I suppose this is how the game with Barbie began. Perhaps I asked Iris a question about sex. Or perhaps it was just boredom. Bexley on a sodden spring weekday afternoon was no place to be. We had Barbie dolls by the dozens, not bought by Noni—perish the thought!—but handed down by the friendly parents of older girls who had moved on to other games. Barbie ballerinas and Barbie stewardesses, Barbie nurses and singers and brides. One wore a green sequined sheath that curled up her plastic body like a giant snake. I thought of Barbie’s hard, jutting breasts as some sort of weaponry, torpedoes, perhaps, or small bombs, and the denuded, squared-off space between her legs as a mysterious slot into which a mechanical tab might fit.
For years Barbie was my example of womanhood. Noni was not a woman; she was our mother, too much and too close. Our friends’ mothers were irritated carpoolers, bleary-eyed pancake makers. A quick, dark ride to the movies. A hatted figure clapping lazily at a soccer game. But Barbie wore frilly dresses and pliable plastic heels. Barbie stared dully from blue eyes painted beneath a crescent of long, pretty lashes.
It was Iris who took it upon herself to teach me the mechanics of sex. For this exercise she used the Barbies.
“First they get married, then they do it,” Iris would say.
I dutifully marched Barbie the bride down an imaginary aisle toward our lone Ken. Ken had fewer clothing options than Barbie; his limbs were not as supple.
“Does she have to marry him?” I asked.
Iris shrugged. “That’s usually how it works, but it’s not like there’s a law or anything.”
Iris showed me how to make Barbie have sex missionary style with Ken and I soon extrapolated from her examples. Over time the couplings I conceived grew increasingly complex and difficult to arrange. I might include the adolescent Skipper, for example, or the small, posable figure of Batman’s Robin, though he was burdened with painted-on clothing. I don’t know where this erotic imagining came from. Iris herself was surprisingly conservative.
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” I asked her one afternoon. “Your mom works nights.”
Iris was polishing her nails a brilliant bubblegum pink, and the acetone stench filled the kitchen. This was generally how the afternoons with Iris progressed: I returned from school, she pulled a snack from the refrigerator—salami, cheese, yogurt—and I ate while watching her perform some act of personal decoration. Hair braiding, makeup application.
Now Iris paused in her polishing to consider my question. “Oh,” she sighed, “boyfriends are too much work. All they want is for you to go places with them and put your hand on their you-know-what. It’s disgusting, actually.” She resumed her nail polish with a little shiver.
I was prepubescent, no breasts to speak of, still two years away from pubic hair and a first period, but of course I knew the implication of a you-know-what. Why disgusting? I had never in my life seen pornography or a naked man other than my brother, but I had glimpsed the covers of the girlie magazines displayed on the high shelves at the pharmacy. Once I had spotted the high-school calculus teacher, Mr. Louden, standing at the rack, flipping casually through the pages as though it were his birthright to look at naked women under the pharmacy’s fluorescent glare while the rest of us passed through with our cough-syrup needs and prescriptions for eardrops. I watched as he tilted the magazine, pulled out an oversize page, raised his eyebrows. A small, secret smile.
Years later, after I began The Last Romantic blog, I would remember those magazine covers. They suggested something so alluring, so corrupting that they were safe only on the highest shelf, where children and women could not reach. Female sex appeal was dangerous. Sexual desire something expressible exclusively by men. My friends’ fathers, male teachers, older brothers. All of them, reaching for that high shelf.
Where, I asked myself even then, was my high shelf? And what wonders would I find there?
* * *
With Will gone I searched in earnest for Noni, worrying that she had seen us speaking and that I would be forced to explain. Noni did not recognize boundaries when it came to us, her daughters, our skin problems or boyfriends or job prospects. Her questions were always frank and pointed, designed to elicit answers that contained enough salient information for her to critique. Dodging Noni’s questions had become a sport for my sisters and me, a verbal tennis match with Noni always retaining the serve. I could only imagine what she’d do with Will and the kiss he’d delivered.
But I didn’t need to worry. When I found her, Noni stood alone at the edge of the party, looking out of place but not uneasy in her black cotton dress and chunky hippie necklace. In late middle age, Noni carried a mystical sort of self-possession that set her apart from all the showy money here. She never wore makeup, and had let her hair grow long again, curled and crazy like mine.
“It’s about time,” Noni said as we hugged. “I was thinking you’d forgotten how to get uptown.”
“I’m not that late,” I said, feeling chastised and annoyed and then silly for feeling chastised and annoyed. I was a grown-up. I could come and go as I pleased.
“I was trying to talk wedding details with Sandrine’s mom, but she kept asking me about the feral-cat problem.” Noni rolled her eyes. Sandrine’s mother, Jacinda, bore an eerie resemblance to Iggy Pop: blond and bland, thin as a racing dog. She spent the majority of her time serving on the boards of various charities related to pets. It did not surprise me that she and Noni had trouble communicating.
“What did she say about cats?” I asked, remembering the ones from Caroline’s new house. I had in the end taken them all to a shelter in Queens. My feckless roommates hadn’t wanted a kitten, not even the smallest one with the white-blue eyes, but I had lied to Caroline and told her I’d found homes for them all.
“Apparently it’s a huge problem in the suburbs. All these dirty, skinny cats wandering around. Jacinda wants to tour some pet place when she comes to Bexley.” Noni had invited Sandrine’s parents to stay overnight with her later in the week, a decision she regretted deeply once she learned that Jacinda was gluten-intolerant and abstained completely from alcohol.
For a moment Noni and I stood at the window, gazing out as one by one the streetlights flared on in Central Park. Standing so close to this wall of glass induced in me a sense of vertigo, as though the trees and lights and people moving sludgily along the park path were all traveling toward me, or me toward them. Inside and out, up and down. I closed my eyes and turned away.
“And where is Renee?” Noni said, looking at her watch. “Her shift ended an hour ago.”
“It’ll be a miracle if she makes it,” I said. Renee’s job was demanding, complex, the justification for any number of late arrivals and missed events. I always expected Renee to be engaged in more important work than spending time with us, her family.
“She’ll come,” Noni said. “She promised Joe. Send her one of those phone-message things.”
“Text, Noni. It’s called a text.” I took out my phone and typed, where r u?
“Are you nervous to read your poem?” Noni asked, looking around the room. “This is a big group.”
“A little,” I said. I didn’t tell her that it wasn’t the crowd that worried me, it was the presence of Will, Man #23, and how he might somehow reveal my identity as the Last Romantic here, in front of Noni and my siblings. Probably Noni had never before read a blog, but undoubtedly she had her views on them. Especially a blog about female sexuality researched and written by her youngest daughter.