As panic injects adrenaline into his veins, he hears footsteps: Candice is walking down the hall in his direction, talking into her phone.
“No, I mean, she locks it. Honest to God, locks it. It’s like I’m not even a person in this house anymore, you know?”
Andy gropes wildly about him, finds something soft and cotton, gives a few vigorous wipes across his bum, and yanks up his pants.
“I mean, it’s so totally unfair. What am I supposed to do, go around — oh, my God, what is that stink? What? Just wait a minute. No, just wait a minute.”
Andy freezes in terror, margarine tub of stool cooling in his palm, eyes transfixed on the knob just visible from the light under the door. The knob turns.
In a blinding, horrifying flash, he realizes the flaw in his plan: the door locks only from the outside. Somehow his distracted mind overlooked this simple, devastating fact. His whole clever scheme shatters as Candice wrenches the door open.
He screams. Candice screams. He bursts into tears and darts by her.
Candice spies the poop-smeared towel. “Oh, my God! Andrew Morton, did you shit in the closet? I don’t believe this! Mother! Mother! I do not believe this! Gloria? Guess what? My moronic little brother just shit in the closet! Yes! No, I’m not! Mother! Look, I gotta go. I can’t handle this. No, forget it. Bye.”
From where she hovers over a pan of frying mushrooms, gently sprinkling garlic powder onto their golden backs, Karen winces. What now? What, oh, what now?
Sputtering and crying, Andy stumbles into the kitchen, fumbles with the back door handle, and flings himself outside.
“Candice!” Karen cries in alarm. “What did you do to your brother?”
“What did I do? What did I do? For Christ’s sake, Mom, he just shit in the closet!” Red-faced, Candice marches into the kitchen, waving her cordless phone in the direction of the hall.
Karen grips the serving spoon beside the stove. “Don’t swear, please.”
“Jesus, Mom, are you deaf? Don’t you care that your precious son just shit in the closet?”
“I said don’t swear!” Karen lashes out without thought. The serving spoon makes a wet, slapping noise as it strikes Candice’s cheek. It leaves behind a smear of brown mushroom juice. Karen stares at the mark in horror — she doesn’t believe in spanking, has never struck her children in her life.
Candice stands still for all of three seconds, then bursts into tears. “I’m sick of living here! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” She hurls the phone to the floor. The plastic battery cover flies off and hits the fridge. “And I hate you!” She storms from the kitchen.
Karen waits — one, two, three, four, wham! The whole house shudders as Candice slams her bedroom door shut.
Swallowing, Karen places the serving spoon on the stove, then switches off the mushrooms and moves the cast-iron pan from the burner. She takes a slow, deep breath, turns around, picks the cordless phone off the floor, and retrieves the plastic backing. One of the little tabs that snaps it into place is missing. She puts both the plastic backing and the phone on the counter and leaves the kitchen.
As she walks down the hall and passes the bathroom, the microwave beeps. The butternut squash is ready.
Why? she wonders as the smell of stool grows stronger the closer she draws to the closet. My dear sweet Andy, why?
Karen leans on the closet door and stares at the pink cotton towel on the floor. Streaks of brown slick its fuzz like oil on cat’s fur. Moving methodically, she picks it up by one unsullied corner and carries it to the battered metal garbage can squatting at the back of the kitchen, adjacent to the teahouse.
Then she scrubs her hands with Pear’s Transparent Soap, goes into her bedroom, and masturbates.
When Karen masturbates, this is what she does.
She chooses a carrot, an organic one, from within a cello bag in her fridge. The carrot must not be too slim at the tapered end, or it will break off during its employment (she has learned this through experience, and there is nothing so sensuously dampening as poking around in one’s vagina in search of a lost carrot end).
Chosen carrot is then peeled and both ends are chopped off, being that the tapered end occasionally has wispy filaments attached to it and the blunt end is far too reminiscent of manure and farmers’ Wellington boots.
Thus amputated and denuded, the carrot is placed in the microwave for twenty-six seconds. This takes the refrigerator chill off the vegetable and endows it with a stimulating heat. Occasionally, the tapered end will sizzle at this point, sometimes steam. If in the correct mood, Karen likes to imagine the carrot is protesting, weeping like a virgin, and that she will ignore its feeble cries and thrust it into herself with a dominance that will silence it.
Into the bedroom Karen goes. She closes the drapes. She kicks off her sandals and socks and moves the full-length bedroom mirror (the same that has been in her possession since she was seven) in front of the bed. Then she lifts her cotton skirt up, pulls her panties down to her ankles, and half lies, half sits on the edge of the bed.
Her knees flop to either side, thighs spread. Exposed to the mirror, she slowly, soothingly, begins rubbing the warmed, peeled organic carrot over the fleshy pink bud that brings her such release, such frustration, and such despair. After a few languorous rubs, the carrot is inserted. Karen’s stomach muscles strain, far more so than they ever do while sweating through sit-ups in front of Susan Powter’s fitness videos.
Eyes fixed on the mirror image of the lodged carrot, her right hand comes into play. And mouth. Hand to mouth, to wet the fingers, to make them slippery. Hand to pink bud. Fingers moving fast, face the apoplectic red of an infant freshly squeezed from the womb. Such desperation written on her contorted face, such need. No, don’t look at the face — concentrate on the carrot, the sensations, the fingers.
Her fingers strum fast and hard against her clitoris, battering the tiny protuberance until it swells and hardens. When climax comes, her legs stiffen. She doesn’t cry out, not in pleasure. She chokes, a dry, despairing sound. Occasionally, if she’s in that frame of mind, she will laugh for the joy of having independently brought herself to this pinnacle of self-indulgence, laugh for the sheer ridiculousness of her situation. But the laugh is always brief.
The carrot is withdrawn, panties tossed into the laundry basket (it is night, after all, and she will not need them much longer), and cotton skirt pulled back into place. Socks on, feet jammed back into sandals. Carrot washed in the bathroom sink. (Aptly, it is always limp at this point, which satisfies her: she has conquered the carrot completely.)
On her way back to the kitchen, she gives the carrot to Yogurt, Andy’s albino guinea pig. Waste not, want not, being her motto.
Karen’s husband, Morris, knows nothing about his wife’s masturbation, though this evening would have presented him with a prime opportunity to Learn a Thing or Two about his wife, for he lies upon the living-room sofa a mere room away, his evening newspaper scattered about him.
As usual he’s preoccupied with feet. In his mind he is back at the office, healing ram’s horn nails, diagnosing bunions, treating plantar’s warts. He wears the soft, rapt look of an antique dealer discovering a Chippendale in a farmer’s barn.
The same expression appears on his face while examining his patients’ appendages. It is noticed by everyone, men and women alike, but especially the women. The men — and there are few of these, Morris would be the first to admit — receive his attentions as they receive their morning coffee: it is a right due unto them for the money they have paid. No more, no less.
But the women,