by Cathy Lamb
“What did the man say after that?”
“Nothing. He couldn’t think of anything to say by the time I was done. No one has ever spoken to him like that, I’m sure, and I haven’t before out of respect for his position as Lara’s father, but I couldn’t hold back any longer. The man is a hate-filled, obsessed, sick shit-head.”
“So then you hung up?” Aunt Lydia asked.
“I hung up after I told him that I also felt that cutting off his son for being gay was sinful, that the hatred and disgust with which he had treated his son was exactly the opposite of how Christ would have treated him. That his son could no more help being gay than I could help loving his daughter. That his son was one of the kindest people I had ever known.” Jerry got up and paced in front of the table, his face flushed. “Did you know that Lara’s brother and his partner have a massive toy drive every year for one of the children’s hospitals in New York? Anyhow, I told him that his son was living a far more Christ-like life than he was, and he could shove his self-righteous anger right up his butt because I didn’t ever want to hear from him again.”
“And then?” Stash asked.
“I hung up.”
There was silence for several seconds. Then Lydia nodded, raised both hands, and started clapping. I joined her. So did Stash.
“You’ve commandeered your role as a true man, Jerry, said Stash. “You’ve taken hold of your rights as a husband and told that shit-head to take a hike. Well done, young man, well done.”
Jerry shook his head. “I should have done it sooner, should have taken action sooner, and I blame myself for the pain that man has caused Lara. I blame myself for not protecting my wife. I blame myself for not taking action when I could tell Lara wasn’t happy. She refused to tell me why, but I should have figured it out. I was too busy to really look at my wife. I was too afraid of what I would see.”
He stopped and stared at the painting of Stash and Aunt Lydia.
“I blame myself for not letting Lara be Lara.”
There was a deep silence at the table when Jerry stopped talking and sank back into his chair. “So what do I do now?”
Stash leaned toward him. “Son, go to her. Go to Lara in New York City. Tell her you love her. Tell her what you’ve told us. And be prepared to change your life if you have to in order to be with her.”
“Stash, she won’t even take my calls.” Jerry’s voice sounded like it was coming from an aching, despairing heart. “I’ve left messages with her brother and his partner, left messages on her cell phone, and nothing happens. The only time she has ever called back is when I’ve left messages telling her I’m coming to New York. Then she calls back right away telling me I am not welcome in New York, that she needs time away from me. I’ve begged, I’ve pleaded, I’ve told her I’ll leave the ministry, that we’ll move and change our lives together, that she can be an artist and I’ll get a different sort of job, but nothing works. One time I talked to Steve, her brother’s partner, and he started crying because he was so upset about how upset I was. Two grown men crying on the phone together who have never even met.”
Aunt Lydia, Stash, and I all looked at each other. We were all hoping someone would have an answer here, but no luck.
Jerry leaned back in his chair. “I’m praying about this,” he said, so quiet. “I’m praying that I don’t go straight out of my mind.”
24
I was almost ready to give up my oh so glamorous paper route. James, who owned Cool Chocolates in the Pearl District of Northwest Portland could not keep my chocolates in stock, they sold out so quickly, and neither could another store, in the Hawthorne area of Southeast Portland.
The thought of not having to get up at 4:00 in the morning for deliveries was quite tempting, although it would eliminate my morning chats with Dean when he was here for the weekend or on vacations.
But then I thought of that steady money. It wasn’t much, but it was a little bit, and I decided not to quit. Chocolate-selling or not, I had been poor, been desperate too many times in my life, and I hated it. I heard once that poverty, or the fear of poverty, never truly leaves a person once it lodges like black sludge in your body, and I believe it.
But the money coming in from my small chocolate business was truly exciting.
“I had a lady in here yesterday who had a vivid and rather ugly fit because this was the third time she’d come by and we’d sold out again of Julia’s Chocolates,” Penny Grayton said, the owner of the candy shop in the Hawthorne area.
“She took off this huge red hat with feathers on it, then pointed the longest finger I’ve ever seen in my life right at my head, and told me that she would sue me if I did not get your chocolates in. I am not kidding, Julia. She threatened to sue me. I told a few regulars we were getting a shipment of your chocolates in last week, and they were waiting outside the shop when I came to work. Please, Julia, I need more.”
“Allrighty, more are coming. Any in particular that you want?” I had expanded my menu to include chocolate tulip-shaped cups with little square chocolates wrapped in gold piled up inside, chocolate champagne glasses, chocolate boxes with pink and yellow wrapped truffles inside and chocolate vases that held candy flowers.
“The penis and boobs chocolates are particularly popular.”
I laughed. I had made a mold in the shape of a penis and in the shape of breasts and had shipped a bunch of them off to Penny as a joke. She had thought I was serious and put the phallic symbols and the chocolate boobs in the display case. They sold in the first hour to a woman who couldn’t stop laughing as she made her purchases.
Penny told me the woman brought them to a party with her girlfriends that night, and the next morning four of her girlfriends came in to ask for the “penis and boobs chocolates.” “It’s the only setting where people can come in and say ‘penis and boobs’ and not get embarrassed. Get started melting that chocolate, Julia.”
So I melted. Chunks and chunks of chocolates.
And it was never enough.
Awakening The Baldness In You Psychic Night ended with Caroline curled up in a ball on Aunt Lydia’s floor, white as a sheet, pleading for me to leave town, Aunt Lydia trooping down to her basement for a little pot, her bald head gleaming in the light, Katie declaring she was going to make herself gay, and me leaning over a toilet after a massive attack of the Dread Disease.
Even Alphy seemed upset. He didn’t even bark at the birds when they flew around the room.
Since “baldness” was the underlying theme of the evening, in honor of Aunt Lydia, she insisted that everyone bring food that was bald.
This threw me, Katie, and Caroline for a loop for a bit but not for long. Being the dessert woman, I made flat, chocolate, round cookies, then created icing faces on them with different colors to represent each of the women. Aunt Lydia’s cookies had green eyes, black scarves around their necks to fight off germs, and yellow T-shirts from the barn party. Caroline’s cookies had huge green eyes, pink lips, dangling hoop earrings, and a lacy-looking collar. Katie’s cookies had a pencil behind one ear to represent the writing she was doing on her romance novel, brown eyes and a huge smile. I also attached four little iced chocolate cookies to the big ones to represent Katie’s kids.
I stared at the cookie I had made of myself. It looked scared.
I shrugged, told myself I was getting used to living with fear. After watching Katie’s brave move away from her husband, Lara’s escape from a life that suffocated her, and Aunt Lydia’s brave fight against cancer, my fears of Robert, the Dread Disease, and my entire future didn’t seem too significant.
But Caroline did get me going that night. She arrived looking pale and wan with a black medical patch over her right eye, the eye that always twitched. Caroline was naturally beautiful, and so unaware of it, it sometimes struck me as odd, but it made her more endearing to me, also.
I got a bad feeling in my gut the second I saw her. Perhaps it was the scared-shitless look she sent my way.
“What happened to your eye, Caroline? You look like a pirate dressed in drag,” Aunt Lydia said.
We had turned down the lights, as usual, so we could get to know the soul of the woman lurking inside of us, and candles were burning all over the place. Aunt Lydia had kicked Stash out, back to his house for the evening, along with Shawn and Carrie Lynn, who were always delighted to go and visit Stash and Scrambler and Katie’s kids.
“I’m having a little problem with my eyes,” Caroline said, her gaze shooting to me once again.
That pretty much did it for me. I felt all the air in my lungs flush out like a hose.
“My girl, what’s wrong with you?” Aunt Lydia asked, taking the round pan from Caroline and lifting the foil. “Very clever, Caroline! This pizza does look bald! Only cheese, but it smells heavenly. Is there garlic in here, too? A bald pizza—this will be a happy experience for our uteruses, as our uteruses are bald in spirit, also, as no one is with child here.” Aunt Lydia sensed the silence then, her head shooting back up. “So what is it, Caroline? Something is amiss. Are you hearing people screaming again? Are you feeling their fear?”
Aunt Lydia wrapped an arm around Caroline, kissed her cheek. “What is it, dear? You must share your problems with women whose inner essences are the same as yours.”
Caroline looked right at me, and her body shuddered.
“Oh God!” Aunt Lydia cried, following her gaze, her expression filling with horror. “Oh God, no.”
When Katie arrived seconds later, we all went to the living room and sat down on the pillows, Caroline across from me, Aunt Lydia to my left, Katie to my right.
Caroline held my hands in her shaking ones, her one eye huge in her face, and twitching like the light from a lighthouse. It was her right eye that always twitched, but that was covered by the black patch. That her left eye was now twitching too sent a special sliver of terror racing through my steadily weakening body. Not only had all the air left my lungs, my heartbeat was in a dead sprint, my hands were freezing, and my mind was shot. I am such a wimp, such a wimp, such a wimp, I thought. Such a very, very scared wimp.
Caroline’s lips tightened. “Write his name down.”
“What?”
Katie made a whimpering sound, then found a pen and pad of paper for me. I noticed vaguely that she had lost more weight. You sure couldn’t say that Katie Margold was fat anymore. But then the Dread Disease grabbed me again, and I concentrated on writing.
It’s funny, but when I was in love with Robert, I used to practice writing his name. Then my name with Robert’s last name attached, Julia Stanfield. All the time. It was a hobby. After he hit me or had verbally destroyed my self-esteem—which he did as easily as one might smash a rotten tomato against the side of a barn—it would take me a few days to start writing my new name again, but I always did. The magnetic pull of the escape that Robert offered me from my life was that strong.
But tonight, under the warm glow of candles, I could barely write that name. I wrote a capital “R.”
Caroline’s tiny, soft moan hit me in the heart like a bullet.
“Are you all right, Caroline?” Aunt Lydia asked. “Maybe you should lay down? You want some vodka?”
Katie hugged me. “Oh! Oh!” she kept saying, “Oh! Oh!”
I wrote the “o.” Caroline made a groaning sound.
I wrote the “b.” Caroline buried her head in her hands.
I felt like running. Like hiding in Aunt Lydia’s basement and smoking pot till I couldn’t see anymore.
Aunt Lydia’s hands clenched and unclenched, then she leaned over and hugged me. “That’s good enough. That’s good enough. We know you have to leave.”
But, call me sick and a sucker for punishment. I wrote the “e.”
Caroline started to sway. I thought about stopping for her but knew she wouldn’t want me to.
I wrote the “r,” then the “t.”
Caroline fell forward, wrapping her arms around her knees, moaning softly.
“Oh! Oh!” Katie cried and tried to pull Caroline into her lap. “Oh! Oh!”
“Julia,” Caroline whispered, “You have to leave.”
I nodded.
“I can’t tell you when he’ll be here, but it will be soon. The color around you isn’t even purple anymore, it’s black. All black. Black, and it’s swirling, and it’s dangerous. God, it is so dangerous, Julia. I’m seeing a dark building. Your back is turned. I see chickens. You’re alone.”
I felt like the star in some cheap horror flick. Caroline’s hands shook again, Aunt Lydia got up and checked for the fortieth time that her shotguns were in the right places, and Katie burst into tears. How strange could this whole thing get? A psychic with a twitching eye, a bald woman chasing down her guns, and a mermaid-type mother crying.
“I can’t leave—”
“Julia, you are leaving,” Aunt Lydia declared, wrapping her arms around me. “Stash will let you use one of his trucks, and you can take my thirty-eight and my rifle. Just drive, sweetheart, anywhere. Go to a big city and get lost, and we’ll call you when Caroline thinks the threat is gone.”
“Oh, Julia,” Katie whimpered. “This is awful. You have to go. God, I am going to turn myself gay.”
This distracted all of us for a moment. From horror to homosexuality. And I thought I had seen Katie and Scrambler gazing at each other with lust and affection. “You’re going to turn yourself gay? Why would you do that? Don’t you like the feel of a penis anymore?” Aunt Lydia asked.
Katie shifted, her tears still falling. “I might still like the feel of a penis, but I haven’t felt a good penis in years, and men can be so damn scary, so damn hurtful. It’s like they exist to make women miserable! Julia can’t even get rid of sicko Robert when she comes all the way across the country. Julia, run, just run.”
Aunt Lydia got up again and handed me a gun. “Remember what I told you, Julia. Shoot to kill. Shoot to kill.”
Caroline pulled her knees up to her chest, swayed, and then lay down on the floor with Katie clucking over her, stroking her hair.
I would have helped Caroline, too, but by that time my air was completely gone and my vision was blackening on the outsides. I knew I was in faint-mode, but I fought to stay away from that particular abyss.
I vaguely saw Aunt Lydia go downstairs to the basement. When she came back up, she handed me a joint, then slipped one between Caroline’s lips and told her to inhale.
We both took long drags.
“I was serious about the part about turning myself gay,” Katie said, eating the last of her children in the cookie I had made her.
Caroline, pale and wan, sat in one of the chairs at the table in Aunt Lydia’s kitchen. Her left eye was still winking. I didn’t even want to think of what her right one was doing, hiding behind the patch.
Aunt Lydia had eaten her bald cookie and was now twining together dried flowers into a wreath for each one of us. “These wreaths will shield us all from dangerous testosterones floating through the air,” she declared, dropping three types of ribbon onto the heap of dried flowers. “We will reawaken the fierceness, the strength that lives in our estrogen, and we will conquer the males in our lives.” Her hands shook as she worked, but she never stopped.
She made my wreath first, filled with dried lavender and white roses and all three colors of ribbon. When she was done I knew the wreath would cover my entire head.
Caroline took a small puff of the joint we were passing around.
“I don’t think I’ll ever conquer a male in my life,” Katie said. “And I don’t think I want to. That’s why I think it would be better if I turned gay.”
I swallowed hard. It was about the five hundredth time I’d swallowed hard. It was as if Caroline’s raw terror had lodged in my throat. I tried to speak. Tried again. “But do you like breasts?” I asked.
I did not particularly like breasts. My whole life men had stared at my breasts with wonder as one might stare at the Grand Canyon. The attention fr
om those men had made me feel cheap and ill and threatened.
Except for Dean. I had to give the man credit. I knew he had seen the size of my knockers, but he didn’t make me feel like one giant breast waiting to be fondled and sucked and bitten.
No, Dean had actually seen my mind. Seen me. Heard my thoughts. Heard my fears, my hopes, my endless chatter about my chocolate and my small chocolate business. And he still liked me.
But I had no desire to see other women’s breasts or to touch them. I had enough breast in my own life.
“Do I like breasts?” Katie pondered this, then took another puff of the joint. “I’ll take a puff for Lara. I feel neutral about breasts, but I have no desire to touch them.”
“That would be a problem if you were gay, then,” said Aunt Lydia. “Gay women like boobs. If you don’t want to touch a boob, I would suggest that you stick with penises.” She wrapped another yard of ribbon around my dried wreath.
“I like a good penis,” Katie said, contemplating the smoke from the joint with a little too much interest. “But I don’t like the man attached to the penis before and after sex. I don’t like the beast he becomes. Really, the best type of man would be one with a great penis, enough money so you didn’t have to work seventy hours a week, and one who didn’t hit and didn’t speak, but always smiled and helped around the house.”
“You want a man who doesn’t speak?” I asked.
“Right. No talking. Ever.” She inhaled again. “Unless it’s to say hot and romantic things in bed.”
“But then you would never be able to hear the words ‘I love you,’ Caroline said, taking the joint from Katie. Her hands still trembled. She looked at me with accusation. I knew Caroline had wanted me to leave that instant, but I couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
Katie looked disgusted. “So what? The words ‘I love you’ are just that—words. It’s so easy to say ‘I love you.’ It takes less than a second. We say ‘I love you’ to our pets, to our friends, to the people we work with sometimes. They’re words. The way a man acts, sure as day, tells you if he really loves you or not. Is he kind? Is he great to the kids? Does he notice when you’re tired and try to do something about that? Does he do something for you even if it inconveniences him? Does he see you as a woman, or as the cleaning lady and baby machine? Does he realize that you have feelings? Most men don’t want to rise to the occasion and believe that the women in their lives have any emotional needs. They certainly don’t want to address them. That’s why I thought I should become gay.”