Shaken and Stirred

by Joan Opyr

  “I am doing something with myself. I’m taking myself to Kim’s.”

  “We have a line just for the younger woman,” Jean said. She arrayed sample packets of lotion, miniature lipsticks, and plastic vials of perfume before her like a hand of cards. “Skin care products, lip glosses, eye shadow.”

  “Thank you,” I smiled politely, “but I don’t need anything.”

  “Every woman needs a little enhancement.” Jean spoke in a shaky Blue Ridge Mountain drawl that must, at one time, have been seductive. “You’re a pretty girl when you smile.”

  “Well,” I said, smiling now like Miss America with a gun to her head, “I suppose I could use a bottle of Skin So Soft. We’ve used it for years to repel fleas.”

  That made my mother laugh. Nana scowled at both of us.

  “A sixteen-ounce bottle?” Jean said.

  “I use it, too,” Nana said quickly. “I’ve always loved the way it smells.”

  “Makes your skin feel like a soft chamois,” Jean agreed. “Would you maybe like two bottles, so you don’t get your personal moisturizer and the dawg’s bottle mixed up?”

  At that moment, the dawg had two feet on the stovetop and was eating leftover hamburger out of a frying pan. “Bad boy!” Nana said. “Maurice, get down!” And then to Jean, “Yes, why don’t we do that. I’ll keep his in the laundry room.”

  “Write his name on it with a Sharpie Marker,” Jean suggested.

  The squeak of the back door followed by a low growl from Maurice told me that Hunter had come in. He’d been out looking for Fred, who had disappeared from work on Friday shortly after getting his paycheck.

  “Find Fred under any bar stools?” I asked.

  My grandmother stiffened. Hunter, however, was all smiles. He’d caught sight of Jean and was delighted to find a fresh female audience. The charm was switched on and ratcheted up to insulin-provoking levels.

  “Hello, Ms. Jean,” he said, drawing the words out to their maximum length. “What brings you over here?”

  “Avon,” Jean croaked. “My new job. How are you today, Hunter?”

  “I’m just as fine as frog’s hair,” he replied. “It’s the damnedest thing, though. I can’t find my brother or my Masonic ring. I lost the one on Friday and the other about a week ago. I have been over hell’s half acre looking for both of them.”

  “White gold with a three-quarter carat diamond,” Nana said, shaking her head sadly. “I hate to think where something that valuable might have gotten to.”

  “Have you reported your brother as a missing person?” Jean asked.

  “No,” I said, “but we’ve called the dog catcher.”

  My mother laughed. Jean winced, perhaps thinking of her expertise in being a missing person. Hunter pulled up a chair at the dining room table and drummed out the William Tell Overture with his fingertips. He treated Jean to a wide-lipped grin.

  “I might just do that, Ms. Jean. I might just.”

  In Hunter’s scheme of things, women fell into two categories, damn relatives and sweet things. Sometimes the two crossed over. When he was happy with us, he called us honey, sugar, and babe. I hated the way both of my grandparents interacted with members of the opposite sex. Hunter became Sir Goofus Gallant, fawning and obsequious. Nana grew flustered and helpless, batting her eyelashes and fanning herself with one limp hand.

  Jean wrote down our order and stood up to leave. “I have five more stops today,” she said brightly. “If ya’ll know anyone who might appreciate a catalog or a visit from Avon, ya’ll let me know.”

  “We’ll do that,” Hunter said. “Here now, let me help you with all of that.” All of that was a bag of samples weighing less than a pound.

  “I’m going too,” I told my mother. “I’ll be back sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Do me a favor,” my mother said, eyeing my grandfather. “Take the dog with you. The DiMarcos have a fenced yard, don’t they?”

  I nodded and snapped a leash onto Maurice’s collar. I followed Hunter and Jean outside. Her car, a navy blue Cutlass Supreme, was parked next to my mother’s battered old Cadillac. As I opened the back door for Maurice, Hunter opened Jean’s door. He dropped the sample bag onto her back seat. Then he paused. I watched as he bent over and picked up something shiny from the blue carpeting behind the driver’s seat.

  Jean climbed in and waved at us both. I closed the door on Maurice and leaned against it, watching Hunter. When Jean was out of the driveway and up the street, I said, “What was that thing you picked up?”

  He kicked a piece of gravel with the toe of his leather work shoe. “An eighth-inch socket,” he said. “One of the mechanics must have dropped it when he was working on her car.”

  “She had her car in for repairs?”

  “Those ’83 Cutlasses aren’t worth the shit on a shit-ass’s shoe,” he said. “It’s always something.”

  I climbed into my mother’s car and started the engine. Hunter came around the front and tapped on my window.

  “Here,” he said, fishing his wallet out of his back pocket and handing me a twenty-dollar bill. “Buy you and your friends some pizza tonight.”

  Just then, I wasn’t clever enough to put two and two together. All I knew was that what he’d picked up from the back of Jean’s car was no socket, it was his Masonic ring, and that twenty bucks wasn’t a gift, it was a bribe.

  Early Sunday morning, the Capitol Area Police found Uncle Fred passed out beneath the statue of Sir Walter Raleigh. Fred’s pants were down around his ankles. Someone had stolen his wallet and his new Florsheim Imperial dress boots. That afternoon, I went with Hunter to retrieve him from the drunk tank.

  Hunter berated him all the way to his boarding house. Fred didn’t say a word. He was still drunk. Mrs. Jones met him at the top of the steps, her artificial leg shining pink beneath her tan support hose. She took his arm and they walked together into the house.

  When we got home, my mother said, “Well?”

  “The cops loaned him a pair of pants, and a pair of shoes,” I said. “Did you know that they keep old clothes and stuff that the prisoners leave behind? It was like a flea market in there.”

  “No,” said my mother. “I didn’t know that. Too bad. He deserved to ride home naked.”

  I agreed. “He’d cashed his entire pay check. What he didn’t drink up was stolen.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to feed him all next week,” Nana said.

  “So what else is new?” my mother asked.

  I sat up late that night, trying to write an essay about Henry IV, Part One. From Sophocles to Shakespeare in one week’s time was quite a leap. Our English teacher, Mr. Reynolds, had decided to cram us full of random classics in the final quarter in order to make up for his dawdling approach during the first thirty weeks. The GT Magnet program ate first-year teachers for breakfast.

  I tried to concentrate, but every time the phone rang, I ran to answer it. It was never Susan. Lucky Eddie called to confirm that May 23 was my graduation date and to say that he was looking forward to meeting all my friends. I wondered if he’d had a religious conversion, some late night experience at a tent revival that made him pretend to be nice.

  At midnight, I gave up on Henry IV and went to bed. I didn’t think Falstaff was funny at all, just another fat bastard drinking wine and eating chicken.

  My father had visited only once during the first year after we left Michigan. He’d shown up at Thanksgiving with divorce papers for my mother to sign and a wad of twenties held together with a gold money clip shaped like a dollar sign. My mother reminded him that he hadn’t sent her any child support yet. He told her the check was in the mail. Then he insisted on taking us all out to dinner at the Kanki Japanese Steak House.

  He didn’t notice my eye until Nana pointed it out to him. He looked at it for a moment before stuffing another piece of steak in his mouth.

  “That’s nothing,” he said. “One day at work, I got a metal sliver lodged under my right eyelid. Hur
t like hell, but I taped the eye shut with two strips of electrical tape and then drove myself to the hospital.”

  My mother rolled her eyes. “What a load of . . .”

  “Amazing,” I interrupted.

  “Unbelievable,” my mother corrected.

  When we dropped Eddie off at his hotel room, my grandfather asked if he could come in for a moment to use the bathroom. Eddie said sure. Hunter was gone for about ten minutes.

  When he came back out, my grandmother asked, “What in the world were you doing in there?”

  “Pissing knee-deep in his shampoo bottle,” Hunter said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kim DiMarco’s family was moderately rich. Her father was a retired IBM executive, and her mother sold high-end real estate. In high school, it seemed to me that she was filthy, stinking, beyondthe-dreams-of-avarice rich. At the entrance to her neighborhood—a collection of monstrously large houses, each with a great circular driveway planted on an acre of lushly maintained lawn—was a small stone gatehouse. It sat unoccupied on the grass median, shaded by an old oak tree. I was both fascinated and repulsed by that gatehouse. It had been built purely for effect, a folly for those who looked to Masterpiece Theatre as an arbiter of taste. “I’m the lodge,” it said. “Welcome to the manor. Please doff your cap to the occupants within.”

  The effect, thankfully, was spoiled by the DiMarcos themselves. Kim’s father, Vince, looked more like Chef Boyardee than to the manor born. He was a short, fat man with a bushy gray mustache and a wide, waddling gait. Her mother, Norma, was a heavybreasted woman with slapdash hair, who always looked as if she’d thrown on her clothes while running to escape a house fire. Had the DiMarcos been more polished nouveau riche, or more attentive to their daughter, it would have been easy to envy Kim. As it was, I only resented the breezy assurance with which she contemplated the future. Kim couldn’t imagine not getting what she wanted out of life—an education at an Ivy League college, a junior year abroad, and big, easy piles of money.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t want to go to the prom,” she said, pinching off a string of mozzarella and chewing it thoughtfully. “You only get one chance. Then we all graduate and high school is over.”

  “You don’t believe all that bullshit about high school being the best years of our lives, do you? I’m looking forward to college. And graduate school. And getting a job and an apartment and a dog who isn’t Maurice.” I softened this blow by reaching out to scratch behind Maurice’s left ear. He sighed and stretched out a lazy paw.

  Kim laughed, a low gurgling sound. “Okay, it’s true that the prom isn’t important in the great scheme of things, but it is one of those quintessential high school experiences. It’s a Hallmark moment. Do you want to miss a Hallmark moment?”

  “I do if it means dancing and wearing a ball gown.”

  “I like to dance,” Abby said. She sat on the floor, reclining against the front of the sofa. Five slices of pepperoni pizza had forced her to unbutton the top of her jeans. “Too bad I don’t know anyone who knows how.”

  “How about you, Kim?” I asked. “Are you up on all your groovy moves?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Kim closed her eyes and folded her hands behind her head, stretching out full length on the brown carpet of her parents’ rec room. Annie Lennox flashed up on the console television behind her, singing, “Here comes the rain again.” Kim assumed a look of concentrated bliss and turned the sound up with the remote control. “I love this song. I wish I looked like Annie Lennox.”

  “I have the haircut,” I said. “But it’s not enough.”

  She curled her lip in disgust. Kim was all hips and breasts, with a narrow waist that emphasized both. “You lie. You’ve got that whole androgynous thing going on; what with your hair and your eyes and your whole . . . I don’t know what.”

  “Your whole way of being,” Abby supplied. “You could go to the prom in a tux, Poppy. That would be very Annie Lennox.”

  “Picture me doing that with Dave,” I said, turning away to hide my blush.

  Abby made a wry face. “Can’t see it,” she agreed.

  “You should go to the prom, Abby,” Kim said. “John and Joe have both asked you.”

  This was news to me. I looked at Abby, who shrugged. “I don’t want to go with them.”

  “You’re both weird,” Kim said. “An invitation to the prom is not a marriage proposal. It’s one night out on the town. It’s somewhere to go and something to do.”

  Kim lived her life in constant search of social stimulation. She was extraordinarily smart. She whizzed through complex math problems with such ease that she’d exhausted the advanced classes at our high school by the time she was a sophomore. For the past two years, she’d been leaving campus in the afternoons to take courses at N. C. State. She made up for academic boredom with an excess of personal excitement. She was a man-magnet. I never asked and she never told, but I suspected she’d been sexually active since junior high.

  Abby struggled to rebutton her pants. She soon gave up and dropped the zipper down an inch instead. “Where are your parents this weekend, Kimmy? Timbuktu?”

  “Atlanta, visiting my brother and his wife. They won’t be back until next week. Then they’re off for a month in France.”

  “Must be nice,” Abby and I said in unison.

  Kim was the youngest of five. Her parents were at least twenty years older than my mother and Edna. One of Kim’s sisters was in her thirties, and her youngest brother was twenty-four. It was like being an only child, only better. Kim’s parents practiced a form of benign neglect. It didn’t matter what she did—drink, smoke, or stay out all night—they’d seen it all before. She didn’t have a long leash; from the time she was sixteen, she had no leash at all. Vince and Norma seemed to regard her as little more than a handy house-sitter.

  “Dad’s retired,” Kim said, “and my mother might as well be. Why should they hang around Raleigh?”

  “To make sure you graduate,” Abby replied. “MIT might be holding a spot for you, but if you flunk English, you’ll find yourself in summer school. You’re as bad as this one,” she jerked her thumb in my direction. “Can’t think about Calculus because she’s too busy thinking about you know what.”

  “What?”

  “Boys. Sex.”

  “I am not!”

  “You forgot your locker combination twice this week. You drift around, not paying attention when people are talking to you. Like me. Are you going to dish with the dirt or what?”

  “There’s no dirt to dish,” I said.

  “If you don’t want to share, that’s fine.” Kim pushed her glasses up on her nose and reached for another slice of pizza. “We’re your best friends, but why should you tell us anything?”

  “She’s not acting like this about Dave,” Abby observed. “No one would act like this about Dave. It’s got to be someone else.”

  “Tell us about him,” Kim whispered conspiratorially. “I’ll tell you about my prom date. I met him at State.”

  “There is no him. Tell us about your date.”

  “Right,” Abby said. “She’s lying.” She turned to Kim. “You tell first. Show her how it’s done.”

  “His name is Kevin. I helped him with some differential equations. Very cute, tall with green eyes. He’s got curly brown hair with this kind of wayward piece that keeps falling into his eyes. I want to reach out and brush it back for him.”

  “Okay,” said Abby, “the picture I’m getting is messy. Another one of those math nerds in dirty jeans and worn out loafers with no socks. Just like . . . what’s his name?”

  “André,” I said. “He wasn’t messy. He was French.”

  “That’s not nice,” Kim said. “Who else am I going to meet except math nerds? I’m a math nerd.”

  “Not entirely,” Abby said. “You’re on the volleyball team.”

  “I’m the worst player on the team. They keep me out of pity for my nerdiness.”

  “We actuall
y keep you because you help us with our homework.”

  She reached out and pinched me on the arm. “Fine. Where did you meet your mystery man? We’re the only people you hang out with besides the volleyball team. Wait—it’s not one of our teammates, is it? I know. It’s Patty Abbott. She’s tall, dark, and handsome, and you sat next to her on the way to the Millbrook game.”

  Lesbian jokes were common on all the teams on which I played. Homophobia and women’s sports went hand in hand. We accused one another of being gay in order to prove that we weren’t, and we accused our opponents because we thought they probably were. Nevertheless, I stared at her in blank astonishment. A hot flush stole up my cheeks, and I could feel Abby’s shrewd brown eyes appraising me.

  Kim laughed. “Don’t get bent out of shape. I was just kidding.”

  At that moment, the doorbell rang. Maurice jumped up, barking, and followed Kim up the basement steps.

  Abby poked an experimental finger at the last slice of pizza before firmly slamming down the cardboard lid. “No. If I eat one more bite, I’ll explode.”

  Upstairs, Kim was laughing loudly while several male voices fought to be heard over top of one another. I recognized Alan, Joe, and the inevitable Dave. The rest, no doubt, were on their way.

  “Damn,” I said, gesturing at the ceiling. “It sounds like a party.”

  Abby frowned. “It’s Saturday night and Kim’s parents are out of town. I told my mother I was staying over, but if she finds out there were guys here, she’ll skin me alive.”

  “Don’t tell her.”

  “I won’t, but that doesn’t mean she won’t know. The woman is psychic.” Abby stood up and, after a brief struggle, finally succeeded in fastening her jeans. “Here,” she said, looking down at me. “I saw your face when Kim said that thing earlier. When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be there.”

  I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what she meant. I looked at her squarely. One thing I’d learned about having a permanently dilated eye was that people found it disconcerting when you deliberately stared at them. “Until I’m ready to talk about what? Is there something you want to hear?”