Girl Trouble: Five Shorts

by Francine Saint Marie

  “She didn’t say—that’s not what she—it was a mistake. You don’t make mistakes?”

  Dragons and butterflies and freaks that can’t or won’t go home. Joan couldn’t recall any of her own mistakes at the moment, but then she was somewhat preoccupied. “If she’s so sorry then why hasn’t she apologized to me?”

  Why should a mother apologize for anything? Jill wanted to ask her. It didn’t make any sense. Does a child say she’s sorry when she soils her diaper for the hundredth time? Does she beg forgiveness when she’s wet the bed? “Joanie…it just ain’t healthy to hold a grudge like this. Come home for Sunday dinner. If you won’t do it for Ma, then do it for me. Do it for your favorite sister.”

  “You’re my only sister, you dope.”

  “Whatever.”

  Joan shook her head no.

  A small white poodle meandered past them, teary-eyed and out of breath, grinning with a bright orange rubber bone in its mouth, its ping pong ball of a tail bobbing behind it like a toy on a stick. It was a wacky looking creature, Joan thought, with all those ribbons and bows, all that saliva. She fought the urge to kick it.

  “Do it for me, Joanie. Please?”

  “No.”

  The park was filling up this afternoon, Jill suddenly realized. People and their pets and their children. Everyone having a good time but Joanie, per usual. She’d visit the balloon man before she goes. Get Tommy one of those great big shiny hearts. “It wasn’t you so much anyway,” she fibbed, intent on resolving this dispute once and for all. “It was that girl you brought home with you. What was her name again?”

  “Tanya.”

  Ah, Tanya. That was her name. The one with black and blue hair and a pierced tongue. Yuck. Mama Majors had finally had it with Joanie’s fashion sense and bad attitude, the tattoos on her arms, her taste in girls. Especially girls with blue hair and pierced tongues. Black fingernails!

  “Her name was Tanya,” Joan repeated, defensively. “She was just a little hung-over that day. It was no big deal.”

  That she was. No comment.

  A red convertible zoomed by blasting its stereo. Joan winced. “She was my girlfriend, Jill. Emphasis here on was.”

  “Yes, yes. I remember it now. Tanya.”

  Probably Mom remembered her name, too, though she no longer mentioned the incident. Jill figured “girlfriend” was definitely stretching things a bit. She was some girl Joanie hardly knew. That had been obvious to everyone and especially irksome to Mom. Tanya was a girl Joanie had picked up at a bar somewhere. Yet another of her sleazy one-night-stands. “Things over between you and Annette?” Jill asked, dropping it. “Is that what happened?”

  Joan didn’t know what to say to that. “Not quite,” was her best answer. She still had Annette’s key; she flashed this proof to her sister, this tiny trophy she always hung around her neck, which could become, she knew, in only the blink of an eye and at a lover’s whim, merely a memento. “Nah, it ain’t over yet,” she said, grimly. “Ain’t over yet.”

  That was just a technicality, Jill suspected. She fixed her eyes on that little white poodle weaving in and out of the crowd with his bone and searched in her mind for something less volatile to talk about.

  Joanie was so belligerent today with those platform boots and camouflage pants, that big, scruffy head of hair. She looked like a resistance fighter from some third world country, Jill decided, though what she was resisting wasn’t exactly clear. Cancer? Mom? Annette?

  “Watch that dog over there, Jill. What a freakin’ idiot. Watch him.”

  She was. He was pretty cute with his purple ribbons hanging undone in his face and a string of drool dripping from his chin, that silly tail.

  “Percy!” someone called out. “Come, Percy. You get over here right now!”

  The dog looked over his shoulder at his owner, dropped his plastic bone and began to head in the opposite direction.

  “Percy, I said come!”

  “Percy,” Joan muttered with a scoff. “What a stupid name. No wonder he’s running away.”

  Percy glanced at her and came to a stop by their bench.

  “Percival, you get over here right now!” his owner called again.

  “Percival…that’s your name?” Joan asked.

  He gave her a toothy grin and wagged his tail.

  “That’s even dumber sounding,” Joan told him. “You got a stupid name, Percy,” she whispered. “Wipe your face.”

  He pricked up his ears at this and his tail stood still.

  “He’s adorable,” Jill said. “You’re adorable, Percival. But I don’t have anything to give you.”

  “Percy!”

  “He’s a slob, Jill. You’re a slob, Percy, and a beggar. Get out of here.”

  “PERCY!”

  The dog hesitated for a moment and then darted toward the sidewalk.

  “Hey there ladies, did you happen to see a little white—”

  “That way,” Joan said, pointing with her thumb. “He went thatta-way.”

  “Oh, shit,” the man said. “Percy! PERCY!”

  “Uh-oh, isn’t that your new car over there?” Jill asked.

  The dog was circling a brand-new, cherry red, fully equipped, luxury sedan, sniffing at the whitewall tires. He looked toward their bench as he picked up his leg.

  “PERCY!”

  “Uh-oh, Joanie. That’s your car, isn’t it?”

  Yeah, it is.

  Love, Annette

  Dear Joan,

  I have tried to write you this letter a hundred times without success, so I guess that blows your whole theory about me. For the record then, this is my very first genuine “Dear John” letter and you’ll have to forgive me if it’s not up to snuff with the other ones you’ve either received or written, or if it fails to live up to your expectations.

  I’m going to be candid with you because I don’t know how else to be, especially about something like this, and I want to put everything in a clear and concise way that I can be sure you’ll understand and appreciate.

  So here goes nothing:

  I don’t want to see you anymore or hear from you ever again.

  Shit, another Dear Joan letter. “Annette!” Joan called out, rapping her knuckles hard against Annette’s front door and swearing under her breath. “Annette…are you in there?”

  I am very angry and very hurt by your exploits, as you well know, and it makes it worse always having to hear about them from you. This bears repeating: I hate having to hear about your girls all the time. Particularly during sex, which so often seems to be the case.

  You are what you are, Joan, a terrible braggart and an awful cheat, and I’m sick of it. By your very own confessions, you’ve been these things your entire adult life, so it’s safe to assume by now that you will be them forever. The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter what you said you wanted to become after your life-altering illness and, quite frankly, I just don’t buy any of it anymore.

  I do feel sorry for you, of course, but more sorry for myself because I had a husband who behaved almost exactly like you do and I guess I just expected better from a woman. It’s been a real eye-opening experience for me, though, (thanks) and I suppose that the similarity in my choices of lovers does probably speak volumes about me. I am studying the implications of it in the hopes of turning over a brand new leaf someday.

  Joan went back to her car to search for Annette’s house key. Usually she wore the key on a gold chain that she hung proudly around her neck, but they’d argued one too many times now and she was no longer inclined to display such a sentiment.

  She retrieved the necklace from her glove compartment and stomped back to the porch with it.

  In the meantime, I’ve taken the trouble to change all my locks. That means you can keep the stupid key you wear around your neck like a trophy, or you can just add it to your collection, or even just throw it away if you want. It’s up to you. Whichever. That was a very difficult thing for me to imagine having to do anyway.
Breaking down and demanding my key back from you and to have you actually return it would have been quite painful. Now I won’t have—

  Three weeks and absolutely no word whatsoever from Annette. Joan found this letter addressed to her and tacked to the woman’s front door, hanging there for all the world to read, if they’d wanted to. She slipped her key into Annette’s lock to test it.

  Yup. She wasn’t bluffing. The key wouldn’t turn the lock anymore. Wouldn’t budge the door a blessed inch.

  Three weeks ago, while they were in bed, Joan and Annette had quarreled. Their argument this time, as with all the other times before, had been about some girl. Some girl that Joan had boasted about all that evening over dinner. A girl she subsequently revealed she had slept with.

  This girl was no big deal to Joan, just some “chick” she’d met at one of her music gigs. The whole thing was just an innocent kiss or two for starters, she’d claimed. Then, after one harmless dinner date, it had become an innocent kiss or two and a little light petting. Before poor Joan knew what was happening to her, it had become lots and lots of harmless dinner dates, with lots and lots of not-so-innocent kissing and lots and lots of heavy-duty petting.

  She shouldn’t even have mentioned it.

  I’m sure it’s no big deal to you. (You always like to use that expression so I couldn’t resist using it, too.) I want you to know that I don’t feel as upset as I expected I would and, as so many days have gone by since we last saw each other, without hearing anything from you or receiving an apology, then I gathered you weren’t too upset about the situation either.

  I felt, therefore, that it was up to me to take the initiative and help us out of our dilemma, if I could. So that is what I intend to—

  Joan had stubbornly refused to go running after Annette this time. She felt she was forever running after the woman, forever apologizing to her for something. So now, Annette had up and disappeared on her. There were no lights on in her house that Joan could tell, no car in the driveway, no sign of her at all, but this long, drawn out farewell and nice-to-know-ya.

  Joan scoured it for a clue as to where she might have gone, but there didn’t appear to be any forwarding address in it.

  You are what you are, Joan, a terrible braggart and an awful cheat, and I’m sick of—

  Crap.

  She’d probably fled the country by now, like she had so frequently threatened to do.

  –an awful cheat, and I’m sick of it.

  Maybe this time, though, it wasn’t just an empty threat, Joan mused. Maybe, judging from the length of this letter, it was finally for real.

  “Annette…? If you’re in there, can we chat? I’d like to talk to you about this…this…about what happened.”

  She cocked her head and listened, but there was no sound at all coming from inside the house.

  In fact, there was, overall, a distinctly deserted quality about the place today. Joan felt foolish standing there on the porch conversing with a door knob, perhaps even being spied on as she did it by the nosy neighbor across the road.

  She brought the letter to her nose and sniffed it for a hint of the author’s perfume but, if there had been any on it, there was no such scent left anymore. Only the faint odor of cheap paper and the ink of a ball-point pen remained. The paper, itself, seemed a little more yellow than it should, more brittle. She wondered how long it had hung here waiting for her.

  Three weeks?

  In a way, I’m glad it’s finally all over between us because I simply couldn’t handle anymore romantic disappointments and setbacks, anymore of your bullshit. It seems clear to me now, in retrospect, that what happened with us was all completely predictable and that our relationship, if you can excuse me for being so naïve as to call it that, was clearly doomed from the very beginning. So I’m happy that—

  Oh, now she’s glad and she’s happy, is she? Joan frowned. What an idiot.

  There was a window in the bathroom on the first floor that had a faulty latch on it, she suddenly remembered. She considered the possibility of prying that window open and sneaking inside to take a look around the place, but then she quickly dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Platform shoes and tight pants and all that.

  This was, indeed, a big, fat wasted trip, she realized. She should have just listened to her sister and stayed home today, spared herself this embarrassment. She folded her arms across her chest in frustration and glanced at her wristwatch.

  It was late afternoon already. Drizzling, but the air was still hot and humid. Above her, above the rain clouds, Joan could hear the engines of a jet plane whining and, even closer yet, there were birds complaining about her trespassing, perched noisily in the treetop overhead.

  She was an intruder here, they squawked. She was the uninvited. The disinvited. Whichever.

  She picked up a stone from the porch flower box and threw it at the flock of them and they scattered, taking their raucous objections elsewhere.

  Joan was a city girl and it was no secret that she hated the country. She only came here because Annette was here. This is where Annette would hideout most of the time. That is, if she wasn’t on a train or on a plane or in a taxi.

  –what happened with us was all completely predictable and that our relationship, if you can excuse me for being so naïve as to call it that, was clearly doomed from the very beginning. So I’m happy that it’s over at last, Joan. That may seem rather humorous to you, but it’s the truth—

  Actually it didn’t seem funny at all to Joan Majors and there wasn’t even the trace of a smile on her lips.

  “That’s it, Joanie. You’re history,” Jill had warned her yesterday. “A month without so much as a text message from her? You’re definitely history, babe.”

  Joan tried to reach her sister on the cell phone now, but, per usual, there was no signal to be found in this neck of the woods.

  What was there to tell Jill, anyway? That she was right again? Always right about Joan and Annette?

  “You’re definitely history, babe.”

  Joan definitely felt like a piece of history.

  She had, she supposed, set out this morning to prove her sister all wrong about that, but her sister was infallible, apparently, and she’d been warning her that this was going to happen for eons.

  “What do you expect, Joanie? She’s going to put up with that shit forever? Who would? Would, you? You wouldn’t tolerate it for one minute.”

  Yeah. Probably not.

  “So Annette is the embodiment of all that is good in the world and I’m just all that is evil, you’re implying?”

  “Joanie…I’m not saying any such thing. It’s just a mismatch, that’s all. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you from the very beginning.”

  That’s true. Her sister was constantly insisting they were a mismatch. What constitutes a mismatch, though? Him-and-her is a mismatch, as far as Joan was concerned. How could two women, even if they didn’t see eye to eye all the time, or ever, be considered a mismatch?

  She just didn’t get it.

  –I felt, therefore, that it was up to me to take the initiative and help us out of our dilemma, if I cou—

  “Annette, I know…I mean, I think you’re in there,” Joan called, looking furtively over her shoulder at the quiet house across the way, certain that the neighbor was spying on her and resisting the urge to give him the finger. “You’ve got to be in there, Annette. Come on out and I’ll take you to dinner some place nice and…and we can talk about this. Anywhere you want to go, Annette.”

  Some place nice out here might be stretching it, Joan thought. Where could she find some place nice in the sticks? “I’ll even take you to Burger King, if you like,” she joked, jesting, she knew, in vain.

  Silence greeted the invitation.

  Burger King—what a whopper of a yuck anyway. But dinner didn’t sound like a bad idea. Joan hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast. Too anxious and jittery to stop somewhere along the way and afraid of what she might find if
she delayed for even one more minute.

  So I’m happy that it’s over at last, Joan. That may seem rather humorous to you, but it’s the truth and I’m not sorry in the least bit to have said it. This will leave you free, of course, to eat with and sleep with and screw to your heart’s content all the girls you can possibly get your greedy little hands on, and to do so without the slightest pang of guilt about my feelings, if guilt’s a sensation you’re actually capable of experiencing.

  As for myself, I think I’m going to take it easy now, take some time off from both women and men, in order to—

  Guilt, women and men.

  Dang.

  “ANNETTE…?” Joan yelled again. She had traveled a long way and she was not ready to abandon the ship here just yet. “Listen, honey, I brought you a few little presents. Some yummy surprises…come on out and get them.”

  This was not a lie or a fib. Joan had come expecting to find some resistance and she had armed herself with an array of enticements she’d hoped to alleviate the hostilities with. Candy, wine, flowers, bedroom toys…you name it. All stashed away in that cherry red sedan that was parked haphazardly over there in the driveway.

  This morning, at dawn, Joan had loaded into the trunk of that car, gifts she had purchased last night for at least a year’s worth of forgotten special occasions, not to mention Annette’s birthday two months ago.

  These, her many sins of omission and commission, Joan had finally confessed to her sister yesterday, but it was the matter of the forgotten birthday that Jill found most appalling.

  “You what?” she had exclaimed in horror. “Her birthday, too? How could you forget Annette’s birthday?” Jill demanded. “A woman’s birthday, Joanie? That was really, really dumb.”

  Yes, it was.

  “And so thoughtless, too, while I’m at it.”

  Yes it was.

  “And so…so fucking unromantic!”

  “Yes—all right, already,” Joan said.

  “I mean, God, if Tommy ever forgot my birthday,” Jill continued to berate, “that would be grounds for murder. I’d lie in wait for him, if he ever forgot my birthday.”