“That one spunk of a man,” she sighed.
“Hunk,” I corrected her, but neither of us cared much about semantics. I sat beside my grandmother eating foods so hot my mouth burned, and I almost wept from the pleasure of it all: the food, my grandmother, the dusty TV set spilling out words in Bob Barker’s smooth, silky voice. Food. House. Grandmother.
Good.
Wednesday, Oct. 19
I. Am. So. Ashamed.
“Wake up,” I hissed earlier this morning to the lump snoring beside me.
A grunt from beneath the covers.
“I said, wake up!”
“Wh-what?” The covers flew back and Barry scrambled out of bed, his naked penis swinging back and forth, as if unsure of which direction it wanted to go.
“Jay-Jay’s in the kitchen.”
We stared at each other, eyes wide.
“Mom?” Jay-Jay called, his footsteps pounding up the hall.
“Don’t come in!” I shouted. “I’m getting dressed.”
“You got the wrong kind of cereal,” Jay-Jay yelled back. “I said corn-flakes, not bran flakes. I’m not the one who—”
“It was on sale!” I rattled dresser drawers so Jay-Jay wouldn’t hear the sound of his father sneaking out of his mother’s bedroom window after a night of wild and desperate sex. Imagine the confusion! Imagine him thinking we might still love each other!
We don’t, of course. At least not in that way. But we still fuck. When either of us is lucky enough to be in a relationship, these sad couplings are supposed to stop. But they rarely do. It has little to do with love or pleasure or even sex and everything to do with the fact that Barry and I can’t let go. If we did, we’d have to face the terror of loving someone else again. So we see other people, we sleep with other people, we have relationships, but we never dip below the surface. As long as we’re secretly sleeping with each other, everything else is a lie. And this lie keeps us safe; it shields us from taking chances and risking love and finding out that maybe, just maybe, the divorce wasn’t the other one’s fault. Maybe it was a lot more about our own stuff than either one of us cares to admit.
Sandee can usually tell when I’ve been with Barry. She says I walk differently, heavier, as if I’m carrying a burden. “A very pleasant burden,” she says, “but a burden nevertheless.”
She didn’t notice today; she was too busy bitching about the guy who wooed and then insulted her at Simon & Seafort’s. Right after their appetizer plate arrived, he leaned suggestively forward and whispered that she’d be stunning if only she had bigger boobs.
“Can you fucking believe that?” It was just after eleven thirty and we stood in the alley behind Mexico in an Igloo, furiously smoking unlit Camel Lights while enjoying our first cig dig of the day. Neither of us smokes, but since the only way they’ll allow us out of the building is if we’re on a cigarette break, we keep packs of Camel Lights in our apron pockets. We’re experts at making these fake breaks last as long as possible, sliding our unlit cigarettes to our mouths and pretending to inhale. Whenever the dining room becomes unbearable, one of us mouths, Cig dig? and the other holds up her fingers, indicating how many minutes until our escape.
“I should have left right then and there, but I wanted to make it through to the clam chowder. Ever have it? There’s this taste that’s real distinct but kind of strange.”
“It’s Barry’s recipe,” I told her.
“Wow, no way!” Sandee paused for a moment, as if out of respect. “Then he tells me he knows this doctor who could fix my boobs for under five grand, he says this like he’s offering me a prize, so I look him in the eye and say, ‘Baby, I’m sure he could.’ When he goes to the bathroom I call over the waiter and order a bottle of two-hundred-dollar wine and five seafood and steak platters. Then I put on my coat and walk out.”
“Good for you.” I picked tobacco flecks out of my teeth.
“No,” Sandee sighed. “I shouldn’t have gone out with him in the first place.”
“Barry stopped over last night,” I said, as if to console her.
“You fuck?”
My mouth turned up in a guilty little grin.
“If Randall were around I’d fuck him.” She dropped her unlit cigarette in her pocket and wiped her mouth over her sleeve. “Then I’d kill him. Or maybe not. He had such tiny ears. I used to worry that if he ever needed glasses he wouldn’t have anything to hold them up. You can’t kill someone with ears like that.”
Sandee sighed and shook her head. “We can’t let go, don’t you see? We’re clinging to the ghosts of our dead husbands. Metaphorically speaking,” she added.
I stared at her.
She leaned toward me. “We’re both so busy fighting the corpses of our dead marriages that we’re half-dead ourselves. There’s no room for anything else—how can there be?” She stamped her heeled foot for emphasis. “You can’t love the dead and the living at the same time.”
I knew what she said was true. I had said the same thing to myself a hundred times. But hearing it out loud was startling. It was like hearing a nun swear.
“I can’t keep on like this,” Sandee said, more to herself than to me. “I’m so goddamned sick of sex. Some nights I want to cut off my vaggy, leave it in the room with the guy, and say, ‘Here, you wanted it so much, you take care of it.’ It’s just getting too hard.”
Amen, I thought, remembering the way Barry and I had clawed and pulled and bit, almost as if we were trying to destroy each other or, most probably, some part of ourselves. I stuck my gnawed cigarette in my apron pocket and followed Sandee back inside, weaving slightly as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. Right before we passed the bathrooms, she turned and laid her hand on my arm.
“Think I’ll ever love anyone again?” she asked, not a question but more of a challenge.
I stared into her face, her clear and pale complexion, her perfect cheekbones, her wide and too generous mouth, leaned forward, and pressed my lips against her forehead, a mother’s kiss.
“Sure you will,” I said in my most comforting voice, “I’m positive you will.”
It wasn’t until later that I realized it was myself I was really talking to.
When I got back home, I grabbed Killer’s leash and took her for a quick walk down by the inlet. It was just beginning to get dark, the sky an orangeish tint, the wind cold and sharp. I love late fall, love how thick and large the air feels, love the trees with their bare branches, love the way the frozen ground feels so much more solid beneath my feet. As soon as we reached the beach, I snapped Killer off the leash and let her run over the sand. During low tide, the distant water is silver blue, the mud flat gleaming and damp. Much of the coast around Anchorage is surrounded by a strange, thick clay that smells of salt and old water and sucks at your feet and sometimes, though rarely, acts like quicksand.
There’s a story locals love to scare newcomers with about a man who got stuck in the mudflat out by Cook Inlet and, when rescuers tried to rescue him by helicopter, was pulled in half. I don’t know if that story is true, but I do know that a handful of people have died in the mudflats and that there have been times when it’s sucked me down to my knees and held me fast for a few seconds before letting me up with a loud, gurgling burp.
I always tell Jay-Jay to stay off the mudflats; I tell him it’s like quicksand; I tell him if I ever catch him with even one toe in the mud, he’ll be grounded until he leaves for college. But who knows what goes through his head, what small tidbits of advice and remarks and petty angers will stay with him, what he’ll remember and what he’ll discard. Having a child is the bravest thing I’ve ever done, braver than staring down a bear or encountering a horny moose during rutting season or trying to keep my head during an earthquake. No matter how much I love Jay-Jay, there’s no guarantee that it’s enough, that I’ll be able to keep him safe. There are so many risks! So many things that could go wrong! I could look away for a minute and in that instant, he could be gone.
O
f course, love is always like that. Or at least any kind of love worth having.
Tuesday, Oct. 25
“He’s here.” Sandee tapped me on the shoulder right as the lunch shift was heating up. Her face was flushed, her bangs frizzed across her forehead. “The Swedish god. He requested your station.”
“God?” I had just seated a table of argumentative lawyers and couldn’t remember if the bald guy with the pink tie had ordered Diet Coke or regular.
“The gorgeous guy with the big feet, you know, always wears high-topped sneakers? Shit, Carly, you have a pimple on your chin.” She reached out and rubbed at my skin, as if to erase it. The “god” looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place him.
“Carla,” he said heartily as I approached his table. “I was hoping you’d be here.”
“Can I start you off with something to drink?”
“Water’s fine. Can’t drink on the job. Too much dirt to sift through.”
“Construction?” I asked hurriedly. From the corner of my eye the lawyer with the big teeth was frantically waving me down.
“Anthropology.” The god stuck out his hand. “I’m Francisco.”
“Fr-Francisco?” Sandee was right, he did look like a god. His hair was lighter than mine, but he was tall enough that when he stood up to shake my hand I had to throw my head back to get a good look at his eyebrows, which weren’t all run together like some men’s. “But aren’t you Swedish?”
“Norwegian,” he laughed, and his teeth were so white. “I get that all the time. It’s an old family name, from the 1800s. My great-grandfather chased a woman down to Mexico…” He stopped for a moment and pulled a pair of smudged glasses out of his pocket. “Sure you want to hear this?”
I nodded and ignored the lawyers, who were whistling and stomping their feet. I stared at the god’s hands, which were weathered and capable.
“…and lived there the rest of his life, returning long enough to knock up my great-grandmother with my grandfather and burden him with a ridiculous Mexican name and…What’s wrong? Did I say something wrong?”
“Ask me my name, okay?”
“It’s Carla, right?”
“My whole name.”
“What’s your whole name?”
“Carlita.”
“No shit.” He whistled. “Wow, listen, I’ll bet we’re the only non-Spanish people with Spanish names in all of Alaska.”
“Yeah.” I looked at him with interest now that we had something in common. “Yeah, we probably are.”
He ordered a bean burrito with green salsa and then excused himself to take a call on his cell phone. I took care of the lawyers, who had decided to order a round of margaritas (“But don’t tell the boss, okay, hon?” the fat one said, his hand creeping up my thigh), and by the time I returned to Francisco’s table, he had been joined by two more men. He nodded but didn’t say anything the rest of his meal. He didn’t even leave a noticeable tip, so I was surprised when the hostess handed me a folded piece of paper.
“From that good-lookin’ blond guy,” she said, peering over my shoulder as I opened it. Carlita, my pseudo Spanish pal, give me a call sometime. We’ll eat hot food and drink Mexican wine. Francisco 555-4289.
“Nice handwriting,” she said. “You gonna call him?”
“No.” I crumbled the note and stuck it in my apron pocket.
“Of course you’re going to call him,” Sandee said during our last cig dig of the day. I was covered with salsa and reeked of tequila—the lawyers had gotten boisterous. “He’s smart, funny. For Christ’s sake, he’s a Swiss god.”
“Norwegian,” I corrected.
“Did you see his feet? They’re enormous. That means he has a big dick.”
“As if I care.”
“You do. Or at least you should.” Sandee fake-smoked in tense silence. Her own love life was a mess, but she felt it was her duty as best friend to boss me toward something better. “You’re parked on a cul-de-sac when you’ve got a whole highway in front of you,” she finally said.
“Francisco’s a highway?”
“You know what I mean.” She stabbed her unsmoked cigarette out on the side wall of the lounge. “He’s a possibility. How can you turn away from that?”
I couldn’t explain the fear that clutched my stomach when I thought of doing it all again: the anxious first date, followed by the worry that there wouldn’t be a second date, followed by the anticipation and worry of the first night of lovemaking, and then the rushed two or three months after that, when all I would think about would be him.
Then the inevitable moment I looked over at him and noticed that his ears were crooked or that he used coasters (coasters!) when he set a glass on the coffee table and something inside of me would come crashing down and I would realize with a start, with a deep sense of betrayal, that he wasn’t quite perfect after all. Then, like dominos falling over, his faults and weaknesses, his bad habits and insecurities, would slam down over my head. Worse still would be the realization that he would be looking at me in the same way, seeing all of my own worst traits and failings.
And then would come the talks, the long, agonizing nights spent talking instead of making love, when we would pour out our doubts and decide if we should call it quits or bravely navigate past this rough patch. If we made it through all of that, we would settle down to a life of steady comfort, interlaced with occasional bouts of mad passion, along with a couple of hefty fights where we would throw things and blame the other for all of our faults.
I didn’t have the energy to do it all again. I wanted to bypass the beginning and settle down in the middle. I wanted to know the ending to all of a man’s stories and sit beside him eating sandwiches and know that he’ll always say, “Are you sure this is mayonnaise and not Miracle Whip?” and be certain that we will always have sex on Saturdays and Tuesdays. It angered Sandee when I talked this way because she felt similar. Maybe a lot of women do, once they reach their midthirties and have played all the games and worn the sexy lingerie and had multiple orgasms and multiple partners and multiple heartbreaks. After a while an orgasm is an orgasm is an orgasm, and if truth be known, it’s easier to invest in a good vibrator and let your fingers do the walking. Love is too complicated. It takes too much effort. It’s something we all want, but we want it our way.
What’s on my kitchen table
Gas bill: DUE!
Phone bill: PAST DUE!
Visa bill: WAAAAYY OVERDUE!!
Chatty Cathy torso
Francisco’s phone number, crumbled into a tight ball
Chapter 5
Thursday, Oct. 27
JAY-JAY WAS IN A QUIET MOOD when I picked him up from school this afternoon, his face pale, a smudge of green marker trailing across his cheek.
“Science sucked,” he said. “Mr. Short wouldn’t let us look at a book of medical mysteries ’cause one of the women didn’t have a shirt on. Duh! We’ve all seen cable. Like we don’t know about boobs.”
I cleared my throat, worried I would have to throw out my Let’s Talk about Sex spiel, but that was all he said. The minute we walked in the door, Killer Bee charged us from the hallway and Jay-Jay yelled something about corn.
“I don’t think I have any.” I kicked off my shoes and sank down on the couch. “Are peas okay?”
“No, an ear of corn. For Halloween.”
I had completely forgotten about Halloween. “You want to be corn? Isn’t that kind of, I don’t know, different?”
“Exactly,” Jay-Jay screamed. “No one will get it. They’ll think I’m a superhero when really I’m a farm product.”
After dinner we loaded ourselves into the car and headed over to the fabric store, where I asked the middle-aged saleswomen in my most polite waitressing voice where I might find a pattern for a stalk of corn.
“This isn’t the supermarket, dear,” she said.
“An ear of corn,” I repeated. “For Halloween.”
“We don’t do fruits and vegetables
.” She peered over her glasses. “It upsets people.”
I decided I would make my own pattern. After all, I was an artist—how hard could it be? I bought yards of bright green fabric plus swatches of yellow for kernels and curtain cords for the tassels. As soon as we got home, I spread the material over the not-so-clean carpet, dog hairs sticking across the sides.
“Better sew fast,” Jay-Jay said. “We’re supposed to come in costume tomorrow.”
“Halloween’s days away.” I pinned a long skinny piece with a short fat one.
“Mr. Short wants to spread out our sugar influx. He says candy at school and candy after school will make our brain cells sag with despair.”
“Mr. Short sounds like a smart man,” I said.
“He flunked out of Harvard,” Jay-Jay said. “He said it’s better to flunk out of a top-notch school than graduate from an inferior place.”
“Don’t,” I warned, pointing the scissors in his direction. For a moment, he had sounded exactly like Laurel.
“What? All’s I said was Mr. Short says it’s better—”
“Put your arms up,” I ordered, measuring the badly sewn pieces against his back; they fell short by at least three inches. “Think you could hunch over for the whole day?”
Jay-Jay snorted with disgust and stomped off to take a bath. An hour later, after sewing a malformed corn kernel to my pant leg, I called Sandee, who was home from work faking a cold.
“Hello?” she said in a nasal tone. Then she coughed twice.
“Cut it out, it’s me.”
“Carla?”
“Jay-Jay wants to be an ear of corn for Halloween and I can’t do it.” My voice was dangerously close to tears. “I forgot about Halloween and he needs it by tomorrow, did you hear me? Tomorrow!”
Dolls Behaving Badly Page 5
