by Diane Cook
Janet forced a giggle, even though she hated when men talked about their dicks like people.
“No, it’s usually different,” he continued, splayed on the bed and dreamy-voiced. “Because we’re in love.” He added quickly, “Me and the wife.”
“Naturally.” Janet felt uncharacteristically embarrassed. I know you don’t mean me, she thought resentfully.
He clasped her hand like they were kids about to run across a field together, gave it a squeeze. “You’re fun, Janet.” He half smiled; it seemed flirtatious and challenging in a way that quickened her breath.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she challenged back. She meant it. She wanted to hear a real thing, a thing only he could say. Even if it was lame, like how she tasted. Even if it was really about him, like how she felt to fuck.
His half smile faded, then became a frown, as he thought. She heard the muffled tick of Dave’s watch from under the tangled sheets.
Finally, he coughed meekly. “I should go.” Guilt tainted his voice. “Meredith will be home soon. Mommy class.”
Her name is Meredith, Janet thought. She faked a yawn to protect the small wound she felt opening in her. “Come back anytime,” she sang in a practiced tone, inviting, yet nonchalant.
“I think that should get me through. Like a dose of medicine, you know?”
“It was six doses,” she teased, but felt hollow.
He chuckled gamely, then was silent as he finished dressing.
The low sun poured orange through the window. The whole room filled to spilling with it.
Dave came to the bed. “Thanks,” he said, and extended a hand for her to shake. Janet eyed it until he withdrew the hand, wiped it on his pant leg.
“Janet.” He sounded disappointed, as though he thought she was ruining this. He was now unsure how to leave.
She posed on the bed seductively out of habit, but she didn’t know how to feel.
“Well, I’m always here,” she said.
“I know. You’re always here.” He sighed. “You’re hard to ignore.”
She should like this comment, but coming from him it sounded like an accusation, as if displaying her dogged desire was somehow unfair. She was always there. She had guessed this kind of attention would be hard for Dave to ignore no matter who he belonged to. And she’d been right. It’s not easy being pursued. That was the point. When all goes well, the wondering gives way to the wanting, then to the needing. These were the stages in the kind of seduction she was best at. He wasn’t supposed to know why he came to her, to be able to parse the logic, to weigh his options, to have an opinion even. He was just supposed to come. But she could see him deciding a mistake had been made. He was feeling duped. She felt like a bad magician who had messed up. The audience had seen the con, the manipulation, and could never unsee it.
She rolled onto her back and began pushing her breasts toward the center of her chest, then letting them slip back down toward her armpits. It was the least sexy thing she’d ever done in front of a man. Dave Santana averted his eyes.
Since her brother Jon and his wife Gloria had their first kid, they’d insisted Janet have Sunday brunches with them once a month. “I want a normal family,” Jon said. Janet had grown to dislike her brother. She found Gloria to be overly housewifely. Their union seemed like happenstance, as did the baby. Like they’d just floated out of state college and hooked fingers to keep floating together. How could they think that was worthwhile? Where was the passion, the anguish, the power play? Had Jon learned nothing from her?
“When are you going to find someone?” her brother asked, ten minutes into the visit. She always hated the question, and he always asked it.
“I don’t know, Jon. When are you going to find someone?” she spat back, glaring at Gloria, who was pouring tea. Gloria looked confused for a moment, opened her mouth as if to explain, He did find someone—me, but then she understood it had been mean-spirited. Wide-eyed, she excused herself to the kitchen, calling Jon in to help. He jumped up and held the baby out to Janet. She made no move to uncross her arms.
“Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t want to hold him.” He slacked his arms and the baby seemed to free-fall, then abruptly stop to dangle at Jon’s knees. Janet cringed, afraid he’d let baby head hit marble coffee table. “Why won’t you settle down?” he asked, changing the subject but acting as if they were one and the same.
Janet said, “I am settled down.”
“Oh?” Jon sat again. “You’ve been seeing someone?”
“Yes. The meteorologist.”
“Janet.” Jon rolled his eyes. “He probably just thinks you’re a groupie.”
“Thanks.”
“You know how you get.”
“For your information,” Janet said, “we’ve been seeing each other quite a while.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. It felt that way to her, though three nights over a couple of years wouldn’t seem like that to anyone else. Despite how their last encounter had ended, she missed him. She wanted him to knock on her door and was feeling depressed that he hadn’t. She liked this game with her brother of pretending that he had.
Janet made up some details and dished them like gossip. The more she said, the more her brother believed. Dave took her to fancy restaurants; people asked for his autograph, and he obliged gracefully. He told her secrets through his weather reports, “Like when he says ‘wind gusts,’ he’s telling me he loves me.”
“Wow,” Jon said, truly admiring.
She felt inspired. “He said I was the woman he’d been waiting for. And can you believe it—we were neighbors. He was right there the whole time. Just like that song.”
Gloria kept calling Jon from the kitchen, but he was rapt. “I knew you could do it,” he said, his eyes glistening. He touched Janet’s arm.
She’d just been about to wonder, Why is he so happy for me? She was winning this fight, after all—she was saying whatever she could to prove him wrong about her life, her ability to find love. But something buckled in her at his touch, a transference of emotion or of belief. And she began to believe it herself. Believe in the possibility. Maybe it could work. Maybe she could do it.
Finally Gloria came out, hands on her hips, and barked, “Are you fucking deaf? Get the fuck in here.” Jon bolted up and dropped the baby into Janet’s lap. And Janet, too stunned by Gloria’s outburst, a kind she’d never thought Gloria capable of, automatically wrapped her arms around the warm squirming mass, as if it were second nature. His head smelled like old furniture no one wanted. “What is the point of you?” she asked, looking him squarely in the eyes. He rolled his head back and forth, like someone in ecstasy.
The mulch around the front windows of Dave’s town house was oversprinklered. Fall decay clung to her slippers. She still hadn’t seen Dave, even though she’d been looking for him. If she wanted to get under his skin, she’d need to be more proactive. She’d thought up a line: “You said I didn’t need to be scared of weather. Then why is everything dying?” She’d also brought a measuring cup with her, in case his wife was there. Neighbors still did that, right? Not that she cared, but she had grown so tired of people regarding her with suspicion. She’d won another award at school, and the other teachers complained she was rigging it. Please, she thought. She had better things to do than tamper with school elections. I wished I’d gotten the memo ordering us to stop making a difference, she’d said to her girls in Sex Ed. They applauded, and when she asked that they not vote for her next year, they refused. She admired their conviction.
A ficus showered Janet as she brushed past to spy into the window. The blinds were drawn, and she could not see inside. Maybe his wife was still pregnant. How long had it been? It seemed like just last week. She could still taste his sea-saltiness. Maybe, she daydreamed, his wife would even approve—would motion for Janet to follow her into the house, saying, “Please take him. He makes me so sick,” then opening the bathroom door to reveal him wet and grunting, beating off over the toilet. He’d
see Janet and exclaim, “Thank God you’re here!” Janet could take him back to her place, and he would explode inside her, and then afterward maybe they would talk. He’d see she was the better woman because she always knew how to fix his problems. Maybe he would never leave. Maybe he’d visit his baby from her town house. Actually, she couldn’t think of a more convenient situation, it being just next door.
She knocked, measuring cup ready, and waited. She knocked again. It wasn’t that late. Were they out? His car was gone. Was hers? She tried the door, and it opened.
The living room was empty except for a rotary phone, lonely in the middle of the awful mauve carpet; its cord slithered to the wall. Each door she opened led to a room empty of every remnant of him. The smell of food, sweat, his cologne, clung to the surfaces. The breeze through the door churned it all up for her.
On the kitchen counter she found the sales binder, though it was already clear Dave had moved. Moved secretly, Janet marveled, feeling both angry and intrigued. So she wouldn’t know. Because he couldn’t face her? Because he was ashamed? Because he didn’t want to hurt her? Because he did want to hurt her? All of these possibilities excited her.
At the association office, the clerk eyed her soggy slippers when she inquired.
“They moved a couple weeks ago. Weren’t you at the party?” he answered innocently. She could tell this guy, name-tagged Jeremy, disliked her.
“What party?”
“Their going-away party. Maybe two weeks ago? In their yard.”
She’d probably been at her brother’s. “That bastard,” she muttered about both men and tore a card for an association-approved landscaper into ragged pieces.
Jeremy’s eyes slit. “You live here?” he asked, as though there was no way she could have not known about the party, let alone not attend, if she did.
“Yes, I live here,” she snapped. “I’ve lived here since the beginning. Since before you.”
He flipped casually through a binder. “Well, their little girl is cute. Had an adorable golden curl on her forehead. Perfection. Like a picture of a baby. But a real baby.”
She slammed her keys onto the counter. “I’m also putting my house on the market,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant and failing.
“Oh?” He brightened as if glad.
“You know, I’ve come in here before.”
“Yes,” he nodded, smiling. “I remember.” His smile was flat, a stain. “Then you know that you can go through the association’s agent or find your own.” He pushed some pamphlets at her. “Buyers have to come here first. No signs in the window or on the lawn. It’s tacky. There’s a fine.” So Dave hadn’t been stealthy, he’d just been following rules. He hadn’t run from her; he’d simply moved to a new home, started a new life, and hadn’t thought to tell her. On a corkboard over Jeremy’s head hung four flyers picturing four almost identical town houses. She recognized Dave’s because of the weather vane he’d installed. She’d found it so charming; now it seemed stupid. She thought of that empty mauve carpeting.
“I tore up all my carpet and put in real wood floors, so I imagine mine will sell pretty quickly. A lot quicker than these pieces of shit,” she said, gesturing at the board.
“I imagine so,” Jeremy agreed, his gaze calm but alert, as if he’d encountered a strange dog in the forest. “Wood flooring is very timeless right now.”
“We used to sleep together.” She dropped it like an oily chicken.
“I’m sorry?”
“Dave and I. Before he was married. After he was married. While she was pregnant.” She smiled. “We were lovers. Multiple times. Multiple orgasms, I mean.” She paused. What did she mean exactly? “I mean, I know him. I know him.”
She stopped. She didn’t need to plead her case to Jeremy.
“I’m sure you do.” He sighed. “Please let someone in the office know what you decide.” He turned his back to her. “And you should have shoes on,” he added, disappearing behind a curtain. “It’s almost winter.”
Another family moved into Dave’s place. Janet saw ribbons of old carpet in the Dumpster and figured they had installed hardwood floors. She decided Dave had bad taste and added that to her growing list of his failings. She watched the husband over the fence as he staked the yard according to some spring planting map. She thought about seducing him, but he was doughy, and worse, clearly under the wife’s thumb. Janet pictured him barely erect and simpering at her bedside.
She did not try to sell.
But she continued to watch Dave’s weather reports, the friendly hum of the vibrator mingling with his expert’s voice. He’d developed something of a giggle that confused her at first, until she realized that it came with something of a smile, genuine, not slight, and ever-present. This was Dave happy. She hated seeing it; it made her want to cry. She masturbated angrily.
Then one day in early spring, with the ground still frozen and the night still arriving by five, the weather was reported by a blonde in a tight pencil skirt and bursting cleavage. Janet was eating cookies from a box in her bra and sweat pants, vibrator tucked under the elastic band, ready.
The broadcast confused Janet. The blonde hadn’t said, “Filling in for Meteorologist Dave Santana.” She’d called herself the weather girl. Janet tried, but she couldn’t get off to that high voice, to an imagined smell rather than a known one.
In the morning, the paper announced a station shakeup. The only people who watched the weather were fishermen, and they wanted a weather girl.
And like that, Meteorologist Dave Santana was gone.
That year, Janet entertained no remarkable men. Those who woke next to her were proud to confess some shortcoming, as though vulnerability was a new trend. She hated the fears most of all; “I fear I’ll never find someone who will love me for me,” said a landscaper, who played guitar in a local 1970s cover band. You probably won’t, Janet would think as he clung to her. But admittedly she had softened, and mostly she kept her mouth shut, or if she ventured to respond, pointedly sighed. She sighed a lot post-Dave.
Worse, she thought she saw Meredith Santana everywhere. At the gas station pumping gas, with a baby in a car seat. Or at the supermarket, a baby strapped to her back. At the bar where Janet picked up game men, bouncing a baby on her knee and flirting in a frayed booth. Squinting out from the background of the adult movies Janet watched. The woman was a specter toting a specter child. Janet wasn’t sure she even remembered what Meredith looked like. She only recalled pregnant Meredith, and so couldn’t even remember, or had never known, if she was as naturally thin as Janet.
So when Meredith Santana walked into the teachers’ lounge, there to cover the school nurse’s maternity leave, Janet barely had any surprise left in her.
Meredith was nothing like Janet remembered. She was lovely. She wore her shining brown hair in a stylish blunt cut; she was athletic and obviously naturally thin. Her appeal wasn’t fleeting; she would always turn heads. Janet couldn’t believe it was the same woman she’d seen slinking off mornings a few years ago. Maybe she had been transformed by the power of Dave’s love for her. When Meredith shook her hand, Janet held it uncomfortably long, then reached out to pinch Meredith’s arm, to test that her flesh was real. Meredith jerked her hand away, eyed Janet, but then laughed. An easygoing girl, the kind who fits herself in anywhere and easily belongs.
Janet avoided speaking to Meredith after that. But when they were both in the lounge, Janet couldn’t help but register the fact. She listened for Meredith’s voice over all others, or for the mention of her name in gossip. She found herself skulking outside the nurse’s office. She parked two spaces beyond Meredith’s car so she would need to walk by it twice a day. She chose the pasta because Meredith chose the pasta; likewise, the meatloaf, the pizza, the wet ham for her salad. In the small, sallow fitness room at school, Janet watched Meredith StairMaster, mesmerized by the shifting apples of her ass, Janet’s mouth shamefully agape.
One day Meredith walked into Janet�
��s room during a prep period and slid into a front-row desk usually occupied by her worst student, the quiet flutist.
“It seems like you’ve been following me,” Meredith said, serene as a cat.
What balls, Janet thought. She found it difficult to speak. She could only open and close her mouth silently. “I’m not,” she finally croaked.
“Look,” Meredith continued kindly but firmly, “I’ve only heard things, so forgive me if I’m out of line. But I’m married.” She added, “To a man.”
Janet would have laughed had she not almost sobbed. She couldn’t explain that her obsession with Meredith stemmed from the need to know what Dave truly desired, or why it wasn’t her. There had to be a clue.
Janet recovered slightly. “I know you’re married. I know him.”
“Oh?” Meredith said brightly, sitting up in her chair. “How do you know Dave?”
Janet prepared herself for the mayhem, but Meredith’s inviting smile stalled her. She should be suspicious. I should be a threat. Janet felt powerless. She gasped slightly. She couldn’t do it. And she couldn’t believe she couldn’t do it.
Meredith covered for her. “He was the weatherman—that’s how.”
“You mean meteorologist,” Janet said, trying to reprimand her. Janet would never make that mistake.
“Oh, shame on me. He was the meteorologist.” She laughed it off easily. “Now he gives motivational speeches.” She beamed, as though unaware that the teachers talked endlessly about her locally famous husband. She probably was unaware. She was the kind of blessed person to whom love, happiness, family, security, confidence, beauty, were just what came with normal old life. She’d probably been told to expect it all.
“I saw him motivate once,” Janet riddled quietly to herself. It was all she could muster. She wanted to curl up under her desk.
Then Meredith leaned in conspiratorially, said, “I know he’s no movie star, but he had fans. Women writing letters. Waiting outside the station. He had this neighbor once. He said—oh, I can’t,” she said, dissolving into giggles.
