Harriet Mercer, buckled tightly into her seat belt, sat still for quite some time in the Ford Fairlane outside the store on Broadway, as she waited for her blood to stop pumping so wildly. Deep flutters rippled through her, flushed her crimson from tip to toe. It felt as if she might explode, like a living hand grenade inside her dark suit jacket, about to leave the whole gray car interior, windows and all, splattered with guts.

 

Letting go of the steering wheel, she held her scorching cheeks between her palms and was surprised by the touch of cool, dry fingers. She looked down at her long, white hands, pulling up and dropping the skin, now loose and sagging, like a fallen circus tent. "Maybe these aren't mine," she thought. "I don't remember how they got like this." Quickly, she summoned her guardian angel, Mary Catherine, invisible companion in many small adventures, arriving always in the nick of time, like in the early convent days at Saint Mary of the Erroneous Assumption, where they had giggled their way back to sanity. They had been together since grade school. At night for years, Harriet had made space for her in bed, worrying about squishing her in her sleep.

 

Harriet now wondered if the orgasms from the vibrator inside that damn store, only twenty paces away, only twenty dollars away, would be better than this pulsating nausea, because she certainly hoped so. There was no other way to do it. She couldn't very well order from a mail-order catalogue or from one of those magazine ads. Somebody might open the box and see. She had read in one of the magazines she hid in her drawer that it would be better to go with an electric one, although Mary Catherine said the battery-operated ones were probably much more realistic, konking out just at the important times.

 

Sixty-seven year-old Virgin Buys Huge Black Dildo, she suddenly read aloud. She pushed the imaginary cart past the magazine rack at the Jewel Food counter. As she unloaded the perfect, fresh vegetables and firm, ripe fruit, so brightly colored that she felt proud, she and the young check-out girl, looking remarkably like a young Harriet, exchanged a brief and shining glance of total understanding, a wink of feminine conspiracy with a hint of appropriate disapproval but, more richly, a knowing fellowship for the wacky old gal headlined on page one. Home free.

 

Harriet exhaled deeply. At least there were no revealing photos of her nun face, pinched and clean, only one close-up of the dildo that was shiny and immense and quite wonderful.  "Here we go," M.C. whispered. She stepped from the car, locked the door and fed the meter two new quarters. "Here we go," Harriet breathed and, no longer trembling, she entered the darkened doors of The Pleasure Palace, humming a little Latin number Xavier Cugat might have loved.