Wrecked (30 page)

I take off my shoes in the front hall and slip into the orthotics I got from my mother-in-law to stretch my toes. We both have ganglia on our feet that cause the big toe to go crooked and press against the other toes. It’s genetic, but exacerbated by wearing shoes that are pointed and too narrow. My mother-in-law had to have operations on both big toes, but the surgeon who operated on her told her that if she had used orthotics her whole life she could have avoided the painful surgery. When she told me that, I figured I would buy myself a set of orthotics. I don’t want to have surgery later in life, so I always wear the devices at home. They pull the big toe back where it’s supposed to be.

“I picked up some cake at Café Heimweh. All organic. Eggs and everything.”

My husband knows how to charm the pants off a woman.

“Super, thanks. I’m hungry. Do you have a couple of slices for me? Now that I’ll soon be free of Cathrin, I can eat cake again.”

“Yeah, two pieces for each of us.”

I take the beautiful slices of cake off the pink tissue paper and put one each on small plates for us. Then I get two glasses of tap water. This is the first time since Liza’s been at her father’s place that we have sat down together at the table, just the two of us. We almost never do that when she’s away. When Liza is home we all sit at the table for every single meal. When she’s not here we usually eat on the couch.

I sit down and immediately start to eat. We used to always fight about the fact that he doesn’t come to the table when I call him. But we figured out in couples therapy that I shouldn’t get upset about it. I don’t need to make him into a copy of myself, unfortunately.

As I sit down I notice a sensation in my asshole. It’s a bit battered from this morning’s sex with Lumi and Georg. It must have been Georg. Lumi was far too gentle and cautious to have hurt it. Anal sex was always a big deal for my boyfriends, but never as big of a deal as it is for Georg. They were all Catholics. I think that has something to do with it. I used to do it as an occasional show of love for a boyfriend. But these days I like to do it often and properly. I love him so much more than any of the previous boyfriends. At first he brought it up very cautiously. Then he begged to try it out with me. You have to beg a woman for that, because it can be quite taxing and painful.
But you have to get through it—for love. Fucking love. I would never offer it on my own. But he asks me to do it for his sake. I agree, though I’m scared and anxious. But I always say yes. I simply can’t imagine saying no to him regardless of what he asks. Fortunately he doesn’t ask me to do any bad things. Or nothing too bad, at least.

Georg finally comes to the table, sits down opposite me, and begins to stuff cake into his mouth. We don’t talk. What do we need to talk about?

I can still remember exactly how he oiled the skin around my asshole the first time. Then he stuck first one finger in, then his thumb, then two fingers. We take our time—which is one reason we have anal sex less often than normal sex. You have to be so cautious and move so slowly so as not to hurt the woman (me!). It’s a lot of work, usually too much for us to bother. Though once we’ve stretched out my asshole enough so his cock can go in without hurting me, it’s a lot of fun.

When I have anal sex I think about the leader of the German women’s movement, Alice Schwarzer, and listen to my body and feel an inner sensation that starts in my asshole and spreads through my entire body. It’s completely different from the feeling I get during vaginal sex. Though even with vaginal sex the women’s movement says there are no orgasms. Of course, I’ve learned from my trusty
Geo Kompakt
that there is definitive scientific evidence of vaginal orgasms. I’m certain there are anal orgasms as well. With my husband’s cock in my ass, my women’s movement head always tries to talk me out of the possibility that it can feel good, even as my rectum is telling me how good it feels. Who should I believe?

At some stage the women’s movement came up with theories that are politically correct but scientifically indefensible. And they are never permitted to be altered. But I can feel in my own body, during sex, that the women’s movement got a lot of things wrong.

Our first pieces of cake are almost gone. I smile about the thoughts running through my head.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing.”

He takes his second piece of cake and serves me mine as well. He always eats poppy-seed cake and I always go for apple. Always the same so I don’t go crazy. That’s how our life is.

When you’ve been stretched by a thick cock, it really feels as if your sphincter muscle is about to explode. My husband always compliments me on how relaxed I am and how coolly I endure it. He probably has other experiences to compare it to. But I don’t ask him about it because I’d have a fit of jealousy. I keep saying to him, “Slowly, careful, wait a second.” It really takes ages before the cock can satisfactorily slide in there. I used to compare myself to the women in porn films and wonder why they could handle it so easily—whoop, cock out of the vagina, whoop, into the ass, no problem. I thought,
Man, I’d love to be able to do that for my husband
. I saw it hundreds of times in movies and thought something was wrong with me. Why can’t I just shove it up there, too?

Then one day came the wonderful explanation. In the documentary
9to5: Days in Porn
I saw a scene that was very enlightening for my sex life with my husband. Before shooting an anal sex scene, the women carefully and slowly and lovingly introduced
increasingly large objects into their asses. I rewound that scene and watched it several times. It freed me forever from the thought that something was wrong with me.
I’m too tight. I’m the only one it hurts so damn badly if you go too fast
. They distend their assholes beforehand—stretching like athletes before a competition. And here I was always starting from scratch and wondering why when he put his cock in it was so painful that it felt as if I were going to throw up. They don’t show the stretching of the asshole and the tedious preparation in real porn films. They want to maintain the illusion that the women are so horny they can just shove anything up their asses with no problem and no pain.

I can never ask my husband to check if anything is wrong with my asshole after anal sex, either, because he always says he wants to deal with disease and injuries only when they are emergencies. Frau Drescher also says I should leave him in peace and not force him into my idea of a relationship, which involves partners squeezing each other’s pimples, checking each other’s stool for worms, and checking on rectal wounds. Even if, as is the case with us, one partner has inflicted the wound on the other.
Pfff
, Drescher.

When we first got together, we had a really bad mishap having to do with my asshole. Because of the drugs and booze, I don’t remember anymore why exactly we ended up in the bathroom. But the image in my mind—just before the pain—is of us both naked in the bathroom mirror. I was leaning forward against the sink, and he was behind me. I had on a blindfold, but it had slipped so I could see us in the mirror. I was sneaking peeks. He was so turned on that he just rammed his cock into my ass. I pulled it out immediately. But something got fucked up. You learn in school that you can catch all sorts of things very
easily from anal sex. Because there’s often blood. That’s how it was with me that time. So there we were, two naked cokeheads in the bathroom with no idea what to do.

We both had a very unpleasant comedown. And an image in our heads that would never go away. I’ve thought about it every time we’ve tried it since. It’s a major barrier, which makes it that much tougher to relax. My asshole. A vicious circle.

Since that injury, anal sex has become a major event for us. Like having the whole family over for cheese fondue. It’s rare, but when we do it, it’s a real party! He apologizes a hundred times a year for that one time. Says he doesn’t know what came over him. I know—I did! And it drives him crazy that he hurt me so badly that time. Yeah, yeah, no problem. It’s just difficult to put it out of your mind whenever the head of his cock knocks on the back door again. I have to talk to my asshole:
Take it easy. Everything’s going to be fine. Relax. Stretch on out. It’s better for both of us. Don’t worry, that’s never going to happen again. Open up. Don’t cramp up. It’ll hurt both of us less
. And within a few minutes, his fat cock fits right in.

He’s finished both of his pieces of cake.

“May I leave the table?”

“Sure.”

That’s how it works at our place. We always ask—really just to set an example for the children. But it’s become so routine that now we do it even when they’re not around.

He stands behind his chair and something occurs to him: “I ordered something online. A surprise. It’s a DVD called
Glory Hazel
. A compilation of scenes from cool 1970s sex films. Two women in Switzerland put it together. Some kind of art project. Want to watch it?”

“Sure.”

Insatiable, my husband. Especially when the children aren’t home. When they are, sex is pretty much out.

I sit alone with the rest of my second piece of cake and continue to think of our anal past. He’s off to clean something, no doubt. Funny. How can someone possibly be so tidy? Of course I know what he would say: how can someone possibly be so messy?

After the mishap with my asshole, he suggested we measure the diameter of his cock and then find an object the same size and stick it inside his ass. That way he’d understand what it was like for me. But also, I’m sure, because he likes to have things shoved up there. He’s Catholic, after all. I’m small, so naturally my asshole is correspondingly small. He’s big, and his cock is actually large even for his size. Disproportionately large. So, since Georg is larger than I am and therefore has a larger asshole, whatever is going up there has to be bigger and thicker than his own cock for him to have an experience comparable to mine—to feel a comparable strain on his sphincter muscles. Woohoo!

We bought a giant rubber dildo in a sex shop. I was very uncomfortable at the register. I’m sure the cashier was smirking. I would love to have explained to him that it wasn’t for little old me, but rather for an experiment. An experiment in equality. But I just played it cool and didn’t let myself get dragged into worrying about whatever the sex shop cashier was thinking. What would be the point? He knows me well—we’ve bought almost everything in our forbidden bag of tricks at this shop. We keep it all hidden from the children. Most of the things have broken after one use. Made in China. The springs of the
battery compartment in one vibrating dildo broke, for instance. With any other electronic device, you’d go back to the store and complain. But for some reason, you don’t do that with sex toys. For one thing, the salesman has an idea where it’s been.

As a result, our bag is full of useless things. Everything from tiny vibrators to the giant jackhammer we got for the experiment on my husband. We also have all kinds of things we got when we were playing around with bondage at the very beginning of our relationship. An all-in-one device with ankle and wrist manacles. Blindfolds (that was part of the reason the asshole mishap took place). We have strings of electric beads that would vibrate thrillingly inside me, if they weren’t from China.

After a session that took forever, we managed to get his asshole stretched wide enough—using butt plugs, increasingly big dildos, and other objects—to get the huge dildo inside him. Ever since, he’s had more respect for my inner anal dialogue. He’s also a lot more careful since then.

For any heterosexual woman who wants to lead a more comfortable life, it’s a good idea to make men put themselves through anything that they ask you to do. Just like us with the giant dildo in the ass. It made my life a lot easier. He totally admires me now whenever I let him in the back door, ride the Hershey Highway, access all areas. Because he knows exactly how much pain it caused him and how difficult it was for him to relax his mind and rectum enough so his asshole wouldn’t tear. What an incredibly long time it took just to get the tip of the giant dildo in him. Such a long time! Ha!

After he’d finally managed to get the huge dildo into his ass—having taken way longer than it does for me, since he
had no experience in letting someone in the back, the way we women do—I said to him, “Now the next thing you have to try is swallowing a mouthful of sperm. If you can do that, I’ll happily start doing it for you again.”

I stand up and walk over to the window facing the garden. I don’t like it when my daughter’s not around. I look at the quince tree in the garden. Up in the top branches, a magpie has built a nest. I’m obsessed with things like that. Since the death of my brothers, I find myself drifting more and more into magical thinking—the kind of stuff kids always come up with, or crazy Christians. I learned the phrase “magical thinking” from Frau Drescher. She uses it to describe things that fall under the category of superstition in the broadest sense of the word. Like my obsession with the number three, for instance. Three dead children. Then my traumatized, wounded wartime brain spins out from three dead children to completely different things. If I see three flies buzzing around the kitchen I think they represent my brothers. I still swat them and kill them. I don’t want them to bother me. And anyway, my mind is too crazy even for myself sometimes. Besides, it’s no problem: if the flies really are my brothers; they already managed to be reincarnated once, so they should be able to do it again. When I’m out in the world, I always look up into the trees to try to see clumps hanging in them. There are three types of clumps I look for: the first are magpie nests, like the one in our back garden. They’re sloppily built and you can recognize them by the loosely thrown together roof that the clever magpies build as umbrellas over their nests. The second kind of clumps I keep an eye out for are parasitic mistletoe bushes hanging in trees. They feed themselves by penetrating the bark of a host tree and drawing all their
nutrients from it. You see a lot of them when you drive along the autobahn. Sometimes you see huge colonies of mistletoe. Oddly enough, in England there’s a Christmas custom based on mistletoe: if you kiss someone under a branch of mistletoe, it means you’ll soon get married. It’s an apt fit—parasitism and marriage. The third kind of clumps I look for are squirrel nests. They are very tidy, and nice and round, unlike magpie nests. They are the rarest of the three sorts of clumps that stand in for my three dead brothers. Whenever I see one, I tell myself I’m going to have a lucky day even as I chide myself, since, as an enlightened person, I shouldn’t believe in that kind of crap.