Ellen laughed.
"It's true. All Lisas except this one."
"You have a Lisa fetish?"
"Not consciously. Subconsciously, who knows? Maybe it's a real popular name." It suddenly occurred to Dana what was bothering her. The singular form was “titty” and the plural was “titties.” There was no such thing as “tittie,” there could only be “titties” with the s on the end. She had no idea, however, how many titties it took to make a biscuit.
Ellen said, "Tell me about your girlfriend now. The one not named Lisa."
Dana took a deep breath. "Well, for starters, she has an acute case of RPS."
"What's that?"
"You've heard of RLS, Restless Leg Syndrome?" Ellen nodded. "Well, she has RPS. Restless Pussy Syndrome."
Ellen laughed.
"Seriously, I think the only reason she stays with me is because she can live rent free." Dana smiled slyly. "Plus, I'm really good in bed." She threw that last line in there because it never hurt to advertise.
"Is that so?" Ellen asked coyly.
"I like to think so." She shrugged.
Ellen wadded up her empty chip bag and set it aside so she wouldn't have to look at Dana while she asked, "Do you love her?"
"No," Dana responded. "Now I'm wondering if I ever did."
Ellen breathed a sigh of relief.
"How about your girlfriend?" Dana asked.
Ellen smiled crookedly. "I don't love mine either. I think I mistook lust for love and only thought I loved her."
"Oh my God! That's what I've always said. What is it with us lesbians?"
"I don't know," Ellen said. "But it's true. One orgasm and that nesting instinct kicks in."
"How long have you been with your girlfriend?"
"Too long. How about you?"
"Seven dog years," Dana answered. She picked up all their trash, walked over to the trash barrel and threw it all inside.
Ellen laughed. "Using that formula, I've been with my girlfriend about three months. I mean, um…twenty-one dog months. What's her name? Your girlfriend, I mean."
"No," Dana said, "let's not say their names. I'd like to continue to objectify them. Once I know your girlfriend's name then she becomes real and I would feel guilty about imagining her dead." Dana sat on top of the table smack dab on top of “tittie biscuits.”
"Oh, do you have those dreams too?"
"Yeah. Except mine aren't dreams, they're fantasies. My girlfriend breathes loud. She breathes so loud I want to kill her. I'll be upstairs and I can even hear her breathing downstairs. If she were hiding in the dark in a horror movie, the murderer would be able to find her every time. One night I woke up and she was sleeping next to me and I couldn't hear her breathing so I thought she was dying, you know, in her sleep. So I whispered encouragement, 'Go to the light. Don't be afraid, walk into the light.’ She woke up and saw me staring at her with my pillow in my hands. I think it scared her."
"No doubt. If I thought I could get by with it, I'd off mine for sure."
"Would you really?"
Ellen shrugged. "Maybe. If I thought I could commit the perfect murder, like stab her with an icicle and there'd be no murder weapon."
"My girlfriend will never die. She never does anything I want," Dana said morosely.
Ellen joined Dana on the table top. Ellen sat close, so close their thighs touched. If this wasn't a date somebody forgot to tell Dana's body about it. Ellen touched Dana lightly on the thigh and said, "You know, you're very beautiful."
Dana looked away. She didn't know what to say. A part of her wanted to contradict Ellen and another part wanted to say thank you and still yet another part wanted to throw her down and rut on top of her. Instead, Dana moved the conversation to neutral territory. "So why'd you move here and where'd you come from?"
"Oh, okay, subject change." Ellen took her hand off Dana's thigh. "Let's see. I got a job transfer to here. Actually, I asked for the transfer."
"What job?"
"It's pretty boring. I move little pieces of paper from one place to another."
"Where'd you move from?"
"San Diego. I got out of a bad relationship and even San Diego was too small after that."
"So then you come here and got into another bad relationship?"
"I didn't say I was smart. My current girlfriend isn't as bad as the last one though. At least this one goes to a little trouble to hide the fact that she's cheating on me."
"What're the odds, we both have girlfriends who are cheating on us? You know what would be weird? What if they were cheating on us with each other?"
They laughed at the outrageousness of it.
Dana said, "I wish I could catch my girlfriend with her fingers in somebody else's cookie jar. I want to throw her out of my house, but every time I try to break up with her...Well, suffice it to say the only time she sleeps with me anymore is when I break up with her."
"Sounds like my girlfriend," Ellen sighed.
Dana took a chance, "Can I tell you something?"
"Sure."
"I like you," Dana said quickly like it was all one word.
"I like you too." Ellen smiled. She took Dana's hand in her hands, which were calloused and strong. Dana wanted to rub lotion on them. She would rub Ellen's hands all night if given half the chance.
Ellen leaned in—close, so close—and Dana panicked. "You know what happened to the last girl I kissed in this park," she joked.
"I'll take that chance," Ellen said.
She leaned in again, but this time Dana stopped her by saying, "No."
"Why? Do I have bad breath?"
Dana smiled. "No, it's not that. I want to kiss you, you don't know how bad. But I don't want to be like our girlfriends. We’d be cheating too, and that's not what I want to do. So can we…? I don't know...? Can we…?"
"Catch their cheating asses, throw them out and then consummate our desire?"
"Well, I was going to say let's be friends, but I think that's an even better idea."
They laughed.
Five
The date that wasn't a date but really was a date lasted longer than Dana had planned. She hurried home and changed into her Slave Labor T-shirt and work jeans. She had about five minutes to spare or she was going to be late and that meant she'd have to suffer through another one of Wanda's clicking lectures about how all the evils of society exist because of people's inconsiderate tardiness or some such drivel.
On the way out the door, Dana almost stepped on the hind end of a squirrel that was laying on the welcome mat. Asscat had struck again. She ran to the garage and grabbed her trusty shovel. She scooped up the butthole remains and carried it into the backyard. She was digging frantically in the dirt and darn near jumped out of her skin when she heard, "What'cha doin', Dana Dooley?"
She whirled around with her shovel raised as a weapon. But it was only Old Man Pringle, her next door neighbor. He was peering at her over the privacy fence that separated their backyards, his large nose hooked over the boards and his rheumy eyes glaring at her.
She lowered her shovel. "Burying a butthole," she said a whole lot friendlier than she felt.
"Hmmm," he said. He scanned Dana's backyard, his eyes pausing at all the fresh mounds of dirt from her previous buryings. "You must have known a lot of buttholes."
"You can say that again," she said and dismissed him by turning her back and poking the shovel back into the earth. It took her exactly fifteen shovelfuls (a multiple of three) to dig a hole deep enough. She threw in the furry tail and kicked the dirt back on top. By the time Asscat's latest victim was buried, Old Man Pringle and his nose were gone.
Dana was twelve minutes late (another multiple of three) to clean the beauty shop. As soon as she opened the front door and saw the pinched look on Wanda's face, she knew Kimmy hadn't come to work. That meant Kimmy had been AWOL for at least twenty-four hours, maybe more like forty-eight.
Wanda slammed down the telephone and spat, "Where is she?"
"Who?" Dana asked, feigning innocence.
When Wanda was irate her clicking turned to clacking. "That girlfriend, clack, of yours. The one who used to, clack, work here."
"Kimmy?" Dana asked in an effort to buy time.
"Yes, Kimmy. Unless you have another girlfriend we don't know about," she snarled. "I've been rescheduling her, clack, appointments all, clack, morning."
"Kimmy's sick," Dana lied. "I thought she called you."
"Sick?" Wanda asked like she didn't believe her. She even squinted her eyes like she had x-ray vision and could peer directly into Dana's brain and see all the lies stored there.
"She's got that flu that's going around." Dana felt pretty safe in saying that because it always seemed like a flu was going around somewhere. As a writer she knew that the truth was in the details, so she piled on some. "It's coming out both ends. At the same time. I can't even be in the same house with her."
Wanda harrumphed and clacked but knew she couldn't say much to that. "Tell her to have you call me, click, next time."
Dana noticed that Wanda's irate clacks had turned into her usual clicks and that the danger of being fired by association was over. She retrieved the cleaning supplies out of the closet and wondered where Kimmy was keeping herself. At first she hadn't been concerned about Kimmy's whereabouts. Her not coming home was nothing unusual. But when she didn't show up to work, there had to be a darn good reason.
Wanda said, "Good thing you're cleaning today. Click. You're tracking dirt all over the floor."
Dana looked down and saw that she'd left a trail of muddy footprints from the door all the way to the back. "Sorry," she said, "I was digging a grave in my backyard right before I got here." She fetched the broom out of the closet.
"Kimmy that sick that you're already digging a, click, grave?" Wanda laughed at her own joke.
"If I was, I wouldn't tell you about it," Dana said with a chuckle.
"I dunno. Click. You might. To throw me off the trail. Click. I saw that in a movie once."
Dana swished the broom over her footprints and sighed. "You got me. I killed Kimmy and buried her in a shallow grave in my backyard."
"Not too, click, shallow, I hope," Wanda said. "Stray dogs'll dig her up." And then as an afterthought, she added, "click."
***
Excerpt from Bad Romance:
I met Lisa Number Two at Dr. Amos's office when I took Asscat in to get his yearly shots. Dr. Amos was the town vet. He loved animals and he hated people. When I was a little kid, I laughed every time somebody said his name because I thought it sounded like they were saying Dr. Anus. I must have been fond of scatological humor because I also cracked up when my third grade teacher said, "There's a ring of debris around Uranus."
Dr. Anus had a full waiting room by the time I arrived. So I lugged Asscat's wire cage over to the only empty chair and sat down next to an odd-looking woman. She was wearing all black and had big, sad eyes like a basset hound. She had an untamed Afro with pencils stuck in it haphazardly here and yonder. She also had pert boobs.
She smiled at Asscat and reached down like she was going to pet him through the wires of his cage.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," I warned.
Asscat howled and hissed at her fingers. She quickly drew back her hand.
"Your cat is mad," she said.
I almost said, "Oh, yeah? How can you tell?" But for once I kept my smart-aleck remarks inside my head.
"My name is Lisa," she said. (She was only my second Lisa, so alarm bells didn't go off yet.) "I'm a pet psychic."
"Really?" I asked. This was getting more interesting by the second. "What defines a pet psychic?"
"I can communicate telepathically with animals."
"What number is my cat thinking of right now?"
She didn't laugh. I learned later that Lisa Number Two never laughed. She scrutinized instead. It was if she was picking the flesh off a funny bone to see what it tasted like.
"You probably won't believe me, but I can talk to animals," she said, defensively.
I asked, "Are you like Dr. Doolittle or do you see the pets move their mouths like Mr. Ed and Babe?"
She ignored my question and forged ahead with her lecture.
"You should be more serious about your feline companion. Cats are natural healers, you know. Their chakras are clean naturally so they can channel energy to a sick human. Have you ever noticed how cats cuddle up next to you or sit on your lap when you're sick or depressed?"
"My cat doesn't," I said. "He hates me to be happy. If I even so much as smile, he shits in my shoes."
"He's trying to tell you that he loves you, but you aren't listening. He wants to get your attention."
"Hmmm," I intoned. "Can you perhaps communicate telepathically to my feline companion that the next time he shits in my shoes, I'm going to shit in his litter box?"
She shook her head like she'd just heard the saddest thing in the world. She looked over at the big yellow dog sitting on his haunches next to her and watched as he slurped at his balls. "We should be more like that dog," she said. "If all men could do that, the world would be a better place."
I laughed. She looked at me sternly. I guess she wasn't trying to be funny.
"Yeah, but if all men could do that we'd still be living in caves," I countered.
"What's his name?" she asked.
"I don't know."
"You don't know your own cat's name?"
"Oh. I thought you meant the dog that's licking his balls." I had my mouth open to tell her that if she was truly a psychic she'd already know my cat's name, but I took it back because I liked her boobs. "His name is Asscat."
She looked like I'd shocked her in the butt with a cattle prod. She immediately said, "Poor kitty, poor, poor kitty," reached down, unlocked the cage and pulled Asscat into her arms. He nuzzled in between her boobs, turned on his purring engine and, while I'm no pet psychic, I was pretty sure I knew what he was thinking.
"Cats are people, you know," she said while scratching behind his ears.
"Actually," I said, "soylent green is people."
She shot me a dirty look. "Animals are people in animal bodies like people are animals in people bodies."
I pretended to consider this, then said, "So what is Catwoman? Is she like...a woman inside a cat who's inside a person inside a cat or what?"
"Don't be absurd," she replied. I took that to mean that she didn't understand what I said any more than I had understood what she said.
I nodded and pretended to watch Asscat knead kitty dough on her breasts when in reality I was watching her breasts. She continued, "Your cat is like a mirror image of you. He is the receptacle for your own hostility. When his human companion is upset, nervous or angry, so is he. He is a reflection of your inner feelings and desires."
"Ahhh," I said. "That's why he's always horny."
She almost smiled. I actually saw the corners of her mouth quiver a tiny bit.
"Can you read human minds too?" I asked.
"No."
"Good." Then I invited her over for dinner at my house so she could show me some meditative exercises to remove my hostilities. All in the name of helping subdue Asscat, of course.
She showed up later that night and promptly cleansed my chakras. Doggie-style.
We never went out on a date. We never moved in together. We never saw each other in broad daylight. But every night around ten o'clock she appeared on my front porch and told me that Asscat was telepathically summoning her. She would whisper to Asscat for a while then we would find our way to my bedroom where we had wild, primal, feral, animalistic sex. She insisted on role-playing different animal couplings every night. That's not as out-there as it sounds because basically all animals do it doggie-style, they just make different sounds.
Monkey sounds made me laugh too much to come. And I wasn't too keen about all the scratches on my back when she was a badger. But other than that, I thought we were very compatible.
The beginning of the end happened one night when I was lying in bed with Lisa Number Two and she was lightly teasing me with her fingers. "I have a dream," she said, licking the curve of my ear.
I squirmed against her fingers and begged her to tell me more.
"It's a petting zoo," she said, stroking my fur. "You know, like a real petting zoo."
"Uh huh," I moaned, moving against her petting.
"Except it's opposite."
"Opposite," I repeated, not really listening. I rolled onto my stomach and she knelt behind me.
"It's a reverse petting zoo. Humans will be in the cages and all the animals will stroll by and pet, sniff and pat the humans."
"Pet, sniff, pat," I panted.
"Cows, horses, goats, chickens, geese, all petting the humans, see?" She moved her hips against my ass and flicked a finger at my most vulnerable flicking spot.
"Yes," I intoned. "Petting, yes."
She pressed her boobs on my back and snuffled softly into my ear. "All I need to open the petting zoo is a thousand dollars. That's all." She teased me more with her fingers and her breath burned hot in my ear. "Will you give me the money?"
She thrust her fingers deep inside me and I gasped. "Yes, oh God, yes." She oinked and I wrote her a check.
The next morning I found her in the living room. She was red-faced and mad as a wet hen. She pointed her finger at me like it was a loaded gun and accused, "Your cat is a lying bitch!"
"I beg to differ," I said calmly. "He's a he, so he's actually a bastard, not a bitch."
She hollered, "Where is he?" She ran around the living room, looking under the sofa, the sofa pillows and the coffee table. "Where is the furry bastard?"
I calmly sat on the couch and patted the cushion next to me. "Let's calm down," I said. "Chillax and tell me what's going on."
"You chillax! I'm not going to calm down until I wring the scrawny bastard's neck!"
I leaned back into the cushions, the picture of serenity and asked, "I don't know what's going on. Did he leave a squirrel butthole on the porch again?"
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