More of This World or Maybe Another

by Barb Johnson

  At last Sal comes with their drinks somewhere toward the end of the painfully long song. “Two Pimm’s Cups,” he says, and without another word, he pivots toward his wall and leaves them.

  Delia watches Maggie pick up her drink and chase a cucumber slice around in its pool of alcohol. Before she can get the fruit to her mouth, it slides from between her fingers and slaps wetly onto the bricks beneath the table.

  When Maggie attempts a dive for the cucumber in Delia’s glass, Delia covers it with her hand. “Oh, no, uhn-uh.”

  “You wanted these all along, didn’t you?”

  “I did want them,” Delia says. Getting a Pimm’s Cup without actually ordering it is something of a sport for them.

  Maggie sighs. “Such a clever girl.”

  There’s real admiration in her voice, and for a few seconds, Delia is buoyed by it, by the respect they have always had for each other. This could be a lie, too, though—an illusion—couldn’t it? Delia feels herself tear up and pulls her sunglasses down for cover. Like a two-year-old, she often cries when she’s confused. Or when she means to be angry. The crying only makes her angrier, which leads to more tears.

  Maggie picks up the eyebrow pencil. She taps out a little song against their glasses. “Aren’t you going to write something?”

  “I am,” Delia says, “but later.”

  Maggie continues tapping her deedly-deedly-doo on the glasses. “Now is later, I think is what you said before.”

  Delia takes a deep breath and pushes it out between her closed lips. She reaches down and sticks her finger between the slingback and her Achilles tendon. The strap is cutting into her, and so is the tapping, the pretend-innocent song, the deedly-deedly-doo. Delia jerks the eyebrow pencil out of Maggie’s hand and uses it to stretch the strap of the shoe. Someone, somewhere knows about Maggie’s fetish for slingbacks. Delia presses her lips together, hard. She holds up two fingers for Sal, and, to her relief, he goes directly to the bar. She slows her breathing, weighs her next move. Once she pulls the card out, there’ll be no turning back.

  They started therapy six months ago because Maggie was traveling so much for work, and she was feeling stressed by it. Or because Delia felt alone in their relationship. Or because, like everyone who’s been together for any amount of time, they’d simply stopped talking about what they hoped to do and took care of what they had to do. The constant present tense of their lives was wearing them out, making them bicker.

  The therapist said that their relationship was “do” heavy, that they needed to spend less time doing and more time being. They needed to talk more, to participate in the process, she said. They’d both laughed at that, at the word process. But behind the therapist’s back, of course.

  “We got issues, missy,” Maggie said in the car after their first session.

  “But only the one,” Delia acknowledged. “Issue is or issue ain’t my baby.”

  Later that evening, Delia had howled with laughter when Maggie grabbed her and said, “Come on and let me process this,” and smacked Delia’s ass.

  For all the fun they made of therapy, though, Delia thought it was helping. They were arguing less. And if phone sex counted, they were talking more. But now the shoes, the card.

  Across the table, Maggie pokes at her PDA, flipping through the electronic calendar. She stares into the tiny screen like it’s a crystal ball. “When are we going to the beach?” she asks the device, then looks up at Delia. “Everything is always so nice at the beach.” Maggie leans back in her chair, closes her eyes and smiles as though she’s already there, the sugary sand beneath her, cocktails at the ready and the Gulf heaving happy sighs at her feet. “So?” Maggie asks, opening her eyes slowly and staring first into her PDA and then right at Delia.

  Delia flinches from the eye contact. The beach. What if they could go to the beach and have a good time? What if they could come back refreshed, renewed, and leave the stranger’s X’s and O’s buried in the sand? “I reckon we might end up at the beach,” she says.

  Her beloved’s expression softens into a look that Delia would like to think Maggie reserves just for her. “I like it when you say ‘I reckon.’ Say it again.”

  Delia tries to imagine that they are strong enough to get past this, to figure out a way. She should just tell Maggie about finding the card, just put it out there.

  “I want for us to go together,” Maggie says. “Not just have a few overlapping days, but really go together this time.”

  “We might be able to do that.”

  “If we talk,” Maggie says.

  “If we make a plan for our leisure time,” Delia says, mocking their therapist.

  “If we participate in the process, you mean.”

  “Process this!” they say together because now it’s what they always say when someone uses the word process. For a few seconds, Delia knows why she and Maggie are together. Knows why she can’t just quit. Then the clarity leaches back into wherever it came from.

  “And what about our anniversary?” Maggie asks. “We should have a party. Like a really big one.”

  Delia rolls her eyes. “I’d rather go to the beach.” Last year they didn’t make it to the beach at all. Maggie had gotten a promotion, and the traveling had started. And then it was just too hard to plan anything. One evening, though, when Delia came home from work, their tiny backyard had been made into a beach. Maggie had hung colored lanterns—Delia loves colored lanterns—and made elaborate, fruity cocktails. Don Ho sang on the stereo.

  Until this very afternoon, Delia has always been sure of Maggie’s love, of her attention. She tries to get at that certainty now, to believe that nothing’s really changed. That the welded joint of love is strong and will hold.

  When she looks across the courtyard, it’s just in time to track Sal’s slow approach to their table. He sets down two more Pimm’s Cups. This second round is even stronger than the first, Sal’s compensation, Delia knows, for taking so long. They cut each other slack. They make allowances, and it all evens out. Like now. The alcohol has begun to loosen the tightness inside Delia. She watches Maggie, pecking things into her PDA, stopping to tap the stylus against the drum of her cheek, whose skin is stretched taut, her mouth opening and closing to make a happy little tune.

  They drink quietly for a while, both staring across the courtyard where a very drunk man, a tourist festooned with out-of-season Mardi Gras beads, is trying to buy cigarettes from the machine. He puts money in and pulls on the knob. When nothing happens, he puts in more money and then more. The machine is broken. There’s a sign that says as much. But the man wants what he wants. “Connect the dots, why don’t you,” Delia says in his direction.

  For ten, maybe fifteen minutes more, Delia and Maggie listen to The Barber of Seville, which is an old part of the Napoleon House’s extensive opera collection. Sal brings another round of drinks to the table without being asked. “Ladies,” he says with a crisp flourish of his drink tray and walks off. He leaves the empty glasses, which have begun to sweat. Cool drops of water drip through the mesh of the table onto Delia’s bare legs. The drops cling to her skin and slide down around her ankles, moistening the leather straps of the slingbacks, which are digging into Delia’s heels.

  Maggie takes a long drink. “These are good, aren’t they,” she coos. When Delia doesn’t say anything, Maggie looks into her eyes. “Are we playing Guess Why I’m Mad?”

  “We might be.”

  Maggie pulls the cucumber from Delia’s drink. When Delia reaches for the stolen fruit, Maggie holds it away. A wave of anger washes over her, and tears start at the corners of her eyes.

  “Close your eyes,” Maggie says.

  “Why?”

  “Trust me, will you?”

  Delia feels Maggie lift her sunglasses and set slices of cucumber on her closed eyelids. It feels great. The cool blackness, the nothingness, is a little vacation from the moment, and Delia’s relieved to have it. Too quickly, the cucumbers take on her heat, and she set
s them on the plate of olives.

  Her feet have begun to swell from the sitting and the hot day and the alcohol, and Delia tries to adjust the straps of the slingbacks again. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Maggie watching her.

  “These shoes are hurting me,” Delia says.

  Maggie is looking right at Delia’s feet now, and she’s nervous, Delia sees.

  “They’re hurting you. I’m sorry.”

  “They’re cutting into me.”

  “I said I’m sorry. Here, let me take them back. You can have mine.” Maggie removes her designer flip-flops and offers them to Delia.

  “I think I already have your shoes, don’t I?” Delia says. She nearly tears her pocket trying to get at the card, whose X’s and O’s she slaps on the table between them.

  Maggie puffs her cheeks, which is what she does when she doesn’t want to cry. She shakes her head no, no, no, and then digs in her purse—for an explanation, maybe?—but comes up empty-handed. She funnels ice into her mouth, chews loudly.

  Delia thumbs an olive into the air for something to do, catches it neatly in her mouth, then bites down on the hard core in an attempt to feel the anger, another assignment from therapy. She scrapes off the salty meat with her teeth, then spits the pit into her palm and closes her hand, making a fist around the sharp little point. Neither of them says anything for what seems a long, long time.

  Delia flicks the olive pit in Maggie’s direction, missing her by enough to make it seem accidental. Then she winds her hair into a French twist and anchors it with the eyebrow pencil. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she says, gesturing toward the kitchen behind Maggie. She buses the table for Sal, scissoring, with one hand, the empty drink glasses, and scoots past Maggie.

  Without getting up, Maggie reaches behind herself and grabs Delia’s wrist, pulls it to her cheek. Kisses it with a tenderness that fires up Delia’s heart, makes it catch, its gears engage. The back of Maggie’s neck looks vulnerable beneath her chic haircut where the skin has begun to crease with age and her refusal to use sunblock. It was so smooth when they first started out. Maggie turns in her chair and looks up at Delia. She puffs her cheeks against the tears. “I shouldn’t have accepted the shoes. I shouldn’t have…I messed up. I messed up, Delia.”

  Delia can feel Maggie’s hand shaking, or maybe it’s her own, and it makes her want to comfort Maggie or kill her, though she can’t tell which. Most of all, though, Delia wants to say the thing she’s just now remembered. She wants to say how, years ago, at a New Year’s Eve party, which was right up the historical staircase of this exact bistro, Delia made out with a woman she knew who was visiting from out of town. They were both drunk, everyone was, and they had begun flirting while they waited in the long, long bathroom line. When the door finally opened, they entered together and went directly to kissing. Why? Delia still doesn’t know. They would’ve done more had there not been threats from the squirming line outside.

  In the cab on the way home from the party, Delia had started her confession. “I messed up…” she said.

  Giggling from all the champagne, Maggie grabbed Delia’s wrist and kissed it. “Uh-oh,” she said. “What’d you do, girl?”

  But then Delia thought it didn’t make any difference what she’d done. It was a stupid New Year’s Eve kind of thing. She put her mouth on someone else. They had a moment. Big deal. She loved Maggie. By the time they got in the cab that night, it was already in the past, and they were driving away from it. Delia let the subject drop.

  Crossing the courtyard, Delia catches sight of Sal inside mooning over a delivery man. She holds up the glasses to show him that she’s cleared the table, and he turns away from his conversation to blow her a kiss. It all seems so normal.

  In the bistro’s kitchen, Delia adds their glasses to a line of dirty dishes waiting near the sink. A rack, fresh from the dishwasher, steams at the counter’s edge, lipstick persevering on several cups. One of them has been filled with a perfect cappuccino and forgotten. Probably by Sal. A neat disc of foam rises above the carmine crescent where a stranger’s lips have left their mark. Delia reaches instinctively to clear the stain. It happens, she thinks, pulling her hand away. It happens all the time. She turns from the cup, from the steaming rack, the sink, and makes her way to the bathroom door, which sticks just a little before it opens.

  Titty Baby

  “You got titties,” Jerry Beatty told Pudge in P.E. this afternoon. Right in front of everyone. The entire fifth grade had to run the fifty-yard dash, and Pudge was last. He always is. When he got close to the finish line, a bunch of Jerry’s friends threw themselves on the ground and covered their heads. “Incoming!” they yelled, like soldiers on TV.

  Now Pudge cuts down Palmyra Street away from the rest of the after-school crowd. Every once in a while, he moves his notebook aside to study his problem chest. There’s something about his new shirt that shows off his titties, which, up until today, were a kind of secret. His mother bought him this new outfit. For incentive, she said. It’s not for him, exactly, but for the slim boy he’s meant to be.

  “Big Luce!” Pudge calls down the street. Big Luce is about to walk back inside the Corner Laundry, and Pudge wants to catch her before she does. His tight pants cut into his thighs, and walking fast turns up the volume of the new denim scratching against itself. Stampede! he hears in his head when he tries to run. And the laughing. “Big Luce!” Pudge calls again and waves.

  Big Luce stops at the gate behind the Laundromat. “How goes it with you?” she asks as Pudge pushes straight into the courtyard, where his classmates won’t be able to see him.

  Pudge’s insides are fizzing, but he can’t think of what that’s called. Fizzing. I’m fizzing, he tries out in his mind. “Okay, I guess,” he says to Big Luce.

  “That bad, huh?”

  It might be that Big Luce can read his mind. Or maybe she’s kidding? Sometimes people are kidding, but Pudge doesn’t catch on in time. Or maybe she saw the titties poking out of his new shirt this morning and knows what kind of day they got him. His Aunt Alma will be coming through the gate soon, and Pudge wants to tell Big Luce about the titty problem before his aunt gets here because Aunt Alma is too tender-hearted and not as practical as Big Luce, who might know what Pudge can do about his girl’s chest. If Aunt Alma hears about it, she’ll get mad at his mama, who is Aunt Alma’s little sister. She’ll say, “Why can’t you buy that boy some clothes that fit?” There’ll be a fight, and his mama will cry or his Aunt Alma will.

  Pudge follows Big Luce through the back door of the Laundromat into the kitchen.

  She pulls a couple of lemon ices from the refrigerator, hands Pudge one with a flat, wooden spoon.

  Pudge would rather have any flavor but lemon. Lemon grabs at the back of your cheeks, right underneath your ears, and it just pulls at you. Every bite the same. Cool and nice and then pulling at you. It makes the fizzing feeling worse.

  They go back outside to the round table in the courtyard, which is full of yellow hibiscus flowers. Big Luce brushes a few of the bright petals off the table. Puts one behind her ear, twirls another in front of Pudge. He likes to tip his face up and feel the flower brush on his closed eyes, but he shakes his head no because it’s a nice thing, and nice things make him cry.

  If you cry, his mama has told him, it only makes the bullies want to hurt you more. That doesn’t make any sense to Pudge, but he knows it’s true. When his baby sister cries, it only makes his father hit her more. Sometimes Pudge sneaks in after and holds Belinda’s tiny baby hand. Belinda’s a quick learner for a baby. Once she’s been hit, she doesn’t cry anymore. She just lies there in the footlocker that their father cleared out for a bed, looks at the ceiling while Pudge holds her hand. Pudge wishes he could tell Aunt Alma or Big Luce about the hitting, but it’s a secret. His mother has warned him. “A family’s business stays in the family,” she told him. “I don’t need an earful from your Aunt Alma or that other one. They don’t know the first thing
about families.”

  Big Luce sits next to Pudge in one of the old iron chairs. Pudge hates the narrow chairs, how they dig into his sides, but he can’t just stand there like an idiot.

  “So what’s the scene, jelly bean?” Big Luce asks.

  Pudge messes with his lemon ice, stalling. “I got into honors chorus,” he says. Honors chorus is good news. Sort of. Focus on the positive, that’s what Big Luce always tells him to do.

  “I thought you weren’t going to audition.”

  “I wasn’t,” Pudge says, “but then I did.” He’ll need a suit to be in honors chorus and how is he going to get one? Where do suits come from, anyway? Titties, he thinks again and then lets all the worried thoughts run together for a minute. He takes a bite of lemon ice and imagines that the pulling beneath his ears is pulling the bad thoughts out of his head, mixing them with ice so they can disappear down his throat. “I don’t think I’m going to do it, though,” he tells Big Luce. “There’s a spring concert and you have to get permission and you wear a suit and it’s a lot of practice and I might not want to go every day.” Pudge knows better than to tell his mama that he needs a suit. It’s the kind of thing she would forget to do, or if she remembered, she’d buy one for a regular-sized boy. For incentive.

  “You should do it,” Big Luce says. “You’re the best singer I know.”

  It’s tricky when someone says something nice. Pudge stares at the cement, takes a big bite of lemon ice and lets it pull hard at his cheeks. Tries not to let the nice thing make him cry. Like a titty baby. “You must not know many singers,” Pudge says and waits.

  Big Luce raises an eyebrow at him, which is about as mean as she ever gets. Even when he’s being a smart aleck. Even when he’s asking for it. She has her long legs crossed, and she swings one slowly, la-le-la, like there’s nothing in the world to worry about.