Hip Replacement

Adina Klein

Word Count 1114

There is nothing sexy about hip replacement surgery to a man who successfully online dates yet he found you, the only single parent with a vagina, at the Hancock House Hotel bar the Friday night of visiting day weekend. 

You know he is hinting at the firm-for-his-age-body that lies beneath his Patagonia fleece, the striped button down shirt unironically tucked into his belted cargo pants, when he brags that he goes indoor mountain climbing every Saturday in Gowanus with his buddy.

When you ask him if he has to wear those man diapers that you saw men wear on a program you once watched for ten minutes about indoor mountain climbing, he should realize the conversation is in desperate need of a pivot. Maybe he shouldn't correct you that its proper name is a “harness,” and, yes, he wears one. Perhaps he shouldn’t also talk about owning special indoor mountain climbing shoes, which are not, in fact, shoes but sticky frog socks that separately encase each toe to better grip the steep fiberglass facade. He and his friend take turns: one holds a rope that is carabinered to the man-diaper, as the other buddy scrabbles up the cliff and then repels down.

After he orders you another martini, you learn that you both graduated from high school in 1988 with birthdays six months apart! That second martini blurs the fact that when he leans in to push back a strand of post pandemic gray hair behind your ear and whispers,  “You look so young for your age,”  it is not a compliment. He is alluding to the fact he has no idea what a woman your age looks like up close.

It has been years, if not decades, since you made out in a bar. His knee, your knee, his knee, your knee, squeezing together in a lust sandwich, Fox News blaring above you on the flat screen so loudly, you can barely hear him ask if he should go out to get condoms. You’ve seen the meth heads smoking outside the gas station down the road, and you are both too drunk to drive, so you look him in the eye and say, “I won’t get you pregnant if you don’t give me herpes.” It slightly ruins the mood when he stops kissing you to ask you why you cannot get pregnant.  Even though you had a prophylactic hysterectomy at age forty-four, it should be obvious that women our age no longer need birth control. 

You raise an eyebrow, put your purse on your arm, stand up. He tells the bartender to make the next round to go. 

A kinder man would have asked if all his athletic pumping felt okay. You had no choice but to show him the still scabby scar of your surgery as he pulled down your panties. Of course you lie and say you are fine. There is nothing sexy about not being able to throw your legs behind your head, worried that the centrifugal force will disengage your thigh from its socket, and hit the headboard of Room 314 at the Hancock House Hotel.

This is a man proud of his erection.

So no way were you going to tell divorced dad that you’re not at all okay. It actually really hurts when he puts his hand precisely on the piece of titanium that what was formally your right femur so he can gain purchase to grind even deeper into you and what part of hip replacement surgery does he not fucking understand? 

You not only pretend that you’re okay, you swallow the pain and pull out all your sexytime tricks.  You do still have them and, after all, it's been a while. 

Afterwards, in the head-on-his-chest portion of the evening, he tells you the inevitable story about separating from his gynecologist wife. She earned all the money while he was the stay at home dad and then, she fell in love with someone at work. He shouldn’t have been shocked  when you ask if his ex-wife left him for a woman, a fact that seems quite obvious in everything he does and doesn't say, the pronouns he does and does not use. He tells you that, of all the women who have had the pleasure of having the same head-on-the-chest  conversation, you were the only one to figure it out.

Ten miles away, your 11-year-old child sleeps, dreaming of genderless love before love includes genitalia in all its complicated stickiness. It’s a Drama Camp, so dramatic it calls itself a Festival of the Arts and not a camp at all. Tomorrow will be a marathon of unairconditioned performances, bug juice in the dining hall. You get up, look for your bra which would have been black and lacy,  not the pilly, stretched out beige thing you put on this morning, had you known how your night would end. He wants to schedule pre breakfast sex after you say you need to sleep alone. You both set your phone alarms.

The whole point was not the actual sex, but the part when you race back to your hotel room and text your one awake friend that you picked up a divorced dad at the bar. She will spread the news! And all your friends will know by morning.  Either way you’re going to text your friends how amazing it was so you might as well strive for amazing.

It was only twelve hours earlier, when you dropped off Pinky, your daughter’s bichon poodle mix at your friend Abraham’s apartment so he and his partner Andy could watch her for the weekend, they laughed when you asked How? How did you become this person with a kid at sleepaway camp? Who sharpied initials into a million pairs of underpants? Who needs to wear sweatpants for the long drive and to get out of the car every hour to do ten downward facing dogs per the strict directions of her physical therapist?  

“What happened to me, Abraham?” you asked. “Weren’t we in Tokyo ten minutes ago? Wasn’t I dancing on the bar at the Red Dragon at four am when the DJ played ‘Like a Prayer’?”

The next morning, after the much sweeter, more enjoyable, less athletic morning sex, you will hold hands under the breakfast table. You’ll pretend it’s totally fine when he says he doesn’t want to hook up in the city where, obviously, he thinks he can do better. But, if it's okay with you, he’ll meet you at the bar for more shenanigans in three weeks, at the next parents’ weekend. He just doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, he says. 

“That’s ok, I’m too old to get hurt,” is what you will tell him.

Because at that very moment , you’re not just pretending you’re okay. In spite of everything, you actually are.

*

Adina is a writer, editor and quilter. Her most recent writing can be found on Esme.Com and Kveller.Com. Adina is currently working on a memoir tentatively titled, “Making Shit Up: A Field Guide to Knitting, Quilting, DIYing Your Own Baby, and Raising Her Alone Without Killing Anyone.” She lives in New York City with her daughter Shirley.