than if I’d sneezed. I turned the gasping sigh into a cough that barely turned heads. In another moment looseness pervaded me, and boneless, I slumped a bit in my seat as the bus eased to a stop.
My stop.
I got off on trembling legs, certain the smell of sex had to be clinging to me like perfume, but nobody seemed to notice. I exited the bus into a spring mist, and I lifted my face to the night sky and let it kiss me all over, not caring that it flattened my hair and dampened my blouse.
I had made myself come on a public bus thinking of his face, and I still didn’t know his name.
For better or worse, that solo touch on the public transportation eased some of my need. The numbers came back to me, filling my mind with their steady stream of plus and minus. I threw myself into my work, landing several big accounts that had been the responsibility of Bob Hoover, now too busy getting lunchtime blow jobs from Mr. Flynn’s secretary to handle the load.
I didn’t mind. More work meant greater opportunity to show the higher-ups I deserved my title, my corner office, my extra vacation time. It meant I didn’t have to invent reasons to stay late at work so I’d need to choose between going home and facing an empty house or heading out to some meat-market bar and testing my strength of will.
“Sex,” Marcy declared in the lunchroom, “is like this chocolate éclair.”
She’d brought me a powdered sugar doughnut. “Full of cream and makes you feel like you want to puke after?”
She rolled her eyes. “What the hell sort of sex do you have, Elle?”
“None, recently.”
“I’m shocked.” Her tone made it clear she wasn’t. “But no wonder, with an attitude like that.”
She might have big hair and trashy taste in clothes, but Marcy could make me laugh. “Tell my why sex is like that éclair, then.”
“Because it’s tempting enough to make you forget everything else you’re supposed to do.” She licked some chocolate off the top. “And it’s satisfying enough to make you glad you did.”
I sat back in my chair a little, watching her. “I take it you had some sex last night?”
She made a mock-innocent face, and I realized something. I liked her. She fluttered her eyelashes. “Who, little ole me?”
“Yes, you.” I put the doughnut back in the box and snagged the last éclair. “And you’re dying to tell me about it, so stop wasting time and get to it before someone else comes in and we have to pretend to be talking about business.”
Marcy laughed. “I wasn’t sure you’d like to hear about it.”
I studied her face. “You think that about me, don’t you. That I don’t like sex?”
She looked up from her gooey plate, her smile sincere, and something passed over her expression. Something a little like pity. It made me frown.
“I don’t know, Elle. I don’t know you well enough to say, really, but you act like you don’t like much of anything sometimes, except work.”
Hearing something you already know shouldn’t ever be a shock, but it usually is. I wanted to answer her right away, but my throat had closed and my eyes burned with tears I blinked against to keep from falling. I put one hand on my stomach, which had lurched at her words in recognition of the truth of them.
Marcy, despite her appearance and occasional dumb-blonde performance, is anything but stupid. She reached at once for my hand and closed her fingers over mine before I could pull it away. She squeezed my hand and let go fast enough to keep me from startling.
“Hey,” she said softly. “It’s all right. We all have buttons.”
Right then, at that moment, I had the chance to make Marcy my friend. A real one, not a business acquaintance. I have stood on the edge of so many things, so many times, and I most always back away. If there is a time when telling the truth will open a door, I lie. If a smile will forge a connection, I turn my face.
But this time, surprising myself and probably her, I didn’t.
I smiled at her. “Tell me about your date last night.”
She did. In detail enough to make me blush. It was the best lunch I’d ever had.
When it was time for us to go to our separate offices, she stopped me with another squeeze of my hand. “You should come out with me sometime.”
I let her squeeze my hand because she was so earnest, and we’d had such a good time. “Sure.”
“You will?” She squealed, the hand squeeze turning into an impromptu, full-length hug that made my entire body stiffen. Marcy patted my back and stepped away, and if she noticed that her embrace had turned me into a wooden effigy, she said nothing. “Great.”
“Great.” I smiled and nodded.
Her enthusiasm was infectious, and it had been a long time since I’d had a girlfriend. Any sort of friend. I caught myself humming later, at my desk.
Euphoria doesn’t last under the best circumstances, and when I pushed open my front door to find the light on my answering machine blinking steadily, mine vanished.
I don’t get many calls at home. Doctors’ offices, sales calls, wrong numbers, my brother Chad…and my mother. The red number four mocked me as I dumped my mail on the table and hung my keys on the small hook by the door. Four messages in one day? They had to be from her.
Hating your mother is such a cliché comedians use it to make audiences laugh. Psychiatrists base their entire careers upon diagnosing it. Greeting card companies stick the knife in further by making consumers feel so guilty about the way they really feel about their mothers, they’ll willingly pay five dollars for a piece of paper with some pretty words they didn’t write, echoing a sentiment they don’t feel.
I don’t hate my mother.
I’ve tried to hate my mother, I really have. If I hated her, I might be able to put her out of my life at last, be done with her, put an end to the torture she provides. The sad fact remains, I haven’t learned to hate my mother. The best I can do is ignore her.
“Ella, pick up the phone.”
My mother’s voice is a nasal foghorn, bleating her disdain as a warning to all the other ships to stay away from me, the reason for her disappointment. I can’t hate her, but I can hate her voice, and the way she calls me Ella instead of Elle.Ella is a waif’s name, an orphan sitting in the cinders. Elle is classier, crisper. The name a woman called herself when she wanted people to take her seriously. She insists on calling me Ella because she knows it annoys me.
By the fourth message she was detailing how life didn’t seem worth living with such an ungrateful excuse for a daughter. How the pills the doctor prescribed for her nerves weren’t working. How she was embarrassed to have to ask Karen Cooper from next door to go to the pharmacy for her when she had a daughter who should be quite capable of taking care of her, but for the fact she refused.
She had a husband who could go for her, too, but she never seemed to remember that.
