virginian-Pilot that would have made Jacques Cousteu shit his scuba suit.

The first half-mile wasn’t so bad; it was rather euphoric, actually, because the weather was fascinating. Trees shook like tuning forks, the wind gathered leaves and dust and crashed them into the once ivory sidewalk, and when I caught sight of the Hague in the distance, it was swollen and blackened, its belly boiled with raindrops. Then I reached the end of Olney Road, and while I had been contemplating getting a coffee from the 7-11 on the corner, I realized this task would be near impossible as the entire avenue had transformed into the river Styx.

Orange barrels clung to the ground, water jetties swirling around them, and cars sat lifeless on the road, reduced to stationary scraps, irregular boulders of metal and plastic. The traffic light I usually sat at on my way to work blinked yellow over and over, an urban lighthouse urging people to stay off the street, not that anyone would be foolish enough to be on the street in weather like this.

I cut through Fairfax Avenue and down towards the Chrysler Museum. A BWM in the distance reaches a pool of water that has formulated around the area, and thinking better of it, turns around. It reminds me of a BMW-driver I used to date. “The insurance is impossible,” he told me once. “Every time I pay my bill I feel like I’m being bent over and fucked in the ass.” As I watch the cherry-red taillights of the BMW make their way down the street, I wonder if he has the same sentiments.

I walk past the Chrysler and my once pink boots are covered with mud and bits of mulch pieces from the saturated grounds. A man in knee-high waders is making his way through a lake of rainwater in front of me. I realize that he is wading through the only pathway to The Pilot. For such a sobering moment it seems anomalous that I should want a shot of scotch before I swim through it.

There’s nothing left to do but cross it, so I take a step into the makeshift pond on Boush Street; it soaks my pantleg up to my mid-calf and my pants stick to my leg like hot leather. “Water-resistant my ass,” I say aloud. My stride becomes slower in the drag of the water, which is now up to my thighs, and by the time I’m in the middle of the street the bottom of my sweatshirt is saturated with wetness. I feel like news footage.

“Keep calm and carry on!” I hear my mother say, though if my mother had really been there, I’m sure she would have probably opted to say, “Laura, get your drenched ass out of the water and go home for God’s sake!”

But this is when my journalistic commitment kicks in, something that becomes acquired if you work at a paper long enough, and I find myself saying, “I have to get to the newsroom!” As I wade through two blocks of waist-high water, I imagine people yelling for me to turn around, turn back before it’s too late! But I just call back to them, “The paper has to get out!” And they beg me to stop putting myself through the flood, go home, let someone else fight this battle, but I’m so committed to reporting area deaths that I just call back, “I have no choice! We have to get out the paper! The public has the right to know the news!” Minor delusions of grandeur are quite constructive for helping one ignore the fact that their vagina is being submerged with stagnant municipal floodwater. 

When I reach the unflooded sidewalk adjacent to Lake Boush, my pants resemble leggings and when I touch my face, my fingers are laced with runoff mascara. I pass a glass door from one of the buildings and my hair is curled into a black tuft on top of my head, giving me an Edward Scissorhands kind of look. I pass two guys from WTKR, who smile at me politely, and if it had been other day, I would have been properly mortified to have anyone see me in such shambles, but all I want to do is get to where there is heat and no water.

I walk into The Pilot, and there are only a few souls that have been able to make it to work, one of whom is my editor. “Jesus!” she says when she sees me. “What happened to your face?”

“Huh?” I say, and look into a compact mirror I keep at my desk. Streams of black mascara residue have leaked down my once unsoiled countenance.

“You might want to fix that,” she says gently. “And I brought some extra pants in case I was stranded here. Why don’t you wear them?”

I spend the rest of the day wearing my boss’s pants. I also take my goulashes off and walk around in my socks for the rest of the evening. It is a very classy, professional look. Luckily everyone else looks about like me, with the exception of the business reporter, who always looks like he waltzed out of a Ralph Lauren ad, though I can’t imagine how he got here so goddamned dry. He walks by in a tweed blazer and pressed khakis and I narrow my eyes at him, envious of the flying hovercraft I suspect he owns. 

That night, my editor drives me home in her husband’s truck. The dead cars are becoming even more prevalent, tombstone markers in the flooded streets of what was once a sunny Ghent.

When I return home, my block is dark. My roommate Bridget is sitting with a candle lit in the middle of the living room. “Please tell me you’re having a séance,” I plead.

“Power’s out,” she sighs. “I’ve been trying to do schoolwork in the dark for an hour.” Bridget is a nuclear med technician, which means she is the type who studies even in the dark, rather than, say, play an imaginary jug.

She gives me a candle and I make my way to my room. It’s 9 p.m. and there’s nothing to do but brush my teeth in the dark and go to sleep.

I listen to the rain as drift off. It’s solid but appears to be tapering off. Maybe we’ll get power tomorrow, I think. Maybe the rains will hold off. Maybe the worst is over. Then I think, That rain is so loud. Which leads me to think, It sounds like it’s in my room it’s so loud. I pause and listen. It’s coming from my window. I walk towards the noise cataleptic and as intently as Lady Macbeth, the window my blood-dripping dagger, and realize that my window is, like her dagger, literally dripping. Pouring, actually. Pouring onto my great-grandmother’s hope chest and the piles of books I have lined atop it, which I immediately snatch into my arms. Sedaris, O’Connor, Ames – even Ford Maddox Ford since I was feeling extra benevolent – all flung from what could have been a watery grave onto the dry floor across the room, where they land with a sad thud. Nothing could break a reader’s heart more than hearing part of their beloved book collection land heartlessly on the ground, but it was a situation that called for action rather than sentimentality.

“FUCK!” I yell, and run to the linen closet, where I grab a pile of towels. Bridget stirs from her reading and joins me in my room, and we discover the source of the waterfall has come from part of the window molding, which has cracked in half.

We move my great-grandmother’s hope chest and Bridget, the calmer of the two of us, formulates a plan. “Let’s try to tape up the leak,” she says, and disappears into the hallway. Bridget brings back a roll of painting tape from the closet. “We didn’t have any duct tape,” she says, “but we could try this.” Bridget, in an amazing acrobatic feat, shimmies up my window and tries to tape the crack; the water is coming out with an amazing strength, however, and soaks through the packing tape before it even has a chance to adhere.

We lay bathroom trashcans beneath the runoff, and the water spills into the plastic pails with a dreadful, irregular drumming. I’m…fucking…up…your…evening, it says with each drop.

The rains subside slightly and the dripping stops; we are left with three trashcans balanced against my windowsill and sopping towels lining the floor. Later, when my landlord comes to assess the damage, he claims he could not deduce which window I had reported damaged. “It was the one framed with mildewed trashcans,” I tell him.

“Oh,” he tells me. “I was wondering what that smell was.”

Ricky offers me a place at her house for the next few days, where I could at least shower and fall asleep to something other than the sound of Chinese water torture. Ricky also owns a cairn terrier named Mo (short for Meauxtier Beautier) who, to wake me up each morning, would jump on my vagina and proceed to roll down my torso until I gave her a minimum 14-minute belly rub, which, if I wanted to keep my labia intact, I did. Ricky’s brother Gordon made me blueberry pancakes in the morning, however, so I kept my complaints to myself, even if I did eat my breakfast with a bruised vulva.

When I wasn’t at Ricky’s, I would drive by my apartment every so often, slowly, like a crazed ex-lover, to see if the electricity was back on. Yet it came to be Sunday afternoon, and the lights were still off. Sparing Ricky and Gordon another glimpse of me in a bathrobe, I decide to shower at the gym. Usually I’m a touch wary about showering in public – I like the familiarity of my apartment bathroom, where I at least know who has been using my shower, and I can be fairly certain that if someone has chosen to urinate in my bathtub, I at least know the person in which whose pee I am stepping. Plus I hate lugging all my stuff into the gym shower. It makes me feel like a pack mule.

But desperate times call for desperate measures, and so I find myself in the gym shower with my leg against the wall in a Cirque du Soleil maneuver trying to shave. While I’m trying to reach my ankles my mind wanders back to an episode of “20/20” on hidden cameras in locker rooms that are broadcasting footage of naked women to audiences in Hungary, but I’m so desperate to feel like a woman again that I don’t care if everyone in Eastern Europe can see my birth canal.

When the electricity comes on, part of me wishes it could have stayed off until our lease was up in May, because when I walk into my room my window appears to have vomited soggy towels. I pick them up and stuff them into the washing machine, which probably thinks it has earned its place in the second circle of hell with the rest of the gluttons. Or maybe not. I’m not sure how my washing machine feels about Dante.

Once the towels and trashcans are cleared, putting my room back together feels curative. The pieces start to come together to form what is familiar and natural as my surroundings – I lovingly rearrange my books, placing them in order by which I read them, and balance them next to the gold-hammered lamp my mother bought me after a rough break up. “You have to make your own light sometimes,” she told me in the aisle of Target, and set it down in the bottom of the cart, where it made a triumphant clang: Damn right. The embossed tray I bought at Stockley Gardens Art Festival of the antique birds’ eggs print leans against the window sill – holding our peacoats together in the blustery October wind, Ricky and I rummaged through the vendors’ stands and drank coffee and listened to a woman who had smoked cigarettes for forty years sing about Sloopy hanging on, and what a good day that was. The vase I painted in college – Fleurs – that my roommate accidentally dropped that made the rim look like it was smiling; the picture of my brother feeding pigeons in Piazza San Marco; my father’s Italian Valentine from last year that I framed in white porcelain; the first picture taken of my mother after she could walk again, the one where we are both sitting under the shady trees of the front lawn drinking iced tea, smiling tentatively but unreservedly, “The Survival Picture” she called it; all of these things keepsakes to the larger bits. They are not permanent – they are pulp and laquer and wood and ink – and easily destroyed. They are the material markers of the fragments that create a life, sign posts that let me to remember on mornings where I am buttoning my coat before the sun rises to suddenly remember that there are people and moments that combine with me like barbed wire, portions of what I’ve become and what I hope to be that could never really go away, come hell, or even high water.

Jonas Brothers and Modern Sexuality: hard truths learned in Seventeen.

I’m sitting at a marbleized faux-jade table in Kin’s Wok waiting for my chicken lo mein. “Teach Your Children Well” is playing over the speaker above the table, and someone has taped up two cut-outs of smiling ivory Chinese babies dressed in scarlet robes to the wall in front of me. There is a littering of business cards for A Step in Time Chimney Sweeps someone left on the counter, and I’ve already read those, so the only thing left for me, a compulsive reader on the border of neurotic, is a year-old issue of Seventeen magazine, which I have flipped open while waiting for an 82-year-old Chinese woman to screech that my noodles are ready.

The format is vastly different from when I was reading it at fourteen – in case you’ve never been a middle-class suburban white girl, no one who is seventeen actually reads Seventeen – and the pages are busier, splashier, filled with leggings and plastic cocktail rings and bubblegum lipgloss, and the models have long, wavy hair. For some reason, a vast majority of them are wearing berets.

So what is it like to be seventeen today?

In: Oversized wool cardigans.

Out: Glitter eyeshadow. (I could point you in the direction of a lot of Ocean View ladies who would vehemently disagree.)

Boys: Strawberry lip balm takes their breath away!

Embarrassing moments: My brother’s cute best friend walked in on me singing in the bathroom!

Four-page hard-hitting essays: My boyfriend asked me to touch him down there.

Most Seventeen articles do, and will likely always, revolve universal feminine truths: make-up is fun, bathing suit shopping sucks, dudes can be dickweasels. I’m pretty sure there are at least seven Dolly Parton songs that touch on all three of those subjects at once.

Then I turn the page.

BAM! I get Jonas Brother-ed.  

The pinnacle of modern sexuality.

 The “JoBros,” as they are sometimes called, are neutered singer-songwriters (?) with immaculately groomed eyebrows. I did a little research (drank a Strongbow and Google-searched them) and found that the youngest Jonas is 17, the middle (who may or may not be gay?) is 20, and the oldest is 22.

Oh, and they’re from Jersey.

The article is entitled: HOW TO BE A GREAT DATE! Advice from the Cutie-Cute Jonas Brothers! Now. I have never been a fan of “cutie-cute” anything. But I can certainly tell you that any dating advice I’ve gotten that’s been worth its salt has not been cute, nor has it been issued by barely post-pubescent males from New Jersey.

So let’s break this mother down:

 “I’m the most conservative when it comes to dating.” – Nick Jonas, 15. Conservative? You’re fif-fucking-teen. Of course you’re a conservative dater. This isn’t medieval France, where at fifteen your main concern was crapping out children to help you work the feudal lord’s field and getting your rocks off before you contracted the bubonic plague.

“I enjoy doing things for other people without expecting anything in return.” – Kevin Jonas, 20. Well. You know what I like, Kevin? Being lavished with praise for being so goddamn thoughtful all the time. Because fuck orphans, you know?

“I’m definitely the flirt of the group!” – Joe Jonas, 18. Well done, you’re the most popular guy with all the sailors down at the Rusty Anchor. You know what? Never mind. Too easy.  

After reading the article, I even took a quiz on which Jonas brother I would be My Perfect Match, since I’m closely following their dating advice now anyway. Questions included insightful inquiries such as: “What is your biggest fashion risk?” (Actual choice: A. Layering.)

After affirming that I liked Thanksgiving and bowling with my friends I got:

NICK JONAS!

Nick, like you, is young but wise beyond his years. Maybe you’ve gone through something life-changing, like Nick being diagnosed with diabetes in 2005, and the two of you would connect over that. This would give both of you a serious and realistic outlook on everything, but a strong passion for joy and experimentation. To find your perfect match in real life, look for a guy like Nick – a fun, understanding guy who you have a lot in common with!

Life-changing moments of mine I could share with Nick have included: waking up on the bathroom floor of the Sigma Pi House missing both shoes and a contact lens, meeting and eyefucking Creigh Deeds at brunch, and once believing for 9 hours that I had tampon with a broken string lodged in my vagina. But that last one is considered medical, just like diabetes. So I could totally connect with him on a deep and spiritual level over that. Also I’m sure he would be interested to know that I once drank two bottles of Melon Ball Boone’s Farm and threw up while I was laying my bed, so drunk that I couldn’t even get up to change the sheets. So in the morning, there I was, seriously hungover and realistically stuck to petrified sheet vomit. But Nick is fun and understanding, so I’m sure we can bond over that, too.

The most marketable part about the Jonas Brothers is that they pose zero risk to the female teen fan base that supposedly worships them, enough so that a magazine that used to answer questions about STD screenings and write exposés on sexual harassment in schools will use them as a journalistic condom, because why would teenage women want to formulate opinions on social and gender issues when they can read such gem advice as “Don’t tell a guy you love him on the first date.” (Thank you, Nick.)

Even more repulsive, one of their avid fans asked the middle brother (the gay one?) this question:

Q: WHY DO YOU WEAR A RING ON YOUR RING FINGER ON YOUR LEFT HAND?

A: It’s a purity ring. A promise to myself and to God to stay pure until marriage.

You know, once I poop out a daughter I may have a different opinion on this, but I think I would rather have my kid come home and tell me she was knocked up by a guy who served at Rikers than listen to some pre-pubescent fucktard spout that kind of crap at the dinner table. Then again that may depend on how good my family planning insurance is.

 Luckily, it’s nothing I have to decide now, for the Chinese counter lady calls, “Awh-RAH!” which means, “Laura, your lo mein is ready. Put down the teen magazine and proceed back to your tiny apartment and your bills and your dates with thirty-something bachelors.” And so I put down the magazine and I pick up my lo mein, which is wrapped in a bag with a yellow smiley face with commanding block letters around it that read: HAVE A NICE DAY.

And I am twenty-five, so I do.