by Rita Ciresi
“If you’re leaving,” Mr. Strauss said, “I’ll walk you to the door.”
“That’s quite all right—”
“I’d be happy to walk you—”
“I don’t need to be walked—”
“You should be careful here after hours. There’s only one security guard.”
Behind him, loud and sudden as a sonic boom, came the flush of a toilet. Mr. Strauss turned and frowned at the men’s room door.
I felt myself blush. “I brought along a bodyguard.”
“I see. Well, in that case, I’ll let you get back to—” He frowned again at my bare knees. “It’s a beautiful day. Enjoy the sunshine.”
He and his root beer disappeared down the hall. I bit my lip and looked to confirm, once again, that I had knock-knees, an offense I considered second only to being bowlegged.
When Dodie came out of the men’s room, he glanced up and down the hallway, tucked in his chin, pushed out his belly, and put his hand to his crotch to dramatically yank at the tab of his fly—all in imitation of my father and his own dad, who were notorious for the conspicuous way they adjusted themselves after they came out of any bathroom, public or private.
“Cut it out,” I whispered. “Somebody might see you—”
“Nobody’s here—”
“My boss just went by.”
Dodie’s eyebrow went up. “Little Miss Currier and Ives?” he whispered.
“No, a bigger gun,” I said. “A guy.”
“Was he the one listening to opera?”
“I’m not sure. But he definitely was drinking a root beer. Do you want a ginger ale for your stomach?”
“Nah. Head for the nearest grocery store. I hear the eggplant calling me. Let’s do parmigiana for dinner.”
We bid good-bye to Gussie and headed back to the Toyota, rolling down the windows to let in whatever moving air there was to be had on such a warm day. After we got on the road, Dodie said, “Now for the real scoop. Dare I ask about the man situation in this drug company of yours?”
After the lecture he once had given me on the glass ceiling, I hardly wanted to admit to Dodie I now moved in pink-collar country, where Tupperware and Sarah Coventry get-togethers lurked on every horizon and where I already had offended my coworkers by politely declining invitations to purchase iced-tea pitchers, five-quart casseroles with hermetically sealed lids, and hideous tricolor jewelry made out of silver, bronze, and gold, as if the designer were undergoing major PMS and couldn’t decide which metal to work with that day. I tried to sound upbeat as I asked Dodie, “Couldn’t you tell—just from the interior-decorating scheme—that everybody in my division keeps extra tampons in their desk drawer?”
“Oh! Didn’t I tell you to check out whether there were any guys in your department?”
“But, Dodie, my boss is pregnant, I’m next in line for her position—”
“Still! You’ve got to learn how to play with the guys. The guys are where the power is at.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said. “Boorman’s totally good-old-boy. There’s only one woman in top management, and she’s built like a Valkyrie.”
“Is she in the loop? One of the boys?”
“She’s definitely not one of the girls,” I said. Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger’s standard uniform—a staunch gray double-breasted blazer and polyester blouse with a floppy rabbit-eared bow—as good as announced her as a lesbian. During my first week at work I had seen her scoping out my skirt in the hall, and what at first I took to be a sexual overture I quickly realized was disapprobation. She clearly thought women should flex, but not show, their muscles. I half-expected her to take out a yardstick and measure my hem, then whack me over the rear with the long end of the stick.
The Doctor certainly was a formidable creature. But the way she withheld emotion reminded me of my own mother, and up close and personal—or at least one on one—she had proved herself to be less of a hard-ass than I first imagined. I had since revised my initial impression of her as a Wagnerian entity incarnate (or at least as a dead ringer for the first female governor of Connecticut—a woman my relatives delighted in criticizing because she looked like a man but sported a first name, Ella, that meant she in Italian). Peggy now looked to me like one of my favorite childhood authors, Beatrix Potter, standing in the doorway of her cottage in a frumpy blouse and tweed skirt that only an English countrywoman would think to wear. Why Peggy reminded me of Potter, I couldn’t quite say—for I was sure she wouldn’t have approved of Potter’s stories in which glum frogs and mischievous kittens and errant bunnies raided the cabbage patch and trashed dollhouses and never even dreamed of apologizing for their irrational behavior, never mind mending their criminal ways.
“You gotta meet this woman sometime,” I told Dodie. “I swear she looks like something out of Ring of the Nibelungs. And she plays golf!”
“Hopefully you won’t cross swords—or clubs—with this Brunhilda of the Bunkers.”
“Actually, she sort of oversees my department.”
“En garde.”
“What for? She’s been nice to me. And I don’t care if she’s a dyke.”
“But, Lise, you’re so girly-girl—”
“I am not—”
“—and this is not looked upon kindly by the lesbian element.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. The lesbian element. Tell me, are they as intolerant as that other group we all know and love, the practicing homosexuals?”
Dodie put his hand over a fake lariat and tried—not too successfully—to imitate the voice of our cowboy president. “Any of those subversives we can lasso here?”
I looked over my shoulder to change lanes. “If they are, they’re mothball material.”
“Any datable straights?”
“I haven’t totally scoped it out yet.”
“This I find hard to believe.”
I sighed. I thought about root beer. “There’s nobody. So far. So forget it. Anything good going on in your life?”
“Yeah. Right. Everybody’s so paranoid. I should join the priesthood.”
“Maybe you should just get gay-married to somebody.”
“Like who?”
I personally would have cast a very strong vote for Dodie’s last boyfriend, George, who was a chef with the James Beard Foundation. George was half-Asian, and I would have killed for that boy’s long glossy hair—kept back in a ponytail that Dodie, who thought it was too fem, kept threatening to cut off with his pizza scissors. Last year Dodie as good as announced he and George had serious intentions when he invited me three weeks in advance for a Friday soiree. George had volunteered to make dinner. Although I was curious, I hadn’t looked forward to the evening. I didn’t much like meeting Dodie’s partners. I knew it was wrong, but I got jealous: Dodie’s relationships with men always seemed better than my relationships with men, and it wasn’t just because his partners were better-looking and better-dressed than mine. It was because they seemed to share with Dodie what I so far had lacked in all my encounters with guys: genuine friendship.
But I found I really liked George. He made us a spectacular dinner and even divulged his secret recipe for the delicious spinach soup (which tasted horrible when I later tried to make it). During the cheese course, however, when the subject came up about Prince Charles’s latest rumored infidelity, I got the feeling that George and Dodie did not share the same definition of the word commitment. That hunch seemed more than confirmed during dessert—an utterly heavenly tiramisù coated with powdered chocolate—when I felt someone’s stockinged foot grazing mine beneath the table and then the light pressure of toes on my lower leg. I was drunk enough to endure it—and then drunk enough to begin enjoying it—before I finally came to my senses and excused myself to use the bathroom, where I threw cold water on my face, only to come out looking—in Dodie’s words—paler than a ghost. “I think I had too much to drink,” I said, and made motions to beat a hasty retreat to the subway, over Dodie’s strenuous objections that I s
tick around awhile: George hadn’t even fired up the Gaggia for cappuccino, never mind there was more than enough marijuana in Dodie’s cookie jar to stuff a bong the size of my mother’s spaghetti pot.
“Really, really,” I said. “I have to go.”
That was when George and Dodie looked at each other and started shaking with laughter.
“Listen, Lise,” Dodie said, “George thought he had my gam under the table.”
I bit my lip. “I shave my legs!”
“So what? We both have jeans on.”
“Sorry, Lisa,” George kept saying. “Really sorry. When you got up to use the bathroom, I found I couldn’t have made a worse mistake.”
Although I also laughed—and eventually stuck around for both the cappuccino and the marijuana—that whole episode sufficiently pissed me off so that I greeted only with sympathetic silence the news Dodie delivered in a hoarse, broken voice two months later, that he and George had parted ways. “I’m really sorry,” I finally told Dodie—and I was. But mixed with disappointment was a selfish relief. There’s nothing worse than having to hear about your best friend’s love affair when you have no information to impart about your own. Besides, Dodie’s relationship with George inspired in me an unhealthy envy. Nobody ever had played footsie with me beneath a table. Nobody ever kissed my hair or affectionately slapped me on the rump with an Irish linen tea towel, as George did to Dodie while I stood watching the milk froth into a stainless-steel pitcher.
“You should have married George,” I told Dodie.
“George should have married me. Damn him. And damn you too, Lise—”
“Me!”
“Just out of curiosity, how long did you let him play footsie with you before you took your leg away?”
I certainly hoped George hadn’t clocked me. “I thought it was your foot, Dodie.”
“Nice try, Lise. But I don’t believe that for a second.”
“Shut up and let me concentrate on driving, will you?”
“When you stop trying to steal my boyfriends. Where are we going anyway? This looks really rural.”
The two-lane country road looked more than rural to me—in fact, it looked like lost. But I didn’t want to admit I’d been so busy talking I had gotten totally turned around. Already, with Dodie, I had the reputation of being a crazy woman driver—due more to my caution than my wildness behind the wheel. Maybe it was just another expression of my need to rebel against authority, but I did have a bad habit of braking at green lights and screeching to dead halts right beneath the yellows, so I either had to back up—which was against the law—or inch forward through the intersection, also an illegal maneuver.
As I went left at the next big intersection, I hoped Dodie wouldn’t notice I was about to head back the same way we came. “You know,” I said, “you’ve never totally ’fessed up what happened between you and George.”
“I told you,” Dodie said, keeping his head turned out the car window. “He wasn’t faithful. And toward the end it got weird.”
“But what’s weird? Everything’s weird.”
“It wasn’t just one thing. It was all sorts of little things.” Dodie continued gazing out the window. “Besides, he wanted me to say unoriginal things to him. In bed.”
I bit my lip, not eager to admit my own verbal repertoire was limited to oh God, that feels so good and the highly redundant fuck me, fuck me, oh God, fuck me, which actually had led one of my partners to reply, “What the hell do you think I’m doing, brushing your teeth?”
“Bed is hardly the place for original dialogue,” I said.
“Yes, but I don’t care to utter lines out of a B porn movie.”
“Such as?”
“Well. My God. Put yourself in my shoes.” Dodie gave me a nervous laugh. “He wanted me to call him a dirty fucking whore.”
“George? Sweet George?”
“Stop spitting on the steering wheel, Lisa—it’s unsanitary.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding.” “How I wish I were.”
We kept on driving. Although I felt curiosity gnawing at me like a cough in my throat, I waited until we finally found our way back to the main road and were parked in the grocery-store lot before I asked, “So did you?”
“What?”
“Call George a dirty fucking whore?”
“I loved him,” Dodie said, and I didn’t know which was stronger: the sadness I felt that I never had experienced such emotion, or my wonder that if this was what constituted love, then why did I still want so desperately to seek it out?
Back at my apartment, Dodie sliced the melanzana—a deep ripe purple, which sported a brown fool’s cap on the end—and I dredged it in salt and egg and flour. Eggplant always smoked in the pan, no matter how low the flame, so I disconnected the battery on the smoke detector, over Dodie’s junior-fire-marshal—like protests that such doings were not safe.
As we took turns standing over the spitting, hissing pan with a pair of silver tongs, Dodie and I bemoaned our boy-craziness, which I insisted we shared because we were born on the same day.
“There’s something to be said for the stars,” Dodie agreed. “Personally, I find it easier to blame my mother.”
“How about your father?”
Dodie nudged my arm. “How about blaming you, Lise?”
I snorted. Dodie always claimed his own love of boys dated back to Halloween of 1966, a dark and thundery afternoon on which Jocko and Carol took turns scaring the pants off us by reading aloud from a thick library volume of ghost tales. The last story they read that day concerned a boy named Reuben (“That’s a Jewish name,” Jocko added, as if this made the story even scarier). For some reason Reuben was frightened of the closet in his room, and he made the mistake of revealing his fear to his older brother, who carried Reuben kicking and yelling to the closet. Reuben got locked in, and after less than a minute, his screaming suddenly ceased. The closet went silent. Reuben had disappeared. “He entered the fifth dimension,” Carol and Jocko cried in unison, as they dragged Dodie and me across the bedroom and locked us both into the closet. Dodie and I had screamed and stomped our feet until we heard Auntie Beppina burst into the bedroom demanding to know what was going on. “Dodie showed Lisa his peenie,” Jocko answered, “so me and Carol locked them in the closet.”
That afternoon Dodie got turned over Auntie Beppina’s knee and spanked with the very volume of ghost tales that had inspired the whole episode. The spanking obviously had left a deep impression. “That’s when I knew,” Dodie told me, as he pulled another slice of eggplant out of the popping oil. “I have you to thank, Lise. That’s when I thought to myself, ‘Why would I ever want to show my penis to Lisa, or any other girl, for that matter?’ ”
I began to layer the fried eggplant slices with sauce and slices of mozzarella in a white Corning casserole dish. I told Dodie, “And that’s when I started to sense—after my mother told me, Don’t you ever, ever let a boy show you his thing!—that one of my biggest concerns in life was going to be convincing boys to show me.”
But by junior high school I had gathered plenty of evidence that most boys didn’t need convincing. Boys of the male species (as Dodie called heterosexual adolescents) took whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it, and the rest of the world could spin out of orbit for all they cared. Boys will be boys! was one of the few American idioms our parents memorized correctly and obviously valued—for our boy cousins (with the exception of Dodie) ran wild, smoking and drinking and knocking girls up before they settled down to their jobs with Midas Muffler or the Southern New England Telephone Company. And girls—true girls—were like my sister, Carol, who liked to bake and tat and knit and buy domestic items for the Lane cedar hope chests we each were given when we turned sixteen. I never put anything in mine. When Mama made a deposit of half a dozen steak knives purchased with Betty Crocker coupons or a place setting of willowware dishes that came free with fifty dollars’ worth of groceries, I gave mine up to Carol, who gladly a
ccepted double the trousseau, as if she anticipated marrying twins.
Later I regretted having done that—not because I wanted to recover the cheap contents of that hope chest, but because my image of Carol having two husbands had fueled my first sexual fantasy, which I’d never been able to shake. The scenario was quite simple: Two clonelike men took me, one at a time. After the first twin had done a good number on me that brought me halfway to the top, I snapped my fingers and the second stepped up to finish the trick. I was sixteen when I first pictured this, and almost ten years later I found myself still clutching upon the image when the going got rough and I needed some extra help to round the corner into climax.
Sometimes I was ashamed of myself for thinking of such things—and wondered, did other women? But who in the world could I ask—my mother? Carol? Karen? Dr. Schoenbarger? And how would I phrase such a question? Excuse me, but do you gals have these sick-turkey kind of fantasies too? No point in pursuing this line of inquiry when I already knew what sad tale it told: that my body had become separate from my heart, that the way I wanted men in my fantasies—as perpetually firm, pulsing pistons whose only function was to satisfy my desire—lacked feeling and romance and had little to do with what the Bible called the greatest of human emotions, love.
Or was that charity?
“Dodie,” I said. “Sometimes I worry about myself. I have these strange fantasies—”
“Alt!” Dodie said. “Stop right there, please.”
“But why do I think such weird things?”