After Petronella walked away, Amy looked down at her feet. She raised a shoe. There was toilet paper stuck to her heel. She tried to step it off with her other shoe. It got caught on that shoe. She tried to kick it off. Finally after several electric slide dance moves, Amy succeeded in ridding herself of both the toilet paper and her dignity.
Edison lifted the edge of the tablecloth and looked down at Jordan. "You can come out now."
Jordan shook her head. "Huh uh. It could be a trick. Go follow Petronella and make sure she got in her car and drove away."
Edison nodded. "Good idea."
"And make sure she isn't just driving around the block either."
Just as Edison was about to walk away, Amy's feet appeared. “Where’s Jordan?”
“She’s under the table. I’ll be right back,” Edison said.
Amy squatted down and looked at Jordan under the table. "Are you hiding?"
Jordan fake-laughed. "Hiding? Me hiding? Don't be ridiculous."
"Then what are you doing under the table?"
About a billion answers to that question flitted through Jordan's mind: She was looking for a lost contact. Retrieving a dropped fork. Checking the cleanliness of the floor. Looking for gum under the table. Doing a study on the shoes of people in Portland cafes. Jordan reached into her grab bag of answers and pulled one out at random, and it just so happened to be partly true. "I was, uh, scared."
Amy's face softened. She crawled on all fours under the table and sat next to Jordan. "What are you scared of?"
Jordan said in a tiny voice, "I'm scared you don't know this a date. You know a date-date. With me."
"I know it's a date-date," Amy said.
"Really?"
Amy nodded.
Jordan asked, "And you're not weirded out or anything? You know, being on a date-date with a real live lesbian?"
Amy shrugged. "I'd be more weirded out if you weren't real or alive."
Jordan smiled. "How do you think it's going so far? For a first date, I mean."
"I think…"Amy said, "I think I want you to kiss me."
Jordan held her breath, closed her eyes and leaned in to kiss her. Her lips were only a fraction from Amy's when a waitress holding a basket of sandwich, chips and pickles in each hand, peeked under the table. "Who had the extra mayo?"
Kissi interruptus.
Edison’s Story
Edison drove her VW Bug two times over the posted speed limit and careened around a corner. Jordan gripped the strap and pumped her foot against an imaginary brake pedal. Jordan ascertained that Edison was upset about the whole Amy thing and it was sending her over the deep end. Edison didn’t want Jordan getting hurt. Jordan knew that. Although her affair with Edison had been brief, a matter of hours really, Jordan knew Edison was infatuated with her. Jordan sensed that Edison found unrequited love blissfully painful. However, it was easier to tolerate when Jordan was not dating. Even when Edison was suffering through Jordan’s relationship with Petronella it was easier because she knew that Jordan didn’t love Petronella, but this Amy thing was different and Jordan knew that Edison knew that.
“You know, I’m really sorry that your lunch date with Amy didn’t work out,” Edison said. Before Jordan could answer, she went on, “I had an unrequited love once, too.”
That was news to Jordan. Edison had never talked about her past before. Even when Jordan tried to draw her out, Edison would clam up like a… well, like a clam.
“I pined after the minister’s daughter,” Edison said, wheeling the car around a sharp curve.
“Ooooh, this sounds like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.”
“Except it was the Amish version,” Edison said. She stared straight ahead. “I grew up Amish.”
“Amish?” Jordan hit her head on the roof of the Bug. “As in bonnets and long dresses and no cell phones Amish?”
“Is there another kind?”
“Amish? You’re Amish. Seriously?” Jordan was on the verge of laughing until she saw the pain etched across Edison’s face.
Edison covered her face with her hands. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that while you’re driving,” Jordan said, reaching over and grabbing the wheel. Maybe that’s why Edison is such a horrible driver, Jordan thought. Driving a buggy must be a lot different from driving a car. “I didn’t even know Portland had Amish communities,” she said.
Edison took the wheel and miraculously even slowed down. “I’m not from here. I lived in Ohio. I came here after I was shunned.”
“You were shunned? Like thrown out?”
“Yes.”
Jordan was beginning to feel like Detective Joe Friday in Dragnet – she’d loved that show when she was growing up. (Of course, she had been watching ancient reruns not the originals.) Plumbing Edison was a “just the facts” kind of interview Joe Friday liked; only Jordan wanted the story and a lot more than just the facts. “Why were you shunned?”
“I was raised in Holmes County, Ohio. We were Swartzentruber, but mother insisted we have a flower garden and a paved driveway so we were already living dangerously on the edge.”
Jordan was already lost. “What’s Swartzentruber?”
“It’s like the super-Amish. They think other Amish people are not strict enough. My people don’t have running water or electricity. They take the buggy thing seriously. We couldn’t even have one of those reflective triangles on the back of the buggy. Do you know how unsafe that it? We couldn’t use anything reflective.”
“What? You’re being serious here?” Jordan honestly thought Edison was fucking with her and she’d burst out laughing saying something like “I really had you going,” only that part of the script didn’t appear to be showing up.
“Yes. It was the reflective triangle and the sidelong glances between Melly and me that got me shunned. Melly was the preacher’s daughter,” Edison said.
“One question,” Jordan said. “Did kids make fun of her and call her Smelly Melly?”
“That’s not funny. I’m being serious.”
Jordan studied Edison. She did look serious. “Okay, sorry,” Jordan said. “Please continue. The triangle was like a symbol of your love or something?”
“No. Even then I was known for my inventions. Being Amish and having limited contact with the outside world, I didn’t know about modern technology. I didn’t know about most ancient technology either. I used to spend my nights in secret in the barn, inventing things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Oh, you know, the Chop-o-matic, Wart Remover, The Clap On-Clap Off, which was much harder to make with oil lanterns than its electrical cousin.”
“I bet,” Jordan muttered.
“I had no idea those things already existed. Anyway, I had noticed a need for a reflective paint. There had been too many buggy accidents. You can’t see a black buggy on a dirt road at night, you know. One night, Melly and her mother were out helping one of the sick people and they got rear ended by a teenage couple who were out for a drive in their car. Actually, I think the girl was giving her boyfriend a blowjob while he drove. They smashed into Melly’s buggy. They weren’t going very fast – probably because of the blowjob – and well they crashed and she bit his penis off.”
Jordan’s mouth gaped open. “Like in The World According to Garp kind of bit off?”
Edison nodded. “The townspeople got a little uptight about it. The loss of the penis proved to be the proverbial straw and things got ugly.”
That was when Jordan realized that the loss of the boy’s penis and Edison’s predilection for inventing fake penii might have an emotional connection. “Then what happened?”