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The day comes when she begins to ask him what he's thinking in those long silences, those moments staring off the porch into the liquid dusk, swatting mosquitoes, filling up ashtrays. She begins to look at him when he walks into a room, and says his name, and waits until he answers.
Maybe she wants him after all. Maybe then he won't want her anymore.
But he can't imagine ever being tired of her, just
the sight of her coming up the stairs jolts him with pleasure, the white fifties
sundress with the turquoise flowers,
She looks at the floor and tells him how her stepfather forbade her to wear underwear
at night. |
her red lips matching the geraniums, her
body plump in the slightest way so that she looks soft, quiet, like a carpeted
room. She throws her leg over him in bed, wants to do the things she only put
up with before, pops into the bathroom to apply a thick coat of lipstick before
giving him a blowjob. Cats are all over the roof like tiles. She begins
coming home late some nights and sleeps deeper into the morning and says of this: "I'm crepuscular." She stops complaining about the lawyers and then stops going in to the office altogether.
"No," he says, "you're nocturnal."
He's hired on as a designer in a local ad firm but a couple of people quit in the first week and he finds himself instantly promoted to a director of commercials, radio mostly but he's learning how to do some television too. His Western-themed, retro ads are a big hit, with their coconuts for horse hooves and stiff-voiced announcers declaring the usefulness of the product, which happens to be bottled water. Sales rise from the moment the first ad is aired. John is pleased. He'd long suspected his life's calling was to make people want things they did not and would not ever need. He gets assigned a secretary, a tongue-tied girl with shaved eyebrows; she draws in substitute ones with a black Sharpie she keeps in a cup on her desk.
When he gets home from work Betty serves him martinis in cone-shaped glasses. She's wearing a black garter belt under her dress and makes sure he knows it. When he reads, she asks him what he's reading. She slides her body across the newspaper and kisses him, crawling all over the paper until he wants to swat her off. She asks him if he loves her. He says yes. She blinks, then asks again. What's the lifespan of a girl like this? Sixty, seventy years? She's sweeter everyday and he thinks about getting in the Caddy and driving, no responsibilities, just Willie on the radio and a cowboy world coming up to meet the cowboy sky, a wide open place where anything can happen. He could visit every drive-in movie theater left in America and take Polaroids. It would be so cool. The boys in Rhode Island would be awed by his drifter ways, his dedication to sucking up the last shreds of the past, days of optimism, when cigarettes didn't cause cancer and girls were made to be looked at and then pinched.
There's a black cat with white feet on the porch every evening. It's kittenish,
grave-faced, with a little taffy nose. It likes to be petted but when he takes
his hand away it meows with alarm until he lowers his hand and pets it some more.
They go on like that for a while, the cat turning on and off like a switch.
"That guy runs across the big road," Betty says.
"How do you know?"
"His owners came by looking for him a few days ago." Then, with feeling: "That's how cats end up dead."
She starts to open up about her shitty home life, her scary girlhood.
He wants to be near her victimhood, her craving for love, but he doesn't want to
see it. |
She looks at the floor and tells him how her stepfather forbade her to wear underwear at night, for reasons of health, and had a system for checking on this. This was when her mother had discovered Champale, a beer-champagne hybrid—she remembers it as being pink—and the liquor store delivered so many cases at once they unloaded them from the truck with a forklift.
Later, when Mom and the stepfather divorced, she was left living alone, thirteen, with a can of mace and the phone number of the police taped to the phone.
He tries to move her along, saying, "Yeah, yeah, the '70s sucked for everyone. The long demise of the nuclear family. I could tell you stories," but he doesn't tell her any. His own scouting days were filled with tortures and absences he barely remembers; it's better that way, and though he's drawn to the fact that she's a casualty, he doesn't want to hear it. He wants to be near her victimhood, her craving for love, but doesn't want to see it, doesn't want to touch that current in himself, his own vein of fear, the thing that pushes him around and around and out into the night. Where he goes to buy his secretary a beer.
When he hears it, he hears it from the neighbors. They thought she was sleeping,
they said. She looked so calm, like someone who had fallen asleep on the pavement.
He runs into the kitchen. The door is ajar and the neighbors are lifting her
onto the table. Oh no. The poor sweetie. The sweet dear. He loves her more than
ever now, if that were possible, soft and asleep with her eyes closed, a trickle
of dark red blood dribbling out of her mouth. Her little feet are just hanging
there, hanging off the kitchen table, in those innocent fifties shoes that speak
of easier days, fresh-baked cookies and Jell-O salads. Her dress is all dirty
with a tire tread on the skirt — it looks so innocuous, as though she'd just brushed against the car. All the things they did together, never again: she offering him a glass of water, and then a cracker, and then a tissue for his sniffle, and then a blowjob. She slipping out into the evening, falling asleep on top of strangers' cars, coming home smelling like someone else's house, someone else's food. She was always trying to get something, trying to get it wherever she could. She was so pretty. The prettiest girlfriend. He buries her in the yard and goes out the next day to get a new one.
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| ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: |
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Stacey Richter is the author of the collection My Date With Satan. Her stories have been widely anthologized and have won many prizes, including three Pushcart prizes and the National Magazine Award. |
For more Stacey Richter, read:
What She Wanted
When to Use
The Ocean
© 2003 Stacey
Richter and Nerve.com, Inc.
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