Social Blunders g-3

by Tim Sandlin

  She claimed to write in there, but I don’t know, as I saw nothing she ever wrote. That’s how we met—at a writer’s conference on Okrakoke Island. I was the token Young Adult sports action novelist, and she gave me grief for not being Saul Bellow.

  I was sitting in the bar, discussing minor league baseball with a sci-fi writer from Montana, who, like me, was waiting to get laid. Writing conferences have a sexual pecking order: The poets and agents are chosen first, followed by serious artists with vision, followed by writers who actually make money. Us genre guys must wait for what’s left, which often means the first two days are spent drinking and watching ESPN in the bar.

  A short woman with jet black hair and soft cheekbones shouldered in between me and the sci-fi writer. “I heard you at the panel discussion today. You wrote Bucky Climbs the Matterhorn.”

  I shrugged and stayed neutral. The panel subject had been “Commitment of the Writer,” and I didn’t consider myself an expert on commitment. Whenever the moderator called on me I quoted Günter Grass.

  She picked up my glass and took a drink. “Why waste your time on drivel? Why write if you aren’t serious?”

  I was impressed how she didn’t ask before stealing my drink. And I liked her lack of cleavage. The last woman I’d involved myself with was tall with mazumbas you could smother between. I’m always drawn to what the last one wasn’t. “Have you ever read Bucky Climbs the Matterhorn?”

  “I only read literature.”

  “How do you know it isn’t serious just because my book is demographically aimed at fourteen-year-olds reading at a sixth-grade level?”

  “No book aimed at an audience is honest.”

  I looked over at the sci-fi writer, who raised an eyebrow in her direction. I don’t know why Wanda didn’t choose him. He had a three-book contract with a possible movie tie-in.

  “Are you a writer?” I asked, knowing the answer. Everyone in North Carolina is a writer.

  Wanda clicked down my drink and glared fiercely into my eyes. “You better not hurt me.”

  “I haven’t hurt anyone yet. No reason to think I’ll start with you.”

  “When I give myself, it’s total. I believe in taking risks and putting my ego-center out there on the line.”

  “I admire your frankness.”

  “Honesty is all that matters. I won’t accept the hidden agenda.”

  “My agenda is visible.”

  “Sure.”

  The Montana writer excused himself and went to the bathroom. Wanda and I spent the next two days eating room service food off each other’s genitals.

  ***

  The lock was putty to the man with a Swiss Army knife. Two screws in the door and two in the door frame and here’s the lock in my hand. The first thing I noticed inside was a twin bed covered by my grandmother’s quilt. A bed hadn’t been among the charged items when Wanda outfitted her writer’s sanctuary.

  The rolltop desk and typewriter sat in a film of dust. Left of the typewriter, a ream of paper collected its own evidence of non-use. On the right, a single sheet had been typed on: My heart screams into the black Void of an uncaring Universe. Not a bad start. A number of possibilities leapt to mind for a second sentence. Piles of Cosmopolitan magazines and National Star newspapers lay scattered on the floor, the Cosmo covers more breast obsessed than Playboy ever was, the Stars announcing miracle diets, ugly behavior by the famous, and bizarre copulations between aliens and lower-middle-income children. The Star on the bed, which must have been the last one Wanda read, featured a pair of New Jersey twins who had sex in their mother’s womb and the little girl twin was born pregnant.

  The top file cabinet held a half-smoked pack of Chesterfields and two empty peppermint schnapps bottles. Wanda smoked Virginia Slims. I thought of her face. She had these tiny creases of dimples that you wouldn’t notice except when she laughed. Her chest was freckle laden down to the top of her bathing suit. Below that line she was white as a kitchen sink. Her pubic hair had been eight ball black and only slightly wavy, not curly like other women I’d known. Six months ago she’d shaved herself down there. Said it made her feel cleaner.

  In the bottom drawer of the file cabinet I found a litter of used condoms. They lay amongst the colored cellophane of their torn wrappers. Some had leaked come out the top onto the dark green of the drawer. Others were tied off at the mouth, like balloons.

  I closed the drawer quietly, walked over to the bed, and sat, facing the wall. She’d hand lettered meaningful quotes from writers and tacked them up at eye level.

  The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a personal orgy.

  flaubert

  We need myths to get by.

  robert coover

  Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.

  j. p. donleavy

  What did this intellectual dither have to do with screwing the pool man and God knows who else in my family’s home?

  I worked open the window and looked down on my backyard, with its magnolias and Georgia hackberry trees sloping to the liver-shaped pool that I would probably never swim in again. The worst of it all was they stood in a circle and urinated on her. What was that supposed to signify?

  I lifted Wanda’s Smith-Corona and carried it to the windowsill, where it balanced, keys facing inward. Ever since the third grade, when Lydia gave me her Royal portable, typewriters have been my sacred objects, magic machines that produce beauty a thousand times greater than the sum of their parts. A typewriter can actually give birth.

  “Sayonara,” I said, then I pushed her out the window. She bounced off the roof of the screened-in veranda, broke into two sections, and tumbled down the sloping lawn, coming to a rest in the grass, well short of the swimming pool.

  ***

  My own room had wagon-wheel lamps, a Two Grey Hills Navajo rug, a Molesworth desk, and twin antelope heads mounted on the wall. I lay on top of the Hudson Bay four-stripe bedspread with my shoes on and stared at the ceiling. I thought about baseball for ten minutes—the ’59 Dodgers, my favorite team of all time—then I rolled over and telephoned Lydia.

  Hank answered, which was out of the ordinary. He’s usually out at the ranch, irrigating and pulling calves.

  “Your mother is in jail,” he said.

  Why wasn’t I surprised? “Who did Lydia kill?”

  “She threatened the President’s dog.”

  Lydia blamed Republicans for everything from urban blight to fluoride in skimmed milk, and she’d never bonded with dogs, but this was beyond cranky feminism.

  “Ronald Reagan’s dog,” Hank added unnecessarily. “His name is Rex. She sent a telegram saying if Reagan didn’t appoint a female attorney general, she would assassinate Rex.”

  I looked from one antelope head to the other. As a teenager, I’d written a short story in which my antelopes’ eyes hid cameras that recorded Lydia’s movements for a team of former Nazi scientists studying defective frontal lobes in white mothers. An editor at the New Yorker rejected the story with a personal note saying I lacked subtlety.

  “Is anyone working on getting her out?” I asked.

  ‘‘Maurey won’t lift a finger—says a woman who threatens dogs deserves prison. Pud and I performed a ghost dance last night.”

  “I mean bail. Lawyers. Reality.”

  Hank made a deep chuckle sound. He and Lydia have been a couple for twenty years, a relationship held together by Hank taking whatever Lydia says or does as humor.

  “They’d let her out on her own recognizance,” Hank said, “but she won’t go.”

  “Because Thoreau refused to leave jail?”

  “Because the women’s cell has a black-and-white TV and the men’s is color. Lydia organized a sisters hunger strike for equality.”

  Here’s a problem I could deal with. There are so few, I like to jump on them when I can. “Look, Hank, call Sheriff Potter, tell him I’ll donate a color TV to the women’s cell.”

  “Lydia will cl
aim you cheated.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t tell her.”

  4

  I telephoned Dyn-o-Mite Novelty Co. and ordered a custom bumper sticker that read As God is my witness, I’ll never be monogamous again. Then I extracted Wanda’s Dodge Dart from the garage full of golf carts. Wanda took my Datsun 240Z. She said I owed it to her.

  “It’s the least you can do after everything I gave up to support your vapid dreams the last fourteen months,” she said.

  “What did you give up?”

  Wanda tossed me a look of intense pity and sped off into the Carolina humidity.

  I drove the Dart up Wendover Avenue through a high school parking lot to an open-ended football stadium where boys in full uniforms and helmets were running steps. Football practice is what I do whenever I’m worked up over life. I sit at the top of the bleachers and imagine the players raping Lydia. I choose five typical teenage boys and picture them on top of her, behind her, in her mouth. I picture them urinating on her nude body.

  The coach stood at the bottom, wearing gym shorts and a cast on his left arm, shouting epithets of failure at the players. I got the idea they’d lost a game the night before and had been sentenced to a Saturday afternoon of running up and down the stadium stairs. The coach called the boys “girls,” meaning it as an insult.

  A fat kid dripping sweat missed a step going up and fell, barking the holy hell out of his shin. He rolled on his back in intense pain, then sat on a wooden bleacher seat and looked glumly down at his bleeding leg.

  The coach threw a wall-eyed hissy fit. Charged up the steps and got right in the kid’s face guard and screamed at the top of his lungs.

  “You stupid homosexual pussy!” the coach screamed. “You pitiful excuse for whale shit!”

  The kid didn’t react. Just sat there looking at his leg. If I’d been the fat kid I would have pushed the coach backward down the stairs and broken his other arm.

  The coach slapped him. “Look at me when I talk!”

  “Hey,” I said. I was sitting twenty feet or so away, atop the bleachers. “That’s no way to treat a human.”

  The coach stared up at me. “This is none of your business.”

  “Touch the kid again and I’ll make it my business.”

  Now the kid was staring like I was a Martian.

  The coach’s face wrinkled up. “Are you in administration?”

  “I’m in humanity and you’re impolite. You’re an ape.”

  The fat kid made it upright. “Don’t call my dad an ape.”

  “Your dad?”

  “He yells because I deserve it.”

  My eyes passed between the two. There was a nasal resemblance. “You’re his father?” I asked.

  The coach beamed with pride. “I don’t show no favoritism.”

  ***

  A funeral procession blocked the intersection at Battleground Avenue, so I turned off my engine and waited. The cars were all big, new, and American, except for a couple of Mercedes being driven by women. I have a religious belief that dead people can read nearby minds for four days after they die, which means I’m careful at funerals. If this dead person was reading my mind as the hearse drove by, he or she, or by now it, I suppose, overheard some pretty confusing thought processes.

  I was parked next to a Christian bookstore with a Kinko’s copy shop on one side and a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor on the other. Two pregnant teenagers sat on a bench in front of Baskin-Robbins, eating goop out of banana split boats. We’re talking third trimester here—beached whales.

  I turned right into the Baskin-Robbins parking lot but missed the drive and jumped the curb and knocked off my muffler, which caused the girls to burst into spontaneous giggles and the Dart to roar like a sick lawn mower.

  As I retrieved the bent muffler, one of the girls said, “We oughtta call the Mothers Against Drunk Driving hot line.”

  The other one stopped her spoon in midair to check me for signs of drunkenness. “We’re not mothers yet.”

  “I’m still against drunk driving. Have been for over four months.”

  They were both short and gave the impression they had been chubby well before pregnancy. They had silver hair with black roots and dimples at the elbows that winked as they spooned triple sundaes. The only difference was complexion—the girl against drunk driving was pink and the other one came off as a dull bamboo color.

  “I’m not drunk,” I said.

  This made the girls laugh, and I liked them immediately. For being so large, they seemed in remarkably good moods.

  “If you’re not drunk, you got no excuse,” the pink one said.

  I walked over to the guardrail Baskin-Robbins had put up to keep people from driving through their plate-glass window. “I don’t have any excuse.”

  “What if I’d been standing on that curb,” the pale one said. “You’d have hit me and I might have gone into premature labor.”

  “Shoot, Lynette, I don’t know about you, but I’d be happy as a peach to go into premature labor.”

  “Babs.”

  “I’m tired of being pregnant.”

  I sat on the rail with the muffler in my lap. “Can I ask you a question?”

  The girls spooned ice cream and considered how to deal with me. Lynette was eating hot fudge on three various forms of chocolate while Babs had separate toppings—butterscotch, caramel, and something red—on what appeared to be strawberry, butter pecan, and creme de menthe. I immediately critiqued their personalities based on ice-cream choices and decided I’d rather be involved in Babs’s problems over Lynette’s, but they were both interesting.

  “I’ll give you each fifty dollars to help me with an ethical dilemma.”

  “Cash or check?” Babs asked.

  “Check, but it’s good. Here, look at this.”

  I talked while they studied my check guarantee card, then me. “You see, there’s this decision I have to make where I must choose right over wrong and not doing anything is a decision unto itself. I’m usually real firm about right and wrong, but this time I can’t figure out which is which. I’m lost.”

  “Are you selling insurance?” Babs asked.

  “Good Lord, no.”

  Lynette said, “Insurance agents always start off with that innocent question stuff and before you know it they’re in your kitchen.”

  “Insurance agents don’t pay fifty dollars for an answer,” I said.

  That gave them cause to think. An ambulance blew by on Battleground going the opposite direction the funeral procession had taken.

  “Just don’t tell Rory,” Babs said. I had no idea what that meant, but it seemed like agreement.

  I folded both hands on the muffler and tried to figure a way to word the problem. “Let’s pretend the fathers of your babies did something awful. They’re both no good sons of bitches.”

  Lynette could relate. “That don’t take no pretending. B. B. Swain is the evilest snake in Broward County.”

  “Great. Now pretend he doesn’t know you’re pregnant.”

  That’s when I lost Babs. “But Rory knows I’m pregnant. He married me in church.”

  “Just pretend.”

  “That’s easy for Lynette, but my Rory is an angel. He rubs my feet when I’m tired.”

  Lynette’s lower lip swelled up. “She’s so smug about her having a husband and I don’t, it makes me want to throw up.” She turned on Babs. “It’s your fault I’m preggers in the first place.”

  “Don’t blame me. You’re the one sold yourself cheap.”

  “B. B. would have been perfectly happy with a hand job till he heard you going at it like a cat.” Lynette made her voice high and truly. “More, more, I’m ready. I’ll do anything for you, Rory.”

  “You should have used protection,” I said. I’m big on protection. Some call me promiscuous, but no one calls me a thoughtless lay.

  Lynette blinked real fast. “B. B. told me he was impotent.”

  Babs made a gesture like waving
flies off her ice cream. “Never believe anything a boy with a hard-on says.”

  “That’s God’s own truth,” I said.

  Lynette started to sniffle and her eyes glistened up. “Now you got me so sad I’ll have to buy another sundae.” She stared accusingly at me. “We were having a perfectly nice time till you had to jump the curb.”

  Babs said, “Yeah.”

  “Let’s make it an even hundred. Each.”

  Babs put her arm around Lynette. It took a minute, but Lynette finally made a sound like sucking tears back into herself and said, “Okay. We’re pretending our babies have rotten fathers.”

  “And the fathers don’t know about the babies.”

  “Why not?” Babs asked.

  “’Cause you never told them.”

  “That don’t make no sense.”

  “Just pretend.”

  “This is easier for me than Babs,” Lynette said. “I have an imagination.”

  “I have an imagination too.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Trying to talk to two women at once is exponentially harder than trying to talk to one. The nuances go on forever.

  I interrupted. “Now pretend your baby has grown up.”

  “How old?” Babs asked.

  “Thirty-three.”

  “That’s how old Jesus was when he died.”

  “Hank Williams was thirty.”

  “Your baby is thirty-three.”

  They stopped and looked at me funny. “No need to raise your voice,” Babs said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re pregnant. Not deaf.” I’d heard that before.