It is 6 a.m. when I walk into my part-time job at the bageldashery, bleary-eyed but freshly make-uped, and stuff my oversized purse behind the counter. Flounder, as we call the line cook, is tapping his fingers on the ticket window, and greets me as I clock in. “Morning, Tits.” He’s called me that since he first realized that I’ve heard too much about my breasts to be genuinely offended by anything anymore.
“Morning, darling,” I say, “how’s it been so far?”
“Same shit, different day,” he shrugs, and scratches at his beard. “But I can’t complain, sweetheart. How ’bout you? Who you doing these days?” This question is nothing new. As a collective, the staff at the bageldashery delves into one another’s intimate lives with reckless abandonment. While I could theorize that it’s because we’re a closely-knit group with a genuine interest in the collective verve of the staff, it’s more than likely a device we use to pass the time between portioning lox slices. Still, it seems to work for us.
“No one,” I admit.
Flounder shakes his head with pity. “What you need is a good metal guy,” he says. “He’ll give it to you real high-quality and you wouldn’t have to worry about him calling you in the morning. I’d give it to you myself, but I got the wife at home and all.” He scratches at his newest neck tattoo, which is of a corncob on fire. I tell him that I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.
As a single woman, I find myself constantly amazed by the bombardment of reminders that I am, indeed, not of a coupling. Most people assume this means that I am also not having sex, and while I am incensed that just because I’m going solo somehow it is somehow assumed that my vagina has hung up an Out to Lunch sign, I’m more infuriated that it’s true. The simple solution, it seems, would be to knock back a few Yuenglings and bed someone whom you only know is named Jack – or Jeff, you can’t really remember which, and like any good one-nighter, it won’t really matter anyway. The problem with that, however, is that this means sex is generally less satisfying, because, hey, who does he have to impress?
This notion was confirmed in a conversation I had the other night with my friend Greg. “I won’t go down on a girl on the first night,” he tells me. “because I have to be relatively sure that the only penis that’s been in her lately has been mine before I put my mouth- ” and his voice lowers, “ – down there.”
“But you’ll let her go down on you, won’t you?” I say.
“Of course!” He says this the way you’d tell someone who just offered to call an ambulance and you were bleeding out on the sidewalk.
“What the hell is the difference,” I ask, gathering my wits about me like the Henry Kissinger of oral sex foreign policy, “between you going down on the girl and her giving you a blowjob?”
He thinks for a moment, and then answers, “A blowjob is – dry.”
“DRY?”
“Yeah. When you’re doing it to a girl it’s all…wet down there.”
“Well, it’s not supposed to be the Judean Desert!”
“I just don’t feel comfortable with it!” he finally admits. “I get nothing out of it, alright?”
“But you’ll let a girl give you a blowjob?”
“Yeah, that’s just – look, what am I going to say? I’d be crazy to be like, ‘Well, no, let’s not do that, we don’t really know each other.’ Of course I’m going to say yes!”
“So what’s the difference between you getting a blowjob and you manning up and eating a pussy?” I’m so annoyed by this point that my language has gone from cunnilingual diplomat to intoxicated longshoreman.
“UGH!” he exclaims. “You don’t understand! The whole thing is just so…invasive.”
“Are you fucking serious?” I say. “Like your dick crammed halfway down my throat is domestic?”
“What does that even mean?” he says, and I realize at that point that this conversation has come, at least in his mind, to a close. It is fruitless to argue with a man who is afraid of vaginas.
Dating has become even less appetizing. As a child, you think that by the age of twenty-four you’ll be married and enjoying a career as a high-profile astronaut. No one ever tells you, however, that at twenty-four you’ll be on the barstool of a biker bar called Hoss’s with a guy named Ken telling you that he’d like your number before he gets deployed to Korea in five weeks, as Ricky and I recently discovered.
“Seriously,” he tells us. “Korea. KOREA.”
“Korea?” Ricky sighs, taking a swig of Blue Moon. “Does that mean you’re going to eat cats?”
“I’d eat a cat,” Ken says, not picking up on her facetiousness. “I’d definitely eat a cat. I would try it. I would eat anything once.” I tell him to call my friend Greg.
Thinking that I could escape the wasteland of the dating scene for a while, I went to my parents’ house to partake of the excitement around the Watkins abode. My mother had tied a bell around either side of the knob of the front door and had trained the cats to ring it whenever they wanted to come or go. There was also talk of her having rearranged her underwear drawer again, which is always a treat, so there I was, staring at my mother’s panties and watching the cats go in and out. Oddly, this was more enjoyable than the dates I had been on recently.
My father is making pancakes for the week. He ladles the putty-colored batter into a sizzling pan, and then stacks his finished cakes neatly into Tupperware. You might think that they would become soggy and tasteless in the refrigerator, but my father has a special gift where anything he reheats tastes like it was just made. I wonder if that’s one of the things that appeals to my mother. He had laid out the paper for me to look over, my favorite section on top, and I decide that it’s a nice thing to look for in a man, too. He should know what you read.
As I skim the news stories, my mother says, “We have a lot of good furniture from moving Buckey out.” Buckey, my grandmother, had just moved into another nursing facility and the family was currently distributing her belongings to those who felt at all sentimental about them to make her house ready to sell.
“I know,” I say, “I just don’t have a truck to take anything, you know? And it’s such a pain for someone else to do it for me.”
“Your friend Chuck has a truck,” Dad says. “You think he’d do it?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe.”
“Just offer him a blowjob!” my mother pipes up.
“Mom.” I look up from the paper and find her standing there, quite earnestly, feeding the cat a pebble-shaped treat from a neon green can. I realize I am safe nowhere from the looming threat of blowjobs.
“It doesn’t mean you have to give it to him,” she says. The cat sniffs around at my mother’s hand and suddenly engulfs the offering. My father stops flipping pancakes long enough to give his non-verbal take on the conversation, and cocks his right eyebrow at ninety-degree angle, a look he has perfected. One of the pancakes starts to sizzle loudly and he turns back to flip it over. He is done with us for this morning at least.
“I read that somewhere,” my mother adds, and sashays off to put the sheets in the drier. The cat licks his face and rings the bell to go outside. I watch him happily collapse in the liriope plants, the sun making his black coat appear navy blue. I walk past him on the way to my car.
“Just be happy you’re not in Korea with Ken,” I mutter, and he pretends not to notice.
