asking, What was the thing you were afraid you would say?
And all day AK has been saying, Nothing, stop, it’s nothing, just forget it.
And Maggie has been like, Oh no you don’t!
He promised that maybe, someday, he would tell her. And now it’s the New Year. She envisions him at some quiet, adult gathering, his wife drinking merlot with another, similar wife and her teacher having stolen to a corner of the room.
He tells Maggie he’ll tell her when he sees her, but for now, just don’t worry about it. He is drinking liquor. Happy New Year, he says, and he asks if she received a New Year’s kiss, to which she responds, Yes, Melani and Sammy kissed me.
There is a text silence, which she can feel between her ears, so she adds, To be funny!
He writes, That doesn’t count.
The words look strange and Maggie feels she has done something wrong. His superpower is that he can make her feel stupid very fast. It’s not just that he’s older, and her teacher. It’s something else, but it’s also those things.
How about you? Maggie asks.
I’m married, Maggie.
Whatever that means. It could mean a million things. One of those things could be, I am married so we make out all the time and of course when the ball drops I deposit my tongue deep in my chosen one’s throat even if our kids are clawing at our ankles. Or it could mean, I am married and so everything that is sexual between us is clinically dead. It’s hamburger meat at the restaurant where you work. Our passion would not be roused if you stepped on its tail in your prom heels. We pay bills together and occasionally share a late-night talk show, if the mood strikes.
Oh, she writes; then she looks around the room, though she doesn’t necessarily wish for anything to be different at all.
Like any young girl who has a crush on someone older, she doesn’t know what she wants to happen. She doesn’t know if she wants sex or no sex or to undress in her room while he watches from the sidewalk. Mostly she just wants a small suggestion of excitement. An anonymous bouquet left on a doorstep.
Lina
A women’s discussion group meets at Lina’s doctor’s office. Behind the examination rooms, there’s a large, attractive chamber with a long oval mahogany table, and on this late November evening eight women drink chardonnay out of plastic cups and eat cashews and Wheat Thins with roasted red pepper hummus. They range in age from their early thirties to their early sixties. Among them: April, a very pretty schoolteacher with a five-year-old named Tristan; and Cathy, who has been married a few times and has a Dolly Parton effervescence, like nothing can keep her down.
The women come to this country doctor for hormones and for weight loss and lately they all feel different inside their bodies. They say it’s something about the way pants fit, the way fabric hangs from pelvic bones. The weight loss creates space between themselves and the world and the hormones fill up that space with new needs or old ones that have been repurposed.
April has a very good-looking boyfriend. She shows a picture of him to the group, and they all agree that he is handsome. They look at her differently afterward. They look her up and down. She says she and her boyfriend have been together several years, all of them happy.
I have a past, she says, smiling, and my boyfriend’s mother knows it and she never lets me forget that she does. It’s a small town.
There were occasional sexual lulls in the past, but since April has moved in, it’s been oddly, inversely, hotter. Her boyfriend has cuckolding fantasies, she tells the group, shyly at first and then, with the confidence that comes from nods of acceptance, more boldly. While they are making love, he asks her to tell him about big penises she’s ridden.
April says there’s a line she knows not to cross. She can’t make it sound as though any of the penises were bigger than his. She knows not to say names out loud, so that he can’t look on Facebook to see if she remains in touch with any of them. She does not talk about the Italian man named Massi with whom she spent a few glorious weeks in San Sebastián. She doesn’t talk about how it felt staring out a gray stone window while he was entering her from