At 1 a.m. on a Friday night, I stood in the personal care aisle of Wal-Mart.

Obviously, I was drunk.

Beside me, my friend Bob rummaged through a shelf of personal massagers — undulating nylon mats and giant, thumping devices that could clock someone — in search of an item he'd dubbed "the Cadillac of vibrators."

"They're out," said Bob, his body half-buried in scattered boxes. "But this might work."

"This?" I turned the white box over in my hand. "It looks like a hand mixer."

He sighed. "This is more like the Grand Am of vibrators. The Ford Escort of vibrators."

"How does it even work?" I asked.

Bob gave me a look. He'd taken me this far. From here, I was on my own.

 

---

Earlier that night, Bob and I had been in a smoky dive, drinking pitchers of lager and admitting things we shouldn't have. Like the number of people we'd slept with, and when, and how, and why.

I made the more-than-slightly-embarrassing revelation that I'd never had an orgasm.

We weren't lovers; we were beer buddies who reveled in this kind of conversational striptease. Inevitably, though, it went a smidge too far, like the time Bob told me his testicles were unusually large. Or the time, that night, when I made the more-than-slightly-embarrassing revelation that I'd never had an orgasm.

Bob was incredulous. "Never, ever?"

I shook my head and lit a cigarette.

"Don't you have a vibrator?"

"Keep it down!" I said, squirming in my seat.

"Why are you freaking out?" asked Bob. "There's nothing wrong with having a vibrator."

"Stop saying that so loud," I whispered.

"What, vibrator? What's wrong with you?" asked Bob.

I wasn't sure. But I was beginning to suspect that — despite a lifetime of pretending otherwise — I was a bit of a prude.

---

How did it happen? In kindergarten, I was the kid who told unbelieving listeners on the playground where babies come from. In sixth grade, I passed around The Color Purple in French class. It was dog-eared to the page where one woman tells another to hold a mirror up to her "you-know-what" and admire it. In high school, I had sex earlier and more often than my girlfriends, who came to me for advice: like what lingerie to wear, how to lay across the bed so your thighs look thinner, which angle was most flattering.

And therein lay the problem. By age seventeen, I had swallowed so many movie fantasies about what sex was supposed to look like — torso arched in ecstasy, toes curled comically — that I didn't bother to ask how it was supposed to feel. And it felt . . . okay. But there was no white-hot ecstasy, no explosion of bliss. My boyfriend was incredibly attentive, valiant when it came to my pleasure, and so, not wanting to disappoint him, I did exactly what they do in the movies.

I faked it.