“You’ve got your head in the sand, Annette. So you can’t see nothing.”
Yessiree…not a cloud in the sky.
Such a heavy letter, Annette mused, weighing it in her hand. Heavy with sentiment and regret, with I’m-sorries and I-love-you’s. Wouldn’t it have been nice to not have to write such things, if “I love you” didn’t always have to be followed by a but? How much lighter a love letter that would be, both to write and to read. Why, it would fit on a postcard!
Was this sufficient postage? she asked herself, turning it over and over in her hand. She rifled through the desk drawer for another first class stamp. There. Two first class stamps ought to do the job just fine. Three then, for safe measure. But what time is it? Hadn’t she missed the mailman already? Didn’t he usually come by now?
It was probably too late to mail it from here, she decided. She tucked it into her luggage. She’ll send it via airmail from Rome tomorrow. That’ll be more impressive. That’ll show Joan she’s serious this time. That’ll show her just who’s got their head in the sand. That’ll show her who’s—
Who’s that? she wondered, startled to see a brand new cherry red sedan pull onto the front lawn like the driver owned the place. She went to the other window to get a better view. Now who would she know in a cherry red sedan? Boom, boom, boom, a bass speaker was blasting from inside it. The whole vehicle seemed to be vibrating with music. Boom, boom, boom…who in the world would have the audacity to park on her front lawn?
Boom, boom, boom…who?
The music stopped. She saw the sunroof slide shut and the driver get out.
Annette shook her head in disbelief. Joan Majors had bought herself a new car. Probably to match some new pair of shoes. She watched as she swaggered up the path, humming to herself and playing air guitar, looking almost edible in a tight, pink wife-beater, cut just above the navel, painted-on jeans that clung low around her hips. She reached the porch and clicked her heels twice, smiling generously, aware that she was being watched. “Honey, I’m home,” she called playfully.
Open-toed sandals. Strapless. Lipstick to go with the car, toenails to go with the shirt. And she had the house key dangling from a shiny gold chain around her neck. Annette stood quietly on the other side of the door.
“Ah-ne-ette. Oh, Ah-ne-ette.”
The neighbor was getting his money’s worth today.
“Annette…?”
“I’m here, Joan.”
“Ah,” Joan murmured, pulling the necklace over her head and fixing her hair. “What a coincidence, my love. Me, too.”
Annette heard a key entering a lock. She put her hand on the knob. And opened the door.
Joan
Girl trouble. All she ever had, it seemed, was girl trouble.
Joan Majors was flying down the interstate this morning in a brand new sedan, deafening herself on rhythm and blues and counting the mile markers as she zipped by them. It was a beautiful day for a drive, not a cloud in the sky, but she didn’t take any notice of that.
“Annette,” she barked into her headset, hoping that maybe this time the woman would actually answer the…but the call went straight through to voice mail again. “Oh, crap, crap, crap!”
“I’m sick of your crap,” had been Annette’s final words last weekend, spoken definitively through the slit in the window of a departing taxicab. Joan had been left standing on the curb in her bathrobe and bunny slippers, pleading her losing case to the darkened buildings across the street, to the cracks in the sidewalk, to the winos eavesdropping in the alleyway. She hadn’t seen or heard from Annette since then. Not even a letter.
“Crapola,” she muttered, cranking up the volume on the radio another notch and giving the car more gas. “Crapola.”
She had bought it on an impulse, this fast machine.
“Red cars get all the tickets,” her sister had warned her in the showroom.
Joan dismissed this bit of trivia. Red was, after all, Annette Martineau’s favorite color. A brand-new red car was bound to make the woman sit up, she had boasted, make her drool and pant over her again.
Annette Martineau. Jill Majors had already figured as much. “Are you in love with this one or what? Because if you’re not, you should stop messing with her head.”
“Of course I’m in love with her. What do you mean messing?”
Jill rolled her eyes. Her sister knew very well what she meant. “You know what I mean, Joanie.”
“No, I do not, so why don’t you just tell me?”
“Ugh—then who were you with the other night at Gino’s? You’re in love with her, too, I suppose? And what’s her favorite color, Joanie? Maybe the guy’ll cut you a deal here—two for the price of one.”
Joan had scowled in response to this and thought it better to say nothing. Jill was the only woman left on the planet she didn’t outright lie to.
Boy-oh-boy, it would have been swell to add Annette’s name to that list, but this wasn’t going to happen any time soon, Joan could tell. Annette was just too damn elusive, too hard to get under her thumb. In the end, she was like all the rest of them, just asking for it. Why do all my girlfriends get so emotionally remote on me?
“I say let her go and save yourself some money in the process,” Jill advised.
“Why should I do that? She knows I date. Besides, I can’t. Don’t want to.”
“She knows you date? How could she know that, Joanie? You’re telling her?”
“I—” the salesman was pacing in anticipation. She flashed him a phony smile. “I do,” Joan said, under her breath “I tell her.”
“Well, that’s just cruel then and you’re a real shit. No wonder she won’t talk to you.”
Joan had no defense to this either. “Think she’ll dig these wheels or not?” she asked.
“Forget about it, I’m telling you. What do you want from her anyway? Her blood?”
“Oh, baloney, her blood. I’d just like to see her be more…more responsive to me, that’s all. She’s so aloof about every—”
“At your beck and call, you mean?”
At her beck and call—now wouldn’t that be nice, Joan thought, imagining Annette dropping everything at the snap of her fingers.
And? What’s so wrong with that anyway?
Jill shook her head. Her sister’s smile was worth a thousand words. “Oh, Joanie, Joanie, Joanie,” she murmured.
“Oh, Joanie, Joanie what?”
“It ain’t right and you know it.”
Joan kicked at a tire. “And what’s so wrong with it?”
What’s so wrong with it? Jill shrugged. Nothing, perhaps, but if that’s what Joanie was after, then she was obviously going about it all wrong. And the car now. The car! That was such a boy thing. So typically misguided. She was never going to win Annette back with a car, red or otherwise. No material girl, that one. Jill felt sorry for the both of them. Such an obvious mismatch. And her sister was acting like a dog with a bone about it. Pitiful is what it was. The whole damned thing was just plain pitiful. “Well, you better ease up on her then. She’s probably always been the way she is and nothing’s going to change her now. None of your stupid stunts, that’s for sure.”
Stupid—Joan snorted.
The salesman lifted his head and smiled agreeably in their direction, a hundred percent optimistic. “How’s it going, ladies?” he called out to them. “Make any decisions yet?”
“Yeah, I want it,” Joan said.
“No, she hasn’t decided yet—besides, aloof is probably what happened to her marriage in the first place. You should talk to her hubby before you part with any cold, hard cash. There’s an interesting story there, I’ll betcha.”
Mr. Martineau was not interesting. He was a piece of…of history. Joan had no desire to ever talk to him. “Ex-hubby, if you don’t mind. You don’t like this car, Jill—why not?”
“Ex. You know what I’m saying.” The car was over the top, a regular chick-mobile. Jill shook the vision of Joan, Boy Drive
r, from her head and chuckled. “What’s your thing for that woman anyway? I thought you only dug girls?”
“Good god, I don’t know,” Joan replied, dragging her fingers longingly across the spotless chrome. “I’m in love with her, that’s all. She’s sooooooo sexy, Jill. She pulls my chain.”
“In love with her—yah. More like obsessed and compelled, I’d say.”
“Oh, you think so, huh? And what’s the difference, know-it-all?”
Well, there was a huge and very healthy difference, but the subject was old and, once again, Jill was getting nowhere with it. Mr. Salesman, she could see from the corner of her eye, had stepped out of his neutral zone and was looming nearer and nearer to them, getting antsy to close the deal, and her sister had, after all, only brought her along for a test drive and a second opinion. As if she ever listened to her anyway. “Ma’s right. You’re an absolute freak,” she finally answered, “and I don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about—buy it and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Well, maybe it was so that she didn’t have a clue, but then what is this, Joan wanted to know, this sense of urgency she had this morning, driving eighty miles an hour into the wilderness because she hadn’t heard from Annette in a whole week? Wasn’t this love, this sickening panic? These awful butterflies? A truck in the opposite lane flashed its headlights at her. Slow down, slow down, it meant. She took her foot off the gas pedal. Of course it was love. What the hell else could it be?
Love was a likely diagnosis for what Joan was experiencing, but it wasn’t supposed to have gotten so skewed like this. At least not ever again.
She had taken a year off from dating to recover from her surgery, to ground herself, she had explained to her friends and relations. In that time she had examined her entire brief existence on the planet, specifically searching for the reason why, when she had awoken on her presumed deathbed that terrible day, there had been no lover beside it waiting and praying for her resurrection. It was quite a reality check for her that there wasn’t a woman in waiting because Joan had presumed, naturally, that there would be plenty.
Forty and facing death—Christ—and facing it alone without a partner! It was never going to be the case again, not if she could help it. And there would never be another woman not speaking to her, either. That’s what she had resolved then, stretched out on her gurney, the anesthesia wearing off, the pain setting in. That’s what death, or her brush with it, or simply the idea of it, did for Joan Majors.
Or so she’d claimed.
And too bad life’s not as simple as that.
Too bad life’s so goddamned complicated, she had just complained to her sister last night, digging up the subject once again of the disappearing Annette.
“Sure, Joanie, but you got to start thinking about what you’re doing to yourself here,” was Jill’s reply. “Like maybe it’s not worth all the aggravation. You know?”
“What am I doing to myself?” Joan asked, defensively.
“I’m talking about your health, Joanie. You have to think of your health now.”
“Annette’s bad for my health?”
Jill frowned. Joanie was playing dumb with her again, forcing her to say more than she wanted to. “I’m wondering whatever happened to that ‘joy and harmony’ thing you were talking about after your…is this joy and harmony, I’d like to know, constantly breaking up and then trying to make up with Annette? Does that make you happy?”
No, but being a whole week without the woman was pure hell. It was a no win situation, Joan conceded.
Yet another no win.
Yet another mile marker went by the window in a blur and she was now more than a hundred miles from home and less than a hundred from the place where she desperately wanted to be. She had no idea how she would be greeted once she got there, if, indeed, she would be greeted at all. She wished Annette would just break down and answer the stupid telephone. It would be helpful to know in advance.
“It isn’t healthy, Joanie,” her sister’s words echoed in her head. “You’ve got to watch out for your health now.”
Yeah, her health—she hit the Seek button on the radio, leaving her selection to chance.
“Doubt is unpleasant,” her god, Voltaire, had once opined, “but certainty is absurd.”
Amen.
The radio was playing an old familiar song…lonely days…and she started to whistle along with it…lonely nights…as both doubt and certainty squabbled in the background…where would I be without my woman?
Doubt and certainty, just like her sister, were always telling Joan things she didn’t like to hear, things she didn’t want to know about.
Lonely days…
“You’re going to make a fool of yourself,” doubt began to nag.
Lonely nights…
“Are we there yet?” chimed his companion.
She scoffed and changed the station.
Certainty was absurd, though. Any survivor would know that. She pushed down hard on the accelerator and the car lurched forward. “Annette,” she called into her cell phone again. (Dialing Annette.) She held her breath and crossed her toes. (Voice mail again. Blah, blah, blah and won’t you please leave a message.) She left a message for her this time, “Why aren’t you answering the phone?”
Why wasn’t she answering the phone?
Doubt and certainty and cancer and Voltaire. Daunting stuff, and probably not too good for her health either, but it was the suspense Joan feared she wouldn’t survive.
-----
“Survive” and “survivor” are pretty potent words, but they suffer from overuse today. Now they’ve been reduced to mere sound bytes. Yet there still remain in our lexicon some equally powerful words and phrases that aren’t spoken often enough. “You’re in remission,” is most assuredly one of them.
“You’re in remission,” Joan’s doctors had informed her, and once she’d heard those three words uttered, she found herself contemplating living again. There was more to life, she suddenly realized, in the midst of all that euphoria, so much more to being alive than merely casting a shadow.
Remission made it possible for her then to leave the catacomb of her apartment and, if only for a few hours at a time in the beginning, to walk gingerly into the light once more. Her friends and family were relieved to see her emerge alive and kicking. Pale and a little puffy-eyed, perhaps, and a trifle more timid than they had known her to be before, but still, there she was, alive and kicking nonetheless. They hadn’t been so sure she would make it.
And then meeting a woman named Annette helped to speed things along considerably.
Joan had first spied Annette Martineau at an art opening close to the apartment. The gallery director happened to be a friend of Joan’s and Joan was providing the music that afternoon, strumming away serenely in the corner. A blue-eyed out-of-towner had wandered in because she thought she had heard music playing and was curious to see if it was live. Joan took one look at her and it was love at first sight, “love” being another one of those powerful words and phrases.
“I’ve never gone out with anyone my own age,” she recalled telling her later that evening.
Ms. Martineau hadn’t seemed the slightest bit surprised by that revelation. Or impressed. She was more inclined to swoon over Joan’s six-string guitar playing and her funky, cool flamenco.
Dexterous Joan, at this moment driving with one hand on the steering wheel, the other tapping away madly on her cell phone. “You have voice mail,” was all she could think to text. Not her cleverest. (Send: Annette.)
I’ve never gone out with anyone my own age. What a terrible pickup line! Joan grinned now with embarrassment at the recollection and took her foot off the gas. Seventy miles per hour in a cherry red sedan. She was really pushing it.
It was true, though. Before Annette, all of the others had been at least ten years younger than Joan. Girls more than women, she had to admit, after her year of truly brutal introspection and soul searching, after s
leeping with Annette. What on earth could she have been thinking, she had mused then with chagrin, dating toddlers? What could twenty-somethings with all their glorious perfection possibly have in common with her anyway? How could they even begin to comprehend at such a blissful age the scope of fate’s imperfect plans for them? The possibility of waking up one day with a bruise or a scratch that simply won’t heal?
And where were those perfect young ladies when she had needed them the most anyhow? Nowhere to be found, in the end. Youth, Joan had learned the hard way, could be just as callous as she was, if not more so. Not one of her girls had even bothered to send her a get-well card, not one of them even on speaking terms with her anymore.
Not one.
Girls, girls, girls, and yet here she was again, messing around with them. And now she had Annette’s cold shoulder to contend with because of it. She simply could not accept that this was happening to her once more. That, despite her ordeal, those trials and tribulations, nothing had radically changed for her but her body.
“Annette,” she shouted into the headset again. It dialed Annette’s number and then…? Same old thing: leave a message.
Annette was not like the other ones, her sister had frequently cautioned. “And not for nothing, Joanie, but if some guy treated me the way you treat her, I’d never talk to the dickhead again. There’s plenty of other fish in the ocean.”
Annette was different all right. Joan didn’t need her sister to tell her that. “Yeah,” she had muttered.
“Don’t yeah me, Joanie. You’re being heartless and mean to her and she’s never going to respond to that kind of crap, not the way you want her to. Guaranteed.”
Crap.
Joan was careening toward the possibility that a door would be slammed in her face this morning. She was fully prepared for that outcome. Or that the door wouldn’t open for her at all. That was just as likely.
Another vehicle flashed its lights at her and Joan glanced at the speedometer. Seventy-five miles per hour! She tapped the brakes and threw her hands-free onto the passenger seat. Maybe once she reached her destination she could convince Annette to go for a ride with her, go parking. Annette had a weakness for fast cars and back seats.
Girl Trouble: Five Shorts Page 3