by Rita Ciresi
The only thing that announced the room didn’t belong to a sloppy seventeen-year-old boy was the size of the bed (queen) and the skylight that topped the slanted ceiling.
“Highly commodious,” I said.
“I’ll change the sheets.”
“Don’t bother.”
“I insist. For you.”
“When was the last time you changed them—for your last girlfriend?”
He told me there hadn’t been anyone else. In quite some time. I wondered how he defined some time. Then I realized he was waiting, and I took my cue and told him he was the first person I’d been out with since moving to Ossining.
“But there was someone else back in New York?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I had a feeling you were running away from someone.”
“Well,” I said, “there was that rat in my kitchen cabinet.”
Strauss actually started to whistle as he went into the closet to get some clean sheets—and another pillow, for I suddenly noticed there was only one on his bed. His relief both flattered and bothered me. What would he have done if I told him about those guys back in New York and then something very telling about the nature of those relationships: I might have called it sleeping with men—but the first time I ever did it and took a snooze afterward I was twenty-one. In spite of my extensive sexual experience—what some might call pure promiscuity—I never before had helped a man make a bed.
The task pleased me. Strauss stripped the old sheets and blankets, and then—as if he were bent on playing the doofus in one of my dumb—guy jokes that split the sides of my office colleagues—he stupidly deposited the bundle of poorly folded clean sheets down on the mattress. I smiled and moved them onto the floor. The sheets were soft but thick—two hundred fifty threads per inch, I was sure of it.
“These are nice,” I said. “Did your mother pick them out?”
He tossed a pillow at me. I caught it and threw it back. Then he started to put the fitted sheet down backward, and I said, “I can see you didn’t pass Bedmaking 101 at Harvard,” and he said, “Cornell. I learned to make my own bed at Cornell,” and we gave each other shy smiles and said, “After you,” “No, after you,” before we both pulled the fitted sheet at the same time and practically ripped it in two as we tried to hook the elastic over our respective sides of the mattress.
“We may just end up sleeping on the carpet,” he said.
We smoothed the flat sheet and made sure there was equal overhang on each side of the bed. As he rescued the cotton bedspread from the floor, I asked, “Are you a blanket hog?”
“No,” he said. “But I have to warn you, I can get a little restless at night.”
“Do you kick?”
He shook his head. “Insomnia.”
“Will you wake me up too?”
“Of course not,” he said. As if I were a kid he planned to tuck in for forty winks, he said, “I want you to have a good night’s sleep.”
We straightened the covers and stuffed the soft feather pillows into their cases. I wondered why this simple activity made me feel so buoyant. Strauss seemed to like it too. His voice was happier than I’d ever heard it when he asked, “Which side do you want? … Which pillow do you want?” and he might have been offering me gold and diamonds for all the joy I felt as I chose a down pillow from among the two he had and selected the side closest to the bathroom just in case I had to get up during the night. Then Strauss played the Jewish mother and brought me a flashlight so I wouldn’t trip and break my ankle in the dark. He asked me if I liked cereal for breakfast—because quite frankly that was probably all he had in the kitchen cabinet.
“I can handle cereal,” I said, “as long as you don’t tell me your dreams over the breakfast table.”
“I wouldn’t think of boring you.”
“Unless it’s a really good one. About a tidal wave or something.”
“I promise to keep mum on the subject.”
Strauss brought more wine upstairs. As the room grew darker and the shadows of the furniture were cast on the walls from the faint illumination that came in through the skylight, we sat up in bed, spending just as much time talking as we did keeping silent. Then we lay down and I kept my arms around him and he kept his arms around me, which set a record. I definitely had never held anyone for so long before, and I wasn’t moved to let him go until he asked me, hesitantly—not to spoil the mood or anything—but downstairs … when I said I was protected … was I on the pill?
“Not right now.”
“Then—?”
His thorough inquiry compelled me to admit I was at that very moment wearing an arc-spring diaphragm manufactured by Boorman’s rival. Then I remembered that Boorman didn’t manufacture contraceptives and that of course the barrier method was good for only one go-around, after which you needed another shot of spermicide, which I had been stupid enough to leave at home. If Strauss was aware of that fact, he didn’t call me on it.
Strauss would have been appalled if he knew how careless I had been about birth control when I first started messing around with boys. I could still shock myself by thinking of it. It was a wonder no one called me Mommy by the time I was fifteen. During my teenage years I relied on dubious behaviors—known as finger-fucking, dry-humping, or pulling out—until I got my driver’s license and made the hair-raising drive over the Quinnipiac Bridge to the downtown Rexall, where I purchased shots of foam that I hid like a small mound of tampons in my locked jewelry box. Until then I had functioned under the illusion that not wanting children was enough to protect you from getting them, just as children think that not wanting to die is a guarantee of immortality.
At sixteen all that turned around. After Dodie got that scholarship to Duke, I set my sights even harder on college, and although I hardly cleaned up my act, I made sure I was protected, because a baby would bar me from the university gates. But after all the years that I’d been scrupulous about birth control (whether it worked or not), that evening I found my recklessness had come back to haunt me. I still hadn’t learned my lesson. For there I was, suddenly worried—hoping, and bound to even do some praying later that night—that I did not get pregnant again.
For a moment I remembered the abortion—the cold shivery feeling that tingled up from my toes as I got down off the examination table and shed the paper gown, crumpling it into a tight hard ball before I shoved it into the wastebasket—and I immediately shut out the memory, resolving never to share it with Strauss. He would never understand. It would not do to tell him I played roulette before and lost at it, especially after he said he was ashamed he hadn’t brought up this subject earlier, because he cared about me—cared for me—and he wouldn’t want anything to happen that we would regret—for my sake.
His tenderness touched me, until he dispelled it one second later with this businesslike command: “I want you to go on the pill.”
“We’re not in the office,” I reminded him. “We’re in bed.”
“I know we’re in bed.”
“So why are you acting like commander-in-chief of my ovaries?”
“What did I say?”
“It was how you said it. Just rephrase it, okay, and add a question mark?”
“I mean, will you go on the pill, Lisar, please, so we can be together—if you want to be together—and not have to worry about this?”
“Much better,” I said. “But the pill makes me dizzy.”
“How long has it been since you’ve tried it?”
“Back in college.”
“They have lower doses of estrogen now. But I don’t want you to take it if it makes you sick.”
“Actually it just makes me fat.”
“You don’t need to be concerned about your weight.”
“I’m not,” I lied. “But I guess—if this sort of thing is going to be a regular occurrence?”
“It will be if you want it to be.”
“I do. So I could try it again.”
“Only
if you want to.”
“I’ll call a doctor on Monday morning.”
“I’ll pay for it, of course.”
The mention of money embarrassed me, and to brush it off I said, “Why don’t you just swipe me some samples from the lab?”
Even in the dark I could feel him frowning. “Just a joke,” I said, and put my fingers over his lips before he could offer to make a midnight run to the drugstore and start lecturing me about how we had better, for both our sakes, continue to keep our relationship a secret from everyone at work—as if I might be tempted to put it in the headline of The Grapevine.
When I took my finger off his lips, he said, “Boorman doesn’t do the pill, and you and I had better have that serious talk in the morning.”
His voice saddened me. “I know,” I said. “I’ll be ready.”
We kissed each other good night. I tossed around, trying to find my groove in that strange mattress, and trying to forget I’d been careless with myself yet again. Then I, too, fell asleep. For the first time since I went to Confession and got my penance from the priest—on the one night I really could have used God’s help—I forgot to say my prayers.
The skylight may have aided romance at night, but in the morning it served only to illuminate the creases on my face—or at least, the crinkles on Strauss’s face as he continued to sleep, which were a good indication I had a few of my own. I hightailed it to the bathroom, splashed supercold water on my cheeks, swished a dab of Crest around in my mouth, and quietly returned to my original position. Oh God, I thought, I’m in bed with my boss. And my boss was stretching the muscles of his legs. He popped a knee joint. He opened his eyes, smiled, and gave me a boardroom greeting: “Good morning.”
“I heard you walking around last night,” I told him, for in the dark hours I felt the bed jolt. This was followed by a loud sigh. A few minutes later a light shone faintly at the bottom of the stairs. “Jet lag?”
“I warned you. I’m restless. Sometimes I can’t sleep.”
“I have sleeping pills. At home, I mean.” Then I added, “They’re prescription. I got them from a doctor.”
“You don’t take them regularly, do you?”
I shook my head. The night before he all but wrote me an Rx for the pill. But he clearly had some odd concerns about other medications. I wondered if his dad, like Dodie’s, had an alcohol problem, or if his mother couldn’t get through the afternoon without Valium. I wondered if Strauss had been sick at some point in his life, with a kind of slow, lingering illness that later made him place a premium on good health.
In high school I had a bad case of mono. My mother told everyone it was the flu, until it went on so long she had to confess I had the kissing disease, which she equated with VD. I spent four months lying in bed, thinking about how horrible it would be to have a terminal illness that kept you strapped to the mattress, waiting only to die. Outside my window the sky grew grayer by the day, the maple tree dropped leaves, and then snow fell on the empty bird’s nest left high in its bare branches. Downstairs my mother made baked ziti and eggplant parmigiana and fried peppers and roasted potatoes. I slept and ate, slept and ate—ten extra pounds’ worth, to be exact, which stuck on my butt for years afterward—and the world went on without me. While lying in that bed, I valued my health above anything else. But the moment I got up, I continued my crusade to ruin it—the drugs, the sex, and some wild dieting.
Since turning sixteen, I had gone up and down the scale, sliding back and forth between 101 and my sworn limit of 125. I never let myself break that number—which was the weight my sister Carol always talked about wanting to be, but never achieved. No matter how many pounds I shed, however, I still felt fat, because I had a chubby face. I’d never get rid of those cheeks that Dodie once described as eminently squeezable—plumper than my mother’s ravioli. I didn’t want eminently squeezable cheeks. I wanted cheekbones, the kind that God had given Dodie but not me. If there was one thing I liked about Strauss (among many), it was the way he reminded me that I could afford to cut loose with food on a more regular basis. If there was one thing I didn’t like about my coworkers—and I had come to hold plenty of petty grievances—it was the bitchy way they urged me to feed my face: “You can stand that extra doughnut, Lisa. Lisa, have some more of this cake before we do the whole thing in. Lisa, this last piece of chocolate has your name on it. Better your hips than mine, girl!”
I was reminded of how lean my body was—at least in comparison to my chubby face—when Strauss offered me first crack at the shower. The entire wall above the vanity was mirrored, making it impossible to avoid looking at myself unless I kept my eyes down to inspect the pale tile floor. Strauss’s bathroom sparkled far brighter than mine—thanks to his cleaning lady (who obviously steered clear of his bedroom) and to the brand-new tub and brass fixtures. Somehow this represented to me the heights of wealth—to own a bathroom that did not require you to get down on your hands and knees with an old toothbrush and an SOS pad to scrub the mold from the grout. The shower head was adjustable. I turned it so the water pounded hard. Strauss’s soap was blue as a built-in swimming pool, and even though it was harsher and more drying than my usual Camay, I liked scrubbing myself with it because it made me smell like him. I toweled off and returned to the bedroom, where I reluctantly put on my clothes from the day before—all except my wrinkled, wine-stained blouse, which I replaced with Strauss’s shirt. My reflection in the mirror over the chest of drawers seemed far from flattering. Funny. I liked wearing Strauss’s shirt. But I didn’t like the way I looked in it. He wore a 15 neck, and the 32 sleeves were too long on me.
I rolled up the cuffs. While he was in the bathroom, I wandered around the bedroom, touching things—old airline tickets and restaurant receipts he had yet to turn in for reimbursement for company travel, the baseball bat in the corner and the soft leather glove on the floor. I had forgotten he sometimes subbed on Boorman’s Friday night company league, precluded from having a regular spot on the roster because of his travel. I wondered what position he played. I hoped he wore a jock strap.
His closet door was halfway open. I slid the door back on the track and stared at the long row of shirts in the blue dry-cleaner bags. I touched the elbows on one of his jackets and smoothed my finger along the leather of one of his belts. On the end of the rack hung the tie Strauss had been wearing that first day I met him, when he stood up from the table and said, “Welcome on board.” The tie had red diamonds on a black background, which reminded me of a deck of cards, or a harlequin. I hated it. I snatched it off the rack, folded it into quarters, crept downstairs, and tucked it into the zippered compartment of my purse, where I usually stashed my tampons and a lucky penny. Then I tried to translate the shame I felt for swiping his tie into something mystical. She Big Chief had just performed some powerful magic, akin to stealing a bit of a man’s soul or speaking an Indian’s secret name.
Voodoo always had pleased me. And although I professed to loathe them—and swore I’d never practice them myself—feminine methods of control and deceit (such as were reported by Carol) also held my interest, if only for their anthropological value. “The first thing you do when you get married,” Carol told me, “is march in there and toss the absolute worst clothes from his closet, and then when he asks where they are, you say, Sorry, I needed more rags to wax the dining-room floor.” To my mind—considering Al’s current wardrobe—Carol could have found several other floors that needed to be polished. But every woman knew her limits.
For a moment I thought it was my duty to stay downstairs and start the coffee. Then I wondered how long Strauss would be in the shower and how much I could find out about him while he was obliviously scrubbing his scalp with antidandruff treatment.
What exactly was I looking for? Proof that he was not as swift a catch as I was starting to think? And what would that proof consist of—a Yankees baseball cap? A neatly stacked pyramid of imported-beer cans that announced he was a quality drinker? A Marilyn Monroe c
alendar? A toilet covered with sheepskin? Ballpark franks and boily-bag rice in the freezer, snack-packs of vanilla pudding in the refrigerator, and in the cabinet, powdered mashed-potato mix, half a dozen Kraft macaroni and cheese boxes next to several cans of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup—the bachelor’s best friend? Evidence that he belonged to a college fraternity? A wool ski mask that might belong to a serial killer or a sexual pervert? A complete lack of books in the house, or worse (since I knew firsthand the kind of absurd shit that routinely got published), glossy, full-color coffee-table editions titled Maine’s Covered Bridges and Famous Outhouses of the Wild, Wild West (hawked on the back cover with this pithy line: Jesse James did his business here!)?
I went back upstairs and wandered into the room at the back of the condo. It was set up as a study and proved what Strauss said the night before—that he lived mainly upstairs. Here were all the books (a lot of them), his stereo, and the records and tapes, arranged in alphabetical order. Strauss had too much baroque—the Bach section seemed to go on forever. At the end of the alphabet, I found a Herb Alpert record that Carol and I also owned (A Taste of Honey) and Greatest Hits of Petula Clark. Ha! To think that I hid from him my Rodgers and Hammerstein tapes and my copy of Opera Without Words, for fear he would think me a Philistine. Back they go, I thought, into a prominent place on my stereo shelf.
Along the front wall Strauss had a long white table littered with statements from companies like Scudder and Merrill Lynch and Fidelity and corporations whose price-earning ratios Dodie no doubt was familiar with to the T. There were white envelopes with the tops slit open from the American Cancer Society and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. A corkboard right above his phone—I tried not to judge this as adolescent—was dotted with multicolored pushpins and four photographs, all in black and white.