Lipstick in the Kitchen

I knew that marrying Kenley would be a mistake the moment he brought me home to meet his mother who, it appeared, never left her kitchen. A passive-aggressive woman, her way of conveying anger was to bash pots and pans around like cymbals and gongs. Her means of showing disapproval was to slam cupboard doors. Her kitchen was a symphony of rage.
Kenley made the introductions, and she was pleasant enough at the start. She offered us both sweet tea, but the glass she handed to me had a definite lipstick print on the rim, a thin lower lip and a smudge of an upper. Moreover, she pronounced my name "Jita," although I had been introduced as "Gita." We sat at the breakfast table and they made family small talk while I took in the surroundings.
The stove was obviously the centerpiece of this domain. It was a gleaming stainless steel behemoth with two ovens, a plate warmer and six gas burners. In the middle of the floor squatted a sway-backed butcher block that appeared to have been chopped upon with such force as to make it cower.
"Lita? You're not drinking your tea. Does it need more sugar?"
"I'm sure it's fine, Mrs. Carmoody," I said. "I'm not thirsty right now."
And there it was. The first lie. It sat in the air between us like a cough, and she chalked up round one. She knew I wouldn't criticize the cleanliness of her glass, and she knew there would be a million more lies to come. I could see the years rolling out ahead of me: a marriage to Kenley would make a complicit, chronic liar of me. No one in Kenley's family ever expressed anger or dissatisfaction openly. I and my children would tiptoe around the knife-wielding Matriarch. She’d rope us like meek heifers into the Carmoody Corral.
"Actually," I said, looking up into her eyes, "the glass is dirty."
I held it up, like Exhibit A, and heard Kenley's quick intake of breath.
" And I'd appreciate it if you would call me Gita with a hard G. Most people over the age of five get it right on the second try."
Kenley drifted away from me after that – not abruptly, but you could tell. (It was not the Carmoody way to confront, after all.)
“That was a speeding bullet that missed you, my girl,” a friend told me later. “You would have become a headline eventually. ‘Daughter-in-law found buried in his Mum’s lettuce patch.’”
Eventually I forgot Kenley, but apparently his family never forgot me. I was “the girl with the tea glass.” This I discovered five years after the fact when I went to apply for a new job at the power company and was made to fill out a dozen forms in their personnel office. Kenley’s younger sister Marjory was sitting behind a long counter, handing out applications to a line of hopefuls. When I reached her and held out my hand she squinted hard and cocked her head.
“Why, you’re the tea glass girl, aren’t you? You’re the one who stood up to Mum! We were talking about you just the other night, wondering what became of you!”
I calculated how this development might improve or dash my chances of getting hired. I decided that silence was my friend.
“We all admired you, you know,” Marjory went on. “You have spine.” Then, leaning in close so that I could feel her breath tickling my cheek, she whispered, “Put on your application that you go to church regular and serve the poor, and I’ll be sure it gets to the Personnel Manager right away. He doesn’t care whether you can type: he only hires Christians.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked.
Marjory Carmoody cocked her head again, sparrow-like, as if that thought had never occurred to her.
“But, hey, thanks for the tip,” I said, “That’s really decent of you to help me.”
She smiled then, a bright front-desk-receptionist smile and I left, arms full of paperwork.
I went home, trying to imagine myself a power company employee with a 45-minute lunch hour, paid holidays and dental insurance. I tried to imagine Mrs. Carmoody’s face when she learned that I had been sighted.
I wondered what clashing of pots and pounding of meat on the swaybacked butcher block would follow that revelation.
“Poor kitchen,” I thought. “You’re in for a loud time tonight.”

Diplomatic Relations

The truth about our marriage is not pretty. Hamilton took a lover after our second child was born. When I got my figure back, I initiated an affair with the Brazilian attaché and a year later dropped him for the second-chair violinist in our city symphony.  (He looked marvelous in tails and black tie.)
 And what quick strong fingers he had. They never tired.

Then Hamilton was transferred to Bogota and I dragged the children along behind him, but I resented every hour of our miserable three years there.

You might think the world of embassies and international relations is glamorous. Well, it’s not. It is a world of petty bickering, social climbing, secrets and second-rate wines poured from cut-glass decanters to make them sparkle like Grand Cru.
One is expected to make small talk, night after night, at dinner parties where one is seated next to flatulent perspiring foreigners who slide their hands below table to squeeze one’s thighs.

As if!

After Bogota, Ham was asked to take a small role in making friends with an Iranian business conglomerate, and so we were sent to Tehran. There, at least, one could eat well and shop with abandon. I spent many happy days in the rug bazaars in the company of an eager young translator with lovely muscled shoulders. Some afternoons, he would take me to drink tea in small cafes far from American eyes. We found a room – no more than four walls and a cot – and pleasured each other for hours under a slow-turning fan.

Then one morning, Hamilton called me to the breakfast room and asked for a divorce.

“Here? In Iran? Are you crazy?” I asked.

“You’ve been unfaithful,” was all he said.

“But I could be punished for adultery with stoning or imprisonment!” I said, panic rising.

“Then go back to America and we’ll get around to it later, in a year or two when my work is done here.”

“What about the children?” I asked.

“They will stay with me and continue here in school. I want them to learn Farsi and Arabic, It’s a changing world.”

I wasn’t ready to give up without a fight. “You’ve been unfaithful too, and I can name them all, your mistresses and whores!” I shouted.

“Not for YEARS! Not since my hiatus hernia operation,” he snarled. Hamilton snarled well, I’ll give him that. It was one of his successful negotiating tricks at world trade conferences. But I was having none of that.

“Please pour me a drink,” I said, adding quickly “but not the embassy wine.”

How, I wondered,  does one end a marriage? It’s not as if there are classes one can take to prepare for exigencies like these. Ham poured me a drink – Bombay gin and limes – and we sat civilly and listened to parrots chattering in the plum trees above our terrace. 

“The buggers will have eaten all the fruit before cook gets his lazy bum out there with a basket,” Ham murmured.

I picked up a basket then, smiled at him conspiratorially, and dashed out to the garden to rescue what plums were left. Each one, pinkish-purple and soft, felt like a testicle in my hands. When I had picked a bowlful I went back inside, hoping to flirt with Ham about the resemblance to his own testicles. Instead, I found him weeping in his wing chair by the window.

“We’ve bollixed everything up, haven’t we?” he said. “It’s a bridge too far.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I sensed that he was on the cusp of reconciliation. I mean, weeping with remorse is better than open-mouthed shouting, isn’t it?

I maneuvered myself onto his lap and fed him bites of plums and made fingertip circles at the edges of his hairline (something the violinist had taught me).

“Darling,” I reminded him, “there are worse things than marriage to a slightly unfaithful spouse.”

“Like what?”

“Like being stuck with a bore. Or a wife who corrects you in public.”

“True,” he said. “True. We could be the Marchioness and Duchess of Lichtenstein who have two teeth between them and those dreadful Pomeranians.”

I could have corrected him and said Pekingese, but why spoil the moment?

We had reached détente, which is a term used in the diplomatic corps to mean both sides are fucking exhausted and ready to agree to anything just to get out of the conference room and away from their opponent.

So, as I said, our marriage isn’t pretty, but we are staying together. I have my reasons, not the least of which is that a birdie told me Hamilton’s next posting will be in Manhattan at the United Nations. It will be spectacular all around with never, ever a dull moment.

In the end, I think the secret to a good marriage in the diplomatic corps all boils down to staying busy.
I’ve already arranged for season tickets at The Met, some quality spa time at Elizabeth Arden, and fittings at Prada. I am positively sure I won’t so much as LOOK at another man, I’ll be so fulfilled.

In fact, we are embarking on a whole new chapter. Those lovely Persian rugs from the bazaar will go down in the new apartment. I fully intend to show Hamilton the delights of soft Oriental carpeting and a delicious new position I learned not long ago.
It involves a silk scarf, a leather strap and some aromatic herbs.
I wish I could remember its name in Farsi. Roughly translated it means ' reaching your hoped-for destination.' 
Appropriate, wouldn't you say?

The Day After Falling in Love

The day after falling in love,
I became unmoored from everything familiar.
This chair, that piece of curtain, all suddenly turned brilliant
And I floated off, as light as a photon.
You stayed behind to guard the perimeters of
our marriage, to summarize the situation when
onlookers stopped to gawk.
"Nothing to see here, folks. Move along," you said
in your crossing guard's voice, the one you used
whenever I was a day late or a dollar short of your estimates.
"It happens every few years. She's just that way," you said,
and the neighbors shuffled off, looking doubtful.
In my altered state, I had no need of food or a clean bathroom,
but I was beset with hiccups and filled with poetry.
Eventually, weeks later, I regained my corporeal form,
which was subject to the usual rules of gravity.
Thus I fell to earth like Icarus, aflame with passion
 and disappointment in my too-short flight.

The Day a Naked Man Walked Into the First United Methodist

He didn't streak the congregation or call attention to himself in any lewd or scary way. He just slipped in the back of the chapel and took a seat  in the last pew, by the aisle.
At that moment, we all happened to have our heads bowed and (most of) our eyes closed in prayer for the healing of  Teeny's uncle Wade who'd fallen out of his bass boat within snacking range of a gator. As soon as we said 'Amen,'  Preacher Terrell told us all to stand up for the singing of Hymn 44, "He walked on the water."
Teeny leaned over and said, "Too bad uncle Wade didn't try that."
Her Momma cuffed her one and Teeny picked up her hymnal.
The church organ had just sounded the opening chord when a  whole bunch of screaming started at the back of the chapel.
"God have mercy!" hollered Louise Ann Fluker.
"Well, Amen!" we answered, thinking that the spirit had taken her.
Her sister, Mattie, was more specific.
"Help! They's a nekkid man in the church!"
Preacher Terrell nearly knocked over his lectern racing to the edge of the stage.
"He's a-right cheer," Mattie yelled blue murder. "I can see his PECKER!"
Oh, boy, me and Teeny wanted to scamper down the aisle something awful. We were both having our best church day ever. Someone had said the word 'pecker' in the First United Methodist!
The naked man stayed standing, unfazed by the two stout, large-hatted women hollering in his face. He looked calm, almost sweet, even.  And then, in the middle of all the brouhaha, he began singing the slow, gospel song.
"Walk on the water, walk on the water children.
Walk on the water, Jesus done walked on the water."
For about ten seconds, everyone shut up. The naked man went on singing. Meanwhile, four churchmen were hustling toward him, bent on rescuing the Fluker sisters from the trauma of naked buttocks and genitals.
The first man to get there removed his jacket and tied it around the naked man's waist by the sleeves, rendering him somewhat less naked.
The remaining three crowded into the pew and started ushering him towards the door. Preacher Terrell mostly just stood there, patting the air in a downward calming motion. The organist struck the opening notes of Hymn 44 again, but no one was in the mood to sing.
"Who was that?"
"What was he doing here?"
"Did you see him come in?"
"Let's send the children downstairs to the social hall in case he comes back."
Five minutes later, me and Teeny and the Cortez twins and Billy Lapham and three of the Davies girls were herded downstairs to the social hall where the after-service cakes and iced tea were laid out.
We divided up all the cakes equally among us, because kids are fair that way, and ate as fast as we could until we heard engines starting and tires crunching gravel out in the parking lot. The adults would be downstairs any minute.
 Billy Lapham left a note on the refreshments table saying "The naked man ate everything," and we ran for our lives.
(The naked man was not heard from again, although, as Teeny pointed out, "He could be amongst us now. Nobody ever gonna recall his face cuz that's the only part of him no one looked at." )

Grand Theft Auto

She was widowed, though not recently, has grown children (one of each) and granddaughters (but no grandson, yet). She has pollen allergies; her son bought his home in Conyers, Georgia, (three bedrooms two baths, a small dining room but a nice kitchen) for only $35,000  -- or was it $38,000?
All this and more she tells me in a stream of pleasant Southern drawl and Marlboro Light smoke outside the Madison Car Wash. She is hoping her daughter will produce a boy, but soon, "because she's 30 and it wouldn't do to wait much longer -- birth defects, you know."
I sit like a stone with ears. The woman seems determined to tell me -- an imperfect stranger -- every detail of her life, from medical history to the color of her sofa cushions. She proceeds to explain that she is having her car washed because she is going to Georgia to visit her children for a nice long stay.
How foolish can one grown-up be, I wonder. I could be anybody. I could be a burglar. With no effort at all, were I so inclined, I could ask her address and she'd tell me.
The Car Wash is short of help and our cars are taking twice as long as normal. Just as I start to  tune her out, she brings me back to full attention.
"...and my husband bought a Buick Grand National."
"Ah ..did you say Grand National?"
"Yes. After he passed, my son took it over."
"So, your son, who lives in Conyers, has a.." I'm squeaking pitifully, "a Buick Grand National?"
"Oh yes, it's his baby. He let it get stolen from an AT&T parking lot, though."
I am about to say 'what a moron to park a BGN without putting The Club on the steering wheel and Lo-Jac on the car' when she continues.
"They found it," she says, "and it was in the process of being stripped, but the robbers hadn't gotten to the engine yet. My son has restored it piece by piece until he got it perfect."
I forgive her, after that. I forgive this foolish overtalker of a woman for boring me witless because, for a shining moment, I am one degree of separation from the last truly great limited edition American muscle car. It was manufactured in 1982 and then 1984 to mid-1987 in small numbers. General Motors stopped production but not before every car reviewer in 50 states ran out of adjectives. One writer called it "a brick shithouse made from Waterford crystal."
Back in 1986, a brash and speed-addled writer named P.J. O'Rourke test drove the BGN for an article in the April issue of AUTOMOBILE magazine. He took the car out into the middle of Nowhere, Mexico, and drove it at top speed, off-road for a day and a night. I am talking badlands, y'all. I am talking strut-breaking, axle-wrecking, wheel-bending, paint-peeling conditions and balls-to-the-wall, testosterone-drunk driving.
The Buick Grand National never flinched. It took the punishment and said, 'Thanks, Boss.' Back in the garage, the mechanics could find no damage to the test car, although a number of armadillos were heat-seared to its exhaust pipes.
And so, as I watched my new friend tip the car wash guys and slide into her everyday Honda, I rushed to her window and said, "Please tell your son you met a lady at the car wash who respects him for fixing up his BGN."
She chirped, "Oh, would you like to meet him? I can give you his number!"
For a split second, I almost said yes. But then, realizing all too well what the penalty is for grand theft auto, I just said, "I better not."

Tom Cruise's Bunker

I heard that Tom Cruise built a $10 million underground bunker by his Telluride home. His intent was to protect his family when the Dark Galactic Overlord Xenu comes down to Earth. I have no clue whether this is true (the bunker, not Xenu). But let's just say for a moment that Mr. Cruise spent six months of Alabama's education budget on a bunker because the Church of Scientology told him that an enemy is going to attack our planet. I think he got ripped off. I know a dozen ol’ boys who could have have fixed him up with a state-of-the-art, below-ground bunker, including cable TV, for a couple grand. We who live in tornado alley know our shelters. Now, in my own world view, the possibility of a galactic invasion seems pretty low; the probability factor is less than the IQ of your average member of our Legislature before his morning coffee. Also, I tend to think that astronauts, the Hubble Telescope and unmanned space probes would have informed us by now if Xenu had so much as a canoe headed this way. So it puzzles me that John Travolta, Kirstie Ally and Cruise -- who appear fairly smart -- would think otherwise. On the other hand, what if the writings of L.Ron. Hubbard and the new director of The Church of Scientology, David Miscavige, have the right idea, but they got the details wrong. The end times may well be at hand due to the fact that Pakistan and North Korea have nukes. Oh, and Iran. I have also heard a rumor that the South is where the Final Armageddon will start because we (meaning Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina) have banished prayer from our schools when we knew better. Allegedly, prayer banishment was to be expected in the North but not in the deep South. I can't afford a bunker like Tom and Katie's rumored hideout, with its high-tech air purifying system. So I guess I'll go out with the rest of the regular folks --unless Xenu or Kim Jong Il or whoever spares me because I have this secret code message that I bought from the back of a Betty and Veronica comic book in the 1950s, along with a Super Valu-Pak from the Garcelon Stamp Company. What? You think it won't work against Xenu? Who are you to say what will or won't protect me when the Dark Galactic Overlord lowers his landing wheels?

Things Unsaid

"Hannah, honey, hand me my lap robe would you, and roll me out to the veranda?"
My name is not Hannah, and there is no veranda where Mrs. Jackson lives, now. But I oblige her with a bath towel across her knees and turn her wheelchair to face out her second story window. While her back is turned to the room, I make her bed, tidy her belongings and disinfect the surfaces she touched overnight after episodes of incontinence.
"The lilacs must be blooming, Hannah. I can smell them!" she exclaims. I do not tell her it's the floral-scented Lysol spray or that lilacs don't grow in the deep South.
"What shall we do this morning, Hannah?" she asks me brightly. I can see that her mind is wandering over myriad possibilities, over whole continents where she used to go, for real.
"Whatever you like, Mrs. Jackson," I say. "Would you like to visit the neighbors?"
"Yes, I would, and especially that nice Mr. Evellyn."
I do not say that there is no Mr. Evellyn -- which she pronounces EEv-Lin -- on her floor or anywhere else in this facility.
There is more I do not say, more everyday: that a son who never comes has died. That a friend who used to call has died, as well.
Finally all the many things I cannot say fill up my throat, and I feel I might choke on Mrs. Jackson's absent life.