at all tonight? Or just not by eight?”
I hung up. A shaking fury quietly rose through my chest into my throat. The lump began to seize up again, tightening like an angry man’s fist. Or my fist. I looked at my veiny hands, slowly curling them into balls. Is this what she meant by fight back? The thought of the receptionist’s smug, horsey face made my globus even harder. I jumped up and scanned the spines of my DVD collection. I probably didn’t even have one. I did: Survival of the Fittest. It wasn’t our most recent release; Carl and Suzanne had given it to me for Christmas about four years ago. Of course I had many opportunities to learn self-defense in the old studio, just never the desire to embarrass myself in front of my coworkers. The great thing about our DVDs (and streaming video), besides burning fat and building muscle, is you can do them alone without anyone watching. I pressed play.
“Hi! Let’s get started!” It was Shamira Tye, the bodybuilder. She doesn’t compete anymore but she was still very expensive and hard to get. “I recommend working out in front of a mirror so you can watch your tush shrink.” I stood in the living room in my pajamas. Kicks were called kicks but punches were called “pops.”
“Pop, pop, pop, pop!” Shamira said. “I pop in my sleep! And soon you will too!” A knee-slam-to-groin movement was presented as the can-can—“Yes you can-can!” If someone was strangling you, “the butterfly” would break their hold while toning your upper arms. “It’s a catch-twenty-two,” Shamira mused at the end. “With your new ripped bod, you may actually get attacked more often!” I fell to my knees. Sweat ran down the sides of my torso and into my elastic waistband.
Clee came home at nine o’clock with a box of trash bags. I hoped this was an olive branch, since we were out of trash bags and I didn’t really have any intention of fighting her. But she used all of the bags to gather up the clothes and mildewed beach towels and food items and electronics that apparently had been in her car this whole time. I watched her park the four bags against the wall in the corner of the living room. Each swallow took concentration but I kept at it. Some people with globus only spit; they have to bring a spittoon with them everywhere they go.
At eleven fifteen Phillip texted. SHE WANTS ME TO TELL YOU I RUBBED HER THROUGH HER JEANS. WE DON’T THINK THAT COUNTS. NO ORGASM. All caps, as if he was yelling out of his penthouse window. Once read, the image was impossible to keep at bay—the tight jean crotch, his stubby, furry hands rubbing wildly. In the living room I could hear Clee crunching ice like cud. The chewing was so loud I began to wonder if she wasn’t doing it sarcastically, to aggravate me. I pressed my ear against the door. Now she was imitating the imitation—it was a chomping sound with a double set of quotation marks around it. Too late I realized there would be no end to this line of thought—her self-impersonation quadrupled, and then sixteenified, her eyeballs popping out of her head, ferociously rubbed jeans, teeth like fangs, tongue whipping around the room, ice flying everywhere. I spit on my sleeve, yanked open the door, and marched over to the couch. She looked up at me from her sleeping bag and quietly regurgitated a single ice cube.
“Could you please not make that sound please?” I shouldn’t have said please twice, but my voice was low and my eye contact was direct. I held my hands in front of me in a position of readiness. My heart was hitting the inside of my body so hard it made a knocking sound. What if she did a move that wasn’t on the DVD? I glanced down to be sure my stance was grounded.
She squinted at me, taking in my hovering hands and planted feet, then tilted her head back and filled her mouth with ice. I grabbed the cup out of her hand. She blinked at her empty palm, slowly chewed the ice, swallowed it and looked past me at the TV. It wasn’t going to happen; we weren’t going to fight. But she could see I wanted to. She could see I’d gotten all geared up—a forty-three-year-old woman in a blouse, ready to brawl. And she was laughing about it, right now, inside. Heh, heh, heh.
CHAPTER FOUR
It took a day to become calm and gather up my pride. Delicate was the word Phillip had used to describe me. A delicate woman would not throw punches in her own home. What a barbaric mentality! As if there weren’t a million other ways to deal with conflict. I drafted a letter to Clee. It was clear-cut and unequivocal. Reading it aloud was quite moving, actually; by inviting her to engage in a civilized manner I was probably showing her a respect that few people ever had. Dignity was on its way. I spit into an empty almond butter jar; there’s something kind of quaint about a spittoon. She didn’t need to thank me for my honest forthrightness, but if she insisted I would be forced to accept. I accepted a few times for practice. I put the letter in an envelope labeled CLEE, taped it to the bathroom mirror, and went out so I wouldn’t be home when she read it.
At the Ethiopian restaurant I requested a fork. They explained that I had to use my hands, so I asked for it to go, got a fork at Starbucks, and sat in my car. But my throat wouldn’t accept even this very soft meal. I put it on the curb for a homeless person. An Ethiopian homeless person would be especially delighted. What a heartbreaking thought, encountering your native food in this way.
When I got back she was eating Thanksgiving dinner, her favorite kind of microwave meal. I was a little nervous about the letter, but she seemed to be in good spirits—texting and reading a magazine with the TV on. She was taking it well. I put on my nightgown and carried my toiletries bag to the bathroom. The envelope labeled CLEE was still taped to the mirror. She either had seen it and not read it, or had not gone to the bathroom yet. I went to bed and checked my phone. Nothing. Phillip had been rubbing Kirsten through her jeans this whole time, still no climax. The jeans would be in tatters now, his fingers blistered, waiting for my green light. The toilet flushed in the bathroom.
A minute later my bedroom door flew open.
“Who’s the guest?” she said. The room was dark but I could see the letter in her hand.
“Who?”
“The one coming Friday that I have to move out for.”
“Oh, it’s an old friend.”
“An old friend?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the name of the old friend?”
“His name is Kubelko Bondy.”
“That’s a made-up-sounding name.” She was moving toward the bed.
“Well, I’ll tell him you think so.”
I slid out of bed and backed slowly away from her. If I ran it would be a chase situation and that would be too terrifying, so I forced myself to walk casually toward the door. She slammed it shut before I got there. Galloping heart and micro-shakes. Sham-ira Tye calls it “your adrenaline event”; once it begins, it has to play forward—it can’t be stopped or reversed. The darkness was disorienting, I couldn’t figure out where she was until she pushed my head down, dunking me as if we were in a pool.
“Trying to get rid of me?” she panted. “Is that it?”
“No!” The right word but the wrong time. I tried to rise, she plunged me down again. I heard myself gasping, drowning. What move were we on? I needed the DVD. My nose was too near her yeasty feet. I was queasy, green. A scream came out as raspy whispers, stuck to my throat. My peak was nearing; if you don’t fight back by the time you hit peak fear then you won’t ever fight back. You’ll die—maybe not physically, but you’ll die.
It came from my bellows, the loudest noise I’d ever made. Not no, but the old Open Palm battle cry: Aiaiaiaiai! My thighs
