The Last Romantics(45)

But Man #23? The details of our encounter were escaping me. What had I written? As he smiled at me, his green eyes reflected spots of gold. His eyelashes were the same rusty red as his hair.

“It’s great running into you,” I said now to the man. “But I . . . I have a boyfriend, and he’s here, and this is a little awkward.” I flashed him what I hoped was a winning, sincere smile. These days I never hesitated to lie; I’d even stopped recognizing them as lies. They were simply a part of the project, as necessary as my keyboard or computer.

“It’s Will, by the way,” he said. “It’s okay, I forget people’s names all the time. Good luck with that boyfriend.” And Man #23—Will—turned away and disappeared into the crowd.

*

During those first years after the Pause, my siblings were busy with after-school activities and friends and homework, but I was home promptly at two forty-five with nothing to do, no one to play with, and so Noni hired our neighbor, Iris Durant, to look after me. Iris had brown eyes set very close together and a quick, high-pitched laugh. She was eighteen, just graduated from Bexley High with atrocious grades and a disinterested mother. She agreed to take the babysitting job until something better—anything, really—presented itself.

This was in the mid-1980s, the Reagan era of Just Say No and a blond Tipper Gore warning us about the corrupting effect of dirty song lyrics. Since the Pause had ended, I’d become the kid who was always asking questions. Probably this had to do with attention seeking or trying to make sense of Noni’s vivid return. I never asked about anything useful—how does the television operate, say, or why do we catch colds?—but only questions that were elusive and unanswerable and always about people. Why do some people get married and some not? Why do women carry their wallets in handbags and men in pockets? How long can a person go without talking? How long does it take to fall in love?

I suppose this is how the game with Barbie began. Perhaps I asked Iris a question about sex. Or perhaps it was just boredom. Bexley on a sodden spring weekday afternoon was no place to be. We had Barbie dolls by the dozens, not bought by Noni—perish the thought!—but handed down by the friendly parents of older girls who had moved on to other games. Barbie ballerinas and Barbie stewardesses, Barbie nurses and singers and brides. One wore a green sequined sheath that curled up her plastic body like a giant snake. I thought of Barbie’s hard, jutting breasts as some sort of weaponry, torpedoes, perhaps, or small bombs, and the denuded, squared-off space between her legs as a mysterious slot into which a mechanical tab might fit.

For years Barbie was my example of womanhood. Noni was not a woman; she was our mother, too much and too close. Our friends’ mothers were irritated carpoolers, bleary-eyed pancake makers. A quick, dark ride to the movies. A hatted figure clapping lazily at a soccer game. But Barbie wore frilly dresses and pliable plastic heels. Barbie stared dully from blue eyes painted beneath a crescent of long, pretty lashes.

It was Iris who took it upon herself to teach me the mechanics of sex. For this exercise she used the Barbies.

“First they get married, then they do it,” Iris would say.

I dutifully marched Barbie the bride down an imaginary aisle toward our lone Ken. Ken had fewer clothing options than Barbie; his limbs were not as supple.

“Does she have to marry him?” I asked.

Iris shrugged. “That’s usually how it works, but it’s not like there’s a law or anything.”

Iris showed me how to make Barbie have sex missionary style with Ken and I soon extrapolated from her examples. Over time the couplings I conceived grew increasingly complex and difficult to arrange. I might include the adolescent Skipper, for example, or the small, posable figure of Batman’s Robin, though he was burdened with painted-on clothing. I don’t know where this erotic imagining came from. Iris herself was surprisingly conservative.

“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” I asked her one afternoon. “Your mom works nights.”

Iris was polishing her nails a brilliant bubblegum pink, and the acetone stench filled the kitchen. This was generally how the afternoons with Iris progressed: I returned from school, she pulled a snack from the refrigerator—salami, cheese, yogurt—and I ate while watching her perform some act of personal decoration. Hair braiding, makeup application.

Now Iris paused in her polishing to consider my question. “Oh,” she sighed, “boyfriends are too much work. All they want is for you to go places with them and put your hand on their you-know-what. It’s disgusting, actually.” She resumed her nail polish with a little shiver.

I was prepubescent, no breasts to speak of, still two years away from pubic hair and a first period, but of course I knew the implication of a you-know-what. Why disgusting? I had never in my life seen pornography or a naked man other than my brother, but I had glimpsed the covers of the girlie magazines displayed on the high shelves at the pharmacy. Once I had spotted the high-school calculus teacher, Mr. Louden, standing at the rack, flipping casually through the pages as though it were his birthright to look at naked women under the pharmacy’s fluorescent glare while the rest of us passed through with our cough-syrup needs and prescriptions for eardrops. I watched as he tilted the magazine, pulled out an oversize page, raised his eyebrows. A small, secret smile.

Years later, after I began The Last Romantic blog, I would remember those magazine covers. They suggested something so alluring, so corrupting that they were safe only on the highest shelf, where children and women could not reach. Female sex appeal was dangerous. Sexual desire something expressible exclusively by men. My friends’ fathers, male teachers, older brothers. All of them, reaching for that high shelf.