A Perfect Romance

by Layce Gardner

  Dana opened the door to the back room and the toe of her flip flop hung up on the metal thing that hides the carpet seam and she accidentally flipped her shoe backward and flopped her body forward. She ended up with her end up. The tossed shoe landed only God knows where. She knew she shouldn't have worn flip flops. Every time she did, she threw shoes faster than a Kentucky race horse.

  Dana tripping over her own feet was second nature. She'd been a klutz ever since she could crawl. In fact, she was the only baby she ever heard of who used to fall on her butt while crawling. That was before she got wise and took up rolling. If she saw something she wanted across the room, she would lie on her back and roll until she reached her destination.

  Dana would still prefer to roll places if it weren't for the social stigma of it. It sure would've saved her a lot of bruises. By the time she was in third grade her name had become a verb. Kids used to call falling down and skinning their knees "pulling a Dooley." In her career as a bumbler, she had Dooleyed off bicycles, porches, roofs, boats and once she even Dooleyed out of a car going down the highway at sixty miles per hour. She wasn't driving, thank God.

  So, after Dana Dooleyed through the door, she got up, brushed off and walked around the room looking for her shoe while pretending not to be looking for her shoe. She finally gave up after she'd walked the perimeter of the room twice.

  What the heck, it was a rubber flip flop that cost a buck ninety-eight. Actually, it came as a pair so the single flip flop cost ninety-nine cents. And if you divided that by three it comes out to thirty-three, so that's a good omen according to my personal numerology.

  Dana gave up on the shoe manhunt and concentrated on the Trudy womanhunt instead. As she looked around, she surmised that the room hadn't been redecorated since the last foreign war. (She made a D in high school history so she wasn't entirely sure what the last foreign war was and besides weren’t all wars foreign except for that one civil war?) Gray metal folding chairs sat in crooked lines facing a podium and a weathered American flag. The cracked linoleum was guacamole-colored with yellowed rips here and there. The walls were the color of corn that'd been boiling on the stove top all day and the ceiling was littered with water stains, giving it a tortilla-that's-burnt-around-the-edges look. Dana thought the room was unappetizing, even if Texican was her favorite ethnic food.

  She scoured the crowd and located Trudy holding court by the coffee urn and donuts that were set out alongside the wall on the ping pong table. Actually, Dana couldn't help but find her because she was the shiniest thing in the whole room. Trudy was lethal with a Bedazzler gun. They should make her have a permit to carry one. One evening Dana had fallen asleep on her couch and when she woke up she found that Trudy had bedazzled “Tuck Fexas” across the chest of her Longhorns’ sweatshirt. She'd been wearing it at the time.

  They'd been at the meeting only ten minutes and Trudy already had men swarming all over her like flies on a pile of honey. Trudy thought it was because of her brilliant conversational skills, acerbic wit and her talent of being able to make a delicious casserole out of a can of cream of mushroom soup and a bag of Lay's potato chips. Dana thought the men buzzed around Trudy because she was black and therefore exotic and taboo by Oklahoma standards. Dana knew better than to remind her that she was black, though. Trudy was indifferent to her race and hated it if you referred to her as African American. She maintained that she wasn't from Africa and she was pure American. If you mentioned her roots, she thought you were talking about her hair. She was the only black person in all of Dooley Springs. Her white parents, Jerry and Ellie Engleman, had adopted her when she was a baby. They raised her up white and she didn't even know she was different until kindergarten when the school nurse put a flesh-colored Band-Aid on her skinned knee and the color was off by ten shades.

  Dana hobbled over to the snack table, poured lukewarm coffee into a Styrofoam cup, dumped in three packages of dry creamer and two artificial sweeteners and used one of those red and white swizzle sticks to beat the hell out of the concoction. She hated it when she sucked up one of those creamer globs and got a mouthful of chalky stuff.

  She eavesdropped on Queen Bee Trudy telling a story to her swarm of worker bees. "And that's when I said, 'Honey, I'm more man than you'll ever be and more woman than you'll ever get.'"

  Dana mentally rolled her eyes. Trudy's stories about marrying Bruce the Fag were her favorites, but she didn't like to show her amusement because as the only openly lesbian representative in Dooley Springs she felt compelled to exhibit a sense of solidarity with the gay population.

  Bruce the Fag was really flamey, and she never understood how Trudy could not have known he was gay. There were so many red flags on that relationship it bordered on the ridiculous. Bruce the Fag didn't watch football. Didn't own one single camouflaged item of clothing. Had no inkling when deer season started. And he could recite all the lines to the movie Funny Girl. On Halloween he dressed up as Carol Channing and sang Hello, Dolly to every trick-or-treater who rang the doorbell. Trudy married him anyway, then proceeded to get upset when she came home from work and caught him playing catch with the Unitarian minister. He wasn't even the pitcher.

  Dana felt sorry for Bruce the Fag. He married the only woman in town who actually wanted to get nailed by her husband.

  "Hi, are you missing something?" asked a voice. Startled, Dana turned and found herself face-to-face with her missing flip flop. And peeking out from behind the rubber shoe was a woman who had short brown hair that stuck straight up on her head like she'd licked her finger and stuck it in a light socket. She was about Dana's height, but her hair made her seem a couple of inches taller. She had brown-almost-black eyes like melted dark chocolate and a smile that reminded Dana of strawberry cheesecake. Her smile itself didn't exactly remind Dana of cheesecake; it's that the smile gave her the same feeling as looking at a slice of strawberry cheesecake.

  "You found it!" Dana said a little too energetically. She immediately toned her reaction down by a few notches. "Where was it?" she asked, accepting the shoe. That was what Dana said out loud, but inside her head were whirling dozens of questions like: What's your name? Are you a lesbian? Do you believe in love at first sight? Did you sue Supercuts when they did that to your hair?

  The woman smiled—Dana's stomach gurgled—and answered, "It was playing hide-and-seek in the rubber tree plant over by the door. I think it thought it was its mother."

  Dana laughed too loud. Several alcoholics turned and looked at her like she was disturbing their quest for sobriety. Dana downshifted to a more reserved chuckle and said, "You're funny."

  Ellen (Dana finally noticed the woman's name tag) said, "It wasn't that funny."

  Dana quickly covered her embarrassment by shaking her finger at the flip flop and scolding, "Bad shoe, bad, bad shoe. What've I told you about hiding from me?"

  Ellen laughed.

  "That wasn't all that funny either," Dana said. She knew right then and without a doubt that Ellen was either A.) stupid, or B.) trying to impress her, or 3.) being nice[NA1].

  "Then we're even."

  "How'd you know it was mine?" Dana asked.

  Ellen looked down at Dana's one bare foot and the other foot wearing the twin flip flop and said with a shrug, "Lucky guess."

  Dana looked at her naked foot and wished she had painted her toenails and she also wished she weren't so A.) stupid when it came to flirting with attractive women.

  Dana dropped the flip flop to the floor and tried to stick her foot into it, but she got her big toe caught on the wrong side of the thingie that went between the toes and when she tried to extricate her foot for a do-over it got twisted up more. So, she stood there with a forced smile on her face and shook her foot like she was trying to fling dog doody off her shoe, and the harder she shook, the worse it got stuck. She shook her foot while holding her cup of coffee away from her body with her right hand.

  You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around. That's what it's all about. />
  Then Ellen did the darnedest thing. She knelt and gently slipped the offending shoe off Dana's foot. She wrapped a hand around Dana's bare ankle and slid her naked foot back into the flip flop the correct way.

  Dana had never felt anything more intimate, and judging by the reaction of her nipples, they thought the same thing. Obviously, her nipples were hardwired directly to her toes. Either that or it had been way too long since she had been touched by anybody.

  Still kneeling, Ellen looked up at Dana and smiled like she was Prince Charming and Dana was Cinderella and the flip flop was the glass slipper. "Thanks," Dana said. "I really need to go before I turn into a pumpkin."

  "But the meeting hasn't even started yet."

  Ellen rose to her feet and smiled at Dana with those lips and that mouth and that nose and those eyes and Dana knew she needed to get out of there fast before she humped Ellen's leg like a toy poodle in heat.

  "You're new here, right?" Ellen said. "We could sit together if you want company."

  "I'm here with somebody."

  "Oh?" Ellen said like it was a question and she wanted more of an explanation.

  Dana halfway gestured somewhere in the general vicinity of where she last saw Trudy. Ellen didn't even bother to look. She took the smallest step into Dana's space. Not so close that Dana could easily kiss her—

  God, I want to kiss those lips.

  —but close enough that she got a big whiff of pink Jolly Rancher when Ellen exhaled. Anybody who had ever known Dana knew one thing for sure: She loved watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers. They were her kryptonite.

  "I've never seen you here before," Ellen said.

  "That's weird," Dana said. "I've never seen you here before either."

  Ellen turned that over in her mind. "So then you've been here before?"

  "Nope."

  Ellen wrinkled her nose.

  Dang, she's cute when she does that.

  Dana smiled to let her know she was kidding and Ellen grinned. "I'm sorry," Dana said, even though she wasn't really sorry at all. "Social situations make me nervous and I sometimes act inappropriately and say weird things."

  "Maybe you have Asperger's Syndrome," Ellen joked.

  "No," Dana deadpanned, "I'm just real bad at reading people's faces."

  "That's what Asperger's is."

  "I know." Dana smiled.

  Ellen laughed and grabbed a Styrofoam cup off the upside down stack and held it under the coffee spigot.

  "Alcoholics sure drink a lot of coffee," Dana remarked.

  Ellen looked at her a little surprised, then laughed.

  "I'm sorry," Dana said, "I shouldn't have said that. It was a needless observation that I was using as a space filler or as a transition into another topic of conversation, but it came out sounding rude and I didn't mean it that way. See, when there's a hole in the conversation I feel this urge to stick something in the hole. In fact, there's very few people in this world I'm comfortable being around and not sticking something in their hole."

  Ellen raised her eyebrows.

  Dana blathered, "Not their hole-hole, you understand. The hole of the conversation."

  Ellen nodded and smiled.

  "You think I'm bizarre. I don't blame you. Most people do."

  "I think you're interesting," Ellen said. "And you're right. We do drink a lot of coffee."

  There was a long silence. Dana was determined not to stick anything in the hole. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from talking. Ellen filled the hole, "You can always tell how long somebody's gone without a drink by how much they've gnawed on their cup."

  Dana glanced around the room and saw that what she said was true. Everybody's cup was decorated with teeth marks and had tiny shark bites around the rims.

  "I like to chew on Styrofoam too," Dana said.

  "I have a thing about popping bubble wrap."

  "Me too!" Dana said.

  Dang it, she thought, I shouldn't have said that with an exclamation mark. Now Ellen’s going to think I am overly excitable.

  She continued in a calm library voice, "Though I don't think those two things are indicative of anything. Most people can't resist bubble wrap popping or Styrofoam nibbling. It can be construed as a nervous tic, but really I do it because it's fun."

  "When I was a little kid I used to suck on my hair," Ellen said. She blew on her coffee, then added, "I sucked on it so much that my mom finally cut it short."

  Dana glanced up at the top of Ellen's head where her hair was sticking straight up like it was scared. She wanted to touch it really bad, but resisted because she didn't know Ellen well enough and touching another person's head wasn't a socially acceptable thing to do when you first met them. She offered up her own confession, "I used to suck on my arm in first grade. Had hickeys all up and down my arm."

  Ellen laughed for realsies this time. Dana liked the sound of her laugh, the way it ran up and down the musical scales and had a sense of freedom to it. Most people's laughs sounded like they were penned in behind barbed wire, but Ellen's laugh was like jazz music, irregular and frenetic, yet oddly exciting. Dana closed her eyes and let Ellen's laugh wash over her.

  This was the kind of real conversation Dana had always fantasized about having with a girlfriend. On the surface they were talking about bubble wrap and arm hickeys, but underneath where the subtext resided, they were really talking about deep issues like love and death and relationships and serial monogamy and lactose intolerance and IBS and …

  Dana opened her eyes and was shocked to see Ellen's green eyes peering at her over the rim of her Styrofoam cup. Dana stumbled backwards a step. She used her tried and true technique for calming her nerves—reciting the multiplication tables. She closed her eyes and got clear up to three times seven before her breath evened out enough to talk.

  "Are you okay?" Ellen asked.

  "What color are your eyes?" Dana asked. "One minute they're brown and the next they're green."

  "Hazel. They turn green when I'm experiencing intense emotion. Or when I have the flu."

  Dana hoped Ellen wasn't sick. Especially since she had handled her shoe and her bare foot and she could have nasty flu germs all over her hands.

  Dana blinked. She had to force herself to stop looking into those hypnotic eyes. Ellen was sucking all the information out of her brain through those kaleidoscope eyes. She closed her eyes and silently recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

  "What's so funny?" Ellen asked.

  Dana realized she must have been staring into space and grinning. That was when she knew that she was doing exactly what she accused her girlfriend, Kimmy, of doing. Well, she wasn't actually doing it doing it, she was only thinking about doing it. Dana was well aware that her moral compass was a bit askew—she once saw a man drop a five dollar bill on the ground and she stuck it in her pocket without telling him—but she was not a cheater whoredog slut of a girlfriend. That was where she drew the line.

  "It was nice meeting you," Dana blurted, "but I really have to go."

  "Was it something I said?"

  "No, I need to go." Dana hurried over to where Trudy was madly scratching her butt. Trudy was cornered by a man who was gnawing on a Styrofoam cup like it was an ear of corn. Her eyes had that telltale glazed-over look that said he was either talking about hunting or fishing or football.

  Dana tapped Trudy on the shoulder. "Excuse me for interrupting," she said, "but aren't you the woman who was just released from prison for chopping off her husband's penis?"

  Trudy replied, "He dropped those charges when I returned the organ in question." She looked back at corncob man and smiled with all her teeth showing. Trudy elbowed the man like she was sharing an inside joke and said, "I put his severed penis on ice first, I'm not all bad."

  And, presto, the man disappeared.

  "Where the hell were you?" Trudy said under her breath. "I've been over here scratching my butt for ten minutes. People are going to think I have fleas."

  "I need
to get out of here. I'm a little overstimulated." She grabbed Trudy's hand and pulled her toward the door.

  A man's voice called out, "Okay, people, have a seat. Let's get this meeting started."

  Trudy yanked her hand out of Dana's grip. "I haven't made the rounds yet. Men outnumber women here ten to one. I need to play those odds." She stuck her bottom lip out like an overgrown baby and pleaded, "Pleeeezzzeeee."

  "Okay," Dana relented. "I'm going to go wait in the bar. I'll give you thirty minutes to find your next husband before I leave without you."

  Trudy turned her charm wattage up to high and sashayed off to a cluster of men in the far corner, leaving Dana to marvel how she could look so sexy while wearing red plastic cowboy boots.

  Dana gave a last look around the room and spotted Ellen. She was already talking to some other woman. Dana's tits were bigger, but the other woman definitely had her beat in the big-hair department.

  She sighed.

  Two

  Dana listened to the song for the dozenth time while she slurped at her drink. She had never realized how much she and Carrie Underwood had in common. They were born and raised about fifty miles from each other, each had cheating lovers and each owned Louisville Sluggers.

  The jukebox sucked up her last five-dollar bill and she punched in A9 twenty more times.

  "Hey, lady, give that song a rest, will ya?" an old man with suspenders called out from his perch on a barstool.

  Of course it would be a man who said that. She sat back down at corner table and waved at the bartender to make her another drink. She had asked for a drink that had ice cream in it because if she was going to drink her calories then she wanted to thoroughly enjoy it. But since they didn't have ice cream at a bar (explained the bartender with a haughty tone) she opted for a White Russian instead.