Your bag is empty.
“You have three kids?”
The question came from two 20-something women who had entered the open-aired watering hole in Mexico as barefooted strangers and had now scooted their stools over to me and my boyfriend during our third round of drinks. The brunette had her hand on my boyfriend’s forearm when she laughed, and left it there a half-second longer each time. He let her, and I let him, because it was Mexico. But somewhere in there, I said something about my kids — all three of them, including the eldest who is taller than me. The blonde put her drink down on the bar so hard it sloshed, confirming that I had given birth to three children.
She looked at him. She looked at me. She asked how old he was and then she asked how old I was and I told her, with her mouth slightly agape as she did the mental math. The brunette and the blonde looked at each other. The blonde put her elbow on the bar next to mine, close enough that I could smell the coconut and chemicals from her sunscreen, and asked me a question, softly.
“Did your pussy get huge? After kids?”
She was drunk and curious, and she had spent an hour watching a younger man kiss a woman with three children like he meant it. She needed to know how the math worked.
My boyfriend laughed so hard that he grabbed his own head with both hands like he was holding it on.
“No, she didn’t,” he said. “It’s fucking perfect.”
I didn’t have to say anything. He said it for me.
I have pushed three people out of it, and it is the same pussy it was at 23, when I was the one on the barstool with wet hair asking strangers things I shouldn’t have asked. I know this because I have been inside it my whole life, and so have a number of other people — and nobody has ever paused. Not a hesitation, not a glance down, not a man working his hand around in the dark, like he dropped his keys under the seat.
But I knew the picture in her head, because it was in mine once before. Besides, how can a head the size of a cantaloupe come through a hole the size of a tangerine, only for the hole to stay? Men have a whole vocabulary for a well-loved pussy: Tube sock. Wind tunnel. Hot dog down a hallway.
Everyone is picturing the same empty room, but it is not a room. When there is nothing in a vagina, there is no space in it. The walls touch, the way your palms touch when you press them together. It is muscle, pink and wet and folded in on itself, and it opens for a baby because that is the whole point of it. Then, it closes again; that is the other point. It’s almost as if a rubber band that’s been stretched over a coffee can goes back to being a rubber band — and no one ever worries about the rubber band.
I didn’t say any of that at the bar. He had already said the only thing that mattered, and I watched the brunette take her hand off his arm. But the question stayed with me, so I asked men and not women. Women will tell you what they’ve been told. I asked men, because men have had their dicks in a lot of different women, and men keep records.
Every one of them said the same thing: It’s random.
One of them — in his 40s forties, sporting a wedding-ring tan line but no ring, drinking a Negroni — told me he has fucked more mothers with tight pussies than women who have never been pregnant in their lives.
“I slept with a woman who had three kids,” he said, “and her pussy was like an AI vacuum.”
He said it gripped him like something with a motor in it, that he could feel her clamp and release around the head of his cock without her moving anything else. Three children had come out of her, but her pussy still fit him like a wet glove one size too small. The loosest he ever, he said, was a 24-year-old who had never been pregnant and had a Pilates stomach you could bounce a quarter off of. Yet, it was like fucking the sleeve of a coat, he said. He closed his eyes and could not have told you he was inside her.
Another younger guy, who has worked as a bartender at the same hotel pool for 11 summers and has gotten to intimately know some of the guests, put it more simply.
“It’s big or it’s not. You find out in the first 30 seconds, and the kids have nothing to do with it,” he told me. “I’ve had a 40-year-old with four kids who was a fist, and a 19-year-old who was a cathedral.”
That is the whole story. Some women are born with a glove and some with a mitten and some with a tote bag, and the baby doesn’t get to pick. What the older man said did change after the kids was that the women got hornier and had less time, which is the best combination for a man.
The young women at the bar were not asking about me. They were asking about themselves, in the way that you ask about a stranger’s surgery when you’re the one with the lump. One of them will have a baby in a few years, maybe both, and some drunk girl with wet hair at the bar will ask if her pussy got huge, and they’ll say no.
Because it is not something you can blow out. It is big or it is not.
