LOOKING FOR LOVE AND FOUCAULT
by Joris K. Huysmans


"Remember, you have type 3 hair, so promise me you'll use a good conditioner, and don't borrow some other girl's," she said.

"Okay, Mother, you can leave now, my hair and I will be fine."

"And sweetie, the most important part of this year is rush.  So start researching the sororities early, and focus on a few superior ones that you think you really have a good shot at."

"Yes, Mama--"

"And don't fall into the habit of snacking.  The `freshman 15' has doomed more girls' chances of getting that M.R.S. than drugs or getting you-know-what."

"Okay, Mama!  You can go--"

"My little girl, gone to college--" she started to tear up.

"Not here, Mother!" I said, getting more formal again.

"Right," she said, and pulled herself together.  Years of competition-- she had been Miss Low-Till Farming in 1977 and Miss Soybean in 1978, and I had been Miss Cledmore County and come in third at the state finals last year-- meant that she knew how to conquer her emotions and put on a brave face.  "Have a wonderful time and find a wonderful boy, preferably pre-med or business school," she said, kissed me on the cheek, and then there was just the clacking of her heels down the hallway.

I looked around my private room-- Mother had insisted on paying for one, she was very concerned that I not end up with a roommate who might stand in the way of landing the right husband.  Well, considering how well she had done with Daddy, and Stepdaddy Jim, and Stepdaddy Brad, she could afford to give her little girl the very best.  It didn't entirely have Mother's personal touch-- she hadn't had time to paint it dusty rose-- but it did look like a flower factory had exploded in here.  That was her style, for sure.

I unpacked some things and thought back, a little nostalgically, on my last few days in Croweville before moving up here to the university in Sparta.  My last date with Trent had gone badly.  He knew he was being dumped, that Mother wanted me to find someone more collegiate than a guy who was likely to work in his dad's body shop the rest of his life, so he tried to finally get me to do it with him.  

I got out of it, as usual, by giving him a BJ-- Mother had taught me early on that there were ways to keep a boy happy without risking a baby-- but as I worked on his thick, bumpy, stinky little pole until he splattered his goo onto the Kleenex I kept handy, I couldn't help but think that this was a pretty high price to pay just for having a boyfriend to go places with once in a while.  Would sex with the future doctor husband of Mother's dreams be any more satisfying?  Or would it just be the price I paid for the house and the cars and the trips, too?

That night, as I lay in bed on my first night away from home, I thought about the path Mother had laid out for me-- for the first time, or at least it seemed like the first time.  It was so simple, and it had worked for her so well, that I had never questioned it-- find the first husband, if things didn't work out encourage him to have a fling by cutting him off in the bedroom, then catch him in the act, big settlement, find next husband, repeat as often as necessary.  It sounded like a great plan, except for one thing-- what about love?

Where did love fit into it?  Where did finding your soulmate and growing old together come into it?  Mother had nobody but me now, and now I was gone from her house, at least, if hardly her control.  Was that how I saw myself, 20 years or so from today-- sending my girl off to college and coming home to a big, admittedly very big and nice, but empty home?

Suddenly college was making me very sad, and scared.

*  *  *

The social life in a dorm is so busy in the first few weeks that I had no trouble meeting lots of boys.  But there were so many of them and they were so much the same-- all bony elbows and pawing-- that I think my doubts started to show.  I heard a couple of stray comments about "boring" or "stuck up" or "doesn't seem interested."  And you know what, they were right.  I was just kind of freaked out by the whole thing-- that I was supposed to look over all these young stud bulls and decide which one had the best earning potential for me, and then rope him and brand him.  ("Ring by spring...")

Meanwhile, I was kind of getting into the school part of college, believe it or not.  High school work had always been easy for me, but for the first time I had professors who weren't just teaching to the dumbest kids in the class but actually forcing me to think, analyze things, use my head.  Mother had always warned me about seeming too smart, that that rarely helped a girl get a man, but suddenly, smartness didn't seem such a liability, even if it was a surprise for them sometimes to hear something bright come out of a tall blonde with good beauty habits.

So I kind of let my participation in the social part slide and focused on my classes for a bit, as much as that would have disappointed Mother.  We talked every day and I could tell she was getting a little frustrated at how vague my answers were about who I was seeing, and what social events I was planning to attend in the next week.

One afternoon I went to the campus bookstore in search of books by an author one of my professors had been talking about, that sounded like it had some interesting things to say about sex.  I only knew how the name was pronounced, not how it was spelled, and I wasn't having much luck finding the author on the shelf, so I tried to find somebody who could help me.  The first guy was helping another customer, so I kept wandering in search of someone who could help and soon found myself in the kids' section. 

Then I saw her.

What was it about her that struck me so?  It certainly wasn't beauty.  She was overweight and, at that moment, displaying an ample crack in the back of her jeans as she sat on the floor, shelving a stack of picture books.  It wasn't style-- she had wildly unkempt black curly hair, black hornrim glasses and no makeup, all of which gave her a certain boyish look.

No, what wowed me was that she seemed free.  Free of all the things I'd come to school with-- the need to dress up like every day was a job interview (which, to Mother's mind, it was), to impress boys, to be somebody I didn't know if I wanted to be.

She looked up at me.  "Can I help you?"

"Yes, I'm looking for a book on a French philosopher-- it's something like Fooko or Fuckall--"

"Feuh-kohhh," she said, trailing the last syllable out.

"Right," I said.

Then she kind of smirked at me and said "I'll see if we have something... for you."  As if someone like me was never, in a million years, going to be capable of understanding this big-brained French dude.  I felt my face flush-- fortunately my blush would disguise the fact-- as she led me to the philosophy section.

We looked at the books for a minute-- she reached for one called Foucault For Dummies and I dismissed it with a haughty glare-- and eventually arrived at a thin introductory volume.  All the while, though, I was looking at her-- her fat breasts loose under her Obama T-shirt, a roll sticking out on one side of her hips, her ample butt squishy in her jeans.  There was something monstrous about her, large and hairy as she was, something repellent and yet magnetic, the sight of a woman my age so completely devoted to a different way of presenting herself to the world.  I tried to imagine letting myself go like that-- no, it was too awful.  And yet I couldn't tear away.

I took the book and thanked her, and as I walked away she sort of shook her head a little and smirked again, as if in amazement at the exotic creature she'd met today.

*  *  *

I devoured the book and was back at the bookstore within two days.  I was eager to tackle Foucault's major work, The History of Sexuality, but just as importantly, I wanted to buy it from her, show her that I had been capable of reading such a work and understanding it.

I had thought about her a lot in the past two days, trying to puzzle out what it would be like to be such a person.  To present yourself that way to the world.  Could I do that?  Could I make such a radical change to myself and what I was here for?  Could I stand the conniption fit that Mother would throw as a result?

I wandered the aisles, Foucault in hand, but didn't see her.  Resigned, I found the philosophy department, and looked through it, but didn't seem to see volume one, The Will to Knowledge.  I leafed through the second volume, but it was about ancient Greece, and seemed less interesting.

"Still looking for Foucault?"

I turned around and there she was, just as I'd remembered her-- rough and unkempt.  Yet there was something lovely about her pale skin set off by black hair, even if some of it grew where it really should be plucked.

"I finished this, so I wanted to read his History of Sexuality," I said.

"You finished it?"  She still seem bemused by me, the bitch.  "What did you think of it."

"I thought it was interesting," I said, wincing at such a lame opening statement.  Hurriedly I added, "I was interested by his concept of repression as being not just an instrument of control over our sexuality, but also, how we define ourselves.  Like, if society wasn't there to set the boundaries, we wouldn't be able to, you know..."

"Construct an identity," she said.

"Right," I said.

"Because the one thing we see around us is that some people have very strong constructed identities," she said, peering at me through those black hornrims.

"And it may lead people who have their own constructed identity to make assumptions about others which might be too narrow," I said.

"Where in fact, their identity might be more fluid," she said.

"There could be a lot of fluidity," I said.  

"So which one are you looking for?" she asked.  "Which book, I mean."

"Oh, uh, volume one of The History of Sexuality," I said.  "But it doesn't seem to be in stock."
"I have it," she said.

I looked at her, wondering what she was implying.

"If you'd like to come over for some tea, I could lend it to you," she said.

*  *  *

"Power isn't just about ordering people to do something," she said.  "For Foucault, it's a whole system that makes you want to do something.  That could be morality, it could be science, it could be marketing.  It doesn't have to be a guy with a gun ordering you around."

We were sitting on a big puffy couch, reclining face to face with our tea cups in our hands.  She was puffy too, a landscape that rolled and curved over the couch, I felt very bony next to her.  "So that's what he means by hegemony?  The ideas are so deeply ingrained that it's how you view the entire world--"

"Right.  Any other way of acting would be unthinkable."

"And that's why he's so focused on discipline--"

"Well, maybe not the only reason," she said, with a sort of smirk.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, he was also a gay guy who was into S&M and stuff like that," she said.  "So I think his interest in discipline was more than academic, if you know what I mean."

"Oh," I said.  We were quiet for a moment.  "So what about freedom?  Is there such a thing?"

"Well, I think that's his point about power," she said.  "We create power by rebelling against it and defining it."

"But is that a bad thing?  Aren't we at least affecting it by pushing against it?"

"Yeah, I think that's part of how Foucault is different from a lot of other philosophers," she said, kicking her sandals off, exposing her long toes.  "Marxists view power as a very rigid game with two teams.  Foucault's view of it is much more dynamic-- it's not just religion or the state--"

"It's in all the ways we deal with people," I said.  My hand bumped into hers.  It stayed there, feeling the warmth coming from her skin.

"Right," she said.

"Like in how members of different social groups act to each other on campus.  They assume certain things about each other, when maybe..." I said, trailing off.

"They want the same thing and don't know it," she said.  "And they need to break through how society defines them--"

At that moment I was done talking about Foucault.  So I leaned forward and kissed her.

Her lips were so soft and yielding, it was unlike any time I'd kissed Trent or any boy.  I loved the heat coming from her mouth as our lips mashed together.  I wanted to eat her up.

She put her hand to my breast and I grabbed hers, roughly, the big round blob of tit that it was under her cotton T-shirt.  I could feel her nipple getting hard under her bra and I knew I had to suck that nipple, now.  So I grabbed her shirt and pulled it up.  She laughed, someone's in a hurry, she seemed to be saying.  She reached behind and popped her bra and then those beautiful fat tits came tumbling out and I dove for one of them, sucking her nipple while mashing the other against my face.  God, they were so soft and wonderful, big spongy boobs, I wanted to suck on them forever, to live between their soft pink bounciness.

She pushed me back and began unbuttoning my blouse.  I just stared at her, topless, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, her unruly black curls falling over her face, her big boobs dangling in front of me, her soft tummy swaying from side to side, a mole with a little hair sticking out right under her tits, adorable.  She unsnapped my brassiere in the middle and then she grabbed my smaller breasts and began flicking her tongue over my nipples, my toes curled up, it was wonderful.  She came back up and kissed me again, and I sucked her tongue in, greedily, while squeezing her dangling tit.

Then I rolled on top of her, her fat breasts lolling to either side as I kissed my way down, past the hairy mole to her stomach.  I grabbed her pants and began to pull them down, and as I did, a magnificent forest of curly dark hair sprang up.  Her crotch was as untamed and hairy as the rest of her, maybe moreso, and now it was my wild place, to lick and suck into submission.  I felt no hesitation about the step I was about to take; I knew that this was what I was, that I felt about her pussy as I never felt about any of the cocks I'd had in my hands or my mouth, spewing their stinky cum onto me.  A pussy was a natural and beautiful thing, and this one would be mine to lick to ecstasy.

I spread her legs apart and there it was, in all that black fur, slimy purple lips dripping with anticipation of my tongue.  I dove in and spread them apart with my tongue, licking up and down the length of their slippery warm womanliness.  They tasted of salt and metal and wet velvet-- no, they tasted of themselves, pussy, the thing I knew I needed from now on.  What was that about identities being constructed?  This was my identity, from birth I now knew, licking her slick wet snatch, feeling her petals undulate under my tongue as I kneaded her big round bottom.  Oh, the hours I would spend loving that fat bottom.

I slid a finger into her pussy and then another, slowly fucking her as I lapped her clit.  She started moaning, her big ass shaking the world in front of me, and then she clamped her soft thick thighs around my head and I felt her pussy squeeze my fingers, rhythmically.  I'd made her cum, me and my fingers and tongue, her pussy was responding to me, it had given herself over to me.

We cuddled for hours, feeling each other all over, playing with the newfound joys of soft fat breasts, squishy tummy, hairy bush, long toes.  I was inexhaustible, I wanted to lick at her womanliness for hours, I saw stars when she climbed on top of me, fucking me with her fingers while she sucked my nipples, kissed her own juices off my face.  We couldn't have been more different, me blonde and well-groomed and long and lithe, her pale and dark-haired and messy in every direction with her wild hair and monobrow and chubbiness.  But she was everything I wanted under me, in my power.

Foucault would have understood, I think.

*  *  *

Mama took it badly at first-- if you can call a pretend suicide attempt taking it badly (four Midol and a glass of champagne is unlikely to be fatal, even if you do leave a three-page note).  But over time I saw a change in her attitude toward Liz and me, and finally I realized what it was-- she saw that we were in love, and I think that was something she'd never seen before.

Now we go shopping together (she's slightly femme'd Liz up, though there's a long way to go to make her Miss Low-Till Farming) and hang out together during break, drinking chardonnay and talking girl talk.  I've even started to wonder about Mama-- could she have been so unhappy in her relationships, at least in every way except money, because she...?  It's a funny thought, but she's taken good care of herself, and her marriages certainly have left her well fixed.  She'd make a nice catch for some gal.  Maybe she should go back to school for her Ms.