by Kent, Julia
“Oh, yeah,” Darla said turning back, almost making me trip off of the crooked stair. “She’s a chimney, too.”
“Yeah, I kind of noticed,” I said.
“Why are you talkin’ funny?” she whispered.
“Because I’m trying not to breathe through my nose.”
“That bad?” she said, wrinkling hers.
I nodded. “You can’t smell it?”
“I guess I’m used to it,” she shrugged.
As we walked into the kitchen, two friendly eyes stared at me from under layer after layer of fat. I wasn’t quite sure whether the person before me was female or male. Two cats began rubbing up against my legs, their fur so soft they had to be kittens. A quick glance down told me I was right. My sense of touch seemed heightened, as if being without clothes for so long had drawn out a proprioceptive connection to a tactile dimension.
That, or I was still a little high. My stomach chose that exact moment to make the loudest gurgle possible, an annoying rumbling that reminded me I was absolutely famished.
“You brought home an alien from the rest area, Darla Jo?” a mouth said, opening under the eyes. The eyes flashed over to Darla, who reached for my hand with a friendly squeeze. The voice was female, and had that craggy, curmudgeonly sound that plenty of old people in New England seemed to cultivate.
Then she coughed, a phlegmy, gross sound that made it seem like she’d hock up a lung and the kittens would feast on it tonight. My hand instinctively went for my pocket – the one that didn’t exist – because I wanted to call Joe and talk to someone, anyone, from my fake life back in Sudborough. Some deep core of politeness kicked in, though, the part of me that was nice to teachers even while my mind screamed asshole! behind my eye sockets.
Darla’s mom wasn’t an asshole, though. Her hair was neat and combed in a style that reminded me of the pictures my mom showed me of the late ’60s, of Grandma dressed in bouffant hairdos and sleeveless dresses that looked like they were made from curtain cloth. I remembered my grandma wearing one of those plastic bonnets whenever it rained, to protect her curly helmet head, and I was pretty certain that if it started raining and this woman needed to go outside, she had one of those plastic hats stuffed in a purse somewhere.
She stood. I forced my jaws together so I didn’t gape. The limp was pronounced and her face was friendly, with Darla’s pale skin that flushed easily with exertion, and brown eyes under brown hair that was so dated. Darla’s dad must have blonde hair, like me. I wondered where her green eyes had come from.
Hmm.
Darla whispered in my ear. “She’s missing a foot. Don’t look. She isn’t a fan of having her business talked about.”
My business was wide open and on display for everyone, so I could certainly sympathize.
“Cathy,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand. Her fingernails were thick, neatly trimmed, and a shade of yellow I normally only saw after a bunch of us ate Ethiopian food in Cambridge, our nailbeds stained by the abundant turmeric.
“Trevor.” I nodded and tried to stay as pleasant as possible. Keeping my junk covered with a thin Mylar blanket now being snagged by kittens’ tiny, curious claws meant that I was a little too overexposed.
And exhausted. The reality of everything was settling in, and I could feel a deep irritability with the world welling up inside me. I went back over my list of needed things, and amended it to be, in no particular order:
Clothes.
A meal.
To fuck Darla.
A few hours of sleep.
Darla let go of my hand so I could shake her mother’s hand and be friendly, but to my surprise she slipped into another room, twisting her body around multiple piles of newspaper that lined the edge of the room. Cathy gestured for me to sit.
And that’s when it got awkward.
“Darla, you’re bringing another naked man home? What is with you?” she shouted in the direction Darla had disappeared. I tried not to look at anything, and especially not at my own dick, as I worked to sit down and keep my groin completely covered with what felt like 2.2 square inches of Mylar. An instinct to take off my hat and shove it over my now-limp dick went away fast as Cathy just stared at me, slack jawed, waiting for Darla’s response. Her ear cocked in a really obvious manner, she was a sitcom caricature. A bad sitcom starring Jeff Foxworthy or Drew Carey.
Wait. Another naked man? Darla wasn’t kidding?
“It wasn’t my fault this time, Mama. He was standing right by the side of the road.”
“With his Twinkie hanging out?” Twinkie? I looked down, my hips a little loose as I started to bend down to sit. I beg to differ, I thought. If anything, it was a baguette. A full-on, French baguette.
I sat up tall and wrapped the blanket around me, only to have Darla tap me on the shoulder. As I turned, I saw Cathy staring at my, uh, baguette. Darla’s face was a mask of a fake smile, horrified eyes gleaming bright and shiny, like green pennies in the sun.
“Here.” Shoving an armful of clothes at my midsection, she forced me to wrap one arm around the bundle and pull harder with the other, the Mylar stretching and probably pulling so hard against my ass Cathy could see which moles were where.
“Thanks,” I gasped, bent over like a freak. “Where can I…?”
“Change back there, in the bathroom.” Darla looked like she was holding herself together with duct tape and Xanax right now. Why did she act so strange? Sure, the house wasn’t exactly nice, but it wasn’t a horror show, either. Plenty of frat houses looked like a more structured version of this. Spend a few nights at an apartment in Allston where eight BU guys cut off from family funds share a two-bedroom place and start naming the cockroaches and you get a sense of filth. Darla’s trailer was run down and cluttered and it smelled like Philip Morris died here, but it wasn’t that bad.
Whatever shred of pride remained, I lost when I entered the bathroom, which was about as big as an airplane toilet, but with a bucket-sized tub. The clothes she brought me said 3X on the shirts labels, a t-shirt and flannel button-down that was more like a tent than clothing. The pants fit remarkably well, though, a bit loose but doable. If she’d handed me underwear I’d have looked like Justin Bieber getting caught climbing the stairs, pants so low they kissed my anus, but at least I had something – anything – to cover myself. A pair of flip-flops with the U.S. Flag and the words “Jones Insurance” stamped on them rounded out the look.
Gratitude and relief seeped in as I made my way back to Darla, the sensation of cloth against my skin a bit unreal.
But I was clothed.
Three more items on my list to go. A huge growl from my guts told me which to check off next.
“I suspect you’re taking him out back,” Cathy said, her voice going up at the end like a question but the words a statement.
Darla nodded and then smiled, a surprise flash of happiness that caught both me and her mother off guard. She’d seemed so dour since we’d come in, and embarrassed and skittish, which wasn’t like her – not the woman I’d known for the past few hours.
Not the woman I felt myself falling for.
Chapter Five
Trevor
I could feel my breathing change, each breath deeper, harder, stronger than the last as the moment slipped by second by second. Darla grabbed my hand and pulled me back out the front door, under the crazy crooked porch and then down onto the earth. The flip flops felt foreign and so did the pants. My nakedness had lasted for so long that I’d become accustomed to it, and now I had both hands free again, no Mylar to use as a sort of fig leaf.
She took me around the corner and then walked straight up to a little junky shed, the kind of thing my parents would have had removed from their property long ago. Moss grew into the roof, so much that I started to wonder if it was one of those green-roof experiments, a
biodiversity project that maybe she’d started back in eighth grade.
No – it was just that neglected.
“What is this?” I whispered.
“Hang on,” her voice held a tone of hope and pride that made me even more intrigued, and that made me feel comfortable and in my own skin again. She pulled a key out of her pocket and slid it into a padlock, unclicked it, unlooped it and then opened the latch. The door creaked so loudly it sounded like the hinges must be rusted shut. As she pushed gently on the door there was a moonlit darkness to the tiny space.
I expected a musty, earthy odor like every potting shed I’d ever been in, with a little bit of mildew, the smell of fertilizer and a smattering of loose tools, and maybe a gasoline soaked lawnmower. She turned, fumbled for something on the right and then, a little click, the sound of a lamp. The room illuminated instantly and showed something like a little dream house in the middle of so much less.
“What is this?” I asked again.
She pulled me in, my feet scuffling against carpet, and then she gently shut the creaky door. She had a small bolt on the inside and slid it shut. The shed couldn’t have been more than 8’X8’, with one tiny window that I noticed was open ever so slightly, not even an inch. Rope lighting, the kind people use to string around houses at Christmas time, was neatly attached to the perimeter of the ceiling, lending the room its glow.
The walls were a rich purple and the floor, covered in different squares of carpet, was a mishmash of colors that made it look like a patchwork. There was a small bed, like a dorm room twin, off to one side, taking up most of the left half of this place and then a little table, a cheap card table with four metal legs, on it a hot plate and under it a small dorm fridge. There was a coffee maker, too, and my mouth began to water.
Food.
I hadn’t eaten in ages but I was also hungry for something other than a meal right now. I reached for her, the warm, soft glow of this little world she’d built making me want her even more. My stomach betrayed me, though, growling even louder than before. She pulled back and laughed, her face open and wanting again.
“Trevor, you must be starving,” she said, her face dawning with the realization. “When was the last time you ate?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know how the hell I got here and you expect me to remember the last thing I ate?”
“Fair enough.” She gestured for me to sit on the bed, which turned out to be soft, like memory foam topped with down. I rested, stretching out, my ankles hanging over the edge of the small bed. But it felt like relaxing on a California king at the Omni in downtown Boston.
She pulled various things out of the refrigerator and then turned on the hotplate. The clattering of a pan made me sit up. “What are you doing?”
“Do you eat eggs?” she asked.
I chuckled. “Are you kidding me? You’re going to make me food now? Here?”
“Of course.”
The room smelled like eucalyptus and lavender, a lush, heady scent of escape, of something divine being sought. I watched as she poured oil into the pan and then, in an interesting interpretation of an omelet, she just cracked the eggs, threw in cheese and something I couldn’t name, and then sprinkled a bunch of spices on top.
“I can’t do a full omelet,” she said, turning her head to talk to me over her shoulder. “But I can at least make you a scramble that will make your stomach shut up.”
I watched her from behind, that heart-shaped ass turned upside down, her legs thick and strong, her shoulders moving as her arms cooked for me. No one cooked for me. Hell, my mom didn’t even cook for me. Everything was prepackaged and made up and if you wanted something made from scratch, you pretty much had to wait for a holiday or to go over to a friend’s house where the mom actually cooked.
Something stirred inside me – and it wasn’t just my ever-anxious penis. This little shed that Darla had turned into some kind of sanctuary for herself, it was like my parent’s basement for me. That felt so stupid to even think because her life was nothing like mine. A pang of ingratitude struck me. What an ungrateful little shit I had been, thinking that the fake, plastic life forced on me by my parents was something I needed to suffer through.
Look what she had created for herself in the middle of all this misery. It made me feel inadequate. It made me feel like a wimp. I didn’t want to go to law school. I wanted to sing, I wanted to go on tour, see what I could make for myself from this world that I loved to taste and touch…. I wanted to take music and turn it into this – a thing that looked shabby on the outside, but was beautiful and whole from the inside, all I really needed. And because that could only be some part time side gig that my parents barely tolerated, I thought that was real pain, a real dilemma. Compared to what Darla had overcome, I could see I was a fool.
Darla
Letting Trevor see my little hideaway was worse than stripping naked and walking down the middle of the street where all the bars were downtown on the first day of hunting season. Thank God he had taken it the way I had hoped – with a sense of delight. I had mixed feelings about that look on his face, though, because it was so different from the one that had crossed his faced when he’d walked into the trailer and seen Mama.
I had a love/hate relationship with my relationship with Mama. This wasn’t the life that I was meant to live, and when the owner of the trailer park had told me, a few years ago when he caught me smoking pot in the potting shed, that I could use it however I wanted, I took him at his word. Hey, don’t blame me – smoking pot in a potting shed sounded really, really funny at 4:20, you know? I’d dispensed with most of that, though, by the time I’d graduated high school. Getting high was just a way to escape and if you were never really going to escape, why bother?
Painting the walls had been easiest. Finding a can of discarded but unused paint for five bucks at the recycling center a few towns over meant that I could cover the walls in a bright color that made me happy. Anything but yellow. Anything but yellow would do.
The bed was a funny little contraption. I went on the internet and looked for plans for a simple bed, and it turned out I could do it with some thick pieces of joist, plywood, and a lot of really hokey, propped up things that kept the bed up. An old memory foam roll, and strangely enough, a down comforter, had come from the small college about half an hour away where my uncle had gone – not Mama’s brother, but daddy’s brother.
A long time ago, Josie had told me that if you go to the colleges after the May term ended, you could find some really awesome stuff – and she’d been right. If my Toyota weren’t so small, I would have filled it with much more but at least I got this, right?
I had enough money to buy a couple of things for nice and cheap at yard sales and the Goodwill. That’s how I acquired the coffee maker, my table, some kitchen utensils, a few pots and pans. The real coup had been that dorm fridge. It had taken two years of searching the dumpsters at the local college, but I’d finally found one that worked.
And now I had my own little home. Mama didn’t mind if I ran an extension cord through the window to give me some electricity. That had been good enough.
Nobody knew what I had made out here. Not even Mama – I wouldn’t let her in. She probably couldn’t walk all the way over, anyhow. Walking had been hard enough with her foot missing, but then the weight that had gathered with time, turning her into a different person altogether, like moss overtaking a roof until it is the only thing holding it up.
This was the real me. That’s right – this room, this little thing. This is where I went to escape all the shit from people like Davey, where I listened to Trevor over and over again, to his beautiful naked voice. Not just him – I had other favorites, like the Parlotones, Thermal and a Quarter, and other weird-ass shit that nobody in this little town had ever heard of but me. So it was all mine. It was mine the same way that a lot o
f my memories I didn’t talk about were mine.
And now Trevor really was mine, at least until his friend came and took him away. Until he went back to whatever world he lived in that was so alien from mine. Mama had called Trevor the alien, wrapped in silver, and so had Davey – but they were wrong. They were wrong.
I was the alien. A long time ago, I had accepted that.
So if I was an alien and Trevor was an alien then it was time for two aliens to get funky.
“I hope you’re not expecting fancy,” I informed Trevor as I finished cooking eggs and slid them onto one of my two plates. I had no appetite, so I wasn’t going to bother, but I handed it to him with a fork and he dug into it as if I had given him caviar and filet mignon.
“Oh, my God,” he groaned.
“That bad?” I said, flinching.
“Oh, Darla. This is unbelievable. What is in this?”
He ate half the plate before I could open my mouth to answer. “It’s just eggs and some cream and a bunch of cheese and some ham and…I don’t know, a little garlic, tarragon, and some pepper.”
“It’s like something from Top Chef,” he said.
“Now you’re just flattering me.”
He flashed me a comfortable, saucy grin, the kind of look that you give someone you have been with for a while, someone who can read your signals, who can know from the slightest fold in the skin around your eyes whether you’re having a good day or a bad day. Whether you want to be fucked or be made love to. Whether you want to be alone, or to cry on their shoulder.
And then he said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”
“Well,” I said, stalling for a little time, my heart and my throat and my eyes welling up with some deep uprising of emotion that I had no right to own. “I have a secret to tell you, Trevor,” I said, walking over.