Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

It wasn’t a total lie that I wanted to get pregnant. Danny and I were planning to work for a year or two, get married, and then have kids. But I was becoming more and more convinced that sooner would be better than later, so that I could have some company.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about sex, which I guess was inevitable. I wanted to have it more than ever, and I was having it less than ever. I started using the toys by myself. I had never even really masturbated before, but now I did it almost every day. I mostly used the Eroscillator and a gold glitter dildo, which had a retracted foreskin but no veins or balls. I also purchased another vibrator called a Rock-Chick, which was U-shaped and which you were supposed to rock in and out. I hadn’t been able to get the hang of it, which was what Pam told me to tell customers, that they just needed to get the hang of it. Now I knew that was a lie. Something was anatomically incorrect. So I gave myself a refund, and I marked them down from $39.99 to $19.99. Pam was very excited when I called Chad and told him we were out. But she didn’t restock them, which confirmed she knew they were no fun. We also sold out of some 99-cent bullet vibrators, which I had marked down from $4.99 when I realized that all of their batteries had leaked acid.

In my sex toy stupor I also bought a butt plug for Danny, although I was doubtful that he would want to try it, or that we would ever be home at the same time again. It was black-and-blue marbled silicone, very masculine, and I was prepared with a speech that Chad gave me when I worked at Making Love about how straight men have prostates too.

• • •

One day I was cleaning the store and trying to decide what toy I wanted to try next when I heard Pam’s bike outside. My heart started beating faster, but then I remembered I was cleaning and I was wearing a work shirt and both of those things were good. I wiped down the next shelf and put the pocket vibrators back, and saw Pam looking through the window. I waved and she came in.

“Hi Pam,” I said.

“Hi Brenda,” she said. “How’s it going?”

“Oh good,” I said. “Just cleaning.”

“Great,” said Pam. “I just wanted to tell you that we’re having a little birthday party for Chad at Making Love on Friday night. Bring your girlfriend.”

Since it was a command I said, “Okay.”

“What’s her name again?” said Pam.

“Nadeen.”

“What does she look like?”

“She’s gorgeous,” I said, remembering seeing Nadeen around campus and in the dark in her twin bed. “She’s half black and half Native American.”

“You know, you don’t look gay at all.”

“Really?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“I guess I’ve always been pretty feminine,” I said. “Although I have always wanted to cut my hair.”

“Really,” said Pam.

“Yeah,” I said. “I won’t give you my whole sob story about my dad, but now that he’s not supporting me anymore I feel like I can finally do it.” I was starting to feel like I was telling the truth.

“It’s liberating.” Pam smiled at me for the second time since I met her. “It really is.”

• • •

By Friday I still hadn’t come up with a plan. I searched Facebook for any friends of friends who lived in the Bay Area and looked like they might be half black and half Native American, and planned to offer them money or an Eroscillator, but I couldn’t come up with anyone. My next best idea was to bring the cash deposit to Making Love, tell Pam that I couldn’t stay because Nadeen was in the hospital with a ruptured spleen, and then start crying. I wondered if it was suspicious that “spleen” rhymed with “Nadeen.”

On the way to work on Friday I got a haircut. It was sort of an impulse decision. I rode by the hair salon every day, but never thought anything of it. Now, faced with losing my job due to my inability to produce a girlfriend, I stopped and went in and asked a punky-looking girl to cut it all off. I didn’t know why I cared if I lost my job, but I did.

“You sure about this?” said the girl.

“Yes,” I said. “I need to look gayer.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Can you do one thing?” I said. “Can you cut the front first and can we take a picture?”

“Fine.”

She started cutting from the top of my head and I watched the pieces fall to the floor. She cut quickly, breathing like she was sleeping.

She gave me a perfect mullet. The back was so gross and long. She took pictures from a few different angles and gave me back my phone. It was like I was looking at pictures of someone else. I sent Danny the best one with a message that said, “You owe me $100.”

I watched in the mirror as she cut the back.

“Can you make it shorter?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“I’m freaking out,” I said.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

Soon the rest of the hair was off of my neck, and my head felt very light.

I opened my eyes but she told me to close them again. She put something that smelled good in my hair and told me I could open. My hair was longer than I had wanted — to the bottom of my ears with sort of side-swept bangs. But I looked like a new woman, and that was exactly what I had wanted.

“Do I look gay?” I said.

“You look gayer,” she said.

• • •

I was practicing my look of panic for when I told Pam about Nadeen’s spleen when Lucy and her drunk friends came in to play with the sex machine.

“Can you show us how that machine works?” said the little blonde.

“Whoa,” said Lucy. “You look great.”

“Thanks,” I said. I went to go plug in the machine.

“I’m sorry that this is, like, a routine,” Lucy said when I sat back down behind the register. “Wow, you look really good.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I don’t really mind stopping by here,” she said, biting her lip.

I wanted to look at the ceiling and pretend I hadn’t heard her, but I forced myself to look her in the eye and smile. “Listen, what are you doing later?”

Her eyes got bigger. “Nothing,” she said. “Going dancing with these winners.”

“Would you want to come to a birthday party with me? It’s at our other store, in the Castro.”

Now she was beaming. “I would love to,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and nobody was doing anything bad to the sex machine, so I couldn’t kick the women out. Mercifully, Lucy rounded up her friends and gave me the sweetest smile on the way out.

“I’ll meet you here at ten,” she said.

• • •

I tried to decide if there was anything else I wanted to buy before I got fired. I had most of the things that might have been useful to me, but I rang up a couple of bottles of lube for when I used my dildo, or for when I hit menopause in twenty-five years.

Lucy showed up at ten of ten, alone and smiling. My heart sped up a little. I put the money in the deposit bag and moved my bike to the storage room. We got a cab, and on the way to the Castro I asked Lucy questions and when she tried to ask me anything I cut her off with more questions. She was a nutritionist who specialized in HIV/AIDS care. She lived alone, except for her dog and her four cats, in the Sunset. She wasn’t a hoarder, people just kept dumping cats on her. One of the cats had feline HIV and she thought it was funny but not really funny that she had to develop a special diet and cook for him. She was from Texas, her parents were Catholic but they loved her anyway, she’d gone to another of the Seven Sisters. She said all of her gay friends were either married to each other or not gay anymore, and I said most of mine weren’t gay anymore.

When we got to Making Love she smiled at me and we went in. It was mostly Chad’s friends, who were his boyfriend, an old white guy, and a lot of similar couples — gorgeous, sinewy men of color and their older, rubberier, whiter boyfriends. Marc was standing in front of the register, pouring himself some champagne. “What the fuck!” he said, and gave me two kisses.