I’M CLOSE TO A DECISION!
I stared at the phone, waiting. No reply.
I added::)
No reply.
I waited twenty more minutes. No reply. I stared grimly at the sea of dancing people. It was time to go home. Jim could manage the rest. I told Clee I was going and she surprised me by immediately walking off the dance floor.
“Let me find Jim.”
Jim carried something out to my trunk. He asked Clee what she wanted it for and she shrugged. It was wrapped in a flowery sheet. In the rearview mirror it seemed to be moving.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see,” said Clee.
She carried it into the bathroom with her. A few minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder. She was in a full pummel suit. I hadn’t seen one like this since the late nineties — the giant head and gloves, the shoulder pads and groin guard. She immediately began grabbing me, no script. It was like being hit by a monster, something from a nightmare. I forgot the simulations and fought to kill. No mercy, no advanced mercy, just blood. I punched Phillip in his balding head and Kirsten in her flat stomach, I punched them both at the same time, pounding on them like a door.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said, holding my arms, “slow it down.”
I slowed it down.
Clee was almost motionless, not assaulting me so much as moving her padded body into mine. My slow punches felt like tai chi. After a while the giant-headed alien just pinned me. Or held me. A strange minute passed. I counted to seventy and then coughed. She stumbled backward and pulled the foam head off. Her hair was messed up, her face sweaty and red.
“This was a dumb idea,” she said. No squeeze squeeze.
THE NEXT DAY CLEE ANNOUNCED she’d been moved to the night shift for two weeks. I crept around her in the mornings, going to the office so she could sleep. Did she miss simulating? She didn’t seem to. I was having trouble working or sleeping. My phone was very still. Ever since my reply, Phillip and I were at an impasse. I regretted the smiley face. Sometimes I went to the bathroom at five A.M., when she got home, just to show her I was awake and available, but she ignored me, watching TV with a T-shirt oddly wrapped around her head like a person lost in the desert. Often her pillow was over her face, so I couldn’t be sure if she was cocooned in her sleeping bag or still at work. Once I patted it, to check, and she reared up like a mummy awakened, her hair matted, eyes frantic.
“Sorry,” I whispered. “I wasn’t sure if you were in there.”
She stared at me, waiting, as if another explanation was coming.
“The way your sleeping bag puffs up,” I reiterated, “sometimes it’s hard to tell… so I was just…” She pulled her head back under the pillow.
AT THE END OF THE two weeks she slept for a full day, then took a shower that seemed to never end. While she was in there Phillip texted: BATH. MUTUAL SOAPING BUT NOTHING MORE. And then: DECISION STILL CLOSE? He was still waiting for me, of course he was. But instead of relief I felt more agitated. I paced around the kitchen. Clee’s shower pounded on and on. It wouldn’t be hard to determine the shower’s gallons per minute, using a bucket. When the water finally shut off I checked the clock — forty-five minutes. We had never discussed splitting the utilities but maybe it was time. Two checks or I pay and she pays me back half? What was that sound? Blow-dryer. She was blow-drying her hair. She came out of the bathroom dressed in slacks and a satiny blouse, her hair a warm, shiny line. Her feet were coated with some kind of mentholated fungal cream. If she was going out, “A Day at the Park” would be a great option and didn’t take too long. Then I could have the house to myself. I put my purse on my shoulder, strolled around the living room and then sat on the “park bench.” She looked at my purse.
“You going out?”
“No…” I said suggestively.
“Me either.”
It was a long night. She tidied the living room, she did her dishes. At one point I found her standing in front of the bookshelf with her head cocked to the side.
“Do you have a favorite one?” she asked.
“Nope.” Whatever she was doing was making me extremely tense. With the TV off there was no separation or sense of privacy.
“But you’ve read them all?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm.” She ran her finger along the spines, waiting for a book recommendation. She had a decorative bobby pin in her straight hair. I had been looking at it without understanding what it was.
“Is that…?” I pointed to the pin. “Does that have a rhinestone on it?” It was not at all her style — the way it was placed looked accidental, like a piece of twig.
“What’s the big deal?”
“Nothing. I just wasn’t sure if you knew it was there.”
“How would I not know? Obviously I put it there.” She adjusted the bobby pin and pulled a book called Mipam off the shelf.
“That’s a Tibetan novel,” I warned her. “It was written in the eighteen hundreds.”
“Sounds interesting.”
She sat carefully on the couch as if it had only ever been a couch, never her bed, never a park bench or a car. The book was open in her lap and she read or pretended to read. After a while I gave up and went to bed.
The next morning she was dressed in her usual sweatpants and tank top.
“My friend Kate is coming to visit,” she said coolly. “She’ll sleep in the ironing room.”
“Great.” But it was not great. How could we do anything with her friend Kate here? It had been more than two weeks since we’d done a scenario. My globus wasn’t back but I felt tight everywhere, wound up and ready to snap. If we could just do it once, then I wouldn’t care who visited.
“She’s on her way,” said Clee. “She left Ojai an hour ago.”
I set up the cot in the ironing room. I laid out the towels with the sugarless mint.
“She should be here any second,” she said.
I dumped some baking soda down the garbage disposal.
“I see her parking,” said Clee. She stood behind me. I turned around. We faced each other. She laughed a little, shaking her head with disbelief. What? What was I supposed to do to make it happen? This felt like the fundraiser all over again, like there was some hip-hop thing that everyone else knew about.
“Holla?” I said.
Her brow furrowed with incomprehension. The doorbell rang.
KATE WAS A BIG ASIAN girl with a loud laugh and a tiny gold crucifix hanging between her breasts. Her truck had a strange vehicle hitched to it. As she came through the door, she said, “Give me some booty,” and slapped Clee’s butt. Then she stuck out her own butt and Clee slapped it back.
“That’s our version of a high five,” Kate said, coming toward me with a wide smile. I held my hand up in the air to show I preferred the regular version. She handed me a Tupperware container full of plain cooked spaghetti.
“Don’t feel like you have to feed me, I’ll just eat that.”
I hid in my bedroom until they went outside to look at the thing on the back of Kate’s truck. I set up the card table again, plugged in my computer, and began to work. A horrendous noise erupted in the driveway. I ran out to the porch expecting to see smoke but Clee and Kate were just chatting loudly next to the deafening vehicle as it idled.
“It’s just like a regular ATV but it’s legal anywhere,” screamed Kate. She was smoking.
“It doesn’t have the horsepower of a regular ATV,” yelled Clee.
“For its size it has the same amount — actually more. If you blew it up to regular size it would have more horsepower.”
“If you blew up just its back half it would look like you.”
They both laughed. Kate dropped her cigarette butt in my driveway.