Slut Lullabies (8 page)

On the cruise, the Intelligent Woman brings with her Vicodin, Flexiril, and Valium. The Vicodin and Flexiril are for her bladder, which has an ulcer or something like an ulcer that is called Interstitial Cystitis and means her immune system is flawed but nobody knows how. There is no cure. The disease is neither progressive nor terminal. Men rarely get it. Doctors say the condition can be managed through rigorous avoidance of alcohol, all tomato and other citrus products, fermented foods (soy sauce, cheese) and molds (mushrooms, cheese again—she has to avoid cheese twice, though even with her limited math, 2 x 0 still equals zero.) The Intelligent Woman adheres to these rules like a nun, yet her symptoms include urinating as frequently as the pregnant and a burning mock-bladder-infection twenty-four hours a day every day with no end in sight.

You might assume that the Valium is self-explanatory given the Intelligent Woman's predicament. It's not: she is afraid of planes.

The Boyfriend of the Beautiful Woman, unaware that he would break up with her in less than a year, sent her roses every day she was in Ft. Lauderdale. At the time, he thought her more beautiful than any of the Models in
Vogue
. At the time, he was terrified of nothing more than that no matter where she went, every man would want her, and the burden of being so desired would prove too much, just as it had when the Boyfriend had relentlessly pursued and stolen her from Boyfriend Number One who had preceded him. So, every day, he sent roses to the hotel room the Beautiful Woman shared with her two Boyfriend-less Friends. But in his own cheater's heart, he knew that she would stray.

On the cruise, the Intelligent Man and the Macho Man play chess all day. The Intelligent Man wins every game.

The Intelligent Woman was once a Neighborhood Girl. She wore an Italian jacket with her Italian surname printed on the back and encircled with red and green stars. She smoked Newport cigarettes and piled purple eye-shadow up to her dark, heavy brows. Still, none of the Neighborhood Boys wanted to fuck her, because she read too much and said things that made them feel stupid, plus she sounded like an ABC Afterschool Special, going off on preachy riffs about how doing drugs instead of going to school was wrong. She even made fun of the cool words they made up (to the tone of the Pledge of Allegiance) swearing loyalty to the Neighborhood Street Gang.

The Girls on the Corner counseled the Intelligent Neighborhood Girl that she never got a guy because she was fat, so when she was thirteen she became Anorexic and lost thirty pounds quick as that, and—though her hungry breasts immediately and forever ceased all development, remaining forever pubescent—all the Neighborhood Fat Ladies said how much better she looked and how envious they were (they were Uneducated People who did not know what Anorexia was). But the Neighborhood Boys still hated her.

Then they gang-raped another Neighborhood Fat Girl, which went to show that not wanting to fuck the Intelligent Neighborhood Girl had never had anything to do with the width of her ass in the first place.

Imagine that.

On the cruise the Intelligent Woman wanders the ship library and complains that the novels are too mainstream, and then finds one she can tolerate and reads.

The Beautiful Woman does not read. Somehow she made straight A's through high school and college, a feat that required copious amounts of reading. But now that there is nothing she is required to memorize for a test she does not read anymore, and she never will, but you already knew that.

When the Aggressive Woman's Ft. Lauderdale Fling told the Beautiful Woman he had fallen in love with her (in the span of three days), the Beautiful Woman let him kiss her even though he was short and stocky and a Guido who spoke with a New Jersey accent she would recall a decade later when watching
The Sopranos
on HBO. Nobody could fathom why a Beautiful Woman with a Boyfriend who sent roses every day would possibly kiss such a little toad, especially when her Best Friend the Aggressive Woman was so smitten with him, being as she preferred Guidos, for reasons of her own.

The Intelligent Woman and her Friends think, in retrospect, that they understand the Beautiful Woman's motives now. But probably they are wrong. Probably they still don't.

On the cruise, the Intelligent Man and the Macho Man play another round of chess. They speak about their Careers, though their work is not similar and they do not understand what the other does.

The Intelligent Man is an almost-renowned Scientist. The Macho Man is Regional Manager for a Best Buy and has a Company Car. But he is a good sport about losing at chess. And, being a Manager, he is a good listener, or good at pretending he is.

The Intelligent Woman failed both physics and trigonometry in high school because she was busy reading Anaïs Nin and scribbling secret poetry that did not turn out to be Any Good. She does not play chess. When her Husband discusses work too often, she cites his Presbyterian upbringing as though this is self-explanatory and necessarily a flaw.

Whenever the Beautiful Woman takes off her shirt at home, her Husband shouts, Boobies! No matter what else he is doing.

The Beautiful Woman grew up in the suburbs.

Duh!

The suburb in question is in Minnesota, and mostly Anglo-blond. The Beautiful Woman is Jewish and olive-skinned. In high school, she was not considered a Beautiful Woman. She was considered a Stingy Jew. Or a Puerto Rican, because she was so dark. That is what Boyfriend Number One was: Puerto Rican. When they were together, Minnesotans said, Look at the two Wetbacks. The Beautiful Woman loved Boyfriend Number One so fiercely, she wept every time they made love and kept his photo in her bathroom no matter how hysterical it drove her mother. He was the only one who understood.

When she got to college, she dumped him immediately for the first persistent Jew.

The Beautiful Woman told the Aggressive Woman that the kiss didn't mean anything; she was only being polite. She said the Ft. Lauderdale Fling was ugly and the Aggressive Woman could have him, although of course he didn't want her. The Aggressive Woman said, Your beak-nosed Boyfriend is ugly, too! The Beautiful Woman said, Well I don't see anybody sending you roses, so you really have no right to judge.

The Intelligent Woman thought all the men in question were so undesirable it was literally amazing, but she didn't open her mouth because not only was she receiving no roses, she didn't even have a Fling to lose to another woman to begin with. So she kept quiet and flicked ants off the bed in their cheap room.

The Beautiful Woman daydreams about a man who looks deep into her eyes and says her name tenderly while making love. She likes kisses that are not too wet and sloppy. Whenever a man tells her she is pretty, she melts.

The Intelligent Woman has recurrent nightmares of damp, flabby sex with her mother.

Both of the Husbands, asleep and awake, dream about head.

On the cruise, which lasts for five nights, both Couples make love exactly twice, on the same days, at the same times. These are the only times they are not all together.

Afterward, the women tell each other about it in the bathroom and marvel at the coincidence.

Whenever her mouth is not otherwise engaged, the Macho Man likes the Beautiful Woman to talk dirty to him and tell him her fantasies. Though the Macho Man may not think she is smart, she is smart enough to know that he doesn't want to hear: You look into my eyes and tell me how pretty I am and how special and how much you love me and only me and would die without me in your arms. So she says other things, but often he tells her she is repetitive and unimaginative and unconvincing.

And if you think that only fuels the fire of her
actual
fantasy and makes her want to run like hell but instead she goes into the bathroom to shit with bowel-churning anxiety because she knows she never will, well. You would be right.

Both women have TMJ and dentists who pretend not to understand why their jaws never improve. And that is enough of that.

On the beach in Rhodes, the first beach they've been on, about two-thirds of the women actually have on bikini tops, or even one-piece suits. The Intelligent Woman becomes flummoxed. Life is always exceedingly more difficult when choice is involved.

That Fat Neighborhood Girl who was once raped by the Gang Boys (who are now in prison, junkies, piddly runners for the mob, or else ordinary Family Men living in the Old Neighborhood or cheap Chicago suburbs) is now a Fat Counselor. After the rape, during which she was also beaten with a coat hanger and thrown down a flight of stairs, many ladies in the neighborhood came forward to offer alibis for the Gang Rapists. One of the Rapists was the Fat Neighborhood Girl's Boyfriend, and one was a thirty-two-year-old small-time Mafioso who was president of the local school board. The Fat Neighborhood Girl and her Single Mother moved out of the Old Neighborhood down to the South Side, where other Italian people lived but where nobody knew them enough to know they were both Sluts. After they were gone, the Fat Neighborhood Ladies said, She's always been a whore, that mother, and now the daughter is, too, see what you get?

On the South Side, the Fat Neighborhood Girl ate and did not have any more Boyfriends and developed a fascination with
The Omen
movies and had satisfying dreams of being seduced by Satan, while her mother fucked a string of men in the other small bedroom. She also kept in sporadic touch with the Intelligent Woman, who later introduced her to her future husband: a Heavyset Man who is also an Intelligent Man, though less intelligent than the Intelligent Woman's Intelligent Man, and, while also an Academic, less successful, too.

If this were the Fat Counselor's story, the Intelligent Woman would be called the Beautiful Woman, because her hair is wild and curly and she goes barefoot with a toe ring and her toenails are always the color of blood in a vial, and she gets her hands hennaed and has a Miró tattoo in the small of her back and wears size four slinky dresses and takes ballet class (at thirty-one!) and her smile lights up a room.

But the Fat Counselor's not in Greece. She's at home being fat. So you just forget about that.

In Minneapolis, the Sister of the Beautiful Woman lives with a Slacker Boy who looks like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. They are in a band and rarely smile or shower, and though the Band Sister is a Beautiful Woman, too, she hides it under buzzed hair and gaudy makeup and thrift store boy's striped pants until the only thing the Sisters have in common is that once, within a span of two days, each was attacked and bitten by a squirrel.

In different cities, mind you. What are the chances!

The Intelligent Woman, though she has a Ph.D., does not have a real job. Oh, she teaches part-time at a few universities and writes the occasional book review, but the money she makes yearly would barely even cover this cruise.

The Beautiful Woman works bringing coffee to Traveling Sales Reps and arranging flight and hotel accommodations for business trips that do not involve her presence, but that many of the Traveling Sales Reps imagine do.

Though everybody thinks she is a Trophy Wife, the Beautiful Woman doubts the truth of this since the Macho Man does not wish her to have a child. Most Trophy Wives bear Trophy Children, don't they? The Macho Man enjoys driving two cars and owning a lakefront condo; if they had children, the Beautiful Woman might want to quit her job and become a Dead Weight like the Intelligent Woman, and then imagine the bills! What can the Intelligent Man be thinking, letting his Wife get away with that shit?

The Beautiful Woman is less valuable at the moment as a Mother than as a Cash Cow.

The Intelligent Woman and the Intelligent Man are in the process of adopting a Chinese Girl, because Chinese People are usually intelligent and because the Intelligent Woman is Infertile. They are excited about their forthcoming Baby. They are not the kind of people who get hung up on propagating their own genetics when there is a population problem at hand. They are happy for the chance to Do Good. Women who make such a big deal about Infertility are Stupid Dolts with Pointless Lives; Husbands who insist upon their own sperm are Narcissistic Assholes. They, however, are Intelligent People, expecting an Intelligent Baby. They are above bourgeois bullshit like that.

Are they really? Wow.
Are they really
? Hey, what do you want from me? This is what they say when asked.

Back in Madison, Wisconsin, in the private dorm full of out-of-staters like the Intelligent Woman, the Beautiful Woman, and the Aggressive Woman, hostilities brewed. One day, the Intelligent Woman was in the hallway relaying to her Gay Male Friend how the Beautiful Woman had said, Well I don't see anybody buying you roses so you really have no right to judge, and the Beautiful Woman came out of her room and said, Don't you know that I can hear you talking about me? To which the Intelligent Woman said, So what, you said it, didn't you, so why should you care who hears? To which the Beautiful Woman replied, This is none of your business, why don't you stop being such a gossip and butt out? After which the Intelligent Woman warned, You'd better just go back in your room you little suburban twit before I kick your ass.

Whereupon the Gay Male Friend exclaimed, Whoa—you can take the girl out of the neighborhood, but you can't take the neighborhood out of the girl!

To which a year of silence between the Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman was the response.

In the WASP-filled Minnesota suburb where the Jewish Girl and her younger Rebel Sister lived with their Jewish Mother and German Father, the Father was the Sun around which they, female planets, revolved. The Mother was jealous of her Beautiful Daughters, because the Father was obsessed with them and thought of nothing except saving money for their security and making sure they were not hit by cars. The Rebel Sister was tired of having her arm gripped tightly by the Father every time she approached a curb, so she had her head shaved and joined a band and painted vagina-looking abstractions on the walls of her bedroom and wrote beneath them, I am obsessed. The Good Sister got a Puerto Rican Boyfriend and repeatedly injured herself on the gymnastics team. At night in their shared bathroom, the Sisters made fun of their Father and wished that he'd get off their backs—He is
such
a dork, they said, He is so lame.