Car Pool

by Karin Kallmaker

  From the looks of some of the old people, Mrs. Giordano’s Sunday meal was all that stood between them and pet food meatloaf. Shay was happy to help and it certainly gave her someone to feel sorry for besides herself. Now she would have a day-to-day grind and wouldn’t be able to help out as much as she had during the week. At least she’d still be able to contribute ingredients from the pizza parlor whenever the owner felt generous.

  She bounded up the steps, glad at least that she hadn’t had an assignment for the day and was at home to take the call about the job.

  “You’ve been out without your coat again,” Mrs. Giordano observed. “You need some hot chocolate.”

  “It’s very mild today, just overcast,” Shay said in her defense, following Mrs. Giordano to her kitchen. “But hot chocolate sounds fabulous. I’m celebrating.”

  Mrs. Giordano faced Shay, one gnarled hand pressing against the gold cross she wore at her throat. “You have a steady job! I knew it would happen soon.”

  “You’re a mind reader.” Shay always thought Mrs. Giordano’s hands looked like the roots of cypress trees. Hard and strong, her fingers dug down

  into dough when Shay’s tiny hands could no longer knead it, and when she was through the mound of flour and water would be as soft as a baby’s tushy, on its way to becoming something unbelievably scrumptious — pizza dough, breadsticks or foccacio.

  Mrs. Giordano bustled to make two cups of hot chocolate. She made it the old-fashioned way, with milk, baker’s chocolate and sugar in a saucepan — nothing instant for Mrs. Giordano. “Well, now you’ll have time to get out and have some friends your own age.”

  “Well, it’s in my field of work, but the pay is lousy. I’ll have to keep working at the pizza parlor. The rent isn’t going to go down.” Mrs. Giordano would only get upset if Shay told her she paid almost as much for her studio as Mrs. Giordano did for the two-bedroom apartment she’d lived in for twenty-three years. Rent control had certainly worked for her.

  “That’s a terrible thing. A crime,” Mrs. Giordano said passionately. “You’ll be exhausted every day. At least you could take off one or two nights each week. A good girl like you shouldn’t have to work so hard.”

  “I’m young.” Shay appreciated Mrs. Giordano’s sympathy more than she could show — without crying — but she didn’t want Mrs. Giordano to worry about her. “I have good bones.” Mrs. Giordano put great faith in good bones.

  The older woman laughed. “If you keep working in the pizza parlor, you’re never going to meet a nice boy who will take all this worry off your shoulders.”

  “Mrs. Giordano,” Shay said slowly, her voice

  fading away. She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t work that way anymore. It takes two people working hard to live as well as their parents did on one income. Chances are, anyone I might meet would be just as tight for cash as I am.”

  “You should have a chance to meet a nice fellow.” Mrs. Giordano shook her head. She tested the heat of the chocolate with the tip of her thumb, then poured the hot mixture into mugs without a single spilled drop. “Someone to share your troubles. It makes a good marriage, sharing troubles the way I did with my Harry, may he rest in peace. Now drink up, there’s more where that came from.”

  “Mrs. Giordano,” Shay began. She really liked the old lady, but she had promised herself that as soon as Mrs. Giordano brought anything of this sort up, she would say her piece. Her heart rate tripled and she set her mug down to make her shaking hands less obvious. Saying what she had to say didn’t get any easier with practice. “It would be nice to share my troubles with someone I loved. But it wouldn’t be with a fellow. It would be with a woman.”

  Mrs. Giordano blinked at her, her mug of chocolate poised halfway to her mouth. “Are you one of those lesbians?” Her thinning eyebrows, carefully and tastefully penciled to a darker brown, disappeared under her elegantly coifed brunette wig.

  “That’s me,” Shay said. She smiled, but anxiously searched Mrs. Giordano’s expression for her true feelings.

  “Goodness gracious. To think of the trouble I’ve been having to get materials for the old gay people at the center and I could have just asked you, don’t you know. I called the Area Agency on Aging and

  you would have thought I’d asked for pornography. All I wanted was someone to speak at one of our meetings about groups that are available and such.” Mrs. Giordano pursed her lips and shook her head sagely. “This state is being run into the ground,” she pronounced. She set her mug down with an emphatic thunk.

  Shay blinked rapidly and then stared into her hot chocolate to hide how close to tears she was. “There’s a group called Gay and Lesbian Outreach to Elders. They’ll be in the Yellow Pages under Gay and Lesbian Organizations.”

  Mrs. Giordano threw up her hands. “The phone book! Why didn’t I think of the phone book?”

  Shay tried her best to look nonchalant. “We’re pretty respectable these days.”

  “My dear, you are a godsend. Have some more chocolate,” Mrs. Giordano said. “Mrs. Stein and Mrs. Kroeger are going to be thrilled. I just don’t see how the Lord would begrudge them comfort in their old age — they’ve only got each other, don’t you know.” She made a noise that was something between a snort and a cough. “But try telling Father Donohue that. I’ve given up.” She patted Shay’s hand.

  “You have an unusual faith.” Shay returned the pat. She sipped her chocolate and continued to fight tears. For the first time since her father’s death she felt warm inside, in places all the hot chocolate in the world couldn’t reach.

  She changed the topic to Mrs. Giordano’s favorite soap opera and sat down to watch it with her. She didn’t follow the plot. Instead, she tried to work out her schedule. And how on earth was she going to get to work? She had to drive almost to San Jose. It

  had been a forty-five-minute drive during non-rush times for the interview. During rush hour… she mentally added up the cost of bridge tolls and gas. She would definitely be working every night at the pizza parlor, and a long Saturday shift, too. She thought about how little sleep there would be.

  She should probably look at the rest of this week and the next as a vacation, because there wouldn’t be any rest for a long time. And her only diversion would be dreams about a woman, any woman, lots of women. Dreams were very unsatisfying but it looked as if that would be all she’d have for a while longer.

  Anthea wasn’t asleep when Lois came in from her class. She kept quiet, waiting until Lois had dozed off… something Lois did quickly after class with Celia. When Anthea was sure Lois wouldn’t be disturbed, she slowly slid out of bed.

  God, I feel like something out of a Movie of the Week … the jealous wife, searching through hubby’s clothes. If she was wrong, she’d never be suspicious again, she told herself. Quietly, she picked up the clothes Lois had discarded. Somehow, her scruples had prevented her from searching through Lois’s private files for credit card slips or other incriminating evidence. But her scruples had no problem with doing laundry. Even if it was nearly midnight.

  She was briefly at war with herself. There was, she had decided, only one way to know for sure … I won’t look. But she did. It was nothing that a court of law would take as proof and most likely Lois

  would deny anything had happened. But Lois’s panties had all the evidence Anthea needed. Tae kwon do did not elicit that kind of physical response. Only intense, prolonged arousal did that. A wave of nausea hit her as her mental video screen created a too-accurate vision of Celia’s fingers sliding around the elastic to arouse Lois even further… Celia stroking what Anthea loved to touch … Lois making that choking cry when she came, but with Celia holding her afterward.

  The collar of her shirt was damp… not with sweat, but water from damp hair. Lois had taken a shower. And why did I believe classes would last until midnight? Because you wanted to, she told herself.

  She had been under deadlines at work. Lois had certainly had her share of stress in marketing.
There had been days when all Anthea needed was a touch of her hand, a quiet kiss and the comfort of her arms. She had thought their need for each other had just taken a different form lately … something less passionate, but still very comforting. Clearly it wasn’t enough for Lois. It looked as if Lois, after all the work on “building communication” they’d done after that first affair, hadn’t wanted to talk to Anthea about it. She’d just gone elsewhere.

  To a straight woman who was probably just having kicks.

  Anthea twisted the incriminating panties into a ball. She felt despicable and cheap. She wanted to break something. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to pull Lois out of bed and scream at her. She wanted to wail and tear her hair.

  Keep control. Control was the legacy of too many

  years of living with alcoholic parents. Control was the legacy of rebuilding her life and home after the firestorm had taken everything away.

  She wrapped herself in her robe and sat in the kitchen, comforting herself with a cigarette. She told herself she should decide what to do about Lois and this affair. She chose what to wear to work in the morning. She mentally drew up a list of the steps she should take to quit smoking. She thought about the time survey presentation she had to give first thing out in the field. She remembered how she had fallen in love with Lois. She had another cigarette.

  “Safety meeting.” Harold slapped Shay on the back and she jerked her head up. Oh shit. Second week on the job and she still didn’t have a grip on the schedule. She’d forgotten about the Monday Morning Horror and now she wouldn’t have time to get another cup of coffee. Scott noticed who came in late. She trailed after Harold and staggered into the tiny conference room.

  The forty or so people on the Groundwater Protection Grip Project squished together for the weekly safety meeting, with at least a dozen standing around the perimeter. This week’s discussion was on what to do in the case of a hydrogen-sulfide gas leak. Right, Shay thought. I’ll cover my mouth and nose with something and be dead in eight seconds instead of five, like everyone else. The discussion was brief, which Shay took as a sign that everyone understood that a leak of that nature was deadly and protecting yourself was futile.

  She started to get up but the head of the project cleared his throat and stood up. Shay stifled a yawn and settled onto the hard seat again.

  After a couple of sentences about management policy, leaving Shay sleepier than ever — would she ever be awake in the morning again, she wondered — he jabbed a thumb in the direction of a woman sitting behind him.

  The woman stood up … damn, she’d missed her name. Shay guessed her blue-green suit had cost the price of a month’s rent and then some. She noticed cynically that the woman held herself away from everything around her, as if she were afraid that the inevitable grime of a working field trailer would rub off on her pristine clothes or muss the French braid of her gold-reddish hair.

  ” —so don’t shoot the messenger,” the woman was saying. She smiled with a certain amount of charm, Shay admitted grudgingly. “What I’m passing out are time survey sheets. For a period of four weeks starting today, you’ll need to keep track of everything you do in twenty-minute increments.”

  Shay, along with almost everyone else, groaned loudly. French Braid smiled again. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it. And you should be thankful… not too many years ago, efficiency specialists insisted that constant, endless recordkeeping was the only accurate way to measure performance and calculate costs. A time survey like this one is still accurate at a much lower expense to the company. And of course it’s much easier on you.”

  “What do you mean by ‘performance’?” The project head, who had been espousing the management line, suddenly looked concerned.

  French Braid’s charming smile didn’t fade. Shay thought her smile was too rehearsed. Obviously, she’d answered the question a hundred times. “Performance in a costing sense is not the same thing as performance in our annual reviews. To us in product costing, performance is the completion of a task — we don’t have a good or bad judgment to place on anything. Our sole concern is what tasks were completed, how long they took, and what product they contributed to.”

  “But we’re environmental cleanup, not a product,” someone said.

  “Groundwater Protection Grid, I know. You’re an overhead item. But your costs have to be transferred to products. In a way, your unit is like legal, or marketing, or like my unit, product costing.” Again, the perfect lips curved in a charming smile. Shay got the picture now. Their unit was going to be added up, a cost assigned and then management would start screaming at the regulators about how much was being spent to comply with their petty directives, like finding out why the xylene toxicity level was increasing in one of the testing wells.

  Sure, this project wasn’t cheap, but there was a ton of dead weight that could be cut — at least that’s how she saw it after a quick review of the organizational chart. Shay heard herself ask, “Why now?”

  French Braid shrugged slightly. “Good a time as any. I understand you’re fully staffed and you’re just beginning the first major phase of this project. We survey the whole refinery over a course of two years. You came up in the rotation.”

  Maybe it was the lack of coffee, but Shay found

  herself really disliking this woman. She was so… poised. A consummate professional. Shay glanced down at her wrinkled jeans and no-brand tennis shoes, consciously setting aside a feeling of dowdiness. She was too tired to make an effort with her clothes, even if she thought it was important, which she didn’t. Fancy clothes were only required if visiting the Exec Building, a place Shay had no intention of going. And she didn’t believe the timing was random… they had just reached full staffing and now management wanted numbers to wave at the Water Quality Board. She’d been in plenty of meetings where it had happened. This woman was an accessory before the fact.

  She took her time sheet — the NOCCU logo neatly imprinted at the top in blue as it was on every piece of paper in the place — and attempted to look interested as French Braid explained how to fill it in. They practiced by filling in the time already spent this morning at the safety meeting. She was disliking working for a large corporation even more than she had thought she would.

  When the meeting was over she filled up her mug and wandered back toward the cubicle she shared with Harold. She had a mountain of data to enter and she should look sharp about it.

  “Hey, Sumoto.” She jerked her head in the direction of her immediate supervisor’s voice. Scott beckoned her to join him and French Braid.

  “Andy needs a lift back to the Exec Building. Could you take her over? Just pick up a car key from the office.” Scott walked away without waiting for Shay’s response.

  “Let me put my coffee down and get a vehicle key,” Shay said.

  “I’ll be right here,” Andy said, with another of those charming, brittle smiles. Shay decided Andy really hated being in the field … tension was written all over her and her eyes, now that Shay was close enough to see that they were gray, were rimmed in red. Andy — what could that possibly be short for? Andrea maybe. Andy’s only detectable makeup had been applied to camouflage heavy circles — twins to the ones under Shay’s own eyes. Shay didn’t bother to cover them. She didn’t have time to spend on makeup, though it looked as if French Braid spent hours every morning. Her complexion was so flawless it had to come out of a bottle. A very expensive bottle.

  Without analyzing why, Shay chose the key to the oldest of the field trucks. Andy followed her to the parking lot and waited as Shay made a show of spreading a clean towel over the less than clean bench seat. Andy perched on the towel, but didn’t say anything or suggest taking one of the cars that also sat in the parking lot. In the enclosed space, Shay could immediately tell that Andy smoked. After watching her father die, the smell of cigarettes turned her stomach.

  Neither of them said anything during the brief ride to the Exec Building. Shay rolled down the window t
o let in cold, but fresh air. The faint smell of chemicals and gasoline was preferable to cigarettes. Shay made a great show of obeying the refinery driving laws … five miles an hour, complete stops at all signs. They wound through the overhead

  piping, flare points and container tracks, at one point stopping for another truck, filled to the top with dirt from a site. A group of workers — all Hispanic, as far as Shay could tell — leaned on shovels next to a wide, shallow excavation while their supervisor, a white male and the only person wearing a hard hat, spoke into a field phone. What on earth were they digging up, she wondered. From the color of the soil, she would have thought the lot of them should be wearing filter masks.

  When their path was clear again, Shay turned into the only landscaped area on the refinery. Andy slid out of the truck as Shay pulled up at the Exec Building North entrance.

  “Thanks for the lift,” Andy said, her smile completely faded. Shay gave her a mocking salute and pulled away as soon as Andy closed the door. She had a lot of data to enter and now, thanks to French Braid, a time survey to fill out.

  Anthea barely made it through the rest of her day. When she called Lois to suggest having lunch together, Lois had said she was too busy… for the fourth time in a row. For two weeks she had been trying to make extra efforts — romantic dinners prepared that Lois said she was too tired to eat. She’d made physical overtures, only to find Lois beset with a series of ailments… headache, indigestion, backache. If it hadn’t been happening to her, Anthea would have advised herself to read the handwriting on the wall. She didn’t want to let three years go so easily. Not that Lois showed any

  signs of wanting to go. She likes it just the way it is — sex on the outside and me to turn on the electric blanket at night.