The Crispiest Apple

My mother is an escort and an adult-actress, not a prostitute, call girl, hooker, whore, porn star, or streetwalker. Yes, she has a website and no, you can’t have the address.

An escort doesn’t trade money for sex. She makes her living exercising the cliché “time is money.” One hour, $500. You’ve got to get in touch with her through her website or from a referral. You can’t call an agency or drive real slow by her on the right street. She’s an entrepreneur, complete with an appointment book and a client list. Her price is non-negotiable, you pay for perfection. She’s not on drugs, and she doesn’t have to meet you. She’s not a classless call girl or a filthy prostitute. See the difference? It’s there, most of the time.

Perfect moms don’t exist. Now that I’m thinking about motherhood, I realize that it’s not “I hope I don’t screw up my kids,” but “I wonder what my kids will have to go to therapy for?”

Being fat and an adolescent girl at the same time was hard until I found out that my mom was an escort. My friends and I would sit on my bed after school and read magazines. We’d read about the ways to pleasure a man and how to dress for your body type. I had to look at the “apple shape” section. We all knew the hourglass shape was the best to have. The best way to dress for your shape was to trick men into thinking that you had an hourglass shape by directing attention to your boobs and butt while distracting from your waist. By the time you were undressed, he’d be so excited by the ice cubes you put in your mouth before blowing him that he wouldn’t care what you looked like, at least for the next twenty minutes.

But my mother was an apple, and men wanted her. They called her begging to see her for just an hour. They could afford anything, even hourglasses. I threw away the magazines and used ice to cool drinks. I was the crispiest apple.

I remember the guy who told me that I looked just like my mother, staring at me but never making eye contact. I came home too early. I wanted to cut open his scrotum, but I smiled and walked away as he turned to watch. He paid for my new school supplies and clothes.

Jake, the one that pays her rent and my college tuition, quietly leaves envelopes fat with cash on my Mother’s dresser for the privilege of being her boyfriend. He’s nice enough; he waited until I was twenty-one to ask if he could rent me. It could be very profitable, being the child of an escort and adult actress. One of her photographers offered me $600 to take my shirt off and ride a mechanical bull for a crowd on camera. I almost said yes but wrote a bucket list instead: 1) Ride a mechanical bull.  Saying no to people offering to pay me $500 an hour has become a reflex. “No” has to be reflexive. “Rent is due”, “I need health insurance”, “It might be interesting.” These responses are slower, less practiced than “No thank you Sir.”

Max was the first person I met who had a poor, black daddy and a rich, white mommy. He lived on a farm down the road and was the only person who wasn’t black or white but black and white. I thought he was sent from heaven or made up in a lab, he had a divine destiny to teach us all that we were just people. We were both defined by who our parents were. Bastard. Oreo. Slut. I hoped that as racism became a four-letter word maybe people would see that I wasn’t just an escorts’ daughter; I was a women, a unique apple, alive.

My mom hates her job. Maybe that’s why we’re both rich and poor, not in between but both. She always works just enough but not more. She loses friends when they find out; she lies to protect my grandma. Grandma knows, she knows we know she knows, we don’t talk about it. When pressed, my mother says she is in “advertising” and changes the subject. A good escort knows how to manipulate any situation. She would make a good politician.

The neighbors notice the expensive cars parked outside our cozy two-bedroom attic apartment. They watch the men come out alone, negotiate the cracked sidewalk and stay in sixty-minute increments. A fog of sex hangs outside the door; you can smell it for miles. The neighbors grow pot and trade it for the essentials. They don’t talk about what they see to my mother because she is too proud, but they ask me questions when they think my guard is down. My lies are impenetrable, but I wish they wouldn’t ask me things they already know. They accept it because we’re good neighbors but I have to come over to their house to play, their children aren’t allowed in mine.

At nineteen I tried to be gay, but I wasn’t. Then I tried to be asexual. Men were giving, and I took. I loved what they gave me, the attention, the privilege, the things. I loved feeling the unique shape of their cocks for the first time. I felt richer with each new fuck.

My mother says she’s an international model and a sex therapist. She’s kept marriages alive. She always says, “Men need to cheat, they’re hunters. They need to marry Mother Mary and fuck Mary Magdalene.” She says they do things to her that they would never do to their wives. My boyfriend can’t understand why I want an open relationship. I don’t want him to have to cheat. He squeezes me tight to his chest and tells me that not all men cheat, that I’m all he needs. I’m trying to be both the virgin and the slut. I’m starting to realize that we’re different, my partner and I. He says we’re not our gender, we’re all just people. Maybe in Vermont, but where I come from even heaven-sent-black-and-white-people have gender. It’s inescapable.

Sometimes when the rent is due and there aren’t any groceries in the house, I can feel my resources rotting. This $8.50/ hour job isn’t worth it. I am my mothers’ secretary. When someone asks, “Do you speak Russian?” I know it has nothing to do with Russia. The cops she gives discounts to tell her where and when. It’s more of a struggle to not become an escort than to become one.

I want. I want individually packaged yogurt with fruity flavors and meat that isn’t the Manager’s Special. I want silky, black underthings with triple digit price tags. I want to separate twenties into piles of five like my mother and I used to.

But my mother said she’d kill me. She wouldn’t, she would tell my dad, and he would beat me into applesauce. My future degree will be their proudest achievement. I want it too, now that it might be too late. They sent me to college where it’s always winter, so I’ll never want to take my clothing off. I have to become a doctor, so I can save her from her choices. I have to build a big house with an addition. She sleeps with strangers so I can go to college, so she can stop sleeping with strangers. When I told her I was getting a degree in literature, she started a second job selling used books.

I wonder where Max is now.