Debra offered a breathy, “What?”
“I realized. It wasn’t my car. I didn’t say a word. So here I am sitting in someone else’s car with Marie, thanking the triple-A guy like crazy, just wanting to get rid of him.” Julie was laughing and breathing and talking—no trouble at all. Debra couldn’t help but laugh, slowed down to do it, holding a painful stitch in her side. Breathing heavily she barely got the words out, “give-me-a-minute.” Julie was still jogging and talking like Debra was right beside her. Twenty feet or so Julie looked back.
“Come on Deb. Walk it out. It’s not good to completely stop.”
Debra walked slowly, still holding her side, tickled by Julie’s tale “. . . someone else’s car,” she said between breaths. “I can’t believe it.”
The next day Debra went jogging with Julie again. Keeping the same moderate pace, she pushed on until the stitch in her side became unbearable, and walked the rest of the way. She came back the next day and the day after that. Julie would run ahead and circle back, the entire time chit-chatting up close, then far off. There was an energy between the two, Julie’s inexhaustible, Debra’s relentless, an energy that bonds two people, as different as they were.
Debra pushed on farther and farther every day, until she could keep up with Julie. In all this time, not a single man stood out among the rest, at least it seemed that way.
There were trails and circles and lanes and drives and courts and roads packed into one development. Julie had always jogged a different route to be adventurous. But she didn’t know which way led to the house of Smitten; that would be the route to avoid. He could have been watching them from anywhere. Maybe one of the sidewalk people, the few there were, who smiled sometimes and offered polite hellos with mechanical nods.
Being the middle of summer there was no shortage of men. He could have been riding a bike, or walking a dog. He could have been mowing a lawn or watering plants or washing his car or one of the men outside listening to the ball game on the radio. Without a letter in all this time Julie figured the home wrecker had moved on and that was that. She would learn later that Kyle was hiding the letters, lots of them. It was by chance that Julie was vacuuming, moving tables and chairs and the like. Kyle always tossed the mail on a small table next to the phone at the base of the stairway, always as though he hadn’t gone through it. She dusted the table first and then moved it to vacuum, and saw an envelope that had slipped behind. It was dated three days ago, and addressed to her, a letter from Anonymous.
Julie,
Have you guessed who I am? Thank you for not getting me into trouble. I go crazy whenever I see you jogging past my house. Your friend is cute, but she’s not beautiful like you. I found out some things about you to see how much we have in common. My favorite dish is Lobster Newburg, the same as yours. My next favorite dish is you. I’ll bet you taste good. I love the way your hair curls around your temples and the way you smile. I love you so much that it is getting harder every day to keep my distance. I want to feel your body against mine. I want to make love to you. Don’t worry, I would never force myself on you or even try to approach you. I will wait until you come to me. Meet me. Please meet me Friday night at 8:00 P.M. in the restaurant where we first met. Not on the main floor, but in the lower floor lounge where it is dark and crowded, no one will know.
Every time I close my eyes, I see you. You are all I think about. Please meet me. I have to know if I have a chance with you or if you are going to break my heart. I will love you as long as I live. I am Smitten.
Chapter 13
Debra hurried to the basement; Julie would be here any minute. The dryer door was still open, a freshly dried load in the laundry basket on the floor. She’d left it there when she’d heard the phone ring and had run upstairs. That’s what you did before answering machines, you ran from wherever you were. The answering machine was a great invention, if only she could stop the impulse to race to the phone.
It still irked her that the laundry room was downstairs, a place where spiders beget generations of spiders. No matter how much she’d pleaded to have it anywhere else, that’s where all the wiring was. She tried to make do, broom-scrubbing the quarry-stone walls with a bleach solution, vacuuming the unfinished ceiling. But spiders came back in full force—hanging from the ceiling, spinning spider sacks between water pipes overhead. She started out by spraying them one at a time with ant killer spray. One spun down its web and landed on her. She figured it must have died somewhere in the middle of her tribal dance, a dance that she’d perfected. She’d set off a bug bomb, the basement sealed shut; but it didn’t take long for a new batch of spiders to migrate back to their old breeding ground.
Because the well had been low for at least a month, she’d been taking clothes to the Laundromat, and had been hanging them on the clothesline. Unchecked in all that time, the spider webs in the basement had multiplied to outrageous proportions. So much so that she wound webs like cotton candy in a broom so they wouldn’t cling to her hair.
Anxious to be ready when Julie got here, she hurriedly whisked up the left-behind basket while on the lookout for crawly things. And carrying it, she could have sworn the clothes in the basket were moving. She looked closer, thinking the sparse lighting had shifted shadows somehow. That’s when a snake slithered out through the weave of the basket, over her arm, and dropped to the floor. Screaming all the while, Debra pitched the basket straight up, reinventing the tribal dance to a secondhand chair. Still screaming, she swiped her arms in a fury, as she teetered on the chair.
A voice yelled to her from the top of the stairs, “Deb? Is that you?”
“There’s a snake down here. It fell out of the clothes all over me. Now it’s under the chair . . .” Debra said, her words high-pitched rolling together, “. . . I can’t move. It’s right under me. I can see it. It’s huge . . .”
Julie came downstairs and stopped at the bottom step. “How’d it get down here?”
“I don’t know.”
Julie scanned the dungeon-like setting. “You’ve got some juicy spiders down here,” and let a shudder take hold. “I think I can move it away from you.” Julie tiptoed off the bottom step and took the broom from the corner. “If you leave it alone, it might just eat all these spiders,” she said, big-eyed, a sideways grin.
“How about I move out and let the thing keep the place?” Debra stuck to the wooden chair, its broad seat gummed in old varnish.
“I’ll sweep him over to the corner, you get the clothes. You can decide what to do with him later.” Just then a snake coiled in the broom bristles slid off, onto Julie’s shoe. She screamed the way Debra had, flinging the broom, joining Debra on the chair. Huddled together they saw a third snake crawl out from under the dryer, both of them pointing it out in a duet of screams. Then Julie said, “I hate to say this, snakes can climb you know.”
They bounced off the chair, and ran up the stairs two steps at a time. Breathing hard, they slammed the basement door shut behind them, and leaned into it with their backs. On this side of the door, the two of them started to laugh. It didn’t make sense but here they were, laughing anyway, holding their stomachs, their eyes tearing in senseless laughter. Happy senseless laughter.
“Greg’s heard me scream so often, he regards it as part of the ambiance,” Debra said in a gleeful laugh.
“And you’re so good at it. You could put yours in a scary movie. This whole house would make a good scary movie. I love the kind that make you jump out of your skin. And boy did I ever.”
“You can have it. The house and all. I’ll box up those snakes and wrap them up in a big red bow.”
“You’ll have to catch them first.”
“I’d shoot them if I had to. If my mom taught me anything, she taught me how to shoot.”
“Your mom? Your mom taught you how to shoot? Does she live around here?”
Debra felt her face getting red. The laughing was done, the smile gone. The last she heard, her mother was having shock treatme
nt therapy in the psychiatric ward of the Hamilton County Prison. “She’s in Cincinnati. I don’t see her much.”
“You’re so lucky to have a mom. I’d love to meet her.”
“Look what time it is. We better get going. I wanted to be back before Greg gets home.”
Chapter 14
“Did you bring the letter?” Debra retied her tennis shoes, a long stretch of sidewalk ahead.
“It’s gone. Kyle ripped it up and threw it away.” Julie was pulling her spiral curls into a ponytail, talking through a clip in her teeth. “I should have hidden it.”
“Did he read it?”
“Yeah. Then he went crazy. He got so mad I swear I think something’s wrong with him.”
“You should tell him you might need those letters. What if that man breaks in your house or something? Is there any way of taping it back together?”
“He dumped coffee grounds on it. I should have known better than to let him see it.”
“What did it say?” Debra asked, keeping pace, jogging next to Julie.
“He thinks you’re cute.”
“Me? I can’t believe it. He’s seen me?”
“Evidently. And somehow, he’s learning more about me, personal things.”
“I think it’s time to call the police.”
“I did. We don’t have a police department out here; I had to call the sheriff. They won’t do anything, not unless he threatens me. To them, he’s nothing more than a secret admirer.” Julie started jogging faster. She always did that when she was anxious. “I have an idea . . . .”
“Yeah . . .” Debra quickened her pace to match Julie’s.
“I’m going to be at the fair all next week . . . . I’ve got just enough time before I leave. How would you like to go out for an evening?”
Debra struggled to pace her breathing. “Sure.” She wished that Julie would slow down. This pace was too fast. She could feel her legs starting to hurt, a growing stitch in her side.
“Let’s go out Friday night.”
“Where to?”
“You don’t think Greg will mind, do you?”
“Why would he? It’s not like we’re going to a bar.” Debra’s words were spaced between breaths.
“What about a lounge?”
Debra didn’t answer. She hated bars or whatever they were called. She hated men like her stepfather; their drunken liquor smell, their suggestive leers, their clumsy-feeling touch. She remembered how she cowered in a corner booth while her mother Aida pointed out the evil men at the bar, her mother saying these men will hurt you, they’ll strip you naked and they will hurt you. But then left her there so she could drink with them.
“Why do you want to go there?”
“His letter said to meet him in the lounge at the restaurant where I used to work. If I could actually meet him, I’d tell him to knock it off. I’d tell him it’s not flattering; he’s just upsetting my husband, and he needs to stop,” Julie answered. “Besides, I want to connect a face to the letters. It really bothers me that I don’t know who he is.”
“Do you think it’s safe? I mean . . . look what his letters suggest.”
“I’ve thought about it and thought about it and you know what? I think he’s just a businessman who got wrapped up in his own fantasies. I don’t think he’s dangerous. Probably just the opposite.”
“Aren’t you worried about Kyle?”
“Kyle doesn’t have to know.”
“I think he’ll figure it out if you just happen to disappear on the same night that man wants to meet you.”
“I’ll figure something out. I have to go, but I don’t want to give him the wrong idea. Go with me . . . please.”
“. . . I’ll talk to Greg.” Debra focused ahead on a big oak tree, watching it get closer as she jogged, visualizing the different bars that Aida had taken her to. Debra would go for Julie’s sake. If that’s what she had to do.
Later on that night Debra talked about it to Greg.
“. . . because Julie’s my friend.”
“But you hate those places. You’ve said it a hundred times.” Greg was sympathetic to a degree. “I don’t care if you go, but I can’t understand why you would.”
Debra cooled her hands around a glass of ice tea. “You know I don’t want to. I get the impression that women in those kind of places line up like chattel, and let themselves be auctioned off to the highest bidder. People say they’re meeting places, but they’re more like meat markets to me.”
“You wouldn’t be in this spot if you had just said no. If she really was your friend, she would have understood,” he said, studying her eyes.
“It’s a non-issue. Kyle won’t let her go.”
“Your eye looks funny. What did you do to your eye?”
“I must have been rubbing it.” She took a compact mirror out of her purse and saw a small bald spot in her lashes where she’d mindlessly pulled them out. “I need a bigger mirror.” Debra went right to the bathroom, closed and locked the door. She’d never told Greg about pulling her eyelashes, too ashamed to tell anybody. She quickly filled in the spot with an eyeliner pencil. Something she did very well. Then she went back to the living room where Greg was. “I must have been rubbing it. It’s just a little red.”
“How well do you know Julie? I think she’s already made up her mind. You were the deciding factor, not Kyle.”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to go,” Debra said.
“Then I’m going too. You never know what a man like that’ll do.”
“Julie says she thinks he’s just a businessman who’s got a warped sense of love. He’s probably harmless. If he sees you, we’ll never get this over with. It’s in a ritzy restaurant. You don’t have to go.”
Greg took her hand and kissed her palm. He loved her so. She knew this much. She rested her head in the nape of his shoulder. “I hate those places.”
“I know . . . .You’ve got to learn how to say no.”
“By the way, we have snakes in the basement. I don’t know how they got there, but we’ve got to get rid of them.”
“You can use your mother’s rifle.”
Up until then it was just a rifle, not her ‘mother’s rifle’—the extension of her mother’s insanity. Her grandfather had given the rifle to her mother when she had convinced him that someone was following her. He’d said he’d shot a Smokey Mountain black bear with that rifle. He’d said it had saved his life. After Aida’s murder trial, her grandfather took possession again, which was legal at the time, and insisted that Debra keep it.
Having good aim wasn’t the same thing as killing something, someone. “You wouldn’t mind if I said no right now, would you?”
At Julie’s house.
“. . . I’m going out with Debra on Friday.” Julie stood behind a dining room chair, clenching the back of it, slowly tipping it back and forth, nervous about what Kyle would say.
Kyle looked tired, his newspaper spread out on the mahogany dining table to the same page since he’d sat down. “Why can’t you just be honest with me? I know what you’re doing. And with everything else that’s been going on . . . .”
She saw a strange sadness in his eyes. Of all the reactions she expected, she hadn’t expected that. She softened her voice. “I just wanted to tell him to stop sending letters. That’s all.” She sat next to Kyle, her hand on his knee. “He’s probably just some businessman with romantic attempts that got out of hand. He needs to know what he’s doing to us. I’ve never seen you so upset, not even when Matt wrecked the car. Please understand. I have to do this.”
“I do. I understand.” He looked away, like he couldn’t feel her there.
An air of anxiousness, Julie asked, “What did you mean when you said, ‘with everything else that’s going on’?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with people. I’ve been losing work all summer. These punks are stealing my jobs because they’re cheap. They don’t pay taxes. They don’t pay insurance or workers comp. They only
know enough about cement to steal my jobs. Then they party all weekend. I work like a dog, and I’m handing out dollar bills like I’m dealing a deck of cards. And then I’ve got some guy having sex fantasies about my wife . . . . But you go on. Go with Debra.” He stood up without looking at her. “At least one of us will have some fun,” he said, walking away.
Friday night, Debra rode as a passenger in Julie’s Pontiac Bonneville, which seemed like an expensive car. Julie was dressed in clothes that looked expensive, a flowing black skirt, silk red blouse, and black heels. She had never seen Julie in lipstick and mascara and couldn’t get over how beautiful she was. Debra had clipped her long hair to one side. Greg told her that he liked it that way, how it accented the soft features of her face. She wanted to look conservative, unassuming, so she wore a white tailored shirt and black bell-bottoms, loose fitting, no heels to speak of. They pulled into the ritzy parking lot, and drove past the parking valet. The parking lot glistened like a high priced show room. A Jaguar, a Regal, a Porsche in one row of cars. A BMW, a Mercedes-Benz, and a Mustang were in another near a white windowless cargo van that seemed out of place.
Inside the lounge, candlelight glowed through a fog of cigarette smoke in the dimly lit room. ‘Shake it Up’ by ‘The Cars’ pounded so loudly it seemed to vibrate the fillings in her teeth.
All of the barstools were taken. Every table and every booth was packed. Chattering people everywhere, talking loudly over the music, laughing in every pitch. People danced on their little bit of space here and there, which made it even harder to navigate the floor. Julie and Debra shifted into a space near the wall, and stood together, getting bumped by everyone that moved. Debra hated it. Hated the smoke and perfume and liquor smell. People bumping into her, bodies touching. A hand suddenly groped her butt. She jerked around angry to face the group. It could have been any one of them.
“Someone grabbed my butt!” She said to Julie.
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