The Confession Club (ARC)

by Elizabeth Berg

  Taking Them Up on Their Offer

  Iris brings corn to pop on the stove when she goes over to Monica and Tiny’s house to watch a movie with them. They’re going to see The Shape of Water again, even though when Monica and Tiny went to see it in the theater, Tiny squirmed the whole time. But he loves his wife, and he loves popcorn you make on the stove, especially with a lot of butter. “I’ll endure the movie for the food,” he tells Iris when she shows him the jar of Orville Redenbacher popcorn she brought along. She also brought Junior Mints and Good & Plenty and RedVines and Milk Duds and Hot Tamales.

  She brought a gift-wrapped onesie for the baby, too, holding back on bringing Monica and Tiny any more of the eight she has bought. So far. She knows Monica’s not superstitious about getting things for an unborn baby, because she’s told Iris about the things she’s bought. But they’re short on newborn onesies, she said, so that’s what Iris brought tonight. It’s powder-blue, with a little lamb embroidered on it, and Iris bought a stuffed-animal lamb to go with it. It was hard for Iris, looking through those baby clothes, knowing she would never buy such things for a baby of her own. But it wasn’t as hard as she thought it might be. It helps to know she’ll be a sought-after babysitter for this little one. Only two and a half weeks to go! When she and Monica saw each other at the Henhouse, Monica’s roomy uniform and apron hid the bump well. But now, with Monica dressed in one of Tiny’s T-shirts and jeans, Iris can see that she is very close indeed.

  “Isn’t this the cutest thing,” Monica says, unwrapping the onesie. “And oh, Tiny, look! A little lamb to go with it!”

  Tiny holds the lamb in his huge hand, and something inside Iris turns a slow somersault. She thinks the most cynical person in the world could still be moved by this kind of love on a father-to-be’s face.

  Tiny volunteers to pop the corn, and Iris and Monica sit in the living room. Iris makes Monica put her feet up on the hassock; Monica makes Iris share it with her, and throws a quilt over them both.

  “How’re you doing?” Monica asks quietly.

  Iris guesses Monica knows that she misses John. She hasn’t talked much about it, but she supposes it’s clear to anyone who knows her.

  Iris shrugs. “I’m okay. You know how when you lose someone, you keep thinking about all the wonderful things about them, all the good times you had? I’m trying to think about the bad times.”

  “Good idea,” Monica says. “Let’s talk about that. What were the bad times?”

  “Well, there weren’t a lot of bad times. That’s the problem. I can’t think of any. We didn’t know each other long enough. He was … moody, I’ll call it. But there were things just after him, he had demons. Still, there was just something about him that I really …” She looks over at Monica. “I don’t know, is this stupid? I thought we could have had a life together. I hoped the two of us would live on the farm together.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with hoping. Things don’t always work out, that’s all. But life is funny. You may end up with what you want after all, but in a way that you never expected. Like this movie, right?” She laughs. “I know that woman never wished for a fish for a lover.”

  “Until she met him,” Iris says. “I have to say, they did make him attractive.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I do,” Iris says. “But then I like unusual things.”

  “Almost done,” Tiny yells into the living room.

  Monica speaks quickly. “Listen, Iris, I want you to know, that … Well, so many people in this town love you, me and Tiny included. I hope you know that.”

  “Here we go!” Tiny says, coming into the room with a huge bowl of popcorn. Just before they start the movie, he says, “I have made an executive decision. I’m watching until that bathtub scene comes on, and then I’m going out to get my steps in.” Tiny tries to walk ten thousand steps a day, and Monica says he gets crabby if he doesn’t get them in.

  “Okay,” Monica and Iris answer together. They’re both already fixated on the screen, even though it’s only previews now. “I can’t wait to see this movie again, I love it so much,” Monica says.

  “Me, too,” says Iris.

  “I always love a good romantic movie.”

  “Did you ever see Gone with the Wind?” Iris asks.

  “Six times,” Monica says, around a mouth full of popcorn.

  “You know that scene when Ashley comes home, he’s walking down the road, and at first Melanie doesn’t know it’s him?”

  “That’s a good scene. She just runs to him.”

  “Wouldn’t it be great to have a love like that?” Iris asks.

  “I do have a love like that,” Monica says, and Tiny beams.

  “But I mean, wouldn’t you love to run to a man you love like that? So romantic!”

  “I guess,” Monica says. “But I can’t run so good anymore. And I doubt Tiny could pick me up now.”

  Tiny says, “I can still—”

  “Shhhhhhh!” both women say, because the previews are over and the movie is starting.

  “I can still pick you up,” Tiny whispers.

  Later, after Tiny has left for his walk and the lovemaking in the film is going on in earnest, Monica says, “Oh, God.”

  “I know,” Iris says softly. “It’s so weirdly sexy.”

  “No, it’s …” Monica stands. “Iris. Iris, I think this is it. I think I’m in labor. I’ve been having pains all day but Tiny said it was just gas. Why do men always think they know about things they don’t know about? This isn’t gas. This hurts. I think this is it!”

  “But …” Iris says. “Where’s Tiny?”

  Monica grabs her phone to call him, and they hear the ringtone in the house.

  “He didn’t bring his phone! I’m going to kill him!”

  “Should I go and look for him?”

  “No! Don’t leave me alone. Don’t leave me alone, Iris.”

  “Well … Shall I take you to the hospital?”

  “Yes. This is it. I’m sure this is it. Oh, Lord, and I didn’t even rinse the supper dishes. They’re still in the sink. Let me just—”

  “Get in the car,” Iris says.

  Monica sits down. “Do you think you could bring the car into the living room?” But then she takes in a big breath and gets up and the women walk slowly out to the car.

  “Tiiiiiiiiiiny!” Iris calls, after she seats Monica in her car. “Tiiiiiiiiny!” she tries again. Someone next door opens a window and yells out, “He’s out for his walk!”

  Iris gets into the car, takes a deep breath, and pulls out onto the street. It’s only six blocks. She can afford to go slowly, carefully.

  “Oh, Monica,” she says. “A brand-new person is about to take his place on the earth.”

  “Yeah,” Monica says. “Can we listen to the radio or something?”

  An hour later, Tiny comes bursting into Monica’s hospital room. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says. He picks up Monica’s hand and covers it with kisses.

  “The doctor was just in,” Monica says. “It won’t be long.”

  “Monica,” Tiny says, his voice breaking, and Iris takes this as her cue.

  She goes to Monica’s bedside and kisses her forehead, squeezes her hand. “You’re going to do just fine,” she says. “Call me afterward, whenever you can.” She hugs Tiny, and goes out into the hall. She leans against the wall, trying to think about what she wants to do. She doesn’t want to go home and be with Matthew and Maddy and Nola, another happy family.

  She gets into the car and drives out to the farm. Twice now, she has slept in John’s old bed, buried under quilts she’s brought out there. He cleaned out everything before he left, but not that bed. She wants to wake up on the farm as it was when he was there, and say goodbye to that iteration. This will be her last chance to sleep there as it was when they we
re there together. Demolition starts tomorrow, and Iris gets to help. Then the carpenter, the plumber, and the electrician are all going to work together to make the place habitable. They’ve told her she can move in there in six weeks. It doesn’t really seem possible, but they assure her it is. She can hardly wait to be living there, with her dogs and all her other animals. She’s especially excited about the llamas. Maddy told her that as a spirit animal they symbolize hard work and responsibility and how everything you want can be achieved if you’ll just put in the effort every day. She’d read to Iris from something she’d printed out: “ ‘Llamas teach you to persevere because there are always good things waiting for you on the horizon.’ See? Right here in black and white.” She gave Iris the paper, and Iris folded it up and put it in her pocket. The general contractor she’s working with told her that there was a tradition of hiding something in the walls before the drywall goes up—did she have anything she wanted to put in there? Now she does.

  Iris herself has learned that llamas are very graceful, curious, intelligent, and gentle. But they’re also loners, and they want little care. They remind her of someone she still thinks of with great affection, and supposes she always will.

  The Thing That Shall Not Be Named

  “All right, ladies,” says Rosemary. “This is it. I’m ready to talk about something very personal.”

  “That’s what we do here,” says Karen. “Duh.”

  “Yes, but this is very personal.”

  Silence but for the clink of Toots’s fork scraping against her dessert plate. It’s only yellow cake and chocolate frosting from the box, but if there’s one thing Toots likes, it’s yellow cake out of the box. One time, when Confession Club fell on her birthday and the women wanted to gift her with something, she asked for and received a mixing bowl of yellow-cake batter, and she went through a substantial amount of it before asking to have it put in a container to take home.

  Rosemary clears her throat. “Okay. For a long time now, Don and I haven’t … We haven’t had sex for years. First, things just slowed up, but now everything has stopped altogether. He isn’t interested. Doesn’t matter how hard I work to keep myself up, he isn’t interested. He’s not mean about it, he’s just … well, he’s nothing. A couple of times, I’ve tried to talk to him about it and he says he’s sorry, and that he feels bad, but he just has no desire. He sees no point in seeing a doctor—he says it’s natural. Then the other day he said right out of the blue, ‘And I’m not taking that medication that gives you a boner for a thousand hours. Have you ever seen the side effects?’ And I said no, I had not seen the side effects, and he said, ‘Well, believe me. There are a lot of side effects. Dangerous ones.’ That man gets nervous taking Tylenol, so I know he won’t come around to trying any medication. One time I got very emotional and I said, ‘Well, I’m just going to find a lover, then!’ As if I could. But I said it like I really meant it and Don said, ‘I understand why you would say that, but I hope you don’t, Rosemary. I do love you.’ ”

  She sighs. “To be honest, I don’t blame him. Every time I look at myself naked in the mirror, I just can’t believe it. I am ugly! Not all of me, but a lot of me. Lord! Isn’t it funny, how we hold these images in our mind, how we think we look a certain way despite all the evidence to the contrary? The other day, I was walking past a shop window, and I saw myself and literally gasped. Literally! Like, I went”—and here she inhales sharply—“and I had my hand over my chest like I’d seen a ghost. I guess I had seen a ghost, only it was the ghost of me.”

  “You actually look pretty darned good for a woman your age,” Dodie says.

  “Well, thank you, but that’s just it. A woman my age. Sometimes I take out the scrapbook and look at pictures of myself, of how I used to be, and I just feel so bad. I know I’m lucky. I do realize all I have. I believe I should accept things about aging, but when I have those moments of … you know, missing myself, I’m not thinking that it’s natural and that it happens to everyone and it’s no big deal, really. I’m thinking, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’

  “Then, to add to it, I feel bad about myself for feeling bad about myself. It makes me remember when I was in the hospital for my cholecystectomy and I was next door to a woman who had cancer. And it was a bad diagnosis, she was going to die, all her relatives would come out of her room crying after they’d visited with her. She was really suffering. I could hear her crying out sometimes. And there I was, a woman who’d had a common and really very simple operation, pressing my call bell for pain medication the moment it was due. I felt so guilty, and I told that to my nurse. She was the nicest nurse, a young girl, really, but a wise soul. She said, ‘You know what? That woman’s pain being greater than yours doesn’t make your pain any less. She deserves the best we can offer, and so do you. Now roll over and hike up your johnnie.’

  “What she said helped me then. But this is a separate issue. Now it’s shame about something I can’t do anything about. I work so hard to make myself look good. But my husband stares at me sometimes, and I can just about hear him thinking, ‘Lord, she’s gone downhill. I married a beautiful woman and look what’s happened.’ Things have gone downhill for him, too, but you know how it is. Men don’t care. And women are gracious enough not to care, either, at least not about them getting older. But us! What happens to us! I’m afraid to turn my back to him because he’ll see how saggy and square my butt has gotten. I won’t wear shorts because he’ll see my spider veins. I turn out the lights when I come to bed lest I lean over him for something and he sees my face look like it’s melting right off. And those damn whiskers on my chin!”

  “I have these kind of wart-y things under my arms,” Gretchen says.

  “Like, flesh-colored things, just hanging there?” Joanie asks.

  “Exactly. Do you have them?”

  “No,” Joanie says, “but I’ve seen them. Skin tags.”

  “Oh, great, that makes me feel a lot better,” says Gretchen, “that you’ve seen them.”

  “All of us over a certain age have things we’d rather not display,” Rosemary says. “And as much as I sometimes feel like I’ve reached critical mass, I know it is going to get worse. But in spite of that, I just feel like it’s too soon to not have any sexual pleasure in my life.

  “So last week I gave myself a good talking-to. I said to myself, ‘Rosemary, there is more to sex than bodies. Just get in there and try! Maybe he just needs a little jump start.’

  “I made us a real good surf-and-turf dinner just like you get at over at Teddy’s. I even made a relish tray with cream-cheese-celery and olives and pickled beets like they do, and I put three different salad dressings in the carousel with little ladles—”

  “Where’d you get the carousel?” Dodie asked.

  “At Teddy’s. They sold me one.”

  “Really!” said Dodie. “I’ve been looking for one of those for years.”

  “Anyway,” Rosemary says, “I made us a good dinner, and I poured us a lot of wine. At bedtime, I went in the bathroom and put on this black nightie I’d hauled out that I’ve had for forty years—it’s the sexiest thing. It ties over the boobs, okay? A little bow tie. All the guy has to do is pull on the string and there they are. Used to be Don loved that gown. I hadn’t worn it in over twenty years and I found that my boobs had moved quite a bit lower from the last time I’d had it on. Bill Clinton was president the last time I wore it. Still, I put it on, and I put on red lipstick and mascara and foundation and blush and I came out of the bathroom swinging my hips, okay? I was swinging my hips like Marilyn Monroe. I’d pretty much talked myself into something, I was feeling confident. And very excited. And very drunk.

  “Well, I came into the bedroom and he was lying in bed, fiddling with his phone—honestly, those phones have become adult pacifiers. But anyway, he’s looking at his phone. And there I am in all my glory, I even had perfume on. Did I mention that? On my thig
hs. So I stood there a while and then I said, ‘Hey, Tarzan! Jane’s here. How about we do some swinging?’ ”

  The room is very still and then Rosemary says, “I know. You can laugh.”

  There are a few snickers, but Gretchen says, “Well, I think that was very fun and creative.”

  “Yeah,” Rosemary says. “He thought it was pretty fun, too, pretty funny. I could tell he wanted to laugh. But to his credit, he said, ‘Well, look at you.’ And I shook my body all around and … you know, did some things like I was a stripper. And under the covers I could see it start to rise.

  “I thought, ‘Hallelujah!’ and I lay down on the bed and I told him to turn out the light and he said why and I said just turn out the light and then we tried, but in the end he was like a floppy fish and I think it humiliated him to high heaven. You can just imagine how I felt when I went back into the bathroom to put my flannel nightie on. I went to take my makeup off and my lipstick was smeared all over my face. I looked ridiculous. I felt ridiculous. When I came out, he was asleep. Or pretending to be. And I thought, Well, that’s that.

  “But here’s the problem. I am still just beset by these urges. I feel this rising up, like a wave of … of …”

  “Horniness?” Toots says, licking off her fork in a manner that could be called lascivious.

  Rosemary glares at her. “Yes, Toots. It’s horniness. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Well, that’s easy,” says Karen. “Get a ‘massager.’ You can get it on Amazon. My friend in St. Louis got one from them that looks like an ice cream cone and she said it works really well. Really saves time. And it is not a sin. She told me she allows herself to use it in between loads of laundry so she’ll be happy about doing the laundry.”

  “That very notion just makes me feel sick,” Rosemary says.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” says Dodie. “Everybody mastur—”

  “Don’t say that word!” Rosemary says. “Oh, I hate that word. I don’t want to hear that word! It’s like someone sticking out their fat tongue and speaking around it and drool is all coming down!”