13
I gargled. Used some sweet-smelling concoction that was designed more to perfume bad breath than to cure sore throats or kill germs. But that was okay; perfumed breath was what I was after. Scent of peppermints and posies beats out that of belched beer any old day.
I grinned at myself in the bathroom mirror. Frowned. My teeth couldn’t be that yellow. I brushed my teeth several times, grinned again: no improvement.
I sniffed under my arms. Bad news! I whipped off the frayed, cut-off sweatshirt I was wearing, stuffed it in the clothes hamper, climbed out of my rib brace and abandoned it as if faith-healed, soaped my underarms, and sprayed them with Right Guard. I walked to the bedroom to look for a shirt that might be a shade more suave than the frayed relic I’d been wearing. Unfortunately, owning no suave shirts whatever, all I managed to come up with was a bland cream short-sleeve number, but it had a collar and was pressed, so that was something. I got into it and looked at myself in the full-length mirror behind the bedroom door. I didn’t look like Ronald Colman, but then, who does anymore?
I tidied the trailer. Got all the beer cans picked up and thrown away. It occurred to me that I’d had a hell of a lot of beer this afternoon, and that maybe that accounted for my light-headedness.
But in reality, I knew my feeling light-headed didn’t have a damn thing to do with beer. It had to do with Debbie Lee coming over. The light-headedness had started then: when Debbie Lee (I mean Nelson) called up and said she was coming over.
I finished tidying the trailer, emptied ashtrays, vacuumed the front room carpet, straightened the books in my brick-and-board bookcase. Then I sat down on the couch. My living quarters and myself were all slicked up. Like a first date. My heart was pounding, adrenalin surging, and I felt like a damn fool.
Which I was.
Worse, I knew it. It’s one thing to be a damn fool and unaware, and quite another to be a damn fool, know it, and go idiotically along being one. For instance, I knew this house-cleaning and instant revamping of me and my life-style was a silly, half-assed thing to do. As if I still carried the torch for Debbie after all these years! Even if I did still care about her in some cobwebbed corner of my mind, I cared about a person who didn’t exist anymore, right? Yet here I was, sprucing myself up like I expected her to be just the same, a cute little blonde, with big blue eyes, in a fuzzy pink sweater. Hell! She was a housewife, with a kid eleven years old! She wasn’t the thirteen-year-old storybook princess. She was a housewife and a mother, and thirty just like I was.
The doorbell.
I answered it, prepared for the shock of what a decade or so might’ve done to Debbie Lee.
Standing there, in the doorway, was a cute little blonde, with big blue eyes, in a fuzzy pink sweater.
“Debbie,” I said.
“Mal,” she said.
Violins played in my mind; surf crashed against mental beaches.
“Come in,” I said.
“Thank you, Mal,” she said. She came in.
I offered her a spot on the couch and she took it, crossing her short but shapely legs. She was the same. Or seemed to be at first glance anyway. Admittedly, the lighting in my trailer isn’t much better than your average bar and may have put her into a sort of soft focus. Yet there she was: just as cute. She’d never grown any taller, of course; still just under five-foot. She wasn’t dainty, though, but full-bodied and slightly layered with, well, I guess you couldn’t rightly call it “baby fat” anymore. But if ever the phrase “pleasantly plump” was appropriate, it was now.
“You’ve changed, Mal,” she said. “You look different.”
“Longer hair,” I said. “A little heavier.”
“It looks good on you,” she said. “Both the hair and the weight. You were skinny before.”
“I’m also older, Debbie.”
She smiled. A tiny smile. “Everybody is.”
Then I noticed it; she’d frozen herself in time. She’d purposely stayed the same. People do that sometimes, you know, especially in small towns like Port City-they think of their youth (their junior high and high school days) as the best time of their lives, and they stay the same, or try to. They don’t vary their fashions as much as the rest of us; Debbie still wore fuzzy pink sweaters, and her pink cotton skirt was a short shift that was decidedly out of style. And they don’t change the way they wear their hair; Debbie still had the cute skullcap of blonde curls. She had never been much for makeup, having rosy cheeks and deep pink lips anyway, thanks to God or somebody being in a good mood when she was assembled. Overall, she had been much more successful in holding onto her youthful identity than most people who try. You should see the women with beehive hairdos running around the streets of Port City in pedal pushers like it was still 1960. None of them have heard of the B-52s, either.
“Listen,” I said, feeling awkward, “can I get you a beer?”
“I don’t want to be any bother.”
“Bother? Hey, I’m glad to have you. I, uh, always wanted to look you up, but….”
“Yes. I know what you mean, Mal.”
This was ridiculous! Here we were, talking in veiled, elliptical language, exchanging meaningful glances, as if we had shared some deep relationship. As if the last time we’d been together was at Casablanca, and not high school homecoming.
“Can I get you that beer, then?”
“Please.”
I got two Pabsts from the icebox, gave her one, and joined her on the couch.
“You said it was important, Debbie, on the phone. You said you had to see me. You seem pretty calm now.”
She smiled again. That tiny smile was the only one she had, but it was a dandy. “Maybe I’m being silly. When I called you, I was upset, but… I’ve had time to think, driving over here, and now I wonder if I should’ve come.”
“What’s bothering you?”
“It’s my husband… Pat.” She looked down at the beer in her hands. Her hands were small-very small-and white, and in the dim trailer lighting they looked like something carved in marble by a first-rate sculptor.
“What about your husband?”
“Maybe you didn’t know that Pat and I… well… we’re separated. Have been for several months now.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” In spite of myself, I felt fireworks going off in my inner recesses somewhere. Celebration was in order.
“Pat has a drinking problem, of sorts.”
“He’s an alcoholic, you mean?”
“No. Not as I understand the word anyway. He isn’t somebody who drinks all the time, gets up in the morning and reaches for a bottle. Not that at all. He’ll go out maybe twice a week. Rarely more. Five days a week he won’t touch a drop, not even a beer like we’re having.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“He… when he does drink, he gets mean. He drinks himself silly and comes home and…” She looked down again, for just a moment. She looked up, and her eyes were bluer than anything I’d ever seen. The best-looking sky on the clearest sunny day came in second to those eyes. “Mal, I know we… haven’t seen each other, haven’t talked in years… but I feel like you’re someone I can trust, someone I can come to for help. I don’t have many places to turn for help, you know. With Dad gone….” She got a little choked up and stopped talking for a moment. I got up and brought her a Kleenex and she dabbed her eyes.
Her father had died several years ago. He was a fine old guy, but both he and Debbie’s mother were on in years when Debbie came along. Debbie had been a change-of-life baby, as a matter of fact, and her parents had been more like grandparents than parents to her. Her dad had died at sixty-eight and her mother, who was still living, must’ve been in her mid-sixties or older. Debbie had a brother, but he was much older than she was and had moved away years before.
“Go on,” I said. “Finish about Pat.”