Punishment with Kisses (6 page)

So there I was one night, sitting on the pool house’s Ikea couch, watching Ash and Cynthia getting ready to go out, trying on dress after dress, throwing the discarded ones onto a growing pile of clothing scattered around the floor. Ash probably expected someone else to pick up after her. Maybe someone did. Looking around, I could see that the beer bottles and discarded drug paraphernalia I observed on one of my earlier visits were now nowhere to be found. I wondered if Ash had figured out a way to smuggle one of the maids in to clean the pool house or if one of her would-be lovers did that kind of dirty work. It puzzled me how we could have been raised in the same house and Ash had rich girl entitlement syndrome when I didn’t. Or maybe she just didn’t care. Maybe Ash was willing to live in squalor if no one else picked things up. I certainly didn’t get it. But even as I felt annoyed by Ash’s behavior, I wished somehow I could be included in even more of her world.

In that moment, she and Cynthia looked so happy and carefree, and I knew they were going out someplace exciting. I wanted so much to do something fun for a change, I asked if I could tag along.

“Oh, girl, you wouldn’t last a minute with our crowd.” Ash laughed.

“What do you mean?” I responded. “I’ve been hanging out with your friends for days.”

“That’s not the crowd I’m talking about,” Ash snorted. “Besides, you could
never
keep up with us. You’re still wearing a training bra, aren’t you?”

My face burned and my witty retort died in my throat. The taunt felt needlessly cruel.

I couldn’t keep up with Ash. She was four years older, had a faster engine under the hood, and was probably jacked up with nitrous oxide or whatever the sideshow crowd was pimping their rides with. In comparison, I was an old clunker running on the power of two horses.

If my darling sister hadn’t always tried to hold me back and keep me from having any friends or sharing any fucking experiences, leaving me trapped at home with two people who had come to hate each other, then maybe things could have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t always have come up short. Being held in comparison to Ash was kind of like using the same yardstick for Judy Blume and V. C. Andrews.

I was trapped in this second-class life and secondhand body and Ash didn’t give a shit. She could have totally changed my life, just taking me with her one night and introducing me to the cool people. I’d seen plenty of uncool kids become totally hip just by extension of their cool siblings. I went to school with this one really unattractive chick who all the guys mooned over because somehow her class status made her pretty. Why couldn’t Ash lend me a little of her mojo? Why didn’t she want to spend time with me? How could she be simultaneously full of self-confidence and then act like she was embarrassed to even be seen with me? Could I drag her down by my very presence?

Why did I bother coming home for the summer? I’d deluded myself into thinking we’d spend time together. Why did I imagine a miraculous change to our relationship? After ten years in the cold, what ever made me think Ash would invite me back in? Instead, we’d managed about fifty words since the beginning of the holidays, and that required battling Ash’s fan club just to get close enough to speak.

“I’m not one of your minions, bitch.” I muttered the insult under my breath and stomped off before Ash could see my lower lip trembling and my eye twitching, sure signs I’d be sobbing in a moment. No doubt she and Cynthia would get a laugh out of that.

Unable to reach my room before the dam burst, I stepped into one of our forgotten rooms and flopped down on the shrouded couch, full out sobbing. By the time my sobs had faded into sputtering hiccups, it finally dawned on me that Ash would always see me as a kid. It didn’t matter that I was an adult, that I’d graduated college, that I was past the drinking age and had voted in my first elections. It didn’t matter that I’d had lovers just like her, even though there hadn’t been nearly as many and even though the world didn’t fall at my feet, Ash would never see me as the grown woman I was.

An hour later, when I was all cried out, I slipped out of the room and was on my way to my room when I ran into Tabitha. She seemed so miserable it pulled me from my own dumps, and I actually tried being nice to her by striking up a friendly conversation about the Junior League, a frivolous topic that usually piqued her interest. But not tonight. She cut me off, shut me down.

My efforts to please others continued to go unnoticed. Why did I even bother? If I couldn’t even get a woman I disliked to notice me, had I hit bottom? When would I stop needing others’ approval? What would it take for me to feel like I’m enough just the way I am? Right as I was about to wallow in my own sense of failure, Tabitha offered me a tantalizing morsel.

“Your father’s moving his stuff into one of the guest rooms.” She pointed vaguely toward the west wing of the house.

I wondered what she had done to finally push Father to the point of leaving her. But why would he leave, instead of merely tossing her aside like he usually did with people who disappointed him?

Tabitha was teary eyed but sounded more resolved than I had ever heard, and I noticed a new sense of determination about her.

I wondered if I had misjudged her all these years. I loved Father, but even I could admit that he could be a bit of a chauvinist pig. I was making so much about being an adult, a grown woman, but wasn’t part of that stepping out from under Father’s shadow, being my own person and not just one of Father’s lackeys? If I tried to step outside of myself and look at this objectively, didn’t I have to acknowledge that Father had never seemed entirely kind or charitable to Tabitha? In fact, it was almost as though he had pitted her and Ash against each other in competition—for attention, affection, and just plain one-upmanship—for his own amusement. I could never stand the men who enjoyed dog fights, and I could see now that Father must have been a bastard to live with.

That summer I had been spying non-stop, not just on Ash and her ilk, but on Tabitha and Father, too. Their arguments were vociferous but never logical. I could never grasp what it was they were arguing about. “What happened?” I prodded, sure that Tabitha wouldn’t tell me a thing.

“Megan, I’m not sure I could explain to you what’s going on. More importantly, I think it’s best you not know. Do know I’m not going anywhere.”

What the hell? I was flummoxed by an admission that whatever had transpired was so complex it must be kept secret.

“Is Father leaving?”

“No. Nobody is going anywhere. Now I need to go speak with Ashley.”

Of course she did. I’d noticed that Tabitha preferred to wait until I left before she joined Ash by the pool, bringing her cocktails and drugstore paperbacks like one of her flunky followers. It sickened me to see everyone so excited by Ash, even our parents. But then again, why wouldn’t Tabitha, a woman Ash’s age, want to hang out with Ash and her friends just as much as I did? There was something intoxicating about their endless party world. No doubt Tabitha gleaned from those meandering days that she had married too young, had given up too much of herself, had traded in the fun life for a man who was relatively distant, for life with a family that couldn’t ever allow for the fun in dysfunctional. Maybe now she was going to have her quarter-life crisis and divorce Father.

The idea thrilled me, though I wasn’t sure who I thought it would benefit.

Although I was certain it would be incredibly awkward and uncomfortable, I decided I had to go out and celebrate this new development, even if it meant going alone. Finding courage in having something, anything, change among my dreadful family dynamics, I resolved not only to go out by myself, but to go to a lesbian bar. Where to find one was a whole other story, of course, but I had the Internet on my phone and I was certain it couldn’t be that difficult.

I should say this was not my first foray into a lesbian bar. Once, at college, I followed Terra to a queer dance club in the French Quarter where women danced with women and men danced with men and everyone was having a sweaty, debauched good time. I was starting to think maybe I was gay, not bisexual, not experimental, not a slut like Ash, just a plain old-fashioned lesbian. But the thing was I’d never known how to pick up other women, and I didn’t know what I’d do if someone hit on me. The very thought made me so uncomfortable I could feel the sweat drip down my sides. Like, what if my junior high PE teacher showed up at the bar and tried to take me home? Or the wife of my old soccer coach, or even one of those slutty girls from porno movies? I wouldn’t know what to do with any of those women. I didn’t have a Brazilian wax, and I’d never strapped on a dildo, gone down on a girl, or owned a vibrator. I’d still only kissed two girls in my lifetime, including Terra, who frankly, did all the work in the sack.

Okay, I was in a little better stead now. At least I’d been
watching
the woman-on-woman erotic dance play itself out nearly every single day of the summer to this point, and I had a sense of what fervent sex looked like—from across the room. Surely that would help me in a real life situation where I was one of the players, wouldn’t it? What if Andrea was right and I just sucked as a lover and I would never please another woman? Then where would I turn? Back to Mark and hairy, sweaty, don’t-believe-the-G-spot-exists sex with men? I could actually feel the shudder crawl down my back. Perish the thought!

What I needed was an expert to come show me everything without asking for similar competence in return. I wondered how that worked. Andrea had talked about women who give other women pleasure but don’t seem to want their lovers to reciprocate. I’d checked online for the terminology she used and found there was a whole sub-genre of “stone butch” lesbians who claimed they only derived pleasure from giving it, not receiving it, which sounded like a load of crap to me. But I liked the idea of someone pleasing me without wanting something in return, nonetheless. So I determined I should set out in search of a stone butch of my own.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of the pussy. Okay, a little afraid. I’d read the myths in sociology about the
vagina dentata,
and while I knew my own furry creature wasn’t fanged, how could I be certain that was a universal truth, when so many cultures share these folk tales? Plus the pussy was just such a foreign and strange fruit and nobody had ever done mine justice, so how would I know what constituted “good”?

I wondered about Ash’s lovers. They seemed awfully intent on pleasuring her even when she seemed like the aggressor, the top. Wait, what constituted a bottom, anyway? Was it only the person who got penetrated, the partner not in the leadership role? Or did it change, depending on who was being pleasured and who was doing the pleasuring? Did I need to understand these terms before I set foot in another lesbian nightclub?

I knew if I thought anymore about this, I was going to freak out and chicken out and end up spending another night alone in my room. Talk about pathetic. At least I’d get some research done, maybe answer a few more of my questions before tackling the real thing. Pa-the-tic. Then I figured out exactly what I needed. A shot of liquid courage. And I knew exactly where to find it. The latch on the liquor cabinet in Father’s study had always been a little loose. Ash taught me years ago how to jimmy it open.

I helped myself to a shot of bourbon, and while it was still warming its way down my gullet, I marched back to my room and went online to check out the lesbian bars in Portland and found The Egyptian Club—apparently “affectionately known as the E Room”—on Division. That was a straight shot from the highway, and with a twenty-minute drive I’d have plenty of time along the way to prep. Or panic.

*

“Ash!” I’d been at the club for fifteen minutes, nursing a five-dollar PBR in a velvet pleather booth while 90s music pulsated the walls around me, and I’d already heard that exclamation half a dozen times.

Since when did I look like my sister? Sober, no one had ever mistaken us, but maybe when someone was drunk enough that their ability to discriminate was lost and the world had turned a little blurry, maybe in that situation, I looked like my sister. I decided to level the playing field and over the next five minutes downed a couple more beers so that when the next woman grabbed me, happy to see my sister, I’d be ready to play along. That’d show Ash. I didn’t need to tag around with her when I could
be
her.

“Yeah, baby?” I replied to the next siren call, and a pair of strong hands on my shoulders spun me around.

It made me a little light-headed. I giggled and put my arms out to stabilize myself and found my hands groping a butch-looking Filipino woman with short hair who was towering over me, her freckled face twisted into a glare.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she spat in my face before my smile had a chance to fade. “Haven’t you ruined enough lives?”

I was flummoxed by the allegation and quite honestly terrified. I’d never been in a bar brawl in my life, but I’d heard that fights could break out any minute in dive and dyke establishments, and I wasn’t interested in being thrown through a plate glass window or having a bar stool busted over my head. My one and only fistfight happened my sophomore year of high school when Melissa McMichael sent me across the room with a quick right hook that broke my jaw, which had to be stapled shut for six weeks, during which time I lost all that unsightly baby fat. Come to think of it, without that broken jaw I may never have gotten a prom date. Still, I had no interest in experiencing fisticuffs again.