A Perfect Romance

by Layce Gardner

  Dana jerked her hand away.

  A drinking problem? She think I'm an alcoholic? She thinks I came here to attend the meeting? Cheeses, Mary and Joseph.

  Ellen interrupted Dana's thoughts, "This is the hardest part. But believe you me, we've all been through it. I'll be with you every step of the way."

  "You'll be with me?" Dana echoed, a plan slowly taking shape in her mind.

  Ellen nodded. "Day or night. Anytime. Doesn't matter. You can call me any minute of the day and I'll come running, I promise you. We'll get through this. Together. You'll never be alone again."

  Dana smiled. If she had heard Ellen right, all she had to do was admit to being an alcoholic and she could see her anytime she wanted. She could even see her all the time if she so desired. And Dana knew, she knew, that if Ellen spent enough time around her, she would fall in love with her.

  All I have to do is pretend to be an alcoholic. It can't be that hard. I saw Meredith Baxter-Birney-Baxter do it in that one TV movie.

  Dana counted the cracks in the linoleum flooring. She made a pact with herself. If the total of the cracks came out to be a multiple of three, then she would be an alcoholic. If not, she would tell the truth and let Ellen disappear.

  One, two, three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen…

  Ellen put her hand on Dana's thigh.

  Twenty-one, twenty-four…

  The warmth of Ellen's seemingly innocent touch seeped through Dana's jeans, into her skin, into her muscles, into her bones, into her blood, getting hotter and hotter, until it boiled over in her brain and that was when she blurted, "I'm an alcoholic."

  I'm absolved of all guilt. There were thirty-three cracks. It's fate.

  "I'm an alcoholic?" Dana said again, this time more like a question than a statement.

  Ellen grabbed Dana in a hug. Dana snuggled into the embrace, feeling Ellen boobs against her own. She inhaled and smelled ocean mist-scented dryer sheets and watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers. From that one delicious second on, Dana embraced Ellen and her faux alcoholism with open arms.

  "I need you," Dana muttered. Those words, at least, were true.

  "I'm right here," Ellen reassured, hugging her closer. "And I won't let you go."

  That's what I'm hoping.

  Eight

  Dana sat still as a statue in back of the room and listened as a parade of alcoholics got up, stood at the podium and related their hard luck stories. She had to pee really bad, but she was afraid that if she moved, Ellen would take her hand off her thigh. So, she listened as Pearl Drowningbear went on and on about how the white man had got her people hooked on evil firewater. Next was the man who saved her life with the bear hug. He told a story about how he knew he had hit rock bottom when he woke up in an abandoned car down in El Paso wearing women's underwear. Then a man with no legs and dozens of medals pinned to his army jacket drove his electric wheelchair up to the front of the room. He introduced himself as Stumpy and then he preached about how every man in a foxhole is a good Christian. But all Dana could concentrate on was the warmth of Ellen's hand.

  Suddenly, Ellen stood and announced, "We have somebody new here tonight. Let's show Dana how much we appreciate the courage it took her to come to our meeting."

  Everyone applauded. Horror-stricken, Dana stared back at their expectant faces.

  "Would you like to share your story, Dana?" Ellen asked.

  "No."

  Ellen coaxed, "It's okay. I'm right here with you."

  "I don't have any good stories to tell. I have legs, I'm white and I wear women's underwear every day."

  Everybody laughed.

  "C'mon," Ellen coaxed, "tell us your story. We're all friends here."

  Crapola. Where's a drink when you need one?

  ***

  Excerpt from Bad Romance:

  The one and only time I stayed in a hotel was when I hid out at the Best Western on the outskirts of town. I was hiding from my girlfriend, Lisa Number Three, who I had broken up with.

  Our relationship began and ended because of the couch. It began when I bought the couch on a clearance sale at Poor Boy's Furniture. Lisa Number Three was one of the deliverymen. Let's just say that one day she delivered more than a couch.

  We'd been living together for six months and I had got back from work (cutting Mrs. Poteet's standard poodle's curly pelt—the poodle's name was Hillary and she was trained so that if you said "Obama" she growled) and I will readily admit, I wasn't in the best of moods. I grabbed a Pop Tart out of the kitchen cupboard and walked into the living room. Lisa Number Three and Asscat were watching TV.

  "What happened to the couch?" I asked.

  "What d'ya mean?" Lisa Number Three asked back.

  I pointed at the back cushions of the couch and said, "Has Asscat been clawing at the cushions?"

  At the sound of his name, Asscat shot me a “Who, me?” look, then went back to licking his butt.

  Lisa Number Three let out a cry of pure anguish, flopped back on the couch with her arm across her face in a bad imitation of Greta Garbo doing the final scene from Camille. She buried her face in the crook of her arm, sobbing pitifully. "Now you know," she cried. "I'm a bad, bad person."

  I grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. "What exactly do I know?" I asked, patting her on the shoulder and stuffing the rest of the Pop Tart in my mouth.

  She looked up at me through her tears and sputtered, "I eat the couch. I can't help myself. I get stressed out and eat the couch."

  I looked at Asscat for clarification, but he was more interested in performing his ablutions than in helping me out.

  I did the only thing I could think to do. I laughed.

  "You think it's funny?" she said in a voice that was half-angry, half-relieved, and all-crazy.

  "Yeah, that was a good one."

  She swiped at her tears with the back of her hand and smiled tentatively. "You don't think I'm a weird person?"

  I shook my head. "Nah. That was funny." I snickered. "You eating the couch…"

  She forced a chuckle of her own. "I thought you'd think I was weird. And bad." She snuffled up her snot and tears.

  I mustered up as much sympathy as I could and said, "It's okay. Now tell me what really happened to the couch."

  She sat up. "I did tell you."

  "No, really, tell me. I won't get mad, I promise."

  "I ate it," she said, crossing her arms.

  I said, "Let me explain the rules of comedy. Saying something once is funny. I laughed, okay? And twice is still a little bit funny. But if you say it three times, then it's not funny anymore and it's creepy-weird."

  "I ate the couch."

  That was the third time. It gave me the same willies as seeing a tight-faced Joan Rivers on Celebrity Apprentice.

  I looked at Asscat. He took a final lick and walked out of the room.

  Lisa Number Three reached behind me, grabbed a handful of the yellow foam sticking out of the ripped cushion and stuffed it in her mouth. She chewed. And swallowed.

  "See?" she said.

  The Pop Tart threatened to come back up. To my credit, I didn't yell or scream or swear. I simply walked into my bedroom and locked the door behind me. I sat on the bed, put my head between my legs and hyperventilated.

  After a few moments, Lisa Number Three knocked on the door. When I didn't answer, she tried the doorknob. Then she rapped on the door again. "It's a sickness," she said from the other side of the door. "It's like an OCD thing. It's a real disease. It's called trichotillomania and it's real."

  I put my hands over my ears and did my own rendition of Edvard Munch's The Scream.

  Even with my ears covered, I could hear her talking, "Are you telling me you never noticed my bald spot? You never noticed in all the time we've been together that I pull out my own hair and eat it?"

  I puked a little in my mouth. I buried myself under the covers and didn't come out of my room for twelve hours. She slept out on the couch. I guess if she wanted a midnight snack, s
he wouldn't have to get up.

  Over the next few days, I surreptitiously shadowed Lisa Number Three around the house. I caught her eating the couch, her own hair, a hot pad, the ironing board cover and the lint out of the dryer.

  I suspected that my cat wasn't the one who was coughing up hairballs under the bed.

  I broke up with her the day I noticed Asscat was sporting some bald patches. And to think I'd been blaming him for eating the neighborhood squirrels. Now, I wasn't so sure.

  I didn't so much as break up with Lisa Number Three as I threw all her shit out the front door and yelled, "Go away! Get out of my life!"

  She stood in the middle of the front yard in a rainstorm of her own panties and shouted, "Is this because I can't have an orgasm?"

  I screamed louder and threw all her CDs onto the lawn.

  "Is this because of your inability to arouse me?! A lot of couples have that problem! We can work on it!" she yelled.

  I ran out the door, across the yard and jumped into Betty. I squealed her tires out of the driveway and left skid marks on the street. I drove in a fugue state until I reached the Best Western and locked myself inside the sanity of a room where nobody ate the hair out of the bathtub drain.

  I drove home the next morning intent on conducting a civil break-up. I pulled Betty into the driveway in time to see Lisa Number Three sitting inside her truck. The truck's bed was heaped with garbage bags full of her belongings. The engine was idling and she was sitting behind the wheel studying a road atlas. I noticed she had highlighted I-40 straight to Los Angeles. She couldn't get lost unless she made a turn.

  I rapped on the window. She rolled it down halfway.

  "You all packed up then?" I asked.

  "Yeah," she mumbled.

  It was weird, but ever since she ate her eyebrows, I couldn't read her expression. I couldn't tell if she was sad or mad.

  "Sure you don't want to take Asscat? You might want a snack on the way," I said.

  She flipped me off and backed out of the driveway.

  I guess she was mad.

  ***

  "My name is Dana and I'm an alcoholic."

  "Hi, Dana!" the people shouted back.

  Dana opened and closed her mouth a few times, but no words came out. She knew she was supposed to tell them a sob story. They were expecting her to tell them about guzzling mouthwash for her next high and giving handjobs for a sip of beer and sleeping in alleys with her shoes as a pillow, but nothing near that exciting had ever happened to her.

  She wracked her brain trying to remember any good TV movies about alcoholics, but the only sordid story she could think up was an urban myth she'd heard as a kid. So before she could talk herself out of it, she said, "It all began, I guess, when I was six years old. It was Christmas Eve. Daddy had gone out of town on a business trip. Mama and I lit a fire in the fireplace that night and that's when we smelled something funny. Something bad. It smelled like singed hair and charred flesh. We put out the fire and I looked up inside the chimney."

  Dana threw in a few sniffles to make her story more realistic. She continued, "It was Daddy. He was wearing a Santa suit and had a bag of presents. He had cancelled his trip and was going to surprise us Christmas Eve by coming down the chimney, but he broke his neck in the fall and was stuck. He died trying to make me happy."

  Dana held her breath and blinked.

  Everyone had their mouths open, staring at her. After a moment of thick silence, some of the people shifted in their chairs. Others looked at each other. Some whispered behind their hands and Dana could make out a few words: "Awful...horrific...My God Almighty…"

  Dana summed up her story quickly with, "That's when I had my first eggnog. I've drank ever since. Especially around Christmastime." She paused, then added, "I'm terrified of chimneys."

  "When you were six years old?" said an old woman who was wearing a plastic Walmart bag tied on her head like a shower cap. "You started drinking that young?"

  Dana hadn't thought about that. That did seem a tad young to start a life of alcoholism. But now that she had told the story she had to stay committed. She nodded at the raincap and said, "Yeah. Sixish. Thereabouts."

  "That's awful young to start drinking," said a man with fingerless gloves. He stroked his long gray beard and said, "I didn't start up till I was nine."

  "I was six, but...I looked seven."

  The legless man in the wheelchair said, "That's the awfullest story I ever heard. And, believe me, I've heard plenty."

  All the people nodded and made "Bless your little heart" faces at Dana. She stole a look in Ellen's direction. She was beaming at Dana. Encouraged, Dana ended her story by saying, "That's also when I stopped believing in Santa Claus."

  She stepped down from the podium and was surrounded by all her new friends. They hugged her and fussed over her and patted her and squeezed her and she had never felt so loved in her whole life.

  Dana hated to admit it, but she was happy. She belonged.

  ***

  Excerpt from Bad Romance:

  Trudy showed up right on time. I unplugged the box of red wine as she walked through my front door carrying a big fishing tackle box and an over-sized photo album. I poured wine from the box's spigot into two of my vintage Jetsons juice glasses while she opened her fishing tackle "Bodacious Box of Beauty" (that's what she had bedazzled across the top of it) and set her supplies out on the counter like a surgeon getting ready to operate.

  Trudy sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. "What's that god-awful smell?"

  "One of Maw Maw's new recipes. It's stewing in the crock pot. So, how come you don't have a date tonight?" I asked, handing her a glass of wine.

  "I did have. I cancelled," she replied. She held out her glass of wine and made a gimme-more gesture with her hand. "Don't be stingy. Fill it up to Elroy's eyes, please."

  I held Elroy back under the spigot. "Why'd you cancel?"

  "My best friend needed me," she said much too sweetly.

  "Yeah, right. Why'd you really cancel?"

  "It was with Bob Wyer." She rolled her eyes. "You were a good excuse to cancel."

  "Wait a minute! You finally told Bob Wyer you'd go on a date with him?"

  She took the glass from me, downed half of it in one gulp, then shrugged. "I had a moment of weakness."

  "You know, he's probably a pretty nice guy if you'd give him half a chance." I was trying to put a shine on Bob Wyer. He'd been declaring his love for Trudy ever since the eighth grade. "You could do a whole lot worse than him, you know." I refrained from saying "You have done a whole lot worse than him." Besides his unfortunate name, he didn't seem that bad.

  Trudy downed her Elroy. "He's boring as all get-out. His idea of a big Friday night is playing dominoes with his mother."

  I sipped from Rosie the Robot. "So he still lives with his mother. That's nice if you think about it. It means he has respect for women." I didn't voice that I was really thinking it was little too Psycho for my taste. "And he plays dominoes, which means he's very good at adding."

  "I don't like his bow ties." She handed Elroy back to me, saying, "Hit me again."

  "That's not exactly a deal breaker." I poured her another. "You married Jeffrey and he wore black dress socks with white tennis shoes."

  "Bob Wyer's too quiet," she said. "I work with dead people all day long. I don't want to be dating them too."

  Not a week went by that Bob Wyer didn't ask her out at least once. And not a week went by that Trudy didn't turn him down. "You got to admire his perseverance," I said. And his creativity. Every week he invited her to do something different. I guess he thought that if he came up with the right thing to do, Trudy would say yes. "What did he invite you to do this time?"

  "One of those SCA things."

  "What the heck is a SCA thing?"

  "Society for Creative Anachronism. It's where all these geeky people get together and the men dress in tights and sword fight with these big foam noodles. They pretend they're in the Mi
ddle Ages and beat the crap out of each other. I think the women sit around and watch them and drink homemade wine."

  "Noodles?"

  She nodded. "It's symbolic of their peckers."

  "That could be...interesting," I said dubiously.

  "Besides, I don't have anything Middle-Agey to wear."

  I took another sip and considered her vast collection of wigs. "What kind of wig would you wear?"

  "I don't know. I think they wore fox tails on their head," she said between gulps. "Besides, there were no black women in the Middle Ages."

  "Sure there were," I said. "They were called Moors."

  "Well, Bob Wyer ain't getting no more of this Moor, I can tell you that. Besides," she said, "I already married one man who wore panty hose, I'm not going to marry another one just because he calls them tights and stuffs a codpiece in ‘em."

  I changed the subject. "What's that?" I pointed Rosie the Robot at the big book she'd brought in with her.

  "It's my book of faces. I've been trying out new makeup styles and taking pictures of my models all done up. You know, for when I open my own make-over business. I brought that for you to look through so you can pick out a new face."

  "A new face?"

  She nodded. "Then I'll make you over to look like it."

  "What's wrong with my old face?"

  "Nothing if you like librarians."

  "Librarians look smart."

  "Yes, they do. But nobody wants to have hot sex with one. I was under the impression you wanted to have hot sex tonight. True or false?"

  "True."

  "Then look through there and pick out a new hot, sexy face."

  "What defines a face that you want to have hot sex with?"

  Trudy said, "Pick one out that makes you want to sit on it."

  I spit the wine out my nose and into my lap. It burned so bad tears streamed down my face. Trudy laughed. "Just kidding. Sort of. Find a face whose eyes you want to gaze into. Lips you want to kiss. That type of thing."

  I opened the book and skimmed through a few pages. "All the people in the photos have their eyes closed."