A Perfect Romance

by Layce Gardner

  Okay, so maybe she wasn't the smartest woman I'd ever met. But she did have redeeming qualities (quali-titties?).

  "This is the historic district. There's lot of old architecture over here. Most of these houses were built in the early 1900s." Kimmy reopened her compact and this time she started powdering her face. I knew I would always be able to tell how bored she was by the layers of makeup she was wearing. To see if she was listening, I threw in, "There's a garage two doors down that looks like a vagina."

  She clicked the compact shut again and looked at me. "Really?"

  "Well, if you think about it," I said, "all garages resemble vaginas." There was a joke in there somewhere (two-car garages? remote-controlled door?), but I was too tired to excavate the funny out, so I changed the subject. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

  She tossed her compact back in her purse and said with sigh, "I'll save you the trouble. I'm bisexual. Emphasis on sexual." She waggled her eyebrows up and down on that last part. "I don't have any debt. I don't have any emotional baggage. I like you, I don't know why except you're cute. And you're honest. And you're really good at the lesbian thing. I'm thirty years old. I've been married twice. I don't have any kids. I have a job. I like to party, but not too much. My favorite color is red. My parents are dead and I have no siblings. I'm not an axe murderer so you don't have to worry." She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. "Does that answer your question?"

  "No, actually, I was going to ask if you had to remove your clit piercing to get through airport security."

  She laughed and whapped me on the arm with the back of her hand. "Let's go in." She winked at me and licked her freshly coated upper lip. "I believe we have some unfinished business."

  The lower half of my body woke up and cheered.

  She climbed out of Betty, then leaned back in. "Get all my stuff, would you? And don't forget Snickerdoodle."

  She gave me a big smackaroo of a kiss which involved a tiny bit of teasing with her tongue. She pranced toward the house. I quickly grabbed Snickerdoodle by the scruff and hauled him out of the car. "Asscat's going to love you," I said under my breath.

  Ten

  Dana didn't have a floor-length mirror in her house because she wasn't masochistic enough to want to see all of herself at the same time. So she balanced in her knee-high red vinyl boots on top of the toilet lid and looked into the mirror over the sink. (The boots came with the costume and they weren't real. They were shin-high spats that you wore over your own shoes, but if you squinted they looked almost real.)

  All she could see in the mirror was the reflection of her strike zone—her knees to her shoulders. She twisted from side to side but still hated what she saw.

  Dana liked her knees fine. She almost liked her shoulders. It was all the fat parts in between that nobody in their right mind would find appetizing. Unless you liked blue-ribbon hams. In her darkest hours, Dana always thought that she should marry a butcher. He would undress her on their wedding night and mutter seductively, "Nice marbling."

  Maybe if she bought a taller mirror she wouldn't hate her reflection so much. She definitely looked better when you could also see her head. She'd always thought her head was her best feature.

  She squatted until her head entered the frame of the mirror. She practiced smiling at herself. She looked like she was grimacing. From this vantage point she was all teeth and boobs.

  She didn't know where the costume's cape was. That was one of her unwritten fashion rules: she didn't wear a costume unless it had a cape. (Maybe she should write it down.) That way her butt was hidden from view. Kind of like that giant head in the Wizard of Oz. Don't look behind the curtain.

  It suddenly dawned on Dana what to do. She could wear her fuzzy blue bathrobe as a jimmy-rigged cape. It was even the same blue hue as the shorts.

  She hopped off the toilet and grabbed the bathrobe off the hook over the door. She hurriedly tied the arms of the bathrobe around her neck and climbed back up on the toilet lid.

  She checked herself out in the mirror again. Uh huh, exactly what she figured. The bathrobe-cape was working its magic. It completely hid her butt and draped down over her abundant thighs, disguising them as well. Dana discovered what full-figured women had known for years: this was the real reason super heroes wore capes.

  If only she could do something about the tights. They were stretched so thin over her thighs that the red material looked pinkish. The tights’ crotch was a good five inches below her own crotch and making her shorts ride too low. She pulled and stretched on the tights, trying to get the crotch up somewhere in the vicinity of her own but gave up when she realized she'd pushed the spandex to the breaking point. The package the costume came in said “One Size Fits Most.”

  Really? Most what? Most anorexics? Most nine-year-olds? Most Asian women?

  Dana scratched her boob under the gold lame corset and then hefted both her girls skyward. The corset was tight enough to keep her boobs aloft for all of three seconds. Her boobs dropped and she gave up. She stuck her cell phone back in its hiding place under her left boob. She dismounted the toilet, faced the door and squared her shoulders. She took a deep breath and struck a heroic pose with her feet shoulder-width apart and her fists on her hips.

  She heard the rip before she felt the draft of air on her butt.

  On second thought, maybe this is why superheroes wore capes.

  Undeterred, Wonder Woman threw open the bathroom door and headed for the stairs.

  ***

  Excerpt from Bad Romance:

  As it turned out, Kimmy wasn't so bad at the lesbian thing either. In fact, she was good at it three times in a row. I was lying sprawled on my back, cross-wise on the bed, in a post-coital daze, half-afraid that my clitoris was blistered. Kimmy had her arm and leg draped over me and I had this sudden crazy thought that she wasn't really cuddling, she was actually holding me down.

  I turned my head and saw Snickerdoodle and Asscat lying at the top of the bed. Asscat had his front leg draped over the snoring dog. To the casual observer, it looked like they were in love. But I knew better. As soon as I fell asleep, Asscat would devour the unsuspecting poodle and in the morning all that would be left was a dog butthole on the pillow.

  Kimmy leaned up on her elbow and looked down at me. Her face was close up, like I was sitting on the front row of a movie theatre. I could see straight up her nose.

  "What're you thinking?" she asked.

  I didn't want to tell her I was thinking about how I could see up her nose, so I said instead, "Umm...I was wondering why they call it coming when it really feels like you're going."

  She laughed. "You know what I'm thinking?"

  "Seven?"

  "Huh?"

  "I'm trying to guess what you're thinking. Is it a number between one and ten?"

  "You're funny," she said. She lightly traced her fingernail around my left nipple. My right nipple got as hard as one of those bells on the counters at motels that you ding-donged for service.

  "I'm thinking this could work," she said.

  "What d'ya mean?" I squeaked in a Minnie Mouse voice.

  "Us. I like us together. Don't you?"

  "Uh huh," I said, thinking more about what she was doing to my body than what I may or may not have been agreeing to.

  "Good," she said. She lowered her head and sucked my nipple into her mouth.

  "I love us," I echoed. She slipped her thigh between my legs and my hips moved with a mind of their own.

  She moved her mouth to my other nipple and murmured, "I could do this the rest of my life."

  "Please do..."

  She thrust her fingers deep inside me and I think she said, "Let's get married."

  "God, yes," I said as I was going.

  ***

  "Trick or treat, smell my feet, gimme something good to eat."

  Dana thumped her forehead against the closed door and wished the trick-or-treaters standing on her front porch would go away. Far, far away.<
br />
  She was one of those people who didn't think that children dressed up in costumes were cute. She also didn't think they were cute naked. She didn't think they were cute with birthday cake all over their faces. She didn't think they were cute when they ate out of the dog bowl or took baths in the kitchen sink. She didn't even think they were cute when they actually were cute.

  Dana didn't like children. Children had problems metabolizing sugar and as a result they ran around the house, bouncing off the walls, screaming and flapping their arms. Children spun themselves in circles until they got so dizzy they fell down. Children wiped their noses with their shirt sleeves. They ate their own boogers. They pooped their pants. They thought knock-knock jokes were funny. They thought farts were funny. (Well, okay, farts were pretty funny.) They made fun of other kids who were fat and called them names like Fatso and Fatty Patty and Two-Ton Dana.

  But to be honest and completely fair, Dana didn't like grownups too much either. She knew some adults who ate their own boogers and told knock-knock jokes. Heck, she'd even gone to prom with a guy who had pooped his pants on their first date.

  His name was Steve Snackenberger and he was an All-State linebacker. He asked her out on a date and Dana said yes because she was going through a rough patch of adolescence. She thought maybe she had decided at too early of an age to be homosexual and maybe she should give bisexuality a try. Steve had glasses that sat crooked on his face and the lenses were always smeared and greasy. Dana wanted to clean his glasses. That was her goal for the evening: get his glasses off his face and give them a good cleaning.

  Steve took her to Long John Silver's. They were awkward and it was glaringly obvious that the date was going to suck ass. In fact, that was exactly what Steve said while they waited on their order. "This date sucks ass." Dana agreed even though she was polite enough not to say it out loud.

  As soon as they sat down at a table with their paper boats of fried food, Steve glared at her through his dirty glasses, got up and, without a word, walked away. Dana waited on him to return. She nibbled at her meal while she waited. Fifteen minutes of nibbling later, she'd eaten her chicken planks and fries. After another ten minutes, she picked up Steve's paper boat and walked out to the parking lot, halfway expecting to see that he'd left her behind. But his Camaro was still there.

  Dana walked up to the car. Steve was sitting inside with his forehead resting on the steering wheel. She rapped on the windshield. "Steve?"

  "Huh," he grunted.

  She held the paper boat out toward him. "Here's your Super Sampler and corn cobbette."

  He glanced at her and rolled the window down two inches. "I crapped my pants," he said.

  "What?"

  He looked away. "I think I must be sick or something. I sharted," he said louder.

  "That's what I thought you said."

  "I'm going." He started the engine.

  "Okay," Dana said, "but can you drop me home first?"

  He snapped his head in her direction and screamed, "What part about ‘I sharted’ don't you understand!" His spittle dotted the window. Dana took a step back. Steve threw the car in reverse and backed all the way out the lot, swerving onto Main Street. He threw the car into D and peeled out.

  Dana watched him drive away. She walked home, nibbling on his Super Sampler until it was nibbled away. She threw the overcooked, mushy corn cobbette into a rain ditch.

  The next Monday at school Steve walked up to her in front of all his jock friends and asked her out to the prom. “Yes” jumped out of her mouth before she even thought about it. She didn't want to be the only girl in the school who didn't go to her own senior prom. Even Wacky Jackie had a date to the prom and the doctors kept her unstable mind so doped up there was a permanent wet streak down the front of her shirt from her drool.

  Prom wasn't all it was cracked up to be. All Dana did was dance a couple of times with Trudy, drink a cup of spiked punch, throw up in the girls' room and start her period. Steve left her halfway through the evening to go cow-tipping with his drunk friends. She didn't get a chance to clean his glasses. A couple of days later, she heard a rumor that she had jacked off Steve in the backseat of his Camaro during prom. She tried to start a revenge rumor that he had sharted in his pants at Long John Silver's, but nobody believed her.

  Dana hated trick-or-treaters almost as much as she had hated high school. After she thumped her head against her front door thirty-three times, she opened it and found a sugar-crazed mob of children in costume. They were dressed as ballerinas and princesses and a couple of OU football players and an army man and there was even a teenager that looked like Paris Hilton. Dana couldn't tell if she was in a Paris costume or if she had dressed normally and looked like Paris. Either way, she didn't like her.

  She put a Tootsie Roll in each paper sack and all the kids put on their frowny sad faces. One of the princesses even squeezed out a moan and a tear. A football player wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve. The camouflaged army man pushed his way to the front of the mob and asked, "What happened to the big Snickers candy bars? You always give out Snickers."

  "Not this year."

  "I waited fifteen minutes in line to get up here! I want a Snickers!"

  "I'm saving them for me," Dana said, shutting the door in his face.

  "You have an assface!" he shouted through the door.

  Dana leaned her back against the door and popped a Tootsie Roll into her mouth.

  Maw Maw hustled into the room with another big bowl of sugar-inducing hyperness for the little trolls masquerading as trick-or-treaters. Dana grabbed for bag of peanut M & M's and Maw Maw slapped them out of her hand.

  "Your brother called," she said.

  "So?"

  "He's in trouble again," she sighed.

  "So?"

  "You can either go rescue him or hand out candy. Your choice."

  "Where's he at?"

  "Tanner's field."

  The doorbell rang. And rang. And rang. Dana peeked through the peephole and saw the red-faced army man. He screamed, "I want my Snickers bar! This is the Snickers house where the lady gives out full-size Snickers and I want my freakin' Snickers!"

  Dana quickly grabbed the squirt bottle full of water from the side table (she used it to spray Asscat when he scratched the side of the couch or when she got bored and wanted to see him run around the room) and opened the door.

  "Make my day," Dana said to the green army man.

  "I want my Snickers!"

  Dana shot a stream of water right into his assface.

  Army man fell on his butt, wet and sputtering. She aimed and shot another stream of water at his crotch for good measure. "Don't mess with Wonder Woman," Dana said.

  She closed the door and smiled at Maw Maw. "I'll go get Matt."

  ***

  Excerpt from Bad Romance:

  When I woke up the sun was bright and I was alone in bed. I could hear the shower on in the bathroom. I was lying on the bed with my feet at the top and my head at the bottom. The entire room smelled feral.

  The door opened a crack and Maw Maw stuck her head in. I pulled the covers over myself.

  "Breakfast is ready," she said.

  "I think I'm engaged," I blurted. "Or maybe even married."

  "Married? To a man?"

  "No, silly. To a woman. And I know two women can't get married in Oklahoma, but I think somebody forgot to tell her that."

  Maw Maw looked toward the bathroom, registered that somebody was in there and then looked back at me. "Don’t be making important decisions when you're naked, Dana. Take it from me, it never works out the way you think it will."

  "But Paw Paw and you got married after only one week of knowing each other."

  "Exactly." She closed the door behind her as Kimmy emerged from the bathroom wrapped only in a towel.

  "Do you love me?" I asked in that needy tone that I hated when other women used it on me.

  "I used your loofah sponge, didn't I?" she said like that was an an
swer to my question. She dropped the towel and I immediately forgot about everything else.

  Seven days and thirty-five orgasms later, I asked Kimmy, "Are you sure you love me?

  She replied, "I gave you half my tuna fish sandwich, didn't I?"

  One month later, I asked, "Do you really love me?"

  She smiled, patted my hand and said, "You got a free haircut, didn't you?"

  Three months later, "Do you love me?"

  "I'm home, aren't I?"

  Six months went by and I asked again, "Do you love me?"

  She said offhandedly, "You ask too many questions."

  A couple of weeks ago I asked her again and she said on her way out the door, "I'd love you more if you'd do a load of laundry for me.'"

  What a difference a year made. Kimmy didn't come home all the time or even most of the time. She stayed out all night three, maybe four, times a week. She had headaches and backaches and we never had sex.

  She began charging me for haircuts and never offered me half her tuna.

  I was beginning to think she didn't really love me in the first place.

  ***

  Judge Tanner's cornfield didn't have any corn and hadn't as long as Dana could remember. It was actually a makeshift airport landing strip. (Judge Tanner had his own airplane and used his field as he pleased.) The location was also used for traveling carnivals to set up their midway and rides every spring. By the time Dana drove Betty out onto the field half the town had already beat her there.

  She parked as close to the crowd as she could get without running over anybody. She squeezed through the mob, bumping people out of her way with her shoulders and hips to could get a good look-see. She craned her neck and saw Fat Matt, wearing what looked like a diaper, standing in the middle of an enormous mowed-down circle with his cell phone in one hand and a blue light saber in the other. He was swinging the saber around like Han Solo on speed. Or maybe more like Chewbacca with a bad case of mange.

  She wasn't at all surprised to find the mayor of Dooley Springs wearing only an adult diaper standing in the middle of a corn field waving a light saber. Dana knew what most other people didn't. Fat Matt wasn't crazy. He was not only sane but was a card-carrying member of MENSA. In high school he was voted Most Likely to Succeed. Instead, the summer after he gave the valedictorian speech (and the day after his one day as a gainfully employed, chicken neck-wringing citizen.), Matt stayed in his bedroom for three months without coming out. Maw Maw brought him meals on a tray and dumped out the Folger's can he used as a bedpan three times a day. At the end of his self-imprisonment, he had typed out a seventy-five page, single-spaced thesis aptly titled Matt's Manifesto. In it he detailed how he was going to "beat the system" by "never working for the man." He vowed that he would always "suck off the government's teat."