“Can’t you just say black, white, or beige like a normal person?” I ask him.
“No, I can’t,” he snaps, “because you look hideous in those colors.”
I tell Ashley I need Friday afternoon off because Brad wants to go to the family cabin and she gives me this tight, pained expression that might have been a smile, or severe constipation, or both. “Everything all right?” I ask.
“Just perfect!” she says.
“Do you not want me to leave early Friday? I was asking for your permission. If you need me, I’ll be here.”
She smiles. “Whatever you want. You just do whatever you want.”
She’s never uttered the phrase “do whatever you want” to me before, and it’s freaking me out. I know she can’t fire me, Ed’s already made that clear, but she still finds ways to belittle me in front of co-workers and make my life a general hell, so goading her like this is bad news. I guess I’ll deal with her and whatever she has in store for me when I come back.
That should be fun.
Brad and I drive five hours north up Highway 35W, which turns into Highway 61 after Duluth. I’ve never been this far north before. It’s already ten degrees cooler outside and the pine trees pierce the blue sky like tall green church spires. We stop at the Naniboujou Lodge, an old campy 1930s resort that still has its grand totem-pole dining room. We catch a light supper, breaded walleye and chicken pot pie, and midway through dinner I get a sinking feeling and excuse myself to the bathroom.
I have my period. Of course, because why wouldn’t I have my period? We’re up north with his whole family and in the vicinity of bears, aren’t we? It’s the most unsexy thing that could happen, isn’t it? Perfect. Luckily the lodge has a complimentary cup of medium-flow Tampax in the ladies’ room and I scoop up a big handful. Thank God for small cardboard-wrapped favors.
We head back out on the road and Brad says we’re really close now. All my exhaustion and road-weariness solidifies into nervousness and fear. Why on freaking earth did I say I’d come here? I’m never going to match up with whatever kind of girl the Kellers hope their son brings home. Never.
About fifteen miles later, we take a sharp right onto a gravel road and follow it around until it dead-ends beside an imposing structure that looks more like a hotel than a cabin. It’s only ten o’clock when we drag our suitcases through the doors, but everyone is already in bed. We find a note on the kitchen counter from Brad’s mother telling us she’s disappointed we missed dinner, but of course with me having to work, we probably left the city late. She tells us Brad’s bedroom is on the main floor, overlooking the lake, and my bedroom is upstairs in the loft.
“No way!” I whisper. “Separate bedrooms? For real?”
“You bet,” he says. “No sleeping together unless you’re married.”
Fabulous.
Brad points to a staircase by the far wall that’s so steep it’s actually more of a ladder. “There’s a bathroom up there, too,” he says and kisses me goodnight.
I lug my bag up the staircase and try to see in the dark, but it’s nearly pitch black. I feel my way to a little lamp on the nightstand, which winks on and dimly lights the room. It’s more of a crawl space than a proper room and I think it’s where the kids usually sleep. The narrow beds have big, ominous clown faces painted on them, the kind they used to put in kids’ rooms to make them seem cheerful, only to find out years later all the kids had nightmares and developed deep-seated phobias of the circus. There’s a tiny rocking chair by the window and a big teddy bear sitting on a wooden toy box painted with interlocking pink hearts. Mrs. Keller has stuck me in the kids’ room.
Just freaking typical.
What’s worse, the “bathroom” is just a tiny child-size sink anchored to the wall next to an equally tiny toilet. It might actually be a bidet. They’re both right next to the wooden banister overlooking the main room of the cabin, so if you were standing on the far side of the living room, you could easily see a person doing their business. I wonder if all the rooms have pervert toilets like these.
I try to make myself comfortable, which basically means putting on my flannel nightie, then brushing my teeth and splashing cold water on my face at the children’s sink. I do all this slightly hunched over, because the sloped wall doesn’t give you room enough to stand up. I skip peeing because no way am I peeing in a kids’ crapper. I’ll just wait till tomorrow and try to find a normal bathroom downstairs.
The next morning, I wake up with a splitting headache to the clatter of pans and water running. People talking. I can tell by the light coming through the small window that it’s late in the morning and I hit my head on the slanted ceiling when I sit up.
My bladder seizes. Holy hell, I have to pee bad. Like burst-a-pipe bad. I can’t possibly make it downstairs. I briefly consider the empty Glacéau Vitamin Water bottle on my nightstand, but the mouth is too small. Maybe the toy box? How often does anyone actually look inside it?
There’s a toilet in the alcove.
I peer over the banister to make sure the living room is empty. It is. The voices I hear are coming from the kitchen, so if I pee discreetly and quickly, I just may pull this off. I hike up my nightgown, squat over the little toilet, and pee. I pee and I pee and I pee. I’m pretty sure this is not how sexy girls pee. They piddle at best, some dainty golden droplets that are fresh as spring rain. This sounds more like someone pouring barrels of ammonia off the back of a loading dock. I vow to never pee in front of Brad, one of the many things I vow never to do in front of him, including passing gas, belching, vomiting, and scratching myself. That’s getting to be one hell of a long list.
“Hello up there, sleepyhead!” Ed shouts. He’s suddenly directly beneath me in the living room, and Brad’s standing next to him, smiling. Luckily, from this vantage point they can only see my grinning head, not my body. I wad up a fistful of toilet paper from the roll next to me and hold it in the bowl, under the stream, so it cushions the sound of my peeing.
“Hey!” I say, trying to muster the most normal voice I can while peeing into my own hand. “Hi there! What’s the…ah…plan for today?”
Ed has a newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. He holds his arms out wide and says, “The world’s our oyster! Whatever we like!”
“Whatcha doin’, hon?” Brad asks, sipping his coffee. “You stuck or something?”
Just then Mrs. Keller rounds the far corner of the living room, drying her hands on a dishtowel. From her vantage point, unfortunately, she can see everything.
“She’s hung up on the kiddie potty!” Mrs. Keller snaps the dishtowel over her shoulder. “Jennifer, why on earth are you using the kiddie potty?”
She storms across the room and starts to come up the stairs. What the hell? I stop peeing and dive down on the floor.
“Are you okay?” Brad calls. “Did you fall?”
“I’m fine,” I say, trying to twist my flannel nightie down.
“What are you doing now?” Mrs. Keller says, appearing at the top of the stairs, frowning at me as I lie half-naked on the floor.
“Sorry,” I say, “just using the facilities!”
“Well, you’re too big for that! Your toilet is over here.” She walks across the loft and flips a metal latch in the wood-paneled wall, revealing a small, sunny bathroom. It even has a tiny claw-foot tub. “We use the kiddie potty for potty-training toddlers,” she says with significant disdain, “and I’d rather you use the bathroom, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” I say and before I can add anything else to my humiliation, she stomps away. It’s another hour before I can gather my wits and go downstairs, where everyone has not only finished breakfast but lunch as well and has now adjourned into the severe wood-paneled living room. I step shyly up to Brad, who hugs me hard enough that I know Mrs. Keller didn’t tell him she saw my naked butt. If she had, he would be scowling at me right now, not asking me if I want to play cribbage.
“No thanks,” I say,
“I’d really like to just relax. Maybe read.” This was my planned response to any activity I didn’t want to do and I deliberately brought reading material I thought the Kellers would approve of. Chicken Soup for the Spiritual Soul. I didn’t even bring a slutty magazine to sneak inside it. I plan to actually read this crap. I take a seat in the glassed-in porch, which is cold, but I pretend it’s balmy.
I remain there for the rest of the day, rereading the same page and trying not to do anything stupid and certainly not going into the kitchen where Mrs. Keller works like a dray horse until late afternoon, when a dark-haired woman with very full lips taps me hard on the shoulder.
“You’re Jennifer?” she says. “I’m Brad’s sister, Sarah. Welcome to the family. Trevor! Put that down! Nana told you to leave her horse alone!” A small boy with sandy hair at the other end of the room has clamped a bronze statue of a horse between his legs, so it looks like he has a bronze horse penis. “Sorry,” she says, “he’s driving me nuts. Five hours in the car with him and I was ready to leave him at a gas station, you know? Mom said you got in last night. Bill had to work, he’s over there.” She points to a hearty-looking man lugging a suitcase and keeps chattering. “He didn’t use to be so fat. He’s trying Atkins, but I say it’ll give him a heart attack before it takes off ten pounds. Trevor! If you don’t put that down I’m going to chop off your hands! Trevor!” She marches over and yanks the horse away from him, explaining the various horrors that would befall him if he were to damage Nana’s knickknacks in any way.
I stay in my chair and read until it gets too dark. I find Brad in his room, where he pounces on me. “I want you so bad,” he says, getting his hands up under my skirt. We kiss until tiny Trevor appears with his finger up his nose and tells us, “Supper is dead-y.”
“You mean ready, big guy?” Brad drops my skirt and Trevor looks at me with a perverted little grin. I give him a big smile back but he sticks his tongue out at me.
Little bastard.
We sit down for dinner under the immense, eerie deer-antler chandelier. It looks like a few generations of animals had to give their lives in order for us to have light. The family holds hands and prays. This time Daddy Ed leads us in prayer and he goes on and on forever. “Blood of the lamb” this and “spirit of Christ” that. I got thrown in there as one of the many, many people to protect, lead, and guide. “We welcome Jennifer to the family,” Ed says. “No matter where she’s been, no matter where her path has led her, she’s here now with us and we want to thank you and to let you know, Lord, we know you’ve entrusted her to us and we will look after her as if she were one of our own.”
I know this was all supposed to be sweet, but what’s with the “wherever her path has led her” crap? He makes it sound like they took in a whore from the docks and gave her a second chance, like I’ve been eating out of garbage cans and sharing needles or something. Sheesh, this family has a way of cutting you down even when they’re building you up.
Then we drop hands and I think now we can finally freaking eat, but no, we can’t because now they sing. Yes. Sing. I had no idea, but I should know by now that Brad won’t prepare me for anything. “Ripping the heads off kittens after dessert? Sure, we do that every Thursday! Didn’t I tell you? Doesn’t your family do that?”
I get a lot of those quizzical looks and “doesn’t your family do that?” questions from him, like everything his family does is normal, and everyone else must be from another planet.
The Kellers sing “Cast Thine Eyes,” which is apparently an old hymn everyone has heard of and everyone has memorized, except me. Mrs. Keller seems very concerned that I don’t know the words, but that doesn’t stop them from singing it, out loud and out proud. All forty million verses. As they bellow away, I sit with a frozen smile on my face and stare at the pine-cone centerpiece. After a hearty meal of venison shank and applesauce, the family gathers to drink warm milk and honey while playing a raucous game of Parcheesi in the living room. This goes on for nine-hundred-and-thirty-eight years.
Mrs. Keller goes to bed promptly at ten o’clock and Mr. Keller follows her about an hour after that. Poor guy, I’d give her a head start in bed, too. Anything to avoid touching her. Then Sarah and her husband put Trevor down and Brad looks at me with a mischievous grin.
“Wanna fool around?” he asks and tugs me into his room, where I nervously take off only the necessary clothing and get into his bed. “Just be quiet,” he says, “so Mom doesn’t hear,” which isn’t exactly the sexiest thing a man can say to you before he makes super-quiet, careful-not-to-squeak-the-bedsprings-because-my-mom-is-listening love to you. Having an orgasm is completely out of the question, for both of us.
Where is my well-oiled Tahitian island boy when I need him?
I’m lucky I remembered to take my tampon out. When Brad was taking his pants off I rummaged around under the blankets and pulled the sticky medium-flow tampon out and dropped it on the hardwood floor so I could throw it away later, without him noticing.
Ick.
Despite the sex being short, weird, and totally unsatisfactory, part of me liked humping Bradford in Ma Keller’s house. The old bat must be sick to her stomach thinking about the two of us doing it, and thinking about her thinking about it makes me sick to mine.
Still, it’s kind of hot to break such devout rules, the way certain sex fantasies are kind of hot because they’re so very gross and wrong. Every once in awhile, when Brad is pumperhumping me, I think of how horrifying it would be if I had sister-wives and was just one of six women he screwed on a regular basis. I can picture myself lying in a narrow single bed wearing a high-necked plaid nightgown and clutching the Book of Mormon to my breast as I listen to my husband giving it good to my sister-wife next door.
Gross and hot.
Grot.
I sneak out of Brad’s room around midnight and climb up to the kids’ loft. I sleep in fits and starts and have an upsetting dream about hunting miniature deer.
It’s still early when I sit bolt upright in my clown bed and smack my cranium on the sloping ceiling. “Fuck!” I say out loud. I woke up with the most terrible thought—I forgot the freaking tampon on Brad’s floor. Gross. I throw on my robe and scramble down the ladder as fast as I can, nearly tripping over Boots at the bottom as she scoots past in her little wheelchair.
I tiptoe back into Brad’s room. “Honey?” I whisper. He’s still snoring, thank God. All I have to do is find my little damp offensive friend before anyone steps on it. I get on my hands and knees and peer under the bed. I crawl around and even turn on one of the bedside lamps, feeling blindly along the floorboards, but I can’t find it anywhere. My tampon is gone.
I try to make the best of the situation. I mean, if I can’t find the tampon crawling around on my hands and knees, then Brad certainly isn’t going to step on it, right? Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe this is a small favor from the universe, a celestial freebie, if you will. What the heck? the angels said. She’s a good kid, let’s help her out here and make that tampon vanish!
“Well, this is very modern,” Mrs. Keller says primly, standing in Brad’s doorway. Boots rolls up behind her.
“Oh!” I say, getting up quickly. Brad mumbles something in his sleep and rolls over.
“I’d say it’s a little too modern for me,” Mrs. Keller says, crossing her arms.
“No, I didn’t sleep here,” I stammer. “I was just…”
“Mom?” Brad wakes up. “What are you doing?”
“Why don’t you ask Jennifer? I just found her on the floor again.”
Brad squints at me. I struggle for answers. “I was just…I forgot something, that I packed…before we came.”
“I see,” she says, and Boots whimpers.
In fact Boots keeps whimpering until we’re midway through a big breakfast (creamed eggs on toast, hot apple cider) and Mrs. Keller sets down her crystal punch bowl filled with gloopy orange chiffon ambrosia. Then Boots stops whimpering and starts growling. “She’s ac
ting so oddly,” Mrs. Keller says. “I hope she didn’t get into the trash again.”
That’s when it hits me.
The forensic gears of my gerbil brain struggle to piece the facts together because as much as I would like to believe in celestial tampon fairies, that damn tampon has to be somewhere. Don’t panic. Stay calm. What are the facts? What do we know? We know that Boots is acting oddly and we know that I am missing a tampon.
Boots + tampon.
Boots + tampon?
My fork freezes in midair. Oh sweet baby Jesus, I think Boots ate my tampon. While everyone at the table is talking, I look up at the sorrowful, unmoving eyes of the deer head on the wall. We lock eyes and begin a silent dialogue fit for a John Waters film.
What do I do? I ask the deer.
If you tell them, he says, you’re dead.
If I don’t tell them, the dog is dead.
Don’t get hysterical.
Actually this is the perfect time to get hysterical. There’s a medium-flow tampon inside the family Pomeranian.
Maybe she didn’t even eat it.
Maybe she did.
If she ate it, she’ll die. They’ll think you’re a monster.
If she didn’t eat it, and I say she did, they’ll think I’m an escaped mental patient.
I don’t know, can a tampon kill a little dog?
You tell me. Did you ever see those Tampax commercials where a single tampon sucks up an entire juice glass of blue liquid?
No, the deer says, I didn’t.
I look over at Boots, who’s now pawing at the back door, and picture a tampon in her belly swelling up to the size of a poodle.
I can’t stand it.
I whisper to Brad that I have to talk to him and he follows me into the kitchen, where I tell him something a woman should never have to say to a man, let alone one she wants to marry. I say, “I think your mother’s dog ate my tampon.”
He thinks I’m being funny and then weird and then a pain in the ass. I have to repeat myself three times before he fully understands. As he grasps the complicated details of the situation—premarital sex in religious parents’ house, used tampon left on floor, crippled dog eats tampon, new girlfriend has to explain to religious parents crippled dog ate used tampon—he begins to look pale.
Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single Page 19
