A Perfect Romance

by Layce Gardner

I picked my way through all Maw Maw's taxidermy experiments in the living room. The room was stuffed (pardon the pun) with opossums, raccoons, armadillos and a deer. They lined the walls and stared at me like I was in a cage at the zoo. I ignored their glassy-eyed stares and weaved my way to the kitchen.

  A few years back Maw Maw took a correspondence course that she found advertised in a magazine and got her degree in taxidermy. Ever since then she's been picking up roadkill and experimenting on the dead animals. However, stuffing them wasn't enough. She wanted to embalm them with her own special embalming juice. Supposedly, she was going to patent an embalming juice that repelled insects and moths. She wanted to make taxidermal history.

  As a creative sideline, she also used some of the roadkill she picked up to create Christian art installations alongside the same highways where she found the animals. She fancied herself an artist and liked to say she resurrected the dead and was giving them a second life so that they didn't die in vain. As Maw Maw was fond of saying, "It's the perfect melding of art and science."

  And Maw Maw was the normalest one in our family tree.

  When I walked into the kitchen, Maw Maw was at the stove and Fat Matt was sitting at the table in his boxers with a heaping plate of biscuits and gravy in front of him. He had gravy dibbled in his beard and all over his hairy chest and big, hairy belly. He was so hairy he looked like he was wearing the bottom half of a bear costume. Or like a bear wearing men's boxers.

  "You're the reason I'm a lesbian," I said sitting down at the table across from him.

  "Be nice to your brother," Maw Maw said without conviction like she'd said it a million times before, which she had. She was stirring a big pot of brackish foulness on the stovetop. For a moment, I thought she was making us a stew for dinner, then I smelled it and realized she was working on perfecting her embalming recipe.

  Matt paused in his mouth-shoveling long enough to say, "At least I wasn't the one dry humping some woman in the parking lot of DeWayne's last night for all the world to see."

  "How do you know about that?"

  Matt grinned. "I'm the mayor. People feel obliged to tell me when my sister is tarnishing my good name by committing public indecencies."

  Maw Maw turned from the stove and looked at me. It wasn't the kind of look you want aimed at you.

  "I wasn't humping her. I accidentally kind of fell on her is all."

  "Without your pants on," Matt added.

  "You're jealous. You haven't dry humped a woman since Wanette in the seventh grade who was blind and in a coma and was trying to win a bet..."

  "Shut up!"

  "And had no sense of smell."

  "Shut up!"

  I laughed. "Why are you even here? Shouldn't you be out cutting some ribbons or leading a parade or something?"

  "It's Saturday," Maw Maw said. "He's a busy man, but he still takes time out to visit with his poor ol' grandma." In other words, I live here but don't pay enough attention to her is what she was saying.

  "That doesn't explain why he's wearing his underwear at the table," I said.

  Maw Maw turned and looked at him. "Why don't you have some clothes on?"

  "I didn't want to get my mayor costume dirty. It's in the car."

  Only my brother would call a three-piece suit a costume. "You drove over here clear from the trailer park in your underwear?" I asked.

  He grinned.

  "You're friggin' disgusting."

  "Yeah, but I'm the mayor and you're not," he said.

  Maw Maw handed me a plate of biscuits and gravy. I scooped up a forkful and almost had the first bite in my mouth before I noticed something wasn't right. "Maw Maw?"

  "What, darlin'?"

  "I don't think this is gravy on my biscuits."

  She looked at my plate and wrinkled her nose. "Well, hell's bells and angels," she said. "I mixed up my pans. Good thing you didn't eat that," she said with a laugh. "It's my newest recipe. I've got some fresh animals out in the freezer to try it out on today. Matt, after you eat, I need you to bring them in from the ice cream truck."

  Maw Maw drove an old ice cream truck that she bought off the Blue Bunny Man when he retired. The deep freeze in the back was perfect for her to stow her roadkill until she could get it home and embalmed or put in one of her artistic dioramas. The truck even came equipped with a megaphone apparatus on the roof so you could play music and the whole neighborhood would hear you coming. Unfortunately, the music player was stuck in the ON position and everywhere she went the speaker blared “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.”

  I scraped Maw Maw's newest recipe into the trash can and watched it curdle the plastic milk container it landed on. What the heck was in that concoction?

  I put the empty plate in the sink while Maw Maw loaded me up another with biscuits and real gravy. I got my appetite from Maw Maw. I also got my genes from her. She was big-boned and strong as an ox like those pictures of pioneer women in history books. She had wild gray hair that she hadn't combed since Paw Paw died twenty years ago. He used to brush it out for her every night and since he died she can't bear to do it herself. Her long gray mane hung halfway down her back in natural dreads and she liked to put "pretties" in her hair. Buttons, ribbons, shells, anything bright that caught her eye. Her hair resembled a blue jay's nest. She wore all tie-dye dresses and the only shoes she ever wore was a pair of old Converse with the toes cut out. In the winter she wore them with wool socks.

  Maw Maw handed over my new plate and I dug in.

  "Maybe Matt could bring you a Bigfoot to embalm," I said.

  "Shut up," Matt said.

  "In fact, you look like a Bigfoot, Matt."

  "Shut up, Double D."

  "Maybe those photos in the National Enquirer were actually pictures of you roaming the woods naked."

  He mouthed a silent, but fierce "Shut up."

  I giggled. "So tell me the truth. The night you spent around the campfire with those Bigfeet, you didn't mate with one, did you?"

  "Maw Maw!" Matt squealed like he was five years old again.

  "Ow!" I yelped when Maw Maw thumped me on the head with her wooden spoon.

  "Don't pick on your little brother," she said.

  "Little, my butt. He's two hundred pounds bigger than me." I rubbed my head. There was going to a knot.

  "Yeah, but you're a bully," Matt said. "I'm going to pass a law in this town against bullying. Then I'll have you thrown in jail."

  "Mayors don't pass laws. All they pass is gas," I said around a mouthful of food. "And then have a parade to celebrate it."

  "Your mother called last night," Maw Maw pronounced.

  Matt and I stopped our quibbling. We sat still with our mouths open. Maw Maw stood at the stove with her back to us as she stirred the goo in the pot. "Said she misses you two something awful," she said like she were telling us what was for supper.

  "Yeah right," I said.

  It wouldn't hurt you to give her a call." She turned and looked at me. "I think she was hinting that she'd like to pay us a visit."

  This news sat heavy on my stomach. I felt like I was going to upchuck. "What if we don't want to see her?"

  "I want to see her," Matt blurted.

  "Well, I don't," I said, pushing my chair back and standing up. "I've gotten along for all this time without her, I think I can last a little longer."

  Maw Maw shook her spoon in my face. "She's your mother. You should be grateful to even have one. Plenty of kids don't, you know."

  "I'm grateful she ran away and left us," I said.

  "She didn't run away," Matt said, defending her.

  "What do you know? You were too young to know the difference and now you're too crazy to know."

  "End of discussion," Maw Maw said, turning her back again.

  I let it go. When Maw Maw said “end of discussion,” she meant it.

  "I'm going to work," I said, kissing Maw Maw on the cheek. I said to Matt as I left, "And when I get home you better not be here." I stuck my tongu
e out at him on the way out the door.

  I thought about my mother while I drove. I can't believe she had the nerve to pop back into my life after that disappearing act she pulled when I was six. I hadn't seen her since the night she pushed me and Matt out of the car with a cardboard box full of our clothes and our stack of Little Golden books and told us we were going to live with Maw Maw now. I remember smelling the exhaust from her old Thunderbird as it drove away. I pulled Matt along by his hand and kicked our box up the sidewalk. Maw Maw came out on the front porch, ushered us in and pretended that she'd been expecting us all along. She served Sugar Smacks for breakfast and her and Paw Paw made over us like it was Christmas Day and they'd gotten the present they'd always wanted.

  It took Maw Maw the better part of a week to coax little Matt away from the front window where he stood with his nose pressed against the glass awaiting the return of a mother who wasn't coming back.

  My mother might be able to buffalo Matt and Maw Maw into letting her back in the door and into their hearts, but not me. No sir, I didn't want to be on that welcome committee. Even the thought of her made me so mad, I could eat nails and spit rust.

  I steered Betty into the driveway of a newly built duplex. I double-checked the address to make sure it was where dog-turd woman lived. It was a pretty nice place as duplexes go, with all red brick siding and two garages in the middle separating the residences' front doors. One door was marked A and the other was B.

  The most noticeable thing about the duplexes was the disparity between the two units. The A side was clean and well-kept. But the B side lawn had brown grass and dirt patches showing through. Weeds had overtaken the flower bed and spider webs were strung between the porch posts and grimy windows. There was a chain looped around one of the posts and on the end of the chain was a brown toy poodle panting in the heat. On second glance, the dog wasn't brown. It was white and dirty.

  The woman hadn't told me in which place she lived, A or B, so I scanned the yards and looked for poop piles. A's yard was immaculate except for the abundance of landmines.

  I approached Door A and had my knuckles ready to knock, but it flew open before I could. A skinny woman with big round glasses, brown, curly hair like the poodle's and a cigarette dangling from her lips, thrust a wad of plastic Walmart bags at me. "Pick it all up and I'll pay when you're done."

  She slammed the door in my face.

  I set about picking up dried white turds while the poodle stared at me. He had a superior look on his face and I didn't appreciate it.

  "You look like something my cat spit up," I sassed the dog.

  He yipped at me and bared his pointy teeth. "Yeah, well, who's picking up whose poop," the dog said.

  "At least I don't poop outdoors," I said back.

  "You don't see me picking up your poop," he said.

  "I don't like you," I said because I was all out of argument-winning material.

  "You have a college education and you're picking up dog doody," he taunted.

  "And you're on chain, sitting outside, with no water or food," I retorted.

  "Fuck you," he said.

  "Eff you back."

  Why is it that all poodles have foul mouths? I turned my back on Mr. Sassypants and worked steadily until the lady's yard was doody-free.

  I walked back up to Door A and had my fist all poised to knock when the door flew open and revealed the same lady as before. She was at the door so quick, she must've been peeking out her front window watching me the whole time.

  Before I could say a word, she ordered, "Take all that poop and go hand it over to Miss So-and-So next door. It belongs to her."

  The door slammed in my face.

  I sensed a Hatfield-and-McCoy type feud going on here and I was caught in the crossfire. The way I saw it I only had two options: Accept the fact that I had worked for free or go next door and hope I got my twenty dollars.

  Demeaned and demoralized, I walked up to Door B. Mr. Sassypants snarled as I got closer, but I held the bags out like I was going to hit him upside the head with his own feces if he got too near. He backed off and growled down deep in his throat like he was gargling. I knocked on the door.

  I heard feet approaching and the door opened a crack. It was so dark inside the apartment that I couldn't see anything but a slice of black. "Hi!" I said with fake cheer. "I'm Dana Dooley with Slave Labor and your neighbor over there said..."

  A throaty voice interrupted, "What's that smell?"

  The voice tickled my brain and I knew that I recognized it but couldn't place exactly where.

  "That smell's not me," I said. "Well, it may be partly me. But what you're most likely smelling is your dog's doody in these bags." I held the two bags up close to the crack for her to see. Or smell. Or both. I thought of my best friend Trudy and how she wanted me to be more assertive, so I sucked in a big breath of air and said without pausing, "Yourneighborhiredmetopickitallupoutofheryardthenshesentmeoverheretocollectthepaymentyouowemetwentydollars."

  There was a long silence, probably because the person behind the door was putting spaces in between all those words in order to figure out what I said.

  Then the door opened and Holy Crapola! It was Kimmy. The woman who cut my hair. The woman who kissed me. The woman who was going to be my future wife. The woman who was wearing a lingerie teddy thing like in the intimate apparel catalogues for women that lesbians masturbated to. (At least I hoped I wasn’t the only one who did.)

  I felt so ridiculous. Here she was looking like she was starring in a really hot Hollywood sex scene—the tasteful kind with Vaseline smeared over the camera lens—and I was thrusting bags of doody under her nose.

  I lowered the bags and averted my gaze.

  It was dark behind her, but now that the door was open, I could see into the grayness of her living room. It was bare. And by bare I don't mean that there wasn't hardly anything in it, I mean there was nothing at all in it. No furniture. No lamps. No rugs. Nary a book. Not even a TV.

  She looked me up and down. I was painfully aware of the sweat stains under my boobs and my hair plastered to my skull. Her eyes focused on the Slave Labor logo on my T-shirt and she said, "Is that for real?"

  "Yeah," I answered. I unplucked the front of my shirt from my sweaty chest and held out the logo for her to examine. "I own the company. It's real."

  "No," she chuckled and flapped her hand at me. "I meant your boobs." She pointed a red polished nail right at my girls and asked, "Are they real?"

  "Oh…uh," I stammered. "Sure. They're real." I laughed and threw out a feeble joke, "Wanna feel for yourself?"

  Okay, that was my version of a joke, but she didn't get it. She extended that same red polished fingernail and poked my right boob a couple of times. My left nipple instantly got hard. I've always been that way, kind of cross-wired. If you touch my right nipple, my left nipple gets hard and vice-versa.

  "They're so firm," she said.

  "I'm wearing a sportsbra," I replied. "That kind of packs them in."

  "What size are they?"

  "Um…" I hesitated. This was really weird. Exchanging bra sizes like recipes. "Double D."

  "Wow."

  "Yeah," I said. "I've had them since I was twelve. I think that's why I'm so klutzy. It's a weight distribution problem."

  Okay, that was probably too much TMI (was that redundant?), but I always talked too much when I was nervous.

  "Feel mine," she offered. And, by offered, I mean she bent at the waist, placed her hands under her boobs and hefted them up under my nose. "I got them redone six months ago and they're hard as concrete."

  She didn't have to ask twice. I dropped the doody bags, stuck out my finger and poked. They felt fine to me. I poked again because I could. They still felt fine. So I grabbed her boobs in my hands and gave them a squeeze. They were hard. But if they were cantaloupes in a grocery store that I was testing for ripeness, I'd buy them. I squeezed again to make sure.

  A horn honked and I turned in time to rec
ognize Hank driving his riding lawnmower down the street. He took off his ball cap and waved it in the air at me.

  I almost waved back before I realized that would mean letting go of Kimmy's boobs and I wasn't ready to do that yet

  She placed her hands on top of mine and said, "You can stop squeezing now."

  "You sure?" I asked.

  She laughed and I took my hands off her boobs to be polite.

  "What'd you think? Hard, right? And I have no feeling at all," she said. "Not a thing. You could bounce on them with both feet and I still wouldn't feel a thing."

  Good to know. But to test her theory, I reached up and tweaked her right nipple.

  "Okay, that I definitely felt," she giggled. "How'd you do that?"

  "Well," I replied with a shrug, "I am a professional."

  She noticed the poop bags at my feet. "How much did the old douche-bag pay you to pick that up?"

  "She didn't. She told me it was your dog, so you had to pay me the twenty dollars."

  Kimmy tilted her head and smiled mischievously. She looked left to right, then whispered, "I'll pay you double to go dump it back in her yard."

  "Tell you what, I won't charge you anything if you let me feel your boobs again."

  She laughed harder. She must've thought I was joking.

  "Okay," she said. "It's a deal. Come back at seven tonight to collect." She took a step back, winked and shut the door.

  I was feeling so good about my impending date that I strode into the other yard and before I could think too hard about what I was doing, I swung the bags around and around like a helicopter propeller and let it all fly.

  Dog turds rained down like manna from heaven.

  The door to A opened and the douche-bag lady stepped out onto her porch yelling, "What the H. E. Double Hockey Sticks are you doing?!"

  "You should've paid me!" I yelled. I humped it for the street, jumped into Betty, and sped away.

  Seven

  By Thursday evening, Dana still hadn't heard from Kimmy. She knew Kimmy was coming home when she wasn't there because she saw the telltale signs of Kimmy's hair in the bathtub drain. And her dirty clothes kept magically appearing in the hamper.