Pink Slip

by Rita Ciresi

Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger was bound and determined to make a Lady Golfer—if not a total feminist—out of me. After I slunk back to my office, I called around to get quotes on lessons. I wanted a female golf pro, but the only one I could find was at the most pricey club in Croton. I swallowed hard and committed to six lessons.

  The pro—“call me Barb”—was maybe in her mid—forties and presented the kind of image I’d always associated with women golfers. She was dressed in a polo shirt, plaid skort, terry—cloth socks with pert fuzzy balls on the back, and cleated shoes with laces black and thin as licorice whips. Her deep brown complexion obviously came from the great outdoors, not a tanning bed.

  Our first lesson took place indoors at the club’s banquet facility. “I’ve got to warn you,” I told Barb. “I’ve never been on a golf course that doesn’t have windmills on it. I don’t even know what to call half of these clubs.”

  “We all have to start somewhere,” Barb said. She took each club from the bag and rattled off a bunch of names—putter, wedge, sand wedge, wood, metal wood.

  “Why do these big ones have socks on them?”

  Barb pulled out a wood and divested it of its red—and—white pompommed sock. I knew we definitely were talking at cross—purposes when she told me, “The greater the loft, the higher and shorter the shot.”

  Slice, pull, hook, slant. Hazards and bunkers and doglegs and divots. My relief was intense when she got out a metal contraption meant to serve as a real golf hole (was there a term for that?) and told me, “Today we’ll concentrate on putting.”

  “I won’t be good at this,” I warned her. “I’m really impatient. The last guy I dated kept making a big deal out of how impatient I was—”

  “You’ll have to curb that fault on the course. Now, this is called the sweet spot on your putter blade … this is the lifeline grip …”

  At first I kept forgetting to concentrate before I hit the dimpled ball toward the cup. My aim was all off But after ten minutes I was starting to be more on target, and after half an hour I found myself discharging the ball with remarkable accuracy toward the hole. After I smacked in my fifth “hole in one”—from all of nine feet back from the cup—Barb told me she was impressed. Her praise immediately went to my head.

  I strutted forward on the runner of artificial turf. I liked this Barb. She struck me as amazingly down—to—earth and approachable for a female jock. As I scooped the ball out of the cup, I told her, “I should admit, I didn’t even really want to learn this game. I lied to my boss—or rather, my boss got the impression that I was a golfer—and now I’m going to have to follow through and play. God, this is fun. It’s actually relaxing. I didn’t realize how tense I was. My spine is completely out of whack. My boss really puts a lot of pressure on me—”

  “Can’t you find your voice and tell him to ease up?”

  “My boss is a woman. At first I thought she had all the bad qualities of a man. But now I get along with her. I mean, I actually think she’s kind of cool.”

  “Eye on the ball. Mouth shut.”

  I knocked in another hole in one. “Wow. God, I can’t tell you how good I feel. This boss of mine, she’s great except for this golf thing. Jeez, I’ve done all sorts of dumb things since I started working there, slacking off, working on my own writing—I’m trying to write a novel, now that requires patience—and man, I don’t know why I ever did this, but I even had an affair with this guy in the office, and she could have creamed me big time on that one, but she let me get away with it. I mean, there’s got to be a God if I got away with that.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Boorman Pharmaceuticals, just outside of Ossining.”

  “Put down that iron,” she told me. “Let’s see how good you are with the driver.”

  I grabbed what I thought was the most powerful club. “That’s your trouble wood,” Barb said. “You’re teeing off, you’re not in the sand trap yet. You want the longest shaft …”

  Maximum carry and roll. Choke up on the grip. Setup. Handicap. Par. “We’ll do this without the ball, of course,” Barb said, gesturing toward the banquet hall’s chandelier. She demonstrated a perfect swing five or six times, showing me how to bring up the club in an arc. “Now you try.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to shout something when you do this, so everyone ducks out of the way?”

  “The word is fore.”

  “How loud do you have to holler—like Tarzan, or something?”

  She looked at me like I truly was King of the Apes.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe I won’t vocalize this time. It might interfere with my concentration.”

  “That might be a wise choice.”

  I held on to the club for dear life. But when I brought it back, somehow I loosened my grip. On my first time teeing off, the club went winging out of my hands, narrowly missing the lowest crystals on the chandelier and hitting the opposite wall, nicking the plaster something wicked.

  “I’ve never seen anyone do that before,” Barb remarked.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I’m hopeless. I give up. I’m going to tell my boss I was a liar—”

  “Nonsense. You don’t want to compromise the good relationship you have with her, do you?”

  “No. No. I really like her.”

  “Then give it another whirl. Remember, you want to send the ball flying, not the club. But just as a safety precaution, move out from under the chandelier.”

  At the end of the hour, Barb told me, “This has been a very interesting session.” We went back into her tiny office to set up a time for the next lesson. On her desk was a double photo frame. On the side facing me there was a picture of a little girl with brownish skin, long braids, and a solemn face bent down toward a book.

  “I see you’re admiring my new daughter,” Barb said. “She’s going to arrive next week. From Guatemala.”

  The girl didn’t have to be reading Peter Rabbit—nor did I have to look at the photo on the other side of the frame—for me to make the connection.

  It was indeed a small world. I gulped. “It’ll probably be hard for her to get adjusted—what with the language barrier and all.”

  “She’ll have two very doting mothers to watch over her.”

  Instantly my heart went out to the girl. One mother was bad enough in my book—but everybody could write a different story about that.

  I might add, however, that Dr. Margaret Schoenbarger took a very nice picture.

  While Strauss was gone, Dodie and I hung out together again. As if to establish that our visits would be tranquil, I didn’t take the train down to the city—he came up to bland Ossining to be with me. Although Dodie had sworn off all mind—altering substances except a little alcohol every now and then, a large wad of cannabis got smoked when my six—month negative came back. After we blew the weed, we tunneled through an entire bag of Cape Cod potato chips and half a box of Chicken—in—a—Biscuit crackers, then laughed the kind of demented laughs I had heard mourners—me among them, most notably at my own father’s graveside—sometimes let loose at inappropriate intervals during funerals.

  Dodie’s visits always promised cheese—filled Entenmann’s and vanilla nut cream coffee. But they also ushered in the Sunday edition of The New York Times, in which the obituaries now came fast and thick: actors, dancers, musicians, even a writer whose manuscript I edited. An epidemic of leukemia seemed to sweep New York that year. A veritable plague of brain tumors. Then the truth finally appeared more and more often on the page, and each time he saw the phrase in black and white, Dodie repeated, “His companion reported … his companion reported …”

  Although Dodie did not admit to being lonely, I could tell he was depressed. He had no companion or partner but his own disease, which lay in wait like a detective determined to sit one more hour in a dark car to catch a criminal in the act.

  When Dodie lowered the newspaper to read an article at the top of the page, I gave him surreptitious glances, trying to fin
d traces of his partner on his body and face. Like a teenage girl determined to hide her pregnancy from her parents for as long as possible, Dodie was worried about “showing it.” There was a case up with the Justice Department to determine whether employers could legally fire carriers of the virus. One morning in March, as we drove back to my place after taking a long soggy walk through the park, Dodie told me he was sure he’d lose his job if the wrong coworker discovered he was sick and ratted on him.

  “Who would do such a thing to you?” I asked.

  “Somebody always wants somebody else’s office. So mum’s the word at work. And I cashed in my life insurance—”

  “What’d you do that for? Are you afraid you won’t pass the physical?”

  “It’s not term. It’s whole life.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Don’t you even know what kind of insurance Boorman is giving you? Are you even covered?”

  “Of course I’m covered. With some kind, I think. But I don’t really need to be, do I? Isn’t life insurance just for people who have kids?”

  “Lisa, who are your beneficiaries?”

  “I can’t remember. I think I named my mother—do you think I should rename Al Dante Junior?”

  “Please do.”

  “But my mother needs the money more, although she’d probably squat on it like a hen sits on eggs.”

  My utter stupidity about finances never failed to frustrate Dodie. He threw up his hands, then gave me a good talking—to about getting under the Allstate umbrella and leaning on Prudential’s solid rock.

  “If you’re such a booster for insurance, then why did you cash yours in?” I asked.

  “Because the money will make more invested than sitting there waiting for me to turn seventy and one—half I’m not turning seventy and one—half, Lisa.” He squinted at my hair. “You really need a deep conditioner.”

  “Does it look that bad?”

  “And how. When I got off the train, it was all I could do to keep from singing ‘Roll Over, Beethoven.’ ” He put a finger to the front of my scalp. “Don’t look now, but there’s a white strand right here.” He hesitated. “Jeez Louise, here’s another. And another.”

  When we got home, I took my trusty Tweezerman from the medicine cabinet, and, staring in the bathroom mirror, I plucked out my white hairs. Then I shut the bathroom door against Dodie’s prying eyes and pulled a chin whisker. As I examined the creases—seemingly deeper every day—that ran from my nose to my mouth, I thought about the horrors of getting old. White hair. Thinning hair. Age spots. Gnarled fingers. A face, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, that reflected all the wrongs I had committed and all the hardships—how—ever trivial in comparison to others’—I had suffered. That life could take such a toll on my looks saddened me, and I could understand why Dodie—who had been blessed with a beauty that far surpassed my own—told me he found some small consolation in dying an early death.

  While we washed our hands to make dinner, Dodie told me matter—of—factly that he had named me in his will.

  “Cut it out,” I said. “I don’t want anything from you.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how much it was.” Dodie got out a separate towel to wipe his hands, claiming he did not like the stiffness of the dish towel I already had out, which was real Irish linen.

  “Stop playing Mr. Moneybags.”

  “I’m playing Ralph Touchett. Remember, in The Portrait of a Lady?” Dodie lowered his voice into a book—jacket—copy register. “Tragically dying of consumption, Ralph Touchett bequeathed a grand fortune to his cousin Isabel so she wouldn’t have to wed an asshole. So what does Isabel do but turn around and marry a repressed pansy who collects antiques?”

  “Pansy’s the name of the daughter,” I said. “And Henry James would be glad to know you got a lot out of his masterpiece.”

  “Tut—tut. She should have married what’s—his—name—the boring Lord Warburton.” Dodie shook his head. Then he looked at me mischievously. “I hope you give your novel a better ending, Lise—because the one you got now sucks rotten eggs.”

  I clenched the dish towel in my fist. Dodie started backing away from the sink, his arms in front of him to ward me off. I was moving in on him. “Now, Lise. Remember, you gave me the A—okay to dust—mop under your bed while you were in the shower—”

  “But I didn’t give you permission to snoop!”

  “You had serious dust bunnies under there—never mind those Trojans. When are you finally going to get around to using those Trojans so you don’t have to write pure porn as a substitute for sex?”

  “You had no right reading my novel!”

  “Hey, I’ve been reading it for weeks now! You take long showers!”

  “My back is killing me from those fucking golf lessons and pure stress!” I unfurled the dish towel and swatted it at Dodie’s head. He ducked, and I swung the towel again, giving him a locker—room slap on the ass.

  He laughed. “To quote one of your characters: ‘Oh, that feels so good, do it again!’ ”

  “Stop it—”

  “—some more!”

  “Those are sex scenes!” I said, giving Dodie one swipe of the towel for every lame defense of my novel, which I now knew for certain was complete shit. “I’m a realistic writer! It’s not my fault people don’t utter stunning dialogue in bed! You have no right spying and no right criticizing—”

  “Take it easy, that Irish linen is lethal. Oh, Lise, have mercy, I beg of you, it’s not bad for a first draft.”

  It was close to the twelfth revision. “Really?” I asked.

  “Put down that dish towel and I’ll give you my honest reaction.”

  I put it down. Dodie ran his fingers through his hair—I had cuffed him a good one right on the side of the head—and warily walked by me. He opened the refrigerator. He crouched in front of my crisper and frowned at the first thing he pulled out: a moldy cucumber, which he threw into the trash. As he lined up an arsenal of stir—fry vegetables on the counter, he told me my book had some good points that he’d discuss later. In the meantime, he strongly suggested I ditch Stop It Some More’s sex—in—the—Saab scene, wipe out at least seventy—five percent of the references to onanism, and tone down the heroine’s latent attraction to her dumb but well—endowed brother—in—law, who always inexplicably greeted her with the gender—inappropriate phrase, hey, how’s it hanging? “And get rid of Donna’s green eyeglasses, or at least stop mentioning them every other paragraph,” he said. “I mean, we get the point that she’s supposed to be artsy. The bigger question, at least from my point of view, is why did you make my character Jewish?”

  “What!”

  “In chapter three, an insufferable faggot—who also conveniently happens to be one of the chosen people—floats in from nowhere—”

  “That’s not you.”

  “But he has my haircut.”

  “But he’s tall and you aren’t.”

  “He wears black jeans on the weekends—”

  “He wears Italian loafers and you wouldn’t be caught dead in them.”

  “But what is this preachy bullshit speech this gee—gee delivers at the office that compares AIDS to a modern—day Holocaust? I mean, the vaccine as the long-awaited Messiah?”

  “It’s just the first draft!” I lied. “Besides, I want to write about something important, something serious—”

  “Then you’d better knock that queen off his moral high horse or your readers will be glad there’s AIDS to do it for you.”

  “All right. Maybe that scene bordered—a little—on the didactic.”

  “Why can’t he do something fun, like whip out his schlong to gross out the German dyke who looks like Beatrix Potter—ha! a German dyke who looks like Beatrix Potter? I don’t think so, Lise. And just because this Donna girl—and by the way, you probably better change her name so it isn’t such an obvious re
flection of your own—just because Donna D.’s an aspiring cartoonist, does she always have to be drawing such mean caricatures?”

  “She wants to be honest and true!”

  “She wants a libel suit, if you ask me. But don’t worry. I’ll let your boyfriend bring it.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Was he really a rower at Harvard?”

  “But Strauss isn’t Thomas Akins, and is there anything at all you like in the book?”

  “Sure. Plenty. There are lots of funny scenes. Some of the serious ones are starting to work too.”

  “Which?” I muttered glumly.

  “So far my favorite is when Donna remembers how the nuns told her the Holocaust was a sign from God that the Jews needed to convert. That seemed pretty real to me.”

  “Maybe that’s because it actually happened,” I said.

  “But you didn’t get sent to the rectory, Lise, and you weren’t spanked with The Baltimore Catechism—do you really have a secret desire to get spanked by The Baltimore Catechism?”

  “It’s fiction, you fuckhead!”

  “And you didn’t yell ‘That’s a crock of shit’ when Sister Paul said that.”

  “Neither did you,” I said.

  “I was seven, and you were seven, and you believed it and so did I.” Dodie got out the knife. “Do you believe the stuff we believed? Why did we place faith for a second in such a God?”

  “We didn’t have evidence that any other kind existed.”

  Over a pot of rice and vegetables lightly flavored with sesame oil and soy sauce, Dodie and I argued about the Divine. Now that we were adults we didn’t have to believe in the kind of God who sent plagues. But we were too smart—or too cynical—to believe in the kind of God who created paradise. So what were we left with?

  “Don’t you have a decent Brillo pad?” Dodie asked after dinner. “I can’t stand to even touch this rusty thing.”

  “Leave it,” I said. “And get back to fat Pierre.”

  I had challenged Dodie to make it from one end of War and Peace to the other without falling asleep. “Physically impossible,” he said, “but I’ll try it.” As I breezed through seventy pages of a novel about anorexia while simultaneously cruising through a bag of macaroons (somehow the irony escaped me), Dodie yawned and slowly turned the pages of Tolstoy’s weightiest opus, occasionally commenting, “Bad move, Andrei,” “For a Russian novel, they’re speaking enough French,” “Isn’t anyone good—looking in this story?” and “Who’s the hero? I need a romantic hero.” At ten o’clock he said, “Life is short, and this book is really long.” He winged the black Penguin edition across the room and said, “Enough of this intellectual shit. Move over.”