the room. “The afro went out in the seventies ladies,” Clarissa said. “Clean it up. It’s your best chance it will get found!” I pulled my legs closer to my chest.
“This next product is a body lotion that you can put anywhere on your body. Anywhere you put it you’ll be perfectly edible from head to foot.” She winked. “This lotion is peppermint flavored and really good for giving foot rubs so I suggest since your feet are clean and edible, well, why don’t you get your toes sucked?”
Toe sucking? Did she actually just say toe sucking? What a hideous thought! My big toes had three very stubborn hairs on each of them that made them look like beetles lying on their sides doing Pilates leg stretches. Though I plucked them on a regular basis, they still seemed to grow faster than any other follicles on my body. I could just picture my toe in Manny’s mouth, the hair protruding from the edges of his lips as though they were trying to make their escape from his teeth.
“That’s so gross!” Jenny slurred.
“I love it!” screamed one of Jenny’s bridesmaids, someone so conservative she made me look like a pole dancer.
My eyes instantly turned to Mahjong.
“Oh yes my little brown friend,” she said pointing to her feet. “Toe sucking is good.” She leaned back against the end of the sofa tucking her arms behind her head and closing her eyes.
“Toe sucking,” Clarissa said, “is actually pretty cool. Try it. I’m just trying to get you to think outside the box.” She smiled at her own joke and waved the round black container in the air.
“Now this stuff is not only good for toe play, it has many other uses. Are you ready?” She waited until everyone stopped talking. “This body lotion is also exceptionally good for analingus.” Clarissa paused. I felt tension rise all around me. “What’s analingus? Well we all know what cunnilingus is right?” She looked around the room. No one moved or spoke.
I stopped breathing in case the slightest shift in position caused the pillow beneath me to roar another loud farting sound in the dead silence.
“Okay, so imagine you’re freshly showered and covered in this lotion and someone is performing cunnilingus on you and then whoops their tongue slips and hello there it is! Analingus!”
She looked every woman in the eye as though she wanted to make sure her advice registered with each one. My brain had completely abandoned ship, setting sail in a sea of malted liquid.
My first introduction to the word anus was quite memorable. I heard the word for the first time in science class. I rushed home to tell my mother about the other planets in the universe and when I got to Uranus she slapped me across the face and shouted, “Dat place only for besharam!”
A few months later at a dinner party my mother was hosting for someone’s arranged marriage, one of the Aunties commented about how badly Westerners behaved. “Ve know how to act na? Ghoras are tooo liberal. Vhere oh vhere do all dese besharam come from?” To which I loudly and proudly replied, “They come from Uranus!” I was slapped and sent to my room. Needless to say after our sex education class when the word came up for real, I knew better than to bring it up to my mother. If a planet got me a hard slap to the head, I didn’t want to think what a rectal discussion would get.
“The next product is something that heats up!” Clarissa held up a tube shaped bottle. “Now I’m supposed to tell you it’s good for muscular aches, pains and cold feet but what it’s really good for is… oral sex!” Mahjong’s eyes shot open. She sat upright and grabbed her penis pencil in hand. “When you blow on this product it makes your skin hot! And speaking of hot ladies, what is the key to performing oral sex on a man?”
No one answered for a brief moment. The long-nosed lady behind me snidely said: “Get someone else to do it.”
Clarissa ignored her.
The pretty brunette next to Jenny said: “Lots of lubrication.”
“No teeth?” the buxom blonde offered, twirling one of her pigtails.
“Good one,” Clarissa said and smiled. “But let me get straight to my point. The key to performing good oral sex on a man is enthusiasm.”
I can’t lie. Oral sex had never interested me. Manny made no secret of his desire for fellatio but I was never that comfortable doing it. It felt awkward and embarrassing. Eventually he stopped asking for it. For the last few years, we both seemed content to treat his penis like a melting ice cream scoop. I gave it just enough licks to form it into a peak and then straight to penetration.
“The more energetic and enthusiastic you are,” Clarissa said, “the happier the penis. With this product, it does some of the work for you warming your mouth and heating him up at the same time. I blow on it and it gets hot and the penis says… wow!” A few women giggled. She had everyone’s attention.
“So now let’s say I want to change it up the next time, you know, practice my enthusiasm. This time I might have a piece of ice tucked into my mouth and now it’s hot and cold. Try it!” Mahjong was smiling at me. I looked down at my order form. I hadn’t taken any decent notes and I was suddenly angry with myself for not paying more attention.
“If you want to liven it up even more, you can buy popping candy from the corner store and put them in your mouth and then lick the penis for special effects!”
When I was eight years old at my cousin’s wedding, my other cousin Vargoo slipped me a handful of popping candy. We laughed riotously as it exploded in our mouths. That is until we got caught by one of his uncles who exclaimed wildly that we were eating crack in the back alley. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with Vargoo again. My mother made a point of telling me that candy would only rot out my teeth and no one wanted a toothless bride.
Mahjong smiled widely. “I love popping candy. It’s a poppy good time!”
“When do you sleep?” I asked Mahjong sarcastically. She smiled and flicked me in the knee with her penis pencil.
“Yes or no, things can get lost inside the vagina?” Clarissa said. She waited for an answer and when no one put one forth she offered it on her own. “No. Nothing gets lost in the vagina. What that means is that it’s closed. So if you put anything in there, it will come out. Just relax. It’s not lost. It’s in there.”
The long-nosed lady behind me put her hand up to tell the story of a friend who lost a ring in her vagina. Her boyfriend at the time, thinking it was a clever way to propose shoved the diamond inside her but when it came time to ask her the question he couldn’t find it. They went to the hospital and once it was retrieved, he got down on bended knee and proposed.
“But it wasn’t lost was it? On to the next question then, true of false, things can get lost inside the anus.” She waited a bit longer for an answer.
Like a voice in the fog, I heard, true from someone near me.
“You are correct.” Clarissa smiled at Mahjong. “Now ladies, this is important, the anus is not like the vagina. The first few inches of the rectum are empty and then after that there is a natural vacuum which means whatever I put in there had better have a loop on the end of it, something I can hold on to or it should flare out at the bottom. Like the lamp, but not the lamp.” I felt my sphincter involuntary spasm against the cushion.
“So always remember this about the rectum, ladies, because if you don’t, and you lose something in there, well that’s a trip to the hospital and you better hope the doctor is cute!” She winked. Two women laughed. I felt my dinner coming up.
She put down the canister of liquid that got hot and while she reached over to get another product, I took my first real notes: Hot stuff = oral. Anus = no lamps.
“Now the next product is lubricant. This one is especially good because it is water-based.” Clarissa held three oval bottles in her hand. “It comes in three flavors. Strawberry is the best seller. Lubricant is important