Jennifer Jussel: This One Small Thing Will Fix Your Sex Life

Jennifer Jussel
THIS ONE SMALL THING WILL FIX YOUR SEX LIFE

After a few months of back and forth, we finally ordered the vibrator. My husband seemed elated by the decision. In a matter of hours after ordering it, his face smoothed from hard and square to the cherubic oval I first fell in love with four years ago. Even before it arrived, we started touching more, and kissing. I woke up the next day and rolled over to find his face inches from mine and neither of us pulled away. Even before it arrived, we had sex for the first time in a month. I was nervous about the vibrator—I have a thing about being electrocuted—but I knew, had known for a while, that something needed to change. The next morning, he shaved his face and woke me up before work to tell me he’s so happy I’m his wife. I told him I was happy too while thinking about how much I like when he shaves. I like how his hair starts dirty blond at his chin and turns sunnier as it gets to the top of his head. I really am happy to be his wife. Maybe it is the small things that matter after all.

I have my suspicions about small things: miracle cures, baby steps, that one weird trick to blast belly fat. I find these are either outright lies or lie-tellers, tricking me into making big life changes little by little. My old therapist, who first brought up the vibrator, was always encouraging the latter type of change. It’s because of her suggestion I try some thirty-minute YouTube workouts that I’ve shed forty pounds in the last year. It’s because of her prescription for Prozac that I’ve finally found the will to do the things that make me feel like a real human being. These are the little habits that have gathered like snowflakes to form the shape of me. I now regularly see friends, volunteer tutor, read books, write stories, and plan date nights with my husband. The only place I struggle to apply this snowflake method is my sex life. It’s black ice over there. I lob tips and tricks, half-baked plots involving hot tubs and rose petals, and hours of therapy in an attempt to get over my hang-ups by force, but nothing sticks.

I have a friend who is obsessed with little things, mostly miniature figurines. I understand the impulse. There is something so satisfying about slipping a shiny purple heel onto Polly Pocket’s plastic foot, something mesmerizing about small things well made, the hours someone must have worked to make Jack Skellington’s pupils expand and contract. I was once stopped in my tracks on a night out by a frog no bigger than the nail bed on my thumb. I wondered how the world might look to him, all zoomed in and indistinct. My body would be like a towering stalagmite to him, a new formation in his world, terrifying to see in motion. I stopped several of my friends from stepping on him as we passed. What must it feel like to be so small?

My husband sometimes cups my ears in his hands and says they’re the tiniest, most delicate ears he’s ever seen. He is six foot two and almost twice my weight. He lets me bang on his stomach like a drum and it doesn’t hurt him. I’ve learned to lean back when he’s telling stories with his hands, instinctively avoiding the backswing of any overzealous gestures. But I have never once been afraid of him. He is probably the kindest, most patient person I know. This is the man who called me in tears when my hamster died from old age while I was away to gently break the news and ask if a tissue box was a suitable coffin. “I put some of his favorite treats in the box,” he said. He can’t help being bigger than me any more than I can help being bigger than that frog. He is not the problem. The problem is me, making associations.

I was so concerned about my friends crushing that frog because I grew up in the Texas hill country, where it was more common to see the flat, sunbaked skins of toads squashed under SUV wheels on the road than it was to see live ones in the greenbelt. These are how the little things add up, how one thing leads to another. That little frog is to steamrolled toads is to me pinned flat on the couch years ago seeing starbursts but unable to cry out is to last week’s candlelit bedroom after a nice dinner with my loving husband where my breath catches in my throat at the sight of his biceps constricting as he lowers himself onto me. Sometimes I wave the thought away and we are just two people in love. Sometimes I shrink down and see giant shoes, a looming car tire, a different man’s arms poised inches from my throat. My husband is so understanding—so caring it hurts. He can read my face, be on the other side of the bed in seconds, the warmth of his skin replaced by empty air. He would never guilt me for putting a stop to things. But a few nights ago, with his arms tucked beneath him on the other side of the bed, he cried. A few nights ago, he said, “I don’t want you to be scared.”

Since moving into our apartment in New York, we have started to collect small things. I have shelves of trinkets now: little glass pumpkins, candles I’ll never light shaped like clouds and cubes, even a miniature frog named George. Some of these things are more important to me than others; one is a stuffed cat I’ve had since I was two, another a wooden toucan from my grandparents’ library that is no longer. But all the little things combined build up to something larger: a nesting sense. I like being an adult who can choose to fritter away my hard earned twenty dollars on a statuette of an iguana, just because it made me smile. I like having the power to give homes to each of the things I collect. I like, for example, that George belongs in the center of the coffee table and the novelty candles belong on the second bookshelf from the top of the case. I feel happier in this self-curated menagerie.

This urge to collect things smaller than myself could certainly be egged on by capitalist forces, but mostly I think it’s comforting to see these things cared for. When I was very young, I used to entertain myself by pushing in the puffy white pods attached to the side of our house with my finger. Then my sister told me they were butterfly’s cocoons.

I was once a little thing treated carelessly; a painstakingly crafted cocoon popped by greedy fingers. After that, the pervading sense of my smallness unnerved me. I resented that I, who had before always felt strangely powerful, like I might be able to kill a man superheroine-style if it came down to it, was so quickly proven helpless, as inert and malleable as my terrified cat in the arms of the vet. For a while, I stopped seeing the value of smallness, of persistence, of taking life day by day with quiet strength. Still, years later, I can be overwhelmed by the thought of new routines. I am daunted by new attempts at recovery—the effort they require, the growing pains they threaten. Baby steps sound doable in theory until you look up and see the brambled path stretching on for miles in front of you, tempting you to break into a dead sprint. If you haven’t found your way by now, what good can small course corrections really do?

The vibrator, when it arrived in a nondescript box at our doorstep, was also surprisingly small. It was hot pink and pliable, and the silicone encasing was soft as the top of a cat’s head. We set it straight up on the kitchen counter like it was just another candle and then played with the settings, laughing as it buzzed and thrust gummily at nothing. It wasn’t so scary after all. We made jokes about our southern upbringings, our societally engrained sexual shame. All that dithering over a plastic toy? Our discussions about healing, about trauma, about love and a healthy sex life were as dizzying as the skyscrapers lining our street, but this little thing on the counter felt manageable.

And maybe we’d absolutely hate it. Maybe we’d end up googling how to safely dispose of it and its rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which still freaked me out a little. But it was a first step, something to prove that my aching legs, tired of running, could at least still stand. After all, I’d recovered enough to know that good sex was not what was done to me, not the forceful smashing of one entire body on another. I knew by then that good sex is intricate, delicate; it values smallness. Good sex is like good love, like the good life I am creating for myself. Both seek to nurture the little things, not to destroy them.

The vibrator was still on the kitchen counter when my husband kissed me and said he was happy to be married to me and I thought of running my finger along the smooth borderline where he shaved his chin. Beside it on the counter were the decorative candles shaped like cubes and clouds and across from it on the bookshelf were the pumpkin figurines. George the frog watched us from the coffee table. Outside the window were the skyscrapers leaning over us, above them a silver-hemmed blanket of clouds that dwarfed us all.

And I was glad to be small.

Jennifer Jussel received her MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her work has been published most recently in Booth, the Santa Clara Review, the Blood Orange Review, Allegory Ridge, The Swamp, the same, and others. She lives in Queens with her husband and their cat.