“I always seem to fail the flirting stuff that other women are so good at. I watch them and wonder why they are skilled at this little dance and I have two left feet? Me, who never flunked a subject in my life. I must have forgotten to sign up for Flirting 101 during my stint at the University of Oklahoma.” I was trying to be flip, but no one laughed. Everyone had a sorrowful look on her face that I hoped wasn’t pity. I hurried to defend myself.
“Articles splashed on the covers of fashion magazines tell you how to achieve a firm butt and uplifted breasts.” I rearranged the plateful of calories spread before me: cheese puffs, barbeque potato chips, candy corn, and an assortment of cheap chocolate from Wal-Mart. Your usual well balanced binge. “Having a good body doesn’t insure success with men. That’s crap. Magazines should be sued for issuing false information.”
Carmen had a startled look on her face and she opened her mouth to disagree so I kept talking.
“I know that I don’t happen to have either of these right now, but I have had in the past, and believe me, it made absolutely no difference.” I gave Carmen a “don’t challenge me just now” look. “Think about it. You and Pamela both starve yourselves to look fabulous, but you were both as dateless as I was last Saturday night.”
This was a mean-spirited thrust to keep Carmen off my case with her positive thinking stuff. Saying it made me feel small of soul and unworthy. But Carmen, always generous hearted, seemed to understand.
“It’s because I can’t keep my house clean,” she said.
Even I blinked twice. Carmen’s topsy-turvy mode of housekeeping had never been an issue of importance to her before. Vacuuming not only wasn’t a priority, it didn’t even make her to-do list.
“Since when did that become a problem? Anyway, when you meet a new man he wouldn’t even have seen the inside of your house,” I reasoned.
“Just knowing the house is such a mess destroys my self confidence,” Carmen said, fully convinced her argument was valid. I was just as convinced she was dead wrong.
“Last year you hired your house cleaned and you didn’t have a boyfriend.”
“Yes I did, remember Dale?” She giggled. “Don’t feel bad, I’m trying to forget him, too.”
My memory kicked in. Dale was a corporate type long on money and short on personality. His idea of a romantic evening was Carmen walking by him and grabbing his crotch; and the relationship had progressed to the point where he felt comfortable farting in her presence.
“I remember the guy,” Pamela said. “He hated your friends, and when you demanded some free evenings to spend time with us he put you on a Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday date schedule.”
“That was a nightmare!” Carmen said. “I felt like a corporate project. I hated it, I just hated it.”
“But you stayed with him for almost two years,” Magda said.
“I didn’t want to be without a date,” Carmen said and we all collapsed in laughter, Carmen loudest of all.
Pamela poured herself another glass of merlot and I refilled my Coke, adding a generous scoop of chipped ice. Then I spilled my guts.
“My life is a train wreck. Every part of it. My house is cluttered and that makes me feel guilty. Most of the time my insides sort of shake because I’m scared that I’m not up to looking after myself, my kids, my aging mother, an arthritic dog, an incontinent cat, and a house that has water seeping in through the foundation. Every appliance I have is so old that as soon as I get one thing fixed, another breaks down. Add to that the job from hell and you pretty well know what my life is like.” My lips curled into what I fear was a somewhat bitter smile. “Garry Ray’s parting shot was that I just wasn’t any fun any more. Imagine that.”
“Forget that jackass. He’s history. And your kids are grown, let them take care of you,” Magda said. The wisest of my friends but without children of her own, Magda is clueless about parenthood.
“When I first realized a divorce was inevitable I told myself this would be a great adventure. But it’s not. It’s hard and scary and lonely too much of the time. And to think that it was caused by a fiancé, now the ex-husband avoiding me at all costs, who cried real tears when I tried to break our engagement back when I was eighteen and he was twenty-two.”
“And here you are thinking that maybe you want another man in your life. Go figure,” Pamela said.
I popped another Wal-Mart chocolate into my mouth.
Chapter 4
I studied the two-pound box of chocolates that I’d brought to Roundtable with a new interest. “Oh, goodie. I just noticed that this box has a map in the lid. You can tell what you’re selecting.” I chose a maple nut coated with dark chocolate and popped it into my mouth. Then I confessed what was really bothering me.
“I screwed up the flirting assignment, really bad.” I glanced around the table at my three friends, envious of their free-spirited attitude toward men and sex. Why was I so uptight? So prim and proper? So ultra middle-class-respectable and boring?
“Why is finding a man so hard for me?” I asked. “I’m really comfortable around men until I’m viewing them as potential dates. And picturing them naked. Then I get all flustered. My face turns red and my palms sweat.”
Three voices defended me against my own accusations; encouraging, rationalizing, and bolstering my ego. Women are wonderful.
Men, on the other hand, are a mystery. Perhaps that’s why women spend hours discussing them.
“Why do we spend so much time discussing men?” I said. “It’s almost as if we think that talking about them long enough will explain how they think.”
“Who knows?” Pamela shrugged. “Maybe someday we’ll solve the mystery of why these strange creatures want to watch sports twenty-four hours a day instead of spending quality time with us.”
“It’ll never happen. We just have to accept the fact that men prefer to watch football on TV, drink beer, belch and fart, and then drink more beer, rather than take us on a romantic date for dinner and dancing.” Magda squeezed a wedge of lime into her Dr. Pepper and lifted the glass in a salute. “To men,” she said. “God bless them.”
The word “fart” triggered a new tangent for my mind. “I don’t understand why almost all men seem to be fascinated by their own farts,” I said. “Garry Ray actually seemed to love the rude noise and the malodorous smell. My ex thought farts were hilarious.”
“Once when my family was on vacation and we were trapped inside a motel by rainstorms, my brothers spent an entire day farting and striking matches near their butts to see if they could ignite the gas,” Carmen said.
“And did they? Flame I mean?” I poured another eight ounces of Coke over my ice.
“Yes. They actually did.”
I thought about this a minute.
“But how could they keep on farting? I mean, like all afternoon?”
“I don’t know. It’s a mystery. But they did.”
We sat in silence, pondering this phenomenon. A woman would need to have a major gastro-intestinal disturbance to accomplish such a feat. After which she would visit her internist, purchase three prescriptions, and refuse to eat for a day.
“Do you think farts are funny?” I asked, wondering if I were a minority of one. I realize that farts are necessary, but to me they have never been funny. Neither is slapstick comedy.
“No,” Carmen said. “But my brothers and dad did. They thought farts were a riot.”
“So did Garry Ray. He’d lean sideways, lift himself part way off his chair, fart, then laugh hysterically, as if someone had told the wittiest joke on earth. It made me crazy,” I said.
“Then he probably wondered why you didn’t want to have sex the next minute,” Carmen said and I nodded.
“I think one of the ways I disappointed him most was that I didn’t appreciate his gas-making gift. He always got very defensive over my complaints, acting as if I hadn’t appreciated a really brilliant talent. I think he thought that passing gas was some sort of great talent, like an exc
eptional tenor voice or something.”
“Just rejoice that all of that now belongs to Bambi,” Carmen said.
“You’re right,” I said. “Maybe I don’t really want another man after all.”
“Men can be handy for some things,” Magda said. “Like unscrewing jars and repairing faucets.”
I nodded my agreement. Most men seem to be born knowing how to fix things. I have trouble remembering which way things screw on, and have to revert to the rhyme of “lefty loosy, righty tighty,” before I can even figure out how to get my garden hose attached to the spigot.
“Men just seem to be born knowing how to change a tire, replace a washer in a faucet, and roof a house. And these are the same human beings who can’t find matching socks.” I sipped my drink and thought about this for a minute before continuing.
“Garry Ray’s father died when Garry Ray was fourteen, yet he seemed to have the innate knowledge to fix anything and everything. His secret, I think, was refusing to admit anything existed that he couldn’t fix. And it never seemed to.”
“I don’t think all men are like that,” Magda said. “I’d have to slip around after my ex ‘fixed’ something and call the plumber on the sly.”
“Not so with Garry Ray. Once he decided to put a splashboard up behind the bathroom lavatory. He removed every fixture in the bathroom and spread them up and down the hallway. I was so stressed by the sight that I had to leave the house. But six hours later, the splashboard was mounted, every fixture replaced, and everything worked. I miss him most when a faucet leaks.”
“We’re getting way off subject here,” Magda said. “What we need to do is critique your first venture into flirting and decide where you went astray. You’re going to be a great success eventually. You just need practice and encouragement.” She shot me an encouraging smile. “Now tell us all about what happened the first time you tried to flirt.”
So I rehashed the fiasco at the first furniture store.
“If I’d have been Pamela, he not only would have given me the nightstand, he’d have delivered it for me.”
“Did you remember to mentally undress him?” Pamela asked.
“No. I totally flubbed and forgot everything. I didn’t gaze into his eyes or think naughty thoughts or any of the things you told me. There’s something about this particular guy that really flusters me.” A sort of hopelessness washed over me and I felt my shoulders droop. “I’m such a failure.”
“There, there,” Magda said. “You’re just learning. It will get easier and gradually become a habit.” She fluffed her wispy, psychedelic sundress. “At least the furniture salesman came back and fawned all over you. That shows progress.”
“Yeah, but he seemed like such a dud,” I said. “The guy I fought with was actually much better looking. Maybe I deliberately sabotage myself. Or maybe I don’t know the kind of guy I really want.”
“I’ll tell you who I want,” Carmen said. “I want a man just like Liam Neeson.” She waved toward a magazine article she had brought for our version of Show-and-Tell. Carmen has dark red hair that she pays money for and bright green eyes that were a birthday gift from her parents. She’s brilliant with computers and is only naive when it comes to judging men. But I listen to her advice because she has caught four husbands.
“Liam Neeson is wonderful,” I agreed, enjoying the fantasy with her. I’d never had sex with a really tall man. Actually, I’d never had sex with any man other than Garry Ray, shameful confession that such an admission is in this day and age. Sex, unfortunately, was a pretty big deal with me. I’d have been a great success during the Victorian era. Another woman born in the wrong century.
“Look at this picture of Liam in the new Redbook,” Carmen said. “He’s wearing this wonderful midnight blue shirt.” Her expression took on an intensity reserved for topics of great consequence. “I’m trying to find a shirt just like that. When I do, I’m going to buy it for the man in my life and make him wear it.”
“But you don’t have a man in your life right now,” I said in my usual bubble-bursting pragmatic way.
“I don’t care. I’m getting the shirt, and when I meet him and he looks wonderful in the shirt, I’ll know I’ve found the right guy.”
“You mean like Cinderella trying on the glass slipper?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Carmen pushed around the snacks she had piled on her plate at the beginning of the evening. I knew that all but perhaps a crumb or two would end up in the trash. This seemed to be her formula for thinness. You can look at anything you want, just don’t eat it.
A chorus of laughter and outrageous comments erupted.
“Listen, I’ve used lots worse criteria to measure men,” Carmen defended herself.
“I like it,” Pamela said.
“Why not?” I agreed.
“Just make sure it’s a big shirt,” Pamela quipped.
“Now don’t throw down on little men. I like little men.” Magda, our five-footer, popped a strawberry into her mouth.
“But Liam Neeson is a big man,” Carmen said, ever mindful of her target fantasy.
“The article says that all of the girls in his high school thought he was a geek.” Pamela had been busy scanning the article.
“Says who?” came the incredulous chorus.
“It said so in the magazine.” Pamela lifted an eyebrow and pointed to the magazine.
“I don’t believe it,” Magda said.
“What do high school girls know?” Carmen demanded.
“The size of the man has nothing to do with the size of his penis.”
This came out of left field from Pamela, our authority on sex. Everyone paused and gave careful consideration to the information. When Pamela speaks about sex it’s worth listening to. Both a Scorpio and a free spirit, she has had the greatest quantity and largest variety of sexual experience.
“I don’t care that much about the size of a penis,” Magda said. “It’s how a man uses what he has that counts, not how big his equipment is.”
“I don’t agree with that,” Carmen said.
“You haven’t my experience.” Magda is also a Scorpio and runner-up in the sexual-experience contest.
Carmen got that stubborn look she gets when she disagrees with Magda but doesn’t want to say so. She studied the pattern of the green and gold tablecloth and I knew she was thinking of Lester, her fourth husband and the only one of the quartet I had met. Lester was a medium sized, insignificant looking man and I always wondered what Carmen saw in him. Then one day, in a burst of confidentiality, she told me that Lester was hung.
“First time he unzipped his pants I almost freaked.” She had confessed some time ago. “I thought, Man, where did all of that come from and where in the world are we going to put it?”
I guess Lester figured it all out because Carmen got a dreamy look on her face at this point. “The men I date don’t realize it, but Lester is some bench mark.”
“Let me see that article again.” I reached for the picture, then studied it. Liam looked good, but didn’t spark the same excitement in me that he seemed to ignite in Carmen. I paused a minute, trying to see what she saw. Carmen watched me.
“It’s a silk shirt,” she said.
I nodded. “Maybe I need to read the article.”
“All I know is that I’m going to find that shirt, hang it in my closet, and every guy I date more than twice has to try it on. Like I said, if he looks like Liam, then I’ll know that he’s the right one for me.”
Along with everyone else I started to explain to her why this was a bad idea, then stopped. I was the one who told her not to quit her day job before she started her own on-line business and tripled her income. But a duet of protest filled the room.
“Listen,” Carmen said, “I’ve used worse criteria to judge men. This is one of my better yardsticks, and I’m sticking with it.”
I closed my eyes and imagined Liam Neeson naked. I figured I needed the practice.
Chapter 5
Luke Wallace had been recommended to me by one of the engineers at the company where I worked, and I prayed he’d be as good as promised. I’d been heartsick with worry ever since I’d noticed a crack in my fireplace. And that wasn’t all of the bad news. There was also a wet spot on Jeannie’s bedroom floor that recurred from time to time when it rained. Bad drainage, perhaps?
The upkeep on a thirty-year-old house seemed overwhelming. And with two kids in a local college and another graduating from high school this spring, where in the world would I find the money for expensive repairs?
Garry Ray had agreed to continue paying college tuition and books for the girls, but he’d also deducted the exact same amount from my alimony check. And idiot that I was, I’d agreed. He wanted credit for their education. I wanted them to be educated. Everyone makes compromises I told myself.
When I finally got home there was a strange car parked in the drive. I sighed with relief. The guy had waited almost thirty minutes for me. What a prince! I hopped out and rushed toward him.
“Hi, I’m sorry I’m late,” I said in my friendliest voice, trying to dazzle him with a smile. Then I stopped dead in my tracks and clamped a hand over my mouth like a little kid. The man climbing out of the dark blue Ford Explorer was my nightstand thief.
He saw me and froze in his tracks. His smile disappeared.
Ohmigosh. This could only happen to me. For a minute he stood without moving, as if considering a quick dash back to the safety of his car.
And me with a crumbling house. I couldn’t let that happen. I swallowed hard, widened the phony-feeling smile still pasted on my lips, and extended my hand.
Chik~Lit for Foxy Hens Page 15
