by Kelly Harms
I greet him and tell him about what’s on my mind: Janey’s reticence to spill the beans. His eyebrows go way, way up. “Maybe she doesn’t know how she feels yet, and she just needs time to sort it out privately,” he conjectures, and I wonder if he’s talking about Janey or himself.
“All the more reason to talk to her confidante, moi, about it. Besides, she owes it to me to explain why she’s hogging all the drives into town.”
“I thought you told me you didn’t want to have to drive Aunt Midge all the time,” he says.
“You really should consider experimenting with more illicit drugs,” I tell him. “With a memory like that you’re never going to be able to keep any friends.”
He makes a face. “Hm. So you wanted to get out of the daily drives, but now that you’re stuck out here with me, you’ve reconsidered?”
If I were stuck out here with him, as in with him, we’d have no problem with boredom. But I’m in boy-toy purgatory. I can see the bare-chested blond man-child, and I can talk to him for hours, but I can’t run my tongue along the lines of his six-pack stomach. Oh, the irony.
After a little back and forth, J.J. tells me he thinks I should give her space, especially since all of this is my doing. He also has no sympathy when I complain about being stranded without a car or a job to keep me occupied. But he is picking up some of the slack in getting me out and about. Yesterday he asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner. I wasn’t sure if he was asking me out out, or just out. But I said yes. If he tries to smooch me at the end of the night I can always play dumb. “Oh, J.J., I had no idea your feelings toward me were of a romantic nature! I feel just terrible that I gave you the wrong idea!”
“So,” he says when the subject of Janey’s sex life is put to rest—at least in his mind. “Are you excited about tonight?”
I’m not sure what the right answer is here. Of course I’m excited, for a myriad of reasons. But do I want him to think I’m excited?
“Meh,” I say but with a smile. “Where are we going?”
He grins. “I’m not telling, but know this: There Will Be Bibs.”
“You know just how to make a woman happy, don’t you?”
At that, J.J. gives me an absolutely wicked smile, and says, “Oh, believe me, I do, and bibs have nothing to do with it.”
Why, John Junior, I had no idea you had it in you! I get a chill that goes down my spine and around to other regions that have been cruelly ignored for some time. Quiet, you, I mentally whisper to my vagina.
J.J. grins, too proud of himself. “And with that, I must leave you. The shrubbery ain’t going to water itself.”
Not wanting him to have the last word—or the last tease—I wave good-bye and, just as he’s turning to go, I say, casually, “Okay, see ya later. I guess I’ll just go put on my bikini and hang out by the water.”
He turns back and gives me exactly the kind of reaction I was going for—a mix of wide eyes and gaping mouth, with just the hint of lolling tongue, while I scamper back into the house as flirtily as possible.
Luckily for my ego, I have actually acquired a bikini of late. Aunt Midge gave it to me from one of her boxes; it’s a bikini she actually made herself back in what she calls her “heyday.” It’s macraméd from thick cream-colored cord and lined with flesh-tone fabric that offers modesty for the wearer without looking modest at all to the observer. It’s also got reddish-brown wooden beads on it, hanging off the strings that tie the bottom closed, and sewn into a triangle pattern on each half of the bra top. When Aunt Midge first pulled it out of tissue paper she was storing it in, it looked huge, and I thought there was no way it would ever fit me, but apparently my butt has come into its own over the last month here at reverse fat camp.
I tie it on and look down and am shocked and delighted to find myself in possession of actual boobs. Not huge boobs, but at least B cups, I think. Now that I have some body fat, I really do look a lot more normal and healthy. I’m probably the only woman in America who feels that way, but so what? I’m hungry, so lay off, Anna Wintour.
Now, clad only in string, I go looking for a snack to take out to the backyard with me and am surprised to find someone already headfirst in the fridge, taking in the breeze while moving around containers of chicken stock and God knows what else.
“Aunt Midge?” I ask, recognizing that expanse of tushie anywhere. “What are you doing home from the shelter?”
She shuts the fridge and whirls around on me. “It’s Saturday. I don’t do lunches on Saturdays,” she says, and I already know this quite well—I just had no idea what day it was until this very moment. “You really do need a job if you can’t even keep track of the days of the week anymore.”
There might be some truth to that. “But I saw Janey take the car out right at the normal time,” I say. “Was she just going for groceries?”
Aunt Midge lowers her eyes at me. “Was she? Or maybe was she going into Little Pond to see someone, do you think?”
“On a Saturday? This thing is more serious than I realized,” I say.
Aunt Midge growls at me. “What good are you if you aren’t keeping track of her?” she asks.
“Jeez! I’m not her mother,” I snap back, though her words only confirm my own fears. If I’m not going to be needed to bring Janey out of her shell anymore, what exactly am I needed for? “Anyway,” I explain, just as much to myself as to her, “all my usual interrogation techniques have failed. I’m not sure what to do short of waterboarding.”
Aunt Midge softens, and smiles. “She is one tough cookie, that girl,” she concedes. “Nice bikini, Miss Bardot. Let’s get some food and go work on our tans.”
I find some slices of ham and Muenster cheese lurking in the fridge and cut us off a stack of thin slices of my latest creation, olive-rosemary bread, and follow Aunt Midge out back to the lounge chairs. She’s trying to heft one over closer to the edge of the cliffs, and I set down my platter on the little table between them and take the chair from her, and then the other, and get us all settled in. The view is incredible today, the sun high in the sky turning the ocean into a diamond mine.
“She’s been humming a lot,” says Aunt Midge when she’s comfortably seated. “I think the humming is a sign.”
“Obviously,” I say. “She’s crazy about him. Which is what worries me.”
“Why would you be worried?”
Well, not because I’m worried that she won’t need me anymore. Certainly not that. “She’s so vulnerable,” I say. “And she hardly knows the guy.”
“That’s for sure,” says Aunt Midge, a little too enthusiastically.
“What do you mean by that?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing,” she says, clearly fibbing. “But I don’t think you need to worry. He seems like a good sort of man.”
“Well, they all look good from a distance,” I say.
“Hmm. Does that include J.J.?”
“Of course it does. He seems nice and smart and fun and whatever, but you don’t really know about a guy until you’ve known him a long time.” And seen him drunk, I mentally add, thinking of Geoff for the first time in a nice long while.
Aunt Midge shrugs. “I knew about Albert right away.” Albert was her husband, the one that stuck for thirty plus years and then keeled over when he was still in his fifties.
“How?” I ask.
“I’ve never told you this story?”
I shake my head, feeling just as surprised as she sounds. In the drives to and from the shelter every day we’ve covered quite a lot of ground in Aunt Midge’s life story. And though I know she loved her husband, many of her tales have been from the “other men I’ve known and loved” department. I guess we never went this far back.
She sinks into her chair a little lower and takes a deep breath before launching in. “Me and my best friend at the time, this awful woman named Roberta, went to see Casablanca. Roberta was already pretty well into Humphrey Bogart, but I had never seen him before. That Maltese Falcon picture
seemed like such a guy movie at the time. Well, believe me, I’ve seen it forty times since. Dear God in heaven, I’ve been a good woman. When I die, all I want is Humphrey Bogart and Matt Damon feeding me grapes, all day long. Or not grapes. Bonbons. The ones that look like nipples, with the maple crème inside…”
“Focus, Aunt Midge,” I remind her.
“Focus on what? Oh. Right. So that night, when Bogart came on screen, I took one look and fell right in love. Oh, that hat. Who else could wear nothing fancier than an old brimmed hat and a raincoat and still look so good you think your teeth are going to fall out?”
I nod, though I have no idea what she’s talking about. Note to self: look up Casablanca on Wikipedia.
“When the movie was over, we got up and were about to leave our seats, but it was a double feature, and the movie after … what was that movie, I can’t remember … well, it was intermission, I know, and the town theater still had an organist come in at intermissions and play a couple of numbers, just like when I was a kid. But this time the lights came up and there was no organist there. Just dead silence. Well, a few people were probably wondering where he was but most of us didn’t even realize what was missing—it was such a silly old holdover from the days of silent movies—until the theater door banged open and a man in a tan hat and a raincoat”—Aunt Midge’s voice turns urgent—“just like the hat and raincoat Humphrey Bogart had been wearing in Casablanca, came barging down the aisle, running in that downhill flop-flop sort of way past all the seats, and down to the organ. And then he sat down on the organ bench, sopping wet, didn’t even take off his raincoat, just pushed it behind him on the bench, and started playing. Oh, I wish I remembered what he had played that night. He made plenty of mistakes, all flustered and dripping as he was. But he still sounded great to me. Just great. He played for about ten minutes and then the music for the next movie started to come up and the lights went down. He stood up from the bench and stretched a little and walked back up the aisle to go. I didn’t even see his face as he passed by. I just got up and I told Roberta I had to take a tinkle, and then I followed that raincoat out of the theater and into the pouring rain and we fell in love with each other as soon as I tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuse me.’ Nothing clever, just ‘excuse me,’ and we were both done and dusted just like that.”
I’m rapt. “So then what happened?
“We went to his mother’s place for pie,” Aunt Midge says, as though that is the most natural answer. “And I kept trying to get him to put that hat back on the whole night, I remember.”
“And then what?” I ask, hoping we are getting to the first kiss, at least.
“What do you mean, then what? Then we got married. Haven’t you been listening?”
I sink back in my chair and sigh. “Never mind.” But I am enchanted all the same.
We share a moment of companionable silence. I try to imagine what J.J. would look like in a fedora.
“Not all love happens like that, you know.”
“I know,” I say.
“For example, sometimes love happens when a young woman has been lying her pants off left and right to everyone who cares for her, and then she meets an interesting guy but she’s in so deep that she can’t trust him with the truth so she pushes him away.”
“Oh, really?”
“Mm-hmm. Happens all the time.”
“Just like that, huh?”
“Just like that.”
“And in how many of these situations does the guy in question happen to be a sexy gardener?”
Aunt Midge purses her lips, pretending to be in deep in thought. “I’d say about a third,” she says, grinning at me. “You could try telling him the truth.”
“Maybe later,” I say.
“Practice on me,” she says back, too fast for me to believe she hasn’t been steering this conversation here for some time. “Tell me what really happened to you before you came here.”
“Nothing happened,” I say. “I entered the contest, so of course I watched the TV show announcing the winners, and I really thought I had won, so I came here and broke into the house. I made up the bullshit about killing someone so you’d let me stay.”
“Did you pull out your own hair just for our benefit too? Slice up your own knuckles?”
Her saying this makes me look down at the bands of scars I have on my hand from where the coffee cup broke when I beaned Geoff. They look so old already, even though it’s only been a little over a month. The ones on the inside of my hand are longer, and have a milky whiteness to them, and without thinking I trace one with my other index finger, like I’m reading my fortune in them. My finger stops on a pale cigarette burn—a souvenir from the boyfriend before Geoff.
Aunt Midge catches me at it and sighs loudly. “A little honesty wouldn’t kill you, you know. You wouldn’t have to make a habit of it or anything.”
I turn to her and give her my best carefree Nean-the-Free-Spirit look. “Nothing left to tell,” I say, and then I pull my barely covered butt off the lounge chair and see myself back inside.
* * *
Hours later, I am still thinking of Aunt Midge’s questions. Did you pull out your own hair? Slice up your own knuckles? But I am determined not to let any trace of uneasiness pollute my time with J.J. Janey still being absent, I go digging through her underwear drawer, hoping to find some lacy bra to cover up my newly budding ta-tas. After all, it may not technically be a “date,” but a gal still deserves to feel sexy from time to time, right? But apparently Janey doesn’t share my philosophy. All I find is a pile of tightly folded cotton briefs and the kinds of bras they sell in boxes. I don’t want an eighteen-hour bra. I want a thirty-minute bra. Leave it to the girl who thinks everything is unmentionable not to own a single actual unmentionable.
In the end I go with the same ol’, same ol’, and put over it a pretty yellow sundress I’ve lifted from another half-unpacked box. It has tie-straps and elastic around the bust so I tie it as low as I can and hope I’m more Bunny Ranch than Sunny Brook Farms.
Aunt Midge sees me on my way out, and nods in approval. “Nice dress!” she calls after me as I bound down the porch stairs toward the road.
“Thanks,” I call back. “It’s yours.”
I hear her laughing even as I make my way around the bend of trees to the end of the drive. J.J. and I have planned to meet at the boat put-in that’s halfway between us, but I don’t get two steps before I see his truck coming up the road. He beeps and I jump.
“Going my way?” he asks, and for a moment I consider saying no, just to see what he’d say. Instead I hop into the cab and start cranking down the window before I’ve even said hello.
“You look nice,” J.J. says, and he uses that same damn neutral voice that I’m always trying to use on him. It means, “We are just friends, and a friend can compliment another friend without it meaning anything.” It drives me crazy to hear it from him now, when I’m deliberately trying to be hot.
“You too,” I say, without looking over at him. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise,” he tells me.
I frown at him. He looks from me to the road, and when he looks back at me again I am still frowning.
“It’s a seafood restaurant,” he says. “On the water.”
“Ooh,” I say in my best upper-crust old lady voice. “Is it Chez Fancy Pants? I have been dying to go there ever since I read the reviews in the Globe.”
J.J. laughs at me and tells me that yes, we are going to Chez Fancy Pants and getting a reservation there is a killer.
“Are those your actual fancy pants?” I ask him, noticing for the first time that he is wearing not just a button-down shirt and khaki slacks but also a red-and-gold-striped tie.
“Yep.”
“Nice tie.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I borrowed it from my dad.”
This makes me turn my head with a start. “Your dad lives with you?” Up until now he’s only mentioned his mot
her in conversation. I sort of assumed that like me and most people I’ve spent any amount of time with, he didn’t have a dad.
“Of course,” he says, laughing. “What did you think?”
I blush, and not in a coquettish way. I’m truly embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I just figured…” I don’t know how to complete this sentence, so I let my voice drift off. I guess I figured that since he’s a gardener, and a townie, he’d be pretty much the same as me in most ways. I hope he’s not offended.
But he doesn’t seem to realize the nature of my mistake, and he sits there looking pleasantly oblivious until he helpfully contributes, “My parents have been married since time began. I’m the baby of the family.”
“Wow,” I say, unable to think of anything more intelligent. I am starting to wonder if maybe our home lives haven’t been just a teensy bit more different than I realized. Starting with, you know, having a home.
“I take it your parents aren’t still married?” he asks.
Well, that’s a startling understatement. “No,” I say, and decide not to clear up the misconception that they were ever married in the first place. I like to think I came about my trailer trashiness all by myself, but my mother shares the same attributes of frequent homelessness and bad taste in men. Happily we do not share her love of meth.
J.J. seems to notice I’m feeling a bit rattled by this little line of conversation. He takes mercy on me and changes the subject. “So, ever had a lobster boil before?”
“I’ve never even had lobster before.”
J.J. slams on the brakes and the tires shriek underneath us. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Some of us think Bumblebee tuna is good enough, Daddy Warbucks.”
“Well, you would be wrong about that.” He shakes his head disapprovingly. “This explains everything.”
“Explains what, exactly?”
“Everything. Why you are so skinny, for one thing. And why you seem so unsure about staying in Maine.”
“I seem unsure about Maine?”
“Yes! You could not be more noncommittal if you tried. I keep thinking I’m going to come by one day and you’ll have gone back to Iowa.”