with BSMTP id 7412; Tue, 25 Jul 95 19:49:26 EDT
Date:         Tue, 25 Jul 1995 16:47:51 -0700
From: "Victoria E. Meredith" <ceilidh@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject:      ADULT(?): A Woman Thing (01/01)

I don't consider this to be particularly adult in nature--in fact, the
action itself is about as G-rated as it gets.  However, Natalie's thoughts
get a little hot, so rather than offend anyone with Freudian metaphors, I
give this warning.

A Woman Thing
     --Ceilidh

     Natalie contemplated her reflection in the window of the Earring
Boutique.  Crowds of shoppers swirled around her as she stood cranelike in
the late afternoon crowd, balancing her bunched handfuls of bags on her
hip and her upraised knee.  The people trailed along in the reflection and
she watched them vanish like ghosts as they moved away from the reflective
glass.
     She always ended up here, unable to justify and at the same time
unable to banish her desire to do something a little bit rash.  Something
ever so slightly radical.  Something final--and yet something small enough
to be kept secret and unexplained to the rest of the world.  She wanted to
pierce her ears.  Again.
     The first time she'd done it, she'd been ten years old, and the only
reason she had wanted the holes was that Susan Phillips, who looked
fourteen and already had a boyfriend, had come to school one day sporting
a pair of white imitation pearls in earlobes the color of apple skin.
She'd begged her mother, even bribing her little brother Richard to help
convince Mom, and finally she'd won.  After a trip to the clean white
doctor's office, Natalie had returned home with two neat holes in her
head, badges of her slavery to peer pressure.  Even now, she shook her
head in remembrance, fingering the conservative gold hoops that adorned
those holes today.
     But the dark and trendy Earring Boutique was about as far from the
clinical sterility of the doctor's office as anyone could get.  And this
time, she had a reason.  It was a reason made all the stronger and more
urgent by the fact that she didn't fully understand it, and couldn't find
its origin.  The scars would be a permanent marker, as permanent as mortal
flesh could make them--a tribute written on her body to the unreachable
flooding desire that, for her, was Nick.
     Natalie peered through the window glass at the pink-and-black clad
salesgirl who rested her chin on her fists and studiously ignored her job
in favor of a fashion magazine.  The little store was empty, save the girl
at the counter, and before Natalie could reason herself out of it again,
her muscles took over and propelled her forward.  Natalie stepped over the
threshhold; a wave of cool air caught her hair and made her blink.  She
was inside.
     The girl barely glanced up at Natalie.  "Welcome-to-the-Earring-
Boutique-my-name's-Amanda-let-me-know-if-I-can-help-you," she intoned.
     Natalie stared at the tiny earrings sealed in their sanitary little
plastic packets.  She'd never gotten this far in her plans before; she
began to contemplate the shapes of the piercer heads, choosing the symbol
she'd potentially be stuck with for the six-week healing period.  A heart
was her first instinct, but she immediately rejected that as too juvenile,
too froo-froo, too surface.  That was the sort of shape you doodled on
your notebook cover in the eighth grade, not the kind of thing that
symbolized perpetual, unachievable desire.  Next she looked at the
five-pointed star,  but the symbolism was too much of the
Romeo-and-Juliet-starcrossed-lovers-take-their-lives kind.  She shivered
involuntarily, from the thought or from the air conditioning.  "How about
the crosses?" she murmured under her breath, and had to bite her lip to
keep in a burst of laughter.  "Wouldn't that be the ultimate irony?" she
whispered, smiling.
     "'Scuse me?"  The girl at the counter looked up from her copy of
_Elle_.
     "Oh--oh, nothing.  Nothing," Natalie assured her.  The girl
scrutinized her closely for a second, then with a half-grin, went back to
her magazine.
     Natalie almost left.  She was embarassed, for she had felt the
curiosity in the girl's stare: "What is that old lady doing looking at
piercing studs?"--for everyone is old when you're seventeen and have never
awoken to see a face that you didn't recognize in the mirror.  "This is
ridiculous," she told herself.  Natalie turned to go, when a packet of
plain gold ball studs, perched on the edge of the display tower, caught
her eye.  Something in her clicked, and she picked up the tiny packet in
her hand.
     The sphere is an intriguing shape, for it is defined simply as the
set of all points in space that are exactly the same fixed distance from
the center point.  No point on a sphere can be any closer, or any farther
away, from the center than any other point, or you end up with an
eggy-looking mass that no longer has that simplistic beauty that the
sphere carries within its very essence.  And then there's the outside
surface of the sphere--you can start out on a straight path across it and
never come to the end.  The surface of a sphere is as close to eternity as
you can get in three dimensions.
     Natalie felt that shiver again, but this time she was certain that it
had nothing to do with the temperature.  What other shape could she
choose, really?  In her mind's eye, she could picture the sphere that
existed between her and Nick--always moving (who was the center point now,
and who the perpetually orbiting satellite?), always that distance between
them, never able for the surface to contact the center, both painfully
aware of the other, pulling inward towards each other but always kept away
by that terrible unalterable distance.  Two aspects of the same entity,
doomed to circle one another in eternal spherical perfection.
     She walked to the counter before she could change her mind.  "Excuse
me," she said, setting her packet down in front of the salesgirl, who had
forgotten herself and was blowing a tiny pink bubble that was the same
color as the clip in her hair.  "I'd like to have my ears pierced."
     The girl perked up immediately, showing the first signs of life since
Natalie had entered the store.  "Really?"  She closed her magazine and
stood up eagerly.
     "With these."  Natalie pointed towards the tiny package on the
counter.
     "Cool."  The girl smiled, and Natalie realized with a shock that she
was quite pretty.  "Have a seat and I'll get the equipment from the back."
     Natalie blinked twice and took a step back.  "_You're_ going to do
this?"  For some reason, she hadn't counted on that.
     "I've been doing this for six months," the girl said, sounding
offended.  "It _is_ my job."
     Natalie's reason urged her to leave now, while she still had intact
earlobes, but something dark and warm inside her urged, *Stay.*  She took
a deep breath and smiled at the girl.  "Sorry."
     The first ear never hurts.  Natalie remembered that from the stories
her mother and friends had told her, and from the first time she'd had her
ears done, and she found that it was still true.  There was the coolness
of the alcohol evaporating on her earlobe, the firm mechanical feel of the
piercing gun closing around her flesh, and then with a reverberating,
fleshy "thunk," there was a new hole in her body.  Natalie gasped at the
shock, strangely aroused and immediately embarassed by it.
     "One more to go," the salesgirl said around her chewing gum.  Natalie
jumped at the voice--she had forgotten the girl's presence in her moment
of strange heat.  That same warm voice within told her that it was
desperately important that she lose herself in the experience this time.
     So, for the second ear, she closed her eyes.  "What's the matter?
You okay?" the salesgirl asked, misinterpreting Natalie's reaction as fear
or faintness.  "Hey, it's nothing to be ashamed of, 'cause, you know, I've
had grown men roll their eyes back and just drop to the floor in a dead
faint after the first one."  She lowered her voice conspiratorially.  "I
expect that's why there are so many guys with just one ear pierced."
     Natalie heard the grin in the girl's voice and smiled in return, but
she kept her eyes closed.  "No, I'm fine," she reassured the girl.  "I'm
just concentrating."
     The girl reloaded the piercing gun; in a lull in the mall noise
outside, Natalie heard the tiny metallic twang of the earring slipping
into the holding groove and the click of the springs reloading for another
effort.  Time slowed and sensation intensified as Natalie focused all her
attention on the left side of her face.  Unbidden, Nick's image flashed
before her eyes.  She thought she saw him smile.
     The sensation of the metal pin penetrating her fragile skin took her
breath again.  This time she could feel the drag on the point, the
resistance as the sliver of metal forced its way through the soft tissues
of her body, tearing a path for itself through flesh that had not asked
for this wound but could not imagine not wanting it.  And in a burst of
intensified consciousness, she was no longer in the store but somewhere
that was not a place, somewhere--and Nick was there, and it was his lips
on her ear, not cold metal, and it was his teeth and his body and his very
self penetrating her as the sphere of them collapsed in on itself.  There
was no time--there was only the wavering instant suddenly pulled into
focus, and her mind, and Nick inside it all.
     A very mortal, very itchy sort of pain pulled her back from her
reverie as the salesgirl carefully freed Natalie's earlobe from the
piercing gun.  Her other earlobe was pulsing now, and she could feel the
tiny trickle of blood wending its way down the back of her ear.  But all
that was somehow less real than the thoughts and visions her mind had
conjured.  For that one timeless instant of penetration, she had been
living in the world of the vampire.

     In her office, Natalie pulled off her surgical gloves and washed her
hands.  She reached up to her still-tender ears and gave the earrings a
half-turn each, just like the salesgirl had told her.  She winced at the
pain, but somehow felt as though each twinge from her angry flesh was a
cleansing burst.  She reveled in the sensation, and was simultaneously
disgusted by this very un-Natalie reaction.  The part of her mind that had
been awakened that afternoon took over, and urged her to savor the
contradiction--"like a vampire would."
     She did.
     Natalie stood over the autopsy table in a sort of trance until she
heard the familiar rhythm of Nick's steps coming down the hallway.  Her
pulse jumped, and it occured to her that with his enhanced hearing he
would have always been able to gauge her body's involuntary reaction to
his presence.
     She still kept up the charade, however, acting as if she hadn't heard
him when he came in.  For the first time, she became truly aware of this
game that they played, each one knowing all the thoughts and feelings of
the other and consciously acting as though everything that was true was
really false.
     Nick stepped up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.  "Hey,
Nat."
     She gave the required jump.  "Hey!  You startled me."
     "Sorry.  I just came down to see how you're doing on that subway
murder that Schanke and I are covering."  The tone of his voice was a
shade too even, too practiced.  Natalie could hear it now, and realized
that she'd been able to hear it all along.  The longing he felt was as
strong as hers, even stronger.  Somewhere along the way, they'd made an
unspoken promise to pretend not to understand.
     She returned his lie with her best knowledgeable-professional voice,
turning her head towards him without actually turning to face him.  "Just
finished up the last of it.  Looks pretty open-and-shut to me.  Of course,
_you're_ the police officer, but...."  She winked a safe-flirtatious wink,
and fiddled busily with a drainage valve on the table.
     "You're a wonder, Nat."  Nick responded right on cue.
     "A miracle of modern science--that's me."
     "What would we all do without you?"  Nick bent to brush his lips
across her cheek in a kiss of gratitude and sublimated desire, and for an
instant Natalie felt their sphere waver and weaken with the possibility in
his lips.  Unexpectedly, he stiffened and pulled away.  "You okay, Nat?"
he asked, concern tinting his voice.
     At first, Natalie thought that he was referring to her thoughts, and
in a moment of panic she became inarticulate.  "Huh?"
     Nick sounded embarassed.  "I smell blood.  On your neck."
     *Of course,* her brain realized.  *He can always smell my blood.
Every month--*  She stopped the thought before it took her places that she
didn't want to think about.  "Oh, that!" she replied with just a little
too much cheerfulness.  "I just had my ears pierced."
     "I thought you already had pierced ears."  Nick's voice was quizzical.
     "I do," she explained offhandedly, hiding her irrational delight that
he'd noticed her ears.  "I do.  But I decided to get them double-pierced."
     Nick raised a wicked eyebrow.  "Sort of the rebel look?"
     "Something like that."
     "But you're not going to start wearing leather hotpants and riding a
motorcycle and hanging out with guys named Moose, are you?"
     Nat kept her tone light and teasing.  "You never know...." she
shrugged, and they laughed together.
     "So tell me something,"  Nick said easily.  "Why do you do this?
Women, I mean.  Why pierce your ears, just so that you can wear ornaments
in them?  It's not as though there aren't clip earrings now.  And there's
no religious ritual involved, at least not in midtown Toronto in 1995.
Why subject yourself to the pain--and the scars?"
     Natalie smiled, looking away as she felt once again the full distance
of the perfect sphere that separated them.  "It's a woman thing," she
explained.  "You wouldn't understand."
          --Ceilidh       ceilidh@ix.netcom.com