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Naked at the Mall (Serial #7)

by Susannah Indigo

I have twenty-four body piercings and none of them show when I'm dressed. With the five tiny holes in each of my earlobes, I'm up to thirty-four total. I have only one tattoo—my name, Nita de Los Reyes, and my lover's name, Ruby Blackwell, are entwined in red and black around a rose on my ass. I am looking for the right spot to place one more piercing for my thirty-fifth birthday. I think it's all intensely erotic and that each piercing maps my personal expedition out of the underground life of a fact-loving fanatic, married to a man I liked only as a pal, into a full-blown life of bliss as the partner of a New-Age, rune-reading, astrology-believing, pagan mystic lesbian therapist. My partner Ruby just thinks that maybe I was a human pincushion in a previous life.

"Get your tongue pierced, Nita sweetheart, and I'll never kiss you again," Ruby has threatened me more than once. I told her that her cunt would disagree and would love the feel of my pierced tongue, but the truth is that I could never live without Ruby's long slow kisses, so I don't even consider going through with it.

My birthday falls on the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year. We celebrate the solstice eve with candles and bells and natural presents and all of Ruby's rituals. I've been sent to Alfalfa's to finish buying their entire stock of the little raspberry candles that change the aroma of the entire house. We will start the celebration at a Silo Park concert of "polyethnic Cajun slamgrass" music from the group Leftover Salmon, complete with bonfire, and then go back to our house to eat and put all the kids to bed and stay up to greet the dawn with a few friends in front of the fireplace.

Annie Braverman and her lover Sam will celebrate with us, as will Ruby's friend Madelaine, who runs some kind of motivational business and splits her time between Colorado and LA. She lives, when she's here, with two guys, who I know are both her lovers and her roommates—I just can never figure out who fucks who and in which way, not that it's any of my business. I think she has at least a couple of guys living with her in LA too. Madelaine is tall and thin and has short cropped black hair like mine, but she is always surrounded by interesting, sexy-looking men. At least she's got the harem idea down right—everyone knows that a woman needs multiple men and not vice versa.

With twenty raspberry candles and the few last-minute items on Ruby's grocery list in my basket, I chat with Ruby's cousin Erick Flanagan who is working the check-out. He tells me he has big plans for his own solstice celebration. He's in love, he tells me: with an older woman, he says, looking at me as though I should understand everything this implies since I am all of eight years older than him, and they will be spending the night hiding out together at the Oxford Hotel in Denver. The sappy look on the face of this sweet guy in love might be better than sex, or maybe even tongue-piercings.

Walking the twenty minutes home to Ruby through the slightly chilly streets of Boulder, I remember how I used to celebrate my birthdays by running marathons. I only did a few things well, so I did them all the time: I was a Jeopardy almost-champion in college so I continued to study facts as though they mattered; I was born with a body meant to run, so I ran as fast as I could every chance I got; as a child, I learned to navigate the world by searching the living-room globe for my missing mother, so I grew up to be a cartographer who clearly defines the route home for other people. This is all I can do, I told Ruby when we first got together, these are the things I am meant to do. No, baby, she would tell me, and still tells me most every day, you only have to dream yourself into your reality—you can dream and visualize yourself into doing anything in this world you want to do.

Before Ruby came into my life, the only thing I ever visualized was naked people. When I was celibate for two years I got through my days by thinking analytically: what's the big deal about naked bodies and touching and all the messiness of sex? Sometimes I would watch someone ahead of me in a race and mentally strip them—then I would know that they were nobody, just another naked body that I could easily pass by, and I would. I never even touched my own body sexually for two years, never had an orgasm. I thought of my body as an athletic machine, and I went to work on time every day and became an expert at mapping out the high country of the Rocky Mountains. Then Ruby touched me: without permission, without my planning it all out, with no map defining the way, and I began to melt like a simple snowflake at the first warmth of spring.

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