God Save the Sweet Potato Queens by Jill Conner Browne Page B
Authors: Jill Conner Browne
Tags: Fiction
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away and said, What do you see now? He said that wasn’t real clear either, and again I assured him, she can still see you. For two mutually old people, up close, everything gets soft and blurry around the edges, kind of like being photographed through a cheesecloth filter—it’s actually very flattering. Distance achieves the same effect. The only place we can see well without our glasses is an arm’s length away, and if you light a few candles that looks pretty good, too. So the only way we would consider dating someone significantly younger than ourselves would be if he is legally blind—because we still
feel
terrific.
Everyone is tempted by the allure of youth from time to time, I suppose. A very good friend of ours found herself employing the very cutest little young thing. She guessed he was about thirty-four, which would have been young enough to disqualify him, but it turned out he was only twenty-five. I could see where she was headed from a long way off, and I tried mightily to verbally slap some sense into her before she ended up in court. She would just look me straight in the eye with a face of cherubic innocence and deny, deny, deny. My better instincts, however, told me she was just trying to get me to shut up and quit spoiling her mood, which was nearly euphoric. Then it came to pass that the two of them were off in a foreign land on business, and I could feel the sexual tension building from five thousand miles away. I was firing off e-mails on an hourly basis, desperately trying to save her and her career from certain doom. And then it came to me—sweet inspiration. I received an on-screen instant message from her. The two of them were sitting in the spring sunshine at an outdoor café in Paris, checking their e-mail on their respective laptops. So I sent her a little instant message right back: “So, how is Opie?” She read it, glanced over her screen at her very young companion, and fired back: “YOU BITCH!” And thus was she saved from her own lasciviousness, and just in the nick, too. Since then, the dense hormonal fog has lifted, and she has thanked me often and profusely for giving her the old slap-in-the-face-with-a-wet-squirrel that was necessary to jerk her back from the precipice.
Alas, even I am not immune to the charms of boyhood. Not long ago, as I came racing belatedly to my place on a plane, I discovered that I was seated next to a man who caused me to wonder to myself, “Hmm—just who is this sack of diamonds?” Trenton, age thirty-three and my own personal Opie—he’s just the kind of guy for whom exceptions to the rules should be made. As soon as he gets all his molars, I think it will be okay to start breaking rules with him, unless, of course, he goes blind before then.
10
Marriage—If You Must
O ne of the Queens, Tammy, and I were discussing the seemingly endless problems in relationships—relationships with guys, of course, since we all get along perfectly well with one another. As a matter of fact, the happiest couples we know are either gay men or lesbians. This is discouraging to us since we don’t appear to be about to fall in love with each other. I mean, we think it would have struck us by now if it was going to. It is our apparent misfortune that we like sex with men, and only men, and we like it a whole lot, which means it will be necessary for us to be involved with them, and therein lies the problem. Lately, they all want to marry us.
We spent a substantial portion of our precious youth desiring, achieving, and dissolving marriages. Now we are old and have acquired good sense. After years of trying to have deep, meaningful relationships with men, we find that now we are constantly seeking shallow ones. We used to think of relationships as being some kind of rock, permanent, solid, immutable. And often we were right—except upon close examination, we found that we had somehow become lodged under the rock and it was pretty dark under there. And if you
feel
terrific.
Everyone is tempted by the allure of youth from time to time, I suppose. A very good friend of ours found herself employing the very cutest little young thing. She guessed he was about thirty-four, which would have been young enough to disqualify him, but it turned out he was only twenty-five. I could see where she was headed from a long way off, and I tried mightily to verbally slap some sense into her before she ended up in court. She would just look me straight in the eye with a face of cherubic innocence and deny, deny, deny. My better instincts, however, told me she was just trying to get me to shut up and quit spoiling her mood, which was nearly euphoric. Then it came to pass that the two of them were off in a foreign land on business, and I could feel the sexual tension building from five thousand miles away. I was firing off e-mails on an hourly basis, desperately trying to save her and her career from certain doom. And then it came to me—sweet inspiration. I received an on-screen instant message from her. The two of them were sitting in the spring sunshine at an outdoor café in Paris, checking their e-mail on their respective laptops. So I sent her a little instant message right back: “So, how is Opie?” She read it, glanced over her screen at her very young companion, and fired back: “YOU BITCH!” And thus was she saved from her own lasciviousness, and just in the nick, too. Since then, the dense hormonal fog has lifted, and she has thanked me often and profusely for giving her the old slap-in-the-face-with-a-wet-squirrel that was necessary to jerk her back from the precipice.
Alas, even I am not immune to the charms of boyhood. Not long ago, as I came racing belatedly to my place on a plane, I discovered that I was seated next to a man who caused me to wonder to myself, “Hmm—just who is this sack of diamonds?” Trenton, age thirty-three and my own personal Opie—he’s just the kind of guy for whom exceptions to the rules should be made. As soon as he gets all his molars, I think it will be okay to start breaking rules with him, unless, of course, he goes blind before then.
10
Marriage—If You Must
O ne of the Queens, Tammy, and I were discussing the seemingly endless problems in relationships—relationships with guys, of course, since we all get along perfectly well with one another. As a matter of fact, the happiest couples we know are either gay men or lesbians. This is discouraging to us since we don’t appear to be about to fall in love with each other. I mean, we think it would have struck us by now if it was going to. It is our apparent misfortune that we like sex with men, and only men, and we like it a whole lot, which means it will be necessary for us to be involved with them, and therein lies the problem. Lately, they all want to marry us.
We spent a substantial portion of our precious youth desiring, achieving, and dissolving marriages. Now we are old and have acquired good sense. After years of trying to have deep, meaningful relationships with men, we find that now we are constantly seeking shallow ones. We used to think of relationships as being some kind of rock, permanent, solid, immutable. And often we were right—except upon close examination, we found that we had somehow become lodged under the rock and it was pretty dark under there. And if you
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