Sonia gets up and knows where she’s going. She’s not going to call Larry or Larissa. She gets to the stairs and tries to get up on the bannister to slide down it, but her pregnant self won’t allow it. She walks down, carefully, and heads straight out the door to her car and heads to the highway. It isn’t until she’s a half an hour on the highway that she realizes she forgot to thank Alison, even forgot to say goodbye.
17
She takes her time, like she took her time getting to Indiana. The days bleed into each other and the driving is more and more uncomfortable, so she spends a lot of time watching movies in hotels. She spends Christmas in a Ramada Inn. She spends New Year’s in a Motel 6. Both days she feels sorry for the people who work at the desk. She’s always felt sorry for people who have to work menial jobs on holidays. You’re supposed to be with your family. And then when her thoughts go there, she doesn’t feel sorry for herself, but she feels ashamed. Then she watches more TV, the great thought killer.
On her final stretch to Boulder, she develops an awful case of hemorrhoids. The worst. Truck driver hemorrhoids. So what does she do? She does what any self-respecting truck driver would do. She gets herself a donut to sit on.
Sonia sits happily on her donut and starts the car. She sits still for a minute, the car humming, and feels her ass cheeks spread open because of the donut hole. This is the point of the donut, to free all pressure from her asshole. Does she feel relief? She sits there for a bit, in the parking lot of the Walmart in western Illinois. To figure out if the donut is really helping her. Her ass is smeared with Preparation H — which she did in the bathroom at Walmart — and now she has her donut. It seems to help, but it puts pressure on her lower back, which already ached a bit. She scoots around, finds a way of perching on her donut and resting her lower back against the seat that seems to feel the best. And then she backs out.
Four hours later, and it’s dark. She’s not ready to stop at a motel yet. Her ass feels so great! She could drive forever! Tonight, she’ll drive late into the night, or so she thinks. She will drive, drive, drive! She is sick of all her tapes and CDs, or rather, she is taking a break from them before she gets completely sick of them, and she’s listening to the radio, listening to a classical station. Sonia doesn’t listen to tons of classical music, but she does listen to a bit of it. She listened to more of it in high school, with her dad, before she moved out, and rock ’n’ roll took over her life. And yet, she knows this music! How exciting! It is Ravel, the piano concertos. Her father played them on his enormous stereo. When she was a little girl, she danced around the living room, a terribly awkward ballerina, flapping her arms to the music. But the music was inspiring, soaring at times, perhaps even emotionally manipulative. But that is what she likes about it, perhaps what she likes most about all music. It can make you feel what it wants you to feel. It can take control. She turns it up and her heart clenches. Her boys. No, no she can’t think of them. Willing herself to think of something else, she thinks of her donut. Ah, the power of the mind. The mind can switch around, can move, can unstick itself. Her shiny, plastic, dark blue donut that is cradling the fat of her ass. She starts moving her ass around, and her lower back is enjoying it, too. She’s massaging her lower back against the back of the car seat, and her butt cheeks on the sturdy but cushiony curves of her donut. Now, in her mental vision, comes the sight of what is floating free in the whole of the donut. Her oversized, red, slightly angry pussy. The baby is pushing down on all of her organs and her vagina gets so much blood trapped down there. She remembers the thought she had during her first pregnancy — monkeys with their red swollen genitalia have nothing on me. And so it was, and so it is again.
Sonia scoots her ass around so she’s gripping the sides of the donut with her ass cheeks. She manages to move the donut with the grip of her butt, so that she now perches on the side of it, rather than sitting on it as she’s meant to sit on it. No more floating in the hole. No more parts of her being suspended in free air. No, now she feels the lips of her crotch embracing the plastic of the donut. She swerves a bit during this maneuvering and looks in the rearview mirror. Her breath is coming a bit more quickly now. She’s nervous. No one behind her, no one immediately behind her. There are some lights far back, far, far back, as this Midwestern highway is so straight and flat she can see for what seems like forever.
She begins grinding, back and forth, back and forth. God. It’s been too long since she last masturbated. During her first pregnancy, she masturbated every day. Like a guy. Like a fifteen-year-old boy. Hell, she was in her late twenties and still thought fucking and coming were the most important things in life. My, how things have changed. During her second pregnancy, she had little time to herself, what with her son running around. But when he napped in the afternoon, she sometimes got to masturbate. Sometimes, she read a magazine, or returned phone calls. But sometimes, she took a “nap”—which meant, jacked off. But this pregnancy, she could count how many times she’d done it, taken care of herself.
It’s not easy to lift her body — she’s getting big and unmanageable — but she does it, lifts herself out of the seat, grunting to do so, and she takes one hand off the wheel and pulls her skirt up and her sticky panties down. The car is swerving, but she’s in control, she is, and she slows down, too. Indeed, she stops pressing the accelerator at all. She gets her panties to her midthighs and then falls back down on the donut. Now, from a more relaxed sitting position, she pulls her panties down to her ankles. First one side, then the other, until the panties drop down to her ankles, and she can kick them off, just by lifting a foot. No more panties! It’s just her wet, needy pussy and the cool, slick plastic of the donut. Back and forth, back and forth. God! Ravel is getting excited, too. Swirling around, quickly, wrenchingly. It’s painful music, but beautiful, beautiful. She feels tears come to her eyes — these concertos always made her cry, she remembers — but she can’t ever remember crying while masturbating. This is a new one. She also is pretty sure she’s never masturbated in a car, or at least not while trying to drive it. She’s given blow jobs in cars, been fingered and fucked in cars, once had her pussy eaten out in a car (that was Philbert Rush), but she’s never masturbated in a car, especially not while driving. Back and forth, around and around. Her ass tenses. Is she going to make it? Well, yes. Too soon? Perhaps there is no too soon in a car, on a highway. Perhaps quick is the point. She looks down at her body — it is the Venus de Milo. Round, wet, a bit smelly. She reaches down into her T-shirt to grab a breast and manages without too much trouble. Her breast is wet. God. With sweat, with that humid nipple sweat that happens when she’s in an excited state. God help her. She pinches her nipple, hard. A white drop appears on the edge of her nipple and then drips down. Soon, she’ll have milk. Her breasts when she is nursing are the most erotic thing to her. For a moment, she can’t see. This scares her. Should she pull over to finish herself off? She can’t look into the mirror, it would ruin it. She’s so close. She can do it. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, she says to herself, as she grinds against the donut.