A Perfect Romance

by Layce Gardner

  Dana drove by The Best Little Hairhouse for the umpteenth time and didn't see Kimmy's car parked out front or in the back lot. She checked her cell phone for the thousandth time, hoping there would be a text or voicemail from Ellen. She hadn't heard from her since Lionel Richie found his roots. Maybe Ellen was busy with work. She thought about sending her a “Hi, how ya doing?” type of text, being friendly and all, then she stumbled upon an even better idea. If the mountain wouldn’t come to Mohammed...

  Dana made it out to the VFW in record time. She parked Betty next to Hank's riding lawn mower. He had obviously discovered that holding an AA meeting in a bar was a good thing. Now he could tell his wife he was at the meeting and not at the bar drinking.

  Dana waved to Hank on her way through the bar to the meeting room in back. This time she made sure to step high over that metal strip that had a tendency to jump up and bite flip flops. She moved over behind the rubber tree plant hoping to be inconspicuous. She looked over a big, green leaf and scanned the crowd for any signs of pokey hair.

  She found Ellen on the other side of the room. Ellen saw her and smiled. So much for the camouflage of the rubber plant. Dana moved toward the refreshment table, acting like that was where she had been headed. If Ellen were to come over and ask her why she was there, Dana didn't know what she'd say. She wasn't an alcoholic, so she didn't have any reason to be here.

  Great. She's gonna think I'm a stalker. Not even a very good stalker.

  Too bad stalking had gotten such a pejorative meaning. Ever since that whole John Hinckley/Jodie Foster thing people have freaked out about being stalked. Before that girls used to think stalking was romantic. John Cusak could stand outside your window all night long holding a blasting stereo above his head, wearing a creepy long overcoat, and that was romantic. Nowadays if Cusak did that, he'd end up in the county pokey.

  Dana gnawed on a Styrofoam cup and tried to think up a good spin story on why she...

  "Glad to see you here," said Ellen's voice from behind her.

  Dana's heart jumped into her throat. No, wait, that wasn't her heart, it was a chunk of Styrofoam. It was going down the wrong way. She gulped for air, but that lodged the Styrofoam more securely in her throat. She felt like she had swallowed concrete.

  She forced a cough, but it came out more like a wheeze. When she tried to inhale, the bit of Styrofoam wedged in even deeper. She gasped for air to no avail and vainly tried to eject the cup by pounding on her chest. Her eyes started tearing and her fingers involuntarily clawed at her throat.

  Ellen's eyes widened. She jumped up and down, flapping her hands in front of her, not sure what to do or how to help. She finally came to her senses and pounded Dana on the back, saying over and over, "Can you breathe, can you breathe?"

  Dana shook her head. If she could breathe, she wouldn't be turning blue and making sucky noises with her mouth.

  My Gosh-All-Mighty, my premonition is coming true. I'm going to choke and die like Tennessee Williams. But at least he went out knowing he had created a body of work that immortalized him. All I have is my lesbian pulp fiction that I can't even finish.

  Dana used the last of her breath to whisper, "I...can't breathe...oh...my…God...I'm going…to die…"

  I'm too young to die. I haven't even experienced true love yet.

  Dana reenacted a scary impersonation of Mama Cass with the ham bone. Time slowed down and she realized the woman she saw standing before her doing the chicken dance was her true love and she was going to die a slow, horrible, cruel death before she got to tell her that.

  I love you, Ellen. I really, really love you, Dana tried to convey with her eyes.

  "Her eyes are bulging!" Ellen screamed at the room in large. "She's dying!"

  Dana blinked rapidly six times (a multiple of three), then closed her eyes and saw a series of romantic snapshots of a future with Ellen: Sharing spaghetti noodles from the same plate, Lady and the Tramp style; Ellen and Dana freezing to death in the Atlantic Ocean, lying on an ice floe while Rosie O'Donnell's cruise ship sinks in the background; Ellen seated at a pottery wheel while Dana tantalizes her from behind...

  Ellen pounded Dana's back with her fist, interrupting her visions.

  Dana quickly made a promise to her higher self...if she did ever manage to draw another breath, she would use that last breath to tell Ellen that she loved her.

  Note to self: Good line. Put that in my book.

  "Somebody help, she's choking to death!" Ellen yelled.

  Everybody in the room turned and looked at Dana. Dana smiled and waved, shaking her head and flapping her hands like she was all right, but her blue face probably gave her away. The next thing she knew, she was surrounded by people. Most of the people didn't have the foggiest notion of how to help a choking person, but they didn't want to miss the show. After all, it wasn't every day that somebody expired right in front of you.

  Pearl Drowningbear, a big Indian lady with gray streaks in her long black hair and big dreamcatcher earrings, pulled a Bic pen out of her flannel shirt pocket and yelled, "Give me room! I'll do a tracheotomy!"

  "You know how to do that?" Ellen asked.

  Pearl pulled the pen apart with her teeth. She spit the ink tube onto the floor and said, "I saw it in a movie once. You jab the tube into the windpipe is all." Pearl narrowed her eyes at Dana, held the empty shell of the pen in her fist and raised it above her head like a hatchet.

  Dana squeaked and covered her neck with her hands. When Pearl walked toward her, Dana panicked. She bent over and butted Pearl with her head. She was trying to do that head-bashing move she'd seen in all those action movies, but instead she rammed Pearl's belly like a drunken goat. It had the same effect, though. Pearl oomphed, dropped the Bic and before she could find it again a big, bearded man wearing camouflage and smelling like deer piss grabbed Dana from behind and squeezed so hard that she coughed and the Styrofoam shot out of her mouth like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

  The man gently set Dana down and patted her on the head like she was a good dog.

  Dana sucked air into her lungs and the color returned to her face. "Thanks," she wheezed at the big, stinky man. "You saved my life."

  "Not a problem, little lady."

  Dana looked at Ellen and smiled feebly. "Somebody should put a warning label on those cups."

  ***

  Excerpt from Bad Romance:

  As soon as I left Kimmy's duplex after what I soon dubbed as the "Dog Doody Incident," I drove straight over to Engleman's Funeral Home. Trudy worked at Engleman's as the makeup and hair lady for all the dead bodies. She took a lot of pride in her work and most people in Dooley Springs had locked in Engleman's to do their funerals because of how good Trudy was with a makeup kit. Trudy's motto was "Just because you're dead doesn't mean you have to look it."

  Her daddy owned the place and it was a family operation. Her mom did the embalming and laying out of the bodies and her daddy sold the caskets and did the handshaking. Trudy did the corpse fluffing.

  Trudy and I practically grew up in the funeral home. We played hide and seek in the coffins, passed out cookies and punch during the viewings and did our math homework with naked, dead bodies. I brought my first girlfriend in here when I was fourteen and we made out inside a silk-lined casket. Trudy didn't mind because she was making out with the girl's brother in another casket.

  We learned how to drive on the hearse. We used to load up the back with our friends and go to the drive-in movies. Trudy would pick me up for school in the hearse. When we were late, she'd flip on the headlights and cars would pull over to the side of the road for us.

  The only time we ever got in trouble was when her mom caught us playing pin-the-tail on dead Mrs. Coates. We didn't see the harm—old Mrs. Coates was dead and was going to be buried bottom side down anyhow.

  I walked down the basement steps and through a series of small hallways until I got to the big room where Trudy did her thing. When I walked in she was bebopping around the floor
with her MP3 player and swiping some makeup on Mr. Peterson, who had died of heart failure a few days earlier. He was laid out on the cold, steel table with a sheet draped over his lower half. He looked greenish. I hoped Trudy could fix that. I leaned in the doorway and watched Trudy move to the music only she could hear. I shook my head and laughed to myself. Trudy moved like a white girl wearing brand-new Wranglers.

  I could faintly hear screechy music coming from her earbuds. She was wearing her orange wig with its ringlets piled up high on her head. She wore a rhinestone-studded tube top and tight black stirrup pants with high heels. A person might not like her style but there's no denying that the woman had style. I'd never had any and probably never would.

  I walked further into the room and waved my arms through the air like one of those guys who direct airplanes on where to go. Trudy saw me and unplugged her earbuds. She looked me up and down with wide eyes. "DD, did you lose weight?"

  I shook my head. "I got my hair cut a couple days ago."

  She walked a tight circle around me. "Your butt looks smaller."

  "So I've been told."

  "Wanda cut it?"

  "That new girl working there, Kimmy."

  "She's a Goddamn miracle worker."

  "That's what I wanted to talk to you about, Trudy. I kind of sort of have a date with her tonight."

  "No shit." She sat in a metal folding chair and wrapped her earbuds around the MP3 player.

  I crossed my arms. "You say that like you're surprised I could get a date."

  "It's not that I don't believe you," she said, "but I don't believe you. I saw her the other day at Walmart looking at lipstick and she looks awful straight to me."

  "How do you know that by looking at her?"

  "She was carrying a purse."

  "So you're saying lesbians don't carry purses?"

  Trudy shrugged. I wanted to prove her wrong, but I wasn't carrying a purse. Instead, I took a defensive tack. "So, in other words, you think I'm too ugly or too stupid to get an actual real-live date with an actual real-live woman who wears lipstick and carries a purse?"

  "No, that's not what I meant and you know it," she said. "And don't take this the wrong way…"

  I hate when people begin sentences with "don't take this the wrong way" or "don't get mad, but…" You know good and well that they're getting ready to piss you off, but now you can't get mad because they already took your mad rights away by saying that.

  Trudy continued, "I don't want to sound…"

  She hesitated long enough that I jumped in with, "Stupid?"

  "No…"

  "Like a butthole?"

  "No…"

  "Mean?"

  "No…"

  I rapid-fired a selection of adjectives: "Bitchy? Grumpy? Jealous? Obnoxious? Uptight? Unbelieving?"

  "That's the one!" She poke the air in my direction. "I don't mean to sound unbelieving, but is this a date or is it a date-date?"

  "She asked me out."

  Trudy sighed. "Straight women ask each other out too, you know. I could ask a woman to go to lunch or the movies or shopping because I wanted to go out with a friend, not because I wanted to boink her."

  "Okay, first," I began, "lesbians don't boink. I find your word choice offensive, and third, she didn't ask me to go shopping with her. She asked me to come over to her house."

  "You forgot second," Trudy said.

  "And second—She touched my boobs."

  "Oooh, now we're getting somewhere."

  "I touched her boobs too."

  "You already got to second base?" she asked.

  "Boobs are second base? I thought they were first base."

  "No, silly, they're second. If they were first, that would make the woo-hoo second. And then where would third be?"

  "The butthole?"

  "Ewww!" Trudy screeched. "Don't tell me you do the butthole thing! That's an exit, not an entrance!"

  "Well," I stammered, "I don't want anything big like a penis up there. But a pinky…"

  "Stop!" she yelled and put her fingers in her ears. "I don't want to know!"

  "Okay, okay," I said and then couldn't help but add, "if you'd been more willing to experiment with the butthole thing then you might've been able to save your marriage with Bruce the Fag."

  Anybody who has ever said black people can't blush has never seen Trudy when she's embarrassed. She turned the color of an eggplant and shuffled her feet. After a moment, she regained her composure, waved the air in front of her like she was getting rid of a fart and said, "Moving on...Tell me about the boob-touching incident."

  I hopped up on the table and sat next to Mr. Peterson. I swung my feet back and forth and told Trudy about it as she applied pancake makeup to his bulbous nose. "She gave me her boobs to feel. She actually offered them to me. See, she has fake boobs and she wanted to know if mine were real and she touched mine to test their firmness and then she let me squeeze hers like I was Mr. Whipple and they were Charmin 'cause she wanted my opinion on how fake they felt."

  Trudy pooched out her bottom lip and wrinkled her nose like she didn't believe me.

  I explained further, "She got them done a few months ago and they put too much air in them or something and I think they're kind of like car tires, you always have to check the air pressure and rotate them and stuff. She wanted me to check her air pressure." I paused. "I think."

  Trudy considered my story, then said, "Sounds more mechanical than romantic."

  "Why would she feel up a known lesbian unless she was putting the move on me?"

  She looked up from Mr. Peterson and asked, "She felt your boobs too?"

  "Yeah, I told you that. She felt mine first. She made the first move."

  "Did she feel them like this?" She held her palms out and moved them in little circles like she was washing a window. "Or did she feel your boobs like this?" She held her palms up and weighed the air like she was getting ready to juggle.

  "Kind of half and half," I said.

  "Show me," Trudy said.

  I reached out to grab Trudy's breasts, but she deflected my hands with a slap of her hand. "Not on me, doofus. We've known each other way too long to be boob-feeling each other."

  "I wasn't going to enjoy it," I said.

  "Yeah, right," she said like a woman who thought everybody always wanted to feel her up. She stood behind the steel table and propped Mr. Peterson up into a sitting position. She slid her arms under his and locked her hands around his big belly. "Here," she said, "pretend he's got your big boobs and you're her and show me exactly what she did to you."

  I wasn't going to have to do much pretending. He did have some pretty good-sized man boobs. In fact, his moobs were bigger than those of lots of women I'd dated.

  I was aware that to a lot of people, okay, most people, this would fall into the "you're sick and need professional help" category. But remember dead bodies weren't icky or even unusual to me or Trudy. Most little girls had stuffed animals. We had dead people. So I didn't think twice about reaching out and demonstrating on Mr. Peterson's moobs. "She poked me a couple of times with her finger and then she did this." I did a rendition of “wax on, wax off” that Ralph Macchio made famous in The Karate Kid. "That pretty much sums it up."

  Trudy nodded and put Mr. Peterson back to rest. "It's a date-date for sure. I would never do that to another woman's boobs unless I was going to give her some."

  "You think?" I asked excitedly. "You think she's planning on giving me some?" I hopped off the table and grabbed Trudy's hands. "You have to help me, please, please, please, please. Please do my makeup and hair so I don't show up looking like me."

  Trudy nodded and let out a deep sigh that said "It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it." "Okay, Double D, I'll come over at five-ish. I'll bring my box of magic, you bring a box of wine."

  "I love you, I love you, I love you!" I shouted, hugging her close. "You're my bestest friend in the whole wide world!"

  "I'm your only friend, girl, now get a
friggin' grip."

  ***

  The crowd dispersed once they realized Dana wasn't going to choke and die. Dana felt like she'd disappointed all the alcoholics by living. She had taken away their Thursday night entertainment and now they were going to have to find somebody else to talk about. They went back to their cup-gnawing like she hadn't been an example of the dangers of Styrofoam chewing.

  Ellen took Dana by the elbow and steered her over to an empty folding chair at the back of the room. Dana plopped down into it, grateful and embarrassed.

  Ellen gently wiped the tears off Dana's face, and as soon as her breath evened out, Dana sheepishly looked at her and offered a weak smile. "Sorry," Dana said. "I really pulled a Dooley, didn't I?"

  Ellen accepted Dana's smile and gave one of her own. "It was my fault for sneaking up on you like that."

  "I thought I was a goner, for sure," Dana said. "I even saw my future flash before my eyes."

  "Future? I thought you were supposed to see your past. Most people who have survived near death experiences have said that their past flashes before their eyes."

  "Really?" Dana asked, sinking into Ellen's gorgeous browns. "Guess I'm not most people."

  "You can say that again."

  "Guess I'm not most people," Dana and Ellen said at the same time.

  They laughed.

  "You know, I was hoping you’d show up," Ellen said.

  Dana gulped and came precariously close to choking again. But this time it was on her heart, which had jumped up into her throat. "Well, here I am. I'm here," Dana said. "Actually, I didn't know whether I should come or not."

  "Why?" Ellen asked. She reached out and gently laid her hand on Dana's knee.

  "I didn't want you to think I was stalking you. I mean stalking you in a bad way like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Not in a good way like John Cusak in Say Anything."

  Ellen laughed and wrapped Dana's hand in hers. She traced light circles on Dana's knuckles, then said, "You're very brave, you know that?"

  "You think? What's so brave about sucking Styrofoam into your windpipe?"

  Ellen explained, "It's hard to come to your first AA meeting. It takes a lot of courage to admit you have a problem and need help."