To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (4 page)

“Oh, I beg your pardon, madam. I didn’t see your breasts there under the water as I backstroked by and accidentally squeezed one of them in my hand. Do forgive me.”

Picture the young male hospital volunteers who kept finding excuses to walk into my room as I nursed my firstborn child like a Wal-Mart-clad Madonna. I realized what they were up to, but I just sighed and went on feeding my baby. A roomful of strangers had just seen me open as wide as a woman can be, screaming curse words as I pushed a human being out of the part of me you couldn’t pay to view in soft-core porn. If these guys wanted to sneak peeks of my tired breasts leaking colostrum all over the sheets, I didn’t really care anymore.

How many stories could there be? So many I forget them and they’re replaced and I forget those and they all become a wash—the foundation on which I stand as I strap on my reinforced underwire in the morning. The annoyances and humiliations fade like flowered lace, wear out like the hooks against my back, and I just reach in my drawer for more.

My full-figured Aunt Sylvia told me a story from her youth. She grew up in the days when teenage girls regularly dropped out of eighth grade to take jobs at factories or downtown stores, including a version of Woolworth’s where they sold elegant veiled hats and gold watches instead of the condoms and cheap candy they offered when I was a teen. I listened, fascinated, as she told of saving up for the pink, three-dollar bra with extra seams, instead of her usual plain white one for only a dollar. She had ironed the precious pink bra so it would lie smooth under her uniform blouse. Instead, the iron had snapped it into the twin cones that we see in the tongue-in-cheek antique lingerie ad reproductions today. My aunt, with no other brassieres washed or aired for that day, was forced to go to her conveyor belt station with breasts that jutted out like missiles, pointed projectiles almost too sharp for men’s eyes. She told me about the one special, kind young man who sometimes spoke to her, and of the narrow-eyed girl who painted her nails red and coveted that man for herself. She told how the mean girl, worldlier than my aunt, called the man over one morning and then asked my teenage aunt to please hop up and down a few times. My aunt—sweet, bosomy, and naïve, with soft brown eyes and billows of curly hair she couldn’t control—did as she was told, figuring there must have been a reason. Her boobs bounced. The bitch and all her friends exploded into the musical peals of laughter they probably practiced every night, and my aunt burned with shame, never to speak to the kind young man again.

Even as I listened to that story, myself the same age that my aunt was on that evil day, I was able to understand the ways of the world. I said to her, “But, Aunt Sylvia, he probably liked it when your boobs bounced up and down.” Although I was by no means powerful, girls of my generation had been lucky enough to cast off at least half the naiveté. My aunt nodded, but bitterly, remembering opportunity lost.

I imagined her reborn as a sort of superhero, walking around downtown with her pink satin torpedo breasts, wiping out injustice among sisters and causing the good strong men of the town to jerk off all night long.

After a few minutes of that reverie, I remembered that I had to be downtown, myself, to meet classmates at the library. We said goodbye, Aunt Sylvia letting me leave the house with my own missile breasts exploding in the flimsy knit top I had outgrown the summer before. If I fought for anything the rest of that day, it was for the right to walk down the sidewalk in peace.

God

T
he other day a feminist friend asked me if I really believed in God. I said I did. She said, “But you believe God is a woman, right? Or, at least, that he’s half female?”

“No,” I said. “I know that God is a man. Otherwise he wouldn’t let women go through so much shit.”

I had to wash the piled-up dishes today. I thought about what I would do if I were suddenly to become God. Let’s say God decided to pass the crown and He picked me to succeed Him. (I don’t know why He would do that. I didn’t get into the logistics of it.)

So I’d be God. At first I was thinking that maybe no one would know the difference.

People would pray to me. Some of the prayers I’d answer immediately, and the others I’d leave in my inbox for later. I’d get to them two months later, or else I’d wait so long that I’d be ashamed to answer the prayers and I’d delete them instead.

“Why doesn’t God answer our prayers?” those people would say.

People would suffer. I’d try to alleviate some of the suffering, but then I’d get annoyed that there was so much, and I’d end up ignoring the bulk of it. “Oh, quit your whining,” I’d say. “Aren’t you old enough to fix it yourself?” And I’d go off and buy supplies to make a new plant or bacteria or something.

“Why does God allow suffering?” people would say.

That’s how I thought it would be, at first. But then I knew I was kidding myself—that it wouldn’t be that way at all. I realized that my heavenly reign would be decadent, political, and totally selfish, like that of the gods of Mount Olympus.

The first thing I’d do is give all my friends little godships of their own. “I want Veronica to be the Goddess of the Hearth and Long-Distance Phone Conversations,” I’d say. And I’d dole out little powers and omniscience and things to them. Then I’d set up a really good meeting place for us all—sort of like Mount Olympus, but warmer and not so high. (Did you think I meant Hell? No. But I am afraid of heights.) We’d sit around and gossip about all our mortals, drink sacred beverages, and stash the tributes we’d raked in.

Then, once all that was set up, the real fun would begin. The temples would be built and people would start worshipping in earnest. And—I’m not gonna lie—I’d binge on some massive slaughter. Goodbye to all the rapists, child molesters, and people who’d done me wrong. Maybe they’d go in a big flood. Maybe in a plague of grasshoppers. I don’t know. I don’t like to dwell on those things.

The things I’d prefer to dwell on are the details. “This person is humble and thrifty,” I’d say. “She will win the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. This person is vain and mean. Her hair will be orange for a year. This person makes me smile. I will visit him in the form of Hello Kitty and he will bear my child.”

I’d have fun. I’d throw thunder and lightning or make it rain frogs to get my point across. I’d reassume human form, go down to Earth, and test people. I’d make them prove their love.

But, then again, I’d probably get tired of that after a while and eventually become like the first god I described. I imagine a deity probably gets bored after so many years.

Was that silly and megalomaniacal? It’s only something I thought of while washing the dishes.

Ghost

Y
ou know what would suck? It would suck if you became famous, and then died, and then became a ghost, and then someone made a movie about your life, and the movie sucked. Let’s say you’re a ghost and you get to go into the theater and see the movie, and you hate it. What could you do? Maybe you’d yell, “That’s not even how it happened!” in your ghostly voice, and no one would hear. You could always haunt the theater, I guess, but that wouldn’t do much good because they’d be showing the movie all over the country. Maybe all over the world, if you’d been famous enough.

So you’d just be sad. A sad ghost.

If I were a ghost, I would be so damned bored. As a child, I thought that it would be great, hilarious fun to be a ghost. But I now believe that I was wrong.

I thought that I would follow people around and play little pranks on them. What good would that do, though? Let’s say I followed my husband around . . . Let’s say my husband’s an old widower, and I follow him around and break something every time he tries to kiss some other lady. What good would that do? Maybe he’d be afraid to kiss other women, but it’s not like he’d say, “That must be the ghost of Gwen punishing me! I vow henceforth to be celibate and put extra fake flowers on her grave!” Even if he did say that, I wouldn’t want him to do it.

I thought that I’d float around and eavesdrop on people. I could hear all their secrets and see all their scandals. That wouldn’t be worth anything, either, though. What good are secrets and scandals if you can’t gossip about them to anyone?

I thought I would appear to people in their dreams and give them little messages. Like what, though?

“Letty, this is Gwen. Tell everyone to put fake flowers on my grave.”

“Melissa, this is Gwen. I like that sweater you had on the other day.”

“Tad, this is Gwen. I’m still dead.”

It just isn’t worth the effort. Even if I had some great mystery to help resolve, like Patrick Swayze did in the movie
Ghost,
I wouldn’t want to mess with it. Too much trouble for too little return, I say.

Maybe I could catch up on all the movies I missed, though.

I used to think that the best part would be hearing what people said about me after I was gone. Now I realize that it would only upset my ghostly self. I’d listen and then either think, “That’s not true! That’s not the way it was at all!” or else I’d think, “Yeah, that was true. But what does it matter now?”

So I guess instead of wasting time as a ghost, I’ll just go straight to hell.

That’s my plan.

Just kidding. I don’t believe in any of that crap, anyway.

Raining

I
t was raining like crazy this morning after a long spell of no daytime rain at all. I don’t have an umbrella. I never have one. I never
have
had one. Don’t ask me why.

My car was parked 40 or 50 feet from my door and the parking lot was developing a shallow moat. I decided to wait out the worst of it. Checked my email, updated my budget, and it was still raining like a big rain bucket from hell. I halfheartedly searched my apartment for a non-existent umbrella, even though I already knew what I would have to do. I just didn’t want to do it.

My late grandmother’s translucent head floated over my left shoulder, crabbily telling me, “Just use a trash bag.”

But I don’t want to use a trash bag, Grandma. I’d rather die. I’d rather wait at the bus stop for fifteen minutes, becoming absolutely drenched in the rain, earning the leers and scorn of the passersby, than be one of those kids who shows up to school wearing black Hefty bags with three holes torn for their arms and head. My friends and me make fun of those kids, Grandma. We’re poor bur we’re not
nerds.
I must retain my soggy pride.

I considered just calling in sick. But no.

Why didn’t my family just buy me an umbrella? Why was every little convenience some extravagant conceit that only “those
bolillos”
had?

Or why didn’t I just buy an umbrella with my summer job money, instead of spending it all on thrift store clothing, pizza, and records?

Teeth gritted, legs dragging, fists clenched, I walked to the pantry to get a glowing white Glad kitchen bag with festive red drawstring. I would just hold it above my head and walk very quickly, I decided. My grandma watched me and rolled her eyes.

Why haven’t I bought myself an umbrella by now? What’s my excuse? I have a nice car/job/apartment and enough money in the bank to get a big striped umbrella with a wooden duck head for the handle. Not to brag, but I have enough money to get two.