The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters With the Human Race

by Sara Barron

  I WAS AT the local coffee shop one weekend afternoon when I spotted a certain gentleman, and after a series of boring events he and I wound up having sex. It was mostly uneventful, except for the fact that during the proceedings, I sprained my neck. We’d had sex and gone to bed, and when I woke up the next morning, I found I couldn’t move it.

  “Oh no!” I exclaimed.

  My companion groaned wordlessly in response.

  I rotated the entirety of my torso to face him.

  “I think I sprained my neck,” I said.

  “From the blowjobs?” he asked, but nodding “yes” was not an option. I pitched my torso back and forth.

  “Oh, shit!” He laughed. “Wow. That’s really funny.”

  Really funny, indeed. The ensuing week consisted of too many ineffective neck braces and heating pads until finally I made an appointment with an acupuncturist. The acupuncturist’s name was James, and James was very handsome. Which didn’t affect the efficacy of his acupuncture, of course, but it did unlock my flirtatious instincts while James performed his acupuncture. When the needles went in, I made sure to groan sexually, rather than in a way that sounded whiny. When the needles came out and I was told to sit up, I made sure to position myself on the acupuncture table in a manner that was more mermaid-on-rock than it was Sara-Barron-on-table. And when a session concluded and it was time to say good-bye, I made sure to tell James how respectful I was of his practice. I’d roll my neck and shoulders erotically to indicate how much better my neck was thanks to him.

  “The healing power of acupuncture is so, like, tangible,” I’d say. “I really respect what you do.”

  I saw James three times in two weeks and, thankfully, my neck did get better. At the end of the last session, James bowed silently in farewell, and it was something in the perceived subservience of that bow that allowed me to channel my untapped reserves of self-confidence.

  “We should go out sometime,” I said.

  James lifted his head.

  “Yes,” he said. “We should.”

  His response was unexpected, but ideal. It was the most wonderful news.

  However, I successfully undermined it by putting Band-Aids on my breasts.

  The source of the problem was an off-the-shoulder sweater I’d decided to wear on our date. Because I was punching above my weight with James, I’d initially planned to go all-out, clothing-wise, to pair an extravagant frock with high heels. But then I reconsidered after James suggested meeting at Chipotle. I’d texted, “Any thoughts on where to meet?” and he had written back, “How about the 42nd Street Chipotle? They have delicious margaritas.”

  Well, I wasn’t picky. I would go on a date at a Chipotle. However, I would also spare myself the indignity of showing up in high heels and an extravagant frock. I’d go instead with my Forever 21 off-the-shoulder sweater.

  I planned to do as one does in an off-the-shoulder sweater and wear a strapless bra. But then I tried one on and saw that it created this unattractive shelf effect. So then I decided maybe I should just go braless, and took off the sweater and the bra, and then put the sweater back on, but this time without the bra. Then, though, I saw that my nipples looked ridiculous. They were all like, HELLO! WE ARE NIPPLES! rather than Ah, bonjour. Nous sommes les … nipples. It was just too much. They were just too much, and after extensive consideration, I decided Band-Aids were the workable solution. They’d provide the optimal level of restraint.

  So it was that I taped one extra-large Band-Aid horizontally across each nipple.

  James needed five margaritas to invite me back to his apartment. I needed zero to accept the offer, but two to forget I had extra-large Band-Aids on my nipples. I knew what I looked like with them on, of course. I had looked in the mirror before I left, and I had noticed how the fleshy color of the Band-Aids blended with my skin tone to create the overall effect of an alien life form. Something sluglike. Undefined. They were gross and alarming, to be sure, but even so, I thought James’s response to the Band-Aids was unnecessarily dramatic. We’d gone back to his bedroom, taken off our shirts, and he had screamed, for God’s sake. I am tempted to write, “He let out a blood-curdling scream,” but to be more specific about it, James screamed like he’d seen, not Band-Aids on breasts, but rather cockroaches on breasts. Truly. It was as though he’d ripped off my sweater to discover one tampon-sized cockroach per breast.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Are those … Band-Aids?” he asked.

  And I looked down. And I remembered.

  “Oh, God. Yes. Sorry. It’s sort of, like, this thing I do.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because,” I answered, “my nipples protrude too much without them.”

  We sat for a moment.

  Finally, James said, “I’m sorry I screamed.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry I put Band-Aids on my breasts.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “You had your reasons.”

  We sat for another moment.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” I said.

  “Do you want to take them off?” he said.

  “Oh. Yes. Sorry,” I said. “Of course I’ll take them off.”

  And so I did. Or rather, and so I tried to.

  At this stage in the story I would like to vouch for Johnson & Johnson’s Band-Aid brand adhesive. As an unpaid sponsor, I would like to tell you that their Band-Aids wanted on. It was almost impossible to remove them, and when finally I did, my breasts looked red and raw. Bumpy and truly diseased.

  It is a testament to both James and me that we tried to carry on. We hemmed and hawed, picked and prodded. We boogied and we woogied. In short, we did all manner of unmentionable things together, but it was like his libido was this perfect, healthy baby, and my breasts were a pillow, and I had used the pillow to kill the baby. So seemingly benign was the weapon, you almost didn’t know it was a weapon. But oh, it was. And the baby wound up limp and flaccid. Unresponsive. Irrevocably dead.

  Finally—hopelessly—I motioned in the direction of James’s genitals.

  “Is there … anything else we could … do?” I asked.

  And James motioned in the direction of my breasts. He shrugged, in apology. He said, “I’m pretty sure there’s not.”

  There’s a subconscious level on which I think I must like feeling ashamed and embarrassed. I’ve been that way for, well, ever I guess, and it’s what made it difficult for me to blame James in the long term. I mean, sure, he had a dramatic, physical response to a small mess of adhesive, but my dominant feeling was that the fault was mostly mine for failing to think things through beforehand. I do not believe in destiny, but I do believe in predictability. I do believe we are more or less likely to wind up in a given situation based on the way we behave. I, for example, was more likely to drink two margaritas, to forget about the Band-Aids, to carelessly remove my shirt. I know these things about myself, and should, then, have put that self-knowledge toward better social planning. But I got wrapped up in a moment, seduced by my own ingenuity. This can happen when you live alone.

  A fantasy returned in the wake of my repulsive breasts. For the first time in a long time, I found myself wanting a roommate. Someone to talk to and check in with. Someone to save me from myself. It was a strange thing to have evoked after all that time away from the idea, and it brought to mind a particular park in Bushwick, just around the block from my apartment. I’d go there once in a while to enjoy the sunshine and/or the physiques of the guys on the basketball court, and while it was lovely by virtue of being outside, it was also kind of gross. There was garbage everywhere. There weren’t any benches. The grass was a mess. So it wasn’t a question of which part was greener. It was a question of whether I felt like sitting in garbage or in mud. Near a baby or a rat.

  A nice day in that park was a hard thing to achieve. A nice life in New York is a hard thing to achieve. You’re damned if you do get entrenched in the psychosis of your roommate
, you’re damned if you don’t have a roommate, but then your imaginary bulldog fails to explain the pitfalls of the Band-Aids on your breasts. I must remember this when times are tough. I must not mourn what I don’t have. I must rejoice in what I do have. I must remember my pedicure station. I must remember that I pass gas when I want to and that doing so provides authentic joy. I must consider there’s no better option out there. I must accept it’s as good as it gets.

  Part IV

  Survivor

  17

  Vicki’s Vagina Is Violet

  Often I find myself in one of two positions: I am either (a) bemoaning whatever drama presently surrounds me, or (b) lacking drama, enduring the grind, and as a result, beset with a crushing panic as to the purpose of human existence.

  I found myself in one such latter phase several years back. I had recently moved into the second of my Bushwick studio apartments. I had been in high spirits because of it.

  But then the winds changed.

  The tides turned.

  Because this friend of mine, Vicki, had gone and scored herself a boyfriend.

  I have, as I’ve said, an unsavory taste for people who find partners like I find ingrown hairs. For them, it is effortless, and this fact was never truer than in the case of my friend Vicki.

  Vicki is warm, bright, and empirically attractive. She is professionally unintimidating. She has a lot of internalized self-loathing, and that internalized self-loathing manifests as a lack of self-esteem. That lack of self-esteem, then, manifests as a willingness to date whomever just so long as they’re around.

  In the fifteen years that I’ve known Vicki, she’s been single for a total of four months. Four months. In fifteen years. And although I would like to say that I pity her situation, that I think it’s sad for her, actually, how she cannot be alone, the truth of the matter is just that I’m jealous. I, Sara Barron, am terribly, wildly jealous, and so it was that my current joy was undercut when Vicki got a shiny, brand-new boyfriend yet again.

  Although perhaps I ought not to use the word “shiny.” Since, well, there was nothing shiny about Vicki’s latest boyfriend. On the contrary, he was old enough to be her dad.

  Before going further, I should admit a problem of my own: I am not amenable to May-December situations. I am terribly judgmental, closed off to even the most sympathetic variations on the theme. It’s something I’m consciously working on, always. But Vicki made my stabs at self-improvement really hard. Her elderly boyfriend’s name was Don, and whenever their relationship came up, Vicki would present it as a demonstration of her own maturity. She would say, “I just needed a grown-up, you know?”

  The statement, to me, was the verbal equivalent of nails running down a chalkboard. Vicki said it all the time, and the process of hearing her do so felt like the process of being pushed into a downward emotional spiral. Down and down I’d go, considering her baser motivations.

  You like being the hot one.

  You need someone less likely to leave you.

  An older man’s less threatening than someone your own age.

  It was the lack of self-awareness that got me, combined with my long-running resentment about the plethora of boyfriends, combined with the fact that I myself had no—I mean no—romantic options on the table at the time.

  These were the circumstances that came together to put me in a chronically bad mood, and it was in the throes of this mood that I went out to dinner with another friend named Deirdre. Deirdre and I waited tables together at the upscale pizzeria where I was working at the time. Deirdre and I enjoyed this particular dinner on what I recall was the Friday before Halloween. The reason I know it was Friday, was that we’d gone to eat at a TGI Fridays (Deirdre had a coupon), and I remember thinking that being at TGI Fridays on Friday made the whole thing that much more pathetic.

  The reason I know it was before Halloween was that I’d just received an Evite to a Halloween party, cohosted by Vicki and Don.

  They’d been together one month. And they were co-hosting parties.

  I received the Evite, I called Deirdre to complain about the Evite, and Deirdre, sweetly, offered to take me to dinner.

  “My treat!” she’d said. “I’ve got a coupon to TGI Fridays.”

  So we went to a TGI Fridays on Friday, and I ordered a total of three different courses of beef. As I ate, I complained. I said, “It’s just, like, ridiculous, you know? Vicki’ll break up with whatever guy she’s been seeing, and she’ll be alone for, like, two weeks! TWO WEEKS! I’m not even kidding! And then I’ll see her the next time, and she’ll be all coy, and say something like, ‘Well, I have some news: I met a guy.’ And I’ll be like, ‘Of course you met a guy! You always meet a guy!’ And she’ll be like, ‘Yes, but this one’s really special. He’s so smart and so cute. I feel … really lucky.’ But then, Deirdre, I meet the guy, and whoever he is, he just seems fine, at best, and at worst he is truly deformed! I swear to God. She dated this one guy whose face evoked Sloth from The Goonies. My mom met him once, and she was like, ‘Is something wrong with Vicki’s boyfriend? I mean, is there something, like, mentally wrong?’ Just because his face was so bizarre!”

  “So what’s your point?”

  I sighed. No, actually, it was more like I huffed.

  “Well, my point, Deirdre, is that it is annoying to hear someone always going on about how this one’s so special, and now how this one’s so special. It’s like, no, Vicki, none of them are ‘so special.’ You just tell yourself they are because you cannot be alone.”

  Deirdre shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it sounds sweet. I think it’s nice if someone cares what’s on the inside.”

  “No,” I said. “No, no, no, no, no. There is a difference between caring what’s on the inside, and having self-esteem so low, you’ll pick up the Sloth-looking guy on the street because you know for sure he’ll worship you, and never leave. These guys, okay, they’re not, like, homely but bursting with charisma. These guys are not homely and rich. No. They are homely, and they are blah. And I’d forgive it all if she would only just admit it! JUST ADMIT IT! Be like, ‘I’m having a rough go at the moment, and I understand this current guy is not forever. But I cannot be alone.’ That would be okay! But please don’t run me through the paces of how special they all are!”

  We sat in silence. For, I don’t know, a while. My third course of beef was cleared. I ordered something called a Chocolate Fudge Fixation. I ate my Chocolate Fudge Fixation. I felt gross, and very full.

  Deirdre said, “Well, okay. So you’re clearly very angry.”

  I exhaled.

  “Not even,” I said. “I think it’s just, I feel jealous.”

  You know how sometimes when you’re drunk, the truth comes out? That happens to me when I’ve had too much processed food. I was deflated now, and hitting at the heart of things.

  “I haven’t had a boyfriend in ages,” I continued. “I haven’t had so much as the prospect of a boyfriend, and I feel, I don’t know, entitled, I guess. I want the universe to shower me with options.”

  Deirdre nodded. “It’s raining men,” she said. “Hallelujah, it’s raining men.”

  “Amen,” I said. “Yes, exactly. It’s time for a downpour, Deirdre. Even someone interesting to think about would be enough.”

  Well. What I am here to tell you is that in the forty-eight hours that followed, my wish was granted. My poorly articulated, un-careful wish. The spirit of the circumstance mirrored the spirit of the movie Big. If, that is, the whole thing was reconceived to star Elizabeth Perkins as the protagonist. Be careful what you wish for, grown-up lady. You thought you’d found a boyfriend, but it turns out he’s thirteen. If viewed from this angle, we don’t have a boy who learns to relish his youth. What we have, actually, is a thirtysomething woman who fails to get herself a boyfriend. We have a thirtysomething woman who adds an atypical notch on her belt.

  SATURDAY, 10:00 A.M.: I awoke on this, the morning of Vicki and Don’s Halloween party.
After a good night’s sleep, I decided to attend.

  Deidre had been generous in taking me to dinner the night before, in listening to me complain. She had helped me work out what parts of the conflict fell, not on Vicki’s shoulders, but on mine. I had therefore woken up feeling very pay-it-forward. Very, like, Okay, Deidre was generous and understanding with me, and perhaps I ought to be more generous and understanding with Vicki. I’d known her a long time, after all, and just because I was bitter about my own single status, well, that didn’t mean I had to pre-judge her elderly boyfriend. Furthermore, I had just read this book called Gilead—I’d been forced to by this book club I was in—and it had been this moving literary tale about a romance between a sympathetic seventysomething and his equally sympathetic thirtysomething wife. I read it, finished it, and then I thought, Well. Those characters were awfully likable. And they had, what? Forty years between them? Vicki and Don reach across the abyss of a mere twenty-three. I really should be open-minded. I owe my friend that much.

  SATURDAY, 11:00 A.M.: As a reward for my open-mindedness, I decided I would treat myself to brunch at a restaurant down the block from my apartment. It was a spot I dined at, on average, two times a week. I’d arrive with book in hand and sit at the bar, order a glass of wine, followed by a bowl of soup, followed by a cup of hot water. The routine, as a whole, prompted frequent urination, which both (a) provided helpful intermissions to my reading, and (b) helped me, as Solo Diner, to look occupied.

  The restaurant’s most winning feature was a loinachingly handsome waiter I shall henceforth call Brian. If you imagine both John Lennon and Justin Timberlake at their most handsome of stages, shaken, stirred, poured into a tall glass of water, you’d wind up with Brian. I knew, as all patrons knew, that Brian was not to be obtained, merely ogled; that one did well to appreciate him as exquisite décor rather than a realistic option.