by Diane Munier
That’s it. Spencer is his own person. He’ll decide…with each of us. For now, he said we’re friends. He makes songs, he likes dogs, we took a nap, he pulls my hair, holds my hand, touches my knee, hypnotizes me.
“Mom, I have to get this done so I can pick my garden with Spencer.”
“Oh, he’s helping.”
“Yes. He said he wants to.”
She looks at me for a minute. “Sarah…be careful.”
“Mom, I have to work.”
She sighs, rubs her temples, pulls in a big breath through her nose, her neck growing longer, her jaw set as she looks toward my window.
I don’t know why she’s home anyway. Sunday is a big hook-up day usually. After church and chicken she’s usually on the back of some old guy’s motorcycle by now.
I don’t want her in my room. I don’t want to talk to her. I have this feeling, this new crazy, awful decision that’s been made in me, just today at the diner, and I’m just hearing it now. I don’t want Mom anywhere around. It’s too late for this…her…caring…or pretending to. It’s too late. I’m not even mad. It just doesn’t matter.
“Mom, go downstairs. I have to work.”
For all she misses, she does not miss that something has changed. “You’re twenty-seven. You…think of the future and…it is the future.”
“Okay.”
“Are you alright?”
I will be. Eventually, if I can keep working really hard and not go crazy…I will be.
Me and Mom Fall for Spencer
Chapter Sixteen
I have fallen into the work chasm. By evening I am so deep in I’ll need a rope lowered with a stretcher to get me out. That’s when I hear a song…Spencer’s song…about me…so my song. It’s about a girl, a girl, a computer genius girl who needs to come outside and pick her tomatoes. I make the sound in my neck and I think I’m his groupie.
I go to my window and there he is strumming that guitar in front of my garden. He’s come into my yard. Very brave because Mom is downstairs as she has never gone out. I should think he was finished with us and all of our twists and turns.
I am standing in front of the window and the curtains are pushed back and he is looking right at me. He’s finished singing, but he’s still strumming. I wave. I’m sorry we are us, my mother and me, and I’m sorry that we are both feeling something for him. Maybe what we feel is good, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s dark, maybe it’s light, fair or unfair, too much or not enough, I don’t know…but I want to.
And he’s still playing, and he’s smiling.
This is the stretcher I need. I look in the mirror really quickly and I am so alive in this moment, I am so alive. It’s nothing to write home about, my reflection. Am I pretty? I have no idea. I have always thought I’m plain. But the happiness I feel, right now, it’s making me much more…something.
I redo my ponytail and that’s pretty much it.
Downstairs, Mom is in her room. Her television is so loud I guess she didn’t hear Spencer’s serenade. I grab my knife for cutting eggplant and okra and the baskets and go outside, but I don’t let the screen door slam.
He is at the porch now. The way he looks at me, it makes me shy and bold at the same time. And he’s so pretty…maybe it’s rubbing off.
He is laying his guitar on the porch and he takes a basket. We just smile at one another, neighborly. I guess Marie can’t stop this…our friendship. Not for him. And not for me.
“That song is getting pretty long,” I say.
“There are more verses in the universe waiting to write themselves,” he says.
I have to laugh at that because of the cheese. He’s quite possibly very full of shit. I don’t tell him I ripped Cyro a new one, then had words of some crazy sort with Mom. I nearly tell him Jason left Cyro, then I hold back. I don’t know why I want to talk so much when even a fool is thought wise if she just keeps her mouth shut.
We get to the garden and it is a fine mess what with not getting picked before now. If plants were milk cows they’d all be mooing. So I check the beans and Spencer seems bent on picking the cherry tomatoes, but I’ll never speak of that fruit again without smiling, but then I’m not smiling because I get slammed with a lightning bolt. Mom told him I’m a virgin.
I know she gave him something, something kind of big because she’d want to use my life to hide her own attraction to him and her crazy rant at the restaurant.
She couldn’t very well say she had a bitch-fit, but she could say she was just watching out for her little virgin. Damn it I’d been too busy all day to let this get through, but now that it has I am mad all over again.
“What’s that noise about?” Spencer asks, popping a tomato in his mouth.
“What noise?”
“I mean the sound of…one hand clapping.”
“Have you been drinking?”
He laughs. “That sound you always make…like a bee trapped in your throat,” he clarifies.
“Just…I don’t know. Sometimes that sound comes out on its own.” Okay, that sounded wrong so I get back to work and feel a tomato hit my head. I stand up. “Don’t throw the produce.”
He smiles. “Tell me one thing.”
“What?” Am I a virgin? Not telling.
“What was that sound for?” He stands too.
“What? You’re….” I make a twirly finger by my temple and bend back over the chard. But he keeps standing there looking at me so I straighten again. “What?”
“I talked to your mom.”
“So?”
“Oh, defensive. “ He must deduce how pissed off this line of conversation is already making me. “Just so you know she apologized for the restaurant thing. She thinks I’m a dirty old man looking to tie you to the railroad tracks in front of an on-coming train. That’s after I have my wicked way with you.”
He gets right back to work, butt in the air, but that doesn’t last, and he squats and starts to whistle. He’s just assumed I’m not going to say anything about this.
“What’d she say? She tell you my business?”
Soon as he looks at me I look away and start pinching off the medium sized leaves.
“You didn’t talk to her about it?”
He’s standing again, hand on the small of his back. He’s stretching side to side.
I think he is a perfect man. There’s nothing about him that doesn’t excite me. This is so phase one.
“Talk about what?” I say to try and dive back into whatever it is that seems more important than just beholding him in my garden this way.
“Okay what were you thinking just now? You do that, like pause and I wonder where you go.”
“No place. I’m right here,” I say.
He reaches in his basket and grabs another tomato and tosses it at me. It hits my leg and I pick it up.
“Look at us…Adam and Eve,” he says.
That makes me laugh. For many reasons. He laughs too.
“Are you Adam…or the other guy?”
“Oh…God?”
I laugh and throw the tomato back at him. It hits him in the place, and he groans and bends over. I have my hand over my mouth, and he looks up with this goofy smirk.
“Liar,” I say. He had me going.
“Takes more than a cherry tomato to knock out my guys.”
“Your guys?” I do laugh now. “And please don’t ever say cherry tomato to me again.”
Now he laughs, doubled over. Then he stays down there and starts picking again, but it’s only a minute before he hits me with another tomato.
“You’re juvenile. You know that, right?”
“Cherry tomato,” he says like a frog says ‘ribet.’
“Stop,” I whine looking for the tomato, finding it and returning it.
He keeps up the ‘cherry tomato’ at intervals. I know she told him.
After we pick the garden he invites me over to watch his favorite show. He’s going to make his famous French fries, he tells me. Am I up for it?
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I stand by the porch, setting down the second basket. Cozy times at Frieda’s? I hate feeling this way. It’s not that I haven’t been in there a few times over the years. It just doesn’t feel good.
“I have to take supper to Cyro.”
“We’ll take him some fries. Your mom, too.”
I don’t know. I don’t know.
I run inside for a Cool Whip container so Spencer can take some of the cherry tomatoes home. I hear Mom in her room talking on her cell.
I get the container and meet Spencer on the porch. “What time?” I still have patrol. It’s not dark yet, but it soon will be.
“Come over now,” he says scooping tomatoes in the bowl. “Or whenever. Whatever you need to do. But soon. Soon as you can. Five minutes. Three seconds.”
He’s giving me all the space in the world, but not really. He stands, the red and yellow fruits in the bowl he holds against the white T-shirt. He’s backing away, picks up his guitar and backs down the stairs even.
“Thing about my fries you have to eat them while they’re hot.” He seems very calm, very sure of himself, but he’s holding my gaze…too long.
“Okay,” I say because I don’t know what else to say that will sound acceptable. I just lectured Cyro and now I can’t take my own advice? I have to try. And if Spencer and I are going to be friends, then I have to be able to go to his house sometimes.
So I sort my produce. I’m barely aware. I slice up a couple of peppers and whip up some dip and put it all on a dish, real nice, a big one for Spencer and me, a small one on a paper plate for Cyro.
As I’m walking to Spencer’s Horny pulls up at our house. I’m actually glad to see her. Now Mom won’t be alone. I’ve never had to worry about that before. Mom leaves me. That’s always how it goes. But now it’s different.
I step onto Frieda’s porch and knock on the screen door and Spencer appears, a dishtowel thrown over his shoulder. “You don’t have to knock,” he says holding the door wide and I keep my two stacked plates close to my body, digging into my stomach actually and I sidle around him. He closes the door and leads the way into the kitchen. “C’mon Miss Sarah. I’m back here.”
He’s so casual about it, leading me into the guts of this place. I don’t look around, but I see everything anyway. There aren’t many boxes, and they are shoved neatly against the wall. Thee wall, but that’s from another time.
There is a couch, a coffee table and a medium sized flat screen.
Unless the boxes are full of knick-knacks, there are none set around the room.
The kitchen is different, better cabinets from what I remember. It’s not very big, never was, but it’s very functional and a little bit stylish with a dishwasher and dark floor. There’s a small island and he’s peeling potatoes in the sink then slicing them into fries on a cutting board on the island.
“You want to peel, or slice, or just watch?”
I’m on overload again. Plus I’m tired. Sleeping on the floor the night before hasn’t done much to help me take the sensory load this house, and its owner inspires.
“Hey I know,” he says, and I wonder if he’s nervous. “You go sit on the couch and I’ll bring you some tea.”
“You make tea?”
“No. It’s bottled. But it’s not bad.”
But I don’t want to be off by myself. The house is more bearable when he’s there to distract me, and he always distracts me.
“I’ll peel,” I say, and he smiles and I smile and shake my head a little. I set my plates on the island then I go to the sink and look at the situation. He’s peeling with a paring knife. There are three peeled already and I count eight more to go. I jump when I feel his arms come around me.
“Sorry,” he says. “Apron. This is wet work.”
Okay. He’s toying with me now, but when I turn my face he is right there. Right there, so I look at the potatoes and hold onto the edge of the sink. “You look good at my sink, Sullivan,” he whispers, tying the apron right over the crack of my ass, to be blunt. A tug on my ponytail and he’s done.
Holy crap I should say something. But my mind is white fuzz. I go for the knife. “No peeler?” I say, keeping my head down.
“Um…no,” he says, standing beside me, turned in the opposite direction as he works at the island.
One more step over and we’d be cheeks to cheeks and we could twerk. I am smiling, and I need to take these thoughts captive and throw away the key.
We work that way for just a minute.
“She told me you don’t date,” he said. “I know you’re wondering. I really wouldn’t do that you know…go around your back to get to know you.” He turns and waves his knife at me. “It’s too much fun finding out for myself…all your secrets Sullivan. But she wanted to explain her protective side.”
“She doesn’t know me like she thinks. I hear her explain me sometimes…and she’s wrong.” I have said this easy, like my tongue is Teflon or something, words sliding off. I’ve given him my anger…at her. It’s not entirely fair or something a decent person does. I’m shit.
“Right. We talked about her work. She loves to….”
“Talk about herself,” I say.
“…talk about her work.”
I get back to scraping. “You have a right to talk to her…say what you want. It’s just….”
“You’re not wanting to waste,” he says, watching the flecks of peel fly off the white flesh beneath.
I don’t say anything. Actions are louder than words. I finish the potato, hand it to him and gather the ones already in the sink. I lay them behind me on the island. I notice the pan of oil heating on the stove and the thermometer sticking out of it. “You’re precise,” I say.
“Three twenty-five.”
I take the knife from his hand and start to slice, since he can’t seem to talk and work at the same time.
“There’s no need to peel the potatoes at all. Most of the vitamins are right under the skin,” I say.
“Sullivan, my famous fries don’t have skin. Those vitamins will never survive the hot oil anyway.”
“Suit yourself,” I say turning back to the sink. “But frying doesn’t leech vitamins it just adds fat and calories.”
“Duly noted,” he says and I hear his knife slice through. “You’re smart, not too ugly, a mean gardener, an excellent walker…mover in general…so about the no dating….”
“What did my mother say?”
“She’s protective because you may be twenty-seven but you’re very innocent, and you don’t date so I need to keep my lecherous paws to myself. She didn’t put it quite that way…that’s what I heard. And she’s probably right…or is she?”
I think of the apron tying. Obviously he’s doing what he wants.
“Sullivan…is she right? Have I made you uncomfortable?”
“Do you think you’ve been too much?”
“I’m just having fun. Just goofing around. But you’d tell me if I was making you uncomfortable, right?”
Wow, this kitchen is not large enough for this conversation.
“Is that why you touch me? You’re goofing around?” I stand next to him. I am looking at the potato he’s slicing. He’s stopped now. When he looks up he’s staring at me.
“Why else? I’ve only known you a week. Right?”
I swallow. “Right. Tomorrow. A week tomorrow.”
“It’s not good for man to be alone.”
He remembers the sermon.
“You’re lonely,” I say. It’s probably rude.
“I’m pathetic aren’t I,” he says.
I laugh. “No. Where’s your family?”
“Dead. They’re all dead. I’m an only child.”
I think at first he’s joking, but he isn’t.
“How long have you been the only one?”
“Since college. My mother raised me and she died. I never knew my father. It was just Mom and me. She died first year of college.” He’s not looking at me. He scoops up a load of
potatoes in his hands and goes to the stove. “Close enough,” he says looking at the thermometer, then he carefully drops the slices into the oil and the bubbling sounds loud and steam rises.
I stand beside him. “You said no children…so never married?”
He smiles briefly, eyes still on the pan. “No. Not even a serious girlfriend really.”
“Why not?”
He does look now. “You first.”
I shrug. “No time.”
He shrugs. He better not say, no time, because teachers have their summers off.
“No inclination.” He looks at me, “Also not gay so don’t ask.”
I laugh. “Also not gay,” I say.
He laughs. “Good to know.”
I stop laughing. “Why? You got something against gay people?”
He takes the knife and pokes at the fries, shaking his head and smiling. I guess he’s not going to answer.
“So why this house? Did you buy it on-line or something?”
“These are ready,” he says. It’s a flurry then, he gets a plate. I look around and see the paper-towels, tear off two sheets and lay them on the plate and he gets two forks to use as tongs, another implement he either doesn’t have or hasn’t unpacked.
“So what do you think about me? What have you observed so far?” he asks scooping out his first batch of golden slices.
“You brought the basics. But nothing extra—the clutter. You came here, but whatever your life was, you left it behind,” I say.
He looks at me, a deep look. I think, damn—did I say too much?
He finishes taking out the fries, puts in another batch. He unwraps a new shaker of seasoned salt. He’s powdering the fries with this.
“What else?” he says, but he is suddenly serious.
“Well, my guess is there are mostly books in those boxes. You couldn’t bear to part with them. And you’re not wired, no internet. An odd choice…like you’re unplugged.
“Go on,” he says.
“You’re lonely, which means you’ve known people and this…isn’t what you’re used to. In some way…it’s like you’re just discovering life. Small life. The kind a person overlooks because they have something…bigger.”