Attachment Read Online Free PDF

teenager.
    The side of the long truck was blazoned with a hand-painted globe, denoting worldwide scope in the local style. Jean stared at the homely planet as the truck inched through its dangerous maneuvers, shielding her face from the wall of sunlight beaming from the west. And she felt, sitting under a womanly chest the size of her car, that she herself was stuck, and not just in this wedge of narrow road, with the wild ocean storming below. It seemed to Jean there were no facts; that rules might give way to exceptions and that everything was open to interpretation, the play of the light, the smacking waves of further revelation. The trapped feeling reminded her of a terrifying childhood episode: out of her depth, caught in the tides, she’d been thrashed between two volcanic boulders, scraped, sick and gasping for air, gulping salt water from a lurching horizon. That time, Dad plucked her out and brought her in, carrying her tight against his huge chest back to shore. And this time?

O ver the next two and a half months, Jean exchanged dozens of juicy e-mails with Thing 2, with Munyeroo, with My Own Mountain Goat, with Ginger, who didn’t have red hair, or with just plain Giovana. She watched for reactions from Mark. She worried when he went to London—and surely met his mistress—that her interference would be revealed. But in her compulsion to follow the trail, she persuaded herself that, even if Mark could do such a thing, he’d never, ever talk about it—and his characteristic cheer on his return seemed to confirm her hope. She explained her frequent trips to town (and the Internet café) as a newfound passion for fitness—the gym. She did feel energized, as if she’d run a mile.
    Anticipation, in particular, was better than any treadmilled endorphins. Yes! There was something in her in-box. Every time she opened the account she felt the flush of excitement, like a child spying the glint of colored foil across a garden, a chocolate egg “hidden” by a parent directly in her line of sight. Her pleasure in the moment was embarrassing, or it would have been if she’d been less engrossed, and less anonymous. She could forget that she wasn’t supposed to see these letters, and Giovana abetted her illusion by never using Mark’s name. Though Jean often cringed at the names she got, she never retreated from the feeling that she was Thing 1, Lover, Big, Huge, Gigantor, Master, Manster, Bun, Boss, Rod (Rodney, Rod Stewart), or, and in the end best of all, just Sir. Giovana’s e-mails were almost exclusively about sex, and each included at least one photograph—a contraband brownie smuggled into her lunch box.
    In one message, which Jean then particularly feared would give her identity away, she forgot her impersonation of Mark and tried, with all her native and professional usefulness, to neutralize her rival with advice.
    You’re not bad looking, Gio, she found herself typing. You have lovely hair. You should be more self-confident. Really, you needn’t try so hard…
    In addition to recommending two esteem-building manuals and a hairdo that didn’t cover half the face, she’d thought it worth pointing out, gently, that extruding your breasts through the slash holes of a tightly laced PVC bodice was a plausible definition of trying too hard. But maybe Mark disagreed. (Giovana, anyway, was exasperatingly humbled: under a picture of herself in a puff-sleeved dress and licking a lollipop, she had apologized. I did bad. XXX Tell me how I am to be punished. ) Jean wondered what kind of experience PVC bustiers promised—if, just possibly, all this theatrical strut and know-how went beyond sex toward a counterintuitive, postfeminist liberation. Would she, in her own future happiness, dress like this? The word “negligée” could mean “neglected,” Jean thought while examining Giovana in a filmy transparent babydoll of tan-enhancing blue, but it might also mean “to give little thought to”—to be