Dating Without Novocaine by Lisa Cach

worked.” He glanced down at his crotch. “It just didn’t.”
    â€œBut why me?” I asked. I didn’t care what he was going through, I was too busy trying to find sense in a dating world suddenly gone upside down and inside out. “Do I come across as masculine?” I whined.
    â€œI don’t know why you.” He shrugged, and gave his unresponsive weenie a quick rub. “I just liked you. It sounded like we’d have fun together. We did have fun together, didn’t we?”
    â€œI guess.” If you call it that. I tramped through the rain and looked at owl vomit for this?
    â€œI mean, we can still be friends, can’t we? I’m sorry if I hurt you, but it’s really not about you. I’d like to still do things with you.”
    My lips parted, and I stared in incredulity. I was getting the same speech I’d given guys in the past. And it was about me—he’d chosen me, after all—and no, I didn’t want to be his friend. I suddenly realized that the only thing that had kept me interested this long was the challenge of overcoming his passivity.
    Without that challenge, he was just a boring, confused guy with a nice dog.
    And he’d let me fondle his weenie. Thank God I hadn’t put it in my mouth. The thought of where it had been made me ill.
    I stood up and found my coat, feeling a thousand miles from my own movements. “I’ve gotta think about this,” I lied. “I’ll let you know.”
    â€œYou aren’t mad at me, are you?”
    â€œSurprised, is all. I’ll let you know, okay?” I said, incapable of more. I had to get out of there.
    â€œOkay. Call me.”
    Yeah, right.

Eleven
Walking Shoes
    â€œA t least you know now why he was so unsure all the time,” Louise said as we crossed the street from my house to Laurelhurst Park, beginning our Sunday constitutional. The park was wooded with fir at this end, where we poor folk lived. Half a block away on either side, the houses lining the edge of the park were big, old and expensive, with carefully tended yards.
    â€œYeah, he had no clue how he was supposed to behave as a heterosexual. I suppose I should think it funny, how worried he must have been the whole time, that he’d give himself away,” I said, still not thinking it funny. “And no wonder he gave me such a strange look when I made that comment about the elephant clitoris making things easy on a guy. He had no idea what I was talking about.”
    â€œAre you still upset about it?” she asked. “I mean, are you okay with it? That had to be a blow to your ego.”
    â€œI worked out my own form of therapy,” I said, smiling.
    â€œHow’s that?” she asked, curious.
    â€œI made a Voodoo Wade doll.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œVoodoo Wade,” I repeated. “I made a little doll and dressed it like him, and then I hung it by a length of filament in front of the window in my sewing room. He spins in the drafts, sort of like a twisting corpse on a noose.”
    â€œAnd this helps?”
    â€œWell, then I was downtown and got the bright idea to stop in a toy store and look for a slingshot. I couldn’t find one, but I did find a fabulous rubber band gun.”
    â€œDon’t tell me.”
    â€œYup. So whenever I start feeling cranky about Wade’s sexual orientation experiment, I sit on the floor with my gun and shoot him.”
    â€œI love it.”
    â€œIt’s very therapeutic. I do his screams myself, which Cassie finds a bit disturbing. I have to do it quietly at night, or she gets upset.”
    We took one of the paved paths that wound through the interior, past lawns of sloping green.
    â€œAre you going to give up on the Internet dating now?” she asked, sounding a bit like a scolding mother. It was hard to take someone with freckles and curls seriously, though.
    â€œI don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t a