Emma Rathbone - Losing It

“Missing out?”

“Well, I don’t think I’d ever really had an orgasm before.”

“I gotta go.”

“Not a real one. Your father. He really moved me. He. Moved. Me.”

“That’s interesting but—”

“And it’s all because we said, ‘Let’s get out of our comfort zone. We’re here, aren’t we? For something new? Well, let’s try something new .’ Our teacher, Mr. Prince, he had the most capable hands. It was in a room with a fountain in the middle. We sat on these really fun reed mats.”

“Mr. Prince?”

“He was honest, and straightforward, and the whole thing was really about healing. That’s what it was about.”

“So this was some kind of like sex class?”

“Don’t be such a prude, Jay.”

“I’m not!”

“I know that you young people today have all sorts of tools and know-how, but for my generation, well, at least for my self —little Miss Star of Collin County — I never really knew how to let go.”

“I’m glad you’ve figured it out.”

“I’m just happy for you. I’m picturing you out there, having all sorts of affairs, getting all of this experience. I’m just happy — happy you’ve been able to explore your sexuality, happy that our society has allowed you to try different things, to try different men. Julia? Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“And that you didn’t have to wait until the ripe old age of twenty-two to finally… Well, you probably didn’t know this. I think I was always a bit embarrassed to tell you. But I was a virgin when I got married.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Can you imagine?” she said. “A virgin at twenty-two.”

“Wow.”

“Yep,” said my mom, and she went on. They were eating cubed fruit every morning. Her skin looked amazing. I stared at the sagging trees in the distance and pictured a bunch of massive, synchronized explosions — whipping white light and people’s skin melting off and vending machines collapsing like gooey plastic bubbles and windows blasting out and forests and buildings going up like tinder until everything is smoldering gristle and ash. And then, from the outside, the whole earth, there’s a laser from another universe and it all gets blown up, just fucking pulverized.

A few days later I sat with Allison Block from work in a downtown seating area with pink concrete dividers separating us from the historic main street walkway. People waded through the heat, peering into store windows. A very old man and woman walked by, hand in hand.

“Cute couple,” she said, tilting her head to the side.

“Awww,” I said, trying to get into the spirit.

We were people watching. It’s what Allison suggested we do when I’d asked her if she wanted to get a drink. We’d always been chatty, and I thought it would be good to have a friend in town. Someone to go out with. But within five minutes of sitting down with her, I could tell she was already zipped up in her life and didn’t have time for or really need another girlfriend.

“Anyway,” she said. She stealthily whipped her hair around so it landed on a different shoulder and readjusted her sunglasses. “We settled on the farmhouse-style tables in the end. God. Stop me. This must be so boring for you.”

“No, no! I mean, it sounds like it’s like trying to organize a United Nations conference,” I said. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

She was telling me about her wedding. She was getting married in the fall. The guy was named Caleb Clark and they met at Duke but they hadn’t hit it off. It was only now, years later, when they were the only two people on some stupid ghost tour, that they’d reconnected. These were some of the things she told me. He was from a large, sprawling, storied Southern family, and his mother was addicted to sleeping pills, but it was more like a joke, just one more quirk in a cast of eccentrics because — and this is something I gathered, that she didn’t tell me — they had money. Money like ancient ore in the Clark family line, money that nullified all problems and that had a home in a mansion surrounded by forty acres on an estate about thirty miles out of town. Allison had alluded to this in an under-the-breath way, but I could tell she savored it, the fact that this would be her life, that she held it in her mouth like a lemon drop. And maybe because of this, or maybe because this was just the way she was , her whole bearing was as peaceful as a just-made bed. And so it didn’t seem right to nose in with my uncomfortable problems.

I watched an ant, trapped in the hairs on my arm. I wondered if, now that she’d fallen through all these lucky chutes, if it must have seemed preordained to her, like it would never have been any other way. I wondered if she’d ever felt like a pinball, rolling appallingly down the center of the board toward the gutter at the bottom, unable to divert into a different life.

“My aunt Viv,” I offered up, “who I’m staying with, is fifty-five and she’s a virgin.”

“Oh, no!” said Allison, as if my hat had flown off.

That’s how she would be about it. She’d be just like that, about everything, gutturally amused, like life was a tragic, funny pageant. She could afford to be that way, now that she had what she had.

I thought of Viv, on her knees, patting something down in the garden. All those years alone in that house.

“How did that happen?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said, looking over her shoulder, into the distance.

“Uh-oh,” she said, scrunching her face up in an amused way.

“What?”

She gestured toward something and I looked over. A man with a bunch of tattoos wearing a leather vest and a plaid skirt and holding a beat-up cardboard box was walking our way.

“Just don’t make eye contact with him,” I said. “He’s got a bunch of plastic anime figurines in that box and he’ll try to sell them to us if you seem one iota interested. So just, seriously, don’t look him in the eye, it’s happened to me twice.”

“Okay,” she said. “That shouldn’t be hard.”

The man passed us.

“He kind of reminds me of Elliot.”

I looked at her. “From work?” I said. “Really? Why?”

“The ponytail.”

“Yeah, he has a ponytail, but I would say that’s the only thing they have in common.”

“It’s just that Elliot’s is so long,” she said.

“Yeah, it is pretty long.”

“He thinks he’s a Highland warrior or something.”

“I know,” I said wistfully.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s nice ,” she said, unscrewing the top of her sparkling water.

She was staring at me.

“What?” I said.

She smiled. “You like him.”

I was playing with the side of the napkin. “No I don’t!” I said. “Besides, he’s married.”

“Yeah,” she said distantly.

She put her bottle down. “His wife, Devon, she came into the office once.” She made a comically frightened expression.

“What?” I said.

“Well, first of all, she’s like fifty feet tall.”

“I knew it,” I said. “I knew she was crazy.”

“She came in holding this huge vase. I think it was supposed to be a gift? For the office? Well, they kept walking around with it. She was like, ‘Put it there, no, put it there,’ you know? Like kind of bossy?”

“Yeah.”

“You can tell who wears the pants. The way he looked at her — just, in love, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said uneasily.

We were quiet for a few moments. A large man on a small bike wobbled by.

“I’m going to set her up,” I said. “My aunt.”

Allison nodded, swallowing a gulp of water.