Pink Slip

by Rita Ciresi

  “I told you, Lisa, you’d better start writing that novel of yours, or you’re going to end up in jail.”

  I shrugged. In a fit of boredom last weekend, I had started writing it, but what I hoped would develop into a witty parlor-comedy look at corporate life—Noel Coward goes to IBM—had quickly degenerated into a pornographic version of day-to-day life at Boorman Pharmaceuticals. I hadn’t gotten more than eight pages into it and already there was copious screwing on the boardroom table, a little lesbian intrigue in the basement ladies’ room, and a ludicrous culinary oral—sex orgy behind the cafeteria counter that involved a four-quart crock of sauerkraut and a barrel of dill pickles toppling to the tile floor. My tentative title was Stop It Some More. This nomer, more than anything in the thin plot, made me fear for my sanity, and I was saved only by the knowledge that any publishing house interested in my manuscript would immediately change the title, claiming I needed to better convey the novel’s concept, or it would end up on the shredder or the remainder table after less than two months on the market.

  “Do you think I’m a nymphomaniac?” I asked Dodie. “And don’t say the way to cure a nymphomaniac is to—”

  So Dodie said it: “Marry her!” He laughed, rinsed out a sponge from the sink, and started attacking the grease on top of the stove. “You do operate more like a man than a woman.”

  This much was true: I liked to swear, tell dirty jokes, have sex so hard it hurt, and even conk right out to sleep afterward, a habit that might have caused me shame had any of my partners hung around or woken up long enough to notice. My face must have expressed discontent, for Dodie was quick to assure me that operating like a man was more compliment than insult.

  “Why shouldn’t women go out and get what they want?” he asked. “Guys do it on a daily basis.”

  I dumped a too-big spoonful of sauce on top of the last layer of eggplant. “Do you think I’m a feminist, then?”

  “Would a real feminist ask that?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Dodie thought about it for a moment. “Can a feminist be Machiavellian?”

  “You got me,” I told Dodie, too embarrassed to admit I had never read the second-most famous of Italian authors after Dante.

  Dodie swiped the fool’s cap from the eggplant out of the trash and put it on my head. “I dub thee the feminist prince.”

  I took the cap off. “I refuse the title.”

  “Well, why do you need a permanent title, Lise? Why can’t you be a nympho one minute and a feminist the next?”

  “They’re not compatible.”

  “Oh, what’s compatible inside any human being? You have a heart and a head. And a soul. And a pretty good body.”

  As if to confirm—or protest—this, my stomach let out a leonine growl.

  “Just be Lisa,” Dodie suggested.

  “I’m not sure I like her.”

  “Learn to,” Dodie said. “Or nobody else will.”

  At the table we talked until the wine bottle was empty. Then we cleaned up. Or rather, Dodie went to town on my kitchen, chiding me for the rust stains in my sink and making me put every single fork and spoon and pot and pan away. No air-drying for him. Afterward, we settled on the couch just like some old married couple, trading sections of the newspaper and commenting on absurd things we came across in the Times.

  “An entire village went blind from staring at the sun because they thought they’d see a vision of the Virgin Mary.”

  “A new operation on the horizon will permit men to elongate their penis.”

  “The gorilla in the San Diego Zoo has undergone another enema.”

  “The Japanese are getting taller.”

  “And more women get depressed than men.”

  After reading about the traffic problems in Hyannisport, Dodie intoned in a dark, dire voice, “The Kennedys. Which one of these mindless millionaire micks would you shoot, maim, or drown first? Fat Teddy? Booze-Hound Ethel? Sargent Shriver?”

  “Isn’t he an in-law?” I asked. “He’s got to be an in-law; he doesn’t have those horsey teeth—”

  “Jackie Oh-So-Moronic? Princess Caroline? Dumb-Dumb John-John?”

  “Have you ever noticed how he always manages to have his shirt off when he gets photographed?” I asked.

  Dodie snorted. “Beats looking at Bonny Prince Charles’s skinny gams under a kilt.”

  “Hey, that reminds me.” I put down the Arts page and told Dodie, “Margaret hired Chippendales to dance at her stag-ette party.”

  Dodie lowered the Metro section just enough to show me his forehead. “Behold my quizzical eyebrows,” he said.

  “I didn’t go. Carol told me about it.”

  “Oh. Carol. She probably got the hots so bad for those hunks she rode Al Dante like a horse for days after.”

  I laughed, far too loudly, considering Carol was my own dear sister. Trying not to make it a leading question, I asked Dodie, “What do you think about Chippendales?”

  “I guess it’s a job. Like any other.”

  “Most jobs require you to keep your clothes on.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.”

  “Would you strip for money?” I asked Dodie.

  “How much money?”

  I didn’t answer. I went back to the newspaper and tried to read a review of a ponderous tome I had edited the previous year on the benefits of having more women in the work force. But I couldn’t concentrate. Curiosity was killing me, and finally I asked Dodie point-blank, “Do you think Chippendale dancers are straight or gay?”

  Dodie dropped the newspaper to his lap. “Why do you think I’d know? Or that there’s even one right answer?”

  “Don’t get your huff up,” I said. “I mean, I was talking about it with Carol—”

  “Sounds like a real intelligent conversation—”

  “—and we got to wondering. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in wondering. You ask me questions about being straight all the time; why can’t I ask you questions back?”

  “Because I’ve told you a million times. It’s like that book we used to stare at when we were kids.”

  Illusioni was one of the few books in our grandparents’ house. When we got bored we pulled it down off the shelf and stared at its black-and-white optical illusions and the captions in Italian:

  Ragazza o vecchia?

  Vuoto o pieno?

  Mario lei o …

  Young girl or old woman?

  Empty or full?

  Is Mario reading his book or …

  Mario’s eyes flickered from his book to a sexually indeterminate figure in the distance. Perhaps it was just a bad drawing. But that one page in Illusioni seemed to contend that often gender was a grand deception.

  “Carol never clued in, did she, about that drawing of darling Mario?” Dodie sighed. “Your sister’s always been so dense about sex.”

  “She’s more on target than my mother.”

  “Who isn’t more on target than your mother?”

  “Your mother,” I told Dodie, and he thought about it for a moment before he reluctantly agreed. Dodie said that trying to tell Auntie Beppina about homosexuality was like trying to teach a kid about how much money there was in the world. She couldn’t even begin to fathom it.

  “Well, we watched Davey and Goliath and didn’t realize it was Christian,” I said. “We didn’t get that Dr. Seuss had a moral.”

  “We were kids,” Dodie said. “We lacked a context. What excuse do our mothers have?”

  “They’re Italian,” I reminded him.

  “I forgot about that,” Dodie said. “Yet we love them all the same.”

  Speak for yourself, I felt like telling Dodie. But I didn’t. Even though Dodie had been on the outs for years with Uncle Gianni, he remained close to Auntie Beppina. They called each other frequently and she visited him every once in a while in the city—although she never once went to his apartment. Claiming he liked kitsch, Dodie took her to Radio City Music Hall and
rode the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. My mother never visited me, nor did I invite her to do so.

  “Mama probably still thinks I’m a lesbian,” I said.

  “Hmm,” said Dodie. “This afternoon you did leap rather vigorously to the defense of gals in combat boots—”

  “I don’t have a thing for boots,” I said. “I like feminine women. I admire images of the female form, I like to look at nudes, I mean—”

  Dodie nodded encouragingly. “Go ahead, Lise. Spit it out.”

  I bit my lip. “Sometimes I get aroused by lingerie ads.”

  “Do tell.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s weird. I used to think it meant something. Then I thought it was just a sort of fantasy—you know, you get hot because you project yourself onto the woman in the picture. All of a sudden you’re the one with the pouty lips and the big tits and the come-hither look in your eyes.”

  “And on the other side of the magazine page is a man?”

  “Well. Yeah. Sure. You know, some equally hot-looking guy.” Then I added, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Everybody’s supposed to be bi, to a certain extent.”

  “Maybe.”

  We had run over this ground before, but I decided to run over it again. “Are you sure you never look at women?”

  “For Christ’s sake, I’m not blind,” Dodie said. “I mean, I notice when they’re dressed well or when they’re fat or ugly or have mongo bazooms—”

  “But you never find them sexy?”

  “Sometimes. If they’re in a fencing outfit, say, and they have on those vests that squeeze it all in, and a hood over their head, and that leash on their butt that pulls tight when they stick out their rears and they lunge forward—”

  “Get serious!”

  “I’m completely serious. I like a woman with a sword. And pregnant women, maybe. I don’t know why. I just have this urge to feel up their stomachs. It seems so soft—”

  “It’s hard,” I said. “The stomach gets hard, Dodie.”

  He looked disappointed. “Another optical illusion.”

  I tried to make my voice sound casual. “Hey, by the way, Carol’s preg-o.”

  “No shit!” Dodie said. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I forgot about it.”

  Dodie looked at me sorrowfully. Then he lay facedown on the floor in a position of complete penitence. Claiming his spine was out of line, he commanded me, “Get over here, girl, and walk the kinks out of my back.”

  Chapter Three

  The Story of My Abortion

  Dodie was the only person on the planet—besides the Hispanic receptionist at the clinic, who was the first person in years to pronounce my name right; the doctor, who held the vacuum tube as if he were cleaning out the backseat of his car; the assisting nurse, who yawned so wide I could see the silver fillings on her molars; and the priest at Saint Patrick’s to whom I eventually confessed—who could hazard a good guess why my sister’s pregnancy bothered me and why I fled the city for the suburbs.

  In Brooklyn, I’d had an abortion.

  I hadn’t meant to tell Dodie—nor the priest. But confession seemed embedded in my nature. Just as high-school boys undoubtedly inscribed on the bathroom walls: If you want a good time, call Lisa D., my family and friends could have scribbled: If you want an honest answer, just ask Lisa. Lisa did not know the value of a secret. Lisa liked to tell it like it was—especially when the way it was wasn’t pretty.

  Back in January—probably right around the time that one of Al Dante’s millions of sperm finally penetrated one of Carol’s eggs—I proved myself a truly schizophrenic Gemini by dating two guys at once (the single guy on the weekend, and the married one on Wednesday nights). I didn’t even realize I was in the family way until one afternoon when I was on the phone, superlong-distance, with an Israeli author who had written a turgid memoir about Nazi-hunting in Chile and Argentina. He had spent the last month ogling tits on a French nudist beach, which meant his corrected manuscript was six weeks overdue.

  As I hung on the phone with the Nazi hunter, trying to enforce a second deadline I knew he never would meet, I looked down at my desk calendar. The number 26 stared back at me. I pulled my chair closer to the desk, but its rusty wheels got stuck in the dustball-ridden carpet and I almost fell off my seat. Hey, I thought, wait a minute. I put the author on hold, yanked open my desk drawer, pulled out my appointment book, and gazed down at the cute row of X’s I always used to mark the arrival and departure of “my friend” (another one of my mother’s stupid euphemisms), which suddenly resembled the shorthand used by teenage girls to sign their letters with love: XXXOOO.

  My lunch—a tahini-and-bean-sprout pita—came back into my throat, and I practically blew my cookies all over my calendar. Math never had been my best subject. I kept recounting, trying to deny that each time the sum came to an ominous thirty-three-thirty-three days instead of the usual twenty-seven, which meant six days overdue, and that meant only one thing. I dropped my calendar and picked up the phone to reconnect with the author, but ended up cutting him off because I didn’t push the button down all the way.

  I buzzed him back and got into a tightwire-taut discussion that ended with him asking me over and over in his heavy accent, “Who is the name of your supervisor, young lady? Tell me the name of your supervisor, young lady!”

  I told him. This time he hung up on me. The next quarter of an hour was tense. From a neighboring cubicle I heard an editorial assistant put through a long-distance call—“Collect,” she kept calling, “the guy’s livid, he’s calling collect from Tel Aviv!”—to the editor-in-chief. We all hated the editor-in-chief. Although his Puritan blood surely was unsullied by a single Squanto-like corpuscle, those of us low on the totem pole had secretly nicknamed him He Big Chief and sometimes even whispered “How!” after he pompously paraded by our desks (not in feathers and war paint, but gray Armani).

  From my cubicle I could hear He Big Chief whining and cajoling, and the more he whined and cajoled, the more the editorial assistants looked covetously at my dented metal desk and IBM Selectric with the space bar that was known to stick. Then He Big Chief strode over to my desk with all the confidence that came with the knowledge that his daddy owned three-quarters of the company. “Why can’t you get along with people, Lisa?”

  “Reasonable people?” I asked.

  “Let me give you a name,” he said, and supplied the Nazi-hunter’s poetic handle—which sounded like the title of an ancient Hebrew text or the name of a forlorn, dusty desert.

  “The guy has a tad of a temper,” I said.

  So did He Big Chief, who went into one of his infamous, unwarranted rages. He wanted that book bound and on the shelves! Klaus Barbie was in the news, and maybe—just maybe—he could get the author on MacNeil/Lehrer when the Butcher of Lyons came to trial—maybe even Nightline if the asshole got convicted!

  Because I needed my job—and because the mere thought of Barbie made me want to throw up—I quickly assured He Big Chief that I would write the Nazi hunter a letter expressing my unbridled enthusiasm for his manuscript, and once I got the pages in my hands I would take them home and slave over them every night.

  That promise was the first of many self-imposed punishments that came, out of my realization: Holy Mary, mother of God, I’m pregnant.

  I knew what I had to do. Later that week I did it. After it was over, I dragged myself home from the clinic. My purse never felt so heavy on my shoulder, even though I had just emptied it of three hundred and fifty dollars in cash—an amount I dared to carry on the subway only because I did not want to write a check. The kind of God I believed in, however, didn’t need a paper trail to find me. Although I thought of myself as a cheerfully lapsed Catholic, when I returned from the clinic I felt I had done something deeply wrong, and I was terrified of divine retribution. I hadn’t been to church in years, not counting the obligatory Christmas and Easter masses I attended when I went home to visit M
ama, but I still believed enough doctrine to feel that I had committed the most grievous sin on earth. At the clinic I had been put under the haze of twilight sleep, and in that fog I felt I heard the voice of the fetus crying from limbo, or the Dumpster—or a tin bucket—wherever its soul and unformed body went.

  How I wished the father—whoever he was—could have heard that voice too. But I didn’t feel as if I could tell either of the two men the news that I carried inside me the beginnings of a boy or girl who someday might address him as Daddy. My weekend partner couldn’t be taken seriously beyond his competent lovemaking techniques. Although he was pushing thirty, he went by the childish (and faux British) name of Davey and was a PacMan fanatic. He also was best friends with one of my coworkers, and telling him I was off to the Emma Goldman Clinic would have been the equivalent of getting out a bullhorn and announcing to the entire office I was a killer of unborn children. The married man, Brian, was a shameless bar pickup who I continued to see mainly because he represented a good hot meal once a week (delivered by hotel room service). I knew more about his wife than I did about him, or at least about how his spouse refused to please him in bed. How could I even think of having the child of a man whose constant refrain was, Oh yes, my wife would never do this; oh yes, my wife would never do this? The minute the doctor stopped the sucking of the pump and pulled out the tube, I knew I’d never see either Davey or Brian again.

  As I stood in front of my apartment door fumbling with my key ring, I heard a voice inside, and in my drug-induced delirium I thought a pair of guys were burglarizing my apartment. Then I remembered the answering machine. I quickly turned the bolts of all three locks and lunged for the phone.

  It was Dodie, chiding me for calling in sick to work—accusing me of staying home to watch Days of Our Lives—and for missing my monthly payment to him—that little wad of cash I always sent for him to invest any way he saw fit.

  “I don’t have it,” I said.

  Dodie clucked his tongue. “I told you to stay out of the pool hall.”

  “I wasn’t in the pool hall. I was in the abortion clinic.”