When the introduction whirlwind was complete, Dean Spaulding took both of Maye’s hands in his.
“I know it’s hard being the new person and meeting all of the department at once, but I want to make sure you really love this place,” he said to her with a gentle smile. “We value Charlie very highly; he’s an incredible asset to us. We’d love to have him stay at Spaulding University for quite some time.”
“Thank you for giving Charlie this opportunity,” Maye replied. “I can’t tell you how much he loves it here.”
An older, impeccably dressed woman turned into the library with a pinched, hard face and brushed-back, flipped-curtly-at-the-end Nan Kempner socialite hair in grim reaper black.
“Oh, it’s Rowena,” Dean Spaulding said as he looked up. “Rowena, I’d like you to meet Maye Roberts, the wife of our newest faculty member.”
Rowena looked up, flashed a sudden small smile, and walked several steps toward them.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Maye said, extending her hand, which Rowena grasped limply.
“Pleasure is all mine,” Rowena said politely as she smiled emptily and handed Maye a gin and tonic. “I believe this is for you.”
“If you’ll excuse me, I hear an argument about Walt Whitman that I feel compelled to settle!” Dean Spaulding said, laughing heartily, then moved to join a group of professors, including Charlie, who were discussing whether the first or deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass was more powerful. He looked at Maye and winked, and she smiled back.
Maye looked back at Rowena, whose makeup had settled into the creases of her face like sand in a shipwreck, particularly around the pucker of her tiny, puckered, blood-red mouth. The pencil-thin bridge of her nose was flanked on either side by motionless marble-like eyes, nudged so close together they seemed baboonish. Even the warm pink hue of her genuine pearls looked cold and freezing wrapped around her neck.
Rowena crossed one arm over her tailored, camel-colored wool waist jacket, bent her other arm, and tapped a curry-yellow index finger at her temple twice.
Despite Rowena’s tintless and ghoulishly ghost-white skin, Maye thought snidely to herself, that must have been the applicator finger for the self-tanner, in the sense that the skin on her hands had begun to turn to hide.
“How are you finding Spaulding? Is it quite a bit different from your hometown?” she inquired. Honestly, however, Maye knew she didn’t care if Maye and Charlie were comfortable and happy in this new place, as it was no matter of concern for her if Maye missed her family and friends in Phoenix and felt a bit awkward at the faculty party. For Rowena, it was simply a matter of standard, obligatory conversation.
“It’s great, thank you for asking. I am learning how to recycle,” Maye said with a smile, wishing that Mrs. Spaulding would suddenly turn the corner and defuse this conversation bomb like a SWAT team. She longed for something else to say, but having met so many new people at once, she couldn’t remember who Rowena was attached to—was it Dr. Castle or Professor Brooks, or was she a faculty member herself? Yes, yes, didn’t Dean Spaulding mention something about Professor Brooks’s significant other also being a professor of…of…was it Old English? Medieval lit? Postmodernism? Nineteenth-century American? As hard as Maye tried, she couldn’t remember, and she certainly couldn’t ask now; horribly embarrassed, she resorted to the obvious. “Have you lived here long?” was the lone, soggy nugget Maye could pull out of her conversation cache. She hoped it might lead to another thread or perhaps even an expression from a woman who seemed to have the emotions of a mineral—that is, if a mineral could hate.
“I was born in Spaulding, and I will die in Spaulding,” Rowena informed her matter-of-factly, then pointed her finger at Maye. “By the way, Maye, who is new in Spaulding, that is a lovely sweater. Vintage, yes? The beading is exquisite. However, it is an afternoon sweater for an afternoon event. Which this is not. Perhaps that sweater would be appropriate attire in Phoenix. But this is an evening event, as everyone else understood it to be.”
Although Maye knew better, she was still waiting for the punch line about her pretty new sweater when Rowena turned and promptly walked out of the library.
Maye stood there. She looked at Charlie, laughing and joking with a circle of his colleagues. She looked at Dean Spaulding, who was holding open a leather-bound first edition of Whitman. She looked at the other guests, lounging and talking on the sofa, and then she felt her face get hot. Flushed. Burning. Her eyes stung. Her ears buzzed with embarrassment and shock. She felt a little dizzy.
“Oh my God,” she mumbled to herself. “That was so unnecessary.”
I need to find a bathroom, she thought, and walked out of the library before she even realized she was able to move.
Chh chh. Chh chh. Chhchhchhchh. Maye shot through the foyer in search of a door, any door that could hide her for just a moment.
She didn’t know which way the bathroom was; up the stairs, down a long hall, back through the library? Chh chh. Was she that inappropriately dressed? It wasn’t like she was wearing a tube top or exposing her butt cleavage. Chh chh chh chh. Did everyone know? Was it apparent to everyone but her? She didn’t want to embarrass Charlie; she couldn’t embarrass Charlie. How could she find the bathroom? Chh chh chh. She darted down the long hall and slid into the thankfully empty dining room, where she stopped and leaned up against a wall.
Stupid, awful sweater, her mind raced; I hate this sweater. I hate pink. Breathe, she told herself; calm down. This is fine. I hate this stupid expensive sweater I spent our grocery money on this hideous pink thing I hate it! Breathe. It’s fine. Slow down. Under the pink sweater is a nice polished-cotton white oxford appropriate for any occasion. You can wear an oxford anyplace, to a funeral, to a wedding, a baby shower, a court date. An oxford has no time restraints. You can wear the oxford at your arraignment after wrapping your anger-induced swollen green Hulk hands around Rowena’s aging neck, which has more pleats than a Catholic girl’s school uniform.
The oxford is fine. The oxford is perfect. See, everything is going to be fine, she thought, and in one motion, Maye crossed her arms, grabbed the hem of the sweater on either side, and pulled up swiftly, as fast as she could, pull, pull, pull, up over her torso, over her boobs, quickly, quickly, hurry, over her head, and just as the sweater released Maye’s face and got to her forehead, it stopped there and froze. The sweater was stuck. She pulled harder, but the sweater, now wedged around her skull like a nun’s wimple, tugged on either side of her face, which was growing increasingly red and puffy. She pulled again as she grimaced and grunted. And then, for some odd reason, her belly felt cold. Chilly. Somewhat breezy. As if it was exposed. She gasped and looked down, and the oxford was gone. It had vanished. The only thing that was there was Maye’s bra, and Maye’s belly, and the waistband of Maye’s girdle, which from girth pressure had now rolled itself downward into the shape of an enchilada and width of the rings of Saturn.
The oxford, apparently, was now up around her head in conjunction with the pink sweater, as the two articles of clothing acted like a tag team with either static or sudden love gluing them together. It was then that Maye remembered rule one in removing an oxford if you don’t want it to become permanently lodged around your head: undo the top button first. She struggled, tried to gather some leverage by twisting from side to side. It stayed put. She rested a few seconds, gathered her strength, gritted her teeth, and pulled up like she was lifting a car off of a baby. The shirt did not budge. She bent over and tried to pull from that angle, hoping that gravity would help, but when she saw shiny, flashing lights floating in front of her, she aborted that attempt, lest she have a stroke as a result and be discovered topless, fat, and drooling on the Spauldings’ carpeted dining room floor.
She sighed. Her arms were tired; she was now breaking a sweat. Pretend you’re fighting off a crazy, bloodthirsty raccoon during daylight hours and that its pointy sharp distemper teeth are trying to impale your face, her mind told her, and in one last
, desperate attempt to get free, she flung herself completely into trying to pretend-save her life and liberating her head from the viselike grip of a polished-cotton collar. Chhhhh chhhhhh chhhhhh. It was as she was thrashing about like a chubby, far less attractive Frances Farmer in straitjacket that Maye realized abruptly that unfortunately, due to her hearing being muffled by layers of pink wool and polished cotton and by her cricket thighs but predominately by her very own grunting, she had neglected to hear the call that dinner was about to be served.
Dozens of eyes were now witnessing her earthy dance in the corner of the dean’s dining room as she displayed the brand of inhibition typically evinced only after ingesting cactus buttons or licking poisonous toads. Some were filled with disbelief, some with disgust, some with dismay, there was one particularly offended pair that caught Maye’s eye and triggered a voice in her head.
“Melissabeth!” it said surprisingly. “I can’t believe I remembered your name after all!”
“Charlie!” Maye called. “Have you seen the aloe vera ointment?”
“It’s in your office,” he replied as he came down the stairs and poked his head into the bathroom, where Maye was studying her forehead in the mirror. “It was right next to your keyboard.”
Apparently, surviving the disgrace of having thirty academics walk in on you while you’re brawling with your apparel as your ta-tas swing vigorously from side to side like you are used to strangers sticking money into your panties was not enough of a challenge for Maye; when she finally got home (after Charlie hastily ushered her to the car) she noticed a dark ring around her face when she passed a mirror—a ring similar to that on an elderly woman who believed that blending the foundation near her hairline was a frivolous waste of however much time her clock had left on it. On Maye, however, it wasn’t makeup, and it wasn’t a shadow. On her head was an inch-thick rainbow of a self-inflicted road rash from fighting with her shirt while she fantasized it was a homicidal raccoon.
“It looks like a bike ran over your head,” Charlie said. “Still hurts, huh?”
Maye closely studied her forehead and decided it looked like a do-it-yourself chemical peel. “Like a ring of fire,” she answered. “I thought cotton was supposed to be the fabric of our lives, not the fabric that gives you a third-degree friction burn.”
“Um,” Charlie began, trying to choose his words carefully. “I saw you, remember? You didn’t really look like you were taking a shirt off, you looked like you were fighting off bees. It was a violent act with the exotic spice of vulgarity.”
“I’m still really sorry,” Maye said, wincing as she poked at the scab that stretched like a scarlet ribbon across her forehead and stretched from ear to ear. “I’ll say that every day until I die, Charlie. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said, nodding as he followed Maye into her office and she picked up the aloe vera ointment. “All I had to say was ‘hot flash’ and everyone understood, plus I reminded them that Sylvia Plath once threw all of her clothes off the roof of the Barbizon Hotel. People are starting to talk to me at work again, sort of, and eventually, they’ll be able to look me in the eye. I think you’ve become the department’s Zelda Fitzgerald. Zany, unpredictable, so ‘Faculty Significant Others Gone Wild!’ Let’s count our blessings that I’m not in the film studies department because then the whole thing would be on tape and for sale in the bookstore for $19.99. Really, I just want you to concentrate on having a good time at the tea. And if anyone there tells you they hate what you’re wearing, come home, change, and then go back and whip them with your oxford. Remember our new motto.”
“I know.” Maye sighed. “‘Naked belongs at home.’”
“Say it again,” he coaxed. “Just so I can be sure. My mother always warned me this would happen if I married you, but she said you’d be drunk first and sailors would be involved.”
“I won’t get naked at our neighbor’s tea party, Charlie, I swear,” Maye promised, dabbing the soothing salve along the line that looked like someone had tried to lasso her like a calf. “What do you think, should I march in like Little Edie Beale with a sweater pinned around my head and holding a baton, go for a simple headband, or proudly wear my scar and use it as an icebreaker?”
“Unless you want to answer repeatedly that no, you are not the French lady who gobbled a fistful of Valium, fell down, had a dog eat her lips off, and then got a face transplant,” Charlie exhaled, “I’d wear the headband and leave the baton at home. We don’t have enough money for you to be considered eccentric, only enough to be considered a belt that hasn’t gone through all of the loops.”
Maye tied the silk scarf around her head, put some lipstick on, and fussed with the bronze-beaded collar of the pink sweater. She was actually beginning to like the sweater, the way the beads sparkled, and the intricacy of the beading, and felt the need to exorcize the spicy vulgar act that had been associated with it. Besides, you can’t throw an expensive sweater away after one wear, she thought, even if it did peel the skin right off your forehead like a cranial circumcision.
Rowena could go to hell, Maye thought as she opened the front door and stepped outside to cross the street; it’s afternoon.
The first thing that Maye noticed when she entered Cynthia’s living room was that enormous pieces of plywood were placed erratically all over the floor. The second thing she noticed was that she was the youngest person there.
By about half a century.
In fact, she was one of only a few who didn’t bring her own chair, as the room was so crowded with motorized medical equipment that it looked like a Rascal Rodeo, thus the sheets of plywood that were improvising as ramps. There wasn’t one model or brand of mobility scooter that wasn’t represented, all lined up on the far side of the room: the Zoom 300, the Avenger Series, the Buzzaround, the Legend XL, the Go Go Ultra, the Sonic, one after the other, so that the tea party looked like a Sturgis rally, although one plagued by osteoporosis. Maye resisted the urge to compress her spine and hunch over just to stop feeling guilty about her ability to stand upright without the aid of a torture rack.
Suddenly, the reason for the absence of noisy children on the street became clear. Most of the women in attendance were only there due to the marvels of modern medicine and oxygen tanks, since all of them had most likely felt the tremors of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. And not the one that knocked down the freeway.
Maye sat on a couch between an elderly woman named Agnes, who had skin so thin that it looked like it came off a roll of Saran Wrap, and another lady, who had already fallen asleep.
“That letter carrier of ours is such a dear,” one of the ladies in the scooter lineup said, to which Maye scoffed in her head but wisely remained silent. “He told me that a vicious dog just moved into the neighborhood and that if I was going to use the Renegade to go to the store, I needed to use my high speed. He said that dog knocked him over backward and almost ripped his throat out! And the owner just stood there! And they live on this street!”
Every single lady in the room except for Maye and her slumbering neighbor gasped in naked fear.
“How fast does the Renegade go?” a woman with cropped gray hair asked her. “Is it as fast as the Celebrity?”
“The Renegade had speeds up to six miles an hour,” the first lady boasted.
“Oh, that’s fast,” another lady said, shaking her head. “That’s a little excessive, if you ask me. Where am I going that I need that kind of speed? Space?”
“Not if a crazy hellhound is chasing you!” a lady in a chair leaned over and cried, shaking her crooked, buckled finger.
“Hmmm,” the ladies agreed, nodding.
“Where’s Alma?” Agnes, the Saran Wrap lady, asked gently as she looked around. “Is Alma here? I haven’t seen her in weeks!”
Every member of the scooter gang smiled at her inquiry, but no one said a word.
“That portrait of Cynthia is still so stunning, isn’t it?” said one of the women who could still s
tand, pointing to a black-and-white photograph that hung over the mantel. “I remember that day like it was yesterday. Actually, I remember that day better than I remember yesterday!”
Laughter, sounding like a gaggle of clucking ducks, filled the room.
Maye’s gaze followed the finger of the woman to the mantel, and took in the photograph of a very young, coiffed, and elegant Cynthia kneeling, her head bowed forward slightly as an older man with a thick white mustache placed a crown upon her head. To Maye, it looked like a scene from a play.
“Do you remember Cynthia’s dress?” the silver-haired matron said dreamily. “The layers of tulle, tier after tier on the strapless bodice. She looked just like Grace Kelly. It was lovely.”
“Oh, Maude, I do remember that dress!” Cynthia said as she swept into the living room holding a large tray filled with tiny sandwiches. “I no longer have that dress, but look at all the friends I still have!”
As Maye darted her eyes back and forth between Cynthia and the old photograph, she noted that her neighbor hadn’t changed much in all of those years. She was still tall and thin, and clearly stood out in the room as the only one who had drunk the necessary amount of milk during her calcium-needy years. Her complexion hadn’t grayed and her skin hadn’t dropped like a feed sack; it stayed high and firm on her cheekbones. Age hadn’t attacked Cynthia the way it had fought with the other ladies in the room; for a woman who was terrified of a dirty dog-food can, she must have had some pretty quick footing, Maye noted, and ducked each time the sandbag of time came hurtling at her, unlike most of her guests, who had not only gotten socked but stayed down for the count until the geriatric bell rang.