“The secret to the swirl,” Allan said, “is the wrist action.”
Dale watched, mesmerized by the motion of Allan’s hand as he coaxed a line of chocolate frozen yogurt into the waffle cone he held. It was magical. He kept it to the interior lining of the cone, tracing a spiral up to a point, then lifting the lever to cut off the flow from the machine. It was beautiful. It was perfect. He handed it to her.
“Wow,” Dale said. She was honestly in awe. “How’d you do that?”
Allan smiled, and Dale’s heart fluttered. It was the smile she had fallen in love with in high school, and she found that, fifteen years and two marriages and Allan’s coming out later, that slightly crooked smile could still bring back those old feelings.
“I’ll teach you,” he said.
~
Dale’s second husband Kenneth had died in a car crash eleven months ago. On the way to his mother’s house for Thanksgiving, and they had been arguing again—about what she could no longer remember, perhaps about sex and the fact that he wasn’t getting enough—the two of them almost screaming at each other inside his little Japanese car, the fight a complete distraction from his focus on the road, so Kenneth naturally didn’t see the spooked Land Behemoth as it bore down on them, and he certainly didn’t see as the elephant-sized animal plowed into his little Japanese car and completely caved in the driver’s side. Dale had emerged with bruises and a broken collarbone from the seatbelt, but Kenneth had been pulverized, transformed from a person into pulp. The Land Behemoth’s handler hadn’t suffered a scratch.
It turned out that Kenneth had built up quite a nest egg. You wouldn’t think that an architectural draftsman could have accrued so much income, but while he was alive, he put almost every cent into savings, living only slightly above the poverty line. After he and Dale had married, he continued this trend, and it had irritated her to no end. He’d scrutinized every purchase she made.
After his death, she sued the handler of the Land Behemoth and won a huge settlement. This and the nest egg were enough that she would never have to work again in her life.
~
“You know that Fairview Road exit,” Dale said, “the one off of 401, that turns left off of the highway? I’d like to take that exit sometime.”
“What?” Allan turned from the waffle cone maker.
“I’ve never taken a left-side exit before,” she said. “Almost all highway exits are on the right side of the road. Have you ever noticed that?”
“So why don’t you do it?”
“I don’t have anywhere to go over there. I don’t even know what’s on that side of town besides apartment buildings.”
“You’ve never driven somewhere just to explore the area?”
“Nope.”
“I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” Allan said, placing several newly crafted waffle cones in their containers at the front counter. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“I think I left it back in my first marriage.”
The smell of the frozen yogurt shop had started to infiltrate her clothing. After discovering two weeks ago that Allan worked there, she had visited every day, staying for hours sometimes. When she went home, the sugary and slightly fruity smell remained, and it took a few days before she realized it was coming from her.
She lit up a cigarette and assumed a posture of resigned defeat. Since the funeral, Dale had taken up smoking again, and was surprised how easily it was to fall back into the old habit. After graduating college, she had quit, when lighting up had become unfashionable and likely to draw scorn from every person within a twenty-foot radius. Now, she couldn’t give a shit what people thought. If the looks or none-too-subtle little coughs got on her nerves, she could always fall back on the excuse that her husband had just died, and that smoking was the only thing that got her through the days, so fuck off with your clean lungs and indignant attitude . . .
“You can’t smoke in here,” Allan said, though his tone wasn’t snarky or irritated. He said it as if he was remarking on the weather or the state of his love life. Matter-of-fact.
“Why’s that?”
“Well, first of all, we’re a No Smoking shop.” He pointed to the pictogram on the wall above her head, the red circle-and-slash superimposed on a lit cigarette. “And second, the smell gets into the yogurt.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But there’s something about frozen yogurt that takes on whatever odors are around it. If you put a quart of Mint Chocolate Chip next to a plate of week-old limburger in the fridge, you’d end up with slightly minty Stinky Cheese frozen yogurt. It’s kind of like meringue that way.”
She stepped outside and smoked the rest of the Lucky Strike. The October breeze hissed the leaves in the trees, and tossed her hair into her eyes. One more pull on the cigarette before it was snuffed by the wind. She looked down the length of the strip mall to the jeweler’s, the coin shop, the used books store, the florist. Not a single customer that she could see, a total absence of cars in the parking lot next to her Prius. How could these places afford to stay open? In all the visits she’d paid to the frozen yogurt shop, not a single other patron had walked in.
Back inside, she asked, “What do you do all day?”
“Read a lot,” Allan said. “I’ve just about worn out my library card.” He held up a dog-eared paperback: Best Serbian Short Fiction. His bookmark, a two-dollar bill folded in half lengthwise, indicated that he had almost finished it. “I also look through these.”
From behind the counter he brought out a stack of tattoo magazines. He opened the one on top and paged through to a stunning photograph of a man’s naked back, a swimmer by the look of it, his muscles taut but untouched by steroids, lean and long as if he spent hours in the pool every day. Starting from his shoulder blades and extending all the way down to just above his waistline was an intricate and vibrantly colorful tattoo of a pair of folded wings, asplash with reds and greens and purples, looking perfectly natural, and for a moment Dale was taken by the artistic resemblance to the real thing.
“I can see why you like this one,” she said. “Very yummy.”
“He is, but that’s not why I showed you this. I want wings like these,” Allan said.
“I don’t know,” Dale said. “That’s an awful lot of time to spend at the tattoo parlor. Expensive too.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want the tattoo of the wings. I want the wings.”
~
Dale hadn’t been able to cry since the car accident. She was told that she was in shock, that people dealt with grief in different ways, that the tears would come when they needed to. But they never did. Not even when she tried to force it. All she felt was a numbing sadness.
The day after the funeral, she adopted a dwarf hamster from a local rescue agency. She had enjoyed visiting the hamsters in the local pet emporium, watching them scamper about, travel through the multi-colored toob network, burrow into bedding, run on metallic or plastic wheels. But after finding out through an online forum how badly they were treated before arriving in the stores, being kept in unsanitary conditions with the males mixing with females (which often meant that the females arrived pregnant, and sometimes carrying disease), Dale looked at other options. She found the Raleigh Rodent Rescue website, and featured at the top of the page was a grey and white Siberian female that was blind in one eye. The agency was located in a two-storey house filled with hamsters, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, voles, hedgehogs, rabbits, opossums, cats, and an ancient tortoise named Henry; the woman who ran it said that most of her rescues were from testing labs.
“There’s a place in town where I get most of the animals,” she said. An aging Goth, she wore a black tee-shirt that read, in big red letters: “Question Authority. Don’t ask why, just DO IT!” The rest of her outfit was black as well, cargo shorts, knee socks, Converse sneakers with scuffed toes and frayed laces. The
tattoo of a grapevine started at her left wrist, twined around her arm up the sleeve, wrapped around her neck, then slithered down her other arm to end at her right wrist. It looked a bit as if the vine were choking her, and Dale wondered how long it had taken to complete. “One of the researchers contacts me when there’s a batch to be put down after experimentation.”
“Does he get in trouble for that?”
“Well, it’s sort of on the down low,” she said and winked. “No one at the facility knows about it. But some animals come from people who bought a pregnant hamster or rabbit and didn’t want to have to take care of all the babies as well. And I have a network of friends who also keep their eyes open.”
Dale picked up the salt-and-pepper colored hamster, and it sat quietly in her hand, a furry paperweight. The blind eye was clouded over with a cataract. The hamster sniffed at her fingers, its whiskers tickling her skin. The woman explained how often the hamster needed to be fed (once per day, at night), when she should clean the cage (which she was throwing in for free), what type of bedding to buy, and which brand of food dwarf hamsters liked best.
“I’ll call her Pepper,” Dale said, and Pepper looked up at the sound of her name.
~
Since she didn’t appear to have a very busy schedule, Allan asked Dale if she wanted to help him out at the frozen yogurt shop.
“But there aren’t any customers.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “You look like you could use the distraction.”
“But what kind of distraction is it if we don’t do any work all day?”
“You’re here anyway. You might as well get paid for it.”
“But I don’t need the money.”
“Come on, Dale. It’ll be fun.”
“I’ll point out again: there aren’t any customers. This whole block is deserted most of the time. How could the owner afford to pay me in addition to you, when there isn’t any money coming in?”
“Oh don’t worry about that,” he said and smiled. “I’m sure it won’t be a problem.”
“What?”
“Just come here. Fill out this form.”
Allan tore off the top sheet of a notepad full of job applications. Dale dutifully filled out her name, address, previous employers, references, reason for wanting the job (“Because I’m here anyway.”), next of kin, and favorite flavor of frozen yogurt (Dutch Chocolate). She signed and dated the form, then handed it back to Allan.
“Come back here,” he said. “Check this out.”
Dale walked through the door marked Employees Only. Sitting on the floor were boxes and cans of different toppings: sprinkles (both chocolate and multi-colored), walnuts, peanuts, dried fruits (banana, apricot, blueberry, blackberry), strawberries in a neon red strawberry-flavored syrup, hot fudge, hot caramel, maraschino cherries, and whipped cream. Farther in the back was a walk-in freezer, where the yogurt was kept in large transparent plastic bags with blue nozzles until it was ready to be poured into the hopper up front for serving. Along a metal table against the wall was the waffle iron and a cone-shaped wooden implement with a handle sticking straight out of the base.
Allan stood against the wall that led to the serving area, and next to him was a pneumatic tube that extended up into the ceiling. He rolled up her application, slid it into a hard plastic cylinder and opened the tube, the sound of rushing air filling Dale’s ears. Upon placing the cylinder in the tube, it was sucked away, disappearing into the ceiling, its destination unknown.
“Where does it go?” she asked.
Allan shrugged. “The home office. But I’ve never been told where exactly that is.”
“So who hired you then?”
Before he could answer, the cylinder appeared again, dropping down with a thunk. He pulled it out and extracted the paper inside.
“Looks like you’ve been approved,” he said. “Welcome aboard!”
~
In addition to not being able to cry since the car accident, Dale couldn’t get wet either. It was an off-and-on problem that had plagued her since her mid-twenties, and she’d started carrying a tube of KY jelly in her purse whenever there was the possibility of sex.
When she and Kenneth had first married, she’d also discovered something about her husband’s sense of hygiene. When they had sex, he liked to shower afterward; he worked up quite a sweat moving above her in bed. But she liked it when he showered before their intimacy. The smell of his freshly scrubbed skin, fragrant with Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint, made her indescribably happy. But he complained every time she asked, not realizing how important smell was to her.
It was one of those little things that always ballooned into bigger arguments. He couldn’t understand that cleanliness was an aphrodisiac for her, that it got her in the mood. For him it was simple practicality: you don’t shower before you get sweaty, because then you’ll just have to shower again. And, Dale found out, he hated repeating himself. The back-and-forth quickly devolved into frustration.
“Look,” she’d say. “If you want to have sex tonight, take a shower. That’s it.”
“You always do this,” he’d reply. “You know I want to do it tonight, and so you turn it against me to get your way.”
“Hey, the way I see it, we both get our way here. Stop being such a selfish bastard.”
This would go on for a few minutes more, then Kenneth would stomp into the bathroom and slam the door. The water would run, his desire for sex trumping his antipathy for repetition. Or sometimes, instead of the shower, things would get worse, a yelling match, him angry at her for not wanting sex as much as him, and her angry at him for having the libido of a wild rabbit. These arguments would end in them not speaking to each other for a day or two, the space between them in bed heated and smothering, or he would sleep on the couch. After a few days, they would inevitably make up, both wondering how things had gone so bad so quickly.
The make-up sex afterward would be raw and primal, and even with the KY, he could hurt her with his thrusting, the friction overwhelming the lubricant. She tried telling him to slow down, not to go so deep, but the words didn’t reach his ears. It was as if he was reasserting his possession of her, reclaiming her in the name of the United Republic of Kenneth.
After Kenneth’s death, her personal reserves had dried up completely, though she couldn’t really seem to care. She had tried touching herself a few times, hoping that an orgasm might relax her, make her feel better, but after fifteen minutes of rubbing, all she would be was sore. So she gave it up. Nothing really put her in the mood anymore anyway.
~
“So what happened to that guy you were seeing in high school?” Dale said. “Gary? Geoff?”
“You mean Graham?” Allan said.
“Graham! Right, him.”
“I don’t know. We broke up not long after graduation and haven’t really kept in touch. Why’d you think of him?”
“I don’t know. You don’t really talk about your love life. I was just trying to start the conversation.”
“I don’t really talk about my love life because I don’t have one at present.”
“Do you go to bars or anything?”
Allan chuckled, shaking his head as if at an inside joke. “You know, there’s that stereotype that gay guys do nothing but hang out in bars and clubs, or go to the gym, or suck each other off in public parks or in dark alleyways, because we’re all so sexual that we can’t keep our hands off each other. It’s an idiotic stereotype, and I hate it. Some of us are quiet, like to stay at home, and are just not that interested in dating. Sure, I’d like to meet a nice guy, but I’m just so sick of the fucking meat-market scene. I’d much rather stay home and read a book.”
“Okay, okay, sorry,” Dale said. “Didn’t mean to hit such a nerve.”
“It’s just that this oversexed portrayal of ‘the gay man,’ as if this represented all of us, is everywhere on TV and in the movies, a lot of times created by straight guys who don’t know any better. It re
ally pisses me off.”
“Is that why you work here, so you can be alone with your books?”
“Partially. I also have nothing better to do,” he said. “But hopefully, soon, that’ll change.”
~
Dale had terrible posture. She hunched and slouched and slumped, and her lower back hated her for it. At night, before bed, she would lie flat on the carpet of her condo’s living room and stare at the ceiling while her vertebrae popped and her muscles groaned. The ceiling had been sprayed with that texturalizing material that was the bane of latex balloons everywhere. She couldn’t imagine why someone would have done such a thing. Was a flat ceiling really so bad? Why make it unnecessarily fancy?
As her back relaxed, her eyes unfocused and patterns emerged in the ceiling. Depending on her mood, she saw animals, or handguns, or distorted faces. Tonight, she saw the face of her dead husband with the body of a Land Behemoth. He was wearing that superior smirk, that I got my Ph.D. at Columbia expression (despite the fact that he’d only gotten an Associate’s degree from the local community college), the one she had grown to hate, the one that had set off the majority of their marital arguments.
She was surprised when these moments came upon her, the rush of negative emotions. Kenneth could have been a bastard sometimes, but he had also been extremely generous and loving. He brought her flowers at unexpected moments. He always cleaned the dishes, whether she had cooked or he had. He left little notes on the refrigerator if he was leaving for work before she was awake, always signed with a “Love you.”
Kenneth was half-Armenian, and he had been hairy all over. Dale could send him into shivers of ecstasy by combing through the hair on his chest and his back with her fingers. Despite his insecurities, she’d loved his hairy body, loved the feeling of it moving against hers, loved the prickles and tickles it produced on her own skin. It was a built-in layer of fur, and he was always warm. He was her grizzly bear.
The only time they had gone to the beach, a year after they’d been married, he asked her to help him Nair his body. She’d balked for weeks, imagining great clumps of thick black hair clogging the shower drain, the work that would tire her out, the mess that would have to be cleaned up.
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