#       Andy calls me to say everything is going into his business. "I owe so much," he says. His Gold Card is running out of steam.       He says he sold his Porsche and bought a Volkswagen, and it's killing him.       I tell him the Volkswagen is way cooler than the Porsche. I tell him driving a Porsche is like screaming that you are so insecure you need people to admire you because of your car. Andy says he feels numb driving the Volkswagen; he feels closer to the transmission when he drives the Porsche.       I say I love that he bought a Volkswagen because it meets California requirements for smog emissions.       But I really like the Volkswagen because we can talk about it instead of talking about our feelings. Or we can talk about our feelings about the Volkswagen, and we can give ourselves credit for talking about feelings. # At the cocktail party, where I know no one and Andy knows everyone, I take a break and go to the bathroom. I lock myself in and relish sitting there on the toilet, in silence: No struggle to be entertaining, or to find Andy to rescue me from the social misdemeanor of standing alone.       After I pee, there's no other business I have on the toilet, but I sit there anyway, dreading my reappearance at the party. I figure I can stay in the bathroom for five more minutes without causing social discomfort.       I sniff my underwear. There's a strong smell from a long kiss during a slow dance. I sniff again, and I wonder why Andy doesn't take my used underwear to work with him in the morning.       The more I sniff, the more I want to go down on a woman. The more I sniff, the more I can't believe Andy doesn't go down on me every chance he gets. To punish him for not appreciating my scent, I think about the hostess while I masturbate on her toilet.       Then I go back out to the party and push my way into the circle where Andy is talking. He hates it when I get too dependent on him at parties, but I don't care now, because now I'm a lesbian.       While I'm standing silently at Andy's side, I play a game with myself. I play this game a lot because I can never decide if I'm a lesbian or not. I look around the room and imagine myself making love to various party dwellers, male and female. I always end up having better fantasies about the women. Their curves seem so soft to rub my cheek against. It always seems to me that my breasts would be more slithery across a woman's stomach than a man's.       "You have to mingle," Andy whispers in my ear. "Is something wrong?"       "Yeah," I say. "I think I'm a lesbian."       "Let's talk about it when we get home," he says. "For right now, why don't you just talk to the women?"       Andy is bored with my lesbianism. He figures since I've already tried women and stayed with men, he's doing fine. I want to say something like, "Every time I scream when we're fucking, it's because I'm pretending you're a woman." But that's not true, so I don't say it. #       I thought my life was so ordinary that I wrote my sixth-grade autobiography about my cousin Jenny. In class we all hand-bound our autobiographies, and I gave mine to my parents for their anniversary. My dad took it as a sure sign I would get into Yale. This Yale thing was a big deal to him because we were the only Jewish family in the world who could become fourth generation Yale in this century. Dad figured that out. It was all up to me and my little brother Marc.              Marc and I felt no pressure, though, because in our eyes everyone went to Yale. So at night, while our parents worked until 9:30, Marc and I would completely ignore our homework. We'd order-out pizza or Chinese food for dinner, and read the Britannica until someone came home to tell us to go to bed.       After a while, I noticed that the kids in school, who had a lot to talk about, all talked about TV. I told my parents I needed a TV. Mom told me to call up an electronics store and have them deliver one. This was the type of thing the spare Visa card in the kitchen drawer was good for. The TV came right away, but I never remembered to take it out of the box.       Once I called up my Mom at work and told her I didn't have any friends because everyone else's clothes were more exciting than mine. Mom told me to use the Visa card. She called ahead to a local store to let them know I had permission. "Next time, call Dad at work," she said, "not me."        When I walked into the juniors section, I didn't see anything that I had seen other kids wearing, and even though I knew I could have whatever I wanted in the store, what I really wanted didn't seem to be there. So I bought a pair of rainbow socks that seemed nice in the store, but when I brought them home, they didn't look special anymore, and I knew they would never win me friends.       Once a teacher asked me to stay after school. She was my favorite teacher ever, and I was hoping she would ask if I wanted to be her daughter. I had gotten stars on every test that year. Instead, she asked why I came to school bruised all the time. She said she thought maybe someone was doing something that ordinary parents don't do. I thought about the question for a few seconds, and then I looked down at my socks. #       Andy has brought the same copy of Vibe magazine on four business trips. When I investigate, I discover a very stained advertisement for Poco Jeans in which a woman is wearing nothing but jeans and earrings. Lots of earrings.       So I get my ears pierced. Seven times. I'd get my nipples pierced, but if there are infections and subsequent amputations, I'd rather lose an ear than a nipple.       The piercings hurt for a second. The piercing woman says they'll hurt more later.       They do. They have a dull, incessant hurt, and an excruciating hurt every time something brushes by them.       Andy takes the magazine to Montreal.       When he gets back, I don't even wait until we're out of the airport. I say, "It's painful to me that you fantasize about another woman."       "What?" he says. "I noticed you brought that issue of Vibe with you for the nine hundredth time. Haven't you read all the articles yet?"       He blushes. He says, "Look, we've talked about this before. It's easier for me to masturbate with visual stimulation. I can't help it. That's just how I am. You use books, I use pictures."       "I feel like you're cheating on me. Like you don't need me in Montreal because you have her."       "I would like to have sex with you in Montreal, but you're not there. And this is not a person we're talking about, it's a picture."       "Yeah. That's right. That's why it's objectifying. Because you treat her like me, like a person, but she's not."       "Right. She would never put me on the spot like this in the middle of baggage claim."       I squeeze my ear really hard until I start to cry. And when I let go, I feel like nothing hurts at all. #       I spend my first week at the bookstore, organizing. I put all the fiction together by author. It takes me three days. Then I start on other sections.       Gene comes in to collect the money, and a customer asks if we have any John Hawkes. "We only have one," I say.       Gene says, "How do you know what we have?"       "I organized them," I say, and I pull the book off the shelf for the customer.       "I don't like it organized," Gene says, "It looks fake. Life is a mess, and books are about life."       I tell him I can help people better if I know where books are.       He says people will buy more books if they have to look around.       He goes to the shelf. "Look here," he says, "Marquis de Sade next to Gloria Steinem. This is a great pair."       I don't tell him that he's in the S part of my women's studies section.       I spend the rest of the week strategically de-organizing fiction - I mess it up enough for Gene, but not so much that I can't tell what's there. #       On the first night of Chanukkah I give Andy two CDs. Andy already has 2,000 CDs, but I know I can pick anything he doesn't have and he'll like it-as long as it's not classical. I get him Bikini Kill. The lyrics are very women-oriented so Andy feels like a hip-feminist male just for owning a Bikini Kill CD. And I feel cool having a boyfriend who listens to it.       On the second night I give Andy bubble bath, because he likes sweet, romantic things. He's surprised because I'm never sweet and romantic. We light three Chanukkah candles and bring the menorah into the bathroom and slide into the raspberry-rhubarb bubble-bathed tub. I lie back against the tub, and Andy lays his back against my chest. I wrap my arms around his waist, and his arms wrap around my thighs, and I nuzzle my nose into his soft blond hair.       On the third night I give Andy pruning shears.       "Thanks," he says, "These will make it so much easier for me."       "No," I say. "They're for me. I'm going to help you so I don't have to talk to your mom for an hour while you prune her bushes."       On the fourth night we have a fight. I return the shirt I bought him and buy a shirt for myself.       On the fifth night I give him boxer shorts covered with my finger-painted handprints.       On the sixth night I give Andy trees. Two hundred redwoods for his model train. He mapped out a replica of the Santa Cruz line at the turn of the century, and the model is almost finished except for the barren plaster that's supposed to be a mountainside. I suggested he put in bushes, which you can find at any hobby shop. He said, "You can't put bushes where redwoods go. The scenery isn't just there to cover up the foundation. Don't you get it? If I wanted to do bushes, I'd do a model of an Illinois train." So I scoured Southern California for a shop that sold redwoods.       On the seventh night I give Andy my other train store purchase. When I was wandering around the N-scale section, which is the inch-high train sets, I noticed a whole wall devoted to models of people-people who are less than one inch high, but covered with interesting details. The most interesting detail was that most of the one-inch people were men, doing things like reading a newspaper, or playing tennis, or buying and selling ice cream. The women were lying down in bikinis, or posing in tight shorts, or hanging out laundry; there were twelve different versions of women hanging out laundry.       "What are these for?" Andy asks, trying not to seem ungrateful for the gift. "The model train. I thought you'd like some people."       "But where do they fit into the model?"       "Well, I think it's important to bring to peoples' attention how sexist the model train industry is."       "What?"       "There were no models of men doing housework or posing on the beach." "I knew you wouldn't like going to train stores."       "You can put the women hanging out laundry in the forest, so they're like a colony of women whose lives consist of cleaning other peoples' clothes. What else could the manufacturer of these women have been thinking? Or they can be Stepford wives, and you can put them in your suburbs, on the front lawns."       "What about these other people?" he asks.       "You can put the sunbathers on the beach, and the other women on the board walk. And that guy who looks like he's buying something? That's the john for one of the women. Isn't that clever?"       "I get your point, but I don't really want to turn my model train into a monument to feminism."       "If you were really a feminist, everything you do would be a monument to feminism."       "How about if I give you the beach, and you can have the prostitution scene..."       "Sex worker."       "You can have the sex worker scene, and the beach bunny scene, and we can trade in the women washing clothes for people playing volleyball? The colony of Stepford wives seems a little over the top. Let's just leave the forest alone, okay?"       "Okay. Isn't it nice that we've found a hobby we can share?"       "Yeah, okay, but you're just sharing the beach, and that's all, all right?"       "Thank you."       "When is Chanukkah over?"       On the eighth night I give Andy a blow job. It's not like this is something that I wouldn't do if it weren't Chanukkah, but I want him to remember it's always a gift. #