Free Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello Page A

sleep), not virginity, as an excuse.

    The Aggressive Woman may also be referred to as: the Smoking Woman, the Skinny Woman, the Foul-Mouthed Skank, the Special-Education Teacher, the Adopted Daughter, the World Traveler, and the Survivor of Childhood Hodgkin’s Disease.

    On the cruise, the Beautiful Woman doubles her dose of Levsinex. The motion of the boat and all the exotic food is certain to make her Irritable Bowel Syndrome act up, which will annoy the Macho Man, who believes her illness is all in her mind and takes the opportunity of her diarrhea exoduses to mock her to any friends remaining around the dinner table, revealing her various unfounded anxieties while imitating her excitable voice until everyone howls even louder than she does when home sick on the toilet alone.

    On the cruise, the Intelligent Woman brings with her Vicodin, Flexiril, and Valium. The Vicodin and Flexiril are for her bladder, which has an ulcer or something like an ulcer that is called Interstitial Cystitis and means her immune system is flawed but nobody knows how. There is no cure. The disease is neither progressive nor terminal. Men rarely get it. Doctors say the condition can be managed through rigorous avoidance of alcohol, all tomato and other citrus products, fermented foods (soy sauce, cheese) and molds (mushrooms, cheese again—she has to avoid cheese twice, though even with her limited math, 2 x 0 still equals zero.) The Intelligent Woman adheres to these rules like a nun, yet her symptoms include urinating as frequently as the pregnant and a burning mock-bladder-infection twenty-four hours a day every day with no end in sight.
    You might assume that the Valium is self-explanatory given the Intelligent Woman’s predicament. It’s not: she is afraid of planes.

    The Boyfriend of the Beautiful Woman, unaware that he would break up with her in less than a year, sent her roses every day she was in Ft. Lauderdale. At the time, he thought her more beautiful than any of the Models in Vogue . At the time, he was terrified of nothing more than that no matter where she went, every man would want her, and the burden of being so desired would prove too much, just as it had when the Boyfriend had relentlessly pursued and stolen her from Boyfriend Number One who had preceded him. So, every day, he sent roses to the hotel room the Beautiful Woman shared with her two Boyfriend-less Friends. But in his own cheater’s heart, he knew that she would stray.

    On the cruise, the Intelligent Man and the Macho Man play chess all day. The Intelligent Man wins every game.

    The Intelligent Woman was once a Neighborhood Girl. She wore an Italian jacket with her Italian surname printed on the back and encircled with red and green stars. She smoked Newport cigarettes and piled purple eye-shadow up to her dark, heavy brows. Still, none of the Neighborhood Boys wanted to fuck her, because she read too much and said things that made them feel stupid, plus she sounded like an ABC Afterschool Special, going off on preachy riffs about how doing drugs instead of going to school was wrong. She even made fun of the cool words they made up (to the tone of the Pledge of Allegiance) swearing loyalty to the Neighborhood Street Gang.
    The Girls on the Corner counseled the Intelligent Neighborhood Girl that she never got a guy because she was fat, so when she was thirteen she became Anorexic and lost thirty pounds quick as that, and—though her hungry breasts immediately and forever ceased all development, remaining forever pubescent—all the Neighborhood Fat Ladies said how much better she looked and how envious they were (they were Uneducated People who did not know what Anorexia was). But the Neighborhood Boys still hated her.
    Then they gang-raped another Neighborhood Fat Girl, which went to show that not wanting to fuck the Intelligent Neighborhood Girl had never had anything to do with the width of her ass in the first place.
    Imagine