“Well, hello,” she said, sounding unnerved. “If it isn’t Mr. Ten-Dollar-Tip.”
Ben nodded politely. “I was just going to get a Coke,” he said and opened his hand to reveal the money. She stared at it for a moment and then turned back to the street, watching for the approaching bus. The road stretched away from them as an empty corridor, lit by strings of weak street lamps and the occasional blinking sign.
“My brother was supposed to pick me up, but he’s probably drunk at some bar.”
Ben wasn’t sure what she expected him to say to that. That her brother was a son of a bitch? He wasn’t comfortable talking about anyone’s time in bars. She shifted her purse onto her other shoulder and turned back to him.
“Where’re you headed?”
“Florida,” he replied, moving the coins around in his hand, feeling the rough edges catch against the calluses on his palm.
“Where from?”
“California.”
She looked him up and down carefully, as if searching him for a reason, for some outward indication of a vagabond soul. He wondered what she found.
“That’s a long way,” she said at last. “You got family in Florida?”
He nodded. Together, they peered down the street, but the bus didn’t appear. An ancient Mustang sputtered past, driven by a kid with long, blond hair like a girl. It was late, well past eleven. Even the teenage boys were headed home.
“Are you sure it’s coming?” he asked and she shrugged.
“Eventually,” she said. “I ain’t walking three miles home at this hour, and I ain’t got the money for a taxi. Either the bus’ll show, or my brother will, eventually.”
“I could give you a ride,” Ben said, pointing toward his car, alone in the parking lot.
“Right,” she said slowly. “Some man I don’t know offers me a ride home. You think I’m stupid or something?” But she was smiling, just a little.
“Then maybe I’ll just stand out here with you till the bus comes,” he said. “This doesn’t look like the world’s safest neighborhood.”
“Which is why you’re stayin’ here.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Basically, I’m cheap. And I don’t usually give waitresses ten dollar tips, you know. It’s been a long day and you were...” He hesitated at the edge of the truth, then skirted it. “... nice to me.”
“That’s my job,” she said, but again, she was smiling.
They stood quietly for a moment, listening to the distant sound of cars passing, on another, livelier road. The motel sign hissed as it blinked; she brushed away an insistent fly.
“Come on,” she said at last, picking up her duffel bag of clothing. “The diner’s closed but I got a key. I’ll get you that Coke.”
Ben followed, the change still pressing into his tender skin. As she fumbled with the keys to the diner door, he stuffed the money into his pocket and wondered, not for the first time since he left California, what the hell he was doing.
She didn’t bother with the lights. The diner was bathed in the soft, pulsing color of the jukebox and a double strip of pink neon that outlined the counter. Setting her duffel down by the door, she lifted the end of the counter into the kitchen and took two clean glasses from beneath the bar.
“Let me make you something else,” she said as Ben settled awkwardly on a cracked brown vinyl stool. “You like milkshakes?”
He watched her hands as she made them each a drink, scooping ice cream from a vat and adding it to the silvered shaker. She had fine, delicate skin that showed her veins.
“What’s your name?” she asked as the machine stirred the liquid behind her.
“Ben,” he answered. “Ben McDunnough.”
She showed no sign of recognition. “Lacey Delaney,” she told him. “It’s Irish, like yours.”
Leaning across the counter toward him, she rested her chin on one hand and stared at him.
“So,” she said. “What do you do?”
He had to think about it for a moment, unsure.
“I coach,” he answered at last. “Baseball.”
“Oh, you used to play? You look like you used to play.” When he nodded, she continued. “My brother used to play football. He was real good, too. Got to go to college, till he blew out his knee. He’s a mechanic now.”
Ben felt a certain sympathy for this unknown brother, even if he was a son of a bitch.
Lacey took the shaker from the machine and poured a bright pink concoction into the glasses. Because of the neon lighting, Ben wasn’t sure whether it was strawberry or vanilla until he brought it to his lips. She sipped hers through a bendable straw and eyed him curiously.
“You married?” she asked, licking her lips.
“No,” he answered. “You?”
She shrugged and looked past him to the window. “Sorta. I got a kid with someone. She’s staying at my sister’s tonight. She’s only three.”
“What’s her name?” Ben asked, letting the cold drink slip down his scorched throat.
“Huh?” She turned back to him and then grinned. “Britney. Her name’s Britney.”
They sat quietly after that, as if they had found out just enough about each other and anything more would push the balance of the evening toward something else, something hesitant and shaking. Lacey slipped out of the bar and started the jukebox with the quarter he offered her from his pocket and a well-placed kick. Ben didn’t recognize the tune, it was something country and sad, maybe Willie Nelson. Lacey knew it, though, and hummed along.
“Let me drive you home,” he said as the clock rolled slowly toward midnight.
“That’s okay,” she said. “The bus’ll be along eventually. They run all night, you know.” He didn’t know. They walked slowly back toward her bus stop through the still, hot night.
“How long you staying?” she asked. He was holding her duffel bag and his car keys, intent on persuading her to let him drive her home.
“Just tonight,” he said.
She made a small gesture toward his room with her chin. “You got a nice TV in there?”
Something within him flared briefly and he could taste the strawberry of the drink against his tongue. “No,” he admitted. “But it’s got air.”
They were barely in the door before she had pulled his shirt over his head and had her mouth on his skin. The room was stifling even with the air-conditioning, but his teeth kept threatening to chatter. She was still luminously lovely. He told her so and she laughed.
“You think?” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and patting the spot beside her. He sat, their legs barely touching. “My brother says I oughta go to Hollywood, but I keep telling him, I’d rather be a waitress here where I can earn enough money to maybe someday buy myself a little something, than to go out there and get screwed, you know?”
He nodded, fascinated by the thick braid, red and gold woven together like rope. “Can I undo this?” he asked and she shrugged.
“If you like,” she said.
His fingers were trembling as he pulled the rubber band from the bottom of the braid and began to comb through her hair. It loosened easily, as if happy to be free, tumbling over her shoulders and down her back to rest in a puddle on the bedspread. It was nearly medieval, her hair, and she was the woman in the ivory tower. He pulled it back from her neck and kissed her, right behind her ear.
“That’s nice,” she said, so he did it again. She smelled so fresh and young, like Iowa corn fields, like rain and sunshine, like the proverbial apple pies of his childhood.
“Who’s in Florida?” she whispered as he touched her shoulder, bared by her loosened shirt.
He shrugged and she reached for the first button on his fly.
“Guess it don’t matter,” she whispered, popping the buttons one by one with her neatly manicured hands.
He lifted his hips to allow her to pull his pants and underwear down, and then she was kissing him. He could hardly breathe, it was all so sweet and unexpected and hell,
he hadn’t gone into the diner looking for this, but here it was and oh, it was wonderful. His whole body quivered and shook and he let it out, all of it, the whole god-awful day and any more that might be coming in one long, aching wail. When she was finished, she lay down on top of his prone body and kissed him chastely on the lips.
He was unable to move until the pleasure stopped pinging behind his eyes, but at last he slid her jeans off her hips and over her toes as she slipped off her sandals. She made no movement or noise to help him, but came as simply and easily as a dream.
“Just stay here for a minute,” he said, his voice gruff to his own ears, and pulled her close to him so he could take in the clean, clean scent of her.
“You seem real nice,” she said softly, rubbing his chest in an abstracted way. “You don’t got a girlfriend or nothing?”
“No,” he told her. “I did, but not right now.”
“Shame you ain’t staying in town,” she said and he thought vaguely beneath all his pleasure that it was a shame. He had a momentary vision of himself, living in Baton Rouge and married to this sweet little waitress, surrounded by their red-headed children. He shook it away. “I’d best be going,” she said, after a while, and rose off him. He reached to stop her, but she had become insubstantial already, and avoided his grasp like a spirit. He watched in silence as she pulled on her clothes and re-braided her hair in the gray motel mirror.
With the duffel in hand, she paused at the door, looking no different than she had two hours before. “You seem kinda sad,” she said. “That’s why I stayed. I thought you could use some cheering up.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You could stay if you wanted. Or I can drive you.”
She shook her head. “Nah,” she said.
Ben pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, and pushed his feet into his unlaced shoes. They stood together at the bus stop for a few moments before he saw the round, white lights of the bus, far down the street. Lacey grasped his hand, briefly, and squeezed once before letting go.
“I needed some cheering up too. Guess most people do. You sleep tight,” she said, shouldering the duffel. The bus pulled closer and he leaned down to kiss her.
And then she was gone. It seemed, when he examined it in his mind, like a dream. But the warm smell of her body was still lingering in the air around his bed, and his groin throbbed in a gentle way, recovering. Slipping between the stiff sheets of the motel bed, Ben curled into his belly, feeling soft and exposed, newly-born. Outside the window, just beyond the crack where the curtains, like all motels, refused to close, he could see the diving women. Blinking, blinking, blinking, until he closed his eyes and let them finally hit the water.
Hoop Skirts and Misery
1981
I don’t care who you are, geek or Homecoming Queen, there is something sacred about the Senior Prom. We all know it, though those of us who’ve never had the real opportunity of going spend an inordinate amount of time pretending it’s just the gathering of a bunch of socially precocious teenagers and not a rite of passage into adulthood as monumental as circumcision to another culture. I wanted to go. I bought Seventeen Magazine and perused the prom section, girls decked out in flounce after flounce of soft pink or peach or baby blue, like the fluffy dolls women crochet to go over toilet paper rolls. Like Scarlet O’Hara. That year, you were no one if you weren’t wearing a hoop skirt so big you could barely pass through a doorway. It was either that or a one-armed polyester something so slinky it wouldn’t have looked out of place on the back-up singers at a Marvin Gaye concert. “Sexual Healing,” indeed. I craved the Prom. For three years I had been denied and I could barely face this final failure with any resistance. Please, I prayed each night to a god I mostly ignored, let someone ask me. Anyone. I’ll even go with one of those horrible boys in Mr. Richards’ science class, the ones who know way too much about blowing things up.
I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t hanging around the fringes wearing clothes from 1972 or anything, but I wasn’t “in.” I had a few friends, loyal in the way fellow misfits always are, but no one went out of their way to talk to me in gym. I’d never had a date. I had kissed a boy once, at a party, for about five minutes in a very smelly coat closet during a game of truth or dare, but it doesn’t count when all you’re thinking is: that’s it?
Lee had been Homecoming Queen, a cheerleader, and she was voted “Most Likely to Set the World on Fire” her senior year. For two lovely years, I was able to bask a bit in that carefully polished glow, but it was more like radiation after she’d gone. So there I was, seventeen years-old and date-less for the Senior Prom. It was as significant as not having teeth.
Two weeks before the Great Event, I left my World Philosophy class (which taught me nothing about either subject, like most of high school) and tried, with my usual lack of success, to get my locker to open. Thirty-eight, twenty-two, sixteen. Bang on the door. Thirty-eight, twenty-two, sixteen. Bang. Finally. I slipped my books onto the shelf, retrieved my coat, and prepared to shut the door. Much to my surprise, there was suddenly a large hand on the edge of the locker door, another to my left, trapping me where I was.
I had never been mercilessly teased or tormented, so I wasn’t frightened, just startled. Especially when I saw who was pinning me there.
Jake Munsey was Popular with a capital “p”. Captain of the baseball team, handsome, rich, funny, bound for the kind of glory that shows itself early and burns long, for a lifetime even. He wasn’t the massive mound of man he would later become. That would surface after the careful shaping of his genetics that only a professional coach and perhaps some drugs could provide. Instead he was tall and strong and yet lanky in the way most eighteen year-old boys are. I frowned.
“Casey Wells,” he said, as if he were confirming my identity. Which, considering the number of times we had actually spoken, he might have been.
“Hi Jake,” I said, mind frantically searching for a reason for this assault. Did he need help in English? Had I somehow insulted him in the only class we had together, Earth Science? Did he want me to be his lab partner instead of that loathsome Cindy Griep, who wouldn’t know a hunk of obsidian from her own ass?
“Where’re you off to?”
“Um... home?” I said, fearing that answer might be the wrong one, somehow.
He shook his head gently, and I was suddenly aware of just how blindingly good-looking he was. Thick, strong body and he smelled like aftershave, which is quite an experience when combined with the coursing hormones of a teenager. “I thought you and I could talk for a minute.”
“Huh?” I said, sounding extraordinarily stupid. “Uh, ok.”
He smiled and let me escape the confines of my locker and his arms. I shrugged my coat on and tried to toss my bag over my shoulder with a casual air, as if I were about to stroll down the runway in Milan.
“Where to?” I asked, realizing he was in control.
“Why don’t I give you a ride home?” he said.
“Uh, sure.”
My normally verbose and frantic mind had slowed to a sudden lust-induced crawl. He just looked so damn good and never in the four years I had known him had I allowed myself to dream about that, or even to acknowledge it. Why torture yourself, when you know you’ll never have something?
Jake drove a Camaro, which ought to surprise no one. I slid into the sleek, dark interior and it was like stepping into a giant penis. The smell of masculinity oozed off the seats and permeated the vinyl of the door panels, completely obliterating the fresh pine scent of the tiny tree air-freshener hanging from the rear view mirror. Jake threw it into first and pounded the gas, and the beast jumped and bucked beneath us. I was enthralled. This was why women went crazy for men, I suddenly knew in a blinding flash of lucidity. This was it, this was sex. Jesus.
“So,” he said slowly as the car purred out of the parking lot and stalked down the street. “Crazy year, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, stroking the furry seat covers with my hidden right hand. They f
elt like velvet and were the color of blood. “Crazy.”
We were silent for a moment, until we reached a stop light. “So, you wanna go to the Prom with me?” he asked over the roar of the idle.
For a moment, I was dumbstruck. It was like I had just been approached by space aliens telling me I was the new messiah. It just didn’t compute at all, not that I knew the word compute at that point.
“Uh, ok?” I said, questioning my own response. What had I just done? I felt like I was riding with the Devil, he was so powerful and sexy. “Sure.”
“Great,” he said and put one hand on my knee. I was instantly so turned on I could hardly move. Never much of a sensualist, I realized that I was going to go home and masturbate like nobody’s business.
We drove in silence the rest of the way to my house, if you could consider riding on a suped-up V8 with everything tuned to perfection riding in silence. Pulling half into the driveway, Jake finally removed his hand from my knee and grinned.
“So, I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said, barely breathing.
“Great,” he said again. “Say ‘hi’ to your dad for me.” I managed somehow to get out of the car and watched it roll away with what I’m sure was a gratifyingly stunned expression on my face.
Lee met me at the door.
“What were you doing in Jake Munsey’s car?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I really have no idea.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Lee said, ever direct.
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