I got confused this morning. I saw the waves racing the southerly and I saw the clouds tagging along and for a second I thought it was all upside down. Like me. It’s May and it’s cold and I’m wondering when I’ll finally start to equate these gently named feminine months with the cooling and drying and dying of warmth? It’s May and I should be pulling out my summer whites, having them pressed or something, imagining my face atop the charmingly bare wire hanger shoulders of models who make summer look so hot. Like an atheist trying to prove her worth, I want some well-trodden traditional proscriptions. Like this: Puffy vests are so inappropriate before May Day. Or this: Seersucker waits for September. Everyone knows this.
You want exercise five? Of course you do. Because you are a figment and I want this to be the case. You are so well behaved.
This is an excerpt of a work in progress. That means that someday you’ll see this again and it will be much cleaner or possibly completely unidentifiable. The exercise asked us to put five things into the story. There was a knife in a bag, a cruise ship, a disputed bill, and two other things that I can’t remember but they’re in there. PS- If Ernie ever finds this, I hope he knows I miss him, and Andy too.
Naomi’s first real customer announced herself with a gasp and a nervous laugh. She barely entered the door before she turned around and left. Naomi’s second customer was more daring. She rattled the spinning rack of anatomically correct diagrams of the sex organs printed in sepia tones on cardstock. Naomi looked up from her book—Coleridge in honor of a friend who’d died a year before of a heroin overdose, but that’s another story—to find a plump woman squeezed into a dress held over from slimmer times.
“Is this a sex shop?” the customer asked. Half her brow lifted with the end of the question, like she promised to be skeptical of any answer.
Naomi thought of saying no because it was only her third day staffing the store on her own and she still thought the words “sex shop” belonged to the dialect spoken by Jennifer and the gay men who owned the place and not the soft skeptic, or anyone else, or Eddie. Naomi thought, this is my culture, not yours. But this, Naomi thought, was probably why she’d only had one customer in three days.
“Well, we don’t sell sex,” said Naomi, “if that’s what you’re looking for.” She laughed and laughed harder when her second customer laughed too. “Like the name says, I guess. Sex Ed?” It was a question because Naomi wasn’t entirely sure at that point how she could possibly educate anyone about sex with a straight face. She thought of her mom and knew Ruth was the woman for the task. Not her.
“Okay.” The second customer wandered toward the glass case where Naomi’s book now rested with pages floating to attention midway through Kubla Khan. Naomi smoothed the pages down with her palm and dipped her eyes to the text. Jennifer had said to respect the privacy of customers, to let them idle or meander or inspect without judgment. Naomi liked the idea because she’d discovered that she was a nervous hostess when Eddie had invited friends over and Naomi had suffered sore feet after running around the block and the apartment to serve three guys things they didn’t really want.
Naomi’s friend who had died, the part of another story, had been her roommate during her second summer break from college. His name had been Andy and Naomi had discovered in him a boy she could love with a strictly friendly heart. For the first two months of the summer, Andy had worked as a pizza cook at Papa Mio’s. He was expert at throwing dough but then he shifted his dexterity to other tasks and started shooting heroin neatly into his veins. Naomi never knew that he wasn’t throwing dough anymore though she did complain that she missed the leftovers. He’d said the restaurant changed the rules and that he couldn’t bring food home. When she found him snoring through sun-bleached afternoons on the couch, she sometimes tried to wake him and sometimes did not. If he did wake up, she let herself love his blissful smile because it caused dimples to pucker on both cheeks. If he didn’t wake up, she watched him and wondered what could possibly make him so deadly exhausted by two and then she let him be. When she went back to school, she found out that the new roommate also did not try to wake him in the afternoon or in the morning the next day and when another afternoon came, the roommate called an ambulance who didn’t bother to do anything to his body to revive it. Andy’s parents, Naomi learned when she called to apologize, were scheduled to take a cruise in the Caribbean and so the funeral would be held too quickly for Naomi to make it and anyway, they said, it was for family only.
“I’m wondering…” said Naomi’s second customer.
Naomi closed her eyes on Andy’s serene, sun-soaked face and opened them to the woman’s daring stare at the items in the glass case.
“Which one is best?”
Naomi knew from Jennifer that she should never try to objectively rank the sex toys arranged beneath the glass like sleeping fish in an aquarium. Naomi knew that she should now ask questions so the customer could establish the rankings herself.
“It depends,” said Naomi. The power of her perch behind the colorful case fought off the doubt of her inexperience. “Are you looking for personal use or are you willing to share?” Jennifer had said, “keep it light.” Naomi smiled sweetly and thought that her mother would appreciate that all her teeth showed between her lips. Naomi had always been a tight-lipped smiler.
The customer was quick. “Just for me.” Then she said, “ha ha ha” so Naomi laughed genuinely and said, “I know, right?” The customer said, “I’ve never bought something for myself before” so Naomi decided she would tell the truth as well. “You know, I haven’t either.” The second customer, who had dark hair pulled roughly into a loose knot at her neck, looked surprised by the admission and her eyes stopped their brazen inspection of the devices in the case to start their inventory of Naomi. “Yeah,” said Naomi. “But I know which one I want.” This was a lie but Naomi said it as though she was just waiting for that perfect moment, when the money came in, maybe, or when she finally got her own courage to confront the task. The truth was, Naomi had given no thought at all to the function of the vibrators under her book, only to their boisterous, bubble gum colors.
“I like this one,” Naomi said, pointing to an innocuous little bulb the color of sea foam. It was the color and not the mechanics that appealed to her.
“I’m thinking,” said the second customer, “of something with a little more impact.”
Naomi became, in that moment, afraid of getting old. Her second customer looked about as old as her mother, which was not incredibly old since Ruth had become pregnant before Naomi’s dad took her to prom. The marriage had been his first act as a savior, Ruth always said. As a kid, Naomi thought saviors were best avoided if they insisted on doing absurd things like marrying Ruth.
“Okay, then,” said Naomi. She tried to be conspiratorial. Jennifer said that helped. “Maybe this side of the case?”
This was the side of the glass case that made Naomi avert her eyes. This was the side of the case that made her think not of aquariums but terrariums and the marching hairy legs of spiders that dominate them. Naomi had to remove from the glass a calendar and several pieces of strategically placed paper to peer at the goods.
“Yes,” whispered the second customer. “I think I see what I’m looking for.”
“Great.” Naomi was authentically cheery. “Take your time,” she said. From outside, the clatter of construction suddenly amplified or Naomi suddenly heard it because listening to the second customer’s heavy breath made her feel like a voyeur or whatever it is when you listen in to the sounds of sex.
“I’d like to see these two,” said the second customer, pointing at objects that Naomi would classify as tools and not toys. Naomi kept smiling as she opened the case and pointed her fingers blindly until the second customer said, “to the right, yes” and “no, no, yes, that’s the one.” Jennifer had told Naomi to roll out a piece of velvet to protect the glass but Naomi had forgotten this detail until after the tools lay awkwardly on the glass, threatening scratches or worse. Naomi pulled the piece of red velvet from behind the register and spread it out underneath them. She smoothed the creases with her hands and but didn’t let her fingers brush the contours of the larger than life vibrators.
“Ha ha,” said the second customer. “That’s a nice touch.”
Naomi left her in peace with her decision and returned to the poem. She remembered that Andy had once come home from work giddy and she’d thought he was drunk. He’d said, “No, I’m not drunk but I stopped a fight and I feel like superman.” After opening a beer and settling into the same couch where he would soon die, he told the story. Naomi remembered his voice distinctly. It was scratchy and eager.
“I guess the date went bad when the ex- showed up for a slice. I was in the kitchen so I don’t know what all came before but eventually the ex- tried to pay the bill for his old girl and the new man thought this was some attempt to worm his way back in and he said oh no, I don’t think so. The girl was all, oh la la, I can’t help it if he treats me right. And the ex- was all that’s right, sugar. The new man didn’t like any of that so he picked himself up and went chest to chest with the ex-. So the ex- pushes the new man because what else is he gonna do, right? And that’s when Kathy said everyone had to take it outside and then Kathy sent me outside too while she called the police and I wasn’t really sure what I should do but I followed them all into the parking lot and saw the girl pull this giant fucking butcher knife from her handbag. Like it was totally normal to carry a fucking butcher knife in a purse. I mean, it was like Mary Poppins or some shit but evil. So I was like, no. That’s crazy. And I walked over to the three of them and I said, hey there and they sort of looked at me like I was the craziest person on earth, right? And I didn’t know what to say so I sort of rambled. I said, man, this woman’s got a knife, you know? And the woman said, you’re damn straight I got my knife. And then I was like, whoa, she’s got, like, a really big knife. I mean, damn. Did you see that thing? It’s like a knife to de-ball a dinosaur. And then they both sort of stopped and looked at the huge fucking gleaming knife and that’s when they both said, damn. And they both said, de-ball a dinosaur. And then, they totally laughed. And the old girl got all mad and said it’s my knife but they were laughing so hard that she actually slid the knife back into her bag and said, that’s right. And then she said, shit. And then the ex-man walked to his motorcycle shaking his head and saying big ass knife and the new guy said come on with your big ass knife and he got in his car with the girl and that was it. They were gone. And no one died and I was superman and it was fucking awesome.”
Naomi remembered Andy beating his chest and raising his fists in victory. She remembered Andy’s dimples and his sky blue eyes that widened like the sky when he was excited.
“I think I’ll take both,” the second customer said.
“Best choice you can make,” said Naomi, keeping Andy’s eyes in mind while she said the necessary words to the second customer, wrapped the two devices in paper and sealed them in an opaque pink bag. For the rest of that third shift, Naomi read and tried to remember the sound of Andy’s laugh and the bad jokes he told when he drank ninety-nine cent Boone’s Farm and the sound that he made when he snored on the couch. It was the sound of a regular old snore, she thought. It seemed to Naomi that Andy was as far away as he could ever be but he would only get farther.
You said what now?