by Cathy Lamb
“Charlotte?”
I whipped around, in the midst of being a proud feminist who stands tall and unbuttons her button.
“Oh. Toran. Good evening.” I smoothed my pioneer bag lady on drugs skirt down. “How are you?”
“Fine, there. Are you coming in straight away?”
“Yes, yes. I was . . . I was . . . buttoning. Unbuttoning.”
“You were what?” He walked closer to me, smiling.
“Do you think that this shirt looks better buttoned like this, or like this?” I was mortified that I’d even asked the question out loud. He watched while I buttoned and unbuttoned.
“I think you should wear it however you like.”
“But I don’t know what I like.”
He tilted his head, those blueberry/Scottish sky eyes soft. “You don’t know what you like?”
“No, Toran, I don’t.” I took my glasses off. The taped arm wobbled. “I live on an island.”
“Yes. Me too.”
“Mine is much smaller. I live a pretty isolated life. I watch whales. Play chess against myself. I like my cats. I think of my cats as friends, which is pathetic. Cat friends. I walk them in a stroller.”
“You walk them in a stroller?” His mouth tilted up. “I would like to see that.”
“Everyone likes to see it. When there are tourists driving by, they practically run off the road to see four furry heads sticking out of a pink stroller.”
“So you’re the cat stroller lady.”
“Yes. I would be that woman. Dull. Eccentric.”
“You aren’t dull at all, Charlotte,” he said quietly. “Not at all. I like the eccentricities.”
“You’ve always been nice, Toran.” And now you’re flat-out sexy. And tall. And you have eyes that stare straight at me and listen. I have never met a man like you.
“I’m not being nice. I’m being truthful. What do you mean when you say that you don’t know what you like?”
“I can’t even button my shirt without standing and wondering whether I want to unbutton a button. I didn’t have that problem until I came to Scotland. I knew how to button before I boldly, brazenly, bravely left America.” Why did I have to use alliteration at bizarre times? “Scotland is unbuttoning me.”
“It’s unbuttoning you?”
I put a hand to my face and fluttered it, trying to cool off. “I am having a button attack.”
“You’re in a place you haven’t been for twenty years and everything’s different.”
“And the same, in some ways. But I haven’t been that person, the person I was when I was here, for twenty years. That person was a kid, but Scottish, and somebody who liked adventures and running around outside, singing Scottish songs, and shooting off guns and bows and arrows with her father and she knew what she wanted to do.”
“And you don’t now?”
“I’m fighting with my buttons, Toran. That should tell you something.”
“I think, Charlotte Mackintosh, that we should find out what you like and what you don’t like.”
“I think I should, too. Buttons shouldn’t confuse, confound, or contradict like this.” And there were my alliterations, again.
“I think you should find out what kind of beer you like first. Surely that’s the first goal.”
“Definitely. I wouldn’t even mind a hangover.”
“All right, then, in you go, luv.”
I woke the next morning with a hangover. I put both hands to my head and groaned.
I opened my eyes slowly. On the floor was my white blouse.
It had red wine on it. I bet it had Scottish whiskey on it, too.
I laughed. That hurt my head.
I had ended up unbuttoning not one button but two, but that was after a shot of whiskey, half a beer, and some tasty red wine. I had not dared go any lower, as then the beat-up bra would have shown through, but if I had been wearing red, who knows what would have happened? Clearly, McKenzie Rae had jumped into me.
Rowena, who came in with Olive, told me her ex-husband, who had the kids that night, had “small balls, like marbles.” Olive told me that she couldn’t wait to eat Mr. Giraffe, one of her favorite pigs, would I like to come to dinner? I said I would love to come and eat Mr. Giraffe. She moaned and said, “I love Mr. Giraffe, and it pains me to eat him. See, I’m wearing a giraffe scarf. Knitted it myself!”
The giraffe looked baffled. I don’t think it was intentional.
I played poker with Toran and several of his friends. I had played poker with my university colleagues in the past and had researched poker so I could win.
That night, with almost everyone watching, I won.
The women in the bar cheered, then heaved me up on their shoulders and paraded me around the room. Toran was second place. He winked at me, grinned . . . and I think he was . . . proud. Yes, proud. I used the winnings to buy drinks for everyone until the money ran out. That was a popular move on my part.
There was a band in the corner, and I danced with Toran. He felt strong and tall. I was stiff and awkward at first, but he pulled me into his arms and smiled and I had another shot of whiskey and things went warm and well after that as he spun me around.
The other couples spun around, too. We all had huge beer mugs and clunked them together in the middle of the dance floor. We sang Scottish drinking songs about a young boy’s longing for the dairy maid, another one about offing the English king, and a third about how Sailor Davey missed his momma so let’s chug, chug, chug to him.
I’d had way too much by then, so I decided to end the night with one of the traditional Scottish dances I knew as a girl, and Rowena and Olive joined in. Our knees went out, our hands went up, and our feet flew and crossed at angles, rapidly. We did this holding beer mugs. On the bar. I tried to pretend I was in my kilt, white blousy shirt, and my blue velvet waistcoat from childhood. I wanted to be authentic in my endeavors.
We received a raucous standing ovation.
Toran smiled at me. “You still have it, Charlotte.”
He held me close, and wonder upon wonders, I even took off my glasses and tucked them into the deep pocket of my skirt as they kept wobbling to the left. During the night my hair fell out of the bun and the clip flew off. Toran kept smiling. He bought me dinner. We had lobster. I did not wear a bib. It was delicious.
I had unleashed my sexuality by two buttons on an unsuspecting Toran.
I laughed again, and it hurt my hangover.
I kept laughing anyhow.
After I showered I took off my high-necked, floor-length, flowered nightgown and stood naked in front of the long mirror in my bedroom. I avoid looking at myself naked. I think it’s because I see no reason to fuss with how I look. I am also somewhat repressed and not exactly a sexy gal. Plus, The Unfortunate Marriage did a number on me, shredding my self-esteem, I know that.
I ran both hands over my breasts. I am “remarkably, blessedly chesty,” as my mother refers to it. “Got those guns from your grandma.”
“Perfect breasts,” Drew had told me. I wear bras that smash them down so they don’t jiggle.
My stomach was flattish, but not perfect. I turned around.
My butt was still mostly up. Not huge. There were a few dimples. Some of them appeared to be smiling.
My legs are skinny.
What are we to expect, and want, realistically from our bodies?
To walk, to run, to move? Yes.
To dance and explore and have adventures? Yes.
To be perfect? No. That’s inane. That’s a pathetic waste of time and almost biologically impossible.
What I want is to be alive and healthy. I don’t get hung up on much more than that.
And here I am.
Alive and healthy with a body that wants to engage in panting, rolling intercourse with Toran.
I wondered if he would ever want to make love to me wearing his kilt and tartan.
I jumped up a bit in excitement. My boobs jiggled. That was okay. Totally o
kay. I jumped again.
I wondered what Toran would think of the jiggling boobs in front and my fat dimples smiling at him from behind.
Ben Harris had been right about the purple flowering clematis that my mother had named The Purple Lush. It was a flowing purple wave, covering our wobbly arch over the pathway, then dancing across the white-gray picket fence. I had planted it with my father while we sang Scottish songs.
I remembered that sunny afternoon. It had been after the Highland Games. My father had won many events, including the Caber Toss, Open Stone, and the Scottish Hammer. He had also played the bagpipes.
When it was planted, he swung my mum up in his arms and carried her upstairs, “for a nap. Your mum is tired, Charlotte. I’m going to tell her a story, then have her lie down for a wee bit.” He kissed her, she giggled, and they disappeared. I stood under the trellis staring at the purple flowers, the sky a blue background, smooth and clear, as if I could scoop it right up.
It was probably then that my love of gardening started and bloomed. While they took their “nap,” I wandered around. My mother had paths to a picnic table and red Adirondack chairs under an oak tree, the branches spread out like an umbrella, that she said was as “old as time, maybe older.” She had another path to a rose garden, one to a vegetable garden, another to a fountain of a little girl in galoshes holding an umbrella.
She had vines growing up steel planters and flowers pouring out of wine barrels, a wheel barrel, a wooden wishing well, even my father’s old boots.
She hung silver watering cans on a tall post and a purple three-foot-high metal star on the wall of the house. We had red flower boxes on each window, and she’d painted a mural of red poppies with outdoor paint and hung it on a fence my dad built specifically for her painting. That painting was gone.
“A garden should be natural art,” she told me. “A place for peace and serenity. It’s yours, for you. You plant and nurture, rip out weeds, and create a place of beauty. Then you get back out into the world as a fighting woman and kick some butt.”
Now most of her brick paths were completely overgrown. I couldn’t find three of the paths, but I was able to walk down to another oak tree where my father had hung a swing. All that was left was the frayed bits of rope.
I adjusted my straw hat and tried to find the picnic table. My grandma and I always sat there. When I found it, the table was crumbling. It had fallen in on itself, the tree massive above it, the branches gnarled.
I heard my grandma’s voice.
“Let me tell you what I see, sweet Charlotte. There are words in your future, many words. There is an ocean, not this one. It is far away. You’ll cross this ocean to get to the next. Come back to this ocean. Come back.”
“I came back, Grandma.” Tears streamed down my face. “I came back. I miss you. I miss the bread we made together, your second sight, your smile. I miss everyone.”
I sniffled, took out an old tissue and blew my nose, then stuck it back into my skirt.
I moaned, sniffled again, wiped my face.
There was so much my mother left in her garden. Part of the star was still there. The silver watering cans were rusting. The wine barrels were crumbling. No wheel barrel in sight. I saw one of my father’s old boots, the other lost. It hurt to see everything she’d done so ragged and overgrown.
She was in South Africa, my father was dead, my grandparents long gone. They had moved out when my father married, to a new home they bought right next to the ocean, and he and my mother had moved in. My granddad had died the same year as my grandma. He could not have lived without her, my dad told me.
I was here alone, without my family. How could that be? How could they all be gone?
I tried to rein in my emotions. Studying science for years has helped me to be practical, logical, and rational when solving problems, equations, formulas, mathematics. My emotions, since I arrived in Scotland, have been skittering around, overwhelming me. I am used to covering up my emotions, but the truth is that I’m a sap.
A sap, I decided then, sitting under the oak tree that was as “old as time, maybe older,” who wanted to restore her mother’s garden to its former glory.
Drew Morgan and I were both working on our master’s degrees in biology. We’d often stay late, work on our research, and then he and I, and whoever else was there, would eat takeout food together. Monday, Chinese, Tuesday, Indian, Wednesday, pizza, Thursday, Italian, Friday, Japanese. We worked together for eighteen months before he asked me out to dinner one night.
Squirming around, nervous, he said, “Charlotte, I would . . . it would be . . . pleasure . . . an I if our my . . . my honor . . .” He cleared his throat. “Me, I would like to take you to dinner, and dessert, if you want dessert, you don’t have to have dessert, um, at Loralee’s on Friday night at sixteen o’clock. I mean, six o’clock. Would you please me? With me.”
And I said, setting down a folder I was writing in and pushing my glasses on top of my head, “Why?”
“Because I want to have dinner with you.”
Drew was tall with thick dark hair and glasses. Our glasses matched almost perfectly. Like me, the glasses made his nose appear more beakish than it was. But behind the glasses his eyes were soft brown. Drew wore the same pea green sweater several days in a row before changing it for a black sweater, which he wore for another three days in a row. He always wore beige pants, which I noticed were different. They were all the same brand, but one was older than the other two, and of the other two, one had cuffs that were slightly frayed.
“Why do you want to have dinner at a restaurant?” I asked him, confused. We had our takeout schedule already, and it was efficient and varied.
He squirmed. “So we can talk.”
“What do you mean?” I was totally not getting it, as I had not been asked out in a long time. Like, in years. “We talk here.”
He fidgeted. “It’s a, well, if you can, want to, um, I, uh, it’s a date, Charlotte. I’m asking you out for a date.”
“A date?” My voice pitched up. “A date? Why do you want to go out on a date?”
“Because I like you.”
That flustered me up. “As a fellow student here, a colleague, so to speak, you like me. You respect my work. You enjoy how we work together on our research and you appreciate my comments and insights into your research. Right?”
“Yes, I like all of that. But I . . . I . . . ,” he stuttered, “I like you, too, Charlotte.”
I puzzled that one out. I liked Drew. He was brilliant. Soft spoken. Gentle. Everyone liked Drew. Not everyone liked me. One, because I was a woman and there were not a lot of other women in the lab back then. When the men were sexist pigs with me, I called them on it and then I did things to take revenge. For example, I published more papers, completed more thorough research, and when necessary called them out on their misogynistic, sexist thinking and verbally twisted their jocks, in public. Gasp! A woman can, and does, fight back!
It didn’t always make me popular. Too bad for the sexist ape-men.
“Okay, Drew. Dinner. I do not eat oysters or clams, because of the slimy texture.”
“I know.”
“I also do not eat sausages.”
“I know.”
And when I go to a restaurant, which is infrequent, I order and eat dessert first. I have a sweet tooth.”
“I know about the sweet tooth, too. That’s why I bring you chocolate cake.”
“I can socialize for perhaps two hours, then I’ll be tired and need to be alone.”
“I understand.”
We went to the restaurant. He paid. I tried to pay, but he refused. I told him, “I can pay for myself.”
He said, “I know you can, Charlotte, but I want to.”
“Then what do you want in return?”
“Nothing, Charlotte.” But his eyes teared up.
“Why are your eyes tearing up?”
“Because I had the best time.”
“You did?”
“Oh.”
“And I think you have pretty hair and eyes, too. I’ve never seen you with your glasses off.”
“And I haven’t seen you, either.”
“Let’s take them off.”
“I’ll hardly be able to see you if my glasses are off.”
“I’ll lean closer.”
“This is silly.”
“Try it. We’ll do it together. One, two, three . . .”
We did it. I was surprised. I actually sat back in my chair. “Well. You are extremely handsome, Drew.”
“So are you, Charlotte. I mean”—he coughed, then smiled—“you’re beautiful. Your eyes are so, so green. Do you remember that lab specimen—”
“From the county health department.”
“Yes. Your eyes are like that. That color.”
I was pleased. “Thank you.”
We smiled. I told him I would pay next time and that I did not want to be beholden to him for anything, as I was a feminist and independent.
He said I wasn’t beholden. But he held my hand on the way out the door and in the car. He was polite, opened my car door, walked me to the door of my apartment.
We went out again and again. It was my first serious relationship.
Between Drew, my research, and school, I had no free time to write my novel. I put it aside, as so much is put aside, I have noticed, in women’s lives in favor of a man.
I became the woman I didn’t want to be, a woman who would give up interests and passions for her man, a woman who would start to become not exactly herself anymore, a woman who would spend so much time spun up about a man that she spun off her ambitions and dreams, no matter how crazy, and independence.
That was a bubble-headed woman’s mistake.
My mother said she lost “a million brain cells watching that antifeminist circus.”
Some mistakes in life cannot be undone.
That one, thankfully, could.
Stanley I and Stanley II, and their crew, worked fast. The kitchen cabinets were up, all the window were now in, the trim and wainscoting was nailed up, and the bathrooms were being transformed.
