by Arthur Day
“Thanks. I’m good. So how did you feel about your parents? You already know how I felt about mine.”
Her voice floated across the divider from the kitchen. “I love them. Dad died a couple of years back, but my mom is still alive.” She looked down at her feet as if searching for digital inspiration. When she looked up at me I was struck by the look of confusion and even sadness in her eyes. “There apparently was some kind of scandal in the family.” She shrugged slightly and shifted her weight. “I think my father wanted to tell me about it, but he died before he could do so. When I asked Mom she simply refused to speak of it. ‘makes no sense to speak ill of the dead’, she told me. Whatever happened took place a long time ago. I was in college when my father died so probably twenty years anyway.”
“Sorry about your dad.” I meant it. I would have loved to have had a father in my life. “I’ve known people who were so miserable in their own lives that they had to attack others to feel happy,” I added.
“Something like that,” Pam replied as she came back into the living room. “They tell me how hard they had it growing up and then look at me as if they expected me to write them out a check or they imply that I am some kind of selfish trust baby feeding off the work of others.”
We left it at that, content to let our little stories and histories rest a while and perhaps forever as far as I was concerned. I had told Pam all that I could about my mother; I saw no sense in opening wounds that were inflicted years before. Pam too fell silent and like two spirits we drifted off to bed without another word.
It was in the bedroom that we shared our best times and it was in the bedroom that our marriage started to unravel. Pam was, and probably still is, an enthusiastic and inventive partner. She was young and flexible and sometimes it felt as if I were making love to a slinky going down a staircase. She liked the top and I was happy to accommodate her. I found the sight of her pendulous breasts with their large pink aureoles delightful and exciting, but she would never hold to any position for very long before changing it. I would see her front and her breasts. I would see her back and the crack of her ass as she bounced up and down. There were times that she was too tired and stressed to do anything but turn over and go to sleep, but I have to admit with some embarrassment that I found myself doing that more often than Pam. Making love to Pam was an act that required some degree of stamina and energy; many times after a twelve hour day at the firm I lacked both.
“What do you mean you don’t feel like it?” She would hiss at me in the darkness. “Are you getting bored with me? Is that your problem because if it is you can go find some bimbo who suits you better.”
“C’mon Pam. You’re tired too. How ‘bout later tonight or tomorrow morning? Better for both of us.”
“So you say.” She would reach over and feel the geography and, finding it unprepared for her assault would attempt to fix the situation. If that didn’t work, she would bounce out of bed and stride into the living room with a blanket and her pillow. It was as if I could not give her what she wanted then she would have nothing to do with me.
This situation did not happen often but often enough to put a rough edge on our relationship and she had this same attitude when it came to other parts of our lives such as where to eat or when to take a vacation or where to go during that time. She was a strong person. That was one of the reasons I loved her, but she pushed the envelope at times and she got worse as time went on. It was as if she were possessed by some inner demon to a physical expression of all of her emotional wounds. She would come in the door after a day at work looking like shit and a couple of hours later she would be all over me whether I was up for it, literally speaking, or not. She seemed to be desperately battling some dark area within her psyche that apparently had something to do with her father though she would not discuss it and maybe she did not even know, and I never found out just what was in there or how to neutralize it. Towards the end of our marriage, we were sleeping in separate beds, a reality that I found both horrifying and a rebuttal of all that I had thought marriage to be.
DIANNE
Dianne Vargas finished her exercise period by delivering a series of kicks with her right leg that almost took her off her feet entirely followed immediately by several blows to the bag that would have taken an opponent out of the fight and into a hospital. Sweating and breathing evenly but heavily she stood back from the bag feeling good, even virtuous. The punching bag of gym size and quality said nothing but swung back and forth on its chain. She had attacked the bag for years to no apparent effect. It had been a good workout, one of thousands over the years, and she always ended up promising herself that the next day she would knock the stupid bag off its chain or split the now faded leather. She looked around at the rest of the equipment she had gathered. A boxer’s punching bag, some exercise matts, a treadmill and a set of uneven bars.
She walked up the stairs from the cellar and down the hallway to her bedroom shucked off her exercise shorts and t-shirt and walked into the bathroom where she turned on the shower, stood in front of the toilet and peed into the bowl and then stood under the shower luxuriating in the stinging cold spray. Her whole body tingled with pleasure. The sun was just over the trees in front of her house when she walked back into the living room dressed in a dove gray pants suit and white frilly shirt and picked up her cell phone. No missed calls and no messages. Good. She had a ten o’clock with prospective buyers on the other side of Rockmarsh and didn’t need any complications early in the day. She checked her schedule and noted the monthly visit with her therapist was the following week. She brought up her emails and noted a meeting at the agency for one o’clock that afternoon. Cool. No conflict with her clients. She added it to her reminders list. She poured Cheerios into a bowl and added fat-free milk. Ladies had to watch their figures after all. Standing in front of the sink she spooned in her breakfast while staring out at the tiny square of green that was her back yard with its even smaller garden showing two tomato plants and baby lettuce growing rapidly in the summer heat. She would need to get in and weed it. Maybe this evening. Standing there, Dianne could not help but think back over the long journey that she had made.
He had been such a docile child, accepting just about everything that came his way and his mother had fed him until he resembled a cue ball more than a boy. The world was soft and friendly and wonderful and he liked playing with Karla who was about his age and lived two doors down. Their mothers would chat and drink coffee while little Donny Vargas and Karla Kanter played with her dolls and a small playhouse that Karla’s father had assembled from a kit. Dianne remembered that Karla had always had her best doll sitting next to Don when they pretended to have tea. The doll was named Lucille and had big button eyes and a pink dress with frills along the bottom and big black shoes on her feet. They would giggle and have the dolls talk to each other with grown-up talk in between innumerable cups of tea and, of course, cookies that the Karla and Don ate since the dolls turned up their noses at such fare. Silly dolls.
Dianne wondered if that is where it all started. She and Karla playing with dolls and immersed in a pretend world where there were no bad people except grown-ups and even those were never really mean but often dictatorial. Dianne couldn’t help a smile. Those dammed dolls ordered each other around constantly. Go and clean up your room Lucille would say and Beatrice, the other doll, would refuse and the kids would have them argue about it in front of the dollhouse until Karla’s mother offered cookies and the dolls were immediately put aside.
Was that where the journey started? Dianne had often asked herself that question but there was never a definite answer. Maybe she had been born liking all things that girls liked or not. Dianne had never really known and had long since stopped beating herself up about it. Origins were origins and endings were endings and she liked where she was and who she was, but it had not been a walk in the park. Not at all.
School had been a nightmare. He quickl
y found out that the boys in his class did not like girls and did not like a fat little boy who liked girls. This puzzled him since, as far as he could see, his dad liked Donny’s mom at least most of the time. They spent a lot of time smiling and joking back and forth so why were girls social outcasts with the boys at his school? He was bitterly disappointed when he asked for a dollhouse for Christmas and his father told him that Santa didn’t have any for little boys and to choose something else. Donny hadn’t wanted anything else. When his parents went out to dinner and the babysitter was watching the TV, he would go up to his parents’ bedroom and stare at the dresses and skirts in his mother’s closet. There was one, a black dress with white stripes that he particularly liked. The sitter found him wrapped up in it when she came looking for him one night.
He remembered coming home and climbing off the bus and asking his mom what a sissy was. She had sighed and said that he should try kicking a ball with the other boys or playing Capture the Flag. The only times he had heard his parents arguing when he was lying in his bed staring at the ceiling had been about him and that led Donny to think that he was somehow to blame for liking Karla and not doing well in school.
Their voices would rise and fall so that sometimes he could not make out the words but even a low murmur rose like a miasmic fog that penetrated his senses along with words like “different”, “queer”, “Doctor” and therapy. He wondered how he could be different? Did being friends with Karla make him different? The boys at school thought so and called him lots of names, most of them far cruder than the language used by his parents. He liked standing with her at the end of the school day as they waited for their bus to pull up with a squeal of its breaks. He would hold her books and nothing would happen because a teacher was out there supervising the kids getting on their proper bus. As he got older though the teacher disappeared and the boys stuck it to him.
His father bought him a football and they threw it back and forth in the back yard. Donny hated it. He was seldom able to catch the ball and was forever running across the back yard and sometimes into the bushes that separated his house from that of Mr. Foxall next door. Mr. Foxall did not appreciate finding balls of various types in his yard; Donny had heard Dad call Mr. Foxall a bad name, maybe several all in the same breath. He wanted to go a play with Karla and his parents explained about boys doing certain things and girls doing certain things. He was too old to play with Karla and it would be many years before he would be able to do that again and then he would feel differently about her. When he asked why that was, his father looked pained and slightly puzzled and told him that God had made people that way. Donny was certain that this God that his parents and the preacher talked about was not perfect because God had made a mistake in Donny’s sex or maybe not. He wasn’t certain. On Sundays his parents would dress him up and take him to church where he liked that songs that everyone sang but he hated his little blue suit and necktie. Karla was was right next door at their temple so it was not all bad and sometimes after the service he could talk with her while the parents visited on the sidewalk outside.
He didn’t like the certain things that boys did. He couldn’t run and he couldn’t catch and he hated gym with a passion returned only by his gym instructor who ordered him to do push-ups whenever he failed a test. He had failed all of them while the rest of the boys stood around him laughing and sniggering at the inept ball of fat that was little Donny Vargas. There were days that he would come home with a black eye or with his clothes covered with dirt and grass stains and snot spread across his face. They had punched him and called him a queer and a mommy’s boy. He understood that the latter was supposed to be an insult though he did not think of it that way.
He loved his mother. She was a small, thin woman with delicate features who was not about to take any shit from her husband who thought that she babied their son too much and that was why he was having trouble in school. Donny was their only child and she doted on him daily. When he got home from school his mother would feed him a piece of cake and a glass of milk and she would sit with him while he ate it and then she would ask him about his day and if he didn’t care to talk about that day’s trouble, she would sit beside him on the living room sofa and read to him. Sometimes she would put a record on the player and they would listen to folk music, jazz and classical. He like Beethoven the best but Mozart was good too.
His mother was always coming to the school to complain to the headmaster and the teachers about the treatment her son was receiving. It did no good. He couldn’t even run with the nerds because school work bored and bewildered him, and it took a concentrated effort aided by his parents simply to pass from one grade to the next.
His was a life of mysterious sounds and melodies where violent intrusions forced him to sit in judgment of his own failures and later to correct those failures with a single-minded ferocity that astonished those who knew him at that time. Donny had never shown that type of self-discipline that a change such as that required but lurking within his psyche was a determination heretofore unknown and unsuspected even by himself for he had often fallen into the trap of feeling sorry for himself for being so mistreated by a cruel and uncaring world where his peers could shore up their non-existent manhood by beating on him.
There had been one in particular, a big ugly chunk of mean named Edward Scite but everyone called him Red because of his flaming orange hair. His father drove a truck for the town of Rockmarsh and was known to hate everyone except the local bartender. His wife and son showed up regularly with fresh bruises but refused to press charges even when the doctors in the ER would have backed them up. Red saw in fat little Don Vargas the perfect target for what he was unable to do to his father. He started slowly, pushing Donny from the back and forcing him to fall and lose whatever books and papers he’d been carrying. Certain that his fellow cretins concurred, he rapidly escalated to more physical assaults. When one of his crowd found enough common sense to warn Red about assaulting the little fat twerp, Red turned and beat him into the ground.
The high school had a small chapel that students of all faiths were encouraged to use if they felt the need to be alone with their God. It was a small rectangular room off the gymnasium with an altar, several rows of wooden seats stained here and there over the years and redolent with the effluvium of generations of the religious and those seeking respite for a variety of reasons. Donny came here whenever there were a few minutes between classes or after his usual torturous time with the athletic department. It was quiet, and he would sit in one of the pews and think about getting home and going over to Karla’s house and all the pretend games they could then play. He was old enough by this time to know that there was a big difference between what he played with her and what most boys his age did, so he kept such thoughts to himself and simply sat quietly looking out the colored windows along one side of the room.
They were crouched down in one of the pews. Red had promised them something special and the three boys with him were tense with excitement. When Donny came into the room there was a moment of silence until he started walking towards his usual seat. Coming out from behind the door to the chapel Red grabbed Donny locking his arms behind him.
“Got him,” he shouted. His companions jumped up from there pew and helped drag Donny kicking and screaming to the small raised platform where the altar was.
“Hold him down,” he commanded. “Get his clothes off.”
Snickering the group stripped Donny and held him down. “Stop squirming you fat little queer,” Red told him “or I’ll give you something to squirm about. Matter if fact, I think I will anyway.” He winked at the other boys. Red stood over the terrified child, peed on him, and then kicked him. Donny screamed and tried to get free, but the grip of the boys was too strong.
“What’s going on here?”
Looking up the boys saw Mr. Bertram, the history teacher staring at them in shock and amazement. “Scrite. Pull your pants up. All of you de
linquents report to the principle’s office. His face had turned a beet red and he shook a finger at them. “Perhaps I should save everyone some time and simply call the police. Scrite pull your pants up this instant. Give Donny back his clothes. Vargas go into the bathroom and clean yourself up.” He stood in the doorway with his arms across his chest as the group filed silently out of the room and turned right towards the administrative offices.
Dianne smiled at the memory. None of the boys came back to school the following day and Donny Vargas breathed a huge sigh of relief. Everyone left him alone and he was okay with that. She remembered the expressions on her parents’ faces when they came to the school and the principle told them what had taken place. Though far worse could have happened had the teacher not shown up, his parents were appalled that this had been done to their son. Their lives would be turned inside out in the years to come and her mother, at least, fell back on blaming her son’s change on that incident at the school.
Dianne wondered what MJ was doing. He was the man who made Dianne wonder if she had done the right thing going non-op. Going stealth part of the time to make a living was one thing but meeting a man she liked and with whom she could get along was quite another. He was, in fact unique in that respect. Dianne had never met a man she liked. Possibly a result of her childhood. She didn’t know and really didn’t care. That’s what the therapist was for if those feelings started getting in the way. To this point in her life they had proved useful in her other career as part-time private investigator. She spent most of her time tracking men cheating on their wives and always enjoyed the results. Men were dogs and deserved everything they got, and Dianne worked hard to assure that they got the full Monte. She read the divorce news as another person might read the Sunday sport section.
