As Seen On Tv

“Hey look,” he says pointing to the poster on the wall. “Let’s be dog walkers. Or let’s get a dog.”

“I’d love to get a dog, but I have a bad feeling about who’s going to have to remember to do all the feeding and all the walking.”

“No, Sun, I’d be great with a dog, I swear.”

“You can’t even remember to give me the right key. Go,” I say when we’re at seven.

“What’s wrong with the key I gave you?”

“Maybe someone gave me the wrong key?”

He seems to be mulling something over and then laughs. His green eyes turn to little moon slices and his mouth opens. He has great big white teeth. His laugh is loud and deep and waves through his body.

Another Steve-ism is coming, I bet. “Yes?”

“Guess who has a key to the restaurant?” he sings to the tune of “New York, New York.” He pulls me close for another hug.

“You gave me the extra key to the restaurant instead of the key to the apartment?”

He continues his made-up song, unlocks the door and tries to waltz me down the hallway and past Greg’s empty room.

I put on my mock-concerned face. “Does one of your waiters now have the key to our apartment?”

“Is that bad?” He cracks up and then says, “Our apartment, huh? Say that again.”

I’m concerned that I’m not more concerned. I kiss his neck. “Our apartment. Our room. Our fridge. Our phone. Our answering machine. When do I get to change the announcement on the machine? I want to leave the new message, okay?”

He puts the groceries on the kitchen table and tugs me the short distance to his bedroom.

I still can’t get over how small New York apartments are. My place was bigger than his, and his is a two-bedroom. His is also older. The appliances have a gray sheen. Or maybe that’s just dirt.

I hope he’s not thinking of touching me before he cleans his hands. “I want to wash up,” I say.

He follows me into the bathroom. “Yes, my little sex-pot.”

I pick up the half-dissolved bar of deodorant soap he uses for his hands, body, face and hair, which is wedged to the side of the bathtub. “We’re taking a trip to the pharmacy tomorrow to buy some supplies.” Like a non-corrosive facial soap. And shampoo and conditioner. I used to bring my own whenever I came to visit, but moving here entitles me to invest. As Steve lifts my hair and kisses the back of my neck, I notice that the soap scum around the sink has fermented into miniature statuettes. “We’re also going to invest in some sponges,” I add. “Do you have Comet?”

He bites my shoulder. “Let’s go into the bedroom and I’ll show you my comet.”

Tingles spread from my neck, to my stomach, down my legs. Mmm. “Bedtime already? And it’s not even eight o’clock.”

I follow him into the bedroom and onto the bed. His faded gray sheets, which I assume were once black, are crumpled in a ball with a long tail draping the floor. You’d think he’d make his bed for me, wouldn’t you? How long could it possibly take to straighten the sheets and throw on the comforter? Half a minute? I’m not talking hospital corners here. I don’t like immaculate, but I like tidy. He moves what I’m assuming are yesterday’s jeans, straddles my thighs, then pulls off his sweatshirt and T-shirt. I love touching his chest. The hairs feel soft and ticklish like blades of grass.

I push him down on the bed and undo his pants. I trace my way down his body with baby kisses. At his waist I add a little tongue for effect.

“Mmm,” he groans.

The woman across the street is loading her dishwasher. “I’m just closing the blinds,” I say. “Do you want to listen to music?” I press Play on the CD player. James Brown “I Got You” comes on.

“Let’s sixty-nine,” he says, pushing his pants off and onto the floor.

The thing is, I hate sixty-nine-ing. It’s not something I’d ever admit to Steve. What guy wants to hear that the girl who is about to move in with him hates a sexual position? That’s like a man telling a woman he never wants to get married. It’s not the oral sex part I don’t like. It’s the two-in-one action that bothers me. First, I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing. I’ve always prided myself on giving good head and I absolutely cannot concentrate on two things at once. Television and conversation, driving and cell phones, salad and pasta. I like my salad first, my pasta second. Why have them both on the plate at the same time? You end up with tomato sauce on your lettuce and noodles in your Thousand Island. It’s a mess. So I end up focusing on what he’s doing until he’s limp in my mouth or I concentrate on what I’m supposed to be doing, unable to compute what’s going on down there. It’s a waste, I tell you. A complete waste.

“I’m in the mood to do you,” I say. Is it possible for a woman to be in the mood for a blow job? Except, of course, for porn stars who crave them anytime, anywhere, pool, library or den.

Steve has the Hot ’n Sexy Channel, and I’ve become a porn connoisseur. A porn critic, actually. For instance, the shrieking woman is something else I find absurd. Why does the woman sound like her partner is yanking out her nails, while the man can’t even get out a simple grunt? I guess the lone male viewer prefers his action stars silent. This way he can pretend that the Brazilian-waxed blonde’s “Oh God!” and “Oh baby!” or my personal porn favorite, “Fuck me, big cock man, fuck me!” refers to him.

Since no guy in the history of mankind has ever turned down a blow job, Steve lies back.

“Your turn,” he says a song later, just in time, too, because my lips are starting to numb. He turns me over on my back and kisses his way down my body. Mmm.

Two songs later I’m moaning and wet and he looks at me. “Tell me what you want,” he says.

Steve always wants me to tell him what I want. I want him to stop asking.

“Sex?” I ask.

He thrusts himself inside me, sending waves of heat through my body. I squeeze his shoulders.

He pulls out of me and tries to make me orgasm with his hand. The song changes. The song changes again. His fingers must have lost feeling by now. “Does it feel good?” he asks.

“Yes, almost there,” I say. Why aren’t I orgasming? I hate when I can’t orgasm. I’m not sure what the problem is. He’s doing all the right moves. I’m certainly aroused—there’s a wet patch under me to prove it. But it’s as if I’m in a hurry and waiting for the subway—obviously when you have somewhere important to go, it’s not going to come. There’s some sort of jam at the last station, sorry, take the bus.

The look of concentration on Steve’s face is intense. Is this how he looked when he wrote his college exams? Maybe if I distract myself with thoughts of him studying, I can trick myself into forgetting that I want to orgasm and then I’ll orgasm. As soon as you climb upstairs to hail a cab, the subway speeds underground into your station.

Steve’s penis droops to the left.

“I’m coming!” I lie. I’ll come tomorrow.

The first time a guy put his hand down my pants, I came the instant his finger touched my clitoris. Since I thought this was abnormal, as no one had ever mentioned it in Seventeen, I didn’t shriek out one “Oh God” or “Oh baby” or even one “Fuck me, big cock man, fuck me!” and he kept at it until I was sore, and the whole time I was worried that the girl on the camp bunk bed above me could feel the frame shaking.

Unfortunately that party trick only worked once, my being able to come with just one touch. Now I have about a forty-percent success rate, which isn’t a bad rate. As long as it’s not your oncologist who’s doing the quoting.

“I love you,” he says and slides back inside me.

“How much do you love me?” I ask him later, tracing the letters I L-O-V-E Y-O-U on his back. He doesn’t know what I’m spelling, because I’m using the cryptic Palm Pilot alphabet, Graffiti. I even draw the underscore it makes you use to create a space between words. Sometimes I give the letters extra swirls at the end to confuse him in case he’s catching on. Not that he’s ever used a Palm Pilot. L-O-V-E M-E, I write next.

“Who said I love you?” he asks.

“Fuck you.”

“Again? Can’t we eat first?” He pushes his groin into my thigh.

“You’re not going to change your mind, right?”

“I can change my mind?”

I slap him on the back. “Once I move here, it’s over. You’re going to have to love me forever.”

He bites my earlobe. “Forever?”

“I’m serious, Steve.”

“You’re always serious.”

“It’s a serious thing. I’m about to quit my job and move to a strange city to be with you.”

“You think NewYork is strange?” He pulls himself up. Our skins make a slurping sound as we separate. “Let me tell you about strange. Did I tell you that someone asked me for a French fry yesterday? I was in Washington Square Park minding my own business, eating some fries, reading my book—” he points to The Tommyknockers, the Stephen King novel lying on his floor “—when some guy comes up to me and asks if he can have one.”

“We were being serious here, Steve.”

“He was being serious.”

I picture him waltzing me down a hospital corridor an hour after I have a miscarriage, offering fries to the orderlies. At least he’d make me laugh. “So what did you do?”

“I gave him a fry. And some ketchup.” He moves to the edge of the bed and tugs his boxers back on. “I’m going to make my chicken stir-fry, okay?”

I love his chicken stir-fry. He tosses random ingredients in the wok and it somehow ends up tasting gourmet. “What should I do?”

“You come tell me about your day.” He takes my clothes from my hands. “But you have to stay naked.”

“All weekend?”

“Buck naked.”

“Should I go to my interviews naked?”

“Definitely. Isn’t it a man who’s interviewing you?”

“One man, one woman. At nine and four. I’m not sure if they’d get the joke.”

“Okay, you can wear a sweater. You might get cold on the subway.”

I might get lost in the subway. I open my suitcase and take out a clean pair of panties. I can walk around topless, but his plastic chairs are cold. I take out my laundry bag and put my pants and sweater inside. “Is the place I’m meeting my dad for dinner tomorrow subwayable or walkable?”

I open my purse and take out my birth control. I pop the blue Friday pill into my mouth and swallow. I can even do it without water. Every night at ten o’clock. I’ve never forgotten. It’s kind of impressive, if you think about it.

“Eden’s is in the West Village. Walkable.”

Tomorrow night is dinner with my dad and his new lady friend. His new thirty-one-year-old lady friend who years ago was in Dana’s bunk at camp. Needless to say, Dana refuses to acknowledge the relationship. “Carrie was a slut, and still is,” she reminded me. “When we were Butterflies, she had the top bunk beside me. She used to give Michael Slotkin head under the covers. It was disgusting. How does she even know the jackass anyway?” It doesn’t matter anyway—he never keeps a girlfriend around longer than three months. And every three months they get younger and blonder.

Carrie was my counselor for two summers in a row, when she was eighteen and nineteen. Unfortunately, she always had more time for her blow-dryer and male staff than for us. She was somewhat apathetic about me. She seemed to like me more than the nerdy girls who stared into space while writing letters home and listening to the Backstreet Boys on their Walkmans, but less than my twelve-year-old bunkmates who had blond highlights and early onset eating disorders. As a teenager, she was tall, blond, tanned, busty, talked with her hands and brought her nail file along to every activity. Until two months ago when my father started dating her, I hadn’t heard her name since I stopped going to Camp Abina.

Steve moves his sweatshirt and T-shirt combo off the floor and back over his head. “Is she hot?” he asks, his voice muffled.

“Yes. I’m not sure what the advantage would be of dating an ugly thirty-one-year-old.”

“Tighter ass and firmer breasts?”

“Honestly, Steve, if you ever trade me in for some chickee twenty years younger than me, I’ll post the picture of you in the plaid skirt all over the Net.”

“I don’t normally date four-year-olds. I like my women with a little more flesh.” He licks my breast, as if to make his point. “It was a kilt, by the way. And I only wore it to that costume party because you have a thing for Scottish men.”

He does aim to please.

The sun is finally seeping through the blinds. Steve has a full-length blackout shade on the window and the pitch-blackness freaks me out. I hate darkness. It makes me think about dying, and why would I want to worry about dying when I’m only twenty-four and in the arms of the man I love?

I’m going to need a night-light or something.

When I was sixteen and alone in my house I would jump at every noise, convinced a murderer was breaking in. Once I locked myself in the bathroom for over two hours, clutching a carving knife, curled up in the fetal position in the dry bathtub.

My father fully alarmed the house, knowing how jumpy I was, and twice I pressed the panic button in my closet, bringing the police over.

A car horn blasts for the tenth time in the last twenty minutes. How does anyone sleep in this city? It’s so loud. The alarm clock says seven-twelve. I duck under Steve’s arm and shimmy down the bed.

We normally wake up late on Saturdays, around one. I tiptoe into the bathroom and gently close the door. I like to brush my teeth before he wakes up. This way, when he wakes up and rolls on top of me, I can have a discussion with him without worrying what I smell like. I realize that I won’t be able to do this every morning for the rest of my life, which would be insane, but I’ve managed to do it every morning so far and he’s never awakened. I brush, spit, rinse, spit, repeat, then climb back into bed and pretend to be asleep.

3

Wonder Woman

Should you be concerned if your boyfriend lies about you?

We’re lying on the grass at Union Square Park. My head is on his stomach and every time I move, I scrape my ear against his belt buckle. I shift so that the ants don’t crawl up my skirt while Steve tells me about when he was a junior in college and his mother found a crushed cigarette in his jean pocket.

“Why was your mother still doing your laundry?” I ask. “You were twenty-one, right?”

“Not everyone has her own house when she’s sixteen.”

A cloud covers the sun and the sky looks like one of its lightbulbs has burst. “My father flew in once a month for a weekend,” I answer.

“If I were your father, I never would have let you live by yourself,” he says, puffing up his chest.

“He asked me to come with him. I said no.” Even though I am looking down at Steve’s feet, I can tell that he is shaking his head. Is he wearing two different socks? Yes, he is wearing two different socks.

“I wouldn’t have given you a choice. There’s no way I’d leave my sixteen-year-old daughter by herself. Especially after what you’ve been through.”

He says “been through” with dread and awe, like a nine-year-old girl asking her older sister what getting her period feels like. Dana called it the Double D effect. Divorce and Death. “First that, and now this,” mothers of friends would whisper, not wanting to look us in the eye for fear the bad luck would spread through the room like cancer. Snapping the shoulder straps of our bras would be our secret signal, our “they’re feeling sorry for us” or “they don’t know what we know” sign.

Sometimes Dana makes fun of these people, behind their backs or to their faces. “It must be so hard for your father,” one of her co-counselors said, a co-counselor who was new to camp. Dana couldn’t stand her, thought she was an airhead. “Not so hard,” Dana replied. “He left her three years before she died, and he’d been fooling around since the day he married her. At least he doesn’t have to pay alimony anymore.”

When my friend Millie’s parents separated in high school and she lost ten pounds from “not being hungry,” I tried to patiently coax her to have a slice of pizza, to get over it, but eventually I snapped. “For God’s sake, at least they’re not dead,” I yelled at her and then felt cruel and horrible and spent the next week apologizing.

Any kind of loss is painful. But after your mother dies, divorce seems like a sprained wrist, compared to an amputated hand.

Dana and I divide people into those who know what we know and those who don’t. A secret club with loss as our badge.

Steve doesn’t know. He looks into the murky and bottomless future and sees something sparkling and blue. I love it that he doesn’t know, but constantly worry about the day he will. Sooner or later everyone does.

His grandmother died last June. It was sad for him, she was his last remaining grandparent, but it didn’t exactly rock his world. He still laughed at the Letterman’s Top Ten list that night.

I think the funeral was harder for me than it was for him. I hate funerals. I don’t breathe well and the walls start to contract.

I met his grandmother a few times before she died. Steve brought me to see her whenever he came to visit me. We sat politely with her at her retirement home while she fed us stale chocolate and tea. She liked me right away, I don’t know why, but she kept grabbing on tight to my wrist. “I want to dance at your wedding,” she said and we blushed. “You have to do it soon, I don’t have that much time,” she’d say.

We’d wave her comment away (“don’t be silly, you have lots of time”) but what are you supposed to say to an eighty-seven-year-old?

“You can have this,” she said and pointed to the engagement ring she still wore. It was beautiful, platinum band, a large round diamond, two baguettes. We kept blushing and she kept insisting.

I wonder what happened to the ring.

Back to my validation.

“Dana was doing her master’s, the first one, so she was only an hour away from my dad’s house,” I say. “She made the drive at least once a week to keep an eye out for me.” Dana had reveled in the pop-by—she’d claim to be drowning at the library and then sneak into the house to make sure tattooed men and acid tablets weren’t decorating the furniture.

My dad had invited me to move with him to New York. What was he supposed to do, not take the promotion? I told him there was no chance I was going. No way. Have a good time. Enjoy. I’d visit. Tobias, the guy I had been in love with since the first day of my freshman year in high school had finally realized what I had been telepathically telling him for twelve months—that we were meant to hold hands and laugh and sneak kisses between classes. There was no way, no way, I was moving now that we were finally a couple.

The idea of senior year, of trips to the shopping center’s food court where we’d hog tables and not buy anything, of destination-less drives of where-should-we-go-I-don’t-know-where-do-you-want-to-go taking place in my absence made me feel claustrophobic and abandoned, as if I’d been waiting in the back of the storage cupboard between the winter coats, not knowing that hide-and-seek was long over.

I told my dad that after all I’d “been through” it would be too traumatizing to have to leave behind the final memories of my mother.

When I was eleven at summer camp, I found out a boy I liked didn’t want to go to the social with me. Humiliated, I locked myself in the wooden bathroom stall at the back of my cabin and sobbed and sobbed until Carrie, my father’s now girlfriend, and my then-counselor, knocked on the door and begged me to tell her what was wrong. I told her I missed my mother.

Unlike Carrie, my father should have known that excuse was full of crap.

Before my parents separated, we all lived in Fort Lauderdale. When I was three, my mother started receiving a plethora of silent, heavy-breathing phone calls (Dana was ten so she remembers these things), which led to the discovery that my father was sleeping with his secretary. Very original, Dad. Anyway, when confronted, instead of begging for forgiveness, buying jewelry and taking large amounts of Depo-Provera, or whatever today’s chemical castration drug of choice is, my father decided that marriage, like last winter’s coat, no longer suited him. We stayed in the house we had grown up in and my dad bought a condo in Palm Beach. When we’d visit for a weekend, we’d transform the living room couch into our bed (“Sunny, doll, be careful with Daddy’s things please.”). “Fa-ther,” Dana would say, she always said his name like that, in two syllables, until she was older and started referring to him as The Jackass, “we’re here for two days, do you think you could make a little room for us?”

“It’s okay,” I’d say quickly hoping to placate them both.

Once every few months he would take us to Walt Disney World. “Sunny,” he’d say. “Do you want to go on ‘It’s a Small World’ again?” He tended to address questions to me, or to “You Kids” instead of directly to Dana. She was always watching him with her best Andy Rooney I-Know-What-You’re-Up-To look, full of mistrust and loathing. I’d walk between them holding their hands, trying to bridge the gap.

When I was six and my mother died, my dad bought a bigger house in Palm Beach. We got our own rooms. Mine was upstairs and Dana’s was in the basement.

My father viewed us as goldfish. Feed three times a day, or at least make sure housekeeper prepares meals. Drop three hundred dollars into jacket pockets weekly to cover transportation, entertainment and clothing costs. Occasionally, press face against glass bowl to make sure children are still swimming.

As a strategy consultant he spent most weekdays in other cities and most weekends in the company of various women we were only occasionally allowed to meet. Growing up we had various housekeepers/baby-sitters who lived with us until Dana was eighteen and I was twelve. After that they came Monday to Friday during the day only. Dana decided to stay in Palm Beach with me for college instead of going away to school, so I was never on my own. She only moved out when she was twenty-two and got into her first master’s program in Miami.

When she told me the news, we were eating chicken wings from our favorite Florida restaurant chain, Clucks, while lying on the white couch. I knew we wouldn’t drop anything, we’d been eating like this since we’d moved in whenever no one was around to tell us not to.

“Forget it, I won’t go,” she said.

“Yes, you will,” I told her. “It’s an hour away. I’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m living alone—I live with my father. I’ll only be alone for a few nights at a time, tops.”

Two months later, he took the job in New York.

When I went to visit Dana in Miami for the day, and told her that our father was moving, she was furious. “That Jackass wants to play bachelor in the city. What kind of a father leaves a sixteen-year-old to live in a house by herself?” I begged her not to complain, not to ruin it. I was mature, I could do it.

“Sunny,” Steve says, mercifully interrupting my train of thought. I love listening to him say my name.

I roll over so I can see his beautiful face. “Yes, Steven?”

“I have to tell you something.” He sounds so serious, like a college recruiter asking me about my plans for the future.

Uh-oh. He’s changed his mind. Now? He changed his mind now? A week after he asks me to move in? Why did he change his mind? Bastard.

Maybe it’s worse. You don’t say, “I have to tell you something,” unless you’re unleashing appalling news. He cheated on me. He’s already married. He’s a woman.

“I…” He plucks a blade of grass from the ground instead of continuing.

Hello? I prefer the quick-motion Band-Aid removal rather than the taunting millimeter-by-cruel-millimeter torture. “Yeeeees?” I say, attempting to stretch the word into a multisyllable confession prompter.

“You’re so going to think I’m lame when I tell you this.”

He’s getting lamer by the second by not coming out with it already. “I won’t.”