Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes

said, and tried to smile at the guys as they hightailed it out of the store.
    Marc told me that poppers were muscle relaxants and he also told me that Pam didn’t want me to work at Desert Hearts because I didn’t look gay.
    “That’s discrimination,” I said.
    “What are you going to do, call a lawyer?” said Marc.
    “Maybe,” I said.
    “She didn’t really fire you.”
    “True.”
    I worked at Making Love all that week and Eunice worked at Desert Hearts until they found a replacement, Carol, who had a crew cut. Marc said if I was really mad he would cut my hair and lend me some cargo shorts. It was clear to me that I needed a rat tail, and later Danny told me he would pay me a hundred dollars to get a mullet, but Marc thought I needed something more subtle, like a faux hawk.
    But then on her third day, Carol the real lesbian dropped the entire computer on the floor by accident. Somehow Pam didn’t fire her for that, but Carol never showed up to work again. Marc told me that Pam begged Eunice to come back before she decided I would have to work at Desert Hearts again. I was almost sad to leave Making Love because I liked working with everyone there and I liked gay men—when it came to sex toys, they were much more outgoing than lesbians—but I was glad to be by myself and read all of the books, and the new cash register was so easy. I just typed in the prices, and if something wasn’t marked, I made up a price that I thought sounded fair.
    •   •   •
    I asked Chad if he could start sending someone from Making Love to work some of the shifts, like he had originally promised. He did, and I got Sundays off. On those mornings, Danny and I slept in and went and got eggs Benedict and talked about whether we should get a Newfoundland or a mutt. I wanted a little tiny dog that would sit in my lap all the time. I imagined bringing her to the store. I imagined that I owned it and instead of sex toys it sold something else, like maybe cheese, or actually maybe dog toys. Danny wanted a Newfoundland because his family always had Newfoundlands. Those dogs don’t live for very long so his family had had a lot of them, and they were all named Boomer—Boomer the first, Boomer the second, et cetera. Danny could somehow tell them apart, and he choked up at the thought of each one.
    •   •   •
    Now that I was back at Desert Hearts, I realized how different the stores were. At Making Love, the boy toys were front and center—butt toys, cock rings, and what I was sure was more lube than even the city of San Francisco could use. The backdrop was leather accessories, bondage accessories, a sex swing, porn, and in one corner, the lesbian and straight stuff, just in case.
    At Desert Hearts, the space was so small that everything was kind of front and center, but it was the books you saw first. Sometimes people looked at them if they were too nervous to head right for the good stuff, which must have been the books’ purpose, but no one ever bought them.
    I obviously didn’t know what lesbians wanted, but I didn’t think we needed the books to make it a classy place. I thought we should send a more affirming message like,
You don’t have to pretend to look at these books
. If it were up to me, I would have had one shelf around the store, vibrators on one long wall, harnesses on the short wall, and then dildos on the other long wall, and maybe lube by the register. Very minimal and chic. Kind of like a nice jewelry store, but with softer lighting.
    I think I would have done without the sex machine. It was basically a motorized dick and when you plugged it in, the dick flew in and out of the console. It was four hundred dollars and it took up a lot of space on a shelf at the back of the store. On Friday nights drunk women would come in and ask me to turn it on. There was one group that came in almost every week. It was four or five women and they always looked like they had been drinking since noon, and they