by Rita Ciresi
“I’m very sorry,” I said.
“No, you’re very impatient. Take your time.”
“I am taking it,” I said. “That’s the problem. I can’t remember which one I locked, if either—”
“You should always lock your doors.”
“Were you on the safety patrol in elementary school?”
“My mother wouldn’t let me. She thought it was dangerous to stand out in the street.”
“Oh,” I said. “So did mine. Did she also make you hang up the phone when you heard thunder?”
Strauss reached around me and met my fingers on the doorknob. “May I kiss you?” he asked.
A non sequitur had never sounded so good. “Yes, you may.”
Strauss gently pulled me toward him, just long enough so I got a whiff of soap on his neck and felt against my blouse the nap of wool on his jacket. The kiss was soft—just a brush of his rough cheek against my hair.
“Good night,” he said, and left in such haste I wondered if he didn’t think I was a Roman candle or some other explosive device marked LIGHT FUSE AND GET AWAY.
Chapter Six
That’s the Way I Like It
In the morning—at an hour that bordered on the afternoon—I had to pop myself out of groggyland with two cups of Cuban coffee before I was ready to make my run for the Times and a cheese-filled Danish dribbled with frosting. On my way out the door, I tripped and skidded on something. “Fanculo,” I said again—this was getting to be a reflex—before I looked down at a long white box parked on the mat. I carried it back inside and set it down on my kitchen counter. For the second time since turning twenty-five, I had received an unexpected gift. Yet this package looked more promising than the coffin that held Security Man. The vanilla-colored bow neatly tied around the box reminded me of the elaborate taffeta ribbons that topped my childhood Easter baskets, and the green cellophane inside practically led me to expect a flock of marshmallow chicks clucking over a nest of solid chocolate eggs. But I had seen enough forties movies to know what the box really contained. Inside were a dozen yellow roses and a small white envelope.
The card read only Ibby.
“Wow,” I said. No man had ever sent me flowers before. Were they an apology for not sticking around the previous night, an expression of regret for what he probably saw as the sheer brazenness of asking me out, or counsel to the receiver that he believed in the traditional interpretation of the color yellow: patience?
What did the message matter? The frog had come a courtin’.
The how-to-care-for-your-flowers instruction card, tucked beneath a cushion of baby’s breath, told me to clip the stems first. With the ragged kitchen shears I usually reserved to cut pizza, I hacked two inches off the stems. The hard green rods went flying all over the floor, and I pricked myself on a thorn. Then I dumped the rest of the Minute Maid left in the refrigerator (the juice was beginning to turn anyway) and broke open the top of the carton. I filled it with water and dumped in the packet of white preservative powder before I stuffed in the roses and the baby’s breath.
A geisha girl or a Southern belle, skilled in the art of flower arrangement, would have howled at the mess I made. Despite their dubious container, the flowers still looked velvety-smooth and perfectly formed, and when I tentatively lowered my nose toward them (afraid of more thorns), I caught a subtle whiff of what my apartment was going to smell like in three or four hours. I counted the blooms, all the way up to twelve in Italian, pausing for a moment on the last number: dodici.
I collected my purse and keys, reluctant to leave the flowers on their own, as if they might rise and dance a waltz to Tchaikovsky in my absence. Then I remembered: Last night I assured Strauss I had manners. Now came my chance to prove it.
The Ossining phone book—one-tenth the size of the Brooklyn White Pages—awaited me by the kitchen extension. Strauss, Eben lived somewhere called Crickle Wood Road. While the phone chirped, I memorized the number and the address. He picked it up on the third ring, and all the warmth in his voice indicated he had been expecting me. I wondered how long he’d been sitting there.
“Grazie,” I said.
“Prego.”
“I don’t even own a vase.”
“I would get one if I were you.”
I sucked on my injured finger. “I just woke up,” I said.
He paused, and I imagined him looking with disapproval at his watch, the one with the black crocodile band and the burnished gold face I had tried not to stare at last evening, dying to know if it was a Rolex.
“It’s eleven-thirty,” he said.
“I couldn’t go to sleep.”
“Why was that?”
“I was thinking.”
“I also did some thinking,” he said.
“Would you like to share your thoughts?”
“I hope you’ll give me a chance. Next weekend.”
“Not this afternoon?”
“I’ve already committed to being Ibby for the rest of the weekend.”
“A shame,” I said. “Don’t slip on the floor wax.”
“And don’t you spend the rest of the weekend beating the throw rugs with a wooden spoon.”
“Actually, I plan to vacuum the ceiling.”
Strauss’s voice sounded censorious when he promised to connect on Monday. “Of course, we’ll be at the office. I wish I didn’t have to say this—”
“But you don’t,” I assured him. “I totally capisce.”
I made my run to the grocery store. I drank too much coffee, perused the Times, and then spent the rest of the afternoon in the gym trying to work off my cheese Danish. Unlike Friday nights, the gym on Saturday afternoons always was populated with the Westchester exec set who needed to sweat off all the martinis and London broil they had consumed during the week. It made me feel good (or at least more powerful) to know I could outstroke those highly salaried guys on the rowing machine any day—thanks mostly to my response to the Pacer, who as usual continued to bark and goad and chastise me through his little dildo-shaped megaphone, spurring me on to great heights and making me feel I missed my calling to be a gondolier on the Grand Canal.
Even though I stretched for ten minutes after my workout, my muscles already hinted they planned to burn later that evening. In the locker room I stood under the hot pounding shower, actually saying “oooh” and “aaah” as the heat hit my back. The dressing area remained empty when I got out, and in the mirror I watched my body, too closely, as I wrapped myself in my towel. I thought about Strauss’s body. I remembered the warmth of his hand when he shook mine. I pictured him taking off his watch and dropping it onto the nightstand beside my bed. I saw his glasses folded next to the watch. I imagined his thighs against mine and felt the pressure of his entire body on mine.
For a second I actually considered it—going back into the shower stall, pulling the curtain, leaning my body against the water-beaded tile, and making love to myself with a corner of my wet towel (because the roses Strauss sent me rendered my usual finger useless for this sort of activity by necessitating a Band-Aid).
Then I thought, Whoa, gal. You are seriously losing it. Whack off in a public bathroom and you could get carted away. If I got arrested, then not only would I not have Strauss—or any other man—I also would lose my club membership and thus my best substitute for sex, which was to work myself to death on those stupid machines until every muscle in my body ached and I felt myself pulsing from my shoulders down to my feet. I would turn into the kind of exhibitionist I once cautioned Dodie about. The one time Dodie and I went to a Manhattan gym, I noticed he was being checked out in the mirror by some of the Fire Island gang. After we got off the Exercycles and decided to clean up and hit a movie, I left Dodie outside the men’s locker room with this mock warning: “I want you out here in five minutes.”
Dodie raised his eyebrow at me. “A lot can happen in five minutes. The whole world can change in just one—”
“Cinque minuti, pal.”
&n
bsp; “I’m a big boy, Lise.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
How Dodie had laughed! For he claimed—just to get on my nerves—that my biggest fantasy in life was to discover just how well (or how measly) he was endowed, a charge I vigorously denied, although I have to admit that the more he talked along these lines, the more my curiosity was piqued. Like me, Dodie was a verbal exhibitionist. But over the past couple of years he had been more talk than action. In any case, he had enough sense not to monkey around with somebody else—or his towel or his own finger—in a place as public as a health-club locker room.
Back at home, I ate a bagel and cream cheese for dinner and took out my notebook and pen. I decided the juicy subplot in Stop It Some More would be an internal rather than external scandal—a seemingly mild-mannered senior vice-president for Research and Development would plow his way through the secretarial forces before being brought to his knees by a feisty young feminist determined to force his Don Juanism to a tragic end. I wasn’t sure how I’d get these steamy scenes to mesh with the chapters that dealt with Donna Dilano and the broad-shouldered ex-rower Thomas Akins, because I had sanitized their romance so squeaky clean I now feared those hard-written pages were destined to become only toilet paper. After a couple of hours of scribbling, I despaired. Why should the Casanova have all the fun? Why couldn’t Donna have some torrid activity in her life? But if I didn’t find a focus—or at least a consistent tone—I’d never get beyond the third chapter. I wanted realism, but my pen kept bleeding potboiler. And my muscles ached. I got out my trusty tube of Ben-Gay and slathered the numbing cream all over my thighs and calves. As I was washing my hands in the kitchen, the phone rang.
“What’s new?” Carol asked, in a voice crazed by boredom.
“Nothing,” I said, gazing at my roses. A lie had never given me such pleasure.
“I keep waiting,” Carol said. “My whole life seems like nothing but waiting.”
I stroked one of the yellow petals. “So does mine.”
“I swear this baby is never going to get here. When is this baby getting here?”
“You don’t want it to be premature, do you?”
“I want it to stop making me fat. Lisa, I’m so fat.”
“You’re not fat. You’re pregnant. And I’m sure you’re beautiful,” I said, even though I was sure Carol wasn’t. The figures of pregnant women—exaggerated to cartoon proportions—may have pleased Dodie, but they frightened me. I knew the condition was temporary, and I knew it all went toward a good cause—the perpetuation of mankind, which was woman’s sad fate to carry out—but still, I couldn’t imagine myself swelling to the circumference of a Broadmouth trash can, then struggling for months afterward just to make it back into a pair of jeans two sizes bigger than what I wore before. Carol’s complaints hardly inspired me in that general direction.
“My butt looks like ground round,” Carol said. “My boobs feel like bowling balls—”
“I bet Al can hardly keep his hands off you then—”
“Lisa! Would you listen to me! I’m never going to lose this weight.”
“How much have you put on?”
“Twenty-five pounds.”
I refrained from bleating back an astonished Twenty-five pounds! and eked out, “Oh, that’s nothing. At least one-third of that is baby—”
“Pretty soon I’m going to weigh more than Al, and then I won’t even fit into his clothes.”
“Mama still has some of Daddy’s.”
“What the hell is she hanging on to those for?” Carol said. “He’s not coming back from the dead.” Then she launched into a long bitch against all the busybody women in our family who kept telling her what not to eat and what not to do, as if her pregnant body had become public property. I punctuated Carol’s tirade against Mama and Auntie Beppina with so many mm-hmms and uh-huhs that Carol finally stopped and said, “You’re not listening.”
“Au contraire. It’s fascinating. Please proceed.”
“Well, what’s so fascinating about your life? What are you really up to these days besides working?”
“Playing.”
“With who?”
“With whom?”
“Like I give a shit about grammar?”
“Obviously not.”
“Still seeing Dodie all the time?”
“No,” I said, my finger hovering above the phone button as I flirted with the idea of hanging up.
Carol’s voice rose in expectation. “You’re seeing someone else then?”
I hesitated. Although the joy in my sister’s voice came from what I considered an extremely limited, if not warped, world view, it was joy nonetheless. It had been so long since anybody in my family had been happy for me about anything. I could have told her there was someone promising in my life. But something perverse inside led me to ask, “Carol, have you ever wanted to rape a man?”
“Lisa, you are totally sick and I am pregnant!”
“Don’t pregnancy hormones put you into sexual overdrive?”
“They make me want to eat and sleep.”
“But do they give you—you know, like, erotic dreams?”
“Well,” Carol said, in a cunning whisper. “Don’t tell Al.”
“Never.”
Then Carol admitted to a one-time nocturnal assault on the star of Saturday Night Fever.
“How boring,” I said.
“It was not! It was very exciting!”
“But John Travolta is a clear stand-in for Al.”
“Al wouldn’t be caught dead in platform shoes. He thinks they’re fruity and the Bee Gees are too.”
Personally, my opinion on the Brothers Gibb was that they looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy in triplicate thirty years later; Dodie called the entire group fey in the worst of ways and proof that lightning could strike more than once in the same family. Carol had chosen “How Deep Is Your Love” for the theme song of her wedding, over Al’s loud protests that he did not want to take his first dance as a married man to the crooning of a man named Robin. But Carol insisted and so Al danced it. Or shuffled it. Or rocked back and forth to it.
It was a cute memory, I had to admit.
On Monday morning, I greeted the secretary, then dived into my office to avoid the crowd in the break room. Now that Karen was on leave, the Editorial staff spent a lot of time fussing over Mr. Coffee, trading stories about picnics and baseball games and movies and visits to their in-laws, and eating up corporate gossip with the same amount of relish that we all scarfed down the vanilla-frosted sheet cakes brought in to celebrate our colleagues’ birthdays. That gossip once had amused me. Now fearing I would become the brunt of it, I vowed never to introduce another interesting factoid into the rumor mill again.
I squirreled myself away in my office for so long that the other girls surely thought I had major PMS, a conjecture probably confirmed when caffeine withdrawal started to pound a regular tom-tom in my head. I grabbed my porcelain cup that said INSTANT HUMAN: JUST ADD COFFEE and ran to the break room, where of course I found that someone had left only the dregs in the decanter, forcing me to fire up a new pot.
“Shit,” I said, loud enough to be heard down the hall. Right at that moment everyone in Editorial suddenly seemed to crave a good strong cup of joe, and pretty soon the break room was full of women. “Greetings, Lisa. We haven’t heard about your weekend yet.”
“I did my laundry,” I said, and no one asked me out to lunch.
Noon found me sitting at my desk like a seventh-grader too scared to enter the cafeteria all by herself, so I slung my purse over my shoulder and went out to the parking lot to make a fast-food run, where I had the bad fortune to view Strauss and two other hotshots in suits piling into a car in the VIP parking lot, probably on their way to a very extended lunch at one of the nearby restaurants. I suspected I would not bump into them at the local Pizza Hut. Strauss nodded at me, and I gave him a weak smile and a halfhearted wave—minus the Band-Aid, which fell off my
forefinger during my morning editing session.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Human Resources—a name I thought made people sound like toxic waste products—had called that morning and asked if someone in Editorial could review ASAP the sexual-harassment policy that Boorman’s legal counsel was hoping to put into place by autumn. I accepted the job. The document was full of lawyerese and went on for more than twenty single-spaced pages. My eyes latched onto the words involuntary attentions and mutual and consensual As I penciled in my marginal notes—subject/object is unclear, language is ambiguous—I told myself, This doesn’t have squat to do with me. So why did my stomach nag at me, the way it had ached and churned after I first let a boy finger me and then ran to The Baltimore Catechism to see if I could excuse my bad behavior by convincing myself the action wasn’t included in the phrase impure acts?
I considered leaving this job off the project log. But in the end I recorded it and watched Strauss blink when he came down to my office to review the log on Friday.
“Peg put you on that job?” he asked me quietly.
“I edited for grammar,” I said, “not content.”
Without further comment, he signed off on it.
Strauss and I began doing something I thought existed only back in the days of drive-ins and Levittown: dating. Which meant I waited for him to call, and when I heard his voice on the other end of the line—sometimes from Crickle Wood, but more often than not from Providence or Atlanta or Charlotte—my heart did a bellywhopper. No topic was too mundane for those phone conversations—even the pervasive fragrance of popcorn in the New Orleans airport and my futile attempt to time my stir-fry vegetables just right—although the subject of Boorman, for the most part, remained off-limits. When I put down the receiver, I went straight to my refrigerator, opened the door and stared at all the food I shouldn’t eat, and thought about Strauss’s outdated way of treating women. The flowers, the tie and coat at dinner, the fingers placed very lightly on my wrist, and that soft, brushing kiss all signaled that he valued that stuff my mother always warned me to demand: respect. But she warned me far too late. By then it was a useless, unobtainable commodity, for I no longer respected myself.