And One Last Thing... by Molly Harper Page B

realized that Mike Terwilliger was just lousy in bed.
    By then, the mere mention that we might need to buy a book or get some counseling sent Mike into a snit that lasted two weeks. It wasn’t his fault that I didn’t respond to him, he said. If I would just relax and give in to some of his naughtier fantasies, I’d be having multiple orgasms in no time. Unfortunately, most of his fantasies weren’t all that naughty. He really thought having sex in our tent on a camping trip was living on the edge.
    I convinced myself my problem was clinical, like I had some nerve endings disconnected somewhere. I even tried talking to my doctor about it, but Dr. Metzger, our general practitioner, had been treating me since I was four and was extremely embarrassed by the conversation. He used some Yahtzee metaphor I didn’t understand, something about scoring combinations and not expecting multiple Yahtzees in the same round, and then quickly left the exam room.
    Of course, my self-diagnosis that I was dead from the waist down changed when I attended Genie Howett’s Pleasure Chest home sales party. Genie, who Mama had always called “fast,” had taken up selling various toys and lubes at home parties for pocket money. She announced this after her husband, Duke, cut up her MasterCard.
    At the time, none of us were sure whether she did it because she enjoyed the work or because she wanted to embarrass Duke into opening another account for her. Three years later she was the regional sex toy queen managing five saleswomen. But this was her first party, a sort of trial run, before she launched herself on the public. While Duke was away on a duck-hunting trip, she invited about a dozen old friends to her house for “tapas, margaritas, and sex swing demonstrations.”
    Mike practically lay across the driveway to keep me from going. He considered the idea of me buying a vibrator a direct insult to his manhood. He seemed to think the other women in the room would know what his “shortcomings” were based on what I bought. He’d almost talked me out of attending - heck, I was almost apologizing for wanting to go - when he said, “You’re not going to go spend my money on that crap.” I don’t know whether it was the tone of his voice or the “my money” part that pissed me off more, but I shoved about two hundred dollars from my mad money jar into my purse and slipped out of the house.
    Imagine sitting in a perfectly respectable living room full of giggling women you’ve known since your Tumble Tots days, drinking from obscene margarita glasses and pretending not to be looking at a hot pink catalog chock-full of things you’ve only seen on the internet. You’re expected to maintain eye contact with a saleswoman as she uses words like “clitoral stimulation” and “nipple tingling.”
    “Now, if you want to know whether a toy is powerful enough for you, touch it to the tip of your nose,” Genie managed to say without any irony. “It’s the most sensitive non-erogenous part of the body.”
    Despite the fact that several women gamely pressed candy-colored small appliances to their faces, I declined. After several seconds of nose-buzzing, Genie laughed and said that putting the toy to the web between your thumb and forefinger worked just as well. Despite their margarita consumption, our embarrassed, red-nosed party compatriots were not amused at Genie’s attempt at breaking the ice, so she started passing stuff around the room to appease the crowd. I was handed something called the Velvet Slide, a small, blue, curved piece of pliable plastic that, frankly, looked like something a naughty dentist might use. I blocked out Genie’s explanation of where exactly I was supposed to use it as the slender body jolted to life. I glanced around, but no one was looking at me. They were fixated on hardware of their own. I pressed the flat tip to the crook of my hand and felt… tingly. A strange, full awareness in my special places. It was