Anywhere But Here

by Jenny Gardiner

  “Sure you did. You’re here, aren’t you? I’d say you took some pretty drastic measures.”

  I hear loud rumbling noises and see a pack of Harley buffs tooling down the road on parade. The sign on the lead hog reads “Harleys for Jesus.” Okay, then. I plug my ears and have to shout above the noise.

  “Who’d have thought thirty days ago my life would take such a dramatic turn?”

  “You got that right, babe. You, Mizz Dupree, took the bull by the horns. I’m so proud of you!”

  Wow. I’ve never had anyone be proud of me before. I’m bursting with such good cheer I feel like a fourth grader who just won a spelling bee.

  “So what about school?”

  Smoothie looks up at me from behind long lashes and shrugs. “It’ll be there if I choose to go back to it.”

  “But what about helping out people who need you?”

  “Shit, Mary Kate. I know now that I don’t have to have another damned degree to help people.”

  “You can say that again,” I say as I point at myself, being the test model for that theory and all. “I’d say you’re working on your dissertation, if I’m any proof of your skills in that area.”

  Smoothie stops smiling for a second and has a serious look on his face. “You’re not my school project, Mary Kate. You just happened into my life at the right time.”

  Right time. How crazy is that that he considers me someone who happened into his life at the right time?

  “That’s me. Mary Kate Dupree. Right time, wrong girl. You know, some days I look in the mirror and still expect to see that sweet, naïve teenaged-version of Mary Kate Morris, fresh out of braces and thinking her world is just ready to open up. But instead all I see is an aging Mary Kate Dupree, sleepwalking down the long corridor into life’s twilight, and too late realizing I haven’t really even lived a life yet.”

  “Stop that, Mary Kate. I think you’re just coming into your time.”

  “Just my luck, coming into my time, right when I’m ready to throw myself into the icy falls.” I’m not sure if I’m serious about this or trying to talk myself into it or what.

  Smoothie purses his lips and knits his brows. “You’re not doing that.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “We’ll talk about this later. Look over there.”

  Changing the subject again, he’s got me looking at a group of Brownie Scouts walking their dogs. They’re so cute.

  “Did you ever have a dog?” I ask him.

  “Buster. A mutt we got from the pound. Part beagle, part beast. Didn’t last long in our house. He dug about a thousand holes beneath our fence and ran away more than he stayed home. Eventually my father took Buster to the farm.”

  “The farm. You think there’s one farm that all bad pets go to?”

  “I don’t know but we sure sent a lot of pets there over the years. Three cats, two parakeets, a ferret. And Buster.”

  “At least you had a chance with pets. We once had a dog. Hank was his name. But that was it. He didn’t last long. He went to that farm, too.”

  “Not even a goldfish? Poor Mary Kate. You don’t know what you’re missing out on.”

  “Yeah, dead fish I’d have to flush down the toilet and a whole lot of poop I’d have to pick up in the yard.” Truth is, I’d love to have had a pet when I was living with Richard. The place was so lonely. But he’d never have put up with the mess of an animal, that’s for sure. He could barely stand the mess of another human.

  Chapter 18

  The parade wraps up but as we get ready to leave, I notice a road has been blocked off for a street fair, so we decide to stroll through and grab some lunch.

  Smoothie heads for the corndog booth but I’m not sure if I can stomach that.

  “Go on, Mary Kate, at least try it,” he says, pointing the thing in my direction. It’s got ketchup and mustard on it and he’s trying to dip it into relish. It looks like something that’s been lost under a sofa for about two months.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Honey, there’s nothing you ever have to do for me. Everything is on your terms.”

  That’s enough convincing for me, so I take a small bite and worry it around in my mouth for a minute before swallowing.

  “That’s actually not bad,” I say. “Here, give me more.”

  I take another big bite and before you know it, I’ve eaten half of Smoothie’s lunch, so I offer to buy another.

  We stroll along the sidewalk and come across a small tent that says Fortunes with Madame Zayna on the front.

  “Let’s go in!” I blurt out.

  I’ve never been very enthusiastic about seeing a fortune-teller. Maybe it’s because I already knew what my fortune would be: “You are in for forty more years of misery…”

  But things have changed and I’m curious to see if Zayna has something to tell me I don’t already know.

  Smoothie pulls the curtain back and we enter the darkened tent. Inside there’s a miniature disco ball suspended from the top, where you’d normally hang a camping lantern, and then there’s a small spotlight aimed at the disco ball, so the tent is filled with sparkles. I feel like we should be dancing.

  Madame Zayna is a large woman of about fifty, dressed in gray sweat pants and a purple t-shirt that says My Pooch Went to Big Dawg Kennel and All He Brought Me Back Was This Dumb T-shirt. She has her graying hair pulled into two stubby pigtails. I have to say she is not exactly the picture of a fortune-teller I’d had in my mind’s eye. But I’m not one to judge a book by its cover, so I disregard that minor transgression.

  “Please, sit,” she motions to two chairs at her small round table.

  We take our seats in the metal folding chairs, awaiting direction from the master.

  “So?” I ask.

  “Whose fortune am I telling?” Madame Zayna asks.

  We hadn’t decided that, so I offer up myself. Madame Zayna takes my right hand in hers, palms up.

  Without a word she begins to trace her fingers around my hand, feeling the size and shape and following the many lines.

  “I see water,” she says. Which spooks me, considering I already know I’ve got a lot of water in my near future. “Your hands, they are water hands.” Hell if I know what she means by that, but I’ll take it at face value as a sign.

  She talks about my heart line, my emotional stability evidently coming into question, and mentions potential romantic prospects, which gets Smoothie’s ears to perk up.

  He leans over and whispers into my ear, “You got some plan with some guy up in Niagara Falls that I don’t know about, Mary Kate?”

  “Ah, and see here, a simian crease,” she points to where two lines meet. “Very special.” It’s dark in here, so I’ll just have to take her word for it. She looks at Smoothie as she talks. “You need to be mindful of her emotional well-being. This is powerful, these two lines joining as one.” She demonstrates with her pointer finger along my palm.

  I’m beginning to feel like maybe she thinks I’m crazy and ready to lose it. Emotionally unstable. And maybe I am, being in a strange town with a fortune-teller, having run away from my rotten husband with a guy I saw on the side of the road.

  Zayna mumbles a little more about lines and fate and things that aren’t making much sense. But then she pauses and looks at us both intensely.

  “There is something important for you both. I’m sensing water, green water. Lots of it. The sun and the moon and stars and water. Pay attention to this, it has meaning.”

  With that she drops my hand, opens her own palm and asks for forty bucks. Which to me seems steep for three minutes of gobbledy gook and nonsense. But I scavenge in my purse for money and pull out her payment.

  She then turns to Smoothie and raises her eyebrow, questioning whether he’s next. He holds up his han
ds like he’s passing on a too-rich dessert.

  “Thanks but no thanks. I don’t need anybody to tell me what’s in store for me. I’m done planning, and done trusting. I’m just going with the flow.”

  I shake my head back and forth with fervor and wag my finger at him like I’m giving him a sistah lecture. “Oh, no you don’t. Nice try. But if I’m having my future poked and prodded at, so are you.”

  “Fine,” he grunts, grudgingly extending his palm for Madame Zayna’s perusal. She traces her fingers over his hand again and again, even begins kneading her fingers along the fleshy part at the base of his thumb, then pulls at his fingers gently. I think she’s giving him a hand massage. Wait a minute! I didn’t get a hand massage! For forty bucks, I should’ve gotten at least that. I’m bothered with this on two levels. First that she didn’t bother giving me the same treatment. My hands could’ve used a nice rub-down. But also I’m feeling a bit proprietary toward Smoothie. As if I have some territorial claims on him. Which I don’t. I’m like China, wanting to exercise my perceived rights over Taiwan.

  I clear my throat loudly, trying to get the point across to Madame Zayna that this is no time for fondling the clientele.

  Finally she snaps out of her trance and begins to speak. “There is darkness. It’s very empty.” She twirls his wedding band around and around, her eyes glazed over, evidently lost in thought. Or a desire to keep groping Smoothie’s hand some more. She runs her pointer finger down to the center of his palm, then to that sensitive area of the wrist, where a nurse would take your pulse, and she traces a circle around and around, a mini-tornado. What is up with this chick? Zayna the Cougar Palm Reader.

  “Now I see light. Warmth. Salvation,” she practically chants. At least she’s not purring. “It’s not what you expect, but it’s what you will want. Keep your mind open or you’ll miss your opportunity.”

  Smoothie and I look at each other and shrug. Whatever that means. We wait for more compelling information from Madame Zayna, but she is not forthcoming. Yet she still won’t let go of his hand. I clear my throat again and finally she drops it.

  “All done!” She says with a chirp in her voice, as if she just finished giving her poodle a bath. She holds out her hand, Smoothie negotiates a price break on the second reading since we did two fortunes, and then we make our way into the bright sunlight.

  “What do you think that means?” I ask him.

  “I think she’s telling you to stay away from green swirling water.” He taps me on the head to emphasize I should be using my brain.

  “Nice try. Don’t think I’ll fall for that, do you?”

  Smoothie hoists his hands in a sign of resignation. “It was worth a try at least. What about for me?”

  “I think she was trying to tell you she’s available if you’re looking.”

  “Thanks, Mary Kate. I’m not looking, thank goodness. Never again, in fact. But if I was, I wouldn’t be looking for that.”

  “Of course not,” I say, somewhat indignantly. An older Plain Jane type will never be a candidate for the affections of the likes of Smoothie Cunningham. Somehow I feel a sense of solidarity with the frumpy Madame Zayna. Our type never would win that prize. Not that I’m looking, either.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Smoothie knits his eyebrows, looking irritated.

  “Just what I said. Of course you’d never look at a woman who looks like her.”

  “Wait a minute.” Smoothie stops walking and turns to look at me, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders bunched. “I don’t think you know me well enough to judge who is and who isn’t my type.”

  I shake my head. “I think it’s fairly obvious. All you need to do is glance at you to know your match set needs to be your equal in looks.”

  “What?” Smoothie raises his voice a little bit, obviously annoyed with my suggestion. “That’s ridiculous! You think I’m so shallow that I’m all about looks?”

  “I’m just saying that’s how it is in this world. People who look like you end up with people who look like you. People who look like Madame Zayna—or me, for that matter—end up with people who look like us.”

  “What, is this the Mary Kate Dupree Theory of Bullshit-itivity? Because that’s some pile of crapola you’re slinging there.”

  Having lived a life of complete looks-driven anonymity, I know differently. “It has nothing to do with bullshit or not. It’s just the way it is.”

  “You know what? That presumption objectifies me, and that’s just wrong,” Smoothie says. “You assume I’m a some sort of superficial person only concerned about looks, simply because I’m half-decent looking?”

  Half-decent? If this guy’s half-decent, I’d be willing to settle for about 1/152 decent and I’d still be coming out ahead. In the SAT test of life, Smoothie is to half-decent what Carrie Underwood is to homely. Or something like that.

  “You know I don’t consider you shallow, Smoothie. I just consider you, well—”

  “Well, what?”

  “You’re kind of a pretty boy. That’s all. The world is different for pretty boys and girls. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Smoothie rolls his eyes and rolls up his sleeves, like he’s getting ready to do battle with me. Only this is merely a battle of wits, and it’s hard to go up against illogic, as he’s got to be realizing by now.

  “Thanks a lot Mary Kate. At least now I know where I stand with you. I’m nothing but a pretty boy. That’s okay. I can handle that. If you look differently on me for that, so be it. All I know is you should realize by now that I haven’t gotten any special treatment along the way for how I look. I’m still here, right now, with you, having walked away from whatever I had left, having lost what I thought was most important to me. And trust me, that was not based on my good looks.”

  This shuts me up. Now I realize I’m letting my own biases get in the way of feeling for Smoothie’s feelings. I was presuming he didn’t even have any, simply because he’s a handsome man. That’s no different than being taken for granted for any other reason. Like being a mousy, middle-aged nobody.

  “Maybe that came out all wrong,” I say, trying to be conciliatory, although maybe it’s too late for that. “I didn’t mean to suggest you were vain or shallow anything like that. I just took umbrage to your suggesting Madame Zayna would never be your type. Maybe I took that comment personally, for all of us homely girls out there.”

  “Mary Kate?” Smoothie stops walking and looks at me. He scrubs his hand over his face, exasperated. “Did you look at Madame Zayna?”

  I nod.

  “And did you notice her greasy hair? And that moustache that looked like wayward pubic hair perched on her lip?”

  Oh, god. Wayward pubic moustache. Wayward pubic moustache. Wayward pubic moustache. My fingers type silently away while I hush him. “Shhhh!”

  “What?”

  “You can’t be yelling out words like that in public!”

  “Words like what?”

  “That one you said, about her moustache.”

  “Wayward?” He says with a wry smile because he knows I’m mortified.

  “No!”

  “Pubic?” He says it really loudly and I can’t believe I’m having this conversation in public. I mean in public. I cover my ears and squeeze my eyes shut to avoid being part of the public spectacle.

  “Let’s get back to the point here, Mary Kate. Did you notice that woman’s mouth? She had all sorts of food stuck in her teeth. Her breath was awful. Only thing worse than her breath was her body odor.”

  “Your point is?”

  “My point is if you put yourself in the same category as someone as skanky as a personal grooming-compromised fortune teller, then clearly your self-esteem is way lower than I gave you credit for.”

  I guess I hadn’t paid attention Madame Zayn
a’s shortcomings, come to think of it.

  “Well if she was nasty why’d you pay her and let her touch you?”

  “I felt sorry for her, Mary Kate. She looked like she could use the money.”

  So now I feel like a double jerk. “I didn’t—”

  Smoothie holds up his hands. “Forget about it, Mary Kate. No harm, no foul. But maybe in the future you can take me for what I am, and not how I look. Deal?”

  If I could slink I would, but I never mastered the fine art of slinking. So instead I blush and mumble an apology and feel like a real idiot and Smoothie’s cool enough that he just scruffs my scruffy hair and tells me to come on, taking my hand and pulling me toward the car.

  We finally get back in the car and point ourselves north. This time I don’t even bother to look on the map; I’m just following my nose. Of course there is some irony in that, because Richard would always say I couldn’t find my way out of a paper bag, so how can I find my way to Niagara Falls without consulting a map? But I can just feel we’re headed in the right direction. And if we’re not? Well, then, we’ll turn back around and re-aim ourselves. No big deal. I mean, what’s my hurry, anyhow? The Falls will be there. They’re not going anywhere.

  We’re on a two-lane country road, haven’t seen a house in a couple of miles, when we hear a loud sound and all of a sudden I lose control of the car, veering across the road. I jerk the steering wheel back with all my might, barely straightening up the car, and wend my way over to the narrow shoulder of the road as quickly as I can. Just barely within sight of a large, weathered clapboard house way down the road.

  “Shit! What the hell was that?” I can’t believe the amount of cursing I’m doing lately. It’s as if it’s been stockpiling in my mouth all these years and now I have to get rid of the surplus or something.

  “If I had to guess I’d say we just blew ourselves out a tire.”

  I look at Smoothie sheepishly. “Darn it, I hate when that man is right. Richard had warned me to have the tires checked.”

  “Goddammit to hell, Mary Kate. Why can’t you ever listen—”