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Sometimes, when Winnie looks around, at the young women who now work in her office, she wonders what happened to the nice girl. (She knows what her assistant would say: “The nice girl is s-o-o-o-o-o over.” Then she would look at Winnie. She wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t have to. Winnie would know what she was thinking: that Winnie was over.) None of the young women are nice girls anymore (and they don’t care). They wear black and flaunt their (ample, sometimes already sagging) bosoms. They wear short skirts. Dresses that look like lingerie. They have tattoos. And piercings. They live downtown in dirty little apartments and have sex a lot and talk to one another about it the next day. No one can say anything to them. Everyone is afraid of sexual harassment.
Sometimes (and Winnie can’t believe this) Winnie is afraid of them. She can’t believe she is already ten years older than they are. She has nothing in common with them. Even when she was ten years younger, she wasn’t like them. She was more ambitious. And more focused. She didn’t use sex to get ahead. (Although she did marry James, which, she has to admit, didn’t exactly hurt her career.) She didn’t come to the office hungover, and she didn’t take drugs. (Last year, one of these young women was caught shooting up heroin in the ladies’ room. She was found nodding out in a stall. By a cleaning lady. The girl was sent to rehab. She wasn’t fired. She couldn’t be. She came back two months later.
Eventually, she was gently moved to another magazine.)
These young women aren’t scared of anything. (They’re hungry. And arrogant. They’ll do anything to get ahead.) Last year, two young women were caught plagiarizing. One of them plagiarized two paragraphs from a piece Winnie had written three years before. When Winnie read it, she felt sick. (She felt violated. By another woman. She couldn’t believe another woman would do this to her. She thought women were supposed to stick together.)
Nothing happened. (Winnie complained. The management said she should be flattered the young woman plagiarized her. It was a compliment.) Eventually the young woman was promoted.
Winnie would like to try to be friends with these young women. But she’s afraid the gulf is too wide. She would like to say, “Hey, when I was young, I was a rebel too.” But she knows they would look at her blankly. (That’s what they always do. To gain control. Stare blankly.) She would like to tell them that when she was a teenager, wanting to move to New York City and do “great things” was considered daring. As was having seven lovers before she met James. (One was a one-night stand. And one was an affair with a professor. Who was twenty years older. He was the first man to perform oral sex on her.) But she won’t tell them. She knows they would laugh. She knows that, by the time they’ve gotten to twenty-five, these young girls have already had a hundred lovers. (And probably a veneral disease. Or an infection. From a piercing or a tattoo.)
On the day of Winnie Dieke’s thirty-eighth birthday, she wakes up and feels depressed.
That afternoon, Winnie does what she has been doing on the afternoon of her birthday for the past ten years: She goes to Elizabeth Arden.
She pampers.
She has her hair highlighted and blown dry. She has a manicure and a facial. She has a bikini wax. (She would never shave down there. Shaving reminds her of what happened when she had the baby. She’s not sure she wants to do that again.)
The bikini wax hurts. She hates it, but she has one every two months. It gives her ingrown hairs, which she sometimes picks at absently with a pair of old tweezers before she gets into bed. (James ignores this. He has gross habits too, like picking his nose while he’s reading and rolling the snot into a little ball and examining it before he flicks it away onto the carpet.) During the bikini wax, Winnie wears paper panties. She has to spread her legs a little (but only a little, she tells herself), and the woman (the facialist) has to touch her a little down there. They both pretend that she isn’t, just as Winnie desperately
tries to pretend that she isn’t thinking about sex. But she always does. She tries not to. She tries not to think about the young women in her office and how they’ve probably had sex with other women as well as men. Tries not to imagine that women know what other women want. They want someone to spread their legs. Instead, Winnie wonders what will happen when she gets gray hairs. Down there. It’s going to happen someday. What will James think?
Does she care?
She and James don’t have sex much anymore. When they do, it’s always the same. He performs oral sex on her. She has an orgasm. They have intercourse. He comes. Winnie has never had an orgasm from “just fucking.” (She doesn’t believe it’s possible. She secretly thinks that women who say they can are faking it.)
After the bikini wax, when the woman leaves the room and Winnie puts on her own underpants (practical black cotton bikinis), she always wants to touch herself down there, but she doesn’t. There are limits to how far she will go. Especially when it comes to being “sexy.” She will not wear lingerie. Overly short skirts. See-through blouses. Or ridiculous shoes.
“What are these, James?” she asks later, standing in the bedroom. The strappy sandal, so delicate it looks like it might break from simply walking across a room, dangles from her finger.
“It’s your birthday present,” James says.
“Why?” Winnie asks.
“You don’t like them,” James says in a hurt voice (knowing it’s the only way he might possibly get out of this horrendous situation he’s created, which he is beginning to enjoy).
“You know I don’t wear shoes like this. I don’t approve of shoes like this,” Winnie says.
“Evie got that assignment from The New York Times,” he says.
“Did Evie pick out these shoes?” Winnie asks.
“It’s disgusting. She got it by sleeping with. . .,” he says, naming the famous journalist Evie picked up at the book party a couple of weeks before. “She says she’s still seeing him.”
Winnie looks at James. When she first met him, she wanted to be him. (Everybody wanted to be James then. He was going to have a big career. The kind of career that Winnie wanted. James was the next best thing.)
“Do you think people still want to be you, James?” she asks. Casually. (He knows that when Winnie asks these questions out of left field she is laying a trap for him. But he’s too weary, and a little hungover, to figure this one out.)
“Why would anybody want to be me?” James asks.
“That’s just what I was wondering,” Winnie says. She carefully packs the sandals back into their box. “This is really a pain, you know,” she says. “I want to return these, but I don’t know when I’m going to have the time.”
“Do it on your lunch hour.”
“I don’t have a lunch hour,” Winnie says. “Not anymore. The magazine is expanding my column. To two pages. So I’m going to be twice as busy.”
“Well, good for you.”
