Here is some change. Go wash the puke from my backseat. Its more prominent aspects will have to be vacuumed up—use the foam brush. The one that leaves steam lines. Everyone at the reunion asked if I’d met you that night at an AA meeting.
I mean to do everything he suggests but realize I’m so sleepy, so I find a flowerbed a few blocks over and crash. No one invited the ants. They like the dried ice cream punch on my skin, and don’t stop biting if I only crush half of their bodies.
Unfortunately their carcasses stick to the punch film so I appear to have a flesh-eating disease. When I return to the car, he is standing there with a very clean woman. She is looking in at the pile of puke on the backseat with a glare of recollection and pain, as though it used to be her dog but her pet somehow got liquefied and his remains were then sprinkled with parsley (on the way to the reunion last night we’d stopped for some Italian. The waiter kept checking out my tennis balls).
“What are you covered in?” he asks.
“I’m Beth,” the girl offers reluctantly. She can’t look at me without scratching herself. I would scratch too, but my fingernails are already filled with dead ants.
“Is that your cousin?” she whispers to him.
I then realize clean Beth couldn’t attend the reunion, so he told her he’d take his cousin and called me.
When I walk up to him, Beth steps back. My one tennis boob has fallen down somewhere in the front of my dress, poking out like the tiniest pregnancy in the world.
“Cousin,” I report. I put my hand on his inner thigh. I realize my clothes are wet; maybe I had peed myself, or maybe the flowerbed had sprinklers.
The girl makes a squeak and leaves immediately on foot. I’m ready for him to run after her—to walk myself home, wash off the dead insects and grow very, very bored.
But instead he stares. I’m itchy, squirmy; he presses me back. His leg pins me against the car right in the ball-stomach. “I’m deciding if you’re too much,” he says, and I meet his stare fondly. I refuse to blink while I wait.
GARDENER
It began during an unconscionably dry spell in lovemaking for Robert and me. I’d gone to the bathroom to cry in my robe, which is big and towellike and cloaks my large and lonely breasts that hang from age. I kept pulling my robe in tighter to swaddle them; in my head I could hear them screaming for attention and I tried to muffle the noise by drawing my robe in even tighter. I was pondering going into the guest room and smothering them with a pillow when I saw the gnomes.
They appeared to be necking, a female and a male gnome. I squinted at them through my bathroom window. “You’ve gone crazy,” I told myself, “that frigid man has made you nuts.” Yet there they were in front of me, clearly rubbing against one another by the bushes. Then, simply and effortlessly, the plastic deer that sits in front of our hydrangeas got up and walked over towards them, stilted on thin plastic legs, to lick the salt from their skin.
Of course shame followed. I already felt guilty about wanting to be satisfied by my husband, who had now turned me down every night for an entire month. I kept telling myself that it wouldn’t, simply could not last four whole weeks, but each day drew closer to that horrible terminus, the point at which, I felt, I must accept the fact that Robert was either cheating on me or had fallen deeply out of love with my physical person.
But now there was a newer, more velvet shame, one soft with complete insanity. I cannot describe how hypnotic it was to watch the gnomes, the deer with the sandpapery-plastic tongue. It seemed wrong, like getting turned on at the zoo. I had opened my towel robe and pressed my flesh to the cold, dark window. Panted. Made steam.
When I went back to bed, I stared at Robert, who had a pie-slice-sized ray of light over his turned-up chin. My skin was flushed and my towel robe hung open, slowly absorbing the sweat from my body. Wake up and look at me, I thought, I’m presenting you with all that I have. My feet stopped at the lit bar from the streetlamp that fell upon the carpet, a boundary of the night-world where gnomes and deer lived and played on one side and Robert snored soundly on the other. How good it would feel to take Robert inside that light, to have both our bodies squeeze together somehow, for our particles to jump into a shared space and stay.
That night I had a Lilliputian dream about the gnomes binding me to my bed. It culminated with the male gnome riding in atop the large plastic deer to demonstrate his prowess over creatures several times his own size.
I gasped as I woke, but Robert was nowhere to be found; he’d left for work and I was stuck playing detective: searching for traces of his aftershave on the carpet in front of his dresser, looking for new stray hairs around the sink. I felt like maybe I’d invented the person I’d always assumed my husband to be, and now, at sixty-two, it was perhaps time to grow up and let him go.
“Well we’re not teenagers anymore,” he tells me that night, when I bring up how it has been a full month of abstinence. I am dressed like a cheerleader, albeit a fat, wrinkled one. I purchased the uniform from a costume shop. The fabric is cheap and the initials of the school it touts are a dubious “FU.”
“Do you think I should get a breast lift?” I ask, though he’s already turned over and has shut off the light by his bed stand.
“Why would you do something like that?” he mumbles. Seeds of what soon will be gentle snores are already pollinating in the back of his throat.
Against my better judgment, I creep out into the garage in my uniform. It’s exciting to think of how awful it would be should someone see me, a neighbor or one of the subdivision’s night security officers. Robert’s car is a long Cadillac and I lie down across the hood and the windshield, stretching myself. From here I can see the backyard out the garage’s side window, and once again the femme gnome and the male have taken up one another’s company. The lust inside the male gnome’s sturdy brow makes his cherubic face seem dangerous and a little thrilling. His white beard has a silvery hue; its shine is modern, like clothes the young people wear into nightclubs. He seems to be in some kind of race against himself; his frown reminds me of a depression-era work mural, a depiction of unyielding strength that cannot be slowed down by the whims of economic fate.
Spying on them, I have the strangest sensation that the car beneath me is going to start up, turn on its lights and bust through the garage door carrying me splayed upon it in my failed costume. Would the gnomes stop what they were doing and hide then, I wondered? Would they erotically harden in place?
On the night marking a sexless forty days and forty nights, I decided this is it. I grabbed my pillow and a blanket and left the bedroom. “What?” Robert called halfheartedly. “Have I been snoring?” I went to the guest room and told myself that from now on, I was sleeping there. I’d had enough of pretense.
The guest room is right next to the garden, so close that I feared they might see me watching. I carefully lit a single match and hid below the windowsill. Peeking through the mini blinds, I watched my gnome in the throws of passion with the yard’s plumpest female milkmaid gnome. I decided that she might have to have a horrible ceramic accident soon.
But oh, his buttocks, the worker-bee industry of their contractions as they squeezed up and out! The muscles of his tiny back as he ran his fingers through her hair! I lit match after match as they burned down to my fingers, letting the pain linger slightly longer with each one. It stung: how could I die without knowing such passion? Why should I be deprived while some statue got her fill?