by Barb Johnson
Across the street, the BMW’s passenger window is open. Luis is in the back, sound asleep, a miner’s light strapped to his head. The batteries must be about gone because there’s only a smudge of yellow light left fighting to get out.
Luis has been sleeping in the car. Pudge has to work hard to keep himself from thinking about why. Or what he should do about it. And how. What kind of protection does he have to offer this boy? A beat-up old man with crappy knees, a foot that won’t support him, a finger pointing in the wrong direction.
He hops across to the car to get a better look at his son. Luis is pressed into the corner in the back, his hands sandwiched between his face and the glass like he’s praying. There’s only the dim eye of the kid’s headlamp watching over him, and it stares right at Pudge. Pudge eases open the door and rolls the window up against the cool night. That light, he imagines, will burn out soon, and Luis will wake alone in the dark. Pudge slips his hand beneath the chain of his dog tags, lifts them off and hangs them on the rearview mirror. They swing back and forth and then go still.
On the windshield, spider-leg cracks crawl away from a bullet hole on the driver’s side. Pudge tries to cover the cracks with his hand, but they run edge to edge across the glass. Some men would walk away from that kind of damage. Some men might not have the touch. But when Pudge gets the tools, he’s going to give it a go.
The Invitation
The dream goes like this:
I’m watching Maggie, who’s reading downstairs in front of the Bubble’s big window. Poetry, probably. The setting sun is throwing Maxfield Parrish light across that corner in the room of mismatched washers and dryers. All my customers are gone, finally, and the door is locked. I’m up in the loft, which is a platform that hovers over the center of the Laundromat, and I’m achy with love for Maggie Kelly. She looks up at me, smiles.
We are twenty. This is our past.
I want to call down to Maggie and say, Come see, but at twenty, even in a dream, an outright invitation is still well beyond my ability. Maggie and I have touched only once, just before a near kiss. In the dream, I am filled with the longing of that almost moment.
At the back of the Laundromat, there’s a kitchen. The door is closed, but I can see inside it anyway. I watch a drop of water gathering like a revelation at the mouth of the faucet. I feel it strain for release, and I want to see it burst open. Then I remember Maggie. When I turn to check on her, she’s right behind me, sitting sideways in a captain’s chair. One leg up over the worn arm, facing east. One leg down on the seat, facing west. The wide-open geography of this pose makes me fidget. It steals my words and leaves me standing there, mute and filled with an anxious yearning.
Finally, I think to open my arms to Maggie Kelly, and when I do, she floats, mouth first, right to me. Kissing her is like a dream, like something I’m remembering instead of learning, like a dream within a memory within a dream. My heart pounds us backward to the sofa, which is covered with a cobalt blue sarong. Que sarong, sarong.
Maggie and I kiss for a long while and then we talk a little, or not talk, I guess. We have that kind of mind-meld that stands for talking in dreams. Maggie’s words are like fingers tracing my naked self—not just my body, my self, my whole self—every word beautiful and perfect. Delia, she says. The sound of my name in her mouth gives me the shivers.
Music, perfectly nuanced, accompanies our every move. Like the talking, the music is mind-meld dream music, and we are its source. The back-and-forth of our wills. Notes rise from the heat of us, converge in the air around us. We are made of music. And not just the sweet strings of the violin and the soulful cello. Not just the bold ta-da of horns. No. We are the cowbell of the misstep, too. We lose our footing, and it jangles. Hilarious.
And then we’re fucking, Maggie Kelly and I. We are lighter than air, floating, euphoric. Even in our weightless state, we’re able to get just the right amount of purchase for what we’re doing. You, I say to Maggie. One word. The rest of what I mean comes pouring out of my chest, and we ride the wave of it. We circle like seals in water.
I got one more trick up my sleeve, Maggie says, not in words but in pulses, a series of clicks that run up and down my spine.
Downstairs, the glow of the snack machine’s light looks like a distant sun just about to rise. It beams with the perfect happiness of being wanted.
Suddenly, the Laundromat’s doorbell is ringing. I don’t intend to answer it, but then I find myself padding across the cool tiles toward the door. The snack machine’s light flickers like a flashback. When I reach to turn the deadbolt, my hand leaves tracers in the air.
I open the door to the smell of Chinese food. “Just say what you want,” a delivery guy tells me. Does he mean say what I want to say or say what it is that I want? I always hear more questions than are being asked. “Just say what you want,” he repeats. Emphatic, but not impatient.
It’s my fiancé, Calvin, there on the other side of the threshold.
Maggie wakes and sleeps like an animal—quickly, with almost no warning. I want to wake her up now. Is that a trick up your sleeve, I want to whisper in her ear, or are you just glad to see me? When Maggie does wake up, there’s going to be a discussion about coffee. This is not a dream. We’re not twenty anymore. Not for a long time now.
“You,” Maggie murmurs without opening her eyes. You is a term of affection between us. Here it probably means it’s my turn to get coffee, though. The muscles in her face slacken as she wakes. She’s a perfect extrovert, more relaxed when she’s conscious and talking than when she’s asleep, her thoughts trapped behind the exit of her mouth.
I leave Maggie in the bed, get up and brush my hair. Before I reach the stairs, the doorbell rings. Saturday morning. Probably someone selling religion. Or a crack-addled scammer, maybe, who will claim to live just down the block. He’ll ask for seven dollars to get a cab to see his mother who’s been rushed to Charity Hospital.
I ignore the bell.
It rings again and there’s knocking. I ignore it. The bell again. More knocking. I feel my dream coming back to me as I head down the stairs.
“Coffee!” Maggie yells as I go.
The persistence of the knocking and ringing says crackhead, and I ready myself to be as hard and rude as I know how. I release the deadbolt on the big door and yank it open to find a bag of doughnuts suspended from a hand. My brother curls into the doorway.
“Hold your fire!” Dooley mock-yells and walks in with the doughnuts in front of him for protection.
“I’m going to need some coffee,” I warn, taking the doughnuts from my little brother, who is tall and gangly and still crackling with energy from his gig last night, maybe from other things, too. He’s wearing a porkpie hat, an undershirt that shows off his ropy, guitar-playing muscles, a tattoo that asks, Where y@?
“You want beer or coffee?”
“You got a root beer?” Dooley follows me back to the kitchen, his hand already reaching for a doughnut in the bag I’m carrying. He hasn’t been home yet, so he still smells like a bar, like beer sweat, and I sniff at a canister of coffee to block out the stink. At the table, he stretches his long legs out and bites into a neon-sprinkled doughnut.
“You eat like a teenager,” I say and flip his hat off his head. His kinky blond hair, our dark skin and light eyes, they tell the story of the French and the Africans, the Scots and the Irish who struggle for ascendance in our DNA. It’s the story of most everyone who’s from Gremillion, Louisiana, which is where we grew up.
“I got the invitations,” Dooley announces proudly and pulls a stack of cards from his messenger bag.
IT’S OUR ANNIVERSARY! the cards blare in forty-eight-point type.
“Uhn-uh. No-o-o,” I say. I pick up the stack of cards and hand them back to Dooley. “Not going to happen, Doo.”
Dooley’s boyish face darkens in disappointment. He’s a grown man, but he still has the dire facial expressions of a child. “But they’re all printed up,” he points ou
t.
“Put them in the bag and take them back where you got them.”
“No can do, señorita. That’s between you and the missus.” Dooley shoves another doughnut in his mouth, chugs root beer, thumbs through an Offbeat he’s pulled from his bag.
“Fine.” I stomp the pedal of the garbage can, and its hungry mouth opens and swallows the invitations in a single gulp. I go back to making coffee. “I told Maggie we could discuss having an anniversary party,” I say to Dooley. “I did not agree to anything, most especially not those loud-ass invitations.”
Behind us, the stairs creak. Maggie. The scene triggers a feeling of déjà vu. The dream of our past, this sleepy lost feeling, the ringing doorbell. My well-worn love comes down the stairs, tying the sash of her killer blue kimono. This is also part of the déjà vu.
“Dooley!” Maggie chirps. “Let’s make omelets.”
On Monday, Maggie has the evening shift at the Laundromat, so she doesn’t come in until noon. I’ve been here since nine. She sits out front chatting with folks while they do their laundry. I go in the back to fold clothes and wrap them in brown paper for our pickup service. Before I get too far into things, I sneak around the side of the Bubble and hide behind the panel of our defunct pay phone so I can have a smoke where Maggie won’t catch me. Ten bucks a bust, that’s the deal we made. The notion that I might get caught makes me smoke really fast, which is the opposite of relaxing and harder to do than it looks. I do it several times a day anyway.
Across the street, a neighborhood kid, Luis, holds up ten fingers to show that I’m busted. Maggie has enlisted him as an informant. “You could pay me five dollars when I catch you,” he suggests. “Then you could smoke two times for the same amount.”
I say, “That would defeat the purpose,” and he just shakes his smooth little head.
“Seem like if you gotta give Miss Maggie ten and you could give me five not to tell Miss Maggie, you could come out way ahead.”
“That’s a different deal, Luis,” I tell him. “That’s extortion.” Luis is only twelve, but he’s the kind of boy who knows what extortion is without knowing the definition of the word.
“Yeah, but it’s only five bucks,” he says and ducks into the abandoned BMW that’s parked across the street.
Cars arrive and disappear on Palmyra Street all the time. This one’s got a flat tire, a bullet hole in the windshield—it’s a magnet for trouble. Luis has made it his private clubhouse.
I finish my cigarette, wave to Luis, who’s pretending to drive. “Better buckle up,” I yell across the street, and then go back to my folding inside.
One morning Maggie offers to paint my toenails. With our anniversary coming up, romantic gestures from our past are enjoying a reprise. I know she’s after something when she makes the offer, but she’s good with that tiny brush, so I accept.
Halfway through: “Why can’t we have an anniversary party?”
I say, “It was the fucking party planning that broke us up before.”
“Weird,” Maggie muses. “I thought it was infidelity and messed-up priorities.”
“You know what I mean.”
“It’ll be fun,” Maggie assures me. “Don’t you want to celebrate the abomination of our homo love, our unholy, unblessed union?”
“Ah, the dark perversion of it all,” I say. “Tempting. But I think the love that dare not speak its name should keep quiet just now.”
Last year, just about this time, we split up briefly, right in the middle of planning an anniversary party. The party was too soon after Maggie’s affair. I thought we could put a happy face on things and just move on. That’s how I am, always thinking I can do things that are the opposite of how I feel. But sometimes you have to say yes before you feel yes. Sometimes you have to suck it up and be brave. But then again, sometimes you have to pay attention to how you feel. It’s never clear to me which moment I’m in when I’m in it.
Maggie slips cotton between the toes of my left foot without breaking eye contact. A shiver of lust runs through me. “Okay,” I tell her. She’s still looking me right in the eye the way she does when she’s waiting for me to talk myself into or out of something. “But we’re not calling it anything. It’s just a regular party at the Bubble.”
At a regular party nobody’s waiting to hear your recipe for success. No one says anything that makes you feel like a fake, that makes you want to set the record straight. At a regular party there’s almost no chance that you will have a few cocktails and say, Twenty years? Not exactly. We broke up for a while after the affair.
“And I mean it about the regular party thing,” I tell Maggie. “I don’t want you springing any announcements on me or letting someone give a special toast.”
“Fair enough,” Maggie concedes and goes back to her painting. “You’re in charge of the invitations, though.”
“The other ones had the A-word, Maggie. Right on the front.”
“So make new ones is all I’m saying.”
“Why can’t we just stick a who-what-when-where in the front window of the Bubble? Everyone we want to invite is going to walk by there sooner or later.”
“Because, Delia,” Maggie explains as she works paint onto my nails, “people like to know they’re wanted, that their invitation isn’t based on proximity, on happenstance.”
“No need to dog proximity,” I point out, looking from Maggie down to the cotton between my toes. My nails have begun to bloom like berries in the snow, one, then another, then another.
Sex isn’t love, Maggie told me, when she was trying to convince me that what she’d done with another woman hadn’t meant a thing. “One stupid moment,” she told me. “Just one!” She wanted me to stop being mad. She wanted to stop feeling guilty. Who wouldn’t? “It’s you I love,” she kept saying. Sex isn’t love. I know that. But just like everything else I know, it’s taking a long time for my feelings to catch up to it.
Three weeks before our anniversary, I’m in the back room of the Laundromat. It’s nice there. I like the folding, the brown paper packages with their still-warm contents. I like not having to jolly people out of the neighborhood disputes they regularly bring inside. Shut the fuck up or take it out to the street. That’s my approach. Or I pull up my bangs and aim the old burn scar on my forehead at whichever kids seem bent on wrecking the place. I’ve told them it’s an evil eye, and they’re afraid of it. Soon enough they’ll learn that it’s the scars you can’t see that do the most harm.
Maggie’s solutions are more elegant, more entertaining. “Show me your fight face,” she’ll say, adjusting the lens of her camera. Maggie has a way of charming even the hardest characters. She’ll say, “Imagine a ’66 Mustang,” and make the hardest man’s face fill with pleasure. She exhausts their bullshit with her excitement, posing and reposing the “subjects” who come back every day to see if she’s hung their picture up yet. They don’t come back to fight. They come to be photographed. People just want to be seen, Maggie’s always saying. That’s what the fighting’s about. I don’t necessarily care what the fighting’s about. I just don’t want it inside my Laundromat. Which, of course, is half Maggie’s now. After the affair, she quit her executive job and bought into the Laundromat so she and I could be together more, the way we talked about. It’s all on paper now, me and Maggie together, the closest we’re likely to get to being married in this country.
I’ve almost finished my folding and wrapping when Maggie comes in and hops up on the counter. “Dooley can play for the party,” she tells me, “and he said a couple of the other guys in the band will probably be up for it.”
I haven’t done a single thing to make this party happen, but it keeps gathering strength anyway. I tell myself to be brave, but the thought of all those balloons, the brightly colored streamers and lanterns. All that attention aimed at me and Maggie. It’s too soon. And I’m worried that it will always be too soon.
Maggie checks the counter for evidence that I’ve been working on the invi
tation. “How’s it coming?” she asks, looking from a stack of towels on the counter to a solitary vase of yellow hibiscus on the table.
“How is what coming?” I ask. I’m being a jackass. I know that.
Maggie nudges me in the hip with her foot. “You realize that you’re not going to wear me down with your indifference, right?”
“It’s not indifference I was going for,” I point out. “I hoped you’d be discouraged by my complete opposition.”
“You said you were fine with having a party as long as we didn’t make any big announcements. As long as we didn’t make it a thing.”
“I did not say I was fine. I said okay. Okay is made up of tiny molecules of ambivalence, Maggie. It’s the opposite of fine.”
Maggie hops off the counter, backs me up to the wall, makes me look her right in her eyes. “You want to take this step, Delia. You want to let the past go and be happy about our anniversary. And you want other people to be happy about it, too. I know you.”
“You’re starting to know me,” I tell her. That’s a thing we say to each other when we don’t think our complexity is being fully appreciated: You’re starting to know me. “Twenty years is nothing,” I say. “Twenty years is still casual sex.”
“Ha!” Maggie laughs and backs away a little. “I know you. You need to drag your feet when you’re afraid, and I need someone to resist my efforts. And that,” she says, kissing me, “makes us perfect for each other.”