by Helene Constant
“What’s that smell?” asked my little darling, wrinkling up her nose as we lay in her teeny tiny bed reading a bed-time story.
“It’s raccoon,” I said, holding up her stuffed raccoon, who was listening to the story with us. “He ate beans for dinner.”
“Oooh, Mom,” she said, holding her nose and inching over toward the wall. “You’re ruining my new sheets.”
As a single Mom, I’ve made many substitutes for missing forms of bodily pleasure. In a few short years my daughter will be carried away from me on a tide of sexual hormones. Then there will be plenty of time to rub furniture polish on my mummified body and advertise in the personals for an archeologist.
If she can see beyond her loss of sex, nice restaurants, dancing, intoxication, and sex, a single Mom can really get into a lot of things. Talking raccoons, bunnies, unicorns, we’ve got ‘em. We’ve got a bear with a pompadour; he looks like Elvis. Our bear tells us that he works as a nurse at the rock and roll hospital playing music to soothe and heal all wounds. There’s nothing wrong with talking to imaginary friends. Most of the men in my life were imaginary friends. Temp agencies do a better job of screening applicants than I used to use for a person with whom I was ready to share the innermost chambers of my, ah, soul.
I’m single again, a euphemism. Other single women answer personal ads. They think love is like a quarter slot machine; they yank the handle all night long, crank, crank. There’s an old Yiddish saying: if you want fresh fish, don’t look in a herring barrel. Here I am, a 50-year-old Dorothy Lamour, my sarong getting a little worn, my tummy jutting out, my breasts dripping like melted ice cream. My friends are worried that I’ll never find my way back to the Holy Land again, where a dove descends, or maybe it’s a duck, and a golden aura surrounds some guy I’ve just met, knighting him and his fleshy sword. Some of my friends have the attitude that if the bus stops you better get on it, even if it’s going nowhere.
But I haven’t given up! I’m going to renew my subscription to happiness; the latest woman’s magazine tells me how easy it is: How To Buy Your Way To Happiness. How To Surgically Alter Your Body into An Object of Value. Famous People Who Aren’t Any Happier.
My girlfriend isn’t happy either but she hasn’t noticed. She’s got the Mercedes, the private school for the kids, and the stable marriage. You go over there to visit and her husband is feverishly applying for their twelfth or thirteenth charge card. She drinks coffee like some people shoot heroin. She says her husband doesn’t respect her, her mother-in-law treats her like dirt, and her church tells her that her inner voices are demonic. For some people a mid-life crisis would be an improvement.
Life takes place largely in the mind. When I was dating my future husband I thought we were writing a love story across eternity. A few years later I realized it wasn’t eternity we were writing on, it was only bedroom sheets and it was a short story. He was a voicemail box for my fantasies.
Now that I’m divorced, I have a real voicemail box, a modem, and a coupon for a free month of email on the world wide web. Men used to be afraid of webs until they wove one of their own where you can use an alias and duck out whenever you want. Like male societies everywhere, the web is more attuned to hunting than to planting seeds.
Men I meet are excited because it’s instant communication, like popping a frozen cube into the microwave and calling it a home-cooked meal. “We could exchange messages three times a day, isn’t that better than writing letters?” demanded one guy I know who hasn’t had three things to say since we met.
Email allows me to avoid being touched by my caller’s voice; talk about safe sex! Computer communication is not about making contact, it’s about fast ejaculation of data. My kind of web would hold me like a hammock, spread out in the sunshine, swinging back and forth slowly with a lemonade and a friend.
I was in Macy’s the other day, gripping my daughter’s hand so she wouldn’t do gymnastics on the escalator. As we descended through the floor I noticed those big wooden blocks that hold the displays. For example, I’m walking past a Superbra display, and am immediately lost in a fantasy of breathless men following me with their hungry eyes, and I never notice that basically I’m seeing a few square inches of elastic, displayed on a large wooden block. I had a euphoric vision. I was sitting in lotus position on one of these big blocks wearing a Superbra. I was the Maidenform woman dreaming that I was enlightened. I had a little smile on my perfect bow-shaped lips and a beam of golden light was coming out of the top of my head. The escalators were radiating around me like spokes of a big wheel, going up to heaven and descending down into hell.
In my vision I knew that the world was an illusion, a play of light and darkness, just like a computer screen. It’s all in letting the data go by. A smile spread over my face as I opened my eyes and stepped down off the escalator.
“Race you to the car,” said my daughter, gaining an unfair advantage in her brand-new sneakers. Puffing, I slid into the car only seconds after she did. “I won,” my daughter announced with authority. I farted sweetly.
