Good In Bed Part 2

I had slept with four people- three long-term boyfriends and one ill-considered freshman year fling- when Bruce and I hooked up, and I'd fooled around extensively with another half-dozen. I might've been a big girl, but I'd been reading Cosmopolitan since I was thirteen, and I knew my way around the various pieces of equipment. At least I'd never had any complaints.

So I was experienced. And Bruce... wasn't. He'd had a few harsh turn-downs in high school, when he'd had really bad skin, and before he'd discovered that pot and a ponytail could reliably attract a certain kind of girl.

When he'd shown up that first night, with his sleeping bag and his plaid shirt, he wasn't a virgin, but he'd never been in a real relationship, and he'd certainly never been in love. So he was looking for his lady fair, and I, while not averse to stumbling into Mr. Right, was mostly looking for... well, call it affection, attention. Actually, call it s.e.x.

We started off on the couch, sitting side by side. I reached for his hand. It was ice-cold and clammy. And when I casually slung an arm over his shoulder, then eased my thigh against his, I could feel him shaking. Which touched me. I wanted to be gentle with him, I wanted to be kind. I took both of his hands in mine and tugged him off the couch. "Let's lie down," I said.

We walked to my bedroom hand in hand, and he lay on my futon, flat on his back, his eyes wide open and gleaming in the dark, looking a bit like a man in a dentist's chair. I propped myself up on my elbow and let the loose ends of my hair trail gently across his cheek. When I kissed the side of his neck he gasped as if I'd burned him, and when I eased one hand inside his shirt and gently tugged at the hair on his chest, he sighed, "Ah, Cannie," in the tenderest voice I'd ever heard.

But his kisses were horrible, s...o...b..ry things, all bludgeoning tongue and lips that felt as if they were somehow collapsing when they met mine, so that I was left with a choice between teeth and mustache. His hands were stiff and clumsy. "Lie still," I whispered.

"I'm sorry," he whispered back unhappily. "I'm all wrong, aren't I?"

"Shh," I breathed, my lips against his neck once more, the tender skin right where his beard ended. I slid one hand down his chest, lightly feathered it over his crotch. Nothing doing. I pressed my b.r.e.a.s.t.s into his side, kissed his forehead, his eyelids, the tip of his nose, and tried again. Still nothing. Well, this was curious. I decided to show him a trick, to teach him how to make me happy whether he could get hard or not. He moved me enormously, this six-foot-tall guy with a ponytail and a look on his face like I might electrocute him instead of... this. I wrapped both of my legs around one of his, took his hand, and slid it into my panties. His eyes met mine and he smiled when he felt how wet I was. I put his fingers where I needed them, with my hand over his, pressing his fingers against myself, showing him what to do, and I moved against him, letting him feel me sweat and breathe hard and moan when I came. And then I pressed my face into his neck again, and moved my lips up to his ear. "Thank you," I whispered. I tasted salt. Sweat? Tears, maybe? But it was dark, and I didn't look.

We fell asleep in that position: me, wearing just a T-shirt and panties, wrapped around him; him, with only his shirt unb.u.t.toned, only halfway, still in underwear, sweatpants, socks. And when the light crept through my windows, when we opened our eyes and looked at each other, it felt like we had known each other much longer than just one night. As if we could never have been strangers. "Good morning," I whispered.

"You're beautiful," he said.

I decided that I could get used to hearing that in the mornings. Bruce decided that he was in love. We were together for the next three years, and we learned things with each other. Eventually, he told me the whole story, about his limited experience, about always being either drunk or stoned and always very shy, about how he'd been turned down a few times his first year in college and just decided to be patient. "I knew I'd meet the right girl someday," he said, smiling at me, cradling me close. We figured it out- the things he liked, the things I liked, the things we both liked. Some of it was straightforward. Some of it would have been raunchy enough to raise eyebrows even in Moxie, where they ran regular features on new "sizzling s.e.xy secrets!"

But the thing that galled me, that chewed at my heart as I tossed and turned, feeling clammy and cotton-mouthed from the previous night's tequila binge, was the column's t.i.tle. "Good in Bed." It was a lie. It wasn't that he'd been some kind of s.e.xual savant, a boy wonder under the sheets... it was that we had loved each other, once. We'd been good in bed together.

TWO.

I woke up on Sat.u.r.day morning to the sound of the telephone. Three rings, then silence. A ten-second pause, then three more rings, followed by more silence. My mother was not a fan of answering machines, so if she either knew or believed that I was home, she'd just keep calling until I picked up. Resistance was futile.

"This is so obnoxious," I said, in lieu of "h.e.l.lo."

"This would be your mom," said my mother.

"I'm shocked. Could you call me back later? Please? It's very early. I'm very tired."

"Oh, quit whining," she said briskly. "You're just hung over. Pick me up in an hour. We'll go to the cooking demonstration at Reading Terminal."

"No," I said. "Absolutely not." Knowing, even as I said it, that I could protest and complain and come up with seventeen different excuses, and, come noon, I'd still be in the Reading Terminal, cringing as my mother offered a high-volume play-by-play critique of the hapless chef's menu selection and cooking skills.

"Drink some water. Take some aspirin," she said. "I'll see you in an hour."

"Ma, please..."

"I'm a.s.suming you read Bruce's article," she said. My mother is not big on elaborate transitions.

"Yeah," I said, knowing, without having to ask, that she had, too. My sister Lucy, a charter subscriber to Moxie and eager reader of any and all things related to femininity, still had her copy delivered to our house. After last night's door-pounding debacle, I could only a.s.sume that she'd pointed it out to my mother... or that Bruce had. The very thought of that conversation- "I'm just calling to let you know that I had an article published this month and I think Cannie's pretty upset by it"- made me want to hide under the bed. If I could even fit. I didn't want to walk around in a world where Moxie was on the newsstands, in mailboxes. I felt scalded by shame, like I was wearing a gigantic crimson C., like everyone who saw me would know that I was the girl from "Good in Bed," and that I was fat and that I'd dumped some guy who'd tried to understand and love me.

"Well, I know you're upset"

"I'm not upset," I snapped. "I'm fine."

"Oh," she said. This, obviously, was not the response she was expecting. "I thought it was kind of crummy of him."

"He's a crummy guy," I said.

"He wasn't a crummy guy. That's why it was so surprising." I slumped against my pillows. My head hurt. "Are we going to debate his crumminess now?"

"Maybe later," said my mother. "I'll see you soon."

There are two kinds of houses in the neighborhood where I grew up- the ones where the parents stayed married, and the ones where they didn't.

Given only a cursory glance, both kinds of houses look the same- big, rambling, four- and five-bedroom colonials set well back from the sidewalk-less streets, each on an acre of land. Most are painted conservative colors, with contrasting shutters and trim- a slate-gray house with blue shutters, for example, or a pale beige house with a red door. Most have long driveways, done in gravel, and many have in-ground pools out back.

But look closer- or, better yet, stay a while- and you'll start to see the difference.

The divorce houses are the ones where the Chem-Lawn truck doesn't stop anymore, the ones the plowing guy drives past on the mornings after winter storms. Watch, and you'll see either a procession of sullen-faced teenagers, or sometimes even the lady of the house, emerge to do the raking, mowing, shoveling, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, themselves. They're the houses where Mom's Camry or Accord or minivan doesn't get replaced every year, but just keeps getting older and older, and where the second car, if there is one, is more likely some fourth-hand piece of automotive detritus purchased from the Examiner's cla.s.sified ads than the time-honored stripped-down but brand-new Honda Civic or, if the kid's really lucky, Dad's cast-off midlife crisis sports car.

There's no fancy landscaping, no big pool parties in the summer, no construction crews making a racket at seven A.M. adding on that new home office or master bedroom suite. The paint job lasts for four or five years instead of two or three, and is more than a little bit flaky by the time it gets redone.

But mostly, you could tell on Sat.u.r.day mornings, when what my friends and I dubbed the Daddy Parade began. At about ten or eleven o'clock every other Sat.u.r.day, the driveways up and down our street, and the neighboring streets, would fill with the cars of the men who used to live in these big four- and five-bedroom houses. One by one, they'd exit their cars, trudge up the walkways, ring the bells of the homes where they used to sleep, and collect their kids for the weekends. The days, my friends would tell me, would be full of every kind of extravagance- shopping excursions, trips to the mall, the zoo, the circus, lunch out, dinner out, a movie before and after. Anything to keep the time pa.s.sing, to fill the dead minutes between children and parents who suddenly had very little to say to each other once they'd got done either mouthing pleasantries (in the cordial no-fault cases) or spitting vitriol (in the contested cases, where the parents paraded each other's shortcomings and infidelities in front of a judge- and, by extension, in front of a gossipy public, and, eventually, their children as well).

My friends all knew the drill. My brother and sister and I did it a few times in the early days of my parents' split, before my father announced that he wanted to be less like a father, more like an uncle, and that our weekend visits didn't fit in with his vision. Sat.u.r.day nights would be spent on a pullout bed in his condo across town- a small, dusty s.p.a.ce full of too much expensive stereo equipment and top-of-the-line TVs, and either too many pictures of the children, or, eventually, none at all. At my dad's place Lucy and I would huddle on the thin mattress of the pullout couch, feeling the metal frame poke us all night long, while Josh would sleep beside us in a sleeping bag on the floor. Meals would be taken in restaurants exclusively. Few of the newly single dads had the skills to cook, or the desire to learn. Most of them, it turned out, were just waiting for a replacement wife or girlfriend to come along, to stock the refrigerators and have dinner waiting every night.

And on Sunday morning, in time for church or Hebrew school, the parade would begin again, only in reverse: the cars pulling up and disgorging the kids, who'd hustle up the driveway trying not to run or look too relieved, and the fathers trying not to drive away too fast, trying to remember that this was supposed to be a pleasure, not a duty. For two years, three years, four years they'd come. Then they'd vanish- remarried, mostly, or moved away.

It wasn't that bad, really- not third-world bad, not Appalachia bad. There was no physical pain, no real hunger. Even with the drop in the standard of living, the suburbs of Philadelphia were still a d.a.m.n sight better than the way most people in the world- or the country- lived. Even if our cars were older and our vacations less lavish and our in-ground swimming pools less than pristine, we still had cars, and vacations, pools in the backyards, and roofs over our heads.

And the mothers and children learned how to lean on each other. Divorce taught us how to deal with stuff, whether it was reduced circ.u.mstances, or what to say when the Girl Scout leader asked what you'd like to bring to the Father/Daughter banquet. ("A father," was the preferred answer.) My girlfriends and I learned to be flippant and tough, a posse of junior cynics, all before we hit sixteen.

I always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges now that they were gone. I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I'd grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the driveway was as thin as an old man's hair combed across an age-spotted scalp, and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the little toolshed. We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had "cleaned" it by dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind the shed, and leaving them there to rust. "Think of it as found art," my mother had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.

My mother was waiting in the driveway. Like me, she's tall, and heavy (a Larger Woman, I heard Bruce's voice taunt in my head). But whereas I am an hourgla.s.s (an extremely full hourgla.s.s), my mother is shaped like an apple- a round midsection on toned and muscular legs. A former high-school standout in tennis, basketball, and field hockey, and the current star of the Switch Hitters (her inevitable lesbian softball team), Ann Goldblum Shapiro has retained both the carriage and the sensibilities of a onetime jock, a woman who believes there's no problem that can't be solved, and no situation that can't be improved, by a good brisk walk or a few laps in the pool.

She wears her hair short and lets it stay gray and dresses in comfortable clothes in shades of gray and beige and pale pink. Her eyes are the same green as mine, but wider and less anxious, and she smiles a lot. She's the kind of person who's constantly being approached by strangers- for directions, for advice, for honest a.s.sessments of whether bathing suits made the would-be wearer's b.u.t.t look big in the communal dressing room at Loehmann's.

Today, she was dressed for our outing in wide-legged pale pink sweatpants, a blue turtleneck sweater, one of her fourteen pairs of activity-specific sneakers, and a windbreaker accented with a small triangular, rainbow-colored pin. She wore no makeup- she never wore it- and her hair was in its usual air-dried spikes. She looked happy as she climbed into the car. For her, the free cooking demonstrations at Philadelphia's premiere downtown food market c.u.m meeting place were better than standup comedy. They weren't intended to be partic.i.p.atory, but n.o.body bothered to tell her that.

"Subtle," I said, pointing at her pin.

"You like?" she asked, oblivious. "Tanya and I picked them up in New Hope last weekend."

"Did you get me one?" I asked.

"No," she said, refusing to take the bait. "We got you this." She handed me a small rectangle wrapped in purple tissue paper. I unwrapped it at a red light, to find a magnet depicting a cartoon girl with squiggly curled hair and gla.s.ses. "I'm not gay, but my mother is," it read. Perfect.

I fiddled with the radio and kept quiet during the half hour drive back to town. My mother sat quietly beside me, obviously waiting for me to bring up Bruce's latest opus. On the way into the Terminal, in between the vegetable vendor and the fresh fish counter, I finally did.

"Good in bed," I snorted. "Hah!"

My mother gave me a sideways glance. "So I take it he wasn't?"

"I don't want to be having this conversation with you," I grumbled, as we worked our way past the bakeries and the Thai and Mexican food stalls and found seats in front of the demonstration kitchen. The chef- a semiregular I remembered from the Southern Favorites lesson three weeks before- blanched as my mother sat down.

She shrugged at me, and stared at the blackboard. This week it was American Cla.s.sics with Five Easy Ingredients. The chef launched into his spiel. One of his a.s.sistants- a gangly, pimply kid from The Restaurant School- started hacking away at a head of cabbage. "He's going to cut his finger off," my mother predicted.

"Shh!" I said, as the front-row regulars- mostly senior citizens who took these sessions way too seriously- scowled at us.

"Well, he is," said my mother. "He's holding the knife all wrong. Now, getting back to Bruce..."

"I don't want to talk about it," I said. The chef melted a gigantic glob of b.u.t.ter in a pan. Then he added bacon. My mother gasped as if she'd witnessed a beheading, and raised her hand.

"Is there a heart-healthy modification for this recipe?" she inquired. The chef sighed and started talking about olive oil. My mother returned her attention to me. "Forget Bruce," she said. "You can do better."

"Mother!"

"Shh!" hissed the front-row foodies. My mother shook her head. "I can't believe this."

"What?"

"Would you look at the size of that pan? That pan's not big enough." Sure enough, the chef-in-training was cramming way too much imperfectly chopped cabbage into a shallow frying pan. My mother raised her hand. I yanked it down.

"Just let it go."

"How's he going to learn anything if n.o.body tells him when he's making a mistake?" she complained, squinting at the stage. "That's right," agreed the woman sitting next to her.

"And if he's going to dredge the chicken in that flour," my mother continued, "I really think he needs to season it first."

"You ever try cayenne pepper?" asked an elderly man in the row ahead. "Not too much, you understand, but just a pinch gives it a really nice flavor."

"Thyme's nice, too," said my mother.

"Okay, Julia Child." I closed my eyes, slumping lower in my folding chair as the chef moved on to candied sweet potatoes and apple fritters, and my mother continued to quiz him about subst.i.tutions, modifications, techniques that she'd learned in her years as a homemaker, while offering running commentary to the bemus.e.m.e.nt of the people sitting near her and the fury of the entire front row.

Later, over cappuccinos and hot b.u.t.tered pretzels from the Amish pretzel stand, she gave me the speech I was sure she'd been preparing since last night. "I know your feelings are hurt right now," she began. "But there are a lot of guys out there."

"Yeah, right," I muttered, keeping my eyes on my cup.

"Women, too," my mother continued helpfully.

"Ma, how many times do I have to tell you? I'm not a lesbian! I'm not interested."

She shook her head in mock sadness. "I had such high hopes for you," she fake-sighed, and pointed toward one of the fish stalls, where pike and carp were stacked on top of each other, open-mouthed and googly-eyed, their scales gleaming silver under the lights. "This is an object lesson," she said.

"This is a fish stall," I corrected.

"This is telling you that there are plenty of fish in the sea," she said. She walked over and tapped one fingernail on the gla.s.s case. I followed her reluctantly. "You see that?" she said. "Think of each one of those fish as a single guy."

I stared at the fish. The fish, stacked six high on the crushed ice, seemed to gape back. "They have better manners," I observed. "Some of them are probably better conversationalists, too."

"You want fish?" asked a short Asian woman in a floor-length rubber ap.r.o.n. She had a filleting knife in one hand. I thought, briefly, about asking to borrow it, and what it would feel like to gut Bruce. "Good fish," she urged.

"No thanks," I said. My mother led me back to the table.

"You shouldn't be so upset," she said. "That article will be lining birdcages by next month"

"What an uplifting thought to share with a journalist," I said.

"Don't be sarcastic," she said.

"I don't have any other way to be." I sighed.

We sat down again. My mother picked up her coffee cup. "Is it because he got a job at a magazine?" she ventured.

I took a deep breath. "Maybe," I acknowledged. And it was true, seeing Bruce's star rise while mine just stayed in place would have hurt even if his first story hadn't been about me.

"You're doing fine," said my mother. "Your day will come."

"What if it doesn't?" I demanded. "What if I never get another job, or another boyfriend"

My mother waved her hand dismissively, as if this was too silly to even consider.

"But what if I don't?" I asked raggedly. "He's got this column, he's writing a novel"

"He says he's writing a novel," said my mother. "Doesn't mean it's true."

"I'm never going to meet anyone else," I said flatly.

My mother sighed. "You know, I think some of this is my fault," she finally said.

That got my attention.

"When your father used to say things..."

This was definitely a turn I didn't want the conversation to take. "Mom..."

"No, no, Cannie, let me finish." She took a deep breath. "He was awful," she said. "Mean and awful, and I let him get away with way too much, and I let it go on for too long."

"Water under the bridge," I said.

"I'm sorry," said my mother. I had heard her say this before, of course, but it hurt every time, because every time it made me remember just what she was apologizing for, and how bad it had been. "I'm sorry because I know it's what's made you this way."

I stood up, grabbing her cup and mine, our used napkins, the remains of the pretzels, and headed off to find a garbage can. She followed behind me. "Made me how?" I asked.

She thought about it. "Well, you're not great with criticism."