Anais poured herself a cup of tea and squeezed a wedge of lemon over the paper thin teacup. She set the lemon on her saucer, lifted the cup and took a sip, glancing at a small tray of chocolate cupcakes and sweet things with whorls of pastel frosting set out on the table, but then she looked demurely into her gold rimmed teacup.
She couldn't eat cake, but she put them out anyways, whenever she took her tea because if she didn't have to fight against the temptation, she could never resist it when she did have to. "I can resist everything except temptation," said some famously famous person whose name she simply could not remember.
Anais wiped her hands on the cloth napkin by her teacup and began typing briskly on the black laptop balance on her knees. Open on the screen was the Vivcore Candy Violet site. Vivcore was a clothing company created by Vivian Hoffpauir and the Candy Violet subdivision sold Lolita clothing. Anais clicked through pages of knee length, domed, lace draped skirts and dresses. Structured cream and black blouses and princess skirts decoupaged with pictures of poker playing cards. Anais glanced at the petticoat she ordered last week and the baby blue ruffled bell skirt she was wearing that day, before moving on the Candy Violet's forum.
She posted there nearly every single day, because it was the only place she could talk to other Lolitas. The Lolita style had started in Japan and hardly anyone knew about it in the West. When Anais went outside wearing her lace shirts and blush colored skirts she attracted a cocktail of strange and accusatory looks. Sometimes people made disparaging comments or asked her why she was dressed like a little girl and Anais couldn't even explain the fashion. In America, as soon as people heard the word Lolita, they turned away because everyone associate the word with that book by the Nabokov man. Even people who hadn't heard of Vladimir Nabokov knew Lolita meant men who want to have sex with little girls.
No one thought of it as a fashion, and Anais had a hard time explaining it. She thought she could say said, "Think of Alice in Wonderland's dress," but then she remembered that Alice's author, Lewis Carroll liked young girls as well. The literary lines between borders were blurring.
Anais glanced at the cakes again but then squeezed her eyes shut tight. It was an important part of the Lolita lifestyle to eat sweet things and drink tea, but it was even more important to look like a young Victorian girl. If Anais ate sweet cakes with her tea and petit fours covered in pink icing, she would get thick thighs and young Victorian girls did not have those. Lolita lifestyle fashion is all about the aesthetic of little girls.
Anais remembered suddenly a quote from Nabokov's Lolita about how men really loved young girls not because they were slim and pale and beautiful but because they represented impossibility. The men already know that the ideal of their love is rejected, so there's no fear of personal rejection. Maybe that's why Anais wore such demure clothing. Don't advertise what you can't sell. If you get a bad reception, you know it's the dress you chose to wear and not the person in it.
But no, she was getting her definitions mixed up. Most Lolita girls didn't even like to be associated with Nabokov's novel. They thought it had too many sexual connotations. Anais looked it up online once, and after a lot of searching she found out that Lolita is a wasei-eigo. It's an English word used in Japan, but with a different meaning.
So in English Lolita is a complex, a disease, but in Japan it's a lifestyle.
It made sense though. Lolita lifestyle fashion is all about the aesthetic of little girls.
But if Nabokov's Lolita isn't Lolita literature, she though, the tip of her tongue tapping on her teeth, then what is? Alice in Wonderland? Because Anais certainly felt like Alice, eating cake after cake and growing larger and larger but never finding the cake to make her smaller.
