When I entered, I found walls lined with hundreds of toys, everything from banal pocket vibrators to tacky blowup dolls to niche rose quartz anal beads. The shop was called Pleasurable Foundations and was owned by an old woman with crimped hair and silver lipstick and massive breasts she pushed up with a corset worn over her clothes. I bought it at a sex shop on Hawthorn Street a few weeks ago. The dildo is puppet green and smooth as fruit skin. I’m going to use it to show you how to properly put on a condom.” They are watching me reach into my suede bag, expecting a banana, but I’m no amateur. The students stare at me the way young people stare. I say, “Condoms can prevent both pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” My voice bounces along the wall of sunny lab equipment, beakers, bulky microscopes that have been pushed aside in honor of my visit. Though they knew this was coming, young people are always surprised when the adult in the room starts talking latex. “Condoms,” I say to the students, “are very practical.” They blink in surprise. The state hires me to visit high schools and teach our children about body parts and where they go and when they should go there, which is never. I am standing in front of a classroom of students because I am teaching a sex education course. My chic widow’s grief, or the headlining grief of parents. Right now I’m choosing between my future husband being killed by an oncoming train or the classroom of students I’m currently standing in front of. I call it Ethical Quandary, and when I’m doing it I’m deciding people’s lives. Its skin puckers and wilts, reminding me of sex organs. “We will have to rent linens and flatware,” my fiancé is saying. What is easy? What is soft beneath my fingers? What is warm? I chose him the only way I know to choose anything. I chose him when I saw him across a living room filled with smoke and streamers and other people whose names I didn’t know. I think I love this man, this once-upon-a-playwright. These are the kinds of things mothers do to their children when no one is watching. And it means, though he is an accountant now, he still identifies himself to new friends as The Playwright. It means he studied writing in college and once wrote a play that was released in tiny bohemian theaters with leaky ceilings and tip jars. Names manifest, don’t mothers know this? My fiancé’s name means he wears glasses round as clock faces. His mother named him something unusual, something hinting at an intellectual, like Homer or Aldwin or Babel. My fiancé is a tall man with plain features and an eccentric style to counteract this plainness. Worlds exist elsewhere, they just aren’t your worlds. Its tentacles graze the glass and I realize that it must know, must have learned at some point that a barrier doesn’t mean the end. It will be romantic, sophisticated-”Īn immense jelly floats past. The blue-eyed socket fish is staring at me from the bottom of the tank, his two-dimensional pancake body looking like something for my shoe to step in. He decides this at the aquarium, in front of the vampire eel and the blue-eyed socket fish.
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