“I’ve got a previous engagement,” Amber said. “Engagement” sounded like she’d added “loser” to the end of it. Bobby just hadn’t paid attention. “But, La Donna?” She pulled the band from her ponytail and shook her hair out. “Maybe if we’re around here together sometime, we could have a coffee or something.”
“That sounds good,” Bobby said. But Amber ignored him and touched my hand. “Nice talking to you,” she said.
“Be good,” Bobby said, and then she gave him the smile I’d given to her earlier. Now go away.
There was going to be what they called an annular eclipse, my astronomy teacher said. On me and Bobby’s anniversary, this was going to happen. Professor Salazar spent a whole class period talking about how annular eclipses come once every couple of years or so and only happen when the moon passes right in front of the sun. But it’s not able to cover the sun the whole way, because the moon looks smaller than the sun. I thought that was all pretty cool. Stuff I hadn’t really thought about. I was trying to tell Bobby all this when we were sitting in front of the TV, watching some dating show where one person goes on a date with a bunch of people and has to get rid of them one by one until they end up with the person they really want.
“And you know what else, Bobby? I learned something else. The moon?” I looked over at him to make sure he was still listening. He didn’t seem to be, but I kept talking anyway. “The moon? It’s this, like, cold rocky ball of stuff. Doesn’t have its own light coming from it. You know why the moon looks so bright at night, Bobby?”
“Why?” He pulled me to him and started twirling one of my braids in his fingers. “Can you believe this? This moron’s gonna pick the short girl, the one with the mouth on her, always talking all the time. They oughtta let me on the show.” He blew out some air, disgusted.
I snuggled up against Bobby and rubbed his belly under his T-shirt.
“That’s nice,” he said. “Keep doing that.”
“I was telling you about the moon,” I whispered, and kissed him on the soft part underneath his armpit. Bobby got still when I did that.
“What about it?” His voice was soft and low, way down his throat.
“I learned that the reason the moon looks so bright is because of the sun. We wouldn’t even see the moon if it wasn’t for the sun.”
“Fascinatin’,” Bobby said. He undid the top button of his jeans and waited for me to do the rest.
Amber always seemed to find me at the gym. This time, I was just finishing my workout when she came up to me. I was sweating so much, I looked like I’d just gotten hosed down. I walked real slow on the treadmill and slowed down the speed until I was barely walking. When Amber walked up to me, she said, “I hate the treadmill. I’m so bored when I do it, it’s like I’m not even there.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said. And then, because I sounded like a bitch to my own ears, I said, “Uh, you look like you hardly ever need to do anything in the first place.” It seemed like a nice thing to say. I thought she was too skinny, to tell you the truth.
She smiled and stared at me. She had these huge, blue, Barbie doll–looking eyes. A lot of her was Barbie doll–looking. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m just saying.
“I like your body better,” she said. “I’d kill for your ass.”
That was nice, what she said. I finally smiled at her for real. “Yeah, well. Tell Bobby that.”
“I did.”
I pretended I didn’t hear her.
“Bobby,” she said, after a second. Like please. “He shouldn’t have to be told something so obvious.”
I didn’t like her talking about Bobby with that tone. But still, what she said had a ring of truth to it.
“Listen,” Amber said. She had a nice voice, soft but sure of herself. She came closer to me, and I stopped the treadmill altogether. “Do you—would you like . . . I would love it if we could maybe grab a bite to eat.”
I looked around the gym. “With Bobby?”
“No. Not with Bobby.”
“Oh,” I said.
I felt funny. The thing was, Amber was OK and all that. Even if she looked fake, she wasn’t. There was something down home about her. Never thought I’d say that. I talked trash about her for the longest. But a couple of days before, I saw her do something. She got in this big dude’s face about leaving the StairMaster all sweaty and disgusting. Did he think his mother was going to come clean up his filth? she asked. Or did he expect one of us other women to clean his shit, before we got to do our own workouts? He called her a bitch, but wiped it off like she asked. Amber wasn’t playing with that fool. I liked that. Lunch with her was something different, though.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe next time? I kind of want to get home.” I did want to get home, even though I didn’t really have anything to do once I got there. I just kept seeing Bobby’s face, cheesing it up, ecstatic that Amber and I were going to lunch, like he was one number away from winning the lottery.
“Oh,” she said. “OK.” She stared at me some more, but looked down at her shoes after a second. When she looked up again, she had a little halfhearted smile.
“Real soon, though,” I said. Don’t ask me why I did this, but I touched her shoulder.
“Next time, then,” Amber said, and then walked away. “Next time” sounded like a contract.
Later, at home taking a shower, I turned on the radio real loud, since Bobby wasn’t home to have a fit about it. I played music to make me want to dance. Evelyn “Champagne” King. Champagne. I liked her attitude. Got to be real, got to be real. It was music that I used to dance to when I worked at the Eight Ball. Thinking about being real, Amber came to mind. Every time I saw her, I kept expecting her to get all giggly and white-girl silly over Bobby. Or just be slutty. Everybody else did. But she looked like she could take or leave Bobby. Mostly leave, and keep on stepping. That just made Bobby get even more stupid over her. Amber this and Amber that. I half-wished she’d hit on Bobby so he’d shut up.
Taking a shower was the best part of working out. I stood there and let the water massage my body, little warm needles with dull points. I started laughing out of nowhere, because I remembered this time when me and Bobby decided to smoke some weed and drink about two bottles of red wine.
Bobby had eaten like food was going out of style, but I hadn’t eaten a bite because I was trying to be all skinny and dainty and cute and shit. Bobby was on top of me, covering my whole body, practically. He was being extra sweet, extra slow, saying my name in a voice I heard less and less lately. I was hypnotized. High, too. “La Donna,” Bobby had whispered, and put his tongue in my ear. Right then, I got sick to my stomach. I jumped up, had to balance myself on the edge of Bobby’s futon couch.
“Where’s your bathroom?” I moaned.
“What?” Bobby was confused—and hard. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t feel too good,” I said. Bobby only had a studio, so the bathroom was just three steps away. I thought I could make it. Bobby’s apartment was practically all white or cream colored. That was a shame. I did make it into the bathroom, but it didn’t matter, because I threw up red all over Bobby’s clean white bathroom, all over his pomade and creams and ten bottles of cologne. I stayed in there for what seemed like days and months and a lifetime before Bobby knocked and came in without an answer from me. I was on my knees, holding on to the toilet like it was my long-lost friend.
To his credit, Bobby didn’t say a word—at first. He just looked at all the red covering every single thing in his bathroom. I hadn’t known him long, but I already knew he was the kind of guy who turned a book back to the exact position it was in before you picked it up from his table. Bobby only had two books in his house. His Way, Frank Sinatra’s biography, and How to Train Your Dog. But still.
“Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” he said finally. “You OK? What the hell?”
“Yeah,” I said. “No.”
“Lemme look at you.” Bobby pulled my braids fr
om my face and grabbed a towel from a rack. He wiped all the vomit from my face. “Can you stand up?”
“Yeah.” I lifted my head. “There,” I said.
“Fuck,” Bobby said. He stood me up, leaned me on the sink, and started undressing me. “You gotta get cleaned up. Lemme clean you up.”
Somehow, he got me in the shower, bathed me, dried me off, put a T-shirt and socks on me, lay me down on the bed, and pulled the covers over me. Before I passed out, I saw Bobby working in the bathroom with a mop and pail. The same bathroom I was standing in now. I had to remember that thought whenever I wanted to smack Bobby with him getting on me about everything and nothing at all.
I turned off the shower, dried off, and looked at myself in the mirror. I thought I looked OK, everything did except the tits. I’d gotten them done a couple of years ago, when I thought I was supposed to look like all the other strippers with big tits—except I was big all over. I should of known that I’d never look like the skinny white girls, unless I stopped eating—and fuck that. They never ended up feeling like a part of my body, these tits. They were from some other place. But maybe Bobby was right, and Amber was wrong. Bobby could fit a whole inch of my fat in between his fingers when he pinched me, and I didn’t want to hear it. I could at least tighten up here and there. Cut down.
I ran out of creative ways to blow off Amber. Every time I saw her, she came at me, asking to have a coffee or lunch, like it was the first time she’d asked me, like I hadn’t said, “No, I can’t,” five times before. So we grabbed a coffee, because lunch seemed like getting in too deep. Once you start eating with somebody, it’s hard to get away from them. If I couldn’t stand her, I wanted to be able to get up out of there right quick.
Having coffee with Amber made me nervous, like going out on a date. Small stuff was always on my mind, like who would get to the door of the coffee shop first, and who would open it? Was she going to offer to pay for my latte, but why would she, though, since it wasn’t a date? Would I trip over my own feet? And was she checking out my body when I walked in front of her? Bobby said she’d mentioned the shape of it more than once. I’d never been nervous around no white girl before, and it felt weird to be jumpy and jittery.
We walked around the corner to some small place, and she wouldn’t let me pay for my own coffee. When I put my money down, she said, “Please, let me. For the pleasure of your company,” and smiled at me. She had two deep dimples in both cheeks that I never noticed before. She said, “Why don’t you find a place for us to sit? I’ll wait for the coffee and come to you.” So that’s what I did. My eyes skimmed over everybody reading their papers and typing on their laptops. In a minute, I saw that the coffees were ready, and she came over to me, already talking.
“Did you know that La Donna means ‘the woman’ in Italian?” She slid into her chair and pushed my coffee toward me. “The woman, not even a. Like, there are no other women.” She grinned at me, showing teeth just as white and perfect as Bobby’s. Then her lips closed over them real slow while she stared at me.
“No, I didn’t know it meant that in Italian. I think my mama just liked the way it sounded.” I was having trouble looking her in the eye, so I looked around the café and stared at some other tiny white girl, who was talking too loud on her cell phone about her doctor’s appointment.
“Don’t you hate how everyone’s always on the phone everywhere you go now?” Amber said, following my eyes. “Like we really want to hear about her shrink’s advice or whatever she’s talking about.”
“I know,” I said, because it was all I could think to say. The other tiny woman flipped her blond ponytail and propped her feet up on the table. I thought about how she was making herself at home, taking up space and filling up everybody’s ears, as small as she was. I thought about how my mama would smack me for putting my feet up on somebody’s table, especially in public. She kept me in check, my mama. I don’t care if you are grown, she was always saying. Looked like nobody had ever checked this girl before in her life.
“What does Amber mean?” I finally asked, hoping that would get her to stop staring out me so hard.
“Well,” she started, running her thin fingers over the top of her coffee glass, “I don’t know what it means, but I know that amber is this stuff that comes from trees from millions of years ago—”
“I know,” I said. “It was this liquid that, like, oozed out of the trees and trapped all kinds of stuff in it, like twigs and bugs . . . all kinds of stuff it picked up along the way. It got hard and turned into stone.” Amber’s mouth was open and she was squinting her eyes like she was having trouble seeing me. “I just thought maybe Amber meant something else. I don’t know why I was thinking that.” I kind of laughed at myself and took a sip of my coffee. Amber reached across the table and touched my wrist, real light, with just the tip of her finger.
“Hey, I forgot, you probably know all about this kind of stuff. You’re always reading those astrology books and stuff at the gym.”
“Astronomy. Astronomy’s different. From astrology. And from rocks and stuff.”
“I know. I meant astronomy. I’m just saying. I shouldn’t have talked like you didn’t know what amber was.”
“That’s OK,” I said. I was thinking about her touching me on my wrist. She’d touched me once before, and this time I could still feel her finger there, like a warm spot. I remembered something else I knew about amber. “You know how you can tell fake amber from real amber?
Amber shrugged.
“I learned this once: If you rub real amber with something, it’ll turn electric, but plastic fake stuff that’s supposed to be real doesn’t feel as warm, and it doesn’t feel electric.”
Amber leaned into the table, put her elbows on it, and then put her face on her knuckles. “Bobby’s real lucky you’re his girlfriend,” she said. She sat up straight and then pulled at her feet so she was sitting cross-legged in her chair. “And I know you probably think it’s weird that I would want to have coffee or lunch with you, but I think you’re just beautiful, and I would love it if we could get to know each other better, because I love beautiful, smart women.” She took the little paper thing from around the glass that keeps you from burning your hands when your drink is hot and started ripping it into little pieces, just staring at me. She was the worst about that staring, like you were a damn meal and she was starving.
Something about her made me like her, even though she made me feel weird, too. Before, I used to think she was just a silly, blond little white girl, like the one who was still talking on her cell phone a few tables over. But there was something real about Amber, even if her lips were fake, her hair color was fake, and all kinds of parts of her body fake. Maybe it was just that she told me I was beautiful in a tone I hadn’t heard from Bobby in a month of Sundays. Or maybe it was because she said I was smart matter-of-fact, wasn’t being funny about it, believed it. Whatever it was, I felt so weird that I wanted to leave. I looked at my watch and then back at Amber, who looked sad.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
“No,” I said. “What you said was nice, really.” And then before I really thought about it, I said, “Maybe we could go out sometime, get to know each other better.” We laughed about some of the people at the gym for a little while, and then she told me about how she was a composer, wrote music—and who would have thought that? I took one last sip of my coffee before I stood up. “I should go, though. Bobby’s waiting for me back at the gym to give him a ride home.”
“OK.” She gave me a weak smile and stood up. She came closer to me. “Mind if I give you a hug before we go?” I wanted to make her feel better, like things weren’t weird. So I hugged her first. And I gave her a real hug, I held on for a long second. When we pulled away from each other, she gave me one of those big toothy grins.
“You’re a good hugger,” she said.
“That’s what Bobby says,” I said.
“Hmm,” she said, like Bobby, who? Like I
give a shit. Then she turned to leave the café.
Driving Bobby home, I was tired. It was hot, the air conditioning was busted, and traffic was working my nerves almost as much as Bobby.
“So, OK. Wait. She buys you the coffee, and then you guys sit down, and then what?”
“Nothing. We just talked.” In the car ahead of us, some kid, a boy it looked like, was waving at us from the backseat. I waved back. When I did, though, he gave me the middle finger.
“Motherfucker,” I said, my voice high. I flipped the kid off.
“Whoa! Hey!” Bobby said. “A kid and everything. Nice.”
I rolled my eyes. “They ought to do something with this street. This is ridiculous.”
“She ask you out again? What?”
“Bobby.”
“C’mon. Bobby. Did she or didn’t she?” Bobby bit down on his knuckles.
“You should have drove,” I said. Everything about everything bothered me. The kid in front of us was waving something in front of us now, a goddamn doll. He kept flipping me off and waving it, and Bobby kept running his mouth about the three of us fucking, and I couldn’t breathe in that hot-ass Mustang anymore.
“Fuck!” I yelled, and banged my hand on the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
“What I tell you?” Bobby said. He thumped me hard on the thigh. “What is your problem?”
He was wanting to know what I wanted for our anniversary. “A whole year with me, sweetheart. Paradise or what, huh?”
“Or what.”
“All right, smart-ass. See? Try and be nice to somebody—”
“I’m just playin’!” I stood behind him and hugged him tight.
“Seriously, though,” Bobby said. “I want to do something nice for you.” He turned and faced me. He kissed me on the forehead.
“I don’t know. Maybe just a romantic dinner? Here even. Make me something special, just for me.”
“I don’t know how to make no chitlins or collard greens or whatever the fuck.”
The Dictionary of Failed Relationships Page 20