When she’s in a state of panic, my mother bargains with the Lord and imposes fioretti on herself: no eating sweets, no going to the movies, no reading magazines, no listening to Rai Radio 3, for weeks, months, years. These days she can’t go to the hairdresser’s or watch TV. Sometimes the combination is no Radio 3 and no sweets. Or no coffee and no new shoes. She mixes them, matches them it depends.
Didn’t he know that I was a servant, and how capable I was of managing humiliation and disgust? I felt he was even endearing, in his desire to escape his wife, his crowd of guests and this smirk I felt now, and bubbling up laughter in the silence of my parked car, were the symptoms of power I’d never felt before.
I can’t give you what you need. Look around you. Everything around us shouts your fertility. Points toward it. The whole palace is waiting on your womb. It’s the organizing principle of this entire operation. You think you can hold out against it?
So much of life is spent not having sex. Put the kitchen in order, clean the bathroom, print the report, return the call, keep the dental appointment, get the car out of the shop. But this isn’t about us at all: it’s about some deal. So let it happen, see what it really is. Watch the ball go up, up over the formalized landscape, lost in bright overcast.
When things were slow on the floor, I liked to duck into the locker room and study the clipboard. To me it was like poetry, this ever-changing list of all the girls on that night. Angelina, Kitty, Buttercup. I tried to memorize them all. Who could make the whole world bend to her? Scarlet, Candy, Foxy, Grace.