by Jane Heller
This thing. Nice.
I wheeled around to face him. I couldn’t let him go without telling him off for the first time in all our years together. I wouldn’t wimp out. Not anymore.
Mustering every ounce of courage I had, I looked him in the eye and parted my lips to speak.
“Yes?” he said in anticipation.
I froze. My mind was full of angry words but nothing came out of my mouth.
“What is it?” he said, tapping his foot on the Mexican tile floor.
I tried again, but his disapproving glare paralyzed me.
Fed up, he turned away.
“Go to bed, Barbara,” he said as he opened the front door, then walked down the stone path to his car.
“Go to hell, Mitchell,” I said finally, when I was sure he was too far away to hear me.
Chapter 2
I cried for about an hour after Mitchell left. Not because I was sorry to see him go, but because I was out of red wine. There’s nothing worse than running out of poison when you’re trying to kill yourself.
I decided to switch to vodka and made myself a Bloody Mary. And then I wolfed down an entire Tupperware container full of cold, sauceless spaghetti and made myself another Bloody Mary. And then I cried some more when it became clear to me that food and booze were no help at all; that no matter how much I ate and drank, I still felt like a hopeless failure with little chance of ever finding happiness.
I carried my glass into the living room, collapsed onto the sofa, and listened to the storm that had blown up outside. It was raining very hard, I noticed. But then it always rained hard in Banyan Beach in July, the middle of South Florida’s dreaded hurricane season, when the snowbirds had all gone north for the summer and only the locals were left to grumble about the heat, the humidity and the mosquitoes. Even when the storms weren’t hurricane-strength, they were often torrential, with booming thunder and swirling, battering winds. In fact, it was a loud crack of thunder that sent me weaving to the sliding glass door to flick on the outside light. Ever since we had moved into our four-bedroom/three-and-a-half-bath Key West–style house on a prime piece of oceanfront property, I had enjoyed watching storms from the living room. They were so dramatic, so intense. Everything my life wasn’t.
As the wind and rain pelted the door, I pressed my nose against the glass and saw that the ocean was swollen and churning. It seemed poised to rise up and swallow the house and me whole.
Would that really be so bad? I asked myself as I peered out at the stormy waters below. Would it really be so bad to be swallowed up by the ocean and carried off into a sea of darkness, to a place where my problems and failures could no longer eat away at me?
I took another sip of my Bloody Mary and felt my legs buckle slightly. I held on to the door handle to steady myself, then drank some more.
I was beyond drunk, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be in control of my thoughts or my actions. Not anymore. I was sick of being in control, sick of being straitjacketed by my feelings. I just wanted to run, to escape, to get away from Mitchell and Chrissy and everyone else in Banyan Beach who thought they knew Barbara Chessner, away from the fact that I had become a self-pitying woman who had once had dreams.
And then, despite the thunder and lightning and ferocious wind, I began to act out my unspoken wish. Almost as if someone were calling to me, beckoning to me, I clutched my glass, opened the sliding door, and staggered out onto the deck.
Within seconds, my clothes were soaked and my hair was matted against my head. I was numb to it, numb to the elements, numb to the fact that, by standing outside in a lightning storm, I was doing a foolish, dangerous thing.
Go back in the house, a different voice whispered from somewhere inside me. Go back in the house before it’s too late.
“Too late for what?” I said out loud, over the roar of the storm and the waves and my beating heart.
I was acting crazy, I knew. Overwrought. But I didn’t care if lightning did strike me. I was asking for it. I just didn’t know what “it” was. How could I know? There was no warning, no hint that I was about to become a “darksider,” as they call people who turn their bodies over to the devil.
The devil? What on earth did I know about the devil? My parents, the late Ira and Estelle Greenberg, had raised me to believe that there was no devil, just Republicans. Their idea of “evil” was a daughter who was still unmarried by the age of thirty. They were greatly relieved when I married Mitchell the week after my twenty-eighth birthday. But, as it turned out, I hadn’t escaped evil after all. Because there I was, standing outside in that storm, only seconds away from being taken over by the darkest evil of them all.
As the wind and rain lashed at my face, I gulped down what was left of my Bloody Mary, then hurled the empty glass onto the beach below and watched the ocean carry it away.
The gesture made me feel ridiculous, even sorrier for myself than I felt before, and I began to sob. Which only made me feel worse. There’s nothing more depressing in its redundancy than crying in the rain, except, maybe, crying in the shower.
“Please help me!” I wailed between sobs as I looked up at the black, angry sky. “I’m so alone and so repressed and so…drunk.” I began to wobble and grabbed on to the railing of the deck to keep myself from going down.
“My husband has just left me. My career has stalled, absolutely stalled.” I hiccuped. “And I’m fat and ugly and can’t express my feelings and no man will ever want me again.”
I was dizzy suddenly, and I felt a strange tingling sensation in my hands and feet, but I kept talking. It felt good to talk, good to let it all out at last.
“Please, won’t you help me?” I cried loud enough for them to hear me in Miami. “Please?”
I had no idea whom I was addressing, of course. I had assumed it was God. Who wouldn’t? Most of us believe that when we’re in big trouble and things look bleak, God is the one to call. How was I to know that somebody else was listening in?
“If you help me,” I went on, wiping my tears on the back of my hand, “I’ll do anything you ask. Anything. All you’ve got to do is break my real estate slump. Give me one sale—one decent sale—say, a house in the $500,000 to $750,000 range.”
I held my ears while I waited for a giant clap of thunder to pass.
“And on a more personal note,” I said, “I’ve waited my entire life to find true love. I realize that I’m not a blond glamorpuss like Chrissy Hemplewhite and that men are not exactly lining up to take Mitchell’s place in my bed. Well…what I’m trying to say is…” I stopped. My old paralysis took over. I was about to say something revealing and I froze.
A strong gust of wind nearly blew me off the deck and I had trouble catching my breath.
“Okay, okay,” I gasped, sensing that if I didn’t finish my speech soon, I never would. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want to stop being a mouse. I’m sick of living the life of the woman in the proverbial ‘before’ ad, the woman who doesn’t get noticed, doesn’t get taken seriously, doesn’t get the man of her dreams.” There. I said it. “I want things to change. I want me to change. I want—”
There was another crash of thunder, this one shaking the deck of my house, throwing me completely off-balance and sending me to the ground with a thud. I lay there for several seconds, trembling, clinging for dear life to the railing, shielding my face from the bracing wind.
And then, suddenly, at the very moment when I wondered if I might actually die in the storm, it was the wind that died. Just like that. One minute the air was turbulent, the next it was perfectly still. What’s more, the thunder and lightning virtually ceased and the ocean became as calm as a lake. It was as if someone had pulled a switch to the “off” position.
Stunned by the dramatic change in the atmosphere, I bolted up and gazed into the sky. It was no longer black but a brilliant, almost transparent blue, which, in itself, was pretty weird, considering that it was nearly ten o’clock at night. Even weirder was the fact tha
t there were dozens of silvery little faces dotting the sky. No kidding. At first, I thought they were stars, but when I looked again, I saw that they had eyes and noses and mouths—and one of them appeared to wink at me!
I laughed for the first time in months and figured I was having one hell of an alcoholic hallucination.
Little did I know that I was not hallucinating; that what I saw represented the opening round in a tug of war for my soul; that what I was about to become was no laughing matter.
Chapter 3
The first thing that struck me when I woke up the next morning was that I didn’t have a hangover. In fact, given the amount of alcohol I’d consumed, I felt remarkably clearheaded.
The second thing that was strange was that I didn’t miss Mitchell’s presence in the house—not in the slightest—even though we’d been together for nearly a decade.
And then there was my singing, which was miraculously on key. I had always been tone deaf—the kid in school who was asked to mouth the words to “The Star Spangled Banner.” But on that particular morning, the Morning After, I turned on the radio before getting out of bed and found myself harmonizing with Gloria Estefan. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I can tell you that I sounded pretty damn good.
At six-forty-five I got up, put on a robe, and padded to the kitchen, thoughts of poached eggs, English muffins, and crispy bacon dancing in my head. I was just about to open the refrigerator when the barking started.
It was loud and insistent and incredibly annoying, and, since I didn’t own a dog and neither did my neighbors, I wondered where it was coming from.
“Aw, shut up,” I growled as the barking went on. And on and on. Exasperated, I walked to the front door, opened it, and looked outside for the offending canine. I didn’t have to look far: it was sitting on my doorstep, taking in the warm sun, its tail wagging back and forth like an out-of-control windshield wiper.
It was a big black dog with a short, shiny coat, floppy ears, and a small white patch on its chest.
“Shoo! Get away!” I shouted and waved my arms at it.
I hated dogs, never could see why people found them so cute and cuddly. As far as I could tell, all they did was bark and drool and sniff your crotch.
“Wuf! Wuf! Wuf!” the dog barked again, looking at me intently, its eyes a rather intriguing hazel.
It’s one of those Labrador retrievers, I realized, remembering Jethro, the dog my brother, Benjamin, used to have. A refugee from the sixties, Benjamin named all his dogs after his favorite rock groups or their songs. Consequently, there was the Lab named Jethro, as in Tull; the Boxer named Floyd, as in Pink; and the golden retriever named Vida, as in In-a-Gadda-Da.
Not knowing this dog’s name, I opted for the generic “Fido.”
“Pipe down, Fido,” I said.
To my amazement, it did pipe down. It cocked its head at me and made that pitiful, whining sound that dogs make when they want to be petted or fed or thrown a Frisbee.
“Look, are you lost or something?” I said, knowing the feeling. My husband had dumped me, I was a bust at my job, and on a scale of one to ten my self-esteem was a minus seven.
As the dog continued to whine, I bent down and looked to see if it was wearing any tags. There were two.
I reached out and tried to examine them, but Fido took the gesture as an invitation to stick its nose up my bathrobe.
“Hey. Cut it out,” I snapped.
Fido pulled his snout away from my privates.
I grabbed hold of its collar and saw that one tag had its Animal Control license number and the date of its rabies shots. The other tag had its name, which, apparently, was Pete.
“Pete,” I mused. “So you’re a boy. Now let’s see where you live.”
I squinted in the sunlight and tried to read the address on the tag. Then I bolted up straight.
“But this can’t be,” I said out loud. According to the tag, Pete’s address was my address!
Was this somebody’s idea of a joke? I wondered. Had Mitchell gotten a dog and forgotten to tell me? Or was the address on the tag a mistake, a typo or clerical error made by the Animal Control office?
There was one way to find out. I made a mental note of Pete’s license number, left him barking and whining, and went back inside the house to call Animal Control.
“Hello,” I said pleasantly. “I’m calling to report a stray dog. A black Labrador retriever named Pete.”
“Do you know who his owner is?” asked the man on the phone.
“No, but I know his license number.” I gave it to him.
“Hang on a second,” he said. “I’ll look it up.”
I waited.
“Okay. I’ve got the owner’s name,” he said. “We’ll pick the dog up and issue the owner a warning. We have a leash law in Banyan Beach, you know.”
“I do know,” I said. “That’s why I called.”
“Not that a lot of people care,” he went on. “Some of them let their pets run all over town.”
“So I see,” I said. “Oh, there’s one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“There’s some sort of mistake on the dog’s tag,” I said.
“What sort of mistake?” he asked.
“It says his address is 666 Seacrest Way,” I said.
“Right. That’s what I’ve got in my records,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” I said politely.
“I said that’s what I’ve got in my records,” he said.
“But that’s impossible,” I said. “My address is 666 Seacrest Way and I don’t own a dog.”
“You sure?”
“I’m positive.”
“What’s your name, lady?”
“Barbara Chessner.”
“Well, according to my records, you’re Pete’s owner, Mrs. Chessner.”
Maybe I am hung over, I thought. Or maybe I have Alzheimer’s. Maybe I do own a dog and don’t remember.
But that was absurd. I had never had a pet in my entire life. Not a dog or a cat or even a parakeet. Well, that wasn’t quite true. When I was six or seven, I did have a turtle named Willie, but Willie didn’t count. He never moved a muscle, not even when I’d poke his shell with a pencil. For the longest time I thought he was dead, and then it turned out that he was.
“I’m sorry, but there must be a mix-up,” I said to the Animal Control officer. “The dog that’s barking outside my front door belongs to someone else.”
“Look, lady,” he said, “I don’t know what your problem is, but I suggest you get a grip. If you’re Barbara Chessner of 666 Seacrest Way, then Pete is all yours.”
I was angry now. How dare he tell me to get a grip!
I swallowed hard and felt all my muscles tense. I didn’t appreciate being patronized and I was dying to tell the guy off. But I couldn’t, of course. Not me, the gutless wonder. God forbid, a perfect stranger should get mad at me.
I was about to hang up the phone and sit in a corner with my tail between my legs when all of a sudden I heard myself say to the Animal Control officer in a loud voice:
“What’s your name?”
“My name?” he asked. “Ted Benson. Why?”
“Because I intend to tell your superior how rude and insensitive you’ve been,” I said in an angry tone I simply didn’t recognize. “I’m not an idiot and I won’t be treated like one.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Chessner,” he said, suddenly full of remorse. “I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
“The hell you didn’t,” I shouted, and slammed the phone down.
Shouted? Slammed down the phone? Me?
Oh my God, I thought, as I sat there, my whole body trembling. Did I really do that? Did I really get angry at someone? At a live person? What was going on?
I shook my head and went back into the kitchen and tried to figure out why I had suddenly been able to vent my frustration. It wasn’t like me. It just wasn’t. I had to admit, though, that it hadn’t felt terrible to say wha
t I thought for a change, to get it off my chest. It was liberating—and so easy! What’s more, it was fun. Why had I waited so long to try it?
I made myself a huge breakfast, then took a hot shower, hoping I could scald the alcohol out of my system and begin to make sense of everything that was happening to me. But when I emerged from the bathroom, there was a brand-new set of puzzles to solve.
As I looked down at my naked body, I noticed that my breasts were bigger! Not Dolly Parton size, by any means, but not my usual flat-as-a-board either.
I hurried over to the mirror above my dresser and peered at them. Yes, they were definitely bigger—two or three cup sizes bigger! And fuller, higher, voluptuous even!
I turned sideways and examined them in profile. It was uncanny! They really stuck out!
When I turned to face the mirror and squeezed my breasts together, I couldn’t believe my eyes: I had achieved real cleavage for the first time in my life! Who needed the WonderBra!
Don’t get excited, I told myself. Money doesn’t grow on trees and boobs don’t grow on thirty-eight-year-old real estate agents. It’s probably just a matter of fat redistribution. And speaking of fat, it appeared that I had lost weight. My second chin seemed to have disappeared, and my stomach didn’t protrude the way it usually did.
What was going on here? My flat breasts had gotten fat and my fat stomach had gotten flat—and I had just put away two poached eggs, two English muffins, six strips of bacon, and a half a package of frozen hash browns. Not exactly Lean Cuisine. Had I been visited by a space alien who liposucked me while I slept and gave me breast implants? Or had all the booze I’d been drinking melted my fat cells as well as my brain cells?
As I continued to stare at myself in the mirror, my eyes drifted upward and I saw that my hair had undergone a dramatic makeover too! The color was no longer gray; it was blond—a golden, glittering blond! And the texture was smoother, straighter, more “relaxed.” Could it be the new shampoo I’d been using? I’d seen several over-the-hill movie actresses endorsing the product on TV infomercials and figured that if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. But turn my prematurely gray hair blond?