Julia's Chocolates

  Click.

  We had had several other Psychic Nights in the past few weeks. One had been called Organizing Your Orgasms, another had been called Dedicating Your Desires. Tonight’s Psychic Night was titled Your Hormones And You: Taking Over, Taking Cover, Taking Charge.

  I thought it sounded splendid.

  “Hormones have ruled us forever!” Lydia scolded me as we worked that morning, the early morning sun cutting through the slats of the chicken house. I glanced at the chicken she held in her hands. She shook the poor bird in her exuberance, and I saw the chicken’s eyes pop in fright. “Isn’t that right, Hilga?” Aunt Lydia yelled at the chicken. She is usually so gentle with her ladies.

  “Too much estrogen has robbed us of our inner souls. Hormones flow and fluctuate and dive and soar and make us go damn, damn crazy. I can hardly stand looking at Stash when I’m having a hormone rush. He walks in the door and I feel the need to throw my jam at his head.”

  I followed Aunt Lydia through the barn. She let the lady go, and we heard a very grateful-sounding cluck cluck. Hilga’s chicken friends gathered around her and cluck-clucked sympathetically. “Lydia’s off her hormonal rocker! Hormonal rocker! Hormonal rocker!” I could almost hear them say.

  “Hormones take over our thoughts and actions. We must learn to control them!” Lydia jabbed a pitchfork into a bale of hay. I was surrounded by chickens, all clucking contentedly now that Aunt Lydia had released their comrade.

  “Hormones are a nuisance,” Aunt Lydia announced, picking up eggs from underneath squawking, resting, clucking chickens. “But with yoga, lots of walking, good sex, and a little pot, we can be in control. Of course, there’s other ways to be in control of your hormones, but I’ll save my womanly secrets for tonight!”

  One chicken pecked at her hand. She grabbed that chicken’s beak quick as a wink. “Now you listen here, Marie Jane, I’ll have none of that pecking. I’ve talked to you about this before.” She kissed that tiny beak, then moved on.

  “Women need to vent their problems and trials and tribulations and hormone-fluctuation levels with other women. Men are hampered by the fact that they have thingies which make them naturally selfish and self-centered and boorish and unthoughtful,” she declared, the chickens clucking at her raised voice. “Women, however, can do it all. Run companies, raise children, volunteer, tickle men’s teensies at night. Our work is NEVER done!”

  “So what time is Psychic Night?” I asked.

  “Seven o’clock, over at Lara’s.”

  “At Lara’s?”

  “Yes, at Lara’s. I talked to her yesterday. She did not sound joyful. When I see her I will undoubtedly be able to ascertain where her hormone levels have taken her!” Aunt Lydia reached down and petted several of the ladies, calling them Honey Claws and Sweetie Beaks.

  “Her husband is out of town at some minister’s convention or something where they pray and pray and pray. I hope all that prayer does not take away from his testosterone-driven libido! Women need a man who can put out and up when their hormonal levels allow the passion lurking inside to run free.”

  I grabbed a few more eggs. A chicken pecked me. I thought about men who can put out and up. I thought about one in particular and wondered how far he could put it up, then grabbed a few more eggs as my face grew a tad hot. The memory of the kisses he had given me at the mailbox that day and his continual invitations for another breakfast made me hotter.

  “Take these ladies, for example,” Lydia said. “If I don’t keep a few roosters around here, they get so uppity, so feisty. Every now and then they need to get laid.”

  I smothered a laugh, imagining the chickens at a bar, dressed to the teeth, but dressed sort of slutty, too, intent on having a one-night stand.

  “Like other females, they need to get their orgasms out! If they don’t, my ladies here start coming on to each other.” Aunt Lydia shook her head. “Can’t relate to that one myself. But if my ladies want a rooster around to satisfy their basic urges, good for them. They can have a rooster.”

  “You mean the chickens turn gay without a rooster?”

  “Damn straight they do,” Aunt Lydia said. “So I keep a few roosters around. The darn things cockadoodle doo all day, and I have come to believe it’s their way of strutting their stuff, strutting their manhood. If they were smart enough to realize that my ladies only want them for sex I don’t think they’d cockadoodle so loud.”

  I banged my head on the slanted roof, then looked behind a battered bookshelf. Sure enough, the ladies had hidden a hoard of eggs.

  “Now, you, Julia. You need a rooster in your life. A man just for sex, nothing else. Men are good for sex and money, Julia.” She looked under an old chair she had in the barn and grabbed four eggs. “But sometimes neither one is very good, so you have to take care of yourself. But if you can find a man who’s good to you and wants to tra la la at night, super. But for heaven’s sake, don’t marry them! Men are best in small doses.”

  She must have seen my body language, which said, Forgetaboutit. I don’t need a man in my life, they scare me to death.

  “Now don’t be like that, darlin’. They’re not all insane creeps. Most of them, but not all of them. Take Dean, for instance—”

  “No, no, please,” I said, flinching as a chicken pecked me on the hand. “Let’s not take Dean at all.” He was too tempting.

  “All right!” Aunt Lydia said, her voice startling a few of the ladies. “We won’t take him. But he would be a good candidate for a little sex now and then, and then you could send him on home. If you wanted to. He is one fine man, though, and big enough to warm a woman’s bed for years. Otherwise, with the exception of Dean Garrett, look for a man in small doses.”

  “Right, Aunt Lydia. Got it. A small-dose man is what I need.”

  “That’s exactly it! Have a lovely day, Agnes.” Aunt Lydia let the chicken fly from her arms, both pointer fingers straight up in the air. “You need A Small-Dose Man.”

  I went back to work while Aunt Lydia burst into song about A Small-Dose Man, rhyming as many words as she could. It had a country feel to it, until she burst into an operatic soprano. The ladies fluttered around her. Cluck. Cluck. Cluck.

  I might have kissed Dean a few times, but I was going to force myself to call it quits with him. I had to, I really did. And I would. As soon as I stopped having the time of my life.

  I kept my head hidden by my hair, bending extra low to get the eggs from the ladies, who alternately clucked in a friendly way to me and pecked my hands.

  Dean Garrett was impossible. Demanding but gentle, independent and strong, and very smart—smart enough not to be arrogant.

  And we were going to make great…friends, I told myself. Great friends. As soon as he stopped kissing me every morning.

  I went to work at the library, ran a splendiferous Story Hour, with kids roaring like lions and growling like bears, read an extra story to Carrie Lynn and Shawn, then packed their dinner in Shawn’s backpack, as I did every night.

  Shawn told me they always ate their dinner after their mother was gone for the night or “busy in her bedroom.” If they’d been kicked out of the house, they ate their dinner on the merry-go-round in the park.

  I had bought both of them a packet of new socks, and they seemed excited about those.

  I then went straight to Lara’s. I was early, but I had called her on my new cell phone, and she said it was perfectly all right if I came over. I knocked and heard her yell at me to come on in, so I did.

  Again, I was struck by the sterility of Lara’s home. Beige walls. Beige carpet. Blue accents, prim furniture. Heavy drapes. Freaky. I could hear her walking around upstairs, and I wandered into the kitchen to put the Double Chocolate Snowball I had made on the counter. I had been designated the dessert person ever since the gals had tasted my first chocolate dessert.

  The kitchen was the same. Not a thing on the counter except my cake, a mixer, and a coffeepot. Spotless. Lifeless. The kitchen opened up to a fam
ily room with a tiny nook for eating. A plastic tablecloth with tiny red flowers covered the table. I went over to the curtains covering the backyard sliding glass door and opened them. Light streamed in like a tunnel.

  It was about 6:00, but still bright and cheerful outside. For the life of me, I couldn’t mesh the Lara I had met the first night at Aunt Lydia’s with the woman who owned the house.

  But I was about to see the other side.

  “Hi Julia,” she said, entering the kitchen. She was wearing beige slacks and a green crew-neck sweater. A thin gold chain with a tiny gold cross hung from around her neck. She smiled as she looked at the dessert. “Yummy. What did you make this time?”

  I told her, and then we took off on the plane of polite chatter.

  We discussed nothing of importance. It was the type of surface conversation that hundreds of millions of people engage in every day. Nothing deep. Nothing controversial. Nothing that reveals much of another person. And sometimes chatter like this can be comforting. Soothing. Sometimes you connect with another person.

  But other times it’s just a cover-up.

  I let her indulge in the cover-up.

  “So how’s your work going at the library?”

  “The library job is fine as long as I stay out of The Vulture’s way.” I thought about Shawn and Carrie Lynn’s expressions when they saw their new socks. “Well, it’s fine except for two kids who have a meth addict for a mother, no father, and aren’t fed or bathed on a regular basis. Oh, and their mother, or someone in their home, beats on them, but Children’s Services won’t do anything about it.”

  “What?” Her voice rose three pitches.

  I told her about the children, and then Lara stood in her kitchen and cried. She fingered the cross, and I wondered if she was going to rip this one right off her neck, too.

  “Childhood sucks,” Lara said. “Totally sucks.” She leaned her forehead against the sliding glass window. Lara was young and beautiful, but sadness was definitely pulling on her face like a toilet plunger.

  “Yes, childhood sucks,” I agreed.

  “There’s nothing you can do as a child to fix your situation. You’re stuck. It’s all you know. Unless my father was at a prayer meeting, he would preach at my brothers and me for two hours every night, alternately screaming and making us cry when we couldn’t memorize a Bible verse.

  “I remember how the Rutulsky family infuriated him. They owned the best bakery in town, and they didn’t go to church. ‘Damned to hell!’ he’d yell, ‘The Rutulskys are damned to hell!’ Then he would quote from the Bible for about an hour, ranting on and on while the three of us and my mother were forced to sit on the couch and listen to him. The Rutulskys actually came to our church once, and on the way out I remembered the kids looked positively horrified and the parents looked at me with pity.”

  “Pity?”

  Lara kept staring. I noticed that she’d lost more weight. She was past scrawny now.

  “Yes, pity. My father had given a sermon about disciplining your children, how to spare the rod was to spoil the child. He condemned others for not taking a firm hand to their children, talked about wives needing to be obedient to their husbands, how they must submit, obey, the man is the head of the house, that type of thing. Of course, he spoke on full throttle, screaming his lesson out to the congregation. ‘Submit, women! Submit! Or you are sinning! God will punish you if you do not bend to your husband’s will!’”

  I nodded. I had watched my mother submit to men her whole life. Violent, mean, manipulative men. And I had watched how some men in her life seemed to submit to her. Sick. Her submission had had nothing to do with the Bible, I was sure of it.

  “Those Rutulskys walked out of there pretty fast after the service, although Mrs. Rutulsky stopped to hug my mother. My mother got tears in her eyes, held Mrs. Rutulsky’s hand for a moment. I heard Mrs. Rutulsky say to my mother, ‘Our door is always open to you, Susanna.’”

  Lara laughed, but it was that bitter laugh I was getting so used to with her. “At school the next day, Sharon, the Rutulskys’ oldest, came up to me and told me that her family had prayed for me and my mother at dinner. I was so offended by that at first. Why did they need to pray for me? They were the ones my father said were going to hell. But I looked in Sharon’s eyes, and it seemed like she was going to cry. So it made me feel like crying because I hated my life and my father and even my mother sometimes for not protecting us. Sharon invited me to spend the night, but of course I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” I didn’t realize I was holding my hands together so tight until I noticed the fingernail indentations on my hands.

  “Because the Rutulskys never came back to church, so my father considered them to be heathens. Absolute heathens. My mother said to him, ‘William, I don’t think they’re heathens. Carolly brought me some flowers the other day and—’”

  “My father held up his hand about six inches from my mother’s face. ‘Stop, woman. Stop now. I will not have you defending the Rutulskys in front of the children. Save your ridiculous comments for when we’re alone so I can pray for your confused and unworthy and rebellious soul. You are so easily led astray, Susanna, and your compassion is misplaced, as usual.’”

  Lara shook her head. “My mother shut right up, her head hanging about seven inches away from her plate.”

  “So, your father, a minister, someone who is supposed to love God and love Jesus and try to be kind to others, terrorized everyone who came into contact with him.”

  “Oh yes. Almost everyone was damned to hell. A couple of times, when someone stood up to him, questioned him, he would put his hands together as if in prayer.” Lara showed how he did it. “And then he told the person that he would pray for them, that he would pray that God would show them the light, take away their ignorance, that they were unworthy to speak of His name until they repented. He used prayer as a weapon all the time. A way to make people feel bad about themselves.”

  “Yes, childhood does suck,” I agreed. Lara had a raving lunatic for a father, and I had a raving bitch for a mother. Perhaps we could introduce them to each other one day. Either Lara’s father would become my mother’s sex slave or they would kill each other.

  “And, of course, gay people just sent him into a tailspin,” Lara continued, her gaze still fixated out the window. She reminded me of someone looking out through the bars of a jail. “I had to stand outside shopping malls with him handing out anti-gay literature. So did my brothers. I read the pamphlets with my brothers at night. They presented as ‘facts’ that gay people had over a hundred partners each, that they were predators against children, had fetishes for animals, particularly sheep, and were otherwise perverted and gross. The literature also had detailed information about the fragility of rectal walls, the dangers of oral sex, and how gays were destroying America and had hidden agendas to take over the country and teach children how to be gay in the schools.

  “A few times people would shake his hand, but almost everyone dropped the literature on the ground, in the trash, and kept going. Sometimes people swore at us, swore at my father, and he would simply stand there with his Bible and quote from it at the top of his voice. Half the time there was such a commotion that the store owners would beg us to leave. My brothers and I were always so relieved to see a store owner. We couldn’t wait to get out of there. And all the way home in the car, my father would talk about how revolting gay sex was, and he would regale us with the physical details of gay sex, things no child should hear.”

  Lara turned to face me, her face flushed. “I cannot even begin to tell you how furious my father was when my brother called him from New York City and told him he was gay and had realized he was gay since he was fifteen. I thought my father was going to have a coronary right there in our little holy rectory.”

  “What happened?”

  “He disowned my brother. Hasn’t talked to him in ten years. Isn’t that Christ-like?” Lara made a choking sound in her throat. “My brother
used to send cards and letters, but my father would send them all back. Now he just calls me and my other brother, who lives in Oregon. Jerry and I see Peter and his partner about twice a year. We go to museums, walk in the park, go out to eat, meet their friends. They’re great people, certainly better people than my father.”

  I didn’t know what to say. As someone who has also had a rotten childhood, I know that silence is sometimes the best comfort. No one can really say anything that will take the pain or inbred fear away.

  “In fact, I miss Peter and Steve. Sometimes I feel like they’re the only people I can talk to.”

  “What do they do in New York?” I asked.

  Lara’s face brightened. “They have this fabulous loft in Greenwich Village. Peter is a vice-president of a financial firm, and Steve is an artist and a teacher for the public school system, and they have all these liberal, wonderful friends who are always holding these great parties.”

  “They must know a lot of artists, then.”

  “Oh, yes, they do.” As her face lit up, a new Lara emerged. “Yes, they’re friends with artists of all types.”

  “You must have a lot in common with their artistic friends, then, Lara, since you’ve told me that you like to paint.” I would later discover that saying Lara “liked to paint” was like saying Beethoven liked to fiddle with piano keys.

  “Oh, yes, I like to paint.” She looked at me, those huge blue eyes awash with tears so big a small squirrel could swim in them. “Hell, Julia, come on up. I’ve never let anyone see the attic except for Jerry, so don’t laugh.”

  “I won’t laugh.” I couldn’t imagine laughing. But, then, I couldn’t imagine what was up there, either.