My friend Faye works at a bookstore,
and she knows how to find the best porn. It's in the Literature
section, under the author name “Anonymous”. Most of it was
written during the Victorian era, and whatever their reputatations,
those Victorians had some dirty minds!
The year I graduate from college, I
decide I am done being a good girl and being alone all the time. I
want to be a bad girl and have some fun. I go to the B. Dalton
bookstore at the mall, and I buy myself some porn. I buy The
Story of O, which is frankly, boring. I buy Fanny Hill
(which, it turns out, is all about “nasty stuff” after
all). That one's pretty good, but the best book I buy is a Victorian
novel about a brother and sister who's governess turns them on to
spanking. That's the one I read over and over. I learn how to
masturbate, to that book (and masturbation, it turns out, is pretty
darn good). I keep it under the mattress when I'm visiting my
parents. Then when the visit's over and I'm back at home, I just
leave it out where anyone can see it.
I keep a diary. I don't write what
happens in it, I write my daydreams and my wishes. One night when I
am all alone, I write one that embarrasses me even while I'm writing
it. I write that I wish I could have sex with my sister Karen, and I
go into a lot of detail, that I learned from my books, about how I
would do it.
What embarrasses me about that, isn't
the dirty stuff I write. People have these weird fantasies, I know
that from reading some copies of Penthouse Variations that my
friend Faye has. What embarrasses me, is I don't really believe it
while I'm writing. Karen is really, really pretty. She's taller, and
slimmer than me, and she has bigger boobs. But if I'm really honest,
I don't want to have sex with her. I want to look like her. Or
maybe I want to be her.
And then I move past it, and I forget
about even writing in my diary for a long time, because my life gets
really, really busy. I am going to go to graduate school. Only
there was a lot of stuff going on during my senior year, and I never
got in and took the test I need to get into one. So now I have a
whole year before I can start, and I can't find any kind of a real
job, so I end up working full-time at Burger King.
I also diet obsessively, because I am
damned if I'm going to stay a fat pig all my life. I start out
eating 1,200 calories a day. Then when the weight doesn't fall off
fast enough, I switch over to 600 calories a day. I spend a lot of
my free time exercising, walking around, and around, and around, the
four blocks nearest my apartment. As the weight starts to fall off,
I reward myself with new, trendy-looking clothes. I have my ears
pierced for the second time. I get a haircut. Then, when the
stylist turns me out looking just as tidy and conservative as I did
before, I take a pair of scissors and I cut my own hair off as near
to the scalp as I can get it. I leave a bald place by accident, and
I cover that with eyebrow pencil when I go out.
At first, I hang out with my roommates.
One of them is a nice girl named Roseanna, who went to High School
with my sister Karen. Roseanna likes Julio Iglesias, which I think
is rather cheesy of her. She has drinking parties, and we all sit
around and get drunk on Riunite Rose and laugh at each others dirty
jokes. The other roommate is Leigh Anne, who heard we had a vacancy
at Cal State San Bernardino, where Roseanna goes to college. Leigh
Anne is blond and kind of chubby, but with big, beautiful boobs. She
is not at all embarrassed about going around the apartment naked, and
she spends weekends with her Vietnamese boyfriend Tanh, and then
tells us all about them afterward.
We go out together to a dance club near
where we live. It's under-21, so you're never sure how much of a kid
the boy is who's flirting with you. – This isn't actually a problem
for me, because no one ever does flirt with me, but I think about it.
– It's got a reputation for being a gay hangout, and I find this
exciting. Gay people fascinate me. They wear cooler clothes, and
they have edgier haircuts than straight people. At least I think
they do, because I am not actually sure if I have ever really met a
gay person. You can't tell just by looking, that's how I understand
it. And I would feel no end of rude if I just out-and-out asked.
Roseanna and Leigh Anne and I go
dancing together a few times. We share a couple more drinking-nights
together. And then they both freeze up on me, and they don't tell me
why. This isn't the first time I've had roommates that didn't like
me, but it's the first time where they started out liking me, and
then changed partway through. I don't know what to do. I ask
Roseanna what's wrong a couple of times, and she just says,
“nothing.” I ask Leigh Anne to find out for me, because at first
she stays friendly, and it's just Roseanna who's giving me the silent
treatment. But then Leigh Anne freezes up too, so I can't talk to
her either.
I go on like that for a few months, and
it's really, really lonely. I get switched to the early morning
shift at work, so I don't go to the dance club any more. I don't go
to any bars by myself, because I'd feel really weird. And I get
invited on one, maybe two dates, so that doesn't take up much of my
free time either. Mostly I sit at home by myself. I listen to Ziggy
Stardust, and The Wall, and a couple of Devo albums I
have. When one side finishes, I flip the record over, and when one
album is finished, I just get up and put on one of the others. I sit
on my bed (which I haven't made in months) and read books I got from
the library, and I wish that my life were better.
And then one night Roseanna FINALLY
tells me what's been bothering her: It turns out she read the part
in my diary with the fantasies about Karen in it, and she was
disgusted by it. I am stunned. After so many months, I'd almost
forgotten I wrote that. I'm also really, really offended, because
she knew that was my diary, so why did she read it? I ask her that,
but she says her doing that is nothing, compared with the fact that
I'm such a pervert. I think about the time that I read another camp
counselor's diary at Girl Scout camp. It had this big part in it
about how she'd had an abortion and, as a good Christian girl, I was
totally horrified. But I didn't let myself hold it against her,
because she'd written it in her diary. It was supposed to be
private. It makes me mad that Roseanna can't be similarly grown-up
about this.
But she can't. She flounces out the
door to go on a date, and I'm left all by myself. I'm so mad I throw
my keys, so hard they make a hole in the door. – Later I go tell
the landlord. He's really nice, and only charges me $20 to fix it.
-- I pack up all my stuff and put it into my 1978 Mercury (which is
big enough to hold all of it). I call my friend Katrelya, and she
says I can stay with her for a while.
That night I go over to Katarina's.
She lives in student housing at U.C. Riverside. She's got a studio
apartment that she's decorated with tapestries and statues of
wizards. It smells of rats, because she's taking care of a pair of
them for a friend of hers. She buys a pizza for us to eat. Then
when we're done, she lets the rats out to nibble the leftovers (which
I find somewhat wasteful). She gives me a comfortable futon to sleep
on, and she tells me I am welcome to stay for as long as I need to.
The next day, I give my notice at work.
I stay with Kaarina for two weeks, then I go back to Barstow to
live with my parents. They don't have a bedroom for me, so I sleep
on the sofa in the living room, and most nights I have to pull the
covers over my head to shut out the light, because Linda and Karen are
entertaining their boyfriends in the family room. I work as a
substitute teacher, and make way more money, for less work, than I
was doing at Burger King. I feel like kind of a fool not to have
just done this in the first place.
I tell my parents that Roseanna kicked
me out, but I don't give them any details. I tell Robin just the
part about me having lesbian fantasies in my diary, but not the part
about them being about Beth. I feel guilty when she gets mad at how
unfair Roseanna was, and stops being friends with her. I feel even
worse a year or so later, when Roseanna dies in a car crash. Linda goes to the funeral, because she's still friends with Roseanna's
family. I go too. I look like a very good, forgiving person, to
attend the funeral of a girl who treated me so shabbily, but I feel
that's undeserved. I can't entirely blame Roseanna. Fantasies about
your own sister are way more disturbing than just plain lesbian
fantasies, and how was she to know that I didn't really mean them?
The only person I tell the truth about
the fantasies is Karen. She says she understands, because that's the
kind of person Karen is. But even to her, I don't tell the whole
story. I don't tell her that what I really want isn't to share sex
with her, but to have her good looks for myself.
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