I’m now wary enough of another rejection not to invite him in. Instead, I step out to the small square of concrete that serves as a porch.
Some inconsequential chatter, an exchange of how-are-yous and nice-weather-we’re-havings, leave me wondering why he’s suddenly reappeared. Then James’s voice turns resolute.
“Joan, I need to ask you a favor,” he says with a stiff formality, as if we’re strangers instead of a couple who have seen one another with drippy head colds or climaxing with animal moans and groans. “I know I told you there was no hurry to sell the house, but I’m pressed for money. Maureen and I need to get a place of our own. We’ve been squeezed into that tiny apartment too long.”
“You mean you can’t live on love?” My disappointment increases my inherent sarcasm, recently suppressed toward the finale of my marriage as I struggled to band-aid the relationship’s incurable wounds. “When you left, you claimed you needed nothing else.”
“Yeah, well, things change,” he mutters and wipes curved fingers across his lips. “Love won’t feed us and it won’t pay the rent. This mortgage is strangling me. Our settlement calls for you and me splitting the house’s value. So sell it or don’t sell it, but I need to have my share soon.”
My anger flares and I forget the house’s expense and inconvenient location in a new middle-class enclave far from Denver’s center. “You told me I could stay as long as I liked. I love this house. I spent nearly a year finding a place that we could afford in a style I liked.”
James retreats hastily. “I’m not taking legal action, just asking you to think about putting this place on the market.”
“I don’t know a thing about realty. You do it.” I cross my arms over my chest and feel my jaw tightening. I’ve had to learn to ignite the stove’s pilot light, add oil to the car, even drag the ladder to the ceiling fixture in the hall to change the light bulb while standing on my toes. I’ve dealt with too many changes in too short a time—I shouldn’t be obligated to deal with a real estate agent.
“You’re living here. It makes more sense for you,” James insists. “You can schedule appointments at your convenience, that sort of thing.”
My temper turning to a slow but feverish burn, I object. “I can’t guess the value. You run the ads and talk to prospective buyers. I don’t have the background or training.”
James snorts, a particularly unpleasant habit of his when he wants to act superior. “You’re deliberately making the process complicated. What do you think we have real estate agents for? I’ve asked Kevin to contact you. See what he says.”
“Kevin is your friend,” I say between clenched teeth to control my volume. Even at eight on a Saturday morning, our neighbors have sharp ears and we’re standing in the full glare of the sun on the front porch. Verbal brawls are definitely not allowed under the terms of the development’s covenant, any more than painting an exterior bright purple. “You call him.”
“Kevin is, was,” James corrects, “our friend. “I haven’t seen him since I moved out. When I called to tell him about our decision...”—Your decision, I interject in my mind— “I think he disapproved.”
“Hmmm... I wonder why?” I purse my lips and hold my index finger over them. Damn, that irrepressible sarcasm again. Can’t beat it down even when I realize I’m sabotaging my self-interest. But striking back at James alleviates my pain. “Not because twelve years of a marriage went down the drain?”
“Don’t.” James is clenching his teeth now. I can hear them grinding. “Be rational for once in your life, not emotional. Just call Kevin.”
“Not because we were together all through school, when Kevin was part of our crowd?” I dig my sharp words deeper and I hit something, for James turns to flee. “Not because he’s known about your little liaisons, your affairs, your peccadilloes, while I kept my head firmly in the sand?” I taunt and tag along.
“Drop the drama queen act! I’m not going to fight with you,” he calls over his shoulder as he moves down the sidewalk. “I won’t lower myself to your level.”
“You mean you lack the balls,” I respond and not in a lowered voice. “Maureen is welcome to you.”
James reaches his new molten-gold Lexus, jumps in the driver’s seat and locks the doors. I’m mere seconds behind, pounding on the window with both fists, neighbors and their reactions the last thing on my mind.
“That’s right, you bastard. Hide in your fancy-schmantzy convertible. Won’t do you any good! Lucky at cards, unlucky at love, isn’t that what they say? I hope the car keeps you warm on winter nights after Maureen discovers what a worm you are and leaves.”
James screeches away, tires smoking a burnt-rubber smell, his attention riveted on me in the rear-view mirror rather than the street ahead of him. Not once have I ridden in the white, smooth, leather-lined luxury of the new car. Pardon me, vehicle, for a Lexus is so much more than mere transportation. He bought it with his ill-gained earnings from the Powerball game, the two-hundred dollar thousand runner-up prize. This bonanza sprang loose the trap of our marriage, as he so kindly told me on his way out the door two months ago.
I never knew he’d been ‘investing’ several hundreds a pop in lotto tickets. Colorado’s a common-property state, so I tried to claim half the windfall in the divorce settlement. That’s when his lawyer most solemnly and officially told me the money was exempt because James purchased the ticket after he’d filed the initial divorce papers. Not that I knew he’d ever filed anything other than income tax.
I was equally an ignoramus about the other woman in James’s life. No, make that women. Although this last one appears to have stuck, I’ve been uncovering evidence of his sundry infidelities—an unexplained motel charge here, a lipstick-stained hanky there.
So here I am, bewildered and betrayed, kicking dust in the gutter, staring after my soon-to-be-ex-husband in his fancy car, possessing nothing but a suburban house identical to its neighbors and destined to be sold from under my feet very shortly. No wonder I’m blue.
* * *
I’m at work, silently crying over my keyboard, thinking again of Saturday’s confrontation.
Every minute or so I blink rapidly to keep the tears from falling into the electronics. I know what I owe my bosses, attorneys-at-law Horowitz, Trimble, Hawkins, & Jones, and it isn’t shorting out this expensive equipment with sobs.
Didn’t they take a chance on a nearly unskilled, displaced homemaker six short weeks prior? After I learned their routines, hadn’t they upgraded both software and hardware so I could produce documents faster?
Yes and yes.
I wipe the tears from my face with the back of my hand. Nearly coffee break time. Then I’ll flee to the restroom for a really good cry. In the meantime, concentrate on the document, I warn myself, and stop sniveling. Mustn’t present a bad image of the law firm to the client sitting just on the other side of the room waiting to see Mr. Hawkins.
Kimberlee, the paralegal, glides into her chair at the next desk, the complete sophisticated professional. Batting her long lashes (real) and tossing her blonde curls (bleached), she nods to me to indicate her willingness to cover the phones. She isn’t the type to add a pleasant word to someone lower on the office hierarchy ladder than she.
I stand and push an old navy-blue polyester skirt down from around my thighs where it habitually clings, like an especially annoying collection of cat hair. It was the first thing to hand in my closet this morning. Rather, the first piece of clothing that fits over the twenty or so pounds I’ve gained since my marriage turned sour. Kimberlee’s eyes flicker over my form, then return to the law book in front of her.
Too bad, I think, lifting my chin. Just too bad you don’t like my clothes, you anorexic witch. Not only are you skinny, even worse that you have to be intelligent and competent. Couldn’t you have some flaws? Why do some women get all the advantages? Why isn’t Mother Nature evenhanded when she distributes gifts at birth?
Down the hall I flee, barely reaching th
e restroom in time to seize a handful of tissue in which to stifle my sobs. Small, thin, smart, and charming versus tall, fat, dull, and depressed. Why does the same situation occur at work as at home? James’s new sweetie is Kimberlee’s double—I know from having been her “very bestest friend in the world”—as she crooned at me just after her own divorce and before she went after James, no holds barred. Unfair, unfair. I was doomed from the get-go to lose to the competition. I weep so hard my cries turned to hiccups.
That’s how Dolores finds me a minute later, leaning on the sink and hiccupping, my nose shiny and red as a ripe cherry tomato, mascara smeared down my cheeks.
“Hija, little one, what’s wrong? Here, have a pastry. It’ll be all right.” Dolores digs into her apron pocket and pulls out a napkin-wrapped, gooey, almond-encrusted bear claw left over from the breakfast rush. Dolores works in the building’s cafeteria and believes with the totality of her own chubby strength that food, unlike men or even money, solves all problems.
“It’s James,” I answer, reaching for the pastry. “He came over Saturday and insisted I put the house on the market.”
“Good riddance,” spits Dolores. “Once you move, you’ll be free of every reminder about that scum-ball.”
“But I’m alone, all alone,” I wail.
“You’re sooooo emotional. Calm down. You have me,” says Dolores as she puts her arm around my shoulders and offers a tissue. “We’re amigas, aren’t we?”
In the mirror over the sink, I see myself and Dolores reflected, two well upholstered female figures. One (me) has a face that looks like it has been in a collision with a truck or a brick wall, so marred and damaged are its makeup and expression. The other (Dolores) sports black hair bound under the hideous hairnet required by her job but also displays features softened with sympathy.
The sight is horrendous enough to dry up any waterfall of emotion. My lip quivers, but I mop up the final traces of tears. “Yeeees.”
“Well, then? Men! Who needs ‘em?” Dolores is just over her fifth live-in boyfriend. “Only to start the kids off.”
Dolores abandoned marriage after her second steady liaison. Marriage laws cause more problems than they solve, she maintains with some credibility. Without legalities, Dolores can drop her boyfriends as soon as she discovers that the current one is as despicable as the previous. The causes of these partings range from lack of child support to other women. Yet she continues to search endlessly for romantic liaisons, much like a risky addiction she can’t live without.
“You on break yet? When you didn’t show, I hightailed it up here to find you. Come on down,” Dolores urges, steering me by the shoulders.
We take the elevator to the second floor. Mid-afternoon is the slow time in the cafeteria, so Dolores joins me at a booth for coffee. Well, actually not for coffee—that’s the euphemism covering the range of comfort food she totes—a package of corn chips, soft drinks, and the remains of the luncheon special, lasagna dripping with sauce and cheese.
“You need a new guy like a birthday needs a cake.” Dolores plunks her generous derriere on the maroon plastic seat and continues the conversation from where we’ve left off. “Someone to take away the bad taste of that James.” She purses her lips into a crumpled circle. “Someone boing! To get your juices going again.”
I tear open the orange and red bag of snacks and pause to consider. “Who’d have me? My father left me years ago, now my husband takes off. I must be cursed.”
From the wall of windows facing west, Dolores squints in the streaming sunlight to study me. “You’re nice looking. Pleasantly plump. Many men prefer that. Gives them something to hold onto during the cold winter nights. My brother, for instance, he likes solid women.”
With a wave of my hand, I dismiss Dolores’s brother as a prospect. “Him? You’ve told me about his drinking and his four children and ex-wife. Not to mention his lack of a job. You can’t complain about him all the time and then suddenly spring him on me as a suitable romance. Anyway, James was my one true love.” I sigh from my toes up.
“Speaking from experience, one true loves come many times in a woman’s life. If you’re open to them.”
“I’m terrified,” I admit. I chew some chips slowly until they’re ready to dissolve, then lick the salt off my fingers one by one. “Not just at the thought of being a single in a doubles’ world. But of maybe never finding my soul mate.”
“Hmmm. I don’t believe in this soul mate babble,” says Dolores. “But it sounds like you’ve decided to toss in the towel about James.”
I open my mouth to deny this when the image of James standing on the porch, demanding that I sell the house, comes to mind. The infuriation I felt at his sudden decision, the desolation at my isolation, rebound, redouble, resolve into a blazing rage. “Yes,” I say, “yes, I have.”
“Good,” replies Dolores with the self-satisfaction of a vindicated prophet. “Now all you need to do is practice taking some chances.”
“I’m not a chance-taker,” I respond, feeling myself shrink even as I think about dipping into that great squalid pool of people known as “singles.” Sleek, well dressed, confident, flirting, chatting, petting, having sex. I turn my mind from that direction at once.
“What do you mean? Isn’t your name Joan?” says Dolores.
“Yes. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Your patron saint is Joan of Arc. There was one lady loco enough to face being burned at the stake for what she believed. Surely you can follow her lead a little?”
“I’m not Catholic,” I point out.
“But surely you know her story? She marched forward bravely, proudly, to show the world what she could do. Nothing phased her, nothing stopped her.” Dolores holds her bag of chips in front of her like a shield.
The bell on the cafeteria door tinkles as someone enters. I’m facing the door and I freeze, chip-clutching hand mid-air, every nerve ending on full alert. My mouth drops.
“What’s wrong?” Dolores asks.
“Him,” I croak, breath fighting for territory with food. “That man.”
Dolores swings in the booth to see what I’m watching. Gray, pin-striped suit, shoulders broader than Mr. America’s, russet wavy hair, firm nose, all smoldering in one neat bundle like a package of dynamite, walks into the food line of the cafeteria. “Who’s he?” she asks, turning back.
I possess the female skill of motionless verbal response like a ventriloquist, in which a tooth-baring smile provides cover for a sotto voce rejoinder. I murmur, “A new attorney in our suite. Scott. Not really part of the firm. He’s sub-leasing an empty office.” I maintain the smile until it feels frozen on my face, hoping and fearing the man will look in my direction.
“No soul,” Dolores throws her instant judgment over her shoulder as she gets up to return to the cashier’s station at the end of the food line.
I sit paralyzed where I am. Because the entire interior of the cafeteria lacks walls and is open to a wide-angle view, I can see the food preparation area, the metal counter beside which customers walk and slide their trays until they reach the cashier. The object of my fascination must believe a tray to be unnecessary, for he balances a container of yogurt and a banana in one hand and reaches for a coffee cup with the other. No soul? I wonder. With a face like an angel’s? Or at least a Greek god’s. Dolores is crazy. Well, maybe not so crazy. For a moment, every thought of my “one true love” has fled faster than soap bubbles burst in air.
The man exits from the cafeteria line and strides to a nearby table. His disinterested look sweeps over me, not even registering my presence, just as it passes over plastic booths, slate walls, signs advertising the special of the day. Well, what did I expect? My hand flies up to my hair, light reddish-brown, fine as cotton candy, slicked back into a scraggly ponytail. Since James split, I’ve lacked the energy to bother with curlers, blow drying, even hair cuts.
Dolores returns and catches me staring at the man as if he were a chocolat
e sundae and I haven’t eaten in a month. Dolores claps her hands and I jump.
“I’m back. Now stop looking starved. Where were we? A boyfriend.” She slides into the opposite side of the booth, her back to the man, and helps herself to one of my chips.
With the dignity of the innocent in a court of law, I speak. “Dolores, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But I have to go through the grieving process for my marriage before I start mixing with new men. You know—denial, acceptance, all that.”
“The way you’re eyeballing that guy, you’re well on the road to recovery. Anyway, you read that self-help garbage in some women’s magazine? Listen, girl, what you need is fun!” Dolores snaps the fingers of both hands high in the air and wriggles her torso in a gravity-defying shimmy. “You got tied down way too young. James was your first? And your only?”
“Ssssh,” I hiss. “The world doesn’t need to hear this.” But then I nod, despite embarrassment about my lack of experience. “We were in high school together. Married right after graduation. Then three years in the service, in San Diego. Then back here to Denver. But we had a good marriage at first. And we did have fun,” I insist.
“You have to believe because you don’t want to face up to the facts. Was it fun to work as a waitress putting him through college?” demands Dolores. Her brown eyes flash a challenge, as if daring me to fib.
In my mind, many voices echo from the course of six years of waitressing, demanding instantaneous food service. “Not exactly,” I say, remembering days that started at five a.m., the smell of ammonia-tinged cleaning water, the roughness of perpetually chapped hands.
“You’re telling me. My feet feel like huge sores at the end of the day. And I never can get the smell of fried hamburgers out of my hair.”
Heart-strong Page 7
