by Joni Rodgers
Kiki nodded, thanked him, and pushed through the glass doors out into the drizzle. In the moist humor of the Houston springtime parking lot, she was better able to breathe, and the rain on her face made her feel less like throwing up.
It wasn’t that she wanted the job, anyway, but she and the kids had been staying with Mel and Kit for going on two weeks now, and Kiki wished she could at least kick in a bag of groceries. Her original plan was to get one of those cute little apartments over on 1960 West and invite them all over for a nice dinner, but that grand scheme had dwindled to this pitiful, single-sack aspiration. Pathetic, she knew, but even a scanty contribution to her own upkeep, any meager measure of independence—it would have given her something of her own.
After Wayne finished his bacon-double-cheeseburger and used the men’s room, he sauntered out to the sidewalk, settling a wide-brimmed hat that always made him feel especially Texan.
“How’d it go, Peaches?” he asked and softly stroked his thumb across the wetness on her cheek.
“I don’t care,” Kiki told him. “I got another interview this afternoon.”
“Perfume squirt girl or waitress?”
“Squirt girl,” she confessed, but did her best to look defiant. “You gonna follow me over there, too?”
“Might make more sense if I give you a ride, as long as I’m here.”
“No thanks.”
“Then you wouldn’t have to take the Metro.”
Kiki was tempted. Her shoe was beginning to bite at her swollen instep, and those Metro benches were so skanky sometimes. But she didn’t like the way Wayne kept showing up everywhere she went. He’d been calling Kit’s house at all hours of the day and night, sending flowers by FTD delivery and effusive, imploring love letters by next-day mail, return receipt requested.
Dearest Kalene,
I am not fit to live on the same planet as you I am such an asshole. I beg you to forgive me. I am a big dumb fuck and if you can ever forgive me and you and me can be a family again I will be the luckiest man on the face of this earth and I will never stop appreciating and cherishing you. I will love you always and I don’t think you will ever find a man who will please you in lovemaking sexually as I can. I bet right now you are thinking about me doing it all to you baby and how good it makes you feel when I do that. I want to do that baby if you would just come home and let me kiss you from your tits to your toes Kiki and everything in between if you know what I mean. You are the most beautiful girl on the face of this earth and I was a fucking blind asshole to ever look at anybody else and I swear to you that this will never happen again if you will only come home. Things are OK over at the shop. I did Trav Avis’s sailfishfor him and it turned out real good. I am such an asshole Kalene but I still love you and I beg you to forgive me.
All my love,
Your Husband Wayne
“C’mon, Peaches,” he said, so soft, “let me take you to Pappasito’s for lunch.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You love Pappasito’s,” he singsonged.
“And I want you to stop following me.”
“Ah, Kiki,” he soothed, “it makes me feel real proud when I see you trying so hard. You been very brave. I know you have. But you made your point now. It’s time to come on home.”
“I told you, Wayne—”
“Kiki, could you be realistic for a damn minute here? You got no job experience, no education. The only time you ever made your own living was when you were a stripper at Calloway’s, and you sure as hell can’t do that anymore. Look at you, girl.” He smiled and spanned his hands over her belly. “Nobody wants to hire some pregnant girl, honey. They know you won’t last, and you’ll be fat and crabby and sick all the time and you won’t look good.”
“I was not a stripper.” Kiki had to talk quietly because her nose and throat were clouding up with emotion.
“Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting—performing artist. I guess that’s why you were so nervous that your mama might find out.”
“I have to go, Wayne.”
“Go where? Hmm? Where ya goin’, Peaches? There’s just one place in this world where you’re worth anything to anybody, and that’s at home with me and the kids. That’s where you belong, honey. I’m the only one who wants to take care of you. You got nobody else.”
“That’s not true. I got Kit.”
“Yeah, well, I could tell you something right now that would shed a whole new light on your big sister.”
Kiki started down the block toward the Metro bench.
“Kalene, I’m more ashamed than I can tell you, but I’m gonna confess to you right here and now because I want to make everything right between us.” He stepped in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders, looking right deep into her eyes. “Kalene, your sister has been coming on to me big time for years, and one night while you were in Orlando—down there with your poor mama—and I swear I was too drunk to even know what was going on, but your sister—she was all over me, Kiki, saying how Mel is such a dud in bed and you’d never find out because you’re not very smart. And then after—well, I told her how ashamed it made me and how it would never happen again, but I can’t stand the thought of you staying under the same roof with her and believing she’s your always big sister. It makes me sick inside, Peaches. What she did—it makes me sick.”
Kiki stared at him for a long moment and then started laughing.
“Oh, Waynee! As if!” she giggled. “Lord, you really are desperate, aren’t you?”
“I am! I truly am,” he laughed too, but only a little. “I’m desperately lonely at the house all by myself. I’m desperately sorry for hurting the sweetest, most wonderful girl in the world. I’m desperately in love with you, Kalene.”
They stood there for a while, and then Kiki said something about how she should head on up to her Metro stop so she could get to her next interview.
“Kalene,” he took her face in his hands, fingertips at her temple, “get it through your head. Nobody wants you.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“You can’t mooch off your sister forever. Mel can’t hardly support the family he’s got without three extra mouths to feed. It ain’t fair to them.”
“I was thinking ... I thought I might go on down to my mama’s for a while.”
“And just how were you planning to get there?” he smiled patiently. “You got some money in your Swiss bank account, Sugar Sweet? Is that it?”
“No.”
“I’m sure as hell not gonna buy y’all a round of plane tickets.”
“I wasn’t even gonna ask you, Wayne.”
“Well, your sister don’t hardly have a pot to piss in, so I guess you’re gonna go crawling to your mama for the money?”
“Just... just as a loan.”
“I don’t know what’s happened to you, Kalene,” he reproached. “You’re not thinking about anybody but yourself. You think your mama wants to hassle with you and the kids right now? The woman just had major surgery, and now she’s gonna start all that chemotherapy and all. She’s got enough on her without a little birdie fluttering back to the nest.”
Rain stung Kiki’s forehead, but her face felt warm between his hands.
“But you don’t really give a shit about her, do you? You don’t care about your sister or her family or even about your own kids sleeping on somebody’s floor at night, don’t even know where their home is anymore. All you care about is Miss Kalene. You’re just being a fat, spoiled, selfish little princess is what you’re being. It’s all about Princess Kalene.”
She bit her bottom lip, shut her eyes, felt cool drizzle on the closed lids.
... when he jams with the bass and guitar...
“I can’t understand you, Kiki. How can you not even care about how you’re hurting everybody who loves you? Hurting your own babies? Have you even got a mother’s heart in you anymore?”
She screwed her eyes and mouth shut tighter, but two tears and a small sound escaped.
“I know you want to do the right thing. I know you do, Kalene.” Wayne folded her in his arms, kissing her forehead and wet cheeks and smooth neck. “Don’t cry, baby. I’m not mad at you, Peaches. You just c’mon home now.”
“Here’s the story of Minnie the Moocher,...”
Kit’s brush made small back-and-forth nips in the hi-de-ho rhythm of a song her mother used to sing. She glanced up and saw Ander smiling at her.
“This is very strange song to me,” he said. “All the time you sing this song when you feel not so terrific.”
“Do I?”
“She was rough and tough as frail,” he imitated her furrowed brow, her hunched posture, and cramped hand, then expanded to an open-armed baritone, “but Minnie had a heart as big as a whale!”
Kit laughed and applauded, which encouraged him to schottische around the room with a plywood cut-out garden gnome, singing “Paul and His Chickens.” It was in Swedish, so the only part she could join in on was the clook-clook-clook of the chorus.
By four-thirty, it was obvious the hoosier was not going to be done, and Kit gave up any hopes of being home by five. At six, Ander spoke to Ruda on the phone, telling her in Swedish he was going to stay and help Kit finish the behemoth off.
They sat on opposite sides of the cabinet, following the faint pencil marks with their brushes, talking about Morris chairs, mailboxes, and other things they’d like to make someday. Ander laughed at the paint on Kit’s nose, and she laughed at his impersonation of the rich lady who’d commissioned the hoosier particularly for a dinner party at which one of the guests would be a Norwegian government official, in Houston for a conference on lutefisk or something.
“Ah, these ferns,” Ander nodded, “very good. These ferns when you freehand them, Kit. Much better than stencil. Better than I do it myself! Nobody can make the ferns like you. You are very best artist of ferns.”
Kit finished one off with a Hogarthian curve, just the way Ander had taught her in her very first tole painting class right here in the workshop ten years earlier. By the time she’d waitressed Mel through trade school, and then Cooper came along, a ten-week class at Scandinavian Design and Furnishings was about all she had left of her art school aspirations. Every Tuesday evening, she sat at a long table with several elderly ladies in paint smocks, who worked away at their plaques and planters and made kissy faces at baby Coo, who lay kicking in his infant seat.
Kit was instantaneously infatuated with the colors and strokes. She took to it as if she remembered it from a former lifetime, and Ander guided her hand as if he recognized her from that same incarnation. He praised and challenged her. His expectations gave her confidence. The technique came so easily to her that, at the end of the course, Ander and Ruda offered her a job stencilling and detailing custom-built items. It was only minimum wage at first, but Kit was able to quit waitressing and send a beautifully decorated (though probably useless) letter box to everyone on her Christmas list.
She wasn’t alarmed, over the years, when the original infatuation began to spill over onto her mentor, when he started to seem kinder and larger than before, his laughter deeper and his eyes bluer. She came to know and love the fatherly sweetness about him, but there was also something European and arty about his big nose and blunt, blonde ponytail. As he built and stripped and sanded, his body moved with a carpenter’s earthy, useful grace. Kit indulged vague daydreams now and then, but she’d read in a magazine that women sometimes develop crushes on their obstetricians, and she thought maybe this was like that: perhaps her attraction was not to him so much as to the new life he coaxed out of her and the gentleness with which he coaxed it.
At seven-thirty, they highlighted the last cherry sprigs on the cupboard’s front doors and sat back to survey their work.
“If we let it dry overnight, then you can do the polyurethane tomorrow, let that dry over Sunday, and still be able to deliver by Monday afternoon,” Kit said. “But don’t forget to take pictures for the book before you take it out.”
“This is excellent good job, Kit,” Ander told her, leaning against an unfinished chest of drawers. “And very much ... I enjoy so much to work with you.”
“Well, thank you,” Kit smiled over her shoulder and went back to checking for blips, blurs, and dribbles. “I enjoy to work with you, too.”
“Yes. Is very good. Beautiful.”
“Except for ... that. What is that?” Kit bent over to correct a tiny bobble.
“Hmm,” Ander smiled.
“Now—” Kit stood back and nodded. “Is beautiful.”
He squeezed her shoulder and rested his hand against her aching back. He was large and comforting, like Mel, almost as tall and just as heavy, and Kit felt a weary impulse to lean back against the cedar smell of his denim shirt.
“You work so hard, Kit. I wish you should have this for yourself.”
“Sure. I really need something that costs more than my car in which to store my priceless collection of plastic plates and Snoopy cups.”
Ander laughed, but then he dropped his head back against the drawers and sighed.
“This project—all this design of flowers and ferns is making me to miss my country very much these days. I am thinking very much of my friends and music where we go. Ruda and I, we go there with all people in this place. We dance with music, we laugh. I miss this house by the water there. And flowers in this yard. Ruda can grow any flowers in this garden. All colors. And she can be so happy. I am missing this garden of hers where she is so happy, so young. All colors, so beautiful. Perhaps, most of everything, I am missing her.”
Kit leaned forward and touched her brush to shade one cherry a little deeper.
“But,” Ander shrugged, “what man can marry this beautiful girl and take her far away from all places and people she love, he gives her seven babies to care, and then is complaining, ‘What? You can’t be happy in this place? You never have a time to give some little kiss?’ But, ah Gott, I miss that kiss.”
“Me too,” Kit confided, settling back beside him.
“You? With this big man of yours? Why would he never kiss you?”
“I don’t know.” Kit took the brushes from her shirt pocket and ruffled them against her hand. “He still loves me. We still—we love each other, of course. It’s just...” She laid the brushes on the floor and rolled them beneath her palm. “I don’t know. I think there must be something wrong with the way I do it.”
“I tell you how you handle this husband problem, Kit.” Only he said it like “Ket.” “You go to video store, rent one of this blue movie.”
“What?”
“Blue movie,” Ander repeated, trying to enunciate. “This pornography video tape.” He cupped his hand to his mouth and whispered, “Fuck film!”
“Ick,” Kit crinkled her nose. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh ya,” Ander nodded wisely. “You show this movie to your Mel. Then I think he is kissing you all the time.”
“Mel’s not into that kind of stuff.”
“All men love this movie,” he said, secure in his expertise. “They go crazy insane.”
“Mel’s not like that.”
“Mel is same as all men. Men in this country, men in my country, men in ancient times of Greece for paintings, scrolls, carving of stone—all the same. Pigs! Disgusting! They like what animals like. You go to video store, you rent this one movie. Hey, I give you ten dollars if he don’t go crazy insane.”
“Ya, I tink you crazy insane,” Kit mocked and nudged his shoulder.
“Ya,” Ander smiled. “Right now I am thinking that, too.”
He leaned over, and his nose was really big up close. Kit couldn’t help but notice, just before he kissed her full on the mouth. Her watch didn’t have a second hand, but the kiss lasted an awfully wonderfully long time and felt awfully wonderfully good. Better than in her occasional idle daydreams of him. When he finally drew back, he brushed his fingers across her lips and said, “No, Kit. Nothing is wrong with yo
u to kiss. He is very foolish man.” And then he kissed her again, and that kiss flowed into another like rosemaling around a windowsill.
ess
scroll
comma
crescent
fern blossoms fern blossoms
full splaying orchids
Kit was unable to determine where the kiss left off and the lovemaking began, or where she might have, could have, and should have stopped it, but somehow her head was under the hoosier and his huge Gerard Depardieu nose was between her legs, and then his huge Scandinavian spunderflägen was pushing inside her, and his skilled carpenter’s hands were roving everywhere, and he never for a moment stopped kissing her.
Kit knew that if she ignored her conscience now, it would wake up howling and hungry in its crib tonight. She knew that she would have to face and fear both Mel and Ruda for the rest of her life and that what she was doing was just flat wrong and her mother might find out and her pants would smell like sex and she was already keeping one horrible secret too many. She knew if she let the next moment flow over her, she’d have a hard time not thinking about it every time she punched in for work. But then nothing mattered, because sunbursts! squiggletails! cherry blossoms! she poured and pooled, crystallized and sugared off like syrup.
“Aaagh ...ah Gott!” Ander rasped when he felt it inside her. “Ah, Kit... my beautiful Kit...”
His hips moving hers in a Hogarthian curve, his tongue stippling and blending florets across her lips, he praised and prayed to her.
“You have so beautiful body, so beautiful breast. I am wanting so very much to do this for very long time.”
Kit wasn’t sure if that meant he’d been wanting it for a long time previously or wanted it to continue for a long time now, but she was still lucid enough to know that neither was appropriate. And she would have told him this if he hadn’t been kissing her and kissing her and kissing her mouth forever, pausing only to allow the licentious colloquy of the Muppet chef.
“She fell in love with the king of Sweden, he gave her things that she was needin’...”
“Keep singing, Mommy,” Chloe tugged at Kiki’s maternity blouse.