by Larry Brill
So Julie hugged the pillow against her breasts and buried her nose in the flannel pillowcase with Christmas penguins running amok across the white fabric. The penguins wore the residual scent of his cologne as if it was their own. Eau de penguin. She let it seep into her nostrils. Musky with a hint of tropical breeze, his cologne left a faint aftertaste in the back of her throat that reminded Julie of her father’s Old Spice. God, it was nice to have a man back in her life after all these years.
As for the sex, that had snuck up on Julie the first time after dating Russell casually for several months. Sex was better now than she remembered. But then it had been so long she didn’t like to dwell on the few-and-far-between relationships that failed over the years since her husband was pummeled to death in a tragic car washing accident. Her friend Carla urged her to play hard to get with Russell. After all, he was a bit of a mystery at the high school in San Jose where they all worked, and she had not been the only single woman Russell had flirted with. That was all done now; Julie won him over. Besides, what did Carla know about dating these days? She’d been married to Larry forever. Carla wasn’t the one who lost her husband only five years into their marriage. Carla wasn’t the one who had to give up on love for nearly thirty years while she raised two kids alone and put them through college. Carla wasn’t the one who had to worry about cobwebs down there as she marched into middle age without a partner. Carla? Pfshh.
Julie tried to roll her eyes at the thought of Carla’s advice. A layer of crust kept the left one glued shut.
“Jeez Louise.” She’d forgotten to take out her contact lenses, distracted by their sex last night and not wanting to break the spell of spooning with him afterwards. Julie licked her thumb, wiped it along the lid of her left eye and then pried it open. She staggered into the bathroom, squinting in a way that made everything appear as if she were looking through a white plastic shower curtain. She removed the contacts and started them soaking, brushed her teeth, grabbed a terry-cloth robe from its hook on the back of the bathroom door, and snatched a pair of black-framed glasses from the dresser as she headed to the kitchen. After the disappointment of waking up alone in bed without Mr. Right, what she needed now was a date with Mr. Coffee.
“Awwww, that’s so sweet.”
A yellow and cherry-red chrysanthemum leaned like a leering sailor to greet her from a water tumbler next to the coffeepot. She didn’t need to look to the table on the opposite side of the kitchen. So what if he merely snatched it from the arrangement sitting there and left it in a more obvious spot to start her day? The flowers came from a planter on her patio. This one flower was meant just for her.
Outside the window over the sink, the sky was turning California winter blue and the Eucalyptus trees along the back fence were being pushed around by a light breeze. It was the first week of December; Christmas would be here before you knew it. At least the Master Batters wouldn’t get rained on. She pulled the grocery list from under a magnet on the refrigerator door and settled down with her coffee. Maybe she could convince Russell to come by for dinner on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. She could cook spaghetti and they could share a bottle of wine. Julie added pasta, wine and sauce to the list. She left space between items in case she needed to add more, arranging them in the order she would find them as she pushed her cart up and down the aisles starting in the produce section and ending in paper products on the far side of the store. In neat block letters, she added one more item to the list of things on the drug/hygiene aisle, below dental floss.
ASTROGLIDE.
Five years post-menopause, a little feminine lubricant was a handy thing to have. Now that she knew she needed it, better to have too much on hand than run out. That would be a wonderful complication to avoid. Things had gotten serious in a good way. What a difference a year made. Carla depressed her last year with one of her observations that Julie was headed down that pothole-filled road, the one you took when you devolved into a snippy, crotchety, pathetically single cat lady. Never mind that Julie had no cats. Yet. Carla was sure it was bound to happen if she didn’t find someone. Loneliness and the fear that it would become a permanent state had grown since her youngest, Daniel, finally graduated from college and moved out of the house to put his art degree to use, designing headstones for a cemetery monument company in Oregon. He married a lovely gal and they had a son whom Julie had seen exactly three times since Daniel moved away. Carla was the one who turned her concern about growing old alone into a matter of life or death. The more she worried about Julie, the more Julie worried.
She was in front of the open refrigerator door, searching for ideas about what she could add to the grocery list, when the phone rang.
“Tiffany,” Julie said. “Happy Saturday, hon.”
“My, you’re in a good mood this morning, Mom. Is he there?” Her daughter giggled.
Since she had started seeing Russell, Tiffany had taken way too much interest in the relationship, and she danced around leading questions in search of some salacious tidbit without coming right out with what she wanted to know. Julie knew the drill because it was much the way she had pestered Tiffany about her sexual activity when the girl was still a girl. Mom had a right to know. A daughter? Not so much.
“Can you keep an eye on the little doodle for me over lunch today? Joe’s working out of town and Heather, Heather, Brittany and Agnes need a girl’s lunch out.”
“What about Heather?” Julie asked. “She couldn’t make it?”
“Nah. Her band has a gig next week. Trust me. They really need the extra practice.”
Julie’s daughter collected girlfriends named Heather the way Ruby Burton, Julie’s latest sophomore reclamation project, collected detention slips. Tiffany ran through a string of Heathers in middle school and high school before settling into this group of stay-at-home moms. In order to keep them all straight, they referred to each other as H1, H2 and H2-point-0. The last one got that nickname for being a weepy lead singer in an all-female group that specialized in blending old-time torch songs with the sound of pop groups from the 1970s. They called themselves the CandleABBAs.
“What about the boys?”
Tiffany said her twins were headed to a friend’s house where they would sleep over. “Just in case lunch runs a little, uh, long.”
Julie was sure it would. “You’d better bring Morgan’s pajamas just in case. And yours, too. In case lunch runs a little, uh, too long,” she mimicked.
It was shaping up to be a good Saturday. Any Saturday with her little jewel of a granddaughter was a great Saturday. Julie poured herself a second cup of coffee after the call and stopped to smell the chrysanthemums. She knew the single flower he left for her wasn’t any sweeter than the bunch, but this morning it just seemed that way.
She passed the dining room table on her way to a hot bath and tried to ignore the stack of files that called to her. She promised Russell she would make some progress on the presentation he needed for his job interview with the school board. Russell was the principal at Mt. Hamilton High, but if things worked out as he planned, he’d get a promotion to assistant superintendent. Russell was an organizational guru, great with spreadsheets, and she admired his skill with facts and figures, but sometimes he had trouble expressing the significance of his data in a way that didn’t cause eyes to glaze over. He asked her to write the presentation. She promised to make it sing if it would help win over the board.
Julie liked her job. She was an assistant principal and counselor at Mt. Hamilton High. It was the same school she attended back in the seventies. She’d been working there fifteen years after spending her life moving through a series of low-paying clerical jobs and raising her family. Being back at the school where she graduated felt like going home again, spending her days in a familiar environment with low risk and high comfort.
She headed to the bedroom and paused when she noticed her purse had been moved on the credenza in the hall. Her lipstick had fallen to the floor; a comb and several pens were scattered
on the tabletop. Her wallet peeped over the lip of her purse like a nosy neighbor at the backyard fence. An envelope with his scribble sat on the edge of the credenza next to the purse.
Thanks for dinner, he wrote. A little short of cash this morning so I borrowed. I’ll catch you up on Monday.
Julie sighed. She took the glasses from her face, nibbled on the right earpiece and squeezed her eyes shut. She calculated the number of ATM machines that had to exist between San Jose and Modesto. Only a million more than a couple, she guessed. She checked the wallet. Well, at least he had left her a dollar. A single dollar.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized to no one in particular, but two years of dating and a few sleepovers when the stars aligned and they both had the time, energy and inclination for sex were all a good start to a permanent relationship, but that didn’t give anybody the right to ransack a woman’s purse. Nope. Shouldn’t dating be easier when you were in your fifties than it was at twenty? No, check that. How would Julie know? Dating at nineteen was how she wound up married and pregnant. Not in that order.
At least she got Tiffany out of that deal, and then Daniel before James died two years later.
Julie laid her glasses on the credenza and crumpled the envelope in both hands, squeezing the annoyance out of her. She was about to drop it into the trash when she inspected it again. Then she tugged at its corners, flattened it on the tabletop and tried to press the wrinkles away with the palm of her hand. The envelope held this month’s PG&E bill. She needed that. She couldn’t even throw the darned thing away yet.
CHAPTER SIX
Plan B
First thing Monday morning, Julie rapped her knuckles on the wall at the edge of Russell’s office door at Mt. Hamilton High. She paused only long enough to shoot him a smile and a cute little wave. The Master Batters had won a game in Saturday’s softball tournament, a major accomplishment considering the way the season had been going. She wished she had been there to see it. The problem with winning Saturday was that the team spent the night in Modesto in order to get crushed and eliminated Sunday. He was in a sour mood, and he took a rain check on spending Sunday night with her when the team got back to San Jose. It shot any hopes she had of spending quality time with him, but he promised to make it up to her with dinner Monday and would let her pick the restaurant. That guaranteed it wouldn’t be pizza and beer at a sports bar.
“Let him take you to that new vegan vegetarian place Chez Tofu Del Mar,” her friend Carla said later in the faculty lounge. Carla wore a knee-length red Christmas cardigan with snowflakes over black slacks. She had one foot on a stepladder and the other on the counter next to the microwave in order to tack a banner of red and gold cutout letters on the wall that read Happy Holidays.
“Why would I want to go to a place like Chez Tofu? I don’t like tofu.”
“Who does? But it will tell you how serious he is about the relationship. Any man who would buy dinner without whining at a place where it’s super expensive and they don’t have steak on the menu, a place where the portions are tiny and look more like art than food, so that you wouldn’t ruin the dish by sticking a fork in it even if you didn’t mind the taste—a guy who would do that for you—well, I’d say that’s true love.”
Julie laughed. “You may have a point. Maybe I should learn to like tofu.” She helped her friend climb down, and together they stood and admired Carla’s effort.
Carla Almeida was one of those cute little bundles of energy no bigger than the smallest freshman. If not for the crow’s feet at her eyes, the pesky strands of gray in her hair that was otherwise the color of finely toasted pizza crust, and wrinkled skin from too many hours out in the California sun as a teen, she could easily pass for one of her science students. People who met her for the first extended time were frequently torn between wanting to wrap her in a big, loving hug and squashing her underfoot to stamp out so much perkiness.
“Now that we have that done, here. Take one of these.” Carla held out a small wicker basket. It was full of red envelopes. As part of her self-appointed duties to be campus morale officer, Carla instigated, organized, supervised and browbeat stragglers into participating in the annual staff Secret Santa gift exchange.
“No. Not that one,” she said when Julie dug into the pile to pull an envelope from near the bottom of the basket. “Take the one on top.”
Julie reached for another.
“Uh uh,” Carla said. She rocked the basket from side to side, swirling the top of the pile, chasing Julie’s fingers as they reached for one envelope and then another. When Julie got a smile, she took the envelope she was destined to have.
“Not much secret to this Santa game if you are going to set everybody up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carla said with a straight face. Then she admitted she was tempted to play favorites for one or two friends who could benefit from some Santa hanky-panky.
“Meaning me.”
“I wasn’t the one who turned fifty”—Carla deliberately ran her hand over her lips to muffle the second digit of Julie’s age—“last week.”
“Thanks for reminding me.” Sarcasm aside, Julie didn’t mind another birthday so much. Russel had broken their standing agreement of not dating on a school night, stopping by with a bottle of wine, a romantic comedy DVD, popcorn and a pair of earrings that were prettier, more stylish and more expensive than she’d expected. If only he hadn’t brought up the fact that she was three years older than him. He thought he was being funny, and he was, the first time, but when he brought it up for a third time, it was as funny as a funeral.
Julie opened the envelope and read the name on the card inside. She closed it with a shrug and the kind of resignation that comes with finding out, what a shock, your lottery numbers had failed to hit again.
No jackpot today. Not even from her best friend. Still, the name on the card held a certain amount of intrigue for all the wrong reasons.
“I smell a setup.”
“You bet your tush, toots. That’s what friends are for. Besides, Seth Naylor is a good guy. No harm there. He teaches music. You used to play piano. You love sports. He’s a good sport. He’s available and you’re…”
“Dating Russell. And don’t start with me.”
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t know what it is, but I just won’t trust Mr. Festerhaven to make an honest woman of you until he says ‘I do.’ I’m starting to think you should have a backup plan.”
“And so now I suppose I’ll be getting a Secret Santa gift from Seth?”
“No, I left that one up to fate. If it happens, well...”
Carla wouldn’t admit to rigging the gift exchange. “Why couldn’t you fix me up with Russell? That would be the logical thing, right?”
“There were a couple of problems there. First, he thought that, as the principal, he shouldn’t have to take part in something as silly as this. Second, he’ll be getting you a Christmas gift anyway. If he doesn’t get you something special like something you could wear on your ring finger, you should start exploring your options.”
Julie said, “The real surprise will be if anybody but Seth gets my name.”
“You could do a whole lot worse, lady. I should know.”
“God. Like that insurance guy. Wayne?”
“Hey, I apologized for that, didn’t I?”
“It was sweet of you to buy that life insurance policy just to get him to agree to a date. But you, lady, are certifiably crazy.”
“That’s okay. I cancelled the policy when things didn’t work out.”
“You know what’s really sad? He wasn’t the worst guy you’ve tried to set me up with.”
“So we’ve had a couple of losers. But let’s face it; the pool of available men is getting pretty shallow. It’s not easy and you’re not young anymore.”
Julie answered her by sticking out her tongue, but Carla had a point, and it cut more than Julie was willing to show. Yes, she wasn’t young anymore. She was aging faster th
an ever, and the prospect of growing old alone, something that was a mild dread in the light of day, could too easily morph into terrifying premonitions on those nights when she had trouble sleeping. Alone. Russell might be her last, best chance to avoid that.
And she loved him. He was whip-smart with a dry sense of humor, handsome enough and knew what he wanted out of life. And he wanted her. Bonus points for that. He’d charmed her socks off the first day after he became principal at Mt. Hamilton High. He was hard to resist when he turned on the charm. Julie couldn’t.
Staff trickled in; teachers checked their mail slots and swapped greetings with the other faculty members within their individual cliques, trading snippets of gossip and the latest war story from their classrooms. They picked up paperwork, grabbed a quick cup of coffee and got waylaid by Carla’s basket of Santa cards next to a plate of brownies in the center of the faculty lounge.
“It looks like Santa’s little elf has been busy this morning.” Rosilla Hernandez made a show of holding up the red envelope she had pulled from the basket.
Beverly Myers and Barbara Unger, English and English II teachers, gave them a nominal wave as they passed on their way to the refrigerator with their lunches in hand and a serious conversation in progress.
“She actually had the nerve to say she didn’t think I needed dessert, right out loud. The whole restaurant heard her. It was totally embarrassing. It’s not like I’m exactly fat, you know.” Which was true in the mind of a big-boned woman approaching thirty who had shopped the full-figure women’s rack at Macy’s for years. “I hate her.”
“She is such a bitch,” Beverly said.
“And even if she does think so, my date was sitting right there. She practically called me a fat cow in front of him. I hate her.”
“Barb, that is so unfair. She is such a bitch.”
Julie glanced at the clock as she and Carla left the lounge. She still had a few minutes before settling down to work. They walked past the counter that separated staff desks from the foot traffic on three sides of the common area, and out the double glass doors to a courtyard between administration and the school library.
