Good In Bed Read Online Free PDF

someday,” he said, smiling at me, cradling me close. We figured it out— the things he liked, the things I liked, the things we both liked. Some of it was straightforward. Some of it would have been raunchy enough to raise eyebrows even in Moxie, where they ran regular features on new “sizzling sexy secrets!”
    But the thing that galled me, that chewed at my heart as I tossed and turned, feeling clammy and cotton-mouthed from the previous night’s tequila binge, was the column’s title. “Good in Bed.” It was a lie. It wasn’t that he’d been some kind of sexual savant, a boy wonder under the sheets… it was that we had loved each other, once. We’d been good in bed together.
    TWO
    I woke up on Saturday morning to the sound of the telephone. Three rings, then silence. A ten-second pause, then three more rings, followed by more silence. My mother was not a fan of answering machines, so if she either knew or believed that I was home, she’d just keep calling until I picked up. Resistance was futile.
    “This is so obnoxious,” I said, in lieu of “hello.”
    “This would be your mom,” said my mother.
    “I’m shocked. Could you call me back later? Please? It’s very early. I’m very tired.”
    “Oh, quit whining,” she said briskly. “You’re just hung over. Pick me up in an hour. We’ll go to the cooking demonstration at Reading Terminal.”
    “No,” I said. “Absolutely not.” Knowing, even as I said it, that I could protest and complain and come up with seventeen different excuses, and, come noon, I’d still be in the Reading Terminal, cringing as my mother offered a high-volume play-by-play critique of the hapless chef’s menu selection and cooking skills.
    “Drink some water. Take some aspirin,” she said. “I’ll see you in an hour.”
    “Ma, please…”
    “I’m assuming you read Bruce’s article,” she said. My mother is not big on elaborate transitions.
    “Yeah,” I said, knowing, without having to ask, that she had, too. My sister Lucy, a charter subscriber to Moxie and eager reader of any and all things related to femininity, still had her copy delivered to our house. After last night’s door-pounding debacle, I could only assume that she’d pointed it out to my mother… or that Bruce had. The very thought of that conversation— “I’m just calling to let you know that I had an article published this month and I think Cannie’s pretty upset by it”— made me want to hide under the bed. If I could even fit. I didn’t want to walk around in a world where Moxie was on the newsstands, in mailboxes. I felt scalded by shame, like I was wearing a gigantic crimson C., like everyone who saw me would know that I was the girl from “Good in Bed,” and that I was fat and that I’d dumped some guy who’d tried to understand and love me.
    “Well, I know you’re upset”
    “I’m not upset,” I snapped. “I’m fine.”
    “Oh,” she said. This, obviously, was not the response she was expecting. “I thought it was kind of crummy of him.”
    “He’s a crummy guy,” I said.
    “He wasn’t a crummy guy. That’s why it was so surprising.” I slumped against my pillows. My head hurt. “Are we going to debate his crumminess now?”
    “Maybe later,” said my mother. “I’ll see you soon.”
    There are two kinds of houses in the neighborhood where I grew up— the ones where the parents stayed married, and the ones where they didn’t.
    Given only a cursory glance, both kinds of houses look the same— big, rambling, four- and five-bedroom colonials set well back from the sidewalk-less streets, each on an acre of land. Most are painted conservative colors, with contrasting shutters and trim— a slate-gray house with blue shutters, for example, or a pale beige house with a red door. Most have long driveways, done in gravel, and many have in-ground pools out back.
    But look closer— or, better yet, stay a while— and you’ll start to see the difference.
    The