Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  We pulled into Boston, where I ran to catch my connecting ride to New Hampshire. I got the last available seat, which was behind the driver, and asked him to tell me when we got to Portsmouth. I didn’t have a particularly clear idea of what Lisa looked like. There were a handful of pictures that existed online, but she looked dramatically different in each one. They spanned a period of almost fifteen years, a spectrum of hair color, and a marked difference in breast size. In one picture she was holding a puppy, in another she was peeing in a litter box in front of a large crowd of cheering Frenchmen. I could gather that she was pretty, tall, wiry, and feral, but little else. I hardly told anyone about my trip up north in the two-week period between winning and collecting the prize. Every day I woke up thinking that I should probably bail out, but somehow I kept forgetting to make the call. I wanted adventure, I wanted to have sex with somebody I probably wasn’t going to marry, and I didn’t want to pay for it. As the bus drew closer to Lisa and the sun began to sink, I could barely recognize my behavior as my own. I felt I was choosing darkness. Filiz (pronounced Felice), the college friend who had introduced Becky and me, was visiting from London, splitting her time between us both like some overgrown love child. Though it was inconvenient for both of them, I sent Filiz to Becky’s new apartment in Newark so that I could have loveless sex with a stranger. I told them that I had a job interview in Boston. I was desperate, deceitful, and a terrible friend.

  From the other side of the window, New Hampshire was telling me it was tough, that it was the Granite State, that its residents live free or die, that its motorcyclists don’t wear helmets. Dover, Portsmouth, Durham—as the situation I had put myself in became more alien, the place names on the road signs became more familiar; they were all English place names. No one at home would believe this.

  Lisa and I had talked on the phone the night before. It was my last out, but I’d solemnly vowed that I would be on the bus.

  “I’m exited to meet you!” she said. “Dave’s excited to meet you, too!”

  Dave is Lisa’s husband. Dave had told Lisa that he was cool with the competition but had second thoughts about it all a few days before. Lisa appeased him by having a second trivia competition that yielded a female winner for Dave to have sex with. Dave was the gentle foil to Lisa’s wildness in her columns and had quite the following himself.

  “Dave’s winner backed out last-minute. Can you believe that?”

  “No.” I could definitely believe that.

  “So I have this other woman on standby. So she’s coming by. She’ll take care of Dave while we, y’know.”

  “I know.”

  I felt calmed that I would have another outsider there, someone else who would probably be feeling similar emotions, somebody to absorb the oddness of the situation along with me. I had told Lisa that I was broke. She said that I should borrow the bus fare and she would reimburse me.

  The bus driver told me that we’d reached my stop. I got out and noticed the twenty-degree dip in temperature throughout my body. Because of its size, weather in the UK is rather uniform. The idea of hopping on a bus to change the weather continues to startle and fascinate me after years in the United States. I hadn’t brought a decent jacket. The stop was in the middle of a parking lot off the highway. This didn’t look at all like the stop Lisa had described. I walked into a glass terminal structure and made four fruitless calls to Lisa’s house on a pay phone.

  “Please check the number and try again,” said the infuriating voice each time.

  I became scared that I had written her number down wrong and would be left here to freeze overnight. I’ve grown to feel helpless, disoriented, and uneasy once I leave Manhattan, and being broke, cold, and hungry in the middle of nowhere was the actualization of my worst fears. I considered crying, and then considered having a temper tantrum, then considered leaving out the area code, as this was probably a local call, and immediately got through. I described my surroundings and Lisa said that they’d be there as soon as possible, although I was an hour early and several miles away. I had half an hour to wait and erroneously pegged three different women as being Lisa, giving them goofy and unrequited smiles before she strode into the empty terminal.

  “Hey.” She smiled politely but didn’t look at me for more than a second, which surprised me and made me feel on edge. I feared that she could not stand to look at me and was asking herself why she’d gone through with this. Lisa spun around and marched out to the parking lot.

  “Dave’s in the car,” she said over her shoulder without looking back at me.

  She walked fast and I had to break into a canter every few steps to try to keep up with her, but only saw her from the back all the way to the car. She wore high-heeled black leather boots, which when coupled with her foal-like gait made an incredible noise. She wore black woolly stockings over her equine legs and a black corduroy miniskirt. A cream-colored angora turtleneck clung tightly to her fake breasts, making them look conspicuous even as I viewed her from behind.

  Lisa opened the car door and folded the front passenger seat down for me and looked above my head and over yonder, nixing another opportunity for a proper greeting. The back of their compact car was full of trash and magazines, for which Lisa apologized, then added that she was buying a new car next week anyway, so there was no point in cleaning it up.

  “Hello,” said Dave without looking at me, and put his foot on the gas before Lisa had closed her door. It was immediately evident from their conversation about the best way to drive to dinner that Dave was gentle and passive and Lisa was odd and spasmodic.

  “Do you like Pacific Islander food?” asked Lisa, facing forward.

  “I am not sure that I’ve ever had it,” I said, relieved that the ice was broken. I stuck my head in the gap between their headrests, prompting Lisa to look out her window. I wondered if she was autistic.

  “We are meeting them at the Tiki Hut. I think the food is very good there,” she said.

  I gathered that Lisa was talking about Dave’s contest winner but wasn’t aware she was coming with someone. Lisa answered my question before I asked it.

  “She doesn’t drive, so her husband is with her,” she said. Dave shook his head and blushed. Lisa looked at his embarrassed expression and pointed, giggling at him.

  “Aw, Leese,” he said. Everything about Dave had an “aw shucks” feel about it, which I found acutely endearing.

  We soon arrived in downtown Portsmouth and parked by a life-sized fresco of a blue whale. Any initial standoffishness dissipated as Lisa shook my hand in exaggerated fashion that jarred my shoulder. She looked me up and down. She had a kind face that protruded forward, longish brown hair, and excited blue eyes that looked younger than the rest of her.

  “Ha ha ha! You look like Dave!” she said, pointing at me then him to illustrate her point. Bashful Dave was strolling around the car and I agreed that we could be related.

  Lisa and I talked on the way to the restaurant as Dave shuffled on a few steps ahead of us, and by the time we arrived at the restaurant I’d concluded that she wasn’t the lunatic that her life story suggested she might be. An attractive Waspy girl in leis and a grass skirt showed us to the table Lisa had reserved.

  “It’s on me, so please order whatever you’d like,” she said, eyeing the menu up and down. “I am starving!”

  “Oh my God, Lisa!” screamed a shrill voice as we pondered the menu.

  I spun around along with the rest of the restaurant’s patrons to see a short Filipina in a cocktail dress, tiara, and a purple feather boa around her neck. She teetered through the tables, unwittingly trawling the end of her boa through an elderly gentleman’s Lobster Rangoon, though he seemed too amused to mind. She fell into Lisa’s lap and gave her a loud smooch on the lips that three younger guys at the next table applauded. Dave looked mortified and almost disappeared under the table, causing Lisa to again point and laugh at him. This was the stranger Dave would be having sex with, a concept he had apparently
refused to think about until she was standing in front of him, larger than life. Lilly looked at Dave and me with a quizzical look on her face.

  “This one’s Dave,” Lisa said and patted my knee under the table. Lilly ruffled his hair, then held his chin between her forefinger and thumb and shook it from left to right, causing his teeth to clatter together, and took the chair next to him. Dave looked like he was about to cry as Lisa clapped her hands in excitement. Dave’s shyness and good nature amused Lisa to no end, and she seemed to live to affectionately tease him for his blushes. Behind the ostentatious diversion of Lilly was her unassuming husband, Paul.

  “Hi, everyone,” he said before plonking himself down next to me. Lisa made the introductions. Paul was originally Lilly’s chauffeur when she was an exotic dancer and sometime porn star in Las Vegas. Around forty and sporting a paunch, Paul looked like any suburban workaday Joe, which is exactly what he became after he and Lilly moved back to Peabody, Massachusetts.

  “So you’re the bloody bloke, are ya?” he asked, slapping me on the back.

  “Er…yes. Yes, I am.”

  “Well, I traveled a lot to Jersey and Guernsey for work and I tell ya, you guys can put down a few pints.”

  “Yeah!” I said, though typically drinking a few pints makes me feel bloated and in need of a nappy nap.

  “They have Boddingtons here,” he said as the waitress delivered the tropical cocktail I’d ordered in a hollowed-out pineapple. She set it between us and lit the sparkler that had been thrust through the lid. I gave Paul an apologetic look through the plume of leaves at the top.

  “Oh,” he said and turned quickly to Dave, terrorizing him with frank statements about his wife’s genitalia. “She’s got a great little pussy, Dave, just you wait.” Every facet of Dave’s body language screamed that he wanted out, right now. I said something that I found hilarious and Paul announced to the restaurant that my British sense of humor was too dry and “needed a big squirt of lube,” horrifying a redheaded hula girl.

  Dinner conversation was propelled along by Lilly and the revelations of her sex life, which she delivered in the most Anglo-Saxon terms, embarrassing Dave, arousing Paul, entertaining Lisa, and leaving me wondering how on earth I got to be sitting there in the first place. Lilly, it transpired, was a squirter—a woman who can ejaculate. Paul, fittingly, was adept at facilitating this phenomenon.

  “Paul can make anyone squirt,” said Lilly, looking lovingly across the table at her husband. “I’ve seen him do it a bunch of times.”

  Lisa, being the celebrity and usual instigator of this kind of weirdness, looked out of place as the beta female. I looked over at her as a single tear ran down her cheek.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be fine in a second,” she said, beginning to gently weep. “It’s this.” Lisa pointed skyward and I followed her finger to whatever was upsetting her.

  “It’s the music.”

  Though it was barely audible, Lisa had been moved by the guitar solo in “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits. They were playing the whole album and I struggled with how it fit in with the overall theme of the South Pacific.

  “It’s just so…soulful,” she said, wiping her tears with her napkin and returning to what I imagined to be her normal self. From what I’d read, and from what I’d seen prior to Lilly and Paul’s arrival, Lisa was usually the person doing the dumbfounding with her uninhibited antics. Lisa was now the reactor and not the instigator. As Lilly took full control of the conversation, Lisa shot me looks that said, “Can you believe this shit?” I couldn’t.

  Lisa decided that we’d all go bowling after dinner and we split into two cars, Dave with Lilly and Paul, me with Lisa. Lisa’s driving was an extension of her reckless spirit, and a thankfully short white-knuckle ride toward the bowling alley ensued. We reached a bridge and Lisa skidded over to an off-ramp and told me that she wanted to show me something.

  We walked down some steep steps to where a grandfather and his grandson were fishing off a dock in the moonlight.

  “Caught anything?” Lisa asked them, seeming genuinely interested.

  “Not yet,” said the older man.

  Lisa sat on the end of the dock, dangled her legs over the edge, and motioned for me to sit down next to her. We watched a cloud of silverfish tumble around in the water below us for about a minute. I thought Lisa was going to mention something about the reason I was here, the competition, sex or backing out. So I waited, saying nothing.

  “My mom’s here,” Lisa said eventually, looking up at the moon. “This is where I scattered her ashes. Do you like it here?”

  “I do.”

  We looked on as the younger fisherman felt a nibble on his line and reeled in fast, but it got away. He recast his line and we peered at where it had sunk for a minute or so.

  “When did she…”

  “We should get back now,” she said, then turned to the men. “Good luck, guys!”

  They waved and I chased her up the hill and into the car.

  We checked our shoes at the bowling alley, where Lisa suggested that we do candlepin bowling and not tenpin. Paul and Dave went to get drinks and Lilly didn’t want to play. Lisa was first up. She took a ten-step run, her gangly limbs flailing, and launched the ball across three lanes before almost falling on her ass. I couldn’t figure whether she’d meant to do that or not. Then her second ball sailed four lanes over and she hit the deck laughing. People from the third and fourth lanes over glanced in our direction but said nothing.

  “The bar here is closed,” said Paul, who was ruthlessly intent on drinking a lot more. “The bartender got wicked sick and went home.”

  We all agreed that if tonight was going to happen the booze needed to flow and swapped our bowling shoes back at no charge. Lisa and Dave conferred about a suitable venue and we split into our same groups and rendezvoused at Carabella’s, a charming dive bar that was holding a karaoke night, hosted by DJ Jazzy Jeff. Whether it was the DJ Jazzy Jeff remained unclear as a huge rubber alien Mardi Gras mask enveloped his constantly bopping head.

  Lisa gave me a twenty and asked me to get a round of drinks while she went to the bathroom. To my horror, Lilly asked for a sex on the beach, a drink the flannel-shirted barkeep was completely unfamiliar with. Lilly shouted the list of ingredients as a woman missing some fairly important teeth sang “Livin’ La Vida Loca” to the best of her smoker’s lung’s abilities. I talked the bartender through the process and he seemed eager to learn. He washed the dust off a seldom-used cocktail shaker and pressed an upturned glass inside it. He had somehow applied too much pressure and broke the delicate cocktail tumbler, forcing a shard of glass into the artery where the palm meets the wrist, shooting an arc of blood through the air and into the ice trough. The stools around the bar all noisily scooted back as loyal patrons helped to the best of their inebriated abilities.

  “Hold it above your head, Jack!” slurred one.

  “Somebody wrap a towel around it!” offered another.

  “Oh my sweet Lord!” wheezed the woman through the karaoke speakers.

  One drunk sobered up enough to improvise a tourniquet and helped the poor man into his car and swerved off toward the emergency room as a wizened regular dutifully took over behind the bar. Oblivious to the pandemonium she’d unleashed, Lilly had cornered Dave and was stroking his inner thighs to his extreme discomfort. Lisa arrived back in the bar, also unaware of the carnage, and helped me deliver the drinks to our unlikely fellowship. The karaoke had become too loud to talk over so we mostly just listened to the performances and swapped a few words in the relative calm between songs.

  “Let’s go fuck!” said Lilly during one of the respites, causing Lisa to spit a mouthful of gin and tonic back into the glass. I was filled with trepidation and was trembling before I stepped into the forty-degree night in my inadequate jacket.

  Lisa’s lemon yellow house was in the center of a thickly wooded cul-de-sac.

  Dave, Lisa, and Lisa’s son
, Wolf, had not been living there long. There were still unpacked boxes, vast expanses of unbroken white wall space, and a new squeak to the slick blond wood floors. It was very cold in the new house, though I seemed to be the only person registering discomfort. My teeth were chattering as Lisa gave us all a perfunctory tour. We returned to the living room, and while Lisa made drinks, Paul went outside and came back in with two boxes, which he set down in the middle of the living room.

  “Now I want you all to sit down,” said Lilly with the inflection of a petulant eight-year-old. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  Dave and I sandwiched Lisa on a small pullout sofa as Paul leaned against the dining table, smiling. Lisa noticed my shivering and produced a crocheted blanket for me to wrap myself in.

  Lilly took a videotape from the first box and inserted it into the VCR. It was one of the porno flicks in which she had recently starred. It was queued to a scene featuring Lilly and an unfamiliar actress in a 69 position. Lilly’s head spun back and forth between the TV and the shocked audience on the sofa.

  “Hee hee, that’s me!” she said.

  “It’s beautiful!” her loving husband chimed in.

  Lisa spied the growing bulge in Dave’s jeans and playfully flicked it, laughing.

  “That other girl is dead now,” she deadpanned. “Drugs.”

  Silence. We watched Lilly’s celluloid orgasm in reverent silence.

  “What does that tattoo on your ass say?” asked Lisa, finally breaching the stillness.

  Preferring to show rather than tell, Lilly immediately stripped down to underwear no bigger than an eye patch and jutted her round posterior into Lisa’s face. Lisa laughed and squeezed it like a melon at the supermarket, Paul smiled proudly, Dave’s erection became more pronounced as his face reddened, and I was unable to stop shaking. Lilly then dropped to her hands and knees and opened the second box and produced about fifteen Ziploc bags, each containing a sex toy. I’d seen a vibrator before, but not the spectrum of butt plugs, ball-gags, strap-on harnesses, riding crops, handcuffs, and mammoth dildos that she neatly laid out before us.