by Carr, Suzie
I was one laugh away from being bullied myself. I didn’t have the gift of money like the rest of these girls did. I slid into this circle through the sheer luck that Barbara and I were born to mothers sharing a hospital room who later became PTA friends. If it weren’t for our mothers forcing us to play together on long, hot summer days at Spring Lake and our fathers eventually working together at the news station, I would be that girl walking halfway around the other side of the school to avoid Barbara and all of her pretty friends. Because my mother was fond of playing Rummy and drinking afternoon martinis, I escaped the cruel side of life. My best friend, Barbara, protected me from it. For a little while anyway.
Barbara and I, along with ten or so other girls, walked around the school with our heads held higher than the rest. Well, I didn’t carry mine as high, just enough to show I half-belonged. I walked with trepidation next to the girls with clout, with confidence, with power.
I used to promise myself when I’d laugh along with them at some poor unfortunate classmate, that one day I’d make up for the hurt I caused by doing good deeds for strangers. I called it my redemption process. That smoothed over the cruel callouses of guilt I suffered from doling out a lingering snicker that got all the other girls going even louder. I had a knack for getting the engines hot on the cruelty, and the rest of the girls would just sneak right in and take over the attack. So, after I honed in on some unsuspecting kid with stringy hair or a set of scrawny legs, and buttered up the path to his attack with some good old-fashioned insults, I’d slide backwards and plan more of my redemption process over again.
My redemption process sucked, but massaged the guilt at the time. I planned out this whole future for myself where I’d mow strangers’ front lawns, help the elderly with their groceries, volunteer to walk neighborhood dogs while their masters worked long hours, and definitely serve the less fortunate by spooning soup into their empty bowls at shelters. Yeah, I planned on being a martyr when I grew up and stopped bullying kids who didn’t come from upper middle class homes and who didn’t enjoy birthday bashes at a catered banquet hall, and who didn’t wear designer clothes and enjoy the best haircuts from the top salons and spas.
Not until after Barbara ran around the school spreading rumors that I was gay did I start to rethink that promise. Shortly after that humiliating day, I flushed my promises down the drain because what I endured punished me far more than any redemptive act I planned to take. The moment I got hit with my first rock, I realized good deeds would never make up for what I’d done to others. By the third time of being tripped in the hallway and falling flat on my stomach in a belly flop, I decided I deserved this treatment and it would serve as punishment.
I deserved a cruel life after all the pain I must’ve caused other kids. I’d never forget the agony on this girl Rhonda’s face the day I told her she couldn’t sit with us popular girls at the lunch table. She gathered her tray and sat alone and peeked up at me while shoveling a sandwich in between her chubby mouth, tears spilling down her cheeks.
I devastated lives, and when the tables turned, I had prayed the torture would take the sting away. Wishful thinking. Pain took on a whole new level when you realized you’d caused yourself this pain and deserved every blow.
I wondered, as I sat clinging to my steering wheel in the parking lot whether all of those kids I bullied had grown up to be like me, someone who lived life in the dark shadows always clinging to a false hope that maybe one day they’d smile and really mean it.
Chapter Four
On Wednesday night, Larry and I met over laundry. I was folding a towel, searching inside its folds for peace, when he asked me why I was so quiet.
I shrugged off his question. “I’m fine.”
He eyed me.
I waved him off. “Fold your shirt.”
He took my hint and didn’t say another peep until later when he dropped my bag of laundry on my living room floor. “I have cheesecake.”
Many stories unfolded between us over cheesecake. The creamy, sugary slices of heaven cocooned us into a safe harbor where anything could be revealed and not a single judgment passed. Larry always had a cheesecake on hand for those spontaneous moments when one of us needed to unleash. If, on the odd occasion, he didn’t have actual cheesecake, he always stored cheesecake flavored yogurts for emergencies.
I first learned about how Larry’s uncle sexually abused him when he was eight-years-old over a slice of strawberry. I confessed to stealing one hundred dollars from my parents’ savings jar to buy a new pair of jeans when I was a freshman in high school over a slice of blueberry. A talk over a slice of New York style helped him come to terms with the fact that his older brother might never answer his calls again because he feared Larry’s homosexuality. Most pivotal was when cheesecake paved the way for me confessing to Larry that I didn’t have one iota of desire for men. To this day, however, cheesecake never did drag the most embarrassing of truths out of me, the one that tortured me in the middle of the night, the one that swept sand over my dreams, the one that shoved me back down the dark tunnel every time something good started to poke its happy rays through the surface.
I feared the cheesecake that night. Its sweet innocence could reach up and into those guarded regions, curl up its magical swirls, and lead an army of ants to its death. What power did I have against it? I didn’t trust the cheesecake’s power to protect me against my ugly past that night. Though, a flicker of truth highlighted the fact that until I confessed this hideous part of my past to my best friend, I’d remain jailed to it. Still, I resisted. “I’m not in the mood for cheesecake,” I said.
He lowered his bottom lip and opened his arms up wide. “Come here,” he said. “Let me get a hug.”
I walked into his arms and sank into his embrace. He smelled like a spring day. He patted my back and cradled me to his chest.
“I’m feeling bad.”
“I know.” He continued to pat my back. “Tell me all about it.”
I clung to him, comforted by his long arms and big spirit. “I’m tired of myself.”
He rocked me.
Since tweeting to Eva, I had wasted countless hours escaping into a dream world where I captured her attention and the two of us twirled around in Twitterland bliss bantering back and forth like a couple of fresh, young lovers. I imagined her soft lips landing on mine, her warm eyes gazing lovingly at me, her soft hands caressing my skin. These daydreams stirred me and left me panting.
“You need cheesecake, darling,” he whispered.
My tears exploded on impact. I bucked against his chest like I’d just witnessed the end of a life. The pain seeped out, poking, pinching, and scratching its way through my tiny pores. “Yes, I need cheesecake.” I finally surrendered.
We left my bag of folded clothes in the middle of my living room floor and walked across the landing to his condo. Within five minutes, we sat cross-legged on his black Italian leather sofa and fed on red velvet cheesecake. I dug my fork into it. “I’m scared, Larry.”
He stopped mid-chew and squinted at me. “Of what, darling?”
I swallowed a bite, waiting for its magic to take over and help me voice the thing I promised myself for years that I’d never say out loud. “Of living the rest of my life alone.”
He dropped his fork on his plate, wiped his mouth with a napkin and sat up taller, “Finally.”
“Finally?”
“Yes, finally we can have this conversation.” He readjusted, folding his legs under him, steadying in for a deep talk. His eyes twinkled. His lips curled into a devilish smile. “I want to hear all about this girl who’s breaking your heart right now.”
“I never mentioned a specific person.”
“You never wear mascara, and for the past few days, you’re wearing it.”
I nodded. I needed another mouthful. I swallowed and stabbed the cheesecake with the fork waiting for it to help me explain. “She doesn’t even know I exist. Well, not really anyway.”
He
scooped up a helping and fed it to me. “Tell me her name.”
I lingered on the bite, rolling the sugar around my tongue, mystified by its power to level out solid ground as I rolled out my confession. A smile fought its way to the surface. “Eva. Her name’s Eva. She just started at our New York City branch. And she’s why I joined Twitter.”
He giggled and scooted up closer. “She’s all you can think about, right?”
“So pathetic, right?”
“Very.” He wiped my mouth with a napkin. “However, it happens to the best of us. So tell me the real issue here.”
“Well, let me set the story for you. With my bio and my fake picture, I explained my exciting life. You see, I’m gorgeous, a professional writer, a world traveler, and as if that’s not enough, I can also run marathons in under two-and-a-half hours.”
He piled another forkful in his mouth. “You’ve created one hell of an alter ego, darling.” He twisted his mouth. “A world traveler? Really?”
“I could be.” I smacked his upper arm.
“A trip to the Smoky Mountains doesn’t count as world traveling, and neither does Skyping me when I traveled to Australia.”
I punched him again. This time even harder.
He winced. “I digressed. I apologize.” He rubbed his arm. “My point is, you could be all of that if you just stop being so hard on yourself.”
“So, I’m not gorgeous? That’s what you’re saying?”
“That’s your takeaway?” He sat back.
“Well?”
He sat up again and laced his fingers through the end of my ponytail. “If you’d style your hair in more than that ponytail, you would be.” He batted the frizzy end of it in between his fingers. “Seriously, get this trimmed.”
He dropped my frizz in lieu of another forkful of creamy cheesecake. He smacked his lips, swiping them with his tongue and wiping every last morsel of the decadence from them. His lips had kissed many. This fact only reminded me of how pathetic I was and that I would certainly spend the rest of my days failing at the one thing that came so easy to most every person on the planet. Geez, my cousin kissed her first set of lips at five when she and her friend, Mike, hid under a bush in a game of hide-and-seek. “When did you have your first kiss?”
“I was twelve. At George Washington Grove State Park in campground site number twenty-two. He was nineteen. His name was George and he invited me to his site to drink beer. I took three sips and then he moved in and started making out with me on his picnic table. His tongue was slimy and took up my entire mouth. He had just smoked a cigarette, too. He tasted like an ashtray. I wanted to throw up. His kiss grossed me out. I’d never tasted anything as disgusting. In fact, I swore off kissing for eternity after leaving his site.” He arched his eye. “Well, that lasted a day.” He giggled and scooted in closer. “The very next morning, my secret boy crush walked by me as I lathered soap onto my chest in the community shower. He smiled. I smiled back. He cocked his head to a changing stall. I followed. The rest was history, darling. Lot of first times happened that weekend for me.” He winked.
I dug deep, pausing before I launched into my confession. “I’ve never been kissed.”
He dropped his plate on the coffee table, sat back and exhaled like I’d just told him I grew up as a member of an alien species who had flown in from a planet far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. His hands flew up to his face, cupping his mouth. “I need a moment to marinate this.”
After he marinated, Larry arrived at a half-baked idea to christen me into the land of the kissing. “Kiss me.”
“Over my dead ass.”
“Okay, then.” He shrugged.
I punched his arm. “Yes, okay then.”
We both agreed kissing each other would cause permanent irreparable damage to our friendship, because from that point on neither one of us would be able to look each other in the eye with a straight face again. Larry’s lips had never landed on a woman’s. As he shoveled his last piece of cheesecake into his mouth he confessed that the thought of kissing a woman caused his stomach to hurl.
I couldn’t have been more relieved that I’d saved him from performing such a sacrifice.
# #
The next day at work, I logged into Twitter and read through my timeline of the twenty people I followed. Eva had tweeted five times in the past ten minutes, mainly replying back to people who mentioned her in a tweet. Even her tweets dripped of her sweet and sultry personality. Her words, colorful and fun, danced across Twitter like poetry. Eleven hundred and twenty-five people followed her. I joined that rank. She followed back five hundred eighty people. She had a lot to sift through to get to my tweets.
I clicked onto my mention tab and read through two mentions thanking me for following them. My eyes scrolled past these and onto my third mention, a mention from my dear Eva Handel. My heart bucked.
“So, don’t you know when a girl is just playing with you? I was hoping for a few volleys with you (wink). Do I get at least one?”
She winked at me.
Eva Handel winked at me. Well, okay, she winked at CarefreeJanie.
I lost my breath. I tapped my chest, making sure I was still breathing, still seeing the wink, still Jane Knoll, the girl who knew nothing about how to play with a girl as lovely as Eva.
I knew nothing about volleying banter. Girls like me never learned to banter. We learned to hide. We learned to walk around the world to avoid the sting of people not wanting to banter with us. I needed to learn, and learn fast.
So, I did what every resourceful twenty-nine-year-old girl who had never been kissed would probably do in my situation. I took to the Internet and pleaded with any of the powers that existed to guide me to my answer. I searched for articles on how to flirt, how to play coy, how to attract using words, and I came up with endless results. The only problem, not one of them told me what to say. They recommended silly things like cueing in on the eye contact, tilting my head, and swaying my hips forward. What a bunch of useless crap. What about instructions for those of us who preferred a keyboard over red lipstick and a sultry smile?
I dove in deeper to research mode, and meanwhile, precious time ticked away. Comedians couldn’t walk away just before dishing their best punch lines and return minutes later to tell it. Timing primed everything brilliant. Respond too soon, look like a desperate fool. Respond too late, risk her forgetting why she played with me in the first place.
I called Larry. “What would you say?”
He sighed. “It’s not supposed to be this hard. This kind of stuff should just flow naturally. You’re not drafting the Declaration of Independence here or a set of wedding vows. You’re simply telling her you’re either into her or not.”
“You’ve got nothing. That’s why you’re saying that.”
“I’ve got nothing. I do all my flirting in person.”
I hung up and stared at her tweet again. I stared at my fan-waving alter ego. “What would you do, huh?” I imagined her winking back, egging Eva on with a simple tug of mystique. She didn’t need words. Her fun sprang from within. CarefreeJanie was a playful lady who waved that fan of hers and created magic dust. She played with the air, commanding it to swirl in just the right circles, to pass through clouds without a hitch, to dance provocatively in the spaces where the visible merged silently with the invisible and created a field of sexy, uninhibited bliss.
CarefreeJanie didn’t fret over incidentals like which word choice would better suit her lips. No, she decidedly curled her lips up into a sweet, sexy smile and typed back something meaningful, something stirring, and something that would rattle Eva Handel’s world. I typed back a wink to match hers and examined it for flaws and compared it to her previous tweet about playing, volleying and winking.
My wink looked friendly, but not flirty, and certainly not engaging enough to spur Eva into continuing on with this dance. I needed a cliff hanger, a ‘please enter’ symbol, a ‘come here and let me banter with you some more’ lead. I added a q
uestion mark and had to admit, it looked like the cutest thing in the world at that moment.
I sent off my winking question mark with an air of confidence.
I sat for several lingering minutes with my eyes closed, enjoying the sweet thrill of the dance swaying in me, the magical ride, the pulsating spread of something wild and wonderful, something lustful and animalistic.
Oh that wink.
My head twirled and I floated, up and away from this dreadful cubicle with its remnants of Katie, away from the miserable anguish over my failed love life, and far from guilt-riddled grime built up from years of fretting over stupid things I did way back when I was a young idiot of a kid.
In that moment, I was free. I floated up to where lucky people hung out, to that place I often looked to with envy, to that place I had always longed to visit. I finally arrived at it and it shined even sunnier than I expected. The colors were brighter. The air was lighter, cleaner, and fresher. I loved this paradise. I wanted to live in this paradise. I wanted more. God, please, let me have more. I just needed a tweet or two a day to pressurize this air and keep me flying up where eagles dipped their wings in the air and soared on the mild breezes of Mother Nature’s art.
After several long minutes of nothing, the fear slowly started to poke its pointy prick into my bubble, lowering me back to where I just sort of flounced mid-air, waiting for the inevitable bubble to burst and for Eva to not understand my questioning wink.
Then, the tiny slit of pastels and warm liquid converged on the horizon of my prayer. My screen moved, and in danced another tweet. “Aw, thank you, doll. How did you know I adore winks?”
Doll. That rolled so easily off of my tongue when I whispered it. A carnival lit up inside and sent some serious flutters pirouetting through me. Walking that tightrope and balancing on its delicate edges, toes pointed, insteps arched, arms extended and joining with the warm air, I welcomed in the thrill. As naturally as I would put one foot in front of the other to balance over a ravine, I typed back, “You adore winks, but not Old Bay seasoning?”