CHAPTER 5

Writing

Leda got home and threw off her jeans. It was late afternoon, and the sunshine was still brilliant and warming, filtering in through the half-drawn blinds left neglected from morning. She played an Édith Piaf record, and then a song by a band she couldn’t remember the name of. It was something like “Leelong,” but it wasn’t Leelong. She changed into a white tank top and her bad underwear, turned the heat down, stretched out on the floor, and flipped through a magazine. Her bare feet were pressed up against the wall, and she kicked in beat with the music. The magazine article was about fifty ways to please a man in bed. How stupid, she thought. Most of them don’t even know one way to please a woman.

“Try dressing up as a naughty nurse and use a stethoscope to hear your man’s heartbeat pound away!” it read.

Leda imagined that there were many sad women reading this article and doing tentative Google searches for stethoscopes, and perhaps even a few went through with the whole charade. Somewhere in the world right now a woman is holding a stethoscope and a penis at the same time, she thought. She flipped through the rest of the magazine, smelled a perfume sample, and took a quiz entitled: “What Kind of Sexual Warrior Are You?” which yielded the result: “You are fierce and relentless. No man can get out from under you, and that isn’t a bad thing!” Leda wondered who wrote the quiz and how they came up with the criteria for the descriptions. What a depressing job, she thought, but she still appreciated it. It was nice to be a sexual warrior. She could agree that she was fierce and relentless, so much better than “coy and demure,” as another description read. After a while everything was boring in the way it always was, her apartment, sitting around, the magazine, the music, her bare feet pressed up against the wall. She thought back to the train, and the walk home, and the smell of her neighbor’s cooking, something peppery and bright. The day had reminded her of a story she’d thought of writing about cherries. She got out her computer and started typing.

The summer I went from a C cup to a D cup was the best summer of my life. I’d started work at a cherry stand and the long days of sitting, as well as the incremental sugary snacks, had caused me to gain a little over ten pounds. All of July I was in denial but by August I’d started to note the difference, so I’d skip breakfast or walk to work. I never attempted to lose the weight in any significant way, and, in retrospect, there must have been some kind of subconscious attempt on my part to preserve it because as soon as I could no longer wear my smallest clothes I found a certain solace, a liberation in no longer caring. Before that I’d spent so much time and concern over my weight, but the day I switched bras marked a march toward the heaviest and ultimately the freest I would ever be.

Leda sat up and reread what she wrote and thought it was okay but lacked a certain polish. She braided a braid in her hair and looked at her knees. One of them she’d missed when shaving. She’d spend much of her life with unshaven, or nearly unshaven, legs. There would only be two occasions that she’d actually shave in the way she had intended. One was a Wednesday at the age of thirty-seven and one was a Sunday at the age of fourteen. She’d never consider leg hair removal to be a failure of her life, but really it was.

That night she finished her story, ate pizza, and masturbated before bed. She thought of a man tying her up and having sex with her from behind. The man was no one in particular because it wasn’t about him. When she slept she dreamt of fifty ways to cherry, and when she woke up she rewrote the ending to her story twice.