by Anne Panning
To my credit, I’m glad to say we didn’t do it in Ardeth’s bed, but instead groped our way over to the couch. I quickly poofed a pink sheet over it and pulled Tim down beside me. He had a practically hairless chest, smooth skin, and tiny, narrow hips, and as I lay there on top of him, naked and gasping and flushed, I remember thinking: Please, please, Ardeth, do not come walking through that door. In a matter of minutes, I was gripping the back of the couch, practically hyperventilating. Ardeth, to my utter relief, did not walk in, and we got quickly dressed and arranged.
“So,” I said, after washing up in the bathroom a bit. I had scrubbed my hands with Dial and sprayed a plume of air freshener around the living room. From the kitchen, I watched Tim fold the sheet and stick it behind the couch. “That was interesting. Now what happens? You’ll have to keep another secret, I guess.” After over a month of no sex, my body felt loose and languid with release. I sat down on a kitchen chair but couldn’t stay upright; I was practically horizontal again, my head leaning back against the chair, my butt sliding off of the seat.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Tim said, and stood behind me, stroking my short wavy hair. “But I could fall in love with you. I’m already halfway there. I adore everything about you. God, your hair.” He bent down and kissed the top of my head, and I shrieked.
“Please!” I said, turning around to look at him. “Do you say that to all the girls? You do! You do, don’t you?”
But we heard a door thunking open downstairs, and although it was thankfully not Ardeth, it reminded us of her, and of our carelessness. I ran outside and did a thorough lookout for Ardeth, then waved Tim down with the all-clear sign. He got in his car, which was dense with closed-up, new-car heat, and rolled down all the windows. I stood a few feet away, just in case, wearing the same original job-hunting outfit, though feeling a bit discombobulated. My hair was now a frizzled mess.
“Now what’re you going to do?” Tim asked, and started the car.
“Apply for jobs,” I told him. “I’ll just be a waitress. It’s really the best money.”
“Briante’s Basement Bistro. It’s the best place in town, seriously, and my friends own it. Tell them I sent you. I think they’re hiring!” With that, he shifted into first, drove off, and yelled out the window, “I will see you again.”
But what about Ardeth? I wanted to say, but was too full of self-loathing to even speak her name.
I was hired on immediately by the Briantes, a middle-aged Italian couple from Toledo for whom Tim had done some drywalling when they first opened, just two years ago, to huge success. Mr. Briante was short and compact with a hook nose and thick dark hair that was obviously dyed; he said to call him Big Daddy, as everyone did. His wife, Marie, had dark, slightly graying hair parted dead center and cut blunt to the chin. They said they liked my looks, kind of dark, kind of ethnic, trim. “Are you Italian?” they asked. I smiled, said, “Yes, of course!” though I wasn’t. I found out it was the only Italian restaurant in Greenwood, and people were crazy for their bubbling red sauces, laced heavily with garlic, their creamy alfredo twirled over handmade spinach fettuccine, their osso buco with saffron lemon risotto.
I was also happy to look at the menu and discover most dinner entrees began at around ten dollars: good tips, likely, plus they served wine by the bottle, another sure way of jacking up a bill. They gave me a red apron with deep pockets on the front and a pad of green order slips, metered out by the number. I would need black pants, they said, tight—stretch pants were okay—and a white blouse, no T-shirts. Heeled black shoes and only black socks or hose. They gave me a tall, fizzy ginger ale with a twist of lemon, then sat back in the booth, hands crossed, both of them looking pleased as I drank it through a straw.
I must’ve been working at Briante’s for two, three months, with a full load of classes, when Ardeth came home one night and told me everything about Tim. I remember I was sitting on the couch, my stockinged feet up on the end table, highlighter in my mouth, reading my large, pointy-cornered psychology textbook, when she came home teary-eyed and broken down. My face froze in a mask of panic, and I tried to ignore the fact that I’d been having sex with her boyfriend any time we could both arrange it, often in Ardeth’s and my apartment. “I have to tell you something I should’ve told you a long time ago,” Ardeth began, and peeled off her heavy, tan trench coat. She poured herself a glass of milk and sat down at the kitchen table. “Come here, will you?” She tapped the seat beside her, and I jumped up like an obedient dog, terrified of the master.
Ardeth ran her hands through her auburn hair, freshly cut, clipped around the ears and shaved at the neck. She removed her glasses and set them like a protective wall around her milk. “I have a lover,” Ardeth said, gazing at me levelly, and the way she said it made me think for a moment she was going to tell me it was a woman. “It’s been going on for some time now. Maybe, I don’t know, five, six months. Before you even got here. Anyway—” She inhaled sharply before continuing and began to scroll for me a similar though slightly skewed version of Tim and his manic-depressive wife, Lori, and his son, Patrick, and how she had never meant to get so involved, but it had just happened. “You know how things just happen, and it’s as if you have no control?” she said, clicking her glasses against the milk, then rolling up the corners of a glossy supermarket ad. “So, it was getting to be that he and I never spent any time together anymore, although he wouldn’t break it off either. See, his wife’s in the hospital now, in very bad shape, and they think it’s going to be long-term this time. So—”
At this point, I had to get up and get myself a beer. We always had a few strays somewhere in the refrigerator, and I dug around and found a Heineken behind the ketchup. “Go on,” I said, sitting. “Sorry.” I didn’t know how much more I could take without alcohol.
“Anyway, Tim and I had a very long talk tonight, and we finally made some decisions, which actually involve you,” Ardeth said, and gestured to me with her hand in a way that I knew would make her a great lawyer someday. “So I told him I’d speak to you first and see what you thought.”
My heart pounded in a furious, jumping frenzy. What was this? I thought. What was going on? I gulped my beer and licked my lips, waiting for life, as I knew it, to end.
Ardeth must’ve sensed my discomfort, because she reached out a parental hand and rubbed my arm. “Don’t look so worried, Winifred!” she said, and leaned her elbows hard on the table, getting to business. “Now, what’s going to happen is that Tim’s son, Patrick, is going to stay with Lori’s parents, who know about Tim and me now, and would have it no other way. They’re going to let Tim see Patrick on weekends, but they don’t want me to, but, really, how can they stop it? Anyway, after a lot of discussion, Tim and I decided to take this beautiful apartment we looked at—I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for sure, okay? You understand, right?” She looked at me with her green flecked eyes, and I nodded, still fearful.
“It’s a great apartment—it’s above Paesano’s Pizza, just down from Briante’s. Have you seen that sign in the window?”
Again, I nodded silently like a shy child in school. I was gripping my beer so hard I thought I might shatter the bottle.
“Well,” Ardeth continued, and began to spin her glass of milk around and around in circles across the tablecloth. “We decided, actually it was Tim’s idea, that you simply have to move in with us. I mean, the place is huge! You can have your own bedroom towards the back, even though it’s a little small—I hope that’s okay. Tim’s and my bedroom will be in the front, towards the street, and there’s a huge kitchen with a brick wall behind the stove and a stainless steel oven and an overhead rack for all our pots and pans. It’s really beautiful. The living room’s a little dark, but very cozy with a fireplace! Can you believe that? And the place is cheap, considering we’ll all split it three ways. You’ll be paying the same as you do for this place and be right on the same block where you work. So what do you think?” Ardeth said, squeez
ing my arm, more excited than I’d seen her in years. Her eyes glowed with hope and warmth. “He’s really leaving her for me, Winnie! I knew he would. I mean, I feel kind of guilty, of course, because she’s sick and everything, right? But Tim deserves some happiness. I tell him that all the time, too, that he’s entitled to a normal life just like anyone else.”
I wanted to tell her right then, to absolve myself and flee town, but I was in too deep. I would shatter this newfound happiness she had worked so hard for. But I did vow, that night, on my soul, that I would never, ever sleep with Tim again. I could not dupe my own sister any longer. “So when do we move?” I asked, and felt the beginning of emotional terrorism.
Two weeks later, huddled over the toilet in our new black-and-white tile bathroom, I peed over a white piece of plastic and found out I was pregnant. The faint blue line grew darker when I held it up to the light, and I cursed every expletive I knew. I hadn’t been with Tim for two weeks; I moved brusquely past him in the hallway, stoically watched videos with him and Ardeth in the living room, then stole off to bed early during the credits. We had used condoms in the past, since I’d learned about the ramifications of The Pill in a class I took called Women, Sexuality, and the Politics of Reproduction. We had always been careful, Tim and I, and I’d watched him carry the slightly full condom like a beaker, rinse it in the sink, and roll it up in mounds and mounds of toilet paper. Then it was shoved deep down in the wastebasket. That had been the ritual. Apparently the 99.7 percent effective rate did not apply to us.
I also vowed never to tell Ardeth the truth. The truth does not necessarily set you free, I decided, but would separate us for the rest of our lives. I did, however, decide not to inform Tim right away about the pregnancy but to let the fact slowly unfold before his eyes, as my stomach bloomed and swelled like a small pan of dough.
These days, working at Briante’s, I wear a loose white poet’s blouse that drapes almost to my knees, and customers are none the wiser. My black stretch pants are starting to give at the elastic waist, and soon I’ll have to break down and buy real maternity clothes—sougly, with big off-color nylon panels over the stomach. My breasts are truly starting to ache, and many nights when I get done with a nearly $100 shift at Briante’s, I rush right home, peel off my heavy, garlic-scented clothes, and hold my breasts in my hands, alleviating them from the heavy impending weight.
Ardeth knows about the baby; I finally told her when it was just the two of us home one night, drinking cinnamon tea out of big ceramic mugs, reading the newspaper on the living room floor. Ardeth had made a fire, and it warmed the room so completely that I was barefoot. “Well, who’s the father?” she asked, peering at me logically out of her tortoise-shell frames. “Is he going to take responsibility?”
“Just someone from school. Drunk at a party. Big mistake,” I said, and brushed it off as if she would just forget it. But she wouldn’t let up.
“So what are you going to do?” she said. “You’re not going to keep it.” It was a statement, not a question, another good lawyer tactic Ardeth had already perfected, and hearing her say it made me wonder, how could I keep it?
Suddenly, I was awash with hormones gone out of control, and tears filled my eyes. I didn’t want to cry in front of Ardeth, because if anyone needed comfort it was more her than me. But she took me in the crook of her arm, and I sunk my face into her fuzzy alpaca cardigan. She smelled like Heaven Scent, which no one wore anymore but Ardeth, true to her brands till the death, and I bawled like a baby out of shame, fear, and regret. I could see the clear, gelatinous strings of snot I’d left on her sweater, and when I pulled away they hung between me and her arm until I swiped them.
“Shh,” Ardeth said, cooing me. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. You can give it up for adoption. People will pay big money for babies, you know. It’s perfectly legal now to sell a baby, if both the mother and the adoptive parents agree to it. In fact, I had a course last semester dealing with adoption. Just let me—”
We both heard the door open, and knew it was Tim. I listened as he hung up his jacket on the hook in the entryway, then heard his footsteps peep in the kitchen, and then he came to us. He leaned in the doorway, cheeks red with cold and blue eyes sparkling.
“Hey, you two,” he said, and shoved his hands in his back pockets. He wore a black sweatshirt speckled with drywall shavings. “Having a pity party or what?”
With me still leaning against her shoulder, Ardeth looked up at him with loving tenderness, like the Virgin Mary. Then she looked down at me. “Can I tell him, Winnie? We have to tell him. He’s like part of the family now.” Her voice, for the first time, sounded like when we were kids, when Ardeth still knew how to play and let loose as I’d pump her high, high up on the swing set with an underdog and she’d squeal in frenzied joy.
“Tell me what?” Tim asked, and sat down on our new blue couch, which had been his and Lori’s and was now covered with an afghan Ardeth had knit—a dark green and tan popcorn stitch.
Before I could speak, Ardeth whispered solemnly, “Winnie’s pregnant. Can you believe it?”
Tim knelt beside us on the floor and threw his arms around me. “Oh, baby,” he said, kissing my cheek right in front of Ardeth. “Oh, Winnie.” He kissed me on the lips then, fast, and I remember Ardeth laughing high-pitched. The fire crackled in the fireplace, and threw shadows of the three of us, jagged, gigantic, against the wall.
FIVE REASONS I MISS
THE LAUNDROMAT
#1
Because once I was washing a load of clothes and a midget walked in with long, blond hair that was almost silver and I realized when I looked hard that it was a man, not a woman. He walked right over to one of the big drum dryers at floor level—he had a Walkman on—and got in. He didn’t close the door but lay inside all curled up with his tiny feet ticking time against the metal. I was single then, and very young, and had only the one load to wash. I wore sunglasses to hide my eyes and leaned against my rumbling washer going at it like a belly dancer.
Before I knew it, it was time for me to dry. I pulled out the wound wet tentacles of cotton and denim and saw the only dryer open was the one above the midget. So that was it. I drove my big square basket over, unloaded into the second-story drum, and slid in dimes. The midget was still in the first-floor drum, snapping his fingers along to music nobody could hear but him. When I stepped away, he gave me a thumbs-up. Startled and confused, I did it back. He smiled then and folded his hands behind his head.
I stood by the bulletin board and read about a lost terrier named Alice, a super new megadiet that promised fifty pounds off in as many days, and three families in town who were selling it all at a yard sale dated three weeks ago. When my clothes were dry, I pulled them all out in a heap, the metal buttons nearly burning holes in my arms. It appeared the midget had fallen asleep. The television blared high up in the corner, and part of me wanted to stay, part of me wanted to go.
I drove back to my apartment, which was above a butcher shop. No killing on the premises, but lots of blood and fat and bone behind the counter. I bought my bacon there sliced fresh off a slab. I liked it that way. You could see where it came from.
In my apartment, I folded my clothes on the kitchen table, careful to avoid honey smears and milk dribbles. I lived alone, worked in telephone sales, and had been struggling through a pretty miserable patch of life. I had just broken up with the person I thought I’d marry, and was having trouble bouncing back. I thought about the midget, and wondered why he seemed so much happier than me, even though he was a midget and I was supposedly normal.
When I went back to find him, of course he was gone. He had been so tiny, so perfect, so comfortable with himself, I’d wanted to cuddle him in my arms.
#2
Because in Minneapolis I was in love with a man named Rudy who was a judge, although a young judge and certainly not a famous or well-known judge. He was married. I called him Judge for a joke and pulled on his ties with both hands. The Cle
an-o-Rama Coin-Op was in my neighborhood, a leftover hippie enclave that boasted old houses of the crumbling gingerbread variety. I lived in one of these with thirteen other people, all involved in theater except for me. I was fresh out of college and completely without a plan.
I had a thing for red hair, and Rudy had extremely red hair and tawny, almost invisible eyelashes and eyebrows and freckles everywhere including on his lips, eyelids, and penis. It was safe to meet at the Coin-Op because Rudy lived in New Brighton and knew no one in my part of the city. The best part of the affair, although I never thought of it as an affair, was that right next door to the Coin-Op was a bar with humongous plates of nachos—not the half-assed kind with cheese sauce on round chips but the real kind with hard triangle tortillas and jalapeno wheels and avocado chunks and tomato cubes and guacamole studded with onion and garlic. We met there every Wednesday at five, scarfed down two orders of nachos, chased them down with Rolling Rocks, then picked up my fluffy hot clothes in the dryer and proceeded to have oral sex in my station wagon. It always smelled like Tide and Bounce as we were doing it, and depending on the season, we could really manage to steam up the car windows like a couple of high schoolers. I always parked behind the dumpster so we couldn’t be seen.
I can’t remember how I met Rudy, but it must have been at one of the numerous plays I was always being dragged to by my roommates. Yes, it was at Hamlet! I was a smoker then, and anyone who smokes knows you meet people outside who are also doing the dirty deed. He needed a light, or maybe I did, but that’s how we met. Something clicked in that proverbial love-at-first-sight way, although it wasn’t really love. I do remember that later, when we were really at the height of our affair, he gave me rolls of quarters and dimes for the laundromat as tokens of his affection. What I really can’t remember is how it ended, because although I distinctly remember continuing my laundry trips to the Coin-Op, eventually the pictures in my mind no longer include him. I stopped going to the bar for nachos, because I couldn’t afford it. I definitely missed the rolls of quarters and dimes. Alone again, I sat reading deep and moody things like Siddhartha and Kerouac in the sunny plate-glass windows of the laundromat. The big windowsill where I sat was full of dying rubber plants and swirling linty dust and so much sunshine it hurt my eyes to see.
