Devils in the Sugar Shop

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Oh, no, no, honey,” Ashley said, taking the slip of paper and only glancing at it. “No, it’s not what you think, sweetie. He wants to write a book. He’s been researching some articles that he wants to expand . . . about these sex parties. Isn’t that funny? Sex parties in Omaha. Don’t worry, it’s completely innocent. He’s completely condescending. How’d you even get this address?”

  “When did you all become so predictable?” Peyton said. “I tell you your husband is at an orgy, and how do you react? With denial.”

  “Peyton, sit down with me,” Ashley said, patting the step.

  “That address was in an e-mail that Dad sent me,” Peyton said, still pacing. “Maybe he sent it accidentally, and maybe not. Maybe he’s just trying to complete this ruination of me that he’s been working on since I was a little girl. Both of you wanted me to turn out crazy, admit it. It’s glamorous to you, the idea of a lunatic daughter. You would have loved to have been able to tell your friends at cocktail parties that you’d checked me into Macleans or the Menninger Clinic. You could just picture me, I don’t know, oversexed, sitting in a corner, uncommunicative, smoking cigarettes and gnawing on my hangnails. You even named me after that fucked-up girl in that William Styron novel. Then gave me the novel to read when I was twelve or something.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Oh, sure, tell the girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown that she’s not making any sense,” Peyton said, crossing her arms. “Are you and Dad happy?”

  “We’re tickled pink.”

  “I’m serious,” Peyton said. “I want the truth.”

  “The truth,” Ashley said. She stood and began to pick up the hors d’oeuvres from the floor, returning them to the silver-plated tray that had dented in the fall. “I think I’ll take the dare,” she said. With the tray in one hand, held waitressly at the tips of her fingers, Ashley hobbled, one shoe on, one shoe off, back up the stairs.

  For a moment, Peyton pitied her mother for having a daughter like her.

  She picked up Ashley’s broken-heeled shoe, and the broken heel, and returned to the living room, and to the sideboard to rummage around for a tube of superglue. She was only there, after all, to look after her pitiful little family.

  In the drawer she found a pair of Fendi sunglasses and put them on. The lenses were all fingerprinty, so she squinted and studied the whorls, growing dizzy, imagining what it would’ve been like had she found her mother dead on the stairs, allowing herself to see the body, to feel in her stomach the rush of tension, to picture the swiftly gathered funeral at which perhaps she’d wear these very same sunglasses to hide her bloodshot eyes. During the service, she’d notice the fingerprints, realize they belonged to her mother, and collapse from the poignancy.

  Ashley

  Ashley sat at the back of the Sugar Shop party in her living room, on an ottoman, a vicious run having clawed its way up the side of her black nylons. She held a martini glass atop her knee, occasionally dipping a cotton ball into the liquid and dabbing it against the bright-red carpet burn on her cheek. It wasn’t gin—Deedee had squirted into the glass some astringent called Joy Buzzer sold as a clitoral tingler in a plastic bottle a suggestive shade of mother-of-pearl.

  The party had quickly popped into full swing, so to speak, all the women almost instantaneously snockered on Ashley’s beloved sangria, a concoction overdosed with brandy, all the fruit succulent with liquor. Twenty or so women sacked out on the sofas, on overstuffed pillows on the floor; a few even shared the baseball-shaped beanbag chair Lee had had since he was six, a little relic of his short-lived heterosexuality.

  The women passed among themselves samples from Deedee’s toolbox of ticklers and unguents. They massaged icy-hot vaginal creams into the backs of their hands, they touched cappuccino-flavored jellies to their tongues, laughing all the while and growing more and more touchy-feely and chastely vulgar with each sip of sangria.

  A jewelry designer named Midge simulated fellatio on a marzipan wiener. An anesthetist named Lucy lifted her skirt all the way up to the lace of her undies and pressed an aphrodisiacal lick-on tattoo in the shape of an arrow-pierced heart onto her inner thigh. A cello player named Christine and an Asian artist named Lila, whose latest project was large-scale origami weapons of mass destruction, made a grand, drunken production of mock-sneaking into the bathroom to test the pistons of a vibrating egg. Everyone was sexed up and delirious with good humor.

  All but Ashley. She couldn’t hear them at all, despite their racket. Stuck in the palm of her hand was the address of the swingers’ party, her sweat smearing the ink and ghosting the numbers. Troy had promised her that, in researching his book, he wouldn’t do anything on the sly. Ashley had even extended what she believed to be a fairly liberated invitation: “Do what you need to do, but I just want to know. I want everything on the up-and-up.” But maybe he saw through it. Maybe he sensed, from a waver in her voice, perhaps, or a blush of her cheeks, a feigned open-mindedness, that she only wanted to appear so very sophisticated.

  She didn’t want to be talked about in the way she frequently talked about others, didn’t want to be one of those cautionary tales for modern marrieds, like Denise Nuñez, who now sat on Ashley’s sofa sampling a candy that popped on her tongue, a product intended to spark up a run-of-the-mill blowjob. Denise, the city’s best-loved weather girl, had contracted a gnarly case of gonorrhea a few years back from a fling she’d had with a sexily unkempt cameraman. Her husband had also been diagnosed with it at about the same time. Neither would admit to cheating, each accusing the other of infidelity. This stalemate and the fear of future STDs, in this puritanical city that had one of the leading STD rates in the country, had kept their frail marriage cemented together.

  Ashley’s fall down the stairs, and its grisly potential, played over and over in her mind, each time with a different conclusion. Ultimately she could too clearly see herself dismantled, a newly drooling victim at the bottom of the stairs, bereft of her movement, her sense.

  Ashley dabbed more Joy Buzzer on her cheek, and when she closed her eyes and concentrated on the peppermint burn of the astringent, she could render the pain halfway pleasurable. A fitting metaphor for her present state of mind, she thought, imagining that she looked, in her Fendi sunglasses and red skin and cocktail dress, like an affluent battered wife.

  Any of the women in that room could be Troy’s mistress, if such a mistress existed, she thought. What did violation look like, anyway? Did it look like Peach Mobley off to the side of the room alone, gnawing (nervously?) on an orange peel, her sangria, undrunk, in a margarita glass? Or did it look like Annabel Lang, the family dentist, swaying her hips and singing with a mocha-colored dildo as her microphone? And if this mistress was in the room, then she and Ashley were suddenly sisters of a kind, both of them jilted for an orgy on West Josephine Lane.

  There was no way of knowing anything about anyone else. It was impossible to understand the vagaries of another couple’s relationship, even when that other couple included your husband. Remember that, Ashley reminded herself, thinking the observation would weave easily into the consciousness of Phyllis in “The Consciousness of Phyllis,” a short story she was writing about a wife with suspicions. Because her own life, Ashley thought, would be her only salvation—remember that too—Phyllis’s life, Phyllis’s salvation. If Troy determined that their marriage was over, there was little Ashley could do about it. Instead of spending her hours and her stomach lining guessing, spying, she’d toss herself back into her own life, all her limbs in perfect working order. Perhaps, eventually, she’d write a novel of consequence. It was almost delicious, the idea of divorce and starting over, of perpetually putting herself first, of sleeping around, of having another shot at delayed adolescence.

  Deedee

  Adolescents, all of them, Deedee thought. All she’d said was, “Simply apply the Yum-Yum Balm liberally to your ya-ya sister for a little yippee-kai-yay,” and the roomful of drunken women had
burst into laughter, a few of them even literally rolling on the floor, clutching their sides.

  “Must we speak in code?” said one woman. “My pink Itzhak’s not going to even know you’re talking about her.” And the laughter swelled again as she parted her legs wide.

  “Oh, honey,” said another, “there ain’t no name for what you got.” More laughter as Deedee stood there, a rubbery Wet Willy wilting in her fist.

  Deedee had long bugged Ashley to host a party, thinking it would be fun to gather their friends together for some soft-core debauchery, for them all to see what she did for a living, but she hadn’t realized how attached she’d grown to her Sugar Shop products, and how protective of their innocence. The women in the small Midwestern towns she visited appreciated Deedee’s gentle approach. They loved all the delicate frills she was introducing to their sex lives, not just the salves but the peacock-feather applicators; not just the toys but their red velvet pouches trimmed with rabbit fur. She was selling nothing more complex than old-fashioned romance.

  But these women tonight, these artists and business owners, were too smart to be wooed by product names like Orchid Leaf Enlivener and Geisha Jelly. Their mockery was disapproval, plain and simple. They were above being polite.

  “Let’s take a short break, ladies,” Deedee said, then, unconsciously waving a neon-pink dildo in the air, “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” which only provoked more shrieking and mayhem among the dirty-minded lunatics.

  I don’t hate my job, I don’t hate my job, Deedee chanted to herself, swallowing a few herbal relaxants, capsules called Lovey-Doveys (“engineered to provoke supreme and dreamy post-coital echoes”) that she sold in a rosebud-shaped bottle, chasing them down with a shot of Southern Comfort. And she didn’t hate her job, not at all. But under a certain kind of scrutiny, her thriving entrepreneurial scheme displayed all the sordid excess and pandering of spam e-mail promoting penis enlargement and erection sustainer, or of porn shops with their wide-mouthed blow-up dolls suspended from the ceiling and dressed in negligees and rubber strap-ons. Lust had rendered her rich and tawdry in equal amounts.

  Even the cunning Anaïs Nin, the topic of oodles of brainy dissertations, had been unable to escape the stigma of the sex market. She would always be the Queen Slut of twentieth-century literature. But a hint of Nin did dress up a few Sugar Shop products, such as the Anaïs Aphrodisia, a gift package that included aromatherapy candles, canisters of honey-chamomile tea, French perfume, and a copy of Delta of Venus bound in smooth pink calfskin.

  “This crowd makes me feel like Margo LaVortman,” Deedee said in the kitchen, where Ashley sliced up a strawberry tart. Viv was in the kitchen as well, but she had her back to them, hushed, whispering into her cell phone in a huddle against the fridge.

  “Everybody’s having a great time,” Ashley said. Deedee frequently kvetched at La Buvette about Margo LaVortman, the lead seller of a competing adult-novelty party line called Ultra-Lush. Margo LaVortman encouraged bad behavior at her parties, told lewd jokes, worked the crowd like a blue comic in a basement lounge. Brassy and boldly vulgar, her hair teased to the brink and shellacked with Aqua Net, she won over her partygoers with tales of her own oversexed blue-collar trailer-trash existence, though she lived in an ostentatious three-story house in a development so new she had a view of overgrown pastureland. She wore terry-cloth halter tops, and she sold the hell out of products with slam-bang names like Cock Wrangler and Clitty Kicker.

  “Put me down for about a case of that mango-flavored Whimsy Whip,” Viv said, tucking her cell phone into her pocket. Ashley handed her some plates of tart to take out into the living room. “Though I don’t know why. I haven’t had even an ounce of sex in forever.”

  Deedee had begun to follow Viv out of the kitchen, three plates of tart lined up one of her own arms, when she noticed the memo pad on the fridge. The doodling across it, in Viv’s distinctive style, a quick sketch of a sad-eyed man with his short sleeves rolled up ’50s-like, was undoubtedly a portrait of Deedee’s ex-husband. Even if Deedee had not recognized the crazy collision of circles and lines as coming together to form Zeke’s pretty face and furrowed brow, there was the tattoo, on his forearm, of two hearts.

  On their first Valentine’s Day together, they had stopped into a tattoo parlor after peppercorn steak and champagne at the French Café. He’d just started his job as a forensics technician, and a body, the face mauled by pit bulls trained for basement dogfights, had been brought into the morgue, and he’d been distracted by it all through dinner. “This is so you’ll always be able to identify me,” he’d told Deedee as the tattooist worked her needle, “no matter what my face looks like.” Deedee, so in love and so light-headed from champagne, had let out a little whimper.

  Peach

  Peach burrowed beneath the duvet. The Sugar Shop party’s noisy intermission continued in the other room, and as she lay there in the dark, in the just-right bed of her lover and his wife, she realized she longed to be caught. She lay there, her heart racing, having already raided Ashley’s vanity, having rosied her lips with Apple Plush, Ashley’s purply shade of red that often left her lips looking bruised. Peach had liberally sprayed Ashley’s eau de cologne at her pulse points and buffed out a hangnail with Ashley’s orange stick, officially devolving into the worst-case scenario in the book by Sybil the Guru she’d been reading to get to sleep at night: Fairy Tale Endings: The Twenty Types of Bewitching Women Your Husband Might Be Cheating on You With.

  Peach had always known she was no Sleeping Beauty, despite how much she wanted to be the type of mistress who quietly, aloofly, kept the affair confined to her bed. She also knew she was no Snow White, the adulteress who innocently played around, taking many lovers, dwarves or otherwise, while she sought her Prince Charming. But she hadn’t quite pegged herself as Goldilocks, the most undesirable mistress there was. A Goldilocks stole into the lives of others, attempting to usurp and assimilate all at once, leaving evidence of herself all over the place. A Goldilocks wanted all that was best in your life, then when she got it, and when she was discovered, she fled the wreckage.

  That can’t be me, can it? Peach wondered as she sat up in the bed, eating chocolates from the box on Ashley’s nightstand. She put a coconut one back into its wrapper half-bitten. Yes, she certainly wanted Ashley to simply wise up, and she did sometimes picture herself as Troy’s wife, but now that Ashley had been tipped off by Plum’s announcement, now that the jig might almost be up, Peach felt wracked with guilt. Ashley was no villain in Peach’s life. She was just another fragile soul, weak in the knees from the threat of love leaving her.

  Peach stepped over to Troy’s office, a windowless room that had once been a walk-in closet. She pulled the cord to the light bulb and sat at his desk to snoop, bumping her elbow against the computer’s mouse. The psychedelic spinning of the screen saver blinked away, and Peach was faced with the desktop’s wallpaper, an old snapshot of Troy and Ashley and Peyton and Lee, each and every one of them plumped out with baby fat. They were happily squalid and literary, their clothes in rags, their hair uncombed. Troy was all adorable affectation, the bowl of a pipe periscoping up from the pocket of his flannel shirt. A mustache, ungroomed, sat with pretension above his lip.

  Peach opened the top drawer to Troy’s desk, and there, not at all tucked away, was just the kind of evidence a Goldilocks hoped to leave behind—a lurid document, perfect undeniable proof. It was a love letter of sorts, handwritten, full of indiscretion and specificity. And though laid out practically in plain sight, it had yet to cause an ounce of injury.

  Peach remembered one of the few times Troy had taken her someplace in public, a late afternoon early in the affair, in the fall, weeks before the Flirt began to stalk, and she and Troy had split a bottle of pinot at Nicola’s, the restaurant just up Jackson Street from Mermaids Singing. The room was warmly candlelit, with a hush of jazz piped in low, and the other couples at the other tables seemed to be having trysts too, all so quiet and slipped i
nto shadows. To not be overheard, Troy and Peach had their conversation on paper, jotting down their romantic filth in the pages of Troy’s steno pad.

  And here was that secret conversation, on pages torn from the notebook, at the top of a pile of papers in a top drawer, impossibly undiscovered, fractions of an inch from the surface. Had Troy half wanted Ashley to find the notes, for her to see his handwriting taking such shape, his swirling, womanish penmanship spelling out obscenity? And hadn’t Ashley snooped the tiniest bit, even by accident?

  Troy and Ashley would never find each other out, Peach thought. Troy couldn’t bear to utter a discouraging word, and Ashley couldn’t bear to hear it. They would always be the little family in the desktop snapshot, young and hopeful, determined not to be the least bit heartbroken in this life. And Peach knew she would always be nothing more than a poltergeist: a mischievous voice on an intercom and unread words on a page.

  Troy tortured Peach with his refusal to stop loving her. He came to her house, ate her porridge, broke her chair, lingered too long in her bed. He’s the Goldilocks, Peach thought.

  Feeling queasy from the chocolates on Ashley’s nightstand and the toxically alcoholic sangria, Peach dropped into a minor shock. So lost was she, inhaling the cold air of a room long undusted, that she thought the scream coming from the living room might have escaped from her own soft, weak throat.

  Viv

  After letting Yvonne the Yorkie lap at the dripping faucet, Viv stepped from the kitchen to see Mrs. Bloom atop the coffee table. Mrs. Bloom lifted the bottom of her own fiery-red kimono above her waist with one hand, and with her other she pushed down her underwear to expose a crotch nubby from having been shaved and a vagina unfolding with age, the pink grooves of flesh in mid-collapse.

  “See? I’m truly a man,” Mrs. Bloom muttered to all the women who stared in stunned, disturbed silence, “yes, yes, a man,” and Viv, more than a little drunk, almost believed her, Mrs. Bloom’s privates appearing to be only a crude approximation of a woman’s genitalia. Viv couldn’t stop looking, examining, wondering if her own vagina would someday slip-slide away along the fault lines, elderly and maimed.