Anywhere But Here

by Jenny Gardiner

  “It was all part of the plan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To get you to be under his thumb. What better way to whip someone into compliance than to control her whole world? He tells you who you can hang out with, he tells you what you can do, he tells you how you can dress. I bet you could find his picture next to the chapter on control freaks in a psychology textbook.”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh.

  “To say the least. I’m thinking you can also find his picture under A the dictionary.”

  “A?”

  “For asshole. Maybe even under ‘asshole’ in Wikipedia!”

  That brings on a hearty laugh from Smoothie that gets a few cows mooing and a horse whinnying. I’m glad the animal kingdom can laugh at my misfortune.

  “Don’t forget D,” he adds.

  “For dick?” He nods his head yes.

  “Well, that goes without saying.”

  “So, about the cheating.”

  “Right. We go to this party. It’s the usual group. He hung with them all the time at work. Many of the same men from when I worked at Peabody Dental.”

  “So does everyone have good teeth there?”

  “What?”

  “Well, they’re selling to all these dentists. Don’t they have great teeth, a side benefit from it?”

  I let out a puff of air. “Funny you should ask that. The answer’s no. Good teeth were not a quid pro quo. Trust me on that. So I’m at this party. Everyone’s talking and drinking and joking. Richard was getting loud—he always does. I noticed him being awfully squeezy with some of the women. Some were secretaries, some were wives of the other salesmen. It didn’t seem to matter to him too much. He’d go up and put his arm around them and pull them close and crush their boobs against him and of course he’d always be leering down at them. And the strange thing is they didn’t seem to mind. That’s one thing I didn’t get. If I’d have been them I’d have been a might uncomfortable with a man being so familiar, especially with his wife right there.”

  “Maybe he had that way of putting other women on the spot and feeling like he called the shots, too.”

  “Huh. Well, I guess I could give them the benefit of the doubt. Not that I choose to. So anyhow, the night grows late, I’m tired. I find myself yawning again and again. I remember Charlie, one of the reps, coming up to me and leaning over to my ear and whispering something like ‘too soon for that, young lady. We’re only just getting started!’ Had I but only known. So around eleven o’clock, Richard calls everyone to the front hall. He holds up a basket—evidently everyone had dropped their keys in there when they arrived. And one by one every woman there was expected to pull out a set of keys—”

  My voice gets crackly and I turn my back to Smoothie, so ashamed at the memory of it. Smoothie rolls toward me and pats my back, like a gentle mama burping her baby to sleep.

  “You okay, Mary Kate?”

  I nod my head and continue. “I stand there dumb as a newborn as I watch Richard cart himself off with Charlie’s wife, Dee. Just up and marches up the stairs with her, her still dangling Richard’s car keys in her hand, wearing a grin like she’d just found herself the keys to Fort Knox. More like the keys to the gates of Hell. Meanwhile, I look around and see couples—make that non-couples, pairing off so fast it was like they feared if they waited too long someone would change their minds. I look around to see one set of keys left in the basket, and coming up behind me is Artie Fleegle, who reaches around me and squeezes my breasts and whispers something vulgar in my ear about his Hot Rod Lincoln.”

  Smoothie blurts out laughter at that one. “What a smooth one that guy was. What’d you do?”

  “Oh, my, God, Smoothie. Nothing in my life prepared me for this. I was just a stupid girl from a small town. Didn’t have much education. Didn’t ever have a helpful mama tell her much about men. I mean, I figured things out just fine with Richard back when it wasn’t such a bad thing. But no way, no how, did I know what I was expected to do with Artie Fleegle.”

  “So?”

  “So Artie grabs me and pulls me by both hands over to a room off the kitchen. It was an older house and I think this room was designed as maid’s quarters or something. Meanwhile, all over the house there are things going on with various men and women. Things that shouldn’t have been going on with a one of them. No one was paired up with his or her own spouse. I could hear things. Banging and moaning and grunting and groaning. And before you know it, I look over at Artie Fleegle—whose mangled set of teeth, by the way, are a distinctive phlegm yellow—and see that he’s taken his pants off and is sporting an erection and calling me over to put my mouth on it!”

  “No!”

  “Would I lie to you? So I look over at Artie Fleegle spread-eagled on the white eyelet day-bed blanket, his protruding yellowed teeth leering up at me, his moustache having captured crumbs from the evening’s appetizers. His bald head shiny beneath the harsh fluorescent overhead light. And he’s got his hand on his, his, thing, and he’s telling me to come closer.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “What any self-respecting woman would do under those circumstances! I leaned over to the side, searching desperately for a trash can, and proceeded to vomit into the wastebasket for a good five minutes.”

  “Probably took care of old Artie’s hard-on.”

  “To say the least,” I laugh. “At that, I left the room, walked out the front door, took off my heels, and walked home.”

  “How far was it to your house?”

  “Oh, I’d reckon about four miles.”

  “You walked home in the dark in your bare feet that far?”

  “Look. There are women in the world who have it a lot worse than I ever have. So if I had to walk for a couple of miles in my bare feet, I knew I could do it. I was as strong as they were, I knew that much.”

  Smoothie rolls me over toward him and just stares into my face. It’s like the look someone makes when they’re trying to understand a complex math equation. “Jesus, Mary Kate. I’m sorry.”

  He pulls me toward him and with his hand behind my head, presses my head to his shoulder and sort of rocks gently back and forth. He doesn’t say a thing, just holds me and rocks. Soon I feel the force of fatigue taking me over, and before I know what’s happened, I’m lulled off to sleep with what feels like the gentle bobbing of a boat in the ocean. Did I mention my belly button hurts like hell?

  Chapter 13

  We’re woken before dawn by roosters, men and moos. Guess those cows are of the dairy variety, and their mammaries can’t wait till sunrise. Machines are turned on, lowing persists, men talk loudly. There will be no sleeping in. Just as well anyhow, because my entire abdominal region hurts like a sonofabitch.

  Smoothie and I get up, get dressed the rest of the way, collect our things and stagger sleepily down the steep ladder. We are greeted by a daisy chain of cows hooked up to contraptions that look a little too sci-fi for my tastes. Takes all the romance out of your notion of the country cow. Or the idea of what mammary glands are for.

  “Christ, that looks like it’d hurt,” Smoothie says.

  I nod in agreement. “Hear, hear. Makes me almost glad I never had to nurse a baby. Least I haven’t had my mammaries distorted beyond recognition by that whole process.”

  Smoothie eyes travel a flagrant path across my chest. “No doubt.”

  Change of subject time for me. We wend our way into the farmhouse. Breakfast is being set out in the dining room, and we pile our plates high with eggs, bacon and blueberry muffins. I can see why Luanne looks the way she does; her cooking is out of this world. I wonder for a second if this bacon is related to anything that was shaking a squiggly tail out back this morning, but then close my mind to the notion.

  Mr. Luanne appears to have taken a break from his farming chores and is sit
ting at the head of the table reading the paper. Luanne brings his food to the long wooden farm table in silence and he quietly grunts his acknowledgment, the metronome of their communication. I can’t help but wonder if this is the nature of all marriages—the various states of oral communications—both spoken and sexual—that exist in the early days of a relationship eventually give way to a semaphore code whereby meanings are exchanged with little effort and even less emotion.

  Smoothie seems to read my mind. “Ah, young love,” he says with a grin. Young love indeed. I think that is the only kind that exists, really. I think it goes from youthful and somewhat healthy to life support in a blink of an eye. At least for me it did.

  “Shoot, I hate to see what old love is then,” I say a little too loudly, and Smoothie shushes me.

  “Do yew or yer husband want anythin’ more, then?” Luanne asks me as she refills my coffee. Christ, I’d forgotten we’re supposed to be married.

  Smoothie reaches across the table and links fingers with mine. “I’ve got everything I need with the little missus, thanks.” He winks at Luanne and I blush and kick him under the table.

  After showering and changing clothes, I tell Luanne I’d like to settle up the bill (it’s a little anniversary gift for my husband, I tell her), and before Smoothie can say a word, I’ve taken care of it. It’s the least I can do after my wardrobe overhaul of yesterday.

  We throw Smoothie’s backpack and my shopping bags into the car (I wonder if I ought to get something a little more permanent with which to haul my worldly possessions) and take to the road.

  Smoothie my navigator takes out the map to chart our course. “Looks as if we could just bypass Pittsburgh altogether if we take this little back road here,” he says, pointing at the map.

  “Nice try. No can do with that plan. We are going to the Burgh, where you are going to clear things up with your—”

  “Please don’t say it, Mary Kate.” Smoothie winces.

  “With Lizzie.” I change it.

  “Right.”

  “So you know where she lives in Pittsburgh?”

  Smoothie looks at me with surprise. “I haven’t the slightest idea. Oh, well, looks like we’ll just be moving on then.”

  His eyes tell me how badly he wants this to be the case. But I know it’s best for them both if they can get past this. Fact is, that poor Lizzie girl must be feeling even more sick about it than Smoothie is.

  “I know what we can do—we’ll find an Internet café and look her up. You can find anyone online if you want to.”

  Smoothie rolls his eyes. “Great,” he says with a grimace. I think he figures he’s safe, because what the hell kind of internet café would there be in this boondock town?

  Before leaving Hawley, I stop at a gas station to find out if there’s somewhere we can find a computer to use. The cashier points me to the library, just a few blocks away.

  We find two computers unattended at the empty library, and settle in to our work. While Smoothie Googles Lizzie’s address, I sit down to check my AOL account. Normally I don’t bother checking email very much; I really only go on it to follow the latest happenings in the news. The sole reason I even have an email address is because Richard said I should have it so that if he needs to reach me he can. I can safely say I’ve received three authentic emails over the past few years (although I’ve gotten a whole lot of offers from long-lost Nigerian relatives who have left me their fortune). So I’m not expecting to find anything earth shattering, though who knows if Richard’s left his mark behind. Nevertheless, I log on, and sure enough, there’s an email from him.

  FROM: DUPREE.R@PDSM.com

  TO: mkdupree@aol.com

  SUBJECT: What in Christ’s name are you up to?

  Mary Kate,

  I have been calling and calling and calling and you aren’t answering the phone. What in ever-loving hell is wrong with you? I am beginning to get very angry that you have not replied to even one call. Let me tell you, there will be hell to pay when I get back home. You can be assured of that.

  Richard

  I stare at the screen for a minute until I realize I haven’t breathed. Not a single exhalation or inhalation. I am frozen in fear, worried about what Richard might do to me. I know when he gets mad, it’s bad news for me. It’s why I do everything I can to keep the angry menace at bay. Once it settles in over my life, things go from bad to worse and stay there so long, it about kills me. That man’s temperament is a living, breathing bubonic plague of an epidemic.

  “Mary Kate—you okay?” I shake my thoughts from my head and look over to see Smoothie with a concerned look on his face.

  “Everything okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  Just saw a ghost. Just saw a ghost. Just saw a ghost. Hell to pay. Hell to pay.

  My fingers are keeping pace with my whirring mind, but thank God they’re on an actual keyboard, so maybe Smoothie won’t even notice.

  “It’s nothin’,” I lie.

  “Well, shoot, if the look on your face is nothing, I’d sure hate to see what something would do to it,” he says.

  Hell to pay. Hell to pay. Hell to pay.

  “One time Richard threatened to kill me,” I say out of the blue.

  Smoothie does a double-take at me, staring at me with wide eyes, wondering exactly where this train of thought came from. Only a few minutes ago he was minding his P’ and Q’s while on a Google search, and I was looking up celebrity gossip on AOL news. I don’t think he even knew I was checking my email.

  “Care to elaborate?” he asks.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s a message here from Richard. He says I’ll have hell to pay when he gets back home—”

  “Mary Kate. Hello!” Smoothie is waving his hand in front of my face like I’m in a trance or something. “Honey. You’re not going back home. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about him. Just think what a surprise it’ll be to ol’ Dick when he finds out you’re all gone!” He snaps his fingers to emphasize the point.

  I feel one aggressive little teardrop trying so damned hard to force its way out of my eye. I close my eyes to fight it. I just won’t cry where Richard’s concerned any more.

  “I had a friend once, a couple of years ago,” I say. “Her name was Bev. Beverly Bee. I called her Bev. Richard insisted on calling her B.B. but she didn’t like that and asked him all the time to call her Beverly. I guess it was typical of Richard to be so disrespectful of others. Well, Bev and I met, of all the places, over a display of broccoli at the Giant. We were both shopping and there was a great sale price on broccoli but then as I rifled through it I realized it all looked a little past its prime. I noticed Bev across the broccoli display from me and said to her ‘this broccoli looks about how I feel. Old and gray.’” I sigh, remembering that very moment we met.

  “Well, Beverly got to laughing at that and we shook hands and next thing you know, we were having a cup of coffee while our groceries melted in the car.” I smile. “We just took to each other, Bev and me. Started doing all sorts of things together. We’d go to the movies in the middle of the day. Or meet at Applebee’s for fruity cocktails and Nachos Nuevos. Bev didn’t like my husband, not one bit. She was always telling me I shouldn’t let him boss me around.”

  A fly is buzzing around my face and I take a few swats at it, then pick up a nearby book and hammer it down, dead.

  “Nice,” Smoothie laughs. I rifle in my purse for a tissue to clean the smashed fly off the book.

  “So one time Dick the dick got to yelling at me about something. I don’t know for sure now what it was. I think I had made plans to do something with Bev, but it would mean that Richard wouldn’t have his dinner waiting for him right when he got home. He started hollering at me, telling me that Bev was a no good, two-bit whore. Well, I am sorry, but my friend Bev was no such thing. She was my friend! So I defended Bev’s honor, told him she was a fine friend. In fact I told
him that Bev said Richard bossed me around and I oughtn’t let him manage me like I do.”

  “I bet that didn’t go over so well with Dick,” Smoothie says.

  “Ooooh. Far worse than that, I’m afraid. Richard had fire in his eyes, he was so mad. He grabbed me by my ponytail, pulled it really, really hard—hard enough that my eyes pulled back like I’d had a too-tight facelift—and said ‘listen up, Mary Kate. If you ever think for one second that you can speak to me that way, you’ve got something else coming to you. In fact, if you ever so much as dare speak to me that way again, I will beat you to a bloody pulp. You’re gonna look like that squirrel I ran over with my car last week. And if that’s not enough, I will drag you out into the woods, way back where I hunt for deer, where nobody ever goes, and I’ll blow this little head of yours right off of your shoulders. And I’ll get rid of your body and ain’t no one gonna be the wiser. Because you know what? Nobody’d even miss your sorry ass. So if you know what’s good for you, Mary Kate, you’ll stay away from that B.B., because she’s nothing but trouble for you. Nothing but trouble.’”

  That damn teardrop that retreated has gathered reinforcements and is charging forth again, blurring my vision and taking away my breath, too. I can feel my nose getting runny and dammit, I don’t cry. I don’t cry. I don’t cry.

  Never let him see you cry, Mary Kate. Never let him see you cry, Mary Kate. Never let him see you cry, Mary Kate.

  Next thing I know, I’m sitting in a dark corner of the library on one of those cheap vinyl couches, the kind that public libraries tend to have. It’s burnt orange and the buttons have popped on the upholstery. Through blurred vision I notice someone has drawn an ugly hairy penis on the sofa in permanent marker right near my left knee. Smoothie has his arms around me. My face is pressed against his shoulder, and he’s making gentle cooing noises as he smoothes down my hair. I’ve never experienced this myself, but it’s so damned soothing. Something I could get used to.

  “There, there, Mary Kate,” he reassures me. “That’s all over for you now. No more of that sonofabitch for you. You got it?”