Elizabeth Mayer
Sex Work, 2013
Call in sick to work. (Conjunctivitis is going around.) Use the last of your three personal days, even though it is only October and flu season has just begun. Tell two friends where you are going. Time, location, what time you will text them after. Walk to the office building downtown, ancient, with curving cornices, a place where founding fathers must have once played out their kinks. Bypass the front desk, as you have been instructed, and take the stairs. Knock at the large white door with the gold nameplate, and, when acknowledged, step inside. Sit where you’re told. Look where you’re told: away. Listen as he tells you the rules. Listen as he explains your renumeration. Listen as he defines his wants. Try to avert your eyes from his high-backed desk chair. Focus on a slim triangle of light falling through a crack in the drawn curtains. Try not to falter when he says go. Go. Go! Spin a homoerotic rape fantasy with your mouth. Imagine into the room a rough-handed lumberjack. Try not to wince at the overwrought cliché. Throw your voice. Do the characters. (This is why the children love it when you read.) Ignore the flapping sound and fierce hand motions coming from his lap. Let your mind wander. Contemplate what a dick Holden Caulfield was for calling his big brother a prostitute just because he wrote screenplays instead of books. Imagine J.D. Salinger alone and drunk in his writing shed ignoring his real-life family for the Glass family. Imagine Cheever drunk in the suburbs writing all those goddamn beautiful stories and still being miserable and hating himself just for being bisexual. Imagine what you could write if you didn’t have to spend all your time working. Listen as the flapping quickens. Reach into your throat for the voice of the lumberjack. Decide against making slapping sound effects, palm on thigh. Bring the story to a crescendo. Listen for his guttural grunt, rodential sigh, an ending. Walk to the desk. Keep your eyes on the carpet. Take the envelope from the desk. Get out. Feel the soft warmth of the sun on your face. Open the envelope and feel the crisp weight of two Ben Franklins. Marvel at what you made in less than an hour, the same amount you make in half a week as a Pre-K instructional aid. A block away, text your two friends. Safe. Done. Buy groceries. Buy toilet paper. Buy a few more days of the internet. Buy a pack of pull-ups for your three-year-old daughter, who still drinks a cup of milk each night before bed (a substitute for your flesh), so that when you and she awake in the morning in the queen bed that you share, your skin will not ache and chafe against rough wet sheets, you will not hurt, neither she nor you, you will be dry, you will be safe, you will be warm and fed.
Reminder
At the dentist, the hygienist, with her purple nitrile gloves and voice like Tree Trunks, runs her finger along the inside of your cheek, across your gumline, palpates the underside of your tongue. She shows you how to massage the space between your teeth with a little rubber pick, says she does it herself while lying in bed, tells you your teeth are a lovely color. All day you run your tongue along the planes of your polished teeth, taste the edge of your lips where she dabbed the toothpaste with such care. At home, no one asks where you have been, so you do not say, but you hold the feeling of the hygienist’s fingers in your mouth a day and a night, three days, a week: as long as you can.
In the morning, you ride the bus. As it jostles over holes in the road, your knees knock against anonymous thighs. You can feel the heat of skin beneath clothes. You can smell the body smells buried beneath the spice of deodorant and the watermelon bubblegum scent of shampoo. You let the back of your hand glance across an arm, feel the stiff cotton of their clothes, imagine the soft flesh beneath. You fold your hands in your lap and stroke one thumb lightly over the other. How easy it would be to slide your palm into the palm of the person beside you. How lovely it would feel to squeeze their hand.
You take a bath. You use the shave gel, even though it isn’t yours. The blue gel turns to foam between your fingertips. It smells like someone else. You shave your left leg but not your right. You shave a section of your left forearm, starting at the wrist and ending midway to your elbow. You release a gob of gel into your palm and rub it between your hands. It feels like velvet. It dissolves in clouds and fogs the lukewarm water until you can no longer see yourself below the surface. After you drain the tub and towel your body dry, you circle the smooth section of your forearm with night cream. It shines in the bare lightbulb light of the bathroom.
Your tongue slides along the inside of your cheek. What memories a mouth holds: the taste of turmeric, the hum of high C, the sandpaper of a stubbled cheek. No one will notice your smooth soft left leg. Already the hairs are pressing through. How long can skin retain the feeling of a touch? You drag your fingernails across your left forearm. Just a little harder and you could draw blood. Just a little further and you could feel it.
Elizabeth Mayer
*Elizabeth Mayer* is a writer, mother, & service-industry worker living in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is the founder and editor of Husk Zine (huskzine.com), a DIY print and digital zine focusing on community-building and connection. Her fiction has appeared in numerous publications. Her story “Mother” was nominated by the editors of Bodega Magazine for a Pushcart Prize, and she was chosen by Emily Nemens as first runner-up for the 2021 Robert Day Fiction Prize. She is the recipient of a New City Arts Initiative SOUP Grant to fund the Charlottesville Zine Fest, a multi-media community engagement project amplifying diverse voices through the creation and celebration of zines. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and received a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Warren Wilson College.