by Jana Casale
After that she walked around and looked for an alternative bronzer. She tried one that was lighter. Does it look like anything? she thought, and she put it back and checked her phone. She tried two more that were still light. And then one that was redder. And then another one that was sort of dark and shimmery. She checked her phone three times in between trying them on and looking in the mirror, her expression increasingly more worried and forlorn, as it was reflected back to her. Where is he? Maybe there’s something wrong. Maybe he’s dating someone else. Why am I not contoured? She wiped her skin clean with alcohol for the sixth time and noticed that it had become red from all the wear. Maybe I’ll just get a lipstick instead, she thought. She tried a red lipstick. A bold red lip was something she had always envisioned was possible somewhere in her life. In her mind she was the kind of girl who threw on bright red lipstick and laughed with her hands up, looking impossibly chic. But there in that mirror it was just her and her worn cheeks and residual sun-kiss and bright red lips staring back at her, worried and tired, and it was then that she thought of Allison and her shaking arm. I’m not better than her and her shaking. She wiped off the lipstick and left the store.
She checked her phone only once the rest of that night. When she thought of not hearing from John it made her ill; she felt a nausea that was specific and markedly foolish. She made a point to try not to think about it. She ate pizza and read Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. I don’t collect many marbles because I’m not a very good shot, it said. Without meaning to, she fell asleep and had a very specific dream about having sex with the boy from the bagel shop. He had a very large penis in the dream, so large that he couldn’t fit it in her, but she wasn’t worried; she just kept laughing with her hands up in the air. “It’s such discord,” she said to him.
In the middle of the night she woke up to pee and found that John had tried calling five times. He’d sent seven texts as well, explaining that he’d lost his phone and that he was so sorry and that he would have loved to go out for dinner. It made her happier and more gratified in that moment than any of the morning texts, or the five-hour conversations, or anything else John had ever said or done before. It was nice to know that at least he was shaking too. She didn’t text back until the next day.
CHAPTER 18
The First Time Having Sex with John
After her experience with Alex, Leda decided that she wanted to wait before she had sex with anyone else. She’d express this idea to John at an Indian restaurant on their fifth date.
“I think it’s better if we wait to have sex.” She didn’t look away from her piece of naan as she spoke.
“I think that’s a good idea,” he said.
“I knew you would,” she said. “I just really wanted to be clear about everything before it gets too serious.”
“Are you worried about things getting too serious?” he asked.
“No, I’m not worried.”
John smiled. She watched him scoop saag aloo onto his rice and take a bite. She admired how thoughtless he seemed in the motion. He ate in a way that was abandoned of all self-consciousness. She always found herself eating meticulously when in front of friends or dates, taking small bites, covering her face with her hand as she chewed, obsessively wiping the corners of her mouth with her napkin. Later she’d notice John maintained the same type of disregard about his bathroom habits. Her whole life she struggled with the fear that people would take notice of how long she was missing after excusing herself. They’ll think I’m pooping, she’d think as she tried to poop as quickly as possible. John, on the other hand, never seemed to worry. Sometimes he’d be in the bathroom for a short time and then other times he’d be gone for longer. She’d ask him about this soon after their six-month anniversary. She had a meeting with a professor in the morning. John waited with her outside of the professor’s office.
“I really have to go to the bathroom,” she said.
“Then go.”
“No, I don’t want to be in there for too long. It’ll be weird.”
“Who cares?”
“But she’ll be waiting for me.”
“Then she’ll wait.”
“No! That’s crazy.”
“You’re the one being crazy. If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom,” John said.
“Don’t you care if people are waiting for you when you’re in the bathroom?”
“No, why would I care?”
“Because then they’ll judge you that you’ve been in there for a long time.”
John shrugged his shoulders. “It seems insane. It’s not like they don’t go to the bathroom too.”
Leda considered then that maybe neurosis over bodily functions was a purely female trait.
“I won’t be able to go anyway,” she said.
All the fear went away eventually. Soon she ate wildly and ravenously in front of him. No longer concerned that he’d judge if she ate too much, no longer needing to eat a second dinner at home after the date, the silent leftover spaghetti and its guiltless indulgence as she’d stand by the fridge still dressed up from going out. The bathroom habits would also break down after living together, and eventually she wouldn’t even worry about pooping with the door open. No longer afraid to be human or unfemale. Real intimacy estimated by audible farts.
It wasn’t easy to abstain from sex with John. Of all the men she’d made out with (there had only been five), she never felt like she did when she was with him. With most of them she needed to convince herself that this was good, that their tongues and all that saliva were somehow what it was meant to be. This is kissing. This is just what it’s like, she’d think.
One of the boys told her she was a good kisser. His name was Neal. He had red hair and a swollen-type face. She knew she should return the compliment, but all the while, as he kissed her, and touched her face with his roundish, feminine hands, and put his tongue delicately this way and that, as if he had written out a plan for kissing her years before they had ever met, she had been thinking that she never, ever wanted to have sex with this person. She imagined his roundish, feminine penis and him delicately thrusting it in her this way and that. So she said, “Thanks, you’re something too.”
The other boys were similar to Neal in the sense that they always seemed to be thinking of ways to impress her. They seemed to kiss with so much thought, so much pressure on themselves to get it right, as if she would pull away from them and say, “Wow, you really are as amazing as you wish you were in your head!” Leda wondered if sex was something that burdened men in the same way bathroom habits had burdened her.
John was different. John was rough. He was uninhibited, unthinking. He held her and dove for the things he wanted. It was as if his body were responding to her body without any conscious effort or control, an abandonment so rich and unyielding that she felt almost shocked by it. Never had she considered that this is what she could want from a man. There was in her a person who would emerge in these times that was so different from the person she had thought herself to be. She could hear her own voice, pale and fragile like a squeak or a listless cry. How frightening to love being so small, she thought.
Leda decided to have sex with John soon after she realized she was in love with him. It was raining and they had been in the Public Garden. They walked along the center pond and saw ducklings. It was warm but not hot, and John held her hand. How good she felt with her hand in his. If she had drawn a picture of her hand in John’s it would have looked as if her hand was so enveloped that it hardly existed. But if she could have expressed the feeling of it, she would have drawn her own hand large and raised up, bigger than the pond, bigger than anything else; she may not have even drawn him at all.
They sat on a bench for a while and watched the day pass. John told her about having never been on the Swan Boats, and she thought they should take a boat ride together sometime.
“L
et’s ride the Swan Boats next weekend,” she said.
“That would be great,” he said.
The rain picked up, and they ran for cover in a nearby Starbucks. John grabbed her arm.
“We have to outrun the rain,” he said, weaving her through trees unnecessarily. I wish I could outrun the rain forever, she thought.
He ordered an espresso and she ordered a tea. They stood together and waited for their drinks. He made fun of a man wearing a fedora with a feather.
“Look at that asshole,” he whispered, nudging her to the direction of the man.
Her tea was made first, and John handed it to her.
She walked over to the milk and sugar in a viscerally hurried manner. The tea clouded with milk as she poured it. She couldn’t find a stirrer, but she didn’t care. She was thinking of something he’d said earlier in the day.
As she headed back to the counter she saw a couple standing beside him. She couldn’t hear what they were saying through the noise of the café, but she knew they wanted directions because of John’s gestures and pointing and then leaning in with his phone to show them a map. As she walked closer his voice became audible only by pitch and she heard him say, “Boylston Street.” The moment was so small, so unimportant. It could have passed by like so many others. It was like blowing the seeds off a dandelion or waking up in the morning, so much of it was nothing, and then Leda thought, I’m in love with him, and suddenly it wasn’t nothing at all.
That weekend they went out for a fancy dinner at a restaurant that had live jazz. She wore her pinchiest high heels and sexiest red dress. It was so low-cut and fit her so perfectly that she didn’t even need to worry about being linear in it. Men all stared at her, and John said that it was like walking around with porn. She took offense until he explained:
“What I mean is I feel like every man in this room wants you.”
She pretended to still be annoyed, but she loved hearing him say it. Feeling like that was some kind of burden and some kind of freedom and little could she distinguish which was which, so she ordered a sundae for dessert, and she ate the cherry languidly, but when she saw a group of men at the table next to them watching her, she slouched forward, put the stem down, and chewed it up fast.
She and John had sex for the first time that night. It was the best first-time sex she’d ever had. It was a little painful, and she certainly did not orgasm, but she was relaxed, she was herself, and she loved him. They did it twice that night and once in the morning after she stood up out of the covers and John said, “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
Afterward they went and got brunch. She had to wear her dress to breakfast, and as she buttered a scone, she sensed that the lady at the next table was saying something bad about her.
“…pregnant…” was all she could hear.
“That woman is talking about me. She thinks I’m a whore,” she whispered to John as he ate eggs.
“Aren’t you?” he said.
Leda smacked him across his forearm.
“I hate you,” she said, but it wasn’t true. Not even a little. Not even at all.
CHAPTER 19
Really Good Sex
Leda had become used to the idea that sex was slightly painful and that that was just what it was. She’d still feel an urgent need to do it, but very often when she’d stop and think about it she’d wonder why exactly. The concept of feeling actual pleasure from sex seemed ambitious. No one she knew had orgasms during sex. Her friend Katrina admitted it to her at the library. The two of them were discussing the large penis of a guy she had just started seeing.
“It’s like this.” Katrina first motioned the length and then the girth. “No, wait, more like this.” She widened her hands. “Honestly, when I was blowing him I could hardly get my mouth around it. If it hurt my mouth, can you imagine what it would be like to have sex with him?”
Leda shook her head. “I would never. Are you sure this is worth it?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I want to have sex with him…I mean, shouldn’t I be able to have sex with him even if he has a really big penis?”
“I wouldn’t want it near me.”
Katrina pulled a book off the shelf absentmindedly. She leaned in close to Leda. “Can I tell you something?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never had an orgasm during sex.” She spoke as quietly as possible, as if Leda would somehow be appalled by the ineptitude of her vagina.
“I haven’t either,” Leda said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, never.”
“But doesn’t that make us weird? Are we weird?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s a huge relief. I thought I was some kind of freak.”
“I kind of think orgasming during sex is a myth,” Leda said.
“Do you think so?”
“Kind of…Yeah.”
“Why doesn’t anyone talk about it?”
“I don’t know. No one wants to be the only one.”
A few weeks later she and John went for a walk in the woods. The day was no different from any other day. She wore a green shirt and they got bagels after spending the night together. They drove outside the city and went for a walk through a state park. It was hot and she could smell the greenery thickly settled in the air. John told her a funny story about his brother buying a shimmery scarf, and they were lulled between each other as they walked holding hands. Somewhere, although it couldn’t be said where, they came to consider that they should have sex in the woods. The suggestion had been mutual really, but Leda would remember it as her own idea. They saw a clearing off the path and through the trees.
“We’re going to break our necks,” John said as they walked over roots and broken branches. Leda could hear each of their steps on the pine needles.
“Break our necks?”
“I meant our legs.”
She stepped carefully and thought about her flats and that she shouldn’t have really worn flats to have sex in the woods, but really none of her other shoes were appropriate either.
“Where are we going to do it?” she asked him.
“There.” He pointed to a large tree with bushes all around.
“In the bushes?”
“Against the tree.”
They walked over, and she could feel her heart speed up. There was a dull buzzing and somewhere far off in the quiet she thought she could hear traffic.
“Is this a good idea?” she asked him.
John looked boyish standing there. He had on a plaid shirt and jeans that had badly frayed on the cuffs.
“I don’t know. Do you not want to do it?”
“Do you think someone will see us?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, although he looked unsure. “We should hurry up, though. The sun is going down.”
He walked up beside her and kissed her neck.
She leaned against the tree. It smelled like waking up early and felt almost heated below her palms in the humid August air. She pulled her jeans down and helped guide his penis in. In that moment she anticipated the obligatory pain that she’d grown so accustomed to. Something that she imagined she’d have the burden to bear the rest of her life like some kind of sex goddess warrior battling penises and yeast infections. But it didn’t hurt. John came quickly and pulled out.
“It didn’t hurt at all,” she said.
They weren’t sure what to do with the used condom. It wasn’t feasible to carry it back to the car, so they dug a hole and buried it and decided that pinecone babies would grow out of it. They promised each other that they’d come back and visit those pinecone babies one day.
“Will we remember these woods? Would we recognize our pinecone babies?” she asked.
They walked back in dusk and got ice cream.
It wou
ldn’t be until well into their relationship that she would have her first orgasm during sex. Soon after, she’d orgasm regularly. She’d tell Katrina about it, but Katrina was single and still sleeping with strangers.
“I don’t think I’ll ever have one,” she’d say.
“You will when you meet someone you love and are comfortable enough with.” But even Leda knew as she said it that she was lucky and that some women would be battling their whole lives. And then you must really feel like the only one, she thought.
They never did go back to the woods.
CHAPTER 20
Being in Love
It was summer. She spent so much time in the sun. If she heard love songs she sat with them. She’d blink them if she could. Sometimes she’d tear up at long lines like “At laaaastt.” If she were in front of people she’d hold back the tears. Swallow them away because she knew that you couldn’t tell someone how good it felt to sit with those songs. You couldn’t say, “I’m blinking each one of these songs.”
She and John got ice cream and walked by the river. She and John slept in on Sundays and ate bagels. She and John said “I love you” as they’d part and hang up the phone and sometimes while kissing and sometimes while cooking. She and John held each other’s elbows and took silly baths. She and John ate pizza and went to shows and once they went dancing and spun. She and John frequented fairs and the inside of each other’s body outline as they’d sleep pushed up against each other. She and John walked home and got dressed up and did so much listening to each other speak.
On Saturday they went to a parade and Leda got cotton candy. John took a picture of her eating it, and she thought she looked pretty holding it and taking a bite. It was so pink and her face looked bright. She posted it on Facebook later and got fifteen likes.
