“Stretch marks. You know, that’s what you get from babies,” she said.
“I know.”
She shrugged and stepped into me, to stop me from looking at her. Putting her arms around me, she strained up on her toes to kiss my neck, pressing God’s blessing against me.
Seducing Bernie
Meda
It was like trying to get a priest to seduce me. I had to take off my clothes and offer myself to him to make him do anything. His hands were shaking when he touched me, he was that nervous. Physically, he wasn’t like a little boy—not all over anyway—just what I had seen before, that he was so thin and he didn’t have much body hair. In the only place that mattered, he wasn’t anything like a little boy.
Him being so tall was awkward, but once we were on the bed so I wasn’t getting a crick in my neck kissing him, it was nice. A lot of guys, you get this feeling that they’re rushing to get somewhere, but even though his lip had to be bothering him, he kissed me like it was the one thing he wanted. That’s how he was about everything, and once he got over being nervous, he was comfortable. He had this way of looking into my face to see what I thought about what he was doing, not like he was unsure, but because he liked to.
I never have been happy with my body since I had Annadore. I didn’t personally mind being heavier or the stretch marks, but I didn’t like wondering what someone else was going to think about it. It was like Bernie didn’t even notice. “You are so soft,” he said while he was kissing my belly. It was my least favorite part of me, the part I thought was still really fat from Annadore, but when I mentioned it, he just said, “One of us has to have some padding. Two skinny people in bed are dangerous and sad, like lawn chairs having sex.”
I laughed and he smiled at me, finally relaxed a little. When we got right down to it, I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. I was going to give him a condom out of the box in my nightstand, but he had one in his jacket pocket. He never even asked, he just got it out and put it on very neatly, so I guessed he’d done it before. That was a relief, because that would have made it too weird.
He was so polite about the whole thing, right down to the condom. I never thought about how there might be good or bad manners when it comes to sex. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder how your own manners are, like when you meet someone with good table manners. Later you try to remember, were you talking with your mouth full? Did you have your elbows on the table? I can’t even remember if any guy ever offered to use a condom before, let alone used one without me having to ask.
As much as he liked to talk, he was the quietest guy I ever had sex with. I wasn’t even sure how close he was, until he grunted really quietly and then rolled off of me. He didn’t have that sleepy, stunned look a lot of guys have after sex, either. Mostly he looked relieved. He shook his wrist to bring his watch around to read it.
“You have somewhere else to be?” I asked. He got red when he saw I’d caught him at it.
“I have a meeting at two. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. It’s too cold for this anyway,” I said to let him off the hook.
He got up and went into the front room to finish getting dressed, where at least it was a little warmer from the gas stove. When one of the heating guys came in to borrow the bathroom, Bernie was standing next to the stove buttoning his shirt up and tucking it in.
“How’s it going?” Bernie asked.
“It’s going good, Mr. Raleigh. We ought to be done this afternoon.” The guy actually took off his hat.
Sometimes Bernie paid so much attention to what he said and did that it was scary. Other times he seemed unaware, like right then, getting dressed in the front room, talking to that guy. I felt like his mistress, and he didn’t have any idea what it looked like, or he didn’t care.
“I’m having dinner tomorrow night at my aunt’s house. Would you like to go? You don’t have to decide now.” Bernie said it like he was worried I would say no.
I said yes, because I didn’t know why I always had to put up with my family embarrassing me. Let his family embarrass him for a change.
Sexual Favors
When I went into the bathroom to try to make my hair and tie behave, Miss Amos came in from wherever she’d been while—ouch, while I was having sex with her granddaughter. Where had she been? She stood in the doorway, watching me fix my tie.
“What are you doing here?” She sounded angry, and I had to reconsider my assumption that she liked me.
“I just came to see Meda, Miss Amos.”
“I know why you’re here. I know all about you.”
“I’m not Holofernes,” I said, hoping she would remember the conversation. She scowled at me and I saw she remembered, but maybe had a different idea about what it meant. “I’m not the enemy, Miss Amos.”
“No? Then what is this? What is this?” I wasn’t sure what she was asking, because it didn’t seem to be a rhetorical question. “You’re turning her into a whore.” She raised her hand and I saw she was holding my wallet. Meda had left it on the coffee table.
“Don’t say that. She’s my girlfriend,” I said, trying not to laugh at the idea that I was purchasing Meda’s sexual favors.
“Lying down with the enemy.” She pressed the wallet into my hand, but her anger seemed to have subsided.
“I brought a present for you.” I reached into my jacket pocket for it.
She smiled, her anger forgotten.
I left Meda’s house and drove to my meeting, not sure of anything. Before my epiphany, I had been thinking about the man who was the head librarian when I was a kid. For all I knew he still was, but when I was little he was already middle-aged, so it was more likely he was retired or maybe dead. If you didn’t make any noise and returned your library books on time, he might never look at you, engaged as he was in studiously stamping your card, or shelving books. Now that I know more about the world, I think the odds are high that he was gay. In a town that small, he could have been as gay as the day was long and it wouldn’t have mattered. He would never have had a date or a boyfriend or a lover. He would have gone on leading his quiet life: walking to and from work, living alone, eating his lunch with a book in his hand.
That was the thing that made me happy working at the library, when I hadn’t been happy anywhere else: the calm. Meda was a force of wholesale destruction of calm.
Not a Fluke
Meda
It wasn’t a one-time fluke, which was what I expected. I figured it would be one time and then it would be over. The next day, when I went to work, I expected Bernie to be embarrassed and trying to avoid me, but he wasn’t. Instead, right there in broad daylight, he asked me if I’d like to go to his bedroom, and gave me what I guess was his come-on look.
“Am I still on the clock? Are you paying me to have sex with you now?” I said to yank his chain.
“No, whatever time we spend in bed, you’re going to have to make up. Maybe you’ll have to stay late or skip lunch.”
So I let him lead me down the hall and hoped that Aunt M. wouldn’t come looking for me. That second time, he had another condom out of a box in his nightstand drawer. It was funny to think about him putting one in his pocket before coming out to my house, because if you’d asked me, I never would have guessed he was thinking about anything like that. Later when I was changing the sheets on the bed, I checked and saw that it was a new box. Just two condoms missing.
He was still polite, even when he wrapped my hair around his fist, and pulled my head back to kiss my throat. I think he did it to see if I would let him. I knew if I said stop, or gave him a look that said stop, he would. Also, he wasn’t finicky, although I was kind of sweaty. He didn’t seem to think there was anything dirty about the human body. I had figured he was the sort of person who showered right after sex, but instead he lay back next to me and talked, asked about Annadore and about me.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I like that you’re giving
me the benefit of the doubt of not thinking I’ve already grown up to be what I am,” I said. He laughed.
“You never stop having a chance to grow up to be something. I wanted to grow up to be a librarian, but now I’m not sure.”
“So, what do you want to be?”
He was quiet for a long time, rubbing my shoulder, looking up at the ceiling. Then he rolled over and put his face into my hair, said he didn’t know.
I wanted to tease him a little, so when he was getting ready to go back downstairs and gave me a kiss, I said, “You’re going back to your office for the rest of the day with cunt-breath? You don’t want to go brush your teeth for five minutes?”
He laughed and said, “No, but thanks for not messing up my hair.”
In my secret life I’m a high priestess. I live in a stone temple in an oasis out in the middle of a terrible desert. People come to me for advice and the days are filled with singing, dancing, sacred rituals, and sacrifices. I read this book in grade school about a priestess who was reborn after she died. When she died, the other priestesses went out and found her in her new self and brought her back to the temple to teach her how to be a priestess again. She never had a name. Her name and her soul were eaten up by the gods of the temple.
When I get tired of my real life, of being me, I close my eyes and go to that other life. I wear a heavy black robe and stand on cold stone floors in front of strange altars. All of my life is ritual, a road laid out in front of me, not this jumble of things I never seem to have a chance to plan out. In my secret life I don’t end up with a baby I didn’t expect and that I don’t know what to do with. I don’t have a crazy mother and an ex-boyfriend who won’t give me a dime for the baby.
That was what I almost told Bernie about what I wanted to be. I didn’t think he would make fun of me, but I was afraid if I told anyone, it would stop being my secret life. I wouldn’t have another life, because someone else would know about it. I’d just have this one.
Of course, in the book, that priestess didn’t get to keep her neat life. A wizard came across the desert and confused everything. Then an earthquake destroyed the temple, and the priestess had to run away. I suppose that’s the way life is.
Raleigh Family Patriarch
Aunt Ginny
The first thing I noticed about Meda was that Bernie didn’t slump when he was with her. Clearly she was trying to be on her best behavior, too, because she said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Raleigh.” I didn’t want to make things awkward, so I played along as though we’d never met. Then we stepped out of the foyer into the parlor, and I saw Bernie in the lights.
“Bernie! Your eye and your cheek. All of you. What happened?” I was honestly surprised at how such a good boy managed to find so much trouble.
“It’s nothing,” he said, and tried to turn away from me a little, to keep me from looking at him too closely.
“It is something. Your poor eye looks terrible.” I reached out, wanting to hug him, but then I saw the bandage on his hand. “Shame on you.”
“You’re blaming me for getting beat up?”
I squeezed his hand then, and he winced and looked shocked that his harmless old aunt had hurt him. “Didn’t our Savior say to turn the other cheek? It doesn’t look as though you did that.”
Meda hid a smile behind her hand, but she tried to defend him.
“He meant well, anyway, Mrs. Raleigh.” She shook her head, just the way I think a girl ought to when she loves a boy but is exasperated with him. Seeing that, I let it pass and we went in to dinner.
We had nearly finished our entrees when I looked at Bernie’s plate, and saw how little he’d eaten. “You need to eat more, dear,” I said to him.
“I’m not very hungry.” He hunched over his plate defensively.
“You’re never hungry. You’re anorexic,” Meda said.
It struck me as just the thing I had been concerned about. I simply hadn’t thought of any way to talk about it with him.
“I don’t think men can be anorexic,” he said.
“That’s a myth. Anyway, it’s not going to make you invisible,” Meda said.
“Now you’re accusing me of wanting to be invisible?”
“I think putting on a little weight would be good if you intend to take up boxing,” I said. I was ashamed of him for that, but he surprised me by smiling at Meda.
“Actually, the invisibility worked in my favor in the fight. He never saw it coming. Hey, is this some kind of intervention?”
“He doesn’t like being so tall. That’s why he doesn’t want to eat,” Meda said.
“I am sitting right here unless I’ve finally managed to make myself invisible.” Bernie was a bit annoyed, but he seemed so much livelier. In the past he would have let us talk across him.
“He even lies about how tall he is. How tall are you? Not six-six. Six-nine?” Meda asked.
Bernie mumbled under his breath what I believe was an extremely offensive word.
“He’s closer to seven feet,” I said. Bernie scowled. “He was only an average baby, maybe smaller than average. Right at six pounds, I think. Such a little sweetie, too. Born with a full head of hair. Little dimples in his—”
“This is not the part of the evening where we look at naked baby pictures,” Bernie said, and seemed pleased when we laughed.
“You see how dictatorial he is now that he’s the Raleigh family patriarch.” I wondered if he would return to his usual deference. He frowned at us, and ate a few more bites of his dinner. Meda winked at me.
“Are there naked baby pictures of Bernie for me to look at?”
“No, there aren’t,” he said.
There were, but I chose to cede the battle at that point. I liked Meda a great deal. She had the sort of wickedness that is essential for a truly beautiful girl. No one could stand a girl as nice as Meda was beautiful.
“Now, tell me about your little girl, Annadore,” I said. Bernie was so relieved to have the conversation move away from him that he cleaned his plate.
Battle Souvenir
Meda
It was a bad habit to get into, but I went to work early to catch Bernie in bed. I knew he was going to try to talk me into getting in bed with him, so first thing I took the picture out of my apron pocket and handed it to him. With his black eye fading and his lip healing, he smiled when he saw it.
“Did you give this to my grandmother?” That’s what she’d told me. He nodded. “Why would you give her something like that? Where in the hell did you get that?”
“His lawyer brought it to me when he came to tell me that Ray was suing me.”
“He’s suing you?”
“Not anymore. I gave it to your grandmother to make her feel better.” He tried to hand it back to me, but I shook my head. I didn’t want to see it again. I definitely didn’t want it in my house.
“How is that going to make her feel better?” I said.
“Because she feels badly that he didn’t suffer any consequences for what he did. I thought she might feel better if she knew that he’d been punished a little.”
It annoyed me how he could lie there buck naked and look so nice, so damned sincere. I’d been ready to say something mean about him being a show-off, wanting to look like some kind of hero, but he was serious. He thought it would make Gramma happy to know that Ray got his jaw broken. I bet it did, too, but I didn’t want to let him off the hook that easily. I wasn’t like Gramma. I couldn’t let something like that make me happy, because it’s no good getting ideas like that about justice.
“You could sit down. You don’t have to keep standing there looking indignant.” He patted the edge of the bed. I wasn’t going to get anything out of him. He looked down at the picture and smiled a little wider.
“You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you?” I said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“I thought you didn’t have a mean bone in your body.”
“I don’t. I have a mean r
oll of quarters.” The way he grinned at me I had to leave. He was so cute I knew I was going to end up in bed if I stayed.
“Are you mad at me?” he called after me.
Some Crappy Eliza Doolittle Scenario
I think Meda was just pretending to be mad about the picture of Ray Brueggeman, but when she came to the study later in the afternoon, she was definitely angry. She came in without knocking and stood at the corner of my desk until I told Celeste to leave. As soon as Celeste was out of the room, Meda said, “Your little bitch assistant needs to learn to keep her mouth shut.”
“Whoa,” I said, like she was a runaway horse.
“My aunt asked me about that stupid Hall of Fame dinner. I wasn’t even going to tell her about it, because I didn’t want to get into it with her. Three guesses who told her.” I didn’t need the three guesses and she didn’t give me a chance to make them. “It’s bad enough I have to put up with everybody thinking I’m some kind of gold digger without her running her trap to everyone.”
“I’m sorry you’re upset.”
“I’m not upset. I’m royally pissed off is what I am.” Meda’s voice cracked and she squeezed the bridge of her nose. It dawned on me that she wasn’t merely angry.
“I didn’t realize it was a secret.” I had contributed to the problem. Celeste asked about the Hall of Fame and I answered truthfully.
“It’s not just that. I hate people talking about us.”
“I doubt there’s that much gossip going around about us.”
“That’s because you don’t have to go to the grocery store or the Laundromat, or anywhere except your accountant’s office. That’s why you think that,” she said. The look she gave me implied I was of sub-par intelligence.
“I’ll talk to Celeste and take care of it. Is that okay?” I wasn’t about to let it turn into another argument. She nodded and didn’t look mad anymore, just troubled. When I took her hand, she let me pull her around the side of the desk and put my arm around her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention. Are you okay?”