The blind eye of the leaking faucet stared down at Ellie, drip drip dripping onto her cheek until it licked down her neck and plopped through the metal drain. The clean porcelain of the bathtub pressed hard and cold against her legs. Sounds of sticky-sweet trendy pop on a fuzzy bluetooth speaker seeped through the gap under the bathroom door. Voices murmured, sober and polite, not yet the drunken growl of a fully-fledged party. Ellie’s heart slammed in her ears and buzzed down her sore, old bones. She settled deeper, feeling the curve of the bowl stretch her shoulders forward.
It was Susanna’s thirtieth birthday party. Dress code: Susanna. Yes, she was quelling her fears of aging by being the center of attention, even more than usual. A party of a hundred Susannas could be a fantasy or a nightmare, depending on who you ask.
Granted, the guests could put on long, dark wigs, puke green colored contacts, and slutty corporate suits, but no one could really look like Susanna. Her buggy eyes, her crooked nose, her thin creepy hair. Nor could they emulate the bones that protruded from her face – those pretentiously sculpted cheekbones, and that smooth, sharp curve of her jaw pointing towards the dessert-spoon divot in her chin. Not her prominent, gently sloped collarbones. Nor her trim, toned body. Her taut paper white skin. Her breasts, her abs, her hips, her thighs, her anklebones…
The first in the bathroom was obviously the birthday girl herself. Or was it birthday woman now? Birthday spinster? She breathed unsteadily as she did her makeup, smoothing powders and creams into her aging skin like she could push herself into the past.
Ellie almost chuckled as she listened. She didn’t remember those days fondly, the first true understanding that her bones would disintegrate and her flesh would loosen and her skin would stretch and she, even she, especially she, would die. Perhaps that was what drove Susanna away in the first place. Being with an older woman could’ve proven too much of an existential challenge for her delicate understanding of her place in the world. Perhaps Susanna had her first glimpse of a rotting body, a festering mind, and began to realize that her life wouldn’t always be a chic trounce through the young-world.
But, no. That wasn’t what drove Susanna away. Even Ellie knew that.
“Aw thank you,” Susanna whispered toward her reflection. “No, no stop. That’s too much!” She laughed humbly and opened the door to the adjoined closet. “A cake? Wow, thank–” she stuttered and started over. She closed the closet door and pulled aside the window curtain to look outside. “A cake? It’s beautiful. Wow, thank you so much.” Her voice cracked. She checked the cabinet under the sink. “I truly do have the best people.” She began to cry. She reached toward the shower curtain. “I’m so blessed,” she sputtered. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the fabric, but she didn’t pull it aside. “To be surrounded,” she sobbed. “By people who keep – who keep me safe.” She let go and sat on the floor.
Her breakdown lasted a good five minutes of throaty, phlegmy gasps interrupted only by desperate sips of red wine and the crackle of snot blown from her nose. Quite the performance. Her teeth were probably already going maroon in the crevices, a tell-tale sign that Susanna was out for blood. They had a fight when she was like this, once, where Susanna eased into a smooth calm, venom dripping viscous from her canines, insults slithering like Desperate Has-Been, Needy Wannabe Dyke, Jealous Career Bartender.
Susanna slid her nails just barely past the shower curtain, again tapping their sharp ends on tile for a fleeting, suffocating moment, and the doorbell rang.
Next in the bathroom were two men from Susanna’s firm, Jacob and Brian. The heavy smell of musky male chauvinist cologne filled the bathroom almost immediately. It was nearly impossible not to choke. These were the guys who always whisked Susanna away at office parties and ignored Ellie entirely. Then from across the room, Ellie would see Susanna laughing that snaggle-toothed laugh and touching their flexed biceps. Susanna would spend the whole evening with those boys, trading inside jokes about clients and cases and current news that they knew Ellie couldn’t follow. And Ellie would eat sugar cookies in the corner, feeling stupid in her mascara and earth-tone dress, keeping all her thoughts squished inside, never saying what she wanted to – that this party was just a bunch of self-important nerds who made up for being bullied in middle school by wracking up hundreds of thousands in student loans and acquiring rock-brained balayage-blonde wives that had to load up on barbiturates to keep from killing themselves, and that Ellie truly, utterly, categorically hated every single one of them, especially those dimwitted housewives. No, Ellie wouldn’t say any of that. She would grind her teeth to keep it all from frothing out as she watched her girlfriend get uglier and uglier in the distance.
As they shut the bathroom door the boys spoke in low, conspiratorial voices.
“Fuck, man,” Jacob said. “Thanks for bringing this.”
“Well,” Brian replied with a lawyerly laugh. “We’re gonna need it.”
Coke, surely.
“This week has been such a shitshow,” Jacob said with the clink of a metal credit card against the counter. “All of my cases are blowing up, and with this Mary thing on top of it, I just can’t handle it.”
Brian snorted and let out a gratified sigh. “I am not jealous of you, I can tell you that.”
“God, it’s just meeting after meeting.” Jacob snorted. “Can’t she just give it up?”
“Tell me about it,” Brian agreed. “HR these days is such a joke.”
“These girls, they just have way too much time on their hands.” Jacob poured another bump on the back of his hand. For a moment there was only the sound of chunky, coke-spattered snot shooting into his sinuses. Then he tipped his head back and laughed. “This shit is good.”
Brian did another bump in agreement.
“And Susanna?” Jacob said, his voice brighter, tone more urgent. “She is batshit – Harley Quinn, asylum crazy, but at least we know she’s never gonna put a case on us.”
“I don’t know.” Brian laughed. “With the wigs, tonight could finally be the night.”
“She’s already drunk enough, that’s for sure.” They laughed and grasped one another’s shoulders.
Ellie adjusted her own aching, damp shoulders. When the boys were gone she was finally afforded the satisfaction of cracking her neck, then her ankles, then her knuckles, feeling the poison spurt out of her joints until, again, she was settled. As settled as she could be.
After a handful of standard solo-pissers, the party outside was bumping heavy bass-line I’m-still-young dance music and voices were an ever-crescendoing chorus of liars and show-offs. Susanna’s house could fit fifty people easily, and it seemed she was hellbent on surpassing capacity and disregarding fire code entirely. It was a classic multi-million dollar rowhome – sleek carpeted staircases, vintage velvet furniture, warm ambient lighting, carved oak doors with still unchanged locks. A couple of Susanna’s high school friends commented that she was getting Messy crackhead drunk as they put on fresh layers of lipstick and wondered out loud if she was going to pull one of her Classic Susie attention stunts.
After that was Susanna’s little sister, in the bathroom to pee while tapping her phone. Ellie could envision her perfectly – some underground ripped-up streetwear outfit, overdone winged eyeliner, and piercings studding her ears, her face, her bellybutton, and who knows where else. Ellie had overheard her once, talking to Susanna about their new relationship. Don’t you think it’s a little weird how much older she is? You don’t, like, have a thing for that, right? I don’t know, she’s just so… dependent. I get it, people can be shy, but she just clings to you. Seriously, and I don’t mean this to sound condescending, but why are you with her?
The toilet flushed. The sink turned on, and then off. Ellie felt blood drip down her palms from where her fingernails had dug. That damn question, and worse, the answer. I don’t know why, I just love her.
Next in the bathroom were a few bizarro randoms Susanna had picked up to stroke her ego. She had a habit of it – promising friendship to any young drunk queer who slobbered over her beauty in a dive bar bathroom.
These three Ellie knew. They were the type of young gender non-conformers that could never grasp what it was like to be gay thirty years ago, to do everything you could to look like other people, talk like other people, to keep yourself a secret. They probably didn’t even know what AIDS was. They had those young boastful hipster names – something like Fern, August, and Nightingale. Susanna met them when she and Ellie were still together. Ellie was nursing a cheap old fashioned at the bar and Susanna was leaning over the pool table, smacking spearmint gum and showing off her smooth apple-ass by teaching these kids some of her tricks, including the one where she leaned backwards against the table, stretched her arms behind her back, and slid the cue artfully behind herself without having to look at what she was doing.
As they took turns peeing, the kids gushed about all the beautiful mature women at the party and complained about the loud-talking lawyerly men.
“I just love you guys,” Fern slurred as they urinated.
The other two laughed appreciatively.
“No, really,” Fern continued. “I, like, really love you guys.”
“We love you, too,” Nightingale replied, clearly the oldest and soberest of the group.
Fern zipped their cargo pants – cargo pants! – and leaned against the bathroom counter, their wig brushing into the basin of the sink. August laid their hands on either side of Fern’s hips and kissed them. Nightingale turned August’s head by their chin and joined in the messy making out.
“Fuck,” August exhaled after a few minutes of heavy petting. “I love being gay.”
“Does anyone hear that, like, heavy breathing?” Fern asked.
“We need to stop giving you molly,” Nightingale replied.
“Come on, let’s go,” August instructed.
After that, a couple of the older lady lawyers from Susanna’s firm visited the bathroom to touch up their makeup. They remarked that parties like this, mingling with the younger coworkers, always made them feel old. Susanna seemed pretty wasted, they said, which was a rite of passage for a thirtieth birthday. Although, Susanna had been slipping at work – showing up hungover, dropping the ball in meetings, forgetting entire briefs. They were worried, maybe, that Susanna’s breakup was affecting her more than she was leading on.
“I liked her. Ellie was her name, right?” said the lawyer with a deeper voice. They both seemed to just be wearing whatever they wore to work, which could be reasonably passed off as a low-effort Susanna costume.
“Yeah, yeah. The older woman,” said the one with the shriller voice. “I liked her.” Fake. “I feel like being with someone mature was good for her.” Liar.
“I mean, she was a little shy.” There it was.
“Yeah, maybe Susanna just needs someone more outgoing – someone who could handle her.”
“Someone who could handle her, yeah.”
“My makeup look good?”
“Yep – mine?”
“Mhm. Great.”
They left the bathroom. Ellie wiped away the tears that had run into her ears. She gulped and nearly gagged on mucus gathered in the back of her throat.
Soon the party outside ebbed and the polite partygoers said their goodbyes. The music took a louder, more sexual turn and sounds of ping pong balls hitting red solo cups echoed. The bathroom became less for pee and more for vomit, the smell of it waxing and waning with each flush of the toilet. A married couple exchanged blow jobs then helped the other wipe semen from their faces. A senior partner from the firm cried, slapped himself on the face, and asserted to his reflection that he was the Alpha Wolf. The boys came back for fatter lines of coke. A couple mothers who left their kids with husbands for the night belligerently professed their love for one another. Then, the familiar drunken voices of Fern and Susanna entered the bathroom.
“Is this room good?” Fern asked.
“Yeah, I checked it earlier. Lock the door,” Susanna instructed before hiking Fern up against the door and locking their legs around her hips. They breathed heavily into one another between desperate, wet kisses, Susanna running her hands through Fern’s Susanna-wig. They fumbled away from the bathroom door and Susanna jumped to sit on the counter. Fern sucked on Susanna’s bony neck and her protruding collarbones and her asymmetrical nipples. Fern unzipped Susanna’s merino wool slacks and pulled down her blood-red thong with their teeth. Fern sucked on Susanna’s clit and put their fingers inside her, slurping and thrusting slowly at first, then gaining speed.
“Fuck, you’re good,” Susanna slurred, knuckles white as she gripped the counter, speaking in the same voice that used to be directed at Ellie.
Fern lifted their head and kissed Susanna, continuing to work with their fingers and using their other hand to rub Susanna’s more sensitive nipple.
“You’re so hot,” Fern sighed.
When Susanna came, Fern held her closely so she wouldn’t slip from the counter. Grasping each other, they looked even more like two Susannas in a masturbatory embrace. Susanna put her clothes back on and laughed the way she always did when she was drunk, like she had just barely escaped drowning. Fern, still breathing heavily, put their hands on Susanna’s hips.
“I think I love you,” Fern said, their words unbelievably sincere.
“Everyone does,” Susanna replied. Ellie bit her bottom lip to keep from screaming. The taste of dirty pennies flooded her mouth. She imagined sitting up and pulling the shower curtain aside. She imagined putting her hands on either side of Susanna’s head and pressing. She imagined she was the one who did what Fern did – that Susanna had never gone through her journal and found what she had written, those terrible words, those disgusting, stinking thoughts she had to get out of her head – and this was their party hosted in their house with Susanna’s drunken prima donna tendencies and Ellie’s slimiest thoughts hidden and locked away. She imagined that the thoughts could clot, that they didn’t bleed from her incessantly. That beneath her thin film of skin there was only flesh and sinew and slush. Her underside was only bile and pumping, living guts. That there wasn’t something truly moldy and rotten within her, squelching as it reached out for air. That she didn’t have to spend every single day clenching every muscle to keep it all inside, to push it down and down and down, to keep the leaking faucet from drip drip dipping, inch inch inching, crawling down until she had to scratch the itch and let the evil out.
“Even the ones that are repulsed by me,” Susanna continued. She wiped the mascara from her cheeks and froze as she locked eyes with Ellie through the mirror, her confident voice finally wavering. “They love me.”
Rachel Jakovac (any/all) is a Montanan, author, and political communications specialist. She works for a labor union and spends free time traveling, reading, running, and spending time with her orange cat.
<<< previous | next >>>