“But if it stings me I might die.” I shrugged and walked out. I could feel Barbie watching me leave.
* * *
I took a Valium about twenty minutes before I picked her up the next Friday. By the time I went into Jennifer’s room, everything was getting easier.
“Hey,” I said when I got up to the dresser.
She was there on the doily with Ken; they were back to back, resting against each other, legs stretched out in front of them.
Ken didn’t look at me. I didn’t care.
“You ready to go?” I asked. Barbie nodded. “I thought you might be thirsty.” I handed her the Diet Coke I’d made for her.
I’d figured Barbie could take a little less than an eighth of a Valium without getting totally senile. Basically, I had to give her Valium crumbs since there was no way to cut one that small.
She took the Coke and drank it right in front of Ken. I kept waiting for him to give me one of those I-know-what-you’re-up-to-and-I-don’t-like-it looks, the kind my father gives me when he walks into my room without knocking and I automatically jump twenty feet in the air.
Ken acted like he didn’t even know I was there. I hated him.
“I can’t do a lot of walking this afternoon,” Barbie said.
I nodded. I figured no big deal since mostly I seemed to be carrying her around anyway.
“My feet are killing me,” she said.
I was thinking about Ken.
“Don’t you have other shoes?”
My family was very into shoes. No matter what seemed to be wrong my father always suggested it could be cured by wearing a different pair of shoes. He believed that shoes, like tires, should be rotated.
“It’s not the shoes,” she said. “It’s my toes.”
“Did you drop something on them?” My Valium wasn’t working. I was having trouble making small talk. I needed another one.
“Jennifer’s been chewing on them.”
“What?”
“She chews on my toes.”
“You let her chew your footies?”
I couldn’t make sense out of what she was saying. I was thinking about not being able to talk, needing another or maybe two more Valiums, yellow adult-strength PEZ.
“Do you enjoy it?” I asked.
“She literally bites down on them, like I’m flank steak or something,” Barbie said. “I wish she’d just bite them off and have it over with. This is taking forever. She’s chewing and chewing, more like gnawing at me.”
“I’ll make her stop. I’ll buy her some gum, some tobacco or something, a pencil to chew on.”
“Please don’t say anything. I wouldn’t have told you except…,” Barbie said.
“But she’s hurting you.”
“It’s between Jennifer and me.”
“Where’s it going to stop?” I asked.
“At the arch, I hope. There’s a bone there, and once she realizes she’s bitten the soft part off, she’ll stop.”
“How will you walk?”
“I have very long feet.”
I sat on the edge of my sister’s bed, my head in my hands. My sister was biting Barbie’s feet off, and Barbie didn’t seem to care. She didn’t hold it against her and in a way I liked her for that. I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud. I started imagining things I might be able to get away with.
“Get me out of here,” Barbie said. I slipped Barbie’s shoes off. Sure enough, someone had been gnawing at her. On her left foot the toes were dangling and on the right, half had been completely taken off. There were tooth marks up to her ankles. “Let’s not dwell on this,” Barbie said.
I picked Barbie up. Ken fell over backward and Barbie made me straighten him up before we left. “Just because you know he only has a bump doesn’t give you permission to treat him badly,” Barbie whispered.
I fixed Ken and carried Barbie down the hall to my room. I held Barbie above me, tilted my head back, and lowered her feet into my mouth. I felt like a young sword swallower practicing for my debut. I lowered Barbie’s feet and legs into my mouth and then began sucking on them. They smelled like Jennifer and dirt and plastic. I sucked on her stubs and she told me it felt nice.
“You’re better than a hot soak,” Barbie said. I left her resting on my pillow and went downstairs to get us each a drink.
We were lying on my bed, curled into and out of each other. Barbie was on a pillow next to me, and I was on my side facing her. She was talking about men, and as she talked I tried to be everything she said. She was saying she didn’t like men who were afraid of themselves. I tried to be brave, to look courageous and secure. I held my head a certain way and it seemed to work. She said she didn’t like men who were afraid of femininity, and I got confused.
“Guys always have to prove how boy they really are,” Barbie said.
I thought of Jennifer trying to be a girl, wearing dresses, doing her nails, putting makeup on, wearing a bra even though she wouldn’t need one for about fifty years.
“You make fun of Ken because he lets himself be everything he is. He doesn’t hide anything.”
“He doesn’t have anything to hide,” I said. “He has tan molded plastic hair, and a bump for a dick.”
“I never should have told you about the bump.”
I lay back on the bed. Barbie rolled over, off the pillow, and rested on my chest. Her body stretched from my nipple to my belly button. Her hands pressed against me, tickling me.
“Barbie,” I said.
“Umm humm.”
“How do you feel about me?”
She didn’t say anything for a minute. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, and slipped her hand into my shirt through the space between the buttons.
Her fingers were like the ends of toothpicks performing some subtle ancient torture, a dance of boy death across my chest. Barbie crawled all over me like an insect who’d run into one too many cans of Raid.
Underneath my clothes, under my skin, I was going crazy. First off, I’d been kidnapped by my underwear with no way to manually adjust without attracting unnecessary attention.
With Barbie caught in my shirt I slowly rolled over, like in some space shuttle docking maneuver. I rolled onto my stomach, trapping her under me. As slowly and unobtrusively as possible, I ground myself against the bed, at first hoping it would fix things and then again and again, caught by a pleasure/pain principle.
“Is this a water bed?” Barbie asked.
My hand was on her breasts, only it wasn’t really my hand, but more like my index finger. I touched Barbie and she made a little gasp, a squeak in reverse. She squeaked backward, then stopped, and I was stuck there with my hand on her, thinking about how I was forever crossing a line between the haves and the have-nots, between good guys and bad, between men and animals, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop myself.
Barbie was sitting on my crotch, her legs flipped back behind her in a position that wasn’t human.
At a certain point I had to free myself. If my dick was blue, it was only because it had suffocated. I did the honors and Richard popped out like an escape from maximum security.
“I’ve never seen anything so big,” Barbie said. It was the sentence I dreamed of, but given the people Barbie normally hung out with, namely the bump boy himself, it didn’t come as a big surprise.
She stood at the base of my dick, her bare feet buried in my pubic hair. I was almost as tall as she was. Okay, not almost as tall, but clearly we could be related. She and Richard even had the same vaguely surprised look on their faces.
She was on me and I couldn’t help wanting to get inside her. I turned Barbie over and was on top of her, not caring if I killed her. Her hands pressed so hard into my stomach that it felt like she was performing an appendectomy.