A Widow in Paradise & Suburban Secrets

by Donna Birdsell

  She was not. Not on an empty stomach.

  She wanted a burger and french fries. She wanted another milk shake.

  “Can we drive through somewhere? I’m hungry.”

  Pete looked at her as if she’d grown another head. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  She pulled over to the side of the street. “No, I’m not. I haven’t eaten a thing today. I need food. I have a medical condition called hypoglycemia. Low blood sugar.”

  “Low blood sugar, huh? You know, that’s just an excuse women use so they can be bitchy when they’re hungry.”

  “Bitchy?” An image flashed in her mind like a movie trailer. Her, morphing into a vicious werewolf and chewing Pete’s head off. “Look. I’m driving you—where?”

  “Cottman Avenue.”

  “I’m driving you all the way across town to Cottman Avenue, largely without complaint. The least you can do is let me take a detour through a Burger King or something.”

  “We’ll eat when we get there.”

  “And where is there?”

  “The Cat’s Meow.”

  Saturday, 3:12 p.m.

  Dinner Theater

  The Cat’s Meow, a chartreuse, clapboard building surrounded by warehouses, pay-by-the-hour motels and fast-food joints, announced its presence with a giant pink neon cat in pasties on the roof.

  “What is this?”

  “One of your boyfriend’s favorite hangouts. As if you didn’t know.”

  She took a deep breath, practicing a mini-meditation, clearing all homicidal thoughts from her head. “I told you. I’m not familiar with Nick’s hangouts. I’m not familiar with anything about Nick.”

  “You looked pretty familiar last night.” Pete unbuckled his seat belt. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not leaving my car in this parking lot. It’ll never be here when we get back.”

  “It’ll be here.”

  She pressed the lock button twice, just to be sure, which she figured was about as effective as putting a sign on the window that said Please Don’t Steal My Car.

  Pete grabbed her purse and hooked it over her shoulder. “Here. You’ve been a good girl. But I’m keeping the ring for a while.”

  “Speaking of my things, do you have anything else that belongs to me?”

  “Your panties?”

  “Something else.”

  “Like what?”

  She glanced over at him. She couldn’t tell if he was genuinely curious or fishing for information.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  The first set of double doors led into a small foyer with a pink linoleum floor and silver, cheetah-print wallpaper. A slick-bald bouncer in jeans, a T-shirt and a suit jacket greeted them in front of a second set of doors. Behind him on the wall were handmade posters announcing the appearances of dancers with names like Luscious Lulu and Sierra Starr.

  Pete handed the bouncer two twenties—the cover charge, apparently, for the privilege of seeing what was behind Door Number Two, which Pete held open for her.

  “Good God.”

  Can I trade for Door Number Three, Bob?

  Because Door Number Two was the booby prize. Literally.

  Behind the bar to their right, up on a long, narrow stage, three women of colossal proportions strolled past bar stools filled with patrons—all men—sucking beer and smiling as if they had dreams of being smothered by giant marshmallows.

  “Where did they get those breasts?”

  “Silicone Valley.”

  A man with slick black hair and a dark spot beneath his nose that may or may not have been a mustache approached.

  “Hey, man.”

  Pete nodded. “Hey, Ferret. You seen Nick Balboa today?”

  Ferret shook his head. “Nah. But he might be in later. It ain’t like him to miss something like this.”

  “Go see what you can find out for me, okay?”

  Ferret nodded and took off.

  Pete took Grace’s hand and led her to a booth in the far corner of the club.

  Grace couldn’t stop staring at the women onstage. It was like a train wreck. No, it was worse than a train wreck.

  It was a train wreck with giant breasts.

  “It’s Mammoth Mammary Day at the Cat’s Meow,” Pete explained.

  “I see that. How do they stand up with all that weight?”

  “That’s why they put the poles there. To give them something to hang on to. Here.” He shoved a menu across the booth.

  “I have to pee.”

  “Again?”

  “Hey, you give birth to three kids and tell me how long you can go in between.”

  “You have three kids?”

  “Yes, I do. And I really have to go again.”

  “In a minute.” He handed her a menu. “Figure out what you want to eat before your blood sugar goes too low.”

  Grace scowled at him and opened the menu, trying not to think about why her fingers were sticking to the plastic cover.

  “I’ll have a hamburger, French fries and a milk shake.”

  “They don’t have milk shakes here,” Pete said.

  “Okay, then. A Coke.”

  “It’s a two-drink minimum per table. Why don’t you order a beer?”

  “Why don’t you order a beer?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Neither do I.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Anymore.”

  A waitress in a hot-pink negligee appeared at the table.

  “Hey, honey, how are ya?” She winked at Pete.

  “I’m good, Amber. How are you?”

  “Hanging in there.”

  “Are you dancing tonight?” Pete said.

  “Yeah. Later. After the cows go home.” She jerked a thumb at the women onstage.

  “You waitress and dance?” Grace asked.

  Amber rolled her eyes. “Dincha ever hear of dinner theater?”

  “You gonna order?” Pete said to Grace.

  Grace gave Amber a fake smile. “I’d like a hamburger, medium, French fries and a Coke.”

  Amber popped her gum. “…and…a…Coke…” She scribbled on a pad. “Wow, you’re brave.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Amber smiled at Pete. “Anything for you, honey?”

  “Just coffee. Thanks.” Pete’s gaze moved over the room.

  “Is Nick here?” Grace asked.

  “Do you see him?” Pete leaned back against the red vinyl seat.

  “I’m afraid to look.”

  Amber returned with their drinks. Pete stirred a few packets of sugar into his coffee, which looked thick enough to stand a spoon in. “So, how did you get involved with Nick?”

  “I’m not involved with Nick.”

  “You and me, we’re not involved, either. Does that mean you’re gonna give me your underpants and let me touch your ass?”

  “You wish.”

  Pete took a sip of his coffee. “I want to believe you, Grace. I do. But look at it from my perspective.”

  She played with the straw in her Coke. “It was a game.”

  “A game?”

  “Yes. Truth or dare. I was at the club last night with some friends from high school, and we decided to play a game of truth or dare. Relive our youth.”

  “So you gave Nick an expensive diamond ring on a dare?”

  “Not the ring, the underwear. I gave him the ring because of the Flaming Togas.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  She sighed. “Shots. I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “You didn’t know you were kissing a stranger? Do you make a habit of kissing men you don’t know?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t. I was just…” How could she explain what she was feeling to him? How a woman felt when she was fading. Becoming invisible.

  No one looked anymore. No one whistled. And it wasn’t as if she enjoyed that kind of thing, but she hadn’t realized until it was gone how reassuring it had been. �
��Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”

  He gave her the strangest look, as if he actually might, and that was worse than if he didn’t. She looked away in time to see the skinny guy with the smudge under his nose coming over to the booth.

  “Looks like we’re getting company,” she said.

  “Hey, Pete.”

  Pete made room, and the skinny guy slid onto the seat next to him.

  “Grace, this is Ferret. Ferret, Grace.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ferret.”

  Ferret snorted. “Mister Ferret. That’s a good one.” He pushed a slip of paper over to Pete. “You might be able to find Nick at this address.”

  Pete nodded, and stuck the paper into his pocket. “This is Nick’s girlfriend.”

  The man’s eyes slid over her like fried eggs on Teflon. “She don’t look like Nick’s type.” He waved Amber over. “Gimme a cheese steak and fries. And I’ll take a couple beers. You know, to meet the two-drink minimum.”

  “You got money?” Amber said. “’Cause you ain’t working it off at the door like you did last time. You let all your friends in for free.”

  Ferret jerked his head at Pete. “He’s paying for it.”

  Pete nodded and took another swig of coffee.

  “How good could the coffee be at a place like this?” Grace asked as she covered her French fries with watery ketchup.

  “Better than that hamburger,” he said.

  She bit into it.

  “Ack.” It tasted like roadkill. Or rather, what roadkill would taste like if it were scraped off the street, fried on a grill that hadn’t been cleaned in a decade and served on a bun dating back to the Reagan administration.

  “This place isn’t exactly known for its food,” Pete said.

  “More for its theater,” she said.

  Pete smiled. “Right.”

  She ate the burger anyway, on the theory that it was better than nothing. She suspected she’d pay a hefty price for that theory later.

  Ferret kept staring at her boobs, as if he didn’t have enough of them to look at on the stage.

  “If you gentlemen will excuse me, I have to hit the ladies’ room.”

  “It’s back there.” Pete jerked a thumb toward the back of the room. “I’ll be watching for you.” He gave her a look fraught with meaning.

  She rolled her eyes.

  Saturday, 3:47 p.m.

  Flushed

  The ladies’ room smelled like tangerine Air Wick and abandoned ambitions.

  Grace tried not to touch anything. She hovered above the toilet seat, wondering how she got there.

  Not only the Cat’s Meow but this place where she would rather give a stranger her underwear than tell her once-best-friends that she had made a mistake a long, long time ago.

  But it wasn’t that long ago, was it? She’d done it again. And this time she couldn’t hide behind the excuse that she was a dumb kid.

  This time, she had a better excuse. She’d forged those papers for her kids. For their house. They deserved a little stability after everything that had happened this past year.

  But she knew she was just sugarcoating things. What she’d done was wrong, her motives be damned.

  Suddenly, she felt overwhelmed. Claustrophobic. The walls of the bathroom stall closed in on her. She grabbed one of the sanitary disposal bags stacked on the toilet tank and breathed into it.

  When the dizziness passed, she staggered out of the stall. This was crazy. She shouldn’t be here. She just wanted to go home and see her kids. She’d never wish for more excitement again.

  On the far wall, just below a small window, a condom machine announced its offerings in bold pink letters:

  RIBBED

  ULTRATHIN

  STUDDED

  NIGHT-GLOW

  Night-glow? Night-glow? Who would want to see something that looked like a nuclear waste accident coming at them in the dark?

  A draft of cold air tickled her neck. She looked up. The window above the condom machine stood open a crack, allowing a narrow shaft of sunlight into the bathroom. Sunlight that would never get through the dirt-caked frosted glass any other way.

  Grace thought she might be able to pull herself up there, and if she could…

  She dragged the plastic trash can over to the wall and turned it over, dumping paper towels, lipstick-stained toilet paper and something that looked suspiciously like a body part onto the floor and climbed up on it.

  The trash can wobbled. Grace caught herself on the condom machine just as the can slid out from beneath her feet.

  She got a foothold on the levers of the machine and heaved herself up to the window, pushing it open with her forehead. Outside, cars raced up and down Cottman Avenue, filled with families on their way home from the mall. Families on their way home from soccer games. Families bickering about what they were going to have for dinner.

  God, she wanted that.

  She dove for the opening, stopping short when her hips got stuck in the window frame.

  Great. She never should have eaten all those fries.

  Outside, her head stuck into a sparse, dusty hedge. Inside, her legs dangled on the wall. She kicked, trying to find the condom machine, but no luck.

  “You ever seen that Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon, the one where he gets stuck in the rabbit hole? I always loved that one.” The voice had a sort of chain-saw-on-metal quality, not quite as melodic as Selma Diamond’s from Night Court.

  “Do you think you could help me?” Grace said.

  “I guess.”

  Hands gripped her ankles.

  “Not that way! I’ll fall on you. Can you just guide my legs to the condom machine?”

  The hands did as they were told.

  Grace shinnied down the condom machine, past the picture of a woman who was supposed to be in the throes of an orgasm but who looked more like she was waiting for dental surgery.

  She turned and came face-to-face with the oldest stripper she’d ever seen.

  She must have been one of the Mammoth Mammary stars, although her mammaries had clearly migrated south, as had most of her contemporaries. Her tasseled pasties dangled just above her belly button.

  Hair a bloodcurdling shade of orange stood a foot higher than her scalp, and Grace was pretty sure only a few of her teeth were real.

  In that moment Grace realized that her life, which had once, long ago, resembled an episode of Fantasy Island, had now deteriorated into an episode of Moonlighting.

  “Thanks for the help,” Grace said.

  “Sure, honey. You having a bad date?”

  “Something like that.” Grace wondered, could a date that was taking place at the Cat’s Meow be anything but bad?

  The dancer withdrew a tube of lipstick from her sequined hot pants and applied it while looking into the cracked mirror above the sink. “Gotta get me some of that collagen in my lips.”

  Right. Like that’s your biggest cosmetic surgery issue.

  “Hey, listen,” Grace said. “Is there a back way out of here?”

  “Sure. Follow me.”

  The old stripper scuffed along in orthopedic feather-trimmed mules, down a hall decorated with peeling psychedelic wallpaper. Club music, coming from beyond the wall on their right, thumped and whined like a jet engine.

  Grace checked her watch. Four oh-five. Kevin would be on the soccer field, looking for a way to avoid the ball. She wondered if Tom was there, too, looking for a way to avoid her parents and probably looking for her and the forged papers.

  The bastard. This was all his fault.

  If he had never come selling pharmaceuticals at the doctor’s office where she’d worked as a summer temp, she never would have met him. And if he hadn’t asked her out the day after she’d seen Pretty Woman—he looked a lot like Richard Gere—she never would have gone out with him.

  If she hadn’t gone out with him, she never would have slept with him, and then she certainly never would have married him, couldn’t have found him in f
lagrante delicto with his assistant, wouldn’t have divorced him, never would have forged those papers and, thus, never would have felt compelled to let loose with her friends at a cheesy nightclub in a desperate attempt to get the whole damned mess off her mind.

  Bastard.

  She followed the stripper past a little room off the corridor lined with mirrors and a folding table with a duct-taped leg. Women revealing varying amounts of skin milled about, smoking cigarettes and applying eye makeup.

  “That’s where we girls get dressed,” the stripper informed her.

  Wouldn’t that be undressed? Grace wondered.

  They passed an area that was cold and smelled oddly like curry. And at long last they reached an old, gray door. Above it in faded red paint were the words Fire Exit.

  Nothing like being safety conscious.

  “This is it. You sure you want to go out there, honey? Alone?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Grace cracked the door. The fresh air was intoxicating, despite its abundance of fine particulates and nearly double the recommended parts per million of ozone. Philadelphians liked air they could sink their teeth into.

  Grace gave the old dancer a nod of thanks and stepped out into the sunshine.

  The door slammed shut behind her.

  She turned, only to find Pete leaning up against the brick wall, smoking a cigarette. “Well, well. I started to get worried when you didn’t come back for dessert. You seem like the kind of woman who eats dessert.”

  “Shit.”

  Pete grabbed her arm. “Come on. We have to find your boyfriend, then you’re off the hook. Maybe.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Right.” They made their way around the building and back to the parking lot. Pete pushed the button to open the car doors, and the car answered back with a flash of the parking lights.

  Tires squealed. Grace and Pete froze, caught in the path of a blue-and-white police cruiser that came to a stop inches in front of them, so close Grace could feel the heat from the car’s hood on her thighs.

  “Holy—”

  Pete clutched her arm.

  Cops leaped out of both sides of the car, and two seconds later, another cruiser pulled up behind them.