No One Is Talking About This (18)
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The more closely we could associate a diet with cavemen, the more we loved it. Cavemen were not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves. A caveman knew what he was; the adjective was a sheltering stone curve over his head. A man alone under the sky had no idea.
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“Have you heard from lately?” her mother asked on the phone, and invoked the specter of a classmate who had escaped, who was nowhere to be found in any of the places where you typed in names. Her job was so legitimate that it seemed like a reproach: Aerospace Engineer. Had she, through her goodness and unswerving concentration, broken off into one of the better timelines? Every few years she typed in the name and called up only the same unresolving pictures of the girl she had known, posing next to a machine that had carried her somewhere other than into the future, her familiar flesh still partially made from those orders of cheese fries they used to share in high school.
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Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something, hadn’t it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet. Polishing your teeth with lead. It was so easy to believe you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist-trainers of your own time, while looking back with tremendous pity to women of the past in their whalebones; that you took the longest strides your body was capable of, while women of the past limped forward on broken arches.
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YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY, her phone announced, and played a slideshow of her trying to get a good picture of her butt in a hotel bathroom, at one point lifting up her leg and balancing it on the towel rack in order to get a better highlight on her left glute. She had shrieked when she realized the towel rack was heated, and accidentally took a photo of herself as she toppled sideways, with the sullen comet of her least photogenic orifice in full view. “I’ll want them after I have kids,” she heard her sister saying. “I’ll want them in fifty years, when I’m old”—in the nursing home, on an ice floe, looking back to herself as she really was.
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Sup
hoor
her little brother texted her. Why were we talking like this?!
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The first boy who had ever called her a bitch was now in jail for possession of child pornography, and this felt like a metaphor for the modern discourse. But the modern discourse, too, was his mother moaning after a single glass of red wine, “I know that he’ll have to go to hell, but still he’s my son” and “What did we do? What did we do? What did we do! What did we do!”
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In other cities there were people who seemed to cherish her, perhaps because their minds had floated into her voice for a minute and then their mouths had widened like an animal’s into automatic happiness, Can a dog be twins? Sometimes a man knelt down in front of her and took her very tenderly by the wrist, or a woman brought her a realistic rubber tarantula, or a girl heard her coughing and ran back to her apartment to fetch prescription cough syrup. On those days every step she took was over a threshold into a home that wanted her. It wasn’t right, really, that she should have that when other people didn’t. In fact it was:
Sad!
Sad!
Sad!
Sad!
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“Got a foot fetish, Sam?” she asked the windburned Indiana man who had complimented her too lavishly on her black ankle boots.
“Yes, ma’am, I do,” he answered, holding all his happiness in his face, aware of his own luck, for bare toes in springtime and summer were everywhere, arches, ankles, soles.
“And whose feet are you into?”
“The feet of my wife, ma’am. Those are the feet that I love.” This was said with a rosy nuance of admonishment. She was touched and put her pen to her lips. There were still gentlemen in the world.
“You might think I’m a little bit of a pervert . . .” he began, not wanting to be misunderstood, but she cut him off.
“I don’t think you’re a pervert at all, Sam. If you were a member of my generation you would cum in a special jar over a period of months and then post pictures of the jar online. A foot fetish . . .” She took a deep breath. “A foot fetish is like a beautiful meadow in comparison. A foot fetish is Pachelbel’s Canon.”
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Actually, she knew all about foot fetishes because a celebrity foot fetishist had once slid into her private messages and asked to buy a pair of her used sneakers for $300. She considered the proposition and then sent an old pair of Converse to him, taking secret pleasure in the fact that they wouldn’t smell like anything, because she hardly ever moved.
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Report: Man’s rectum fell out after he played phone games on the toilet for 30 minutes