by Julia Kent
“Tell the rest,” I urged, holding back a nasty glare at the four of them.
“You guys can listen in if you want,” she said to them.
They gave us a dubious look, and then one of the bearded dudes asked, “Are you MFA students in literature?”
“No. We’re musicians. Well, he is. I just manage the band,” Darla replied.
That perplexed them.
“Is this story part of a song? Are you brainstorming?”
“No.” My answer was intended to be terse.
“So....”
“Just telling the story of how I was conceived,” Darla chirped.
All four of their faces went slack with shock.
“Let’s get outta here,” Darla said, standing. She grasped her coffee cup, looped her arm through mine, and we left them hanging.
“Genre fiction,” one of them muttered under his breath. “Bet they’re genre fiction writers.” That made the other three shake their heads in disgust.
The wave of cold night air smacked some reality into me. “Finish,” I ordered.
“There happened to be a yoga class taking place in the church at that very moment—”
“This has gone too far!” I exclaimed.
“What?”
“I find it hard to believe the town doctor liked to fuck shoes in secret. Harder to believe he started stealing shoes. Even harder to believe the whole shoe-fucking-in-a-church-closet part. But you got me at yoga in Peters, Ohio. I refuse to believe it. No way your town was that enlightened.”
“Fuck off. We have yoga and Reiki and Feldenkrais and all that shit. Where do you think people who practice that stuff can afford to live? We can’t all have $5,000 a month practice studios like in Cambridge.”
“Still....”
“You wanna hear the rest, or not?” Her eyes tilted up over the rim of her coffee cup, glittering with mirth.
“Yes,” I confessed. “I do.” God help me.
“The yoga instructor, Sheena, barged in with her yoga people behind her, coming upon the pastor beating Old Doc with the baby Jesus, and she started screaming. The women pulled the naked man off Mrs. Johns, who stubbornly held on to the shoe.” Darla stopped and looked at me. “You know, this is the part I never understood about the story. His cock stayed hard through the whole time. Wouldn’t he get a limp dick?”
“No. Not necessarily.”
“Really? Don’t you need the blood for your brain and arms and legs when you get attacked?” Darla was taking Biology 101 at the Harvard Extension School this semester. I smiled.
“You can get fear boners.”
“‘FEARBONERS?” she shouted, like it was one word.
“Yes,” I hissed.
“Huh. Learn something new.” She shook her head quickly, then said, “They got poor Mrs. Johns untrapped. Her hand was holding the shoe, which was attached to the cock, which—”
“You’re starting to tell the story in verse. Like that old kid’s story, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed the Fly.”
She frowned. “There was an old lady who...jizzed in a shoe,” she said in a sing-songy voice, her eyes lighting up. “I could probably put together a pretty good set of song lyrics about this.”
“Let’s not and say we did. Besides, the old lady wouldn’t jizz in a...oh, never mind.”
“And then,” she pressed on, ignoring me, “Sheena reached over and unbuckled the buckle, setting poor Old Doc free. He just stood there, naked and aroused, his clothes and reputation in a little puddle behind him, the pastor holding baby Jesus like a baseball bat.”
She took a sip. “And then he whacked Old Doc unconscious with one final, big blow and cracked the baby Jesus in half.”
“I think my leg is getting pulled.”
“It’s true! Ask Josie.”
“I am not asking your aunt whether this story is true.”
“Suit yourself.”
“And that’s it? The end of the story?”
“No. Pastor Johns called Old Doc’s wife. They took old Doc to the hospital and told the story. His colleagues treated him, and his wife went home and found the stash of stolen shoes. Twenty-nine pairs in all.”
“Twenty-nine!”
“That was over the course of a decade or so.”
“Hmm.”
“And when he woke up, he was so humiliated he started talking about killing himself via autoerotic asphyxiation.”
“You are totally pulling my leg.”
“I’m not! Ask Josie.”
“What the hell similarity is there between me not wanting to sign the damn band tour contract and this old pervert?”
She stopped dead in her tracks and pointed to me. “That. Right there.”
“What?”
“Pervert.”
“I’m not a pervert.”
“Yes. You are.”
She was so serious that my stomach dropped. My skin began to hum and go cold all at the same time. A soulful look filled her irises, as if some entity poured it right in.
“No,” I said slowly. “We’re not perverts. We’re not.” I still didn’t understand how this connected to my need for more time to decide whether to leave law school for a year and go on tour.
“Was Old Doc a pervert? Or was he just trying to do his best to get what he needed in a world that wouldn’t give him a safe place to live and be himself without judgment or shunning?”
Oh, shit.
My skin began to crawl. This wasn’t about the contract at all. This was about my parents inviting her over to dinner, wasn’t it?
And so much more.
“Don’t be a naked shoe fucker hiding in the church craft closet, Trevor,” she said quietly. She stopped and started up at me. “Old Doc lived.”
“What?”
She shrugged. “He lived. The whole town knew his secret now. His wife, the doctors and nurses at the hospital where he treated patients, all his patients, his wife, the twenty-nine women whose shoes had been stolen...everyone. And you know what?”
“Hmph.”
“He lived.” She blinked a few times. “It wasn’t easy, and he was humiliated as fuck, but he made it through. His practice dropped for a while, but people eventually came back. His wife went home to her family in Minnesota for a few weeks with their kids, but she came back. And the weird part is that although not one of those twenty-nine women wanted their stolen shoes back—” she shuddered “—women started quietly giving him their old shoes. Their discards. Just leaving them next to his car in the parking lot.”
“WHAT?”
She snorted. “Don’t ask me why. Hell if I know. I think some people get it. They understand. It’s just who a person is. No rhyme or reason. It’s not like Old Doc said to himself when he was a little kid that he wanted to fuck shoes. Any more than you, me and Joe said we wanted to find ourself fulfilled in a threesome.”
The coffee suddenly tasted like sand.
“I’ll go to your parents’ house for dinner. And I’ll pretend. But one day you’re gonna be caught naked with your cock in a shoe and I would really prefer you not have to do that. We don’t need more broken baby Jesuses.”
And with that, Darla walked away from me, slow and steady but firmly toward the T subway entrance. She didn’t look back.
I didn’t follow.
CHAPTER 4
Darla
Josie lent me her car so I could drive out into the suburbs to go to Trevor’s parents’ house. He couldn’t drive me because he had an appointment that day at the dentist in his hometown, so it was easier to meet there. I’d long gotten used to the strangeness of New England towns surrounding Boston. So different from Ohio. A home in Ohio was “old” if it was a hundred years. Out here, people sniffed as if that were cute. “Old” was a three-hundred year old house, and it was really special if it was from the 1600s and involved Salem Witch Trial refugees.
The roads were different. No curbs in most places. And while Peters wasn’t exactly suburbia, what I found diffe
rent in the fancier suburbs of Boston was that people kept pine orchards in their front yards. The edges of yards were bordered by woods in a way they weren’t back home. Subdivisions here could involve an acre or two of land per home. Near Peters, a subdivision involved a quarter acre per house at best, and the lawns were well-edged and green. Almost a radioactive green.
Not in my trailer park, of course. Hell, a “nice” yard was one that didn’t have garbage or old tires in it. My sense of “nice” and Joe and Trevor’s sense of the same word were worlds away.
And that was increasingly a problem.
When I’d moved out here I knew we’d have a class divide. That was kind of a duh. As I became more educated, taking more classes at Harvard and working on the business end of the band, I came to see that money sure don’t equal class. There’s a shifting set of standards that each class puts out there for its members, and if you want to move up or down, you not only need to master the core set of basics, but you need to be ever watchful. Ever vigilant. One misstep and you stand out.
Standing out makes you a target.
Herd mentality is what it is, and you find it among the richie-riches on Beacon Hill or in Weston and Sudborough, and among the poorest folks in Fitchburg, Springfield and Lowell. The only way to really get along in life is to get along. Don’t make waves. Ripples are okay, and even entertaining in a group.
Waves make everyone move.
And that is unacceptable to some people who are only comfortable in one place. They’re fine with sweating a bit and watching other people move, but by God you make them nudge an inch and they howl.
Fingers pointed directly at you.
And they’ll do whatever it takes to stop you.
I saw this back in Ohio. It’s why I admired Josie so much. She wasn’t supposed to go off to college after she plowed through her associate’s degree in nursing. That alone made ripples; uprooting her entire life to go off and get a bachelor’s degree was an affront to a lot of people in Peters. People can be threatened by someone with ambition, no matter how low the stakes or how small the rewards.
And while lots of people will plant a smile on their face and say they’re pleased, behind closed doors the whispers form a kind of toxic cloud of gas that goes out on the wind and finds you eventually.
My conversation with Trevor the other night haunted me. I told him the Old Doc story because I meant it. No one wants to have a secret inside them so big it finally blows spectacularly, like a pressure cooker full of chili that busts a seam.
On the other hand, if it does blow, everything fades over time. Calms down. Blows over.
That doesn’t mean you don’t leave chili stains forever on the ceiling, though.
I wasn’t bothered by telling the story, nor by Trevor’s reaction.
I was bothered by my own hypocrisy. Because Old Doc ain’t Trevor.
Old Doc is me. Minus the cock, of course.
Notice how I berated Trevor and Joe all the time for not being open about me? But you probably also see that I wasn’t exactly forthcoming with Mama about my relationship with them.
And I still hadn’t told them about Mama’s wedding, which was coming up in two weeks. They’d finish their final papers and we’d go on tour this fall if Trevor got his head out of his ass, but I still hadn’t come clean with Mama.
I was naked in the closet humping a Jimmy Choo. In the dark.
And here I am, at the address Trevor gave me. Nice house. Big colonial with the giant picture window over the garage. Trevor calls that a “bonus” room. How big does a house have to be before you start calling rooms a “bonus”? In my world, your bonus room is that yay—you have a room. Period. I turned a potting shed into my purple passion place, just to have two minutes of peace to myself.
And now Trevor’s childhood home has a bonus room bigger than my entire trailer in Ohio.
I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. The cold leather felt weird, sending a piercing pain between my eyes.
Maybe this was all a big mistake. I shouldn’t be here. If anyone should be here, it should be Joe and me, if the goal here was for Trevor’s parents to get to know his romantic interest.
That was not allowed.
I inhaled deeply and opened the car door, ready to lie.
So far, it had all been lies of omission.
Time for lies of commission.
Crocuses dotted the long sidewalk to their front door, the yellow hard not to smile at. We were getting on toward that second half of spring, where everything lights up with joy at the prospect of the long, cold Massachusetts winter dissolving. The twilight made everything look a little sharper, a little more worthy of measure and appreciation as I reached for the doorbell and pressed with a shaking finger.
It’ll be okay, I told myself. They’re just people. Just like me. I looked down at myself. Pearl earrings, shoes with a slight heel, and a wrap skirt. I was trying to fit in and look the part.
The door opened and it was like something out of a movie. Susan Connor wore a sweater set and pearls, with matching earrings. She could have just gotten back from a fancy luncheon, while Doug Connor looked like he’d stepped off a golf course, wearing a striped polo shirt and tan khakis.
I wanted to flee. These were not my people.
Like a mute, I just held out the dish of ambrosia salad I brought. Trevor had told me I didn’t need to bring anything, but where I’m from, you show up with something. Anything. It’s rude not to. He suggested wine but what if I brought the wrong kind? Besides, I imagined these people didn’t drink the three dollar cheapo stuff like me and Josie.
“What’s this?” his mom asked, eyes lighting up as she took the glass bowl.
“Ambrosia salad,” I said, my throat dry. “It’s for dessert.”
She turned and looked at the mini marshmallows and mandarin orange slices, then back and me. “Thank you! This is wonderful!” His mom took it, disappeared, and came right back. As she stepped aside, Mr. Connor put out his hand for me to shake. “Come on in! Trevor isn’t here yet, but we can sit and talk.”
Or shove bamboo under my fingernails.
Same difference.
Where the fuck was Trevor? It was bad enough I had to pretend to be only his girlfriend, but to leave me hanging and sitting in the God-damned twenty-first century version of a parlor with his parents, who eyed me like they were trying to decide whether I’d make good grandbabies for their son, was over the top.
And then my salvation walked down the hallway and gave me the hugest bear hug ever.
“Rick!” I said, bursting as my lungs lost every ounce of air. Trevor’s older brother was a good two inches taller than Trev and about fifty pounds heavier, most of it fat. He looked like a blonde bear. He couldn’t speak, but he made happy grunting sounds and put me down, finally, with a big, loopy grin.
Trevor’s mom and dad shared a look of shock.
“You know each other?” his mom asked, eyes on Rick, who was beaming.
“I go with Trevor to visit Rick most weeks. We play piano.”
Rick started his hand flapping, which he did when he was happy, and he turned and walked to the piano, opened it, and played the first lines of “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer.”
His mom gave me a shiny smile, eyes lit up by suppressed tears. “You and Trevor taught him that?”
I shook my head and grinned as Rick played the entire song, turning it into a classical music piece. “Mostly Trevor, but yeah. Someday,” I whispered, “we’d love to have him on stage.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said quickly. “He’s too...”
I reached out and touched her arm. She flinched. I pulled back. “I understand,” I said tightly, nineteen different emotions filling me at once. “The rages.”
She nodded mutely, her face going blank on purpose.
Maybe she was controlling too many emotions, too.
Both of his parents had a different feel about them, Trevor’s dad putting his hand on my
shoulder and guiding me into the living room, gesturing for me to have a seat. I guess finding out I was part of helping with Rick made them change their opinion of me. Or something. Who knew? Right now my hands and feet felt like bricks and my heart was about to defect from my chest.
But when I watched Rick play I calmed down.
Just as we were sitting, the doorbell rang. Ah, Trevor.
Uh, nope.
A teeny tiny woman, so small I could stuff her into a large Vera Bradley purse if I wanted to, and an enormous man entered, Trevor’s mom planting air kisses on the woman and Trevor’s dad doing the lumberjack handshake with the guy. They looked familiar, both with dark hair, olive skin and—
“Darla! I’d like to introduce you to Herb and Joanne Ross. Joe’s parents.”
Rick stopped the piano playing dramatically, cut off like he’d been shot. Like in the movies.
Like my heart.
“Joe’s parents?” I croaked out.
“Yes.” The woman had enormous brown eyes, the irises impossibly big, and she looked at me with no expression, but her lips were tight. Bright red lipstick covered what looked like a cat’s butthole.
I stood there, awkward and feeling like my hand should know what to do next. I was still reeling from how nice the house was, with big, fancy striped cloth on the couches that didn’t have stains. The seats didn’t sag, and there were so many pillows in every color you could imagine. The sheer panels of the curtains were different, rotating colors that matched up perfectly to the stripes in the couch cloth.
People in the Boston area have a thing about hardwood floors, which confuses the fuck out of me. Where I’m from, the pinnacle of success is being able to afford the really nice, plush wall-to-wall carpeting. Companies have payment plans and everything. You rent a carpet steamer once a year from the grocery store and clean the shit out of your carpets.
Here? If you had carpet it was low class.
I couldn’t win.
“Nice to meet you,” I finally said, offering my hand to Herb Ross. He gave me that fake woman’s hand shake where his fingers landed on either side of my middle finger’s knuckles. Creepy. And he looked at a spot just over my head, never actually meeting my eyes.