A Fearless Moral Inventory

CARLA PROMISES HERSELF AND POOJA FROM THE LIBRARY that she won’t engage with the Mifflin Street Fair tomorrow, won’t drink with the undergrads, won’t even walk down her street while it’s in session, though her apartment and the library are both on Mifflin—a chilly length of residential Wisconsin street that’s raucous once a year. Carla has a sex addiction, but she’s been perfect for a month, and she resolves to maintain.

Pooja offers a half-assed solution: a vacation to the Dells for the day. She presents the idea like it’s just occurred to her. “You could get a room on the waterpark side,” she says, falsely casual, her busybody hands herding the due-date stamps into a row. “Rates are a joke in the off-season. And this one hotel has a slide straight from the main office into the pool.”

Carla pictures herself in her stretched-out bikini, selected to showcase the most flesh and not the least bit flattering, pitching out of a hotel on a water slide, in full view of Route 13. She promises Pooja that she won’t repeat 2014. No way, not this year. She has the ferrets.

“I’m a mom now,” she says.

Pooja freshens the knot on her scarf and offers a worried smile. “I’ll cover for you at the library. I rearranged my schedule.”

“That’s ridiculous. I’ll be fine.”

Carla hunches from Pooja’s sagging grin and squanders her fifteen-minute break gazing at the expanse of Mifflin, pristine from the street sweeper. A wobbly copy of herself watches back from the plate glass window across the road.

The next morning, the sun is a red rip on the horizon, gilding the doughnut of the sleeping ferrets in their cage. The fair has already started. Outside, a girl spins a hula hoop around her skinny hips. Glitter courses through the tube like a mini river. She must be cold out there, in her tank top. Though it’s technically spring, the snow only melted a few days before.

Carla has been attending Sex and Love Addiction Anonymous meetings for three years. In Madison, her home meeting is held in the basement of the community center. She goes every week. Or at least every other. Though she was humiliated to tell Pooja, Annie, and Linda—all new friends, all librarians—that she’d become involved with the program—part of her self-assigned Accountability Homework—she has to admit that the meetings make sense. SLA is definitely what she has. She likes sex, obviously, comes easily and is rarely grossed out. What gets her is the urgent penny romance of one-night stands. A guy she doesn’t even know becoming moved enough to sweep her bangs away, a baby dyke’s hungry grip. People are startled by how much they like her. She’s chubby, with big lips and a childish laugh.

Some symptoms on the SLAA website seem universal. Like lacking boundaries and fearing loneliness. Who has boundaries, truly? Who likes loneliness? Carla doesn’t understand how the opposite kind of people—people who fear sex and avoid intimacy—fall into the same addiction category. Her eyes glaze when members launch into sagas of pizza and milk at home on a Saturday night. Is she supposed to be surprised because they’re hot? One tenet says SLAs sexualize stress and guilt. She can almost put her finger on that one, but not quite.