She Poured Out Her Heart

by Jean Thompson

Bonnie was bored with saying she was bored, and waiting for her jobless future to land on her. If nothing else came through, she was going to move to California, where exactly she did not know, and get a job in a bookstore or a coffeehouse or more likely both. The prospect was mildly panic-inducing, but it was a talisman against the used-up feeling of college life.

  Bonnie’s mother and stepfather, who had paid for her education, wanted to believe it had all been worth it, if not in a strict dollars and cents calculation, at least so they would not have to keep worrying about her. Bonnie’s stepfather was a sculptor of large, landscape-sized, beaky-looking metalworks, the kind commissioned by enlightened corporations and civic bodies. Bonnie’s mother handled the business end of things, keeping the books and wheedling clients. They wanted Bonnie to have some tangible accomplishment, not just be a student of the human condition, which was the unfortunate flip answer she’d given them the last time they asked. Bonnie liked to make fun of the stepfather’s sculptures; she considered them ugly and overpraised. But they were kind of a big deal, getting respectful mention in art journals and bringing in handsome amounts of money. It was confounding, it put her into a false position to be sniping at something massive, tangible, and successful when she had nothing of her own to set against them.

  At any rate, she would not be moving back home after graduation, inhabiting a spare bedroom and listening to everybody else’s ideas for what she should do with herself. Grad school would be better than that. Of course she had not applied to grad school, so that wasn’t an option either.

  Jane said, “I don’t suppose we could clean the place up some while we’re waiting to graduate, you know?”

  Meaning, it was Bonnie’s turn to vacuum and dust and scrub the toilet. It always seemed to be Bonnie’s turn, but that was because Jane was so tidy. Jane wore an apron and rubber gloves to do the dishes, scrubbing away like a housewife on speed. She wiped down refrigerator shelves and even cleaned the top of the refrigerator, which Bonnie regarded as something like the free space in bingo.

  “It doesn’t look so bad.”

  “There may not be standards around here, but there are limits.”

  “All right, fine, memsahib. There shall be clean.”

  “You know, one reason to get with the program on jobs is so you can hire a maid.”

  “But most elevated memsahib, do you not understand? Maid will be my job.”

  “So funny,” Jane said. She stood up from the couch and started straightening a toppling pile of magazines. “Jonah’s coming over tonight.” Jonah was Jane’s boyfriend. They were probably going to get married sometime, if she could get Jonah to go along with it.

  “Really not much point in cleaning up ahead of time, is there.”

  “Just do it, please?”

  Jane was stomping around the room, or Jane’s version of stomping, and looking all furrowed and put out, and Bonnie ventured to ask, “So how is Loverboy?”

  “He’s just great. Rolls out of bed in the morning, watches SportsCenter, shows up in class, goes home, plays video games, shows up here, eats whatever I put in front of him, and then we go to bed.”

  “Yeah?” Bonnie prompted her.

  Jane gave her an irritated look. “Not everything is about sex, you know.”

  “My mistake.”

  “I really do love him, I just wish he was more . . .”

  “Don’t look at me, I don’t want to get in trouble.” Jonah had a body like a teddy bear and a halo of dark curly hair. He had trouble with his aim when using the toilet. There were any number of things Bonnie might wish he was more of, or less of, but it was not always wise to express these.

  “We’re really comfortable together.”

  Bonnie waited for it.

  “Maybe too comfortable,” Jane added, after a beat or two.

  “You mean, bored. So all right, what do you want to do about it?”

  “I don’t know.” Jane stopped her pissed-off circuit around the room and stood, swaying a little. She was wearing a pair of unfashionable, waist-high jeans. She had a boy’s meager butt and hips. She’d cut her hair short, a blond fringe. It made her look like a Scandinavian athlete who excelled in some minor winter sport. “I guess when we graduate, we’ll end up going off in different directions anyway.”

  “Leave it up to inertia,” Bonnie suggested.

  “I thought I wanted to marry him.”

  “No, you just thought you wanted to get married. Uh oh, here it comes. Don’t give me the look of loathing. Don’t tell me this stuff if you don’t want to hear my opinion.”

  Jane sat down on the orange tweed chair they’d bought for a joke, no longer funny. “You think I should go ahead and break up with him now?”

  “I think we need the wisdom of the elders here,” Bonnie said, getting up and going into her bedroom.

  “Oh God, not the stupid comic books again.”

  Bonnie returned with a handful of tattered and gnawed-looking magazines. “Here we go. ‘From the strange turmoil in a woman’s heart comes the question, “Can I Forget You?’”

  “Crap.” Jane slid deeper into the orange upholstery.

  “This is from ‘Love Diary,’ January 1950, Quality Romance Publications, illustrated. Here’s one about a lumberjack. Do we know any lumberjacks? ‘Though I shrank from the look in his eye, in my heart I desired his kisses, and I knew that I was . . . Afraid to Love!’”

  “I’m begging you, stop.”

  “‘Dear Diary, I can’t understand what’s happened to me! I thought I had my emotions under rigid control . . . that no one could turn me away from the kind of life I chose for myself! But then along came Jack Banton . . . a big, burly galoot . . .’ Do people say that anymore? Galoot? ‘. . . and all my plans were blown sky high!’ You should see this guy, he looks like a gay pin-up. And she’s got these pneumatic tits. She’s yelling at him ‘Did you hear what I said? Take your hands off me!’ Then he says, ‘Take it easy, sister! I guess they forgot to tell you in finishing school that up here in the north woods, women don’t give the orders!’ Now honestly, doesn’t that give you a little retrograde thrill?”

  “Sure. Domestic violence always does.”

  “See, she thinks she’s in love with her city-slicker boyfriend, but then Jack dives into the river to rescue her from a log jam.”

  “What’s she doing in a log jam?”

  “Unclear. So he pulls her out of the river and takes her back to his cabin, and would you believe he has a bookshelf full of Shakespeare and Thackeray. He’s a self-educated diamond in the rough!”

  “The Thackeray is overkill.”

  “Agreed. Well, you can guess the rest. She breaks up with the city slicker. His name is Jonah.”

  “It is not.”

  “Now, what have we learned from this story?”

  “We should head for the north woods and jump in a river.”

  “Correct. OK, here’s another: ‘Office Cinderella.’ ‘Just be patient, Sally. When we’re married I want to support my wife! I don’t want to share her with a boss!’”

  “It’s hard to find great guys like that nowadays.”

  “How about this one: ‘Gee, Ruth, I thought you understood. I’m crazy about you, but well, a guy doesn’t like it when a girl is smarter than he is about everything.’”

  “Sound of vomiting.”

  “This is from ‘Western Love Stories.’ ‘Can a girl be a sheriff and forget that she is a woman? Lucy performed her duties very efficiently until she had to arrest Dave Ringo, and then she was all woman.’ Dave Ringo! I bet you money that’s not his real name.”

  Jane wriggled herself upright again. “Maybe you could get a job as a sheriff.”

  “I think I’d like that. These comics have some great ads. The ‘Up-And-Out Bra,’ with a testimonial by Miss Doris Harris, Wichita, Kansas. Her new, attractive bu
stline has given her poise and confidence. Or perhaps, Jane, your problem is tormenting foot itch?”

  “Why did you buy these wretched things?”

  “I swear, the only thing that’s changed in fifty years is reliable contraception. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not nothing. Why aren’t there any romance magazines for men?”

  “They’re called pornography.”

  “Seriously, don’t men fall in love? Are they embarrassed about it? What about love poems and love songs, do they write them just so they can get laid? It’s very discouraging.”

  “Don’t forget to take the garbage out,” Jane said, getting up.

  So Bonnie resigned herself to cleaning. After Jane left for class, she started in on the bathroom, clearing away all the shampoos and styling products and skin scrubs and toothpaste, the eyelash curlers and lip gloss, all the products with hopeful names, meant to evoke, variously, meadows, jungles, deserts, breezes sultry or fresh, innocence or ripeness. Vanity vanity vanity. Would she be any happier with blotchy skin and fuzzy hair? No. It was one more discouraging thing.

  Bonnie took a sponge and Comet to the shower, and yes, there did seem to be more of her own hair clogging the drain than Jane’s, as Jane often noted. She had thick, coiling dark hair, always falling forward into her eyes. There was too much of it, just as, it sometimes seemed, there could be too much of Bonnie.

  “You’re like, a sexual predator,” Jane told her once, meaning it mostly, but not entirely, as an insult. “Why thank you,” Bonnie had answered, because what else could you say, really. By now she knew she was different from most women, not even necessarily more juiced up, because how did you measure such things anyway, but willing to go to greater and more outlandish lengths, have the wrong kind of boyfriends and the wrong kind of sex and go about things all wrong so that more often than not her romances ended in wreckage and despair.

  She wouldn’t have said she was in love with every one of them, but often enough she was, and often enough love, or keening lust, or mad impulse overwhelmed her in ways that confounded and embarrassed her and led her to all manner of bad behavior, including, but not limited to, drama, indiscretion, urgent phone calls, reckless trysts, peering through windows at night, crying fits (on sidewalks, in bars, in a hospital emergency room), outlandish couplings (including in a parked VW Beetle, but that was only the once), and breaking and entering (once or possibly twice, even if that particular time she had not meant to go inside, only heave a chunk of rock through a glass door).

  These were the things that she had told Jane, or that Jane had witnessed, although there were some further incidents that Bonnie had not shared.

  What was wrong with her? She was always too impatient to sit back and wait for boys to come calling, or those who did call didn’t please or interest her. She was too full of longing, she wanted what she wanted and saw no reason not to pursue it, and of course she scared the crap out of most guys. Not one of whom was a burly lumberjack who owned a shelf of Great Books. Laugh all you wanted at the old, sappy stories with their cartoon faces and cartoon hairstyles, and all the while sex like a dog under the dinner table, fed in sly handfuls. Hilarious, cornball, a triumph of repression aided by industrial-strength lingerie! But everybody wanted the dream, the fantasy, the happy ending, and in spite of it everybody wanted the dream, the fantasy, the happy ending, and that included her, no matter how much she mocked them.

  Jane thought that Bonnie was too often unrealistic, that she expected too much. “You put so much energy into chasing these guys, you keep trying to turn them into something they aren’t. Maybe you should just calm down some. They don’t have to like, make your toes curl every time, do they?”

  How funny it was that they had met on the occasion of Jane’s single most transgressive act, the removal of her virginity by some drunken character she couldn’t have picked out of a police lineup. Which must have scared Jane away from doing anything so bold ever again, because instead she had a series of boyfriends, each more dreary than the last, the soon-to-be discarded Jonah the latest.

  Anyway, it was time to get her head out of her ass, stop thinking about boys, in comic books or out of them, and figure some way to make a living.

  Bonnie moved on to the kitchen. The stove needed degreasing. The inside of the microwave looked like a miniature crime scene. She hauled the kitchen garbage out from under the sink and started a new bag. Set the morning’s oatmeal bowl to soak, swept and mopped the floor. She wasn’t enjoying it, exactly, but there was an energy to it that carried you along. She would have sung a work song, if she’d known any, something about hoeing cotton or hauling in fishing nets.

  She took the garbage down to the outside bins, not bothering to lock the apartment door behind her, and when she came back, and was wrestling the vacuum cleaner out of the hall closet, she looked up to find a man standing in the passageway.

  “Hey!” she said, more of a yelp than a word. At first glance Bonnie took him for a student, but no, he was older, rougher and shabbier, tall and thin, with his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. The coat, she noticed, as if this were important, was the same kind as her old high school boyfriend once had, with a facing of soiled fake sheepskin. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “Terry live here?” he asked, looking not at Bonnie, but at the floor near his own feet. He had a long, hollowed-out face, and droopy blond hair.

  “No, you have the wrong apartment.” She waited for him to do something, say something. “So you need to get out of here.”

  “Terry back there?” he asked, nodding at the rooms behind her and taking a step toward her. He was between her and the door. Bonnie shoved the vacuum cleaner into the hallway and that checked him. He took one hand out of his pocket. He held a knife with a short, thick, sharp blade. Bonnie’s brain spun like a dial. She could almost hear it making clicking sounds. She was unable to fathom the idea of the knife, of it actually doing something to her.

  So out of pure and stupid reflex she said, “Would you at least get out of the way so I can vacuum?” And bumped the machine toward him.

  He took a few steps back. “Go on,” Bonnie said. “Give me some space here.” She stooped down, plugged the vacuum in, turned it on, and advanced on him. It was an old machine and it made a lot of racket, vrooming and hooming.

  Together they rounded the corner and Bonnie ran the vacuum energetically over the nubby carpet. The man watched her. The hand with the knife hung at his side. Bonnie was aware of some bodily process happening to her from the skin out, a coldness, a quivering, traveling inward in rapid waves, until her heart was squeezing through some painful cold.

  The vacuum went quiet. He had pulled the plug.

  Bonnie wheeled behind her, retreating into the kitchen portion of the main room, and opened the refrigerator. “Hey, you want a beer?” As long as she kept moving, talking, she felt, nothing bad would happen. “Bud Light OK?” She took out two cans of beer and set one on the counter closest to him. “Come on, man, have a drink with me.”

  He looked at the beer can, then down at the knife in his hand, as if asking its opinion. His long, oddball face and long hair made him look as if he’d been stretched out, like kids’ clay. Bonnie sat down at the kitchen table and opened her own beer. “Make yourself at home,” she said, idiotically.

  He picked up the beer with his free hand, then laid the knife down on the counter to open it. The kitchen was small, and he stood maybe ten feet away from her. Only the dinky table was between them. Bonnie raised her beer and sloshed some into her mouth, swallowed. She watched him drink, then he set the can down again, next to the knife. He wasn’t looking at her, he still hadn’t looked directly at her. His face had a blank, unseeing quality, or else he was seeing something nobody else did, submerged beneath layers of murky impulse. “So who’s Terry?” Bonnie asked, trying to nudge him toward the surface. “Do I know Terry?” Man or woman Terry? Did it matter? H
er heart hurt. It was bruised from all the work of beating. The advice of a million dopey magazines, generations of true romance, slipped into a groove in her dumb brain: Show an interest in what he says! Be an active listener! But why was it always the girl who had to make all the effort at conversation? She said, “I’m really thinking you need to check the address again.”

  He took another drink. It made him cough and sputter, as if it had gone down the wrong way, and he leaned on the counter, trying to recover. “Whoa,” Bonnie said. “Easy there.”

  His jaw worked as he tried to set himself to rights. “Goddamn,” he said, still coughing.

  “Sometimes it helps if you hold your breath.” She demonstrated, puffing her cheeks out.

  “Goddamn sheriff took my dogs away and the county had them put down.”

  And what did the moron magazines tell you to say to that? Like dating advice or makeup ads were enough to keep you from getting raped and murdered in your own kitchen. Bonnie felt her face attempting a number of false emotions all at once: sympathy, interest, indignation on his behalf. See, nice person! Friend! Not that he was paying any real attention to her. There was something wrong with his mouth, something loose, like a baby’s.

  Bonnie started to say she liked dogs, and that’s when the man said, “Stupid bitch.” Spitting the words out like seeds.

  Who did he mean? Her, Bonnie? The sheriff? Somebody else, maybe even an actual female dog? And because there was no way of knowing, and what difference would it make anyway, Bonnie said, “She shouldn’t have done those things she did.”

  “Goddamn,” he said again, and this time it sounded like agreement. He lifted the beer can once more and drank it down. Bonnie got up and fetched another from the refrigerator. She put this one a little farther away on the counter, so that he’d have to take a step away from the front door. A part of her mind was working furiously, wondering if she might be able to get to the door, or scream, and would anyone hear, and when was Jane due home, and how would that even help, since Jane would just stand there pie-eyed, a born victim.