by Pamela Ribon
Funny how you can be so wrong about something.
I propped my elbow to rest my head in my hand. “Let’s focus less on what’s my fault and go back to your complaints about Vikki,” I said.
“Ugh, Vikki. Six so-borings! All she talks about is that dog, I swear to God. She got a dog, did you know that?”
“No.”
“Some kind of shit-zu. Looks like someone took a pretty dog and melted it down. Named it Barksy. Like she’s two. Now, what kind of grown-up names a dog Barksy? Honestly. And she can’t stop going on about the damn thing. ‘Barksy jumped up on my bed. Barksy ate a carrot. Barksy got stuck in the pantry.’ I wanna be like, ‘Vikki. Just have a baby. I will steal one for you, if I have to, just to make you shut the hell up.’ She is turning into one crazy woman, Danny. I can’t take it. Okay, so she’s got raisiny ovaries. Lots of people have problems. Just fix it.”
One had to be careful in telling Smidge personal information, as she’d find a way to fit it into one of her rants like a piece of trivia. Fun facts everyone knows, no big deal. I’d think Vikki would prefer I wasn’t privy to the workings or nonworkings of her reproductive system, but to Smidge, if it were really a secret, she wouldn’t know about it. In her mind, if you’re talking about it to someone, obviously you don’t mind someone else knowing.
“Smidge,” I gently scolded.
“What? You’ve got the ovaries of a Golden Girl, too, but at least you put them to use most nights. Can’t wait to find out which derelict will end up being your baby’s daddy.”
With my right thumb and forefinger, I reached out to the front of Smidge’s tank top and flicked the very tip of her tiny nipple. She instantly doubled over, howling and laughing, clutching her chest.
“I earned that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Sooooooooo. To numb the pain of Vikki’s dogologue, I started drinking. The next thing I know I have had a bottle of wine. And a half.”
That’s usually an alarming amount of wine to anyone else the size of Smidge, but my friend never met a blood alcohol content she couldn’t handle. I’d seen her drink marines under the table. Marines at a bachelor party. In a strip club. In Pat-pong, Thailand.
Smidge fiddled with her sunglasses as she talked, playing with the hinge in a way that was definitely going to cause them to break. “And it’s fine, all that wine,” she said, “because Jenny’s at her friend’s house for the night, and Henry’s out with Tucker, and I suddenly realize that all I want to do is get into bed and watch an old movie. Without Vikki. I just want my bed and some Turner Classic Movies. I start wanting it so bad I’m practically salivating. So I’m cleaning up, doing the dishes. Washin’ up a little hint, you know? I put on my pajamas, trying to give some clues. The ones with all the happy tacos on them? Those are pants that say, ‘I am going to bed.’ But this girl’s just standing in my kitchen, chatting away. So now I’m fixing to kill this woman who thinks I actually want to hear about her dog-baby, because she will not take the hint! Crap. I just broke my sunglasses.”
Smidge leaned forward to scroll through the radio stations, unable to find one that wasn’t pure static. She banged the knob with the palm of her hand, silencing it. Then she turned her attention to the remaining sips of her cherry limeade. She slid the plastic straw through the lid, causing a haunting sound that made my spine shiver. Yanking off the lid, she tipped her head back to pour the last sweet drops onto her tongue. Rooting for the maraschino cherry at the bottom, she jammed the straw back into the cup and hacked at the packed shaved ice.
“Soooooo,” she continued. “Vikki finally goes home, and I get into bed and realize, now that she’s gone, I should celebrate. With a drink!”
“Oh, dear.”
“‘Oh, dear’ is right,” Smidge said, “because dumb Vikki made me drink the last of my wine before she left. I had to drive my bike over to the Liquor Stop Gas Shop for a bottle of red. I am in my house shoes and pajamas—”
“Looking like a crazy person.”
Smidge dug her fingers into the cup to scoop ice into her mouth. “Like I rode away from the sanitarium,” she said as she juggled the minuscule frosty cubes over her tongue. “On my bike. Anyway, I end up buying a six-pack and I’ve got it in my basket and as I’m headed back I start wondering if it’s too late to catch Sweet and Lowe’s show over at The Pantry.”
The Pantry was a dark bar with a huge back patio and rows of damp, musty wooden benches adorned with piles of overflowing ashtrays. Nightly, a band crowded onto the matchbox of a stage and played so loudly all conversations were held just shy of screaming. You never went home from The Pantry without a damaged larynx.
“Smidge. Tell me you didn’t go to The Pantry on your bike in your house shoes!”
I was only mostly sure that “house shoes” were the same thing as slippers. I understand what the people of Ogden say and do, but it’s neither my native tongue nor my first instinct when it comes to communicating. For instance, I would never say “I drove my bike,” even if it were a motorcycle.
Smidge patted me on the hip. “I parked my bike up to a post like I was hitching a horse, hid my six-pack in a bush by the back door, and waltzed into The Pantry just in time to hear Lowe sing ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’”
I would never think to do these things, to wander around looking for fun while intoxicated and wearing pajama pants. If I tried half the things Smidge could get away with, I’d no doubt be arrested within twenty minutes. But in the end, it was always just another funny story for Smidge.
“I’m kind of jealous,” I admitted.
“You should be,” she said. “Because the lovely Lowe had me come up onstage to help her sing.”
I gave her a brief but challenging stare. “She had you?”
“I mean she was already up there singing, and there was a second microphone, and space on the stage and—I don’t know. It happened. Plus, Sweet has a crush on me.”
I could imagine Smidge standing onstage in her taco-covered pajama pants, hair twisted into some bedtime knot, belting away like she was the one they all came to see. Most likely, the only people in the bar who weren’t cheering her on were the ones who never even noticed Sweet & Lowe had a surprise guest.
“Anyway, I take a bow, the crowd goes wild. Obviously. Then I head over to the bar to finish my drink, and who’s sitting there but your buddy Tucker Collier? And guess what he said?”
“‘Can I request some Skid Row?’”
“He said, ‘If you could kindly do me a favor and stand still for a moment, I need to call your husband to inform him that you are neither dead nor kidnapped.’”
Smidge had left her house wide open with all the televisions on. Just like I’d always imagined was possible, Henry came home to find that busy, empty house and assumed someone had snatched his wife.
“Had he already called the police?”
“No. Once he knew Tucker was on his way to The Pantry, he figured he ought to find out first if I was there. If I had been kidnapped I could have been dead before he even bothered to check on me, so I’ll make sure to be mad at him later for that. But the moral of this story is, my husband must really love me, because I don’t know why else he hasn’t killed me yet.”
Henry loved Smidge in a kind of old-timey way you rarely see men love women anymore. Not just in the way that he looked at her like she was always telling the most fascinating story, or how when he came home from work, the first thing he did was bend down toward her until his head rested in her lap and she rubbed the back of his neck with her hand. It wasn’t in how they made each other laugh, or how he would cook until she begged him to stop feeding her. It wasn’t in the way he brought home flowers every Friday.
Henry’s love was in his patience.
We all endured Smidge, but the rest of us shared the burden, spread it around a bit. Henry was the only one who was her husband. The one man in her life. There are statues less patient than that man. Even a statue would have found a way to mobiliz
e his marble-stone mouth just to tell your mother to shut her crazy ass up.
But Henry, he just nodded. Rocked his head and absorbed her words. The more Smidge consumed, the more he doted. Sometimes I wondered if his insides were riddled with ulcers.
“Soooooo, Tucker calls my husband and tells him that he found his wife. Henry goes to bed. Once the bar closes I figure I’d better get home. I do, on my bike, somehow, and when I wake up the next morning I get a phone call from Sweden.”
“Sweden? Like the country?”
Smidge threw back her head and cackled. “Yes, Sweden! They were just looking over their recent online orders, and they wanted to know if I meant to purchase a chair shaped like an egg.”
“What did you say?”
“What do you think I said? I immediately answered, ‘Uh, yes, ma’am. I did!’”
“Oh, no!”
She pulled at her eyelids with her thumb one at a time, trying to keep her mascara away from her tears. “Well, I’m sure I wanted it when I bought it!”
“An egg chair?”
“And then my credit card company called to also make sure I meant to purchase a brand-new laptop computer.”
“Smidge!”
“I know! So what I am telling you is that last weekend I made a two-thousand-dollar drunk dial on my credit card. Which is why I am now asking you to drive faster, because I want to make sure I am long gone and far away by the time Henry finds out.”
“You are a dead woman,” I said.
We drove in silence for a while as I tried to imagine what would happen if one day everybody decided Smidge should be forced to do what we said for a change. Just for one day. What if she ever had to answer to anybody? I don’t think she could handle it, living under rules that weren’t hers and hers alone.
I was just about to ask her which one of us she’d let be the boss of her, when I noticed she’d fallen asleep, a thin, red line of cherry stain on her upper lip. Her hands twitched as the empty Styrofoam cup tumbled to her feet.
SIX
While Smidge slept I stopped at a gas station for a fill-up, taking a moment to check my messages. Even though I had told all of my clients I was on vacation for at least two weeks, I knew there’d be an emergency. Sure enough, there was an e-mail from a client who desperately needed me to “fix the flow” in his kitchen.
I am convinced we have the refrigerator against the wrong wall. Mark insists—GET THIS—that we currently have it on the wall that is the most pleasing to his arm when he reaches. Please come tell us where the fridge should go, because I think it’s why I keep giving up on making breakfast. McDonald’s is easier than fighting over how to reach for the eggs. My stove sits untouched. My fridge only has mayo. We miss you! Help us! Take us shopping and whip us back into shape!
Your cheerful yet soon to be diabetic client,
Sean
PS: “Pleasing to his arm”!!
I couldn’t wait to tell Smidge about this e-mail, because I knew she’d give her smug smile and say, “This is why your job is sad balls.”
We didn’t always take our vacations with just the two of us to a place where we could rest. Since these trips originally came out of Smidge’s grief over her father’s early passing, at first we tried to make them have importance. It’s as naïve as it is noble how we thought we could leave a place better for having had us in it. Eventually we learned that our lofty goals were covering the guilt that came with the privilege of getting to travel, and not every trip needed to be a charity event. But back then we were young, and hadn’t yet experienced “sad balls.”
Sad balls came about the summer we volunteered to go to Guatemala to help a local organization rebuild structures damaged from a large earthquake. It had been almost a year, but there was still rubble in the streets, bridges destroyed, roads unpredictable and dangerous. Parts of the country were quite unsafe. We never felt in danger, however, since we were clearly marked as relief workers. Our nights were spent in the heavily policed tourist zones, our days hard at work carrying lumber, digging holes, and lugging buckets of water from rickety wells consisting of not much more than a hose, a PVC pipe, and a bucket.
I believe that was the trip where I asked Smidge if maybe we could start a tradition of doing the backbreaking, morally fulfilling vacation every other year.
Smidge was in her element when we worked on these projects. Her smile never left her face and she would often extend our trips by a day or two, having gotten attached to a particular group of people. She couldn’t leave them until the last board was nailed, the final bag of sand carried. She worked well under pressure. In a situation where leaders were needed and nobody questioned the bossy one, she was a natural. She might start with grunt work, but by the end of the second day she usually had her own crew and her own side assignment.
In Thailand they painted her name on the back of a bench to thank her for helping to repair a damaged hospital in Phuket. I have that picture framed in my living room. Smidge is standing in the middle of a group of smiling Thai men coated in the same thick red sand as the roads, their grins toothy from ear to ear, all standing at just about the same height—including Smidge—arms locked around one another. An elephant stands in the background with his head down, looking like he was banished from the happy clique. Smidge has one leg wrapped around the other, like she’s about to lead a kick line. Her head is thrown back in laughter.
Toward the end of our stay in Guatemala, our guides took us to visit an elementary school. We had lunch with the children on their hillside campus overlooking a breathtaking mountain that shot high into the perfect blue sky. Smidge and I wondered how anybody could focus enough to learn how to read at that school—we knew if we went there we’d never stop staring out the window at the magnificent view.
After lunch it was time for recess. One of the teachers tossed a pair of soccer balls onto the play area, sending the children screeching with joy. The girls chased one ball while the boys chased the other. Smidge and I were soon gasping for breath as we ran alongside them. A young girl of six or seven with a wide nose and dark, serious eyes held my hands, pulling me with purpose. The grass had long worn away in the field; the shuffling of fifty pairs of tiny shoes sent clouds of dirt into the air. I was sweating and coughing; my eyes stung from gritty bits of earth.
“Tortuga!” said a round-faced eight-year-old wearing a worn pink sweater over a thick, patterned skirt. She pointed at me as she repeated, “Tortuga!”
That means turtle. That’s how they saw me. Slow as a turtle, hunched over and openmouthed. Blanca tortuga.
Once recess ended, our group headed out to go back to the work site. We watched one of the main guys locate the two soccer balls and kick them back toward the van.
“Hey!” Smidge shouted. “You’re not taking those, are you?”
I can’t remember his name, but he looked like Sean Penn. To be honest, a lot of the guys we met in Guatemala who had left everything to work with charities seemed to resemble Sean Penn. They were either Sean Penn look-alikes or they spoke German.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a rule. We can’t leave any toys here.”
He walked away not knowing enough about Smidge to lock those balls in a safe place.
“That is just mean,” Smidge said. “How much could these things cost? I’ll buy them some new ones.”
She trotted back over to the children, who were standing in lines outside their classroom doors. Balancing a ball on each hip, she looked like a proud mother about to announce her twin babies.
Neither of us knew much Spanish, so I’m not sure what the kids were yelling when they broke their lines to surround her.
“Okay, now,” Smidge started to say, but then a ball was ripped from her grip. “Hey!”
The second one immediately followed, and for a moment I couldn’t even see Smidge through all the dust kicked up by fifty children tangling over possession of two balls. It wasn’t a game they were playing. This time it was a fight.
“Those are to share!” I heard her yell. As she was getting elbowed out of the crowd, she turned to me with a look of desperation. “What is Spanish for—” She abruptly turned back toward the kids and yelled, “¡Compartir! ¡Compartir!”
The kids continued fighting, pushing, running, and yelling until the teachers got involved. The children were lined up and severely scolded as Smidge returned the soccer balls to the van.
“I see now why you have a rule,” she said, chin tucked in defeat.
To his credit, fake Sean Penn never said a word the entire drive back to the work site. He just chewed on a toothpick, as if nothing had happened.
Smidge was in the backseat, staring out the window in shock, her face slack. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said. “I just wanted to help.”
I rubbed her arm. “It’s okay. You were trying to do a good thing.”
“I need to learn Spanish,” she said.
“Probably not. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to get asked back. Not after you gave them sad balls.”
From then on, “sad balls” stood for trying to do a nice gesture, only to end up accidentally causing a shitstorm.
I would have never guessed in a million years that the king of all sad balls was about to smack me right in the face.
SEVEN
About seven hours into our road trip, just outside Birmingham, Alabama, Smidge abruptly yelled, “Okay, we’re pulling off here!”
“How can you have to pee again? We just stopped like—”
“No, no, we’re here!”
“What do you mean, ‘here’? We barely left Louisiana!”
We were in some place called Anniston, Alabama, and I was confused. It was just a little suburb, and as Smidge directed me off one street and onto another, I started getting suspicious. What could be at the end of this map? Judging from the lack of anything you couldn’t find in your typical small-town-off-a-highway, I was concerned our destination might not be an airport.
