"Lonely?” he said. “Blaming everything on yourself again, Alice?"
Alice leashed Grammarcy, her eight-pound black poodle, and took the dog outside. "Yeah. If I'd just been little and cute, I'd be married to a doctor now. An orthopedist in Beverly Hills who'd spend his lunches with me. We'd have perfect kids."
"Hey, if I'd been perfect, I'd have married Ashley Judd.”
"It was bad for years. Why'd I stick it out so long?" Grammarcy, checking her pee-mail in every bush, pulled Alice along.
"You tell me.”
"Because I needed a man. I figured no other guy would willingly be climbed on, pooped on and barfed on by three snotty kids. Dirk sure didn't put up with it much.”
Grammarcy barked furiously at a passing dog.
"Grammarcy, quiet. And then there's my waist.”
"And don't forget Cleveland.”
"Hey! My butt was only the size of Oahu then,” she laughed. “The expansion to Cleveland proportions is new. Why does everyone think my butt is at the bottom of all my problems anyway?"
He snorted. "You said you stuck it out for a long time.”
She tried not to laugh.
"And Oahu's bigger," Billy went on, "So when are you going to get back up on the horse and—"
"Billy, stop! I'm not discussing this with you." Alice said. Grammarcy saw another dog and wrapped the leash around Alice's legs, barking madly.
"Alice?"
"When my kids go off to college, my house is clean, and I lose twenty-five pounds. About 2020, give or take.”
"Come on, Alice. You’re too young to stay alone forever."
Alice was in the middle of some East Coast swing-type dance moves with her leash. Those East Coast swing lessons had been such fun with Dirk before the kids came along.
"Look," Alice said. "The kids will scare away anyone who comes to the house now. If not, the mess will. It looks like Grandma's house."
"Ack! Not Grandma's! They had to dig her place out with a backhoe. Do you have possums nesting in the family room yet?"
"Probably. Under all the piles. Piles of boring papers to correct, humiliating monologues to rehearse, bills to pay, laundry to put away. Oh, and stinky piles of dirty dishes and old memories of Dirk."
"Memories, shmemories," Billy said. "You gotta toss the piles out wholesale.”
"The piles may go, but the memories won't budge. There're too many. Damn that asshole, dumping me into this rough dating market. Ugh. Dating is so impersonal. Whenever I'm anywhere near an eligible man, I feel like there's a barcode stuck on my back, a defective one.”
"Has Evan been taping messages to your back again?" Billy laughed.
"No, it's just the prospect of all those rejections. All that awkwardness.”
He laughed. "You need a fresh outlook, Al. Try some BrainClean. Remember? My patented invention. Wipes away unwanted memories in twenty seconds! Keeps them safe for two weeks for that final wallow, then sends them to hell! Call now and get two bottles for one low price of $9.95. And that's not all! Call in the next fifteen minutes and we'll personally send a nearly qualified medical technician to your house to perform a frontal lobotomy for you right on your own kitchen table! Absolutely free! You'll never remember anything again! Payment required before surgery. Batteries not included. Brain disposal $55,000. Side effects may include large cavities in skull, better social life, divorce. Lobotomy not applicable to residents of North Dakota, Washington, D.C., and Arkansas. Consult your girlfriend before use."
Alice hooted with laughter as Grammarcy barked and pulled the leash again. Step-together-step, twirl, and Alice stepped under the leash, right into a pile of dog poop.
* * *
Alice sat on her bed in her sweats grading papers. In the background, a TV cooking show featured a lot of cute banter from a chatty blond female and her almost-handsome chef friend preparing stuffed eggplant in a homey kitchen.
Her brother's question came back to her as she went over her day. No, she couldn't picture herself seriously dating either Joe with the goofy hair and Birkenstocks or obnoxious, married Luu with the smoker's breath. But the discussion with Joe had pointed up her dearth of knowledge of current terminology and technology for the whole, er—sex act. Were there refresher courses? It had been a long time since her crazy college days.
And romance novels didn't help, discussing the whole thing in terms of his “male member,” and her “pleasure bud.” The governess and the duke never mentioned the best positions to maximize her orgasms or drive him crazy. Cosmopolitan probably did better than that, but if Alice ever bought an issue, her eleven-year-old daughter Kate would surely find it. At forty-one, Alice felt twice as prudish as her mother had ever been, despite having lived through women's lib, the seventies, some one-night stands, two serious boyfriends, and a fifteen-year marriage. Or maybe because of the marriage.
She looked around the room at the piles of Dirk's old magazines, papers and college notebooks and the kids' schoolwork. Damn Dirk. Thoughts of him made her stomach hurt. Her mother swore by warm milk for stomachaches. Grandma had prescribed graham crackers. Her sister used Elavil for everything. But Alice meditated.
She lay back, closed her eyes and took three deep breaths. Her own sweet little meditation house appeared with its giant sofa facing a huge bay window. Outside, the wide wrap-around porch full of rocking chairs overlooked a giant rose garden and green lawn spreading down to the Potomac. The Grand Tetons rose snowy and purple on the left, and the Pacific Ocean stretched away to the right, palm trees swaying in the breeze. The porch was always stocked with trays of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and lemonade, served by young Hawaiian beefcake in grass skirts and smiles.
But today, the porch suddenly rose up to become a high circus stage, and the roses became thousands of rowdy, tough onlookers, cigarettes hanging from their rose petal lips, thorny tattoos on their hammy arms. She was up there discussing calla lily pollination on her tiny shrinking platform as the restless rose crowd grumbled vengefully at her about some unknown plant crime. Eating salad? They started flinging mirrors and avocadoes at her. These crashed green and silver around her while the circus elephants, horses and poodles performing on three revolving stages grew larger, changed hue, and went berserk. Dodging avocados and glass, she was suddenly attacked by a legion of wicked black Indian goddesses riding menacing blue animals, wielding huge, serrated swords and five-foot-long phalluses right at her. Caught between a particularly nasty mastodon and a ferocious indigo poodle, Alice tripped over a large phallus and fell headfirst into the angry mass of thorny-armed rose people, who pushed her, bumping and sliding, slashed and bleeding, down the hill toward the violently rushing waters of the evil river.
Alice awoke, gasping for breath. She ran to the kitchen to find her favorite drug. None behind the school lunch tickets or in the vegetable drawer under the moldy carrots. And Evan had evidently raided her desk drawer. But the secret pocket in the clothes hamper held pay dirt. Score!
With a happy mouthful of dark chocolate truffle bar, she lugged the laundry upstairs. And clarity hit. She'd never, ever discussed her private body parts. Not with her mother. Nor her sister. Nor a cousin. Nor her girlfriends. Yikes. Her mother and sister wouldn't touch the subject, literally or figuratively. Even her best friend Melissa had resorted to code, referring occasionally to “the vicuña” on good days and “the Visigoth” during her period. Alice had ignored this whole topic completely, and didn't really plan to discuss this with her daughter Kate, either. Thank God for the school health course. So no way was she about to mourn her sad, dry vagina on stage. No way, no how, no, Ma’am. Never mind the job situation.
Alice picked up five books off the boys' bedroom floor. She realized the P-word got about as much play as the V-word at their house. The boys had “weenies”, and Alice only called Dirk “Dickface” in their hearing, not “Penishead,” which he so richly deserved. As she sat on her bed and reached in her bag for another stac
k of tests, something clattered to the floor.
The Venus Monologues DVD with its title in virulent pink. Venus, virgins, and vaginas, oh my. Well, V stood for many things: vast, variegated, voluminous, vivacious, vociferous, vanquished, volatile, voracious, vindictive, violet, velvet, venal, vixen, voluptuous, virile, vibrating… It was sort of a sensual, lurid letter, really: the first in vile, the second in evil. It brought back things she used to do with Dirk—or wished she'd done. Acts involving Vs were probably all over for this lifetime. For Alice, now the equivalent of a dried up spinster, V was mostly for vacuum cleaner, vexing, vestige, and varnish.
She slid the salacious DVD under the bed so a kid wouldn't mistake it for Lord of the Rings and graded papers. But the giant pink V and M on the DVD case still mocked her. V. M. her eye. There could simply be no V. M. in her house, in her life. Not now. No way. No how. Then a TV ad for a new snack food, cheesy pigs in a blanket called “Velveeta Minidogs,” made her giggle. After grading ten more tests, she lay down on the carpet to stretch and hit the damned DVD with her elbow.
Okay. Fine. Whatever. It went smoothly into the player, as if greased. Hah. V. M. equaled the Vaseline Monologues. With pure clinical curiosity, Alice pressed PLAY.
In black satin tuxes and top hats, the female monologists cast a spell on their audience, and within five minutes, even Alice stopped doing stomach crunches and listened. Every aspect of womankind was covered. Menarche. Menopause. Childbirth. Dowries. Arranged marriage. Juggling work and home. Peeing sitting down. Wife beating. Human trafficking. Bad dates. All were explored in the poetic, hilarious, and moving script. She was disconcerted, she was riveted, she was aghast. She put her head under a pillow once and fast-forwarded through one part. A piece about having sex in the oddest of places had her laughing out loud when the front door slammed.
"Hi, Mom!" It was Jamey, her nine-year-old.
She ripped the DVD from the machine and shoved it and the script in the wastebasket on her way downstairs. She threw together snacks for a marathon afternoon, then ran to the bathroom, stopping short at the sight of her tummy bulge in the mirror. Cursing looming menopause and twenty-four-hour donut shops, she vowed to walk twice as far tomorrow and restart her diet.
But her stomach still hurt, and for once, neither donuts nor samosas were the culprit. Man, all that discussion of Venus in Maya's office must have brought it on—a full blown, batten-down-the-hatches, category-five period. But the bathroom vanity was empty. Three ibuprofen tablets and a real rag later, she left the house with kid in tow.
Author Bio
Amy Gettinger, a part-time community college ESL instructor, lives in her dream house in Orange County, California underneath a very noisy eucalyptus windrow with her husband and her two piteous poodles. For fun, she walks the beach cliff path at Laguna Beach. Her blog Raucous Eucalyptus, Piteous Poodles, is at amygettinger.com.
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Amy-Gettinger/e/B00S9Y99II/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1425584079&sr=8-2-ent
Acknowledgments
A big thank you to everyone who read Roll with the Punches in its infancy: Lenore Weir, Lisa Henderson, Jean Jenkins, Therese Gilardi, Rita Holcomb, Jan Buckner, Donna Brigman, Dora Nur, Dr. Gordon Grannis, Peter Gettinger, and anyone else who was brave enough to tackle it, and for all their valued feedback and enthusiasm. Also a huge thank you to my family, who put up with all those frozen dinners when I wrote all day. (Writing is such a great excuse not to cook.) Thank you also to Daniel Cox, Carole Oldroyd, and Lisa Henderson for help with cover art.
Thanks to my mother and father, who dealt with Alzheimer's in an intense form. And many thanks to everyone who supported them through that period.
And of course, thanks to Posy Mortem, Randy Stadler, the Salisbury Roller Girls, the Los Angeles Derby Dolls, the Orange County Roller Girls, and derby girls everywhere for all their spunk and determination to bout, as well as their invaluable demonstrations of feminine power and skill that inspired the skating scenes in this book.
Cover art with the help of Lisa Henderson @Do You Believe Photography
Disclaimer
This book is a work of fiction. All characters and situations are fictional. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Care was taken to create new, fictional derby names in the writing of this book. Any resemblance of fictional names of derby characters, teams, and leagues to real derby players, teams, or leagues in the U. S. is purely coincidental.
© 2015 by Amy B. Gettinger
ISBN: 978-0-9911548-0-7
The right of Amy B. Gettinger to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission from the author.
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