Wetlands (9 page)

So my entire collection of underwear has a brown stain right in the middle. You get used to it after a few years. Do other people have it, too? What girl or woman could I ask? None. It’s always the same. With everything I really want to know.

There are probably other, more hygiene-obsessed, girls who run around their entire lives wearing panty liners to protect their underwear from their own discharges.

But I’m not one of them. I’d rather have everything stained with blood than do that.

Those girls definitely don’t have the nice light-yellow crust in their crotch, either, which during the course of the day gets thicker as it continually gets re-moistened.

Sometimes a bit of the crust will hang like a dreadlock from your pubic hair, spun around the hair like pollen on a bee’s leg by the rubbing motions of walking.

I like to pull this pollen off and eat it. It’s a delicacy.

I just can’t keep my fingers off anything on my body. I find a use for everything. If I notice a booger has slowly hardened in my nose, I have to pick it out.

When I was little I would do this in class. Even today I don’t see anything wrong about someone eating boogers. There’s no way it’s unhealthy. I see people all the time on the highway who, when they think they aren’t being watched, pop a snack from their nose into their mouth.

In school you get teased for it and quickly stop doing it. At some point I quit doing it except at home, either alone or in front of my boyfriend. I thought it was only reasonable. It’s a part of me after all, this habit. But I could see in his eyes that he couldn’t deal with it.

Since then I’ve maintained a second life in the bathroom. Whenever I piss or take a crap, I munch my nose empty of boogers. Creates a liberating sensation in your nose. But that’s not the main reason I do it. If I can grab a dry booger and, by picking it out, manage to set something in motion and pull out a long piece of snot attached to it, it turns me on. Similar to pulling out the hairs stuck in my pussy. Or the crust on a pubic hair. It hurts and it turns me on. And all of it makes its way into my mouth and gets slowly chewed with my front teeth so I can really taste it. I don’t need any tissues. I’m my own garbage disposal. Bodily secretion recycler. I get the same thrill out of cleaning my ears with cotton swabs. Sticking them in a little too deep.

That’s another distinct childhood memory. I’m sitting on the rim of the bathtub and my mother is cleaning my ears with a cotton swab dipped in warm water. A nice, tingling feeling that immediately turns to pain if you go in too far. I’m constantly told that I shouldn’t use cotton swabs because you might pack the earwax in and damage the ear. And that it’s bad to use cotton swabs too often because your
ears will be too clean and the earwax is necessary to protect the inner ear. I don’t care. I don’t do it to clean my ears but to get myself off. More than once a day. Preferably on the toilet.

Back to the hygiene freaks. They throw out the lovely crust with their panty liners each time they go to the bathroom and have to start collecting it all over again from scratch.

And I’m sure these girls never forget they’re about to get their period. Even while in pain in the hospital. The highest imperative in their lives: leave no stains. With me it’s the opposite.

It’s starting to flow, the blood. I knew it. I take the giant Tupperware container off the windowsill, put it on my lap, and root around in it until I’ve found some gauze squares. I estimate them to be about four inches by four inches. I decide to experiment and instead of making a tampon out of toilet paper as usual, I make one out of gauze.

It should be easier, and unlike toilet paper it should be absorbant. We’ll see. I pull out a square and put the container back on the windowsill. I fold one side a little bit so I have a starting point to roll it up. Now it looks like a sausage. Then I fold it over like a horseshoe or a long apple strudel, so it fits in the oven with the thick, folded side shoved as deep in my pussy as possible.

Whenever I can cheat the tampon industry, it makes me feel good.

I smell the finger I used to stuff in my homemade tampon. I can already detect a musty pussy scent.

At one of my numerous brothel visits a hooker told me that some men get off on coming in with their cocks dirty and making a hooker suck them off. She said it was a power game. Those are their least favorite clients, the dirty ones. The purposefully dirty ones. They don’t have anything against inadvertently dirty ones.

I wanted to try that, too. I didn’t wash myself for a long time and then had a hooker go down on me. For me there was nothing different about it from having someone go down on me when I’m clean. Power games aren’t my thing.

What can I do now to divert my attention from my numbing loneliness?

I guess I could try to think of all the useful things I’ve learned over the course of my young life. I can entertain myself well that way—at least for a few minutes.

I once had a really old lover
. I love to say “lover.” It sounds so old-fashioned. Better than “fucker.” He was many, many years older than me. I learned a lot from him. He wanted me to experience everything about male sexuality so that in the future no man could ever pull one over on me. Now I supposedly know a lot about male sexuality, but I don’t know whether all of what I learned applies to all men or only to him. I still have to see. One of his cardinal rules was that you should always stick your finger up a guy’s ass during sex. Makes him come harder. So far I can certainly concur. It’s always a hit. They go wild. But you shouldn’t discuss it with them beforehand or after. Otherwise they’ll worry they’re gay and get all uptight. Just do it and afterward pretend nothing was ever in there.

This older boyfriend also showed me lots of porn films. He thought not only could men learn a lot from them, but women, too. It’s true.

It was in one of those films that I saw a black woman’s pussy for the first time. That’s something. Because they have
dark skin, the interior colors of the pussy really pop when it’s spread open. Much more than with white women, where the contrast isn’t as extreme. Something to do with complementary colors, I think. Pussy-pink next to light-pink skin tone looks a lot more boring than pussy-pink next to dark-brown skin tone. Against dark brown the pussy-pink looks dark-lavender-bluish-red. Swollen and throbbing.

I’m telling you. Complementary colors. Brown skin complements pussy-pink.

It impressed me so much that since then I always put makeup on the inside of my pussy when I have a date to fuck. I use standard makeup that you’d normally put on your face. I have yet to find pussy makeup at the drugstore. A gap in the market.

Like when you’re putting makeup on your eyes, I make it darker the closer you get to the center. I start with light pink and pink tones, lip gloss and eye shadow, and work my way through the folds until I’m right at the entrance to the tunnel, where I use dark red, lavender, and blue. I like to color the brown-pink of the rosette with a few dabs of lipstick, too, rubbing it on with my finger.

It makes the pussy and rosette more dramatic, deeper, more beguiling.

Since I learned that black women have the reddest pussies, I only go to black hookers. There are no other black
women in my world—not in my school, not in my neighborhood. Prostitution is my only chance. I’m sure plenty of men understand my problem.

I had a really bad experience with a white hooker. She had skin as pale as cheese and light-red hair. She was a little chubby and—totally unnecessarily—completely shaved. And I mean everything was bare. Not a single pubic hair anywhere. Her crotch looked like a sculpture of a newborn baby made out of cheese.

I had been looking forward to her tits. From beneath her shirt they made a good impression. Big but still pointing upward. When she undressed and took off her bra, it was a big disappointment. She had big droopy breasts with flat nipples.

Flat nipples are something really bad.

All a nipple is supposed to do is stick out. Flat nipples don’t do that. It’s as if someone had pushed the nipple back into the breast and it stayed there, cowering in fear. Like a little collapsed soufflé.

I thought, well I’m already here and I’m going to have to pay so I might as well close my eyes and go for it. Some of the hookers had told me that men who weren’t happy with their hooker once she got naked just walked back out without paying and picked a different one. I could never do that. I’m too much of a beginner—and too polite.

I would have to tell her to her face that she didn’t look good. I’d rather not. I wouldn’t have the heart.

I convince myself that it’s also an important experience to have sex with someone I find ugly, and immediately I go down on her on the bed.

She puts her hands behind her head and does nothing. I’m doing all the work. I lick her and grind my pussy on her bent knee. I come fast. I’m the queen of grinding. She hasn’t moved an inch the entire time. A very lazy hooker. Didn’t know there was such a thing.

After I’ve come, she starts looking around for something to munch on. Finds something. She knocks back a glass of the expensive champagne I paid for and munches on goldfish crackers. She can’t believe how fast I came and asks whether I’ve ever had anal sex.

I don’t understand why she’s asking. But I answer truthfully and say yes.

“How is it? Doesn’t it hurt?”

What? Who’s the hooker here? I decide that as a young client it’s not my job to explain anal sex to a hooker. I leave. But I pay. I did come, after all, even if the collapsed soufflés were no help at all. It was simple mechanics.

The hookers are always older than me—even the youngest ones. That’s why I always assume they’ve had more experience than me when it comes to sexual experimentation. But that’s not the case. They limit what they do professionally. They’ll say, for instance, no kissing and no anal. So they never learn anything new. I suppose they have their reasons.

Maybe there are a lot of johns who don’t properly prepare the asshole before they fuck it. That can hurt. And guys like that probably pretend not to notice the pain they’re causing, and that makes it hurt even worse.

Depending on how long and thick the cock is that’s supposed to go up there, I like to take plenty of time to stretch it out, or at least have a lot of alcohol or something else numbing.

Anal sex is great—even though sometimes you don’t notice until the next day that you overestimated your ability to stretch.

Overall it was a bad experience with the redhead. Now whenever I see a light-skinned redhead, I chuckle inside and think to myself she’s lazy in bed, has no hair—anywhere, like an alien—eats goldfish and has never had anything up her ass. And her nipples don’t stick out.

My dad, drunk at a party, once said to a redhead friend of my mother’s, “Ginger hair, always moist down there.”

Not at all!

And now, Helen? What are you going to do now? Got a plan?

I could look out the window and ponder nature for a while. It’s summer. The chestnut trees in the hospital yard are in full bloom. Someone—probably a landscaper—has made planters by cutting off the top halves of what look like big, green-plastic trash barrels. If I’m seeing them correctly
from this distance, they’re planted with fuschia and bleeding-heart flowers. Those are my favorites. It sounds so romantic. Bleeding-heart. My father taught me the name. I remember everything my father has taught me. Always. The things my mother’s taught me, not so much. But my father doesn’t try to teach me things as often—maybe that makes the lessons easier to remember. My mother blathers on all day about things I’m supposed to remember. Things she thinks are important for me. Half of it I forget immediately; as for the other half, I purposefully do the opposite. My father teaches me things that are important to him. Everything about plants. He’ll say out of the blue: “Did you know you should dig up dahlias in the fall and let them winter over in the basement? And that you plant them again early in the year in the garden?”

Of course I didn’t know that. But duly noted, now I do. Dad derives great pleasure from knowing so much about the natural world. Mom’s afraid of the natural world and her knowledge of it. She always seems to be fighting against it. She fights against dirt in the household. She fights against various insects. In the garden, too. Fights against bacteria of all kinds. Against sex. Against men and against women. There seems to be nothing my mother isn’t bothered by. She once told me that sex with my father caused her pain. That his penis was too big for her insides. This is not information I wanted to know. Wait, I was actually hoping to focus
on the natural world outside the hospital. That’ll put me in a better mood than pondering sexual intercourse between my parents. Unfortunately, I always picture things in intricate detail. Sometimes the images aren’t very pretty.

Helen, kill these thoughts of yours.

Boredom is creeping back.

Mom always says, “Boring people are bored.”

Oh well. She also says, “We aren’t put on this earth to be happy.”

Not your kids, anyway, mom.

Try again, Helen. If you’re bored, you can always make a date with yourself to look out the window. Good idea. Busy yourself getting to know your environment. No reason to stay fixated on things down below. Now would be a good time.

I snap my head to the side and stare out the window.

Lawn. Trees. Chestnuts. What else? I see a huge staghorn sumac tree. I guess I don’t even have to say it’s big. Staghorn sumac trees are always big. They scare me. My father taught me that, too. To be scared of staghorn sumac trees. They’re not from here. They’re not native. Asian or something. And they grow a lot faster than our trees. When they’re still small—which is the case for only a short period—they send up a long, thin, rubberlike trunk that puts all its energy into gaining height.

That way they overtake all the surrounding plants. Once they’ve exceeded the height of everything around them, they sprout a broad crown over everything else. That kills everything else had been growing beneath it—light no longer gets through, and the roots of the fast-growing staghorn sumac suck up all the water.

But it’s not all bad. Since the trunk shoots up so fast, it’s unstable compared to our trees. Entire branches break off in the slightest breeze. Serves it right. But the branches often hit people who don’t realize they’re standing under an Asian tree unable to withstand wind because it busies itself trying to outpace everything else in terms of height and forgets to build a sturdy base for itself.

I always walk in a wide arc around staghorn sumac trees. I wouldn’t want one of them to become the epitaph on my gravestone.

When I walk the streets, I see staghorn sumacs all over the place. They seem to grow out of every crack in the earth. They propagate like mad. The city government must be constantly removing them—otherwise they would have completely taken over long ago. Sometimes I notice people who have let one grow in their garden after it appeared. They have no one to blame but themselves. Soon it’ll be the only thing in the garden. But I can’t ring all of their doorbells and warn them. That would be too much work. Unfortunately, not
everyone has a father like mine who can teach them such useful things.

The staghorn sumac fronds are big. In the middle a long stem, at the top end a little leaflet like a head, and then a series of very symmetrical lance-shaped leaflets along each side. Left and right, like ribs. I’ll pick out a branch from here and count the leaflets. I’ve got to do something. Twenty-five leaflets on one frond. Eagle-eyed Helen. Not really—like I said, they’re big. Too big. The trunk is smooth and greenish. It looks like uncut brown bread. It feels nice—if you’re brave enough to walk under one and touch it.