“Oh, well, you’ll have to meet one of our other tenants, then.”
“Really? Who?”
“Mrs. LaGattuta. Lovely woman. She’s a nurse. Very active in the Audubon Society.”
“Oh,” I said. “Birds.”
“And then of course there’s Mr. Davis, right across the hall from you. He’s a lovely young man, a schoolteacher here in town. Has quite a green thumb, too. He’s planted a lovely garden out back with—”
“A teacher, you said? How about his wife or girlfriend? What does she do for a living?”
“Why, il n’est pas attaché,” she said, smiling.
“What?”
“He’s unattached.”
“Does his share of tomcatting, though,” Chadley called in from the kitchen. “I hope you like stuffed mushrooms, young lady.”
“They’re Chadley’s specialty,” Mrs. Wing said. “He sautées canned crabmeat. Then he crushes Ritz crackers with a rolling pin and . . .”
“Hi-Ho crackers, Marguerite. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work . . .”
Shut up out there, you little dwarf, I felt like yelling. “So this teacher guy likes gardening?” I said.
“Oh, yes. He’s kept us in vegetables and herbs all summer long. Has the time to spend on it, you know, with his summers free.”
“Has time to entertain a chippy or two every once in a while as well,” Chadley said. “Overnight, that is.” The ice cubes clinked in our gin and tonics as he hobbled toward us. I’d meant to move nonchalantly to a chair for one while he was in the kitchen, but the information about Dante had distracted me. He sat back down beside me.
“Yes, well,” Mrs. Wing smiled, “that’s fine with us. Chadley and I feel you young people have the right idea with your sexual revolution. Why, I was married to Mr. Wing for forty-three years, God rest his soul, and never once achieved an orgasm. Had never even considered clitoral stimulation until I was in my early seventies. Had I, Chadley, dear?”
“But we’ve made up for lost time, right, Honeydew?” Chadley said.
“Yes, Honeydew,” Mrs. Wing beamed. “This man is a precious gift.”
It occurred to me that Chadley and my grandmother were exactly the same age. If Grandma had ever heard about clitoral stimulation, I was pretty sure she had classified it as a mortal sin and dismissed it. She would die before she called someone “Honeydew.”
You were supposed to transfer the stuffed mushrooms onto your little Oriental plate with a porcelain-handled spatula. I hadn’t planned on any chippies. Chadley watched a mushroom shake on its way to my plate.
“What sort of work do you do, Dolores, dear?” Mrs. Wing asked.
Getting a job was a subject I’d let myself ignore during all my planning and plotting. “Worry about that once you’re settled,” I kept telling myself. But now I was settled. “Well, I’ve been working at . . . a photography studio,” I said. “But really, I’m an artist.”
Mrs. Wing’s hands flew up in delight. “How wonderful! What medium do you work in?”
“Etch-a-Sketch.”
Mrs. Wing cocked her head into a question. Chadley’s mushroom stood poised in front of his mouth.
“But mostly watercolors,” I added. “Paint them. Watercolors.”
“Ah, lovely,” Mrs. Wing grinned. “May we see your work some time?”
“Well, it’s pretty personal. I don’t expect to make a living at it or anything. I was thinking of filling out an application down at the Grand Union to tide me over.” I hadn’t been until that second, but it was picturable: me in a red smock, bagging groceries.
I chugged my drink, said no to another, and got up to go. Mrs. Wing was on her feet, too. “Now, dear, if you can sit down again for a minute, I’ll get the lease for you to sign before it slips my mind. You sit, too, Honeydew. They’re in the armoire, aren’t they?”
“Yes, my love.”
When she left the room, I reached for another mushroom, figuring if my mouth was full, I wouldn’t have to talk to Chadley.
His liver-spotted hand landed back on my leg and he started stroking. “You know,” he said. “I think the three of us are going to be fast friends. I have a sense for such things.” The hand brushed up and over toward my crotch.
I sat there, frozen, that mushroom stuck halfway down my throat.
“And we could have a private friendship as well, you and I,” he whispered. “I’m very partner oriented, you know. There are things I could teach you.” He leaned over and began to sniff at my hair.
“Visualize your solutions!” I heard Dr. Shaw say. “Picture an answer to the problem. Then make the picture real!”
I stared at that little hors d’oeuvre spatula. I picked it up and held the corner of it against the top of his hand, pressing down a little. It was my decision who I wanted touching me. I didn’t have to take this kind of shit from Jack Speight or his great-grandfather.
His hand paused for a second. Then it began kneading my thigh.
I put more pressure on the spatula, enough so that he flinched. “Cut it out, you old motherfucker.” I said it softly, met him eye to eye.
This time he stopped for real. “Let’s keep the party friendly, shall we?” he said. “For Marguerite’s sake?”
I let up on the pressure. I’d made a red indentation on his skin.
“Tight-assed bitch,” he mumbled.
“Old fart,” I mumbled back.
“Here we are,” Mrs. Wing said, reentering. “You sign right here.”
I wavered twice in the middle of my signature. My name on the lease was shaky, but legal.
Back in the basement, I flopped down on the bed and cried until my ribs ached. I could so have a normal sex life—as soon as I felt ready for one. “Sex is something shared between two consenting partners,” I heard Dr. Shaw say. “What Speight did to you out there in those woods was about violence—not sex. It was about degrading you.” That old goat upstairs hadn’t known me for five minutes before he’d started grabbing. Of all the nervy, degrading . . . Old motherfucker: he could put that one down in their stupid notebook of colloquial expressions. Honeydew my ass.
A normal sex life: I was ready for one. That was why I’d come all this way—why fate had put Eddie Ann’s pictures in front of me in the first place. I opened my dictionary and studied Dante’s Polaroids. Then I went to my drawer and took out the camisole. The silk material slid coolly against my skin. Did a tight-assed bitch wear one of these? I walked unsteadily toward the mirror.
My face was puffy and pink from the crying. The lingerie hugged the bulge around my middle. There I stood: fat, ugly Dolores with a new Halloween wig of a hairdo. Who did I think I was kidding?
Fred Burden wasn’t home at the outreach house when I called. Neither was Mrs. DePolito. “A bunch of them went bowling together,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Can I take a message?” I couldn’t tell if she was a new case aide or a new crazy person—someone occupying my old bed and eyeing Fred, seeing all those good qualities he had beneath that rocky complexion.
I opened the refrigerator and stared at the food I’d bought in town that morning: cottage cheese, tuna salad, Diet Pepsi, yogurt. Hopeful things. I blushed at my own idiotic hopefulness. I’d been a stupid fool to sign that lease, to give up all I had.
I reached past my purchases and took out the three beers the last tenant had left, opened one and poured it into the hula-girl cup. I sipped my way down the foam, drank, twisted open the second beer.
The hula woman’s eyes were closed and she was smiling coyly. I gave her breasts a little swing. Some man was supposed to think he was giving her sexual satisfaction by playing with them; some man, no doubt, had made the cup in the first place. “Don’t let them degrade you like that,” I told her. I drained the cup and turned it on its side, prying with a fork until the wire popped out. I slid off her ceramic breasts. Back at the photo lab, it was me who spoke up when they gave the dirty work only to the women. “Right on, Dolores!” Grace and Lydia would say when I
stormed toward the office . . . Now the hula girl had a caved-in chest. Mastectomies. Her shut-eyed smile transformed itself into something else: the smile of someone brave and knowing, someone whose pain had made her wise.
Unlike myself. Who sat in a basement wearing a dumb-ass hairdo and getting woozy on Pabst Blue Ribbons. I got up and paced, feeling that beer slosh in my stomach. I belched so loud it scared me.
I pulled off the camisole and got into my new flip-flops and my paisley muumuu—the one I’d worn since fat days. It wasn’t entirely true about my not learning from pain. Upstairs, I had stopped him—hadn’t just let him degrade me, the way I had with Jack. Or taken my anger out on a tank of innocent fish. I’d hurt him back a little, directly. Visualized a solution to my problem and then made it real. “Take a chance! Be gutsy!” Ma was always saying after she got out of the crazy hospital. Moving here might have been stupid, but it was gutsy, too. I was standing in my own apartment that I’d rented all by myself. Those were healthy things in the refrigerator. I had lost a hundred and twenty-six pounds.
In the kitchen I spotted that can of Easy-Off and got down on my knees. The directions said to wait an hour, to let the “foaming action” do the work for you. But work was what I wanted. I wished I had remembered to buy paper towels. I used a Brillo and the camisole instead, scouring and wiping away the grease of a thousand fatty meals. I only stopped once, to pull my hair back into a sweaty ponytail. Maybe I’d dye it back. Maybe I wouldn’t. Part of me hoped Fred Burden wouldn’t call back. I stepped back to admire the oven’s gleam but looked instead at what was in my hand. I’d turned that fancy underwear into a brown rag.
Outside it was cooler and a breeze dried my sweaty face. I walked clear of the house. Out back I found his garden.
He’d terraced it against a bank at the edge of the woods. The lowest row was a neat line of marigolds, then cucumber vines and summer squash, waxy-looking cabbages, glossy eggplants. The staked tomato plants were heavy with fruit in all stages of ripeness.
If Fred called back, I thought, I might not hear the phone.
A rusty Volkswagen rumbled up the driveway, radio blasting. The brakes made a watery sound.
He got out without turning off the engine and walked around back to have a look. Tank top and cutoffs, no shoes. He’d grown a beard since Eddie Ann’s pictures. I tried to tiptoe past, tried to calm my heart.
“Hey, whoa,” he said. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
His finger pointed at me. “New tenant. Basement apartment. Right?”
I nodded. “I’ve . . . I’ve been cleaning the stove.”
“I’m Dante. Live right across the hall from you.”
He seemed less real than his pictures. “I’m Dolores,” I said.
“Dolores,” he repeated. “Okay, great. Welcome.”
“I have to go wash up now,” I said. “I’ve been cleaning the oven.”
“Right. You just told me that.”
“Oh, I did? Sorry. I . . . I like your garden. At least I assume it’s yours, right?” I started toward the house on wobbly legs. Wearing my muumuu, for Christ’s sake!
“Hey, whoa. Could you do me a favor? Could you put your foot down on the gas so I can check something back here?” He patted the car’s roof. “Piece-a-shit automobile.”
The driver’s-side door was dented in. There was a hibachi on the passenger’s seat, a jumble of mail and newspapers on the floor. The radio was playing an oldie, one of my and Jeanette Nord’s old 45s.
“Yoo-hoo,” he said. “Now.”
“Now? The gas?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” I pushed my foot against the pedal. The whole car vibrated.
Our day will come
If we just wait awhile . . .
“Once more,” he said.
I made the engine roar. My body shook with its revving, and when it subsided, with the sound of that song—its promises of everlasting love and dreams made magic.
“Okay, fuck it,” he said. “Thanks.” He reached past my leg and turned off the key. The backyard went quiet.
“Mrs. Wing says you’re a teacher,” I said.
“Uh-huh. How about you? Professional oven cleaner?”
“I’m . . . an artist. I’m not that good, though. How about you?”
“I’m not that good either.”
I laughed. “What do you teach?”
“High school English. You know, The Scarlet Letter, who and whom, where to put the apostrophe. Hey, listen. I’m getting this brainstorm. You want to do some supper after you get cleaned up?”
“Oh, well, actually I have some more stuff to do—”
“Okay, I got it! Take your shower—take your time. I’ll go get us some wine. What goes with cheese popcorn, anyway—white or red?”
Nothing charming would come out of my mouth—only my stupid, nervous laugh. “You decide,” I said.
In the shower stall, my elbows kept whacking against the tin walls, calling up a rumble like thunder. He was real! We had a date! All of it was actually happening!
I began humming something. Quietly first and then I was singing.
Our day will come
If we just wait awhile . . .
It was something I’d never done before: sing in the shower. I sang and sang over the ringing telephone, Fred Burden returning my call. If I answered, I’d regain my life at the halfway house. Or worse, be demoted back to the wards at Gracewood—be fat and crazy again. I stayed under that hissing water until Fred gave up.
* * *
We sat at his glass-top kitchen table drinking wine from coffee mugs. Through the clear glass, I saw that my thighs were bigger than his.
“She and her husband were New Deal Democrats,” Dante said. “Henry Wing. He was pretty high up there in the Roosevelt administration.”
Her nonorgasm years, I thought to myself. Come to think of it, she’d started in late on her normal sex life, too.
“She sure loves antiques,” I said.
He sipped his wine and smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “and Chadley’s her favorite one.”
“Dirty old man,” I mumbled.
“That he is,” he laughed. “But harmless.”
He is now, I thought.
“By the way, I like your shirt,” he said.
I had put on jeans and my new “Mount Peculiar” T-shirt. His looking at it made me self-conscious and I pulled my knees up to my chest and stretched the shirt up over them. I’d bought a large out of habit.
“Get this one,” he said. “I was going out with this girl last spring who used to come over here? One afternoon, right after she leaves, Chadley shows up at the door—says he’d appreciate my letting him know if we might ever enjoy the pleasure of a third party in our lovemaking.”
“No, sir,” I said.
“I kid you not. ‘The pleasure of a third party’: like something out of the etiquette book.”
“Did Mrs. Wing know about it?”
“Oh, hell, no. This was strictly confidential, he assured me. The randy old bastard.”
He made it sound funny, turned Chadley into a cartoon. Dante was nothing at all like I’d imagined he’d be. Nothing like his old letters. If it wasn’t for those eyes, I’d have almost wondered if I’d aimed my new life at the wrong Dante.
“So you’re an artist, huh? What kind?”
There was a second where I almost told him the truth. But I was afraid I’d start with Etch-a-Sketching and end up with Dr. Shaw and reparenting and stealing Kippy’s letters. Instead, I wove him a lie about watercolors and disillusionment and a guy named Russ, a long-term relationship I’d just decided to move away from. “And my artwork was part of all that,” I said. “So I’d just rather not go into it.”
“A clean break,” he said. “I can respect that.” He took a sip of wine, watching me over the rim of his cup. Then he leaned forward and his smile turned into a long, soft kiss.
Supper was bakery bread and his garden vegetables, raw or just
barely cooked. We started with a perfect red tomato, cold from the refrigerator. He sliced it in half and salted both pieces, held out one. My thighs were jiggly from wine and kissing. The tomato tasted sexual.
After we’d done the dishes, he reached up and touched me on the shoulders. “So,” he said, “do you want to go to bed with me or shall we keep it at vino and veggies?”
I didn’t say anything.
“So anyway, what do you think of the New Deal?”
I shrugged.
“So anyway, your phone is ringing.”
“I hear it,” I said.
“We could call it ‘intercourse,’ keep it nice and dignified.”
Involuntarily, I cracked a smile. His hand reached down for mine; he glided his fingers back and forth in the spaces between my fingers.
Shared between consenting partners . . . I heard Dr. Shaw say.
“Or we could be very hip, very seventies, and call it ‘having sex.’ You know, lots of experimentation and position-switching. Chapter six in the manual.”
“You’re embarrassing me.” I laughed.
“Hey, I’ve got it! Let’s just make love. Lights off, candle on the bureau. If you give me a minute, I could probably find my old Roy Orbison album. Ever do it to ‘Blue Bayou’?”
I shook my head and took a sip of wine. The phone stopped ringing.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay what?”
“That last choice. I’ll take that one.”
“Aha,” he said. “Very nice. The lady opts for romance.”
In the bedroom, he kept kissing me as he slipped out of his clothes. I was too close, the room too shadowy, for me to study his body the way I would have liked. But when he undressed me—slowly, gently—I was grateful for the semi-darkness. My nakedness was what he was feeling, not seeing. With the lights on, he might have detected evidence: the stretch marks and puckers of fat whale Dolores, the girl whose body I had and hadn’t shed. If he could see me, he might stop.
He guided me down onto his bed and sat next to me. “Can I ask you something first?” he whispered.
I waited.
“That phone that was ringing? Was that your disillusionment calling you—the guy you moved away from?”