other women must envy me for being so wanted.
By him.
What I’m not imagining is his gigantic boner. Is that really his dick on my thigh ? How big is that thing, anyway?
We make out for the next hour—in the Baja Fresh line, while waiting for the food, during the meal, after the meal, and again once we get back to my car—which is all the time I have before I am scheduled to report to my TV news job.
The station is located just two blocks down Sunset Boulevard, so I stagger into work, drunk on adrenaline, oxytocin, and dopamine. I sit at my desk, struggling to write much in the way of TV news. I’m too gone even to tell Lisa to start shopping for a dress for the wedding.
This guy is going to be my next boyfriend.
YVONNE IS, APPARENTLY, going to be my next mom. No one has told her that I don’t want a new mom—I liked my last mom just fine—and that even if I did want a new mom, I could certainly find someone with more qualifications than being my dad’s chain-smoking girlfriend.
Yvonne also doesn’t know that I phased out the position of My Mom the day I left the Ericsons, and I see no reason to tell her, because actually, I really like her. She’s beautiful in a fierce Joan Crawford kind of way, with thick shoulder-length hair and wide-set eyes the color of the Swedish flag. She smokes Parliament cigarettes, thirty a day, swears whenever she wants to, and has a whole drawer full of sparkly cocktail rings. Even though she’s always saying her hips are too wide and her ass is too flat, the truth is she’s utterly glam and by pretty much any measure a total knockout.
And her house—her house is a seventies wet dream. Every room has its own custom wallpaper, “Special-ordered from Chicago,” she says, and you can tell that’s true because it’s not like anything anybody has in the Ericson’s neighborhood. (Nobody has anything like it in this area either, for that matter.) The living room walls are covered in a pattern of bluish-gray oversize fleurs-de-lys wallpaper—made all the more awesome because it’s both mirrored and flocked.
The rest of the décor is straight out of American Gangster: a giant chrome Arco lamp shrugged sexily over the sleek maroon sofa like a studly guy moving in for the kill, and a pair of sumptuous almond-milk love seats separated by a coffee table wearing a glass top almost two inches thick.
It’s tight.
But even without the house, I’d like Yvonne. She’s like a really cool aunt who lets you ride in the front seat and drink soda at every meal. The one whose house you would run away to if your own parents got too parental on you.
When she’s good, Yvonne is the most fun grown-up I’ve ever met—even more fun than my dad because she’s a girl, which means she talks a lot more and the stuff she talks about is more interesting to me. Her kind of fun is very similar to my kind of fun—for example, she has a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , including the yearbooks.
That’s major fun.
Our dining room is lined with shelves of books on every subject—philosophy, psychology, Eastern religion, art, music, and biographies. There are hardcovers of great contemporary literature: a Philip Roth, say, and Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe. But others are decidedly more grocery-store checkout line: Robin Cook, V. C. Andrews, and Stephen King. (There was even a romance novel phase—which lasted about as long as the vegetarianism.) And when I feel like putting a couple of notches on my “she’s so mature for her age” belt, I can always find a Looking for Mr. Goodbar or pick up a Cosmopolitan magazine.
Yvonne is wicked smart. Worldly. Sophisticated, even, certainly by Minnesota standards. She is like a Pentium chip in a world of 256 megabytes. Moving in with her is like going to Yvonne School, a cross between a Chinese reeducation camp and one of those reality shows where they take someone from one world, like a Lutheran minister’s family, and
By him.
What I’m not imagining is his gigantic boner. Is that really his dick on my thigh ? How big is that thing, anyway?
We make out for the next hour—in the Baja Fresh line, while waiting for the food, during the meal, after the meal, and again once we get back to my car—which is all the time I have before I am scheduled to report to my TV news job.
The station is located just two blocks down Sunset Boulevard, so I stagger into work, drunk on adrenaline, oxytocin, and dopamine. I sit at my desk, struggling to write much in the way of TV news. I’m too gone even to tell Lisa to start shopping for a dress for the wedding.
This guy is going to be my next boyfriend.
YVONNE IS, APPARENTLY, going to be my next mom. No one has told her that I don’t want a new mom—I liked my last mom just fine—and that even if I did want a new mom, I could certainly find someone with more qualifications than being my dad’s chain-smoking girlfriend.
Yvonne also doesn’t know that I phased out the position of My Mom the day I left the Ericsons, and I see no reason to tell her, because actually, I really like her. She’s beautiful in a fierce Joan Crawford kind of way, with thick shoulder-length hair and wide-set eyes the color of the Swedish flag. She smokes Parliament cigarettes, thirty a day, swears whenever she wants to, and has a whole drawer full of sparkly cocktail rings. Even though she’s always saying her hips are too wide and her ass is too flat, the truth is she’s utterly glam and by pretty much any measure a total knockout.
And her house—her house is a seventies wet dream. Every room has its own custom wallpaper, “Special-ordered from Chicago,” she says, and you can tell that’s true because it’s not like anything anybody has in the Ericson’s neighborhood. (Nobody has anything like it in this area either, for that matter.) The living room walls are covered in a pattern of bluish-gray oversize fleurs-de-lys wallpaper—made all the more awesome because it’s both mirrored and flocked.
The rest of the décor is straight out of American Gangster: a giant chrome Arco lamp shrugged sexily over the sleek maroon sofa like a studly guy moving in for the kill, and a pair of sumptuous almond-milk love seats separated by a coffee table wearing a glass top almost two inches thick.
It’s tight.
But even without the house, I’d like Yvonne. She’s like a really cool aunt who lets you ride in the front seat and drink soda at every meal. The one whose house you would run away to if your own parents got too parental on you.
When she’s good, Yvonne is the most fun grown-up I’ve ever met—even more fun than my dad because she’s a girl, which means she talks a lot more and the stuff she talks about is more interesting to me. Her kind of fun is very similar to my kind of fun—for example, she has a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , including the yearbooks.
That’s major fun.
Our dining room is lined with shelves of books on every subject—philosophy, psychology, Eastern religion, art, music, and biographies. There are hardcovers of great contemporary literature: a Philip Roth, say, and Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe. But others are decidedly more grocery-store checkout line: Robin Cook, V. C. Andrews, and Stephen King. (There was even a romance novel phase—which lasted about as long as the vegetarianism.) And when I feel like putting a couple of notches on my “she’s so mature for her age” belt, I can always find a Looking for Mr. Goodbar or pick up a Cosmopolitan magazine.
Yvonne is wicked smart. Worldly. Sophisticated, even, certainly by Minnesota standards. She is like a Pentium chip in a world of 256 megabytes. Moving in with her is like going to Yvonne School, a cross between a Chinese reeducation camp and one of those reality shows where they take someone from one world, like a Lutheran minister’s family, and
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