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Fiction Contest
| No. 6 |
Spring 2004 |
*** *** ***
Heidi Bell
My Life Would Be Perfect
It's lunchtime at Rosemary's Golden Shears, and I am intending to start a load of towels when I find Joseph in the laundry room, sitting on top of the washing machine eating a peach. The other stylists have walked down the block to Okun Brothers Shoes, and at one of the manicure stations, our receptionist is simultaneously nibbling a sandwich, reading the August issue of Glamour, and doing her nails.
"Why are you lurking around in here?" I ask Joseph, trying not to look at him directly, simultaneously hating and craving the sight of his face, the perfect sweep of his black hair.
He says nothing, just stares at me while sucking the juice noisily from the fruit.
I sigh. "Would you please get off the washer, Joseph?"
"Isn't it funny," he says, "that you would come in here just now, when this peach was reminding me of you?"
A bolt of alarm goes through me as he slides down from the washer, but he just leans past me to throw his pit into the trash. He licks his fingers one by one.
"There's already a load in the washer," he says, and right on cue the machine lurches into the next phase of its cycle. Joseph takes the towels from my arms and drops them into the empty laundry basket then walks to the door.
I hate myself for feeling disappointed. Then I hear the lock click, and Joseph returns to stand in front of me, his nose just inches from mine. He isn't much taller than me and only outweighs me by about twenty pounds. Why then, does he seem so strong? The irises of his eyes are dark blue shot with even darker blue, and the permanent sneer of his lips drives me crazy. I struggle silently when he first puts his hands on my face.
"Don't be stupid, Mona," he says. "If you want me to stop, just say so."
I say nothing.
One of his eyes looks into one of mine as he kisses me. His mouth tastes like summer. I breathe the delicate scent of his hair oil, the smell of his sweat mixed with glycerin soap. In spite of myself, I am running my hands over his black linen pants.
It's just that it's been so long.
He pushes me up against the wall next to the dryer. The washer goes thump, thump, thump as the metal basket spins inside.
So when I get home and Ryan is waiting for me on the bed with a flowered washcloth laid like a fig leaf over his genitals, I can't help laughing. He seems concerned, though, when I fall, shrieking, onto the bed.
"I got off work early, so I thought I'd surprise you," he says finally. He works at Family Video on Oakland Avenue, not far from our apartment. "I even put pot pies in the oven." He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.
Besides my mother, only Ryan knows about my weakness for chicken pot pies, how I burn my mouth every time I eat one because I just can't wait for it to cool.
I take a shower and get into bed with him, knowing it's useless, that I should be concentrating instead of thinking about hair, specifically that I should have left the rollers in on the right side of Mrs. Collins's perm a little bit longer. I know she has a difficult right side, so why didn't I leave them in longer? And I cut Mary Day's hair too quickly, trimmed her bangs too short for the second time. She seemed annoyed when she left. She might even switch stylists. Had I remembered to unplug my curling iron before I left?
I'm thinking of these things, lying on my back on the bed with my hands on Ryan's head, my hands moving with his head as if holding onto a giant saddle horn. Happy trails.
I got on a horse once, against my better judgment. The mare was stomping her feet and screaming before I got within two yards of her.
"Oh, Scheherazade's real social," the owner of the dude ranch said, dismissing my fears with a wave of her pink-tipped fingers. She wore her hair in bright yellow wiener curls. "She's just calling to the other horses. Just hold onto the reins. You'll be fine."
But as soon as my butt touched the saddle, Scheherazade bolted after the other horses, taking the shortest route -- straight across the grassy middle of the track. I lost the reins right away and lurched to one side, trying to clutch the saddle with my knees as I had been told to do, hoping that when I finally fell, the horse's hooves wouldn't pop my head like a milkweed pod -- but I was hanging onto the saddle horn so tightly that I managed to stay on.
I let my hands fall away from Ryan's head, and he looks up at me, his sandy brown hair standing up like devil's horns, a crazy grin making his brown eyes glow.
"Are you close?" he asks.
I can't say anything because I don't want to see the look on his face when I answer, and that seems answer enough.
"Sorry," I say and turn onto my side, drawing my knees up. Ryan crawls up the bed and puts his face on the pillow next to mine. I would get a high score on a Cosmo "Are you sexually dysfunctional?" quiz.
I've read about women who can have orgasms at will. I imagine riding the bus home at the end of a stressful day, wearing a secretive smile. Unfortunately, Joseph barges into the daydream, turns around in the seat ahead of me and smiles, his canine teeth just a little longer, a little whiter than they really are.
Ryan strokes my cheek and forehead with his clammy fingers. "Can't I do something for you?" he asks.
"Put your arms around me," I say, and we lie together, the circle of our arms and his smooth chest forming a warm cave for my head. Our breathing falls into a similar rhythm. He tells me that the Groundhog Day lady was in again today for the twenty-third time. He talks about making a salad to go with our pot pies. The vibration of his voice and the combined warmth of our bodies make me sleepy.
I can never sleep with Joseph. I lie awake next to him all night, staring at the constellation of moles on his back, sure there must be a myth about its origins, maybe the story of a two-timing man who angered a goddess and was turned into a parking meter or a stone at the bottom of a river.
Ryan's hand makes circles between my shoulder blades, makes me sigh. If this were all we needed, to hold each other this way, my life would be perfect.
Libby's hair swings violently as she saws her club sandwich into quarters. Her hair looks best boyishly short, but she wants to grow it out, so now it hangs on either side of her face like a dog's ears. Libby likes Ryan a lot, and she hated Joseph at first sight. She doesn't trust really good-looking people, and she hates male hair stylists because they're what she calls an "elite minority." She says they take all the jobs at the upscale salons, leaving women stylists to work at places like SuperCuts. She compares the phenomenon to upscale restaurants where the waiters wear tuxes and there's not a waitress in sight. It doesn't matter to her that Rosemary's Golden Shears is hardly upscale.
"What did you say Joseph smells like again?" Libby asks bitterly. "Canned olives?"
"I did not say that, you jerk."
The waiter, who is sporting flipped up bangs and triangular sideburns, lifts his eyebrows while refilling our water glasses, and to punish him for snooping, I stuff a large piece of feta-covered romaine into my mouth without cutting it. I smile at him and chew with my mouth open. He leaves.
"So get some different soap," Libby says. "Buy him some cologne."
"What am I going to say, 'Here, Ryan, you stink, so wear this'? Haven't you noticed that people just have a certain smell? It's not something you can hide."
"Oh, Jesus." Libby rolls her eyes. Lately, she's impatient with me, seemingly bored with my problems. When I confront her she says, "Oh, you keep saying the same things over and over." Because she and Howard have been married for so long, because they have a beautiful baby girl, Libby believes she has the authority to say things like, "Maybe Ryan's just not right for you. You know I don't want it to be true, but it could be true."
This particular speculation makes me panic. "But I love him," I say. "I'm just not physically attracted to him."
"Do you honestly think," she asks me, "that everything that comes with love is easy?"
I stare at her across the table, my fork and knife poised over a bright tomato wedge. Why shouldn't it be easy? Everything else is so difficult. My car needs new tires; every time I talk with my mother, we end up fighting; my money runs out well before the end of each month; my best friend shouldn't have bangs, but I don't know how to tell her to grow them out in a tactful way. I don't think it's too much to ask for love to be simple.
Libby licks the tip of her middle finger and rubs it across her plate to get every last bit of salt from the place her potato chips were. "There are things about Howard that disgust me," she says.
"Like what?" I ask. I lean across the table toward her, she toward me.
"Well, at first I couldn't stand how he shoved his entire tongue into my mouth."
We giggle, and the waiter, who has come with our bill, smiles along. We ignore him.
"You have to show him what you want, Mona," Libby says conspiratorially, "He's less experienced than you are. Make it a game. Get what you want."
But a few days later, when I'm on top of Ryan with his hands splayed over my stomach, I can't seem to figure out what it is I do want. I don't feel much of anything except self-consciousness, as though someone were standing in the doorway watching.
At Rosemary's Golden Shears, Joseph flirts with every woman who crosses his path. With his customers he is charming, full of compliments and good ideas about hair. His customers let him experiment on them, trying daring cuts and colors straight out of Stylist Monthly. One of the drawers at his station is stuffed with cards and scraps of paper scrawled with women's telephone numbers. I know because I've looked through them. His psychotic girlfriend Candace shows up unexpectedly at the shop every so often, making it difficult for him to take any of these women up on their offers.
Candace also comes in every so often to have Joseph perm the limp blond hair that falls down her back. During her last perm, she complained incessantly about the fumes affecting her immune system and how the skin around her hairline would take a month to recover from the chemicals. She said that Joseph should be able to find something gentler, more natural.
"I know, love. I'm working on it," he said to her softly, as if he concocts the products himself in some private little laboratory and would never dream of testing on animals. As if anything about a perm is "natural."
Candace grew up in one of the huge houses on Long Road. The other stylists and I figure she must have a trust fund, since she doesn't work and Joseph's salary wouldn't even cover the rent on their two-bedroom apartment in the historic district. Whenever Candace is around, Jennifer, Michelle, and I roll our eyes at each other in the mirrors and mimic her gestures -- which include a tendency to squeeze her eyes shut tightly each time she blinks.
But I can't help comparing the way Joseph treats Candace to the way he treats me, can't stop the envy stabbing me between the ribs like hunger pangs. Once I complained to him about us not spending any real time together. I said, "I'd like us to do normal things together, go to a movie or a concert or something. We could go out for dinner."
"Don't be stupid," he said, unbuttoning my dress. My body leaned into his touch automatically. His teeth grazed my neck. "This isn't a big town, and she's got spies all over the place. She'd find out, and then she'd have you killed. Or she'd kill herself, and where would that leave me?"
The dress collapsed around my feet as if it were my skin.
Ryan seemed uncomplicated by comparison. For starters, he was actually available. Still, Joseph had the nerve to be angry when I broke it off with him.
"I'll leave Candace tomorrow, if that's what you want Mona," he said. "But if she tries to kill herself, it will be on your head. Are you ready to take responsibility for that?"
"The only thing I'm taking responsibility for," I said, "is breaking up with you."
I poked him in the chest, which made him grit his teeth.
It would have simplified things if I had quit my job then. But I had a good customer base and paid vacation for the first time in my life. I still didn't have health or dental, but once in a while I could buy a new outfit or a pair of shoes. And for a while after Ryan and I started dating, I felt immune to Joseph.
"What's wrong Joe?" I asked one day as he pouted in his chair. "Nobody left to insult?"
I'm not sure of the exact moment I started sneaking looks at the way his jeans hug his thighs or pausing mid-snip at the low murmur of his voice, but after the laundry room incident in July, I'm a goner. A week later, I ask him to color my hair after hours, though I know it isn't wise. My excuse is that he does it better than I do
"How about 'Autumn Fire'?" he asks, pretending to be professional. Then, after the color is in and he's covered my head with a towel, he starts rubbing my shoulders and neck in a way that makes my eyes roll back in my head.
"How's the dweeb?" he asks, his warm breath in my ear.
I knew Ryan for several months before Joseph even started cutting hair at the Golden Shears. Jennifer and I had gone down the street to a new bar for Happy Hour after a day of especially good tips, and Ryan was there with a guy I'd met at Kalamazoo Valley Community College when I was taking styling classes. The two of them stopped at our table and ended up staying for a couple of hours. The next week, we all showed up again.
I didn't think of Ryan as my type at all. The men I stare at usually have dark, hair and a more muscular build. And though Ryan wore a tough leather jacket, it looked as though he only had to shave a couple times a week. He had a light brown crew cut and a bump on his nose where his younger brother had clobbered him accidentally with a baseball bat in 1982 and a big goofy laugh that makes everyone who hears it laugh along. He always offered to do favors for me -- to tape TV shows when my VCR broke down, to lend me books, to pay for a pitcher of beer and an order of French fries those weeks when my page in the scheduling book had so many blank spaces it made my heart skip.
Ryan knew the saga of Joseph and me from the gruesome beginning. One night, in our favorite booth in the back left-hand corner of the bar, I started to cry. Why had I started sleeping with a man who already had a girlfriend? I wondered aloud. Why did I continue to throw myself at him when he couldn't seem to care less most of the time? Why couldn't I be good at something lucrative like business or computers? Could I at least blame my parents for some of it? Ryan pried my hands away from my face and held them.
"Listen," he said. "Don't think I'm biased because I'm in love with you, but that guy's not worth your time."
Poor Ryan, was all I could think. But what he said must have ricocheted around inside my brain. That must be why I stopped by his apartment one freezing night in October on my way home from Joseph's apartment.
Joseph usually came to my house, but occasionally he insisted I come to the historic district -- this time so he wouldn't miss Candace's call from the holistic spa she was visiting in Aspen. After Joseph had fallen into the blissful slumber of the truly evil, I lay awake next to him for so long that I decided I might as well get dressed and go home.
Outside, the cold rain had turned into freezing drizzle, and everything -- bushes, houses, sidewalks -- was coated with ice. I shuffled carefully to my car, then spent five minutes chipping ice from the door handle with my keys just to get in. Payday was a still a couple days away, and as usual, my gas gauge had dipped to "E." I thought I might run out of gas while defrosting the windshield, or maybe while driving home, but I still went out of my way to swing past Ryan's building, just to see if there was a light on in his second floor window. There was. In the hallway outside his apartment, I could hear Screamin' Jay Hawkins singing "I Put a Spell on You."
Ryan's dog, Professor Longhair, barked like crazy when I knocked, but Ryan didn't answer the door right away. When he finally did, his hair was wet and his hands were full of styling gel. For months, he'd been growing out the crewcut he'd had since high school. We grinned at each other from opposite sides of the threshold. It was the first time I'd seen him since the night he had confessed his love for me.
"I couldn't get the door open with all this stuff on my hands," he said. "I had to use my wrists."
I glanced pointedly at his hair.
"Actually," he said, "I'm really glad you're here. I'm trying to get a good mohawk going."
I followed him through the bedroom/living room -- which was crowded with his double bed, bookshelves, stereo, TV, and an old green corduroy chair -- and into the long narrow bathroom. The long narrow kitchen was the only other room in the apartment. I could barely afford my one-bedroom apartment with a separate living room, but when I turned thirty I decided it was too humiliating to have a roommate, to live with someone I wasn't married to or sleeping with.
From the cupboard under the bathroom sink, Ryan dug out an old pair of electric clippers, and I shaved the sides of his head and fashioned some two-inch spikes on top. In turn, with some enthusiastic encouragement from me, Ryan ratted my hair until it was huge and pulled it back from my face with a skiing headband. It was the closest I'll ever get to having an afro, although as the evening wore on, it began to sag, looking more and more like the cap of a mushroom. We laughed so hard it was like being drunk, drunk on hairspray fumes and the cold air that leaked steadily in through the poorly caulked windows.
I had a bottle of Candy Apple fingernail polish in my bag, and we painted each other's toenails, then fell asleep on the bed in the middle of Tales From the Crypt. When I woke up, the window was glowing with weak light, and the clock said 6:21. Ryan's arm was around me, his body pressed against my back, keeping me warm. I put my hand over his where it rested on my stomach and went back to sleep.
When I opened my eyes again, Ryan was propped up on one elbow, watching me. His eyes were bloodshot, but the mohawk had survived the night with minimal damage; all but one of the spikes were still fairly straight, and I reached up to prop up the saggy one. We laughed a little, and it hurt my ribs and chest, like a laugh hangover. A warm, ticklish feeling stirred in my stomach. We lay there for a long time, kissing and touching one another with all our clothes on as Professor Longhair snuffled at Ryan's dirty socks on the floor. It was like being transported back in time to high school, to one of the nights when Libby's parents were out of town for the weekend, and I was upstairs in her little brother's bedroom making out with a boy I really liked on top of the Star Wars bedspread, never thinking of going any further.
On Christmas Day, I went to Ryan's parents' house for dinner, and he announced to his family that we were moving in together.
"Cool," his fifteen-year-old sister said. She liked me because I did her hair for free, and I didn't tell her parents that I saw her smoking once outside the Crossroads Mall.
"Well," his father said, looking up from his mashed potatoes, "that's what people do nowadays, isn't it?"
"How exciting," his mother said. "Have you found an apartment yet? I'll have to get together a box of housewarming things." She hugged me.
Combining our salaries, Ryan and I could afford a first floor apartment in a three-flat. We had a porch, tall ceilings and huge windows, a big bedroom, and a kitchen with room enough for a table. We had two copies of Rilke's Collected Poems, two black leather jackets, two TVs. Together, we could afford premium cable. I cried in his arms that first night, but I think he misunderstood. He kissed the tears from my face and held me tighter. He told me he loved me, and I wondered what was wrong with me that my perfect partner left me cold.
"My God, what a relief," Libby says, sucking a margarita through a straw. She came by the salon earlier and let me style her hair. I texturized her bangs then swept them to the side to expose her small, beautiful brow.
"Do you have any idea what kind of pressure I've been under for the past three years," she continues, "knowing that everything I ate, she ate? I'm going to eat an entire box of Little Debbie Nutty Bars when I leave here. I'm not kidding, they're in my car. Just sixteen more years now before I can throw her out of the house altogether."
"Ryan and I have been talking about getting married," I tell her in a desperate attempt to convince myself that I'm never, ever going to sleep with Joseph again.
"Really," Libby says flatly.
"No one else will ever care about me the way he does."
"How could you possibly know that?" Libby snorts. She licks salt from the edge of her glass. I have a feeling I don't want to hear what she's about to say, and I take a long, fortifying pull from my own straw.
"Ryan's great Mona," she says, "I'll give him that in a second, but don't you think he'll figure out sooner or later that there's something missing from your relationship? Why won't you admit it?"
I shrug.
"You know, honey, there are plenty of men in the world besides Ryan. And I don't mean Joseph." She sneers when she says Joseph's name.
"Barrels of them," I say as I scan the bar, which is located near Libby's subdivision, on the outskirts of a strip mall. The booths are filled with guys who haven't realized that perms for men were an '80s fad -- men wearing puffy high-top basketball shoes and polo shirts tucked into black jeans.
"Can you believe I'm actually considering having children?" I say to Libby.
Her mouth drops open.
"I really do love him, Libby." I detest the whine in my own voice, but at least it drowns out the hum of impending doom I can hear just beneath the surface of my everyday life.
I sit in my car in the bar parking lot until Libby drives away, then drive to Joseph's apartment. Why do I feel as though I will die if our skin doesn't touch? Candace's black Passat is missing from its usual place at the curb. When I knock on the door, Joseph pulls me inside and tells me Candace is at her women's support group. We make love on a towel he puts over the bedspread in the guest room so that there will be no evidence for Candace to discover.
I hold off calling him for a long time after that, the rest of August and all of September. I rearrange my schedule at Rosemary's so that he and I work opposite hours and are rarely at the salon alone together. Then, one Saturday afternoon in October while Ryan is at work, I have the irresistible urge to pick up the phone and call Joseph. Instead, I turn on the TV and open a bag of Fritos and a pint of French onion dip.
At first, it's easy to concentrate completely on how well the cold, creamy dip complements each salty chip, on how hilarious the hairstyles are in the rerun of Eight is Enough. But soon I am simply stuffing the chips into my mouth automatically while my attention hovers like an insect around the telephone, which sits there pretending innocence just inches from my right elbow. I am trying with everything in me not to call Joseph. I am trying with everything except for the small but insistent part of me that says, Just to hear his voice, Just to remind you what a jerk he is. Besides, maybe he and Candace broke up over the weekend, or maybe they are about to break up and your call will push them over the edge. Maybe this feeling you're having is a premonition.
The receiver is cool and heavy in my hand. I dial.
"Yeah."
"It's Mona."
"What."
"Is Candace there?"
"No. She's at her aerobics class. You should try it. You're on the verge of becoming full-figured."
"I should try a martial art so I could knock your fucking head off."
"Oh, Mona, I've missed you. Listen, I'm really -- "
I hang up the phone because the doorknob has begun to turn, and then Ryan is standing in the doorway. Our phone is an old-fashioned deal that Ryan got at the thrift store on Cork Road, so it dings when you hang up, and the sound reverberates in the room for a few of the longest seconds of my life.
"Who was that?" Ryan asks, tossing his keys and the mail onto the table and prying off his shoes without untying them.
"Hi," I say. "How was work?" I become intensely interested in the Stylist Monthly magazine on the coffee table. Why do I even subscribe to it? These aren't hairstyles for real people. Who would want bangs combed down over her eyes? What man would want such a brassy blond dye job?
"Who was on the phone?" Ryan asks again.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him doing this head-bobbing thing he does when he's trying to get me to look at him when I really don't want to look at him. It's not unlike the motions of some long-necked birds I saw on the Discovery channels. During mating season, the males all go around bobbing their heads and arching their necks that way to get the females' attention.
"It was Joseph." I say, squeezing one eye shut and looking at Ryan sideways through the other. The light in his face seems to flicker.
"Why's he calling you? I thought you told him to cut that shit out."
"Yeah, well, you know how he is."
Among other things, I am a terrible liar.
"Did he call you?"
"Hmm?" I am flipping through the pages of the styling magazine faster and faster. Short-cuts, tips for highlighting, new products, classifieds.
"Did he call you or did you call him?"
"Uh . . . "
"What?"
"I called him." I look up. Ryan has his hands on his hips. He is wearing his ratty "Poodle With a Mohawk" T-shirt, and his hair is pulled back into the ridiculously small ponytail I begged him this morning not to wear.
"I'm sorry," I say.
"What does that mean?" he asks. "Does that mean 'I'm sorry, Ryan, you're out of here,' or 'I'm sorry I called Joseph, the guy I supposedly hate'? Tell me what it means, Mona, because I'm really lost here." He seems dangerously close to crying, and if he cries, I swear I will lie down and die.
"I'm sorry I called him," I say, going to Ryan and pulling his head down and kissing him. "It was a mistake. I'm not going to call him anymore." I pull his hips in close to my body. "Guess what? I'm going to find another job. Don't you think that's a good idea?"
In the bedroom, we pull off each other's clothes. Naked, I run to the kitchen to grab two glasses and the bottle of Zinfandel. I gulp from the bottle on my way back.
"Yes, why are you leaving, Mona?" Joseph asks at my going-away party. He smirks and takes a bite of the cake decorated in my honor. He elbows Michelle. "She's in love with me, that's why," he says. "Look, she's so lovesick she can't even eat." He gestures toward my empty hands. The table behind me is spread with shrimp, crackers and cheese, grapes and wine.
Everyone laughs as if it's all a big joke. I show my teeth in something that might be mistaken for a smile. The combined smell of food and hair spray and the burn of murderous hatred is making me queasy.
"I could use a little time off," I lie.
"Well, dear, you could have had some time off without abandoning us like this," Rosemary pouts.
At the end of my shift, I hug the girls, and Jennifer gives me the name and number of a guy who's opening a shop in the Crossroads Mall sometime within the next couple of months.
"Bye, Mona," Joseph calls after me as I go out the door. "Call me! We'll do lunch."
For the rest of the week, I read and watch TV -- X-Men in the morning, talk shows and old reruns of Match Game until All My Children at noon. On Friday afternoon, Ryan calls me from work.
"Some of us are doing Happy Hour. You want to come?" he asks.
Remember the good old days? I want to ask him. I look out the window at the pouchy gray sky, which has been bulging all day without letting anything go. I imagine sitting around a table with Ryan and his co-workers at the old familiar bar, watching Darlene flirt with him right in front of me. I wonder if he knows how much she likes him, how she thinks he's too good for me.
"Nah," I say, "I'm busy." I hold the phone in the crook of my neck as I pack a bowl with pot.
"What are you doing?"
"Watching the Brady Bunch marathon. The one guest-starring Joe Namath just started."
"Tape it."
"Nah. I'll just see you later."
I consider telling him how sad it makes me that I can't talk to him about my man troubles anymore. He always gave such good advice.
After I hang up, I stare at the phone, something squirming uncontrollably at the center of my body. I imagine myself infested with worms, a nest of them snuggled up against my spinal cord where they interfere with the connection between my brain and my body, forcing me to do stupid, crazy things. What would happen if I just showed up at Joseph's door when Candace was home? What would he do?
I smoke until my head feels swollen but light, then eat three quarters of a frozen pizza. I eat chocolate ice cream out of the container until my tongue goes numb.
At nine-thirty I turn off all the lights and get into to bed. An hour later, I am still awake, lying on my side listening to cars passing and the cold rain finally coming down, harder and harder by the minute. Professor Longhair lies snoring with his head and front paws on my legs. I am considering taking one of the Valium Jennifer gave me, or getting up to do a couple shots of tequila, considering packing a suitcase and leaving tonight -- when I hear footsteps on the porch. The window is open a crack, and I can hear Ryan singing an old Ozzy Osborne song, giving it a waltz tempo. His shadow sways across the window shades as he dances, his arms around the empty air. Finally, he sits down against the house, just outside the windows. The porch floorboards complain as he settles his weight. He must be freezing.
"I'm soaking wet, Monie."
He only calls me that when he's drunk.
"You wouldn't believe this rain," he says. "The streets are all flooding 'cause the water can't drain fast enough. It's like rapids coming down the hill, all white and foamy. On my way home, I saw a shoe go down the sewer." He laughs softly, that goofy laugh. "Some guy's car stalled in an intersection 'cause the water's so deep. I helped him push it up onto the sidewalk. You should be out here to see it. You should really be out here with me, Mone."
I don't know how I'll ever be able to leave him. I am afraid of the things I will do to make him leave me.
Copyright 2004, Heidi Bell nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing
Program
at the University of Pittsburgh's English
Department.