Girlfriends

by Patrick Sanchez

  What the hell was Gina doing over at Peter’s in the wee hours of the morning? She’s worse than an ex-wife who won’t let go of her former husband, Cheryl thought to herself as she kicked off her shoes and plopped down onto the sofa. The whole feud between her and Gina was so stupid, but Cheryl had grown weary of trying to patch things up with Gina and gave up trying a long time ago.

  Cheryl missed having Gina as a friend. They were so much alike—both attractive, young, smart women who just couldn’t seem to get their act together, especially when it came to men. Cheryl used to think Gina would eventually forgive her, and one day they would be friends again. But, now that several years had gone by since they stopped speaking to each other, Cheryl accepted the fact that her friendship with Gina was history. And what made matters even worse, Cheryl lost Linda’s friendship as well. Cheryl and Linda were never terribly close. In fact, Cheryl couldn’t think of when she and Linda ever really hung out by themselves, but they did spend a lot of time together because of Gina. It was no real surprise that when Gina and Cheryl had their rift, Linda dropped out of Cheryl’s life as well. Gina and Linda were close, worked together, and had a long history between them.

  Thank God for Nick at Nite, she thought as she clicked on a late night episode of The Facts of Life and riffled through a couple of cooking magazines strewn on the coffee table. After skimming through last month’s edition of Bon Appétit, she picked up a copy of the Washington City Paper that was lying on the floor next to the sofa. Cheryl had never been known for neatness. She wasn’t a complete slob, but most of the time her apartment was pretty much in a state of disarray, and she constantly had trouble finding things. Her place wasn’t dirty or anything, just terribly disorganized.

  As she started to flip through the paper, she remembered how she used to comb through it every week to see where the latest hot spots were—which bars were offering specials or had themed evenings. In her early twenties it wasn’t uncommon for her to hit the clubs three or four nights a week. She remembered getting trashed at the Insect Club or Planet Fred, two D.C. clubs that had long since closed. Before she and Gina had their falling out, the two of them were almost a staple at 15 Minutes. The doorman knew them on sight and never made them pay the cover charge. He told them they were both so young and beautiful that their presence alone would draw a crowd. They would spend the night drinking and dancing, rarely being troubled to actually pay for a drink. Cheryl remembered all the ridiculous one-liners she would get from guys at the bars—guys who eventually wanted to know if she wanted them to take her home. In her early days it didn’t quite click with her why the guys rarely offered to take her to their own place, but she soon realized if the guys came home with her, they didn’t have to worry about kicking her out as soon as the sex was over. They could just say they had to get home to let their dog out or something and be on their way. Besides, who wanted some one-night stand from a bar knowing where he lived?

  Despite all the free drinks and offers to take them home, Cheryl and Gina usually ended up leaving the bars together. Not because they were morally above no-strings-attached sex. There were definitely times when Cheryl or Gina would leave a club in the company of a young man, but these instances were uncommon. It was just rare that either one of them found a guy who excited them enough to be bothered. Sometimes they were sluts, but at least they were picky sluts.

  When she did actually have one-night stands, Cheryl remembered those awkward moments after the sex was over—how awful it was when she didn’t get an invitation to stay the night and had to get out of bed and pick her clothes up off the floor. It was so humiliating, kneeling on the floor, trying to separate her clothes from the guy’s she’d gone home with. She was never a smoker, but after a night at a bar her clothes would reek of cigarette smoke and pulling her shirt over her head would almost make her gag. Just thinking about it all gave Cheryl goose bumps.

  Cheryl perused the ads in the City Paper for the newest dance clubs, most of which she hadn’t been to. Now that she was pushing thirty, she started to feel a little out of place in many of the local clubs, particularly the ones that attracted the college crowd. Being surrounded by drunk eighteen-year-olds with fake IDs, who were about an hour away from puking their guts up in the bathroom was no longer Cheryl’s idea of a good time.

  A few weeks earlier, she went to Mister Days with a couple of the girls from work, when a young college guy approached her and tried to make conversation. Cheryl didn’t have any interest in the kid, but it didn’t hurt to be polite. After a few minutes they actually started to hit it off. He was a psychology major at American University, where Cheryl had graduated from, and they even had some of the same professors. The conversation went along smoothly until he inquired as to when she graduated. When she told him, his mouth dropped just a tad before he tried to recover by telling her how good she looked for twenty-nine. The young white boy then said he had heard that black people aged better than white people and she was surely proof of it. Annoyed and feeling about a hundred and ten, Cheryl joked that she used a lot of sunblock and tried to always get enough fiber. The young man politely laughed at her little joke and said it was nice to meet her before letting her know he was going to roam around a bit and maybe “they’d catch up later.” He then extended his hand, offering a good-bye handshake. Feeling a tad humiliated, Cheryl shook his hand and forced a smile.

  It all seemed so ridiculous. In the scheme of things, she was still very young. She wasn’t even thirty yet, but she could remember back when she was twenty-one and thirty was just plain old. She also remembered being twenty-one and telling her friends to shoot her if she was still doing the bar scene when she was thirty. She had one more year to avoid a bullet.

  Cheryl read an article or two in the City Paper and made her way toward the back. Eventually, she hit the classified section and flipped a few more pages until she reached the personal ads. She looked at the Matches section every couple of weeks and sometimes even circled a few ads she thought were interesting, but she was never able to make that final leap and actually place a call.

  As she combed the ads, she laughed at herself. She hated how youth-obsessed people were and how a twenty-one-year-old at Mister Days thought she was an old hag. But this didn’t stop her from immediately bypassing any ads from guys who were over thirty-five. She skipped over the divorced ones, the ones with kids, the ones who said they were hairy, and the ones who said they were stocky, which everyone knew was a marketer’s term for big as a house.

  Of course, she also passed on the ads that were specifically looking for white women. These ads annoyed her. It was like she wasn’t good enough for certain men because of her skin color, but a part of her also felt sorry for men who limited themselves to one race. There were so many people out there, and it was just foolish not to give someone a chance because they were African American or Asian or Latino or whatever. Over the years Cheryl had dated men of different races—a few black men, a Latino guy, and a man of Native American descent. But mostly Cheryl seemed to date white guys. In fact, most of the people in her life tended to be white. White people were just what she was used to. She grew up outside Portland, Maine, and was the only black girl in her grade school and one of two in her high school. In Maine she could go weeks without seeing a black person other than her parents.

  Now that she had been in D.C. for a few years, she had a few black friends, but when she first moved to D.C. to go to college, it was almost a culture shock. She had never seen so many ethnic minorities in her life, and not just African Americans. D.C. was the epitome of diversity. During the brief walk from her dorm room to the Armand’s Pizza on Wisconsin Avenue she might see other black people, Caucasians, some Latinos, an Asian or two, and sometimes women in full Muslim attire. It took some getting used to, but Cheryl eventually embraced the diversity of her new city. This was one of the reasons she stayed in D.C. after she graduated from college. She felt at home in a city with such a varied population. Now, after ten years in a
multicultural city, when she went home to Maine it was almost like the twilight zone—white people everywhere, no one speaking foreign languages around her, and people who worked at McDonald’s and Ames actually spoke English as their first language.

  By the time Cheryl reviewed the entire Men Seeking Women section, she only found two that were even remotely suitable. She circled them both with a red marker and set the paper aside. Maybe, just maybe, she would actually respond to one of them this time.

  Immediate Regret

  “Hey, pup. Aren’t you cute?” Griffin said to Gomez as he walked into Gina’s apartment. Gomez put on the usual show for Gina’s guest. He yipped and barked and wagged his tail.

  “Hush, Gomez. It’s late. You’re going to wake up the neighbors,” Gina said, snapping her finger at the dog. Right then she had a terrible thought. She was talking to her dog the same way Annie talked to that feline beast of hers.

  “Would you like a drink or something?”

  “Sure,” Griffin said. “Whatever you’ve got is fine.”

  Gina brought him a beer from the kitchen and got one for herself too. She was going to need even more intoxication if she was going to spend the night with Griffin. They sat on the sofa with Gomez and made small talk for a while. Griffin complimented Gina on her apartment and all the little knickknacks she had displayed around the living room.

  Gina had a one-bedroom apartment that was quite a bit larger than Peter’s efficiency. The building was over fifty years old, but her unit had been remodeled a few years before so the appliances, carpeting, and such were fairly new. She furnished it with traditional pieces and solid colors. The overstuffed sofa was her favorite. It was light blue and almost swallowed her up when she lay on it. She and Peter lived on the seventh floor, but neither of them had views from their balconies. All they could see was the building across the alley.

  Gina and Griffin sipped their beers and chatted for a while until Griffin got the nerve up to lean closer to Gina and kiss her. Gina immediately regretted ever letting him into her apartment. When she wrapped her arms around him, all she could focus on were the rolls of fat around his waist. His breath smelled like an ashtray, and he was a lousy kisser. He even kept his cap on the whole time they were on the sofa. It was so ridiculous to Gina. It was obvious that he was bald underneath, and he was silly to think he was hiding it with his stupid cap.

  In spite of this, Gina continued to kiss him and agreed when Griffin suggested they move to the bedroom. She didn’t quite know how to get rid of him without hurting his feelings. Why she cared about the feelings of a sleazy fat man she’d just met a few hours earlier was a whole different issue. Eventually, in her inebriated state, she decided it would be easier to just sleep with him and hope he would leave quickly afterward.

  After all was said and done . . . mostly done . . . Gina lay in bed next to Griffin, feeling disgusted—absolutely disgusted. She usually felt a tinge of regret and a bit sleazy on the few occasions when she had brought guys home from the bars. But this time it was different. Generally, it was a nice-looking young man, about her age, lying next to her, and he was usually trying to figure out a good excuse for vacating the premises now that the sex was over. This time it was a short, fat, balding man who was probably old enough to be her father. She began to feel nauseated for the third or fourth time that evening and went into the bathroom. She’d had way too much to drink, and having sex with one of the seven dwarfs certainly didn’t help her upset stomach. Feeling queasy, she sat on the floor, crossing her arms over the toilet seat. In a drunken haze she buried her head in her arms and began crying hysterically, all the while managing to keep it quiet, so Griffin wouldn’t hear her. As she sobbed, she had an awful vision of herself still going to bars like Rumors twenty years from now.

  As the crying quieted and the dizziness passed, Gina went to the sink and tried to gain her composure. She looked in the mirror and just wanted to cry again. Instead, she slipped on a robe, grabbed a towel, cleaned herself up, and went back into the bedroom. Griffin was asleep on the bed, and Gomez lay there wide awake, looking at her, his big brown eyes glistening in the darkness. She didn’t even want to face the dog. She nudged Griffin awake and offered him the towel. He declined and started rubbing her leg.

  “I think you should go. I’m really not feeling very well. Guess I had too much to drink,” Gina said in a gentle voice, hiding her disgust at the fact that he wouldn’t use the towel. He was gross enough without being wet and sticky on top of it.

  “I really don’t think I should be driving at this point. I had a little too much to drink myself,” Griffin replied.

  “Maybe you could stay with your friend down the hall.” At that point, Gina didn’t care if he ran his car into a telephone pole and decapitated himself. She just wanted him out of her apartment. Griffin ignored her suggestion and lay next to her with his eyes shut.

  “Well, I hate to ask, but my mother’s coming early tomorrow, and I don’t think she would be pleased to find you here,” Gina lied.

  “Okay, I’ll sleep for a few hours, then leave,” Griffin replied, barely lifting his head from the pillow.

  “Look! You have to go now. My friend, Peter, lives down the hall. Either get out, or I’ll call him to get you out. I’m sorry to be such a bitch, but I really don’t feel well. You need to go.”

  “Okay, okay,” Griffin said, sitting up and fumbling for his clothes.

  Gina looked the other way while he got dressed. She couldn’t bear to see what she had gone to bed with—those rolls of fat and his ridiculous bikini undershorts. Griffin finished dressing, put his cap on, and Gina showed him to the door. He knew better than to try to kiss her good-bye or ask for her number.

  Gina quickly closed the door behind him, thankful he was gone and hoping never to see him again. She locked the dead bolt and went back into the bathroom. She slipped off her robe and turned on the faucet in the tub, getting the water as hot as she thought she could stand it. After she stepped into the tub, she switched the shower on and let the hot water cascade over her. She soaped herself up from head to toe and scrubbed her body with a washcloth. She wanted every trace of Griffin off her. She soaped up and rinsed three times and washed her hair before finally getting out of the shower. As she toweled off and took a quick swig of mouthwash, she once again caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror and quickly turned away.

  Once she was all dried off and had run a comb through her wet hair, she slipped on a cotton nightshirt and got back into bed. Damn! She could smell him on the sheets—kind of a musky cigarette smell. She immediately hopped off the bed and grabbed some clean sheets from the closet. She slumped the old linens into the corner of the bedroom and stretched the fresh sheets over the mattress. Once she had the clean sheets in place, she lay back down and the dog curled up next to her. The sun slowly started to rise as Gina tried to put the whole evening behind her and drift off to sleep.

  Blue Sundays

  Gina lay in bed, wishing Linda would stop calling. This was the fourth time since about eleven o’clock. After her first try she stopped leaving messages on the machine, but Gina knew it was her. She obviously was more than a little curious and wanted to know what had happened to Gina—why she had left the Phase without any notice. Linda must have been really intrigued and maybe a little worried. Gina never actually left her at a bar before—well, at least not without any explanation.

  Gina groaned and reached over to get the phone. “Hello.”

  “So what happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?” Gina replied, knowing exactly what she meant.

  “What do I mean? I saw you take off from the Phase with that short girl with the bad perm. Are you like a fucking dyke now?” Linda said only half jokingly. “I saw that chick you left with, Gina, and believe me, you can do better.”

  “Very funny, Linda, and no, I regret to inform you, I’m not a lesbian. That was Annie from high school. Remember? I hadn’t seen her since graduation, and we
just went for coffee to catch up a little. It was too loud at the Phase. We could barely hear each other.”

  “Annie Harrison? Wow, how the mighty have fallen. She looks like crap. Anyway, thanks for telling me you were leaving,” Linda said, sounding a tad annoyed and wondering what on earth Gina and Annie had to catch up on. They had barely spoken to each other in high school.

  “I’m sorry, Linda. I was a wee bit toasted at the time. I just didn’t think about it. How was the rest of your night?” Gina asked, trying to change the subject.

  “Nothing interesting happened. I left shortly after you and your new girlfriend.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny, Linda. Listen, that’s my call waiting. Let me give you a ring later.”

  “Hello,” Gina said after tapping over to the other call.

  “Hey, sweetie. How are you?”

  “Hi, Shirley. I’m really hung over and don’t feel very well.”

  “Collin dumped me last night.” Shirley responded as if she hadn’t even heard Gina express her own discomfort.

  “What do you mean, he dumped you? Don’t you have to have a relationship in order to get dumped?”

  “We had a relationship.”

  “Mother, he pages you a couple of times a week when his wife is asleep so he can come over and fuck you. That’s hardly a relationship.”

  “It was more than that.”

  “Not to him, Shirley. I warned you over and over again.”

  “Thanks for the sympathy. I’m really upset. And do you know what the worst part is? He didn’t even dump me to be faithful to his wife. He has another honey on the side, maybe two for all I know. Can you believe that?”