Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello Page A

animalistic, like the author of that novel she tried to read once—not at all like the actor who’d starred in the film version, ethereal Daniel Day-Lewis. The Unbearable Lightness of Being . She thinks it’s still hidden under a mattress in her parents’ home, like porn. Annette remembers a scene in the movie where Day-Lewis’s character, Tomas, a doctor by trade, is forced out of his practice by oppressive Communists and has to become a window washer to make a living. Tomas systematically beds the housewives inside the homes whose windows he cleans—including the wife (played by a flat-chested, pug-looking actress) of a high-ranking Communist official. The scene intrigued Annette even before having a window washer of her own to think about, because it showed a man in a chick role—without money or power—using sex the way women had to: as revenge, as an equalizer. Though if she remembers right, Tomas-the-Powerful-Doctor was a player to begin with (easy since every woman wants to fuck a doctor), so maybe she doesn’t get the point at all. Still, it makes her want to ask who ranks higher on the urban food chain: a financially dependent, poorly educated mistress of an influential married man, or a young, blue collar window washer, possibly of foreign descent, who has, regardless of other obvious social deficiencies, a dick?
    She is not Brent’s wife; it is not her apartment; fucking her would offer, in the sad, bottom-line truth of it, no revenge on the alpha males of the world.
    But her square-jawed, secret Tomas knows none of this.

    Once upon a time, Annette and her cousin Nicky were partners in crime. He introduced her to every illicit thing she did; she dated the Mafioso wannabes he traveled with, snorted the coke he sold, hung out at the club where he bounced. Before that, when he was nothing but another punk in the hood, fourteen to her ten, she worshipped him; trailed around behind his fellow gangbangers until the scummier among them, who could not get fourteen-year-old girls to make out with them, would settle for French kissing Annette behind the shelter court in the playground, groping up her shirt for breasts that wouldn’t be there for three years.
    She was prettier than other girls. It was her currency in the neighborhood, where being female or smart or ambitious didn’t count for much, could even be a liability. Guys liked her, and since she was an only child, Nicky was her stand-in brother, protector and pimp in one. He guarded her virginity ruthlessly at first—threatened to smack her around if she drank or got high with anyone but him. But by the time she started high school it was as though his mission was accomplished, and like a hippie dad overeager to relive his own youth, he hastily drew her into his fold as a full initiate. Her school acquaintances amused her with their adolescent antics. By then she was going out with Nicky’s best friend, a nineteen-year-old dealer; she got her coke for free. Even the sex didn’t seem to bother Nicky anymore—when her first lover tired of her, there were a string of others, all stamped with Nicky’s seal of approval, all in the club scene, all small-time aspiring gangsters in an era before The Sopranos made Guidos chic, all with a plethora of drugs and occasional free tickets to Vegas, all with hard, lean bodies and pissed-off pricks and a disgust for the female menstrual cycle that bordered on Hasidic.
    In Nicky’s world, her closest girlfriends were the rotating parade of girls his friends fucked. Women existed only on the fringes. She was really the guys’ mascot; their team whore on a one-at-a-time basis. They trusted her, told her about the break-ins, the occasional shootings. She hid under the bed when somebody came trying to kill Nicky over a deal gone awry. It was a family.
    â€œBlood is thicker than water,” Nicky always used to say. “You’re the only one I can talk