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Authors: Brady Udall
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week, she felt an unexpected longing for the life she had left behind, the life in which reading a magazine like this wouldn’t have caused her a moment of shame, a life where Cleavage Enhancements and bikini waxes were an option if not a necessity, a life she thought she had given up on forever.
She paused at one of the feature articles titled “Advanced Lovemaking Techniques For the Rest of Us.” Wearing the casual expression of somebody checking out the newest advances in Tupperware technology in Family Circle , she read:
A BIRD IN THE HAND
Pleasuring your man manually—whether it’s a prelude to full-fledged sex or an erotic act in itself—is an incredibly sexy sack skill that’s sadly overlooked
She felt a touch on her shoulder and nearly leapt sideways off her chair. Rose-of-Sharon was already backing up, saying, “Oh dear, I didn’t mean, I just wanted to—” She squeezed her hands against her breastbone, her shoulders braced in an apologetic hunch. She was a woman, Trish thought, who might have been pretty if she didn’t look scared to death fifty minutes out of every hour. Trish stood, slipped the Cosmo under an old National Geographic , and took Rose-of-Sharon by the wrists to calm her. When Trish first met her, Rose seemed shy, unsure of herself in a charming country-girl sort of way, but over the past year her nervousness had come to seem almost pathological—she avoided eye contact, had difficulty finishing a sentence, went skittish around anyone but her sister and her children, framed every conversation in terms of apology and regret. A few years before Trish joined the family, Rose had spent six weeks in a hospital after a nervous breakdown, and while no one spoke about it openly, there was a worry among Golden and the other wives that she might be headed down that path again. Even as Rose grew pale and unsure and small, her sister widened at the waist, added new hips and busts and stomachs, became even more bombastic and full of color, telling jokes, teasing anyone who happened into her sights, yelping with please-don’t-kill-me laughter.
“I was wondering if you wanted a shampoo,” Rose-of-Sharon said in her choked little powder-soft voice. “I can do it, if you want. But if you want Nola to do it…”
“Oh no!” Trish said. “Of course. A shampoo. Thank you. That would be lovely.” She practically had to drag Rose-of-Sharon over to the shampoo sink, where she sat back in a swivel chair and placed her neck in the sunken lip, thinking, for some reason, of some famous person she’d read about—was it Sir Thomas More or maybe Louis XVI?—who had asked to be positioned in the guillotine with his face toward heaven so he could meet his doom head-on.
While Rose-of-Sharon wetted down her hair, Trish kept up a stream of questions to keep her sister-wife comfortable. How were the kids? Who was looking after the younger ones while she was here at the academy? Had Sybil gotten over her flu? But once Rose-of-Sharon began to massage the shampoo into Trish’s hair, the questions dropped off and Rose’s answers—if there were any—lost themselves to the gurgling of the spigot, the pleasure of the warm water, the peppermint scent of the shampoo, the soft and steady pressure of Rose’s massaging fingertips. For a moment she felt luxuriously alone in her pleasure, the crackling of shampoo suds in her ears blocking out every other sound, her eyes closed to the unforgiving brilliance of midday light slanting in from the window, and the phrase advanced lovemaking slipped into her mind, and full-fledged sex , and she began to feel oddly relaxed and aroused, a tingling at her chest and inside her thighs, and then she heard a faraway voice:
“…going to Cedar City tonight?”
“What?” Trish sat up a little, the tingling blood in her chest moving quickly up her neck and into her cheeks.
“Oh. No. I was just—I was just wondering if you knew about my Pauline’s recital? In Cedar City?
She paused at one of the feature articles titled “Advanced Lovemaking Techniques For the Rest of Us.” Wearing the casual expression of somebody checking out the newest advances in Tupperware technology in Family Circle , she read:
A BIRD IN THE HAND
Pleasuring your man manually—whether it’s a prelude to full-fledged sex or an erotic act in itself—is an incredibly sexy sack skill that’s sadly overlooked
She felt a touch on her shoulder and nearly leapt sideways off her chair. Rose-of-Sharon was already backing up, saying, “Oh dear, I didn’t mean, I just wanted to—” She squeezed her hands against her breastbone, her shoulders braced in an apologetic hunch. She was a woman, Trish thought, who might have been pretty if she didn’t look scared to death fifty minutes out of every hour. Trish stood, slipped the Cosmo under an old National Geographic , and took Rose-of-Sharon by the wrists to calm her. When Trish first met her, Rose seemed shy, unsure of herself in a charming country-girl sort of way, but over the past year her nervousness had come to seem almost pathological—she avoided eye contact, had difficulty finishing a sentence, went skittish around anyone but her sister and her children, framed every conversation in terms of apology and regret. A few years before Trish joined the family, Rose had spent six weeks in a hospital after a nervous breakdown, and while no one spoke about it openly, there was a worry among Golden and the other wives that she might be headed down that path again. Even as Rose grew pale and unsure and small, her sister widened at the waist, added new hips and busts and stomachs, became even more bombastic and full of color, telling jokes, teasing anyone who happened into her sights, yelping with please-don’t-kill-me laughter.
“I was wondering if you wanted a shampoo,” Rose-of-Sharon said in her choked little powder-soft voice. “I can do it, if you want. But if you want Nola to do it…”
“Oh no!” Trish said. “Of course. A shampoo. Thank you. That would be lovely.” She practically had to drag Rose-of-Sharon over to the shampoo sink, where she sat back in a swivel chair and placed her neck in the sunken lip, thinking, for some reason, of some famous person she’d read about—was it Sir Thomas More or maybe Louis XVI?—who had asked to be positioned in the guillotine with his face toward heaven so he could meet his doom head-on.
While Rose-of-Sharon wetted down her hair, Trish kept up a stream of questions to keep her sister-wife comfortable. How were the kids? Who was looking after the younger ones while she was here at the academy? Had Sybil gotten over her flu? But once Rose-of-Sharon began to massage the shampoo into Trish’s hair, the questions dropped off and Rose’s answers—if there were any—lost themselves to the gurgling of the spigot, the pleasure of the warm water, the peppermint scent of the shampoo, the soft and steady pressure of Rose’s massaging fingertips. For a moment she felt luxuriously alone in her pleasure, the crackling of shampoo suds in her ears blocking out every other sound, her eyes closed to the unforgiving brilliance of midday light slanting in from the window, and the phrase advanced lovemaking slipped into her mind, and full-fledged sex , and she began to feel oddly relaxed and aroused, a tingling at her chest and inside her thighs, and then she heard a faraway voice:
“…going to Cedar City tonight?”
“What?” Trish sat up a little, the tingling blood in her chest moving quickly up her neck and into her cheeks.
“Oh. No. I was just—I was just wondering if you knew about my Pauline’s recital? In Cedar City?
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