The Sweet Grime of Summer by Charlotte Rice

The Sweet Grime of Summer

Nanci Reggier always told me I should keep a "couple of victims rattlin' around my pipeline." She said, "Blondie, the only things boys are good for is oral sex and hauling around heavy furniture. Gotta have three so you can pit them against each other. It is imperative you have a little talent on the side. Oh, and you must oscillate between being an Ice-Princess and an affectionate 16-year-old...just enough to make `em crazy. Kiss `em sweet if they're good, but give `em the old Greta Garbo if they try to mess with you."

Nanci, my golden Cowgirl, busting everyone's chops in Austin, Texas. Writing poetry and breaking hearts. A girl so self-actualized she'd have broken Maslow into chunks. And he'd have let her.

When Jack told me he was leaving for a lawyer's seminar that would last a week and two days, it wasn't as if I immediately thought of skipping out while I had the chance. Far from it. When he left that August morning, kissing me on the cheek and promising to call the moment he was settled into the Birmingham Holiday Inn, I went back into the house, poured a bowl of cereal, and watched MTV.

Jack was gone all the time, but it wasn't his fault--he was a new lawyer and the firm he had hired on with gave him an inordinate amount of grunt work. However, this was different. He was out of town. I didn't quite know what to do with myself, so I began walking around the house. Maybe some of the furniture could be rearranged. I lugged the bed out and repositioned it. I switched the nightstands from the guestroom and the master bedroom. I thought about painting the walls, but decided against it. Too much work. I pulled a tattered piece of music by Rachmaninoff from inside the piano bench and played it. My fingers were rusty, but I was still pretty good.

I have a degree in music education and used to teach piano lessons at the Crescendo Music School. I really enjoyed the job, but quit after I married Jack. We hadn't really needed the money and my student load had been relatively light at the time. The Rachmaninoff felt so satisfying I decided to go through the entire bench, playing Chopin etudes, Tchaikovsky concertoes, and everything in between.

I thought of going back to teach; perhaps I could go back to school myself, finish my training in concert piano, and tour. But touring was the very reason I never finished. Being a concert pianist required traveling and having a string of husbands made that an impracticality. In retrospect, I should have done that instead of marrying Jack, marrying Randall before him, and marrying Kenneth before him.

I know, I know...married three times at twenty-six! I can't explain it, so don't even ask. I'm like some marital version of Sisyphus, only rolling a big wedding ring up a hill instead of a rock. A Runaway Bride, but after the fact. Or maybe like Charlie Brown and the football. I seem to thrive on the idea of persistence through adversity. If Camus (or Charles Schulz) were still alive, I'd make them pay for my divorces. But whatever the underlying psychology, I can say that getting married is fun. It's being married that's such a drag.

The first divorce wasn't my fault: I was nineteen and married for sixteen Saturdays (that's four months if you're an English major). I was a naive girl who didn't have the good sense to move in with Kenneth before I married him and, therefore, found out the hard way that he had a severe gambling problem. The whole time we dated, he would drop me off at my house and then go to the casinos for the rest of the night. I assumed he was going home himself. He was a counselor for a rehab center and was responsible for treating people who had gambling disorders. Figure that one out. At any rate, once we were married, he couldn't hide it anymore and I found out why he was so broke all the time. He squandered every dime he had to the point where I would have groceries rung up and sacked only to open my purse and not have any money in it. Within two months, we had been kicked out of our apartment and I was sleeping with my wallet practically duct-taped to the palm of my hand. I begged him to get help, but he refused and got really belligerent to boot, so I moved back home with my parents and that was the end of that one.

Then I met Randall, who was dashing, clever, and who dressed like T.S. Eliot. He was a car salesman and my favorite clotheshorse: always in vests with striped ties or suspenders with shiny shoes. I couldn’t wait to see what he would put on in the morning. I dated him for two years and never knew he was riding every girl in town like a jackhammer after he dropped me off at home. Again, I was a good girl. I left him after twenty-four Saturdays (seven months for you right-brainers) of marriage because I came home early from school one day to find some girl lying on my sheets with her head on my pillow, and thumbing through my bedside copy of The New Yorker. Randall was in the bathroom showering the adultery off of him at the time, so he missed seeing her yanked out of the bed by her hair, dragged down the hall, and kicked out of the house ass-naked.

But he had tickets to his own show, which featured the debut performance of my little keychain of mace. I am sorry y’all missed it because it was hilarious. I got that mace and sprayed it steadily into every orifice in his skull. I had originally planned to re-enact the opening scene of Psycho, but we didn’t have one of those big butcher knives like the one in the movie. Plus, I wanted him to feel dead, but not actually be dead because then I’d get in trouble.

So I sprayed him, flinging open the shower door and just going to town with that mace. He had been very surprised. I spritzed him at point-blank range until the air was so thick; we were both on the floor with tears streaming down our faces, coughing. It stung like hell, but I kept my finger pressed down on that little spray-bottle until it hissed dry. It was just as well it ran out because, from what I could see, he was lying every bit as flat as the bathroom rug. And about as lifeless, too. By that time, I had gone all but blind and wasn’t sure I had actually been getting him with those last squirts, anyway. And that was the end of that one.

Then I met Jack. This time, I moved in with him almost immediately because if he were a freak, liar, player, gambler, alcoholic, schizophrenic, pervert, coke-head, pedophile, slut, kleptomaniac, hypochondriac, felon, or just an asshole in general, I was going to make myself privy to it before I legally bound myself to it. Forget being a good girl.

I had just turned twenty-two. He was twenty-three and in his third year of law school. We got along so well I decided to marry him after only a year of living together. He was everything I wanted: brilliant, with dark flopsy hair and blue eyes. He was also the nicest son-of-a-bitch on the planet. Everybody who met him just loved him. I think I was determined to show everybody that I could be married--determined to show myself I could. Jack and I were such good buddies I knew I could make this marriage work. The only question I hadn’t asked myself was why I felt I had to be married at all.

Now, at twenty-six and going on one-hundred and fifty-two Saturdays (that's three years, Shakespeare), I wondered why I felt so excited about being alone in the house. Maybe it was because I had never been alone in a house. Come to think of it, I had never been alone at all.

I wandered the halls. The house didn't move--didn't speak. It sat there with a closed mouth and supported me as I walked. I began to see it as a domestic building with a personality all its own. It would still be the same structure whether Jack and I lived in it, or whether Jack lived in it alone. It sheltered me, but it wouldn't miss me if I left.

I decided to go shopping, but couldn’t find anything I wanted to buy. I visited museums and strolled through parks. Jack had only been gone three days but, in those three days, I realized I hadn’t thought of him in two. I thumbed through my old bookshelves and plucked out Madame Bovary. I read, as if for the first time, her wretched plight. I slept on the couch and didn’t miss the bed. I ate alone, enveloped by the isolation of the house. One morning, I opened my book of Bach Inventions and and practiced them until I could play them all without stumbling. I sat at the piano for sixteen hours. It was then I knew what I needed to do.

"Nanci," I scrawled. "Shall I lie back and let the world spin me like a bottle? You, be my convertible and whoosh me to where you are. I am ready...be my vehicle until I learn to navigate this unfamiliar road. I don't know how to be a single girl. You, the Chevy, the Thunderbird, the Cadillac of my eye. Love, Electra."

Two days later, I had an apartment lined up and never looked back.

Nanci's postcard was the first one I received at my new address. It came a week after I had finished moving and had a photo of a nun on the front and a caption that read, "I'm too sexy for this habit." Typical. I read the carefully-penned cursive handwriting. "Electra, my girl!" her handwriting exclaimed. "You're doing the right thing. But then, I've been called a self-serving bitch, so what do I know? Ha, ha. Love you, Nan."

I knew I was doing the right thing because it felt good. However, it was also terrible. Jack had come home to the empty house confused and concerned, but became furious when I told him I had decided to explore my life on my own and couldn’t wait to see what was out there. Of course, I didn’t say it quite like that-remember, I loved him-but that was its inevitable interpretation. He replied quietly that he didn’t know who I was and would never utter another word to me as long as I lived.

As much as that slayed me to my core, I don’t suppose I expected anything else. I tried to explain that it wasn’t him--that I had made a huge mistake getting married at twenty-three and realized I wasn’t meant to be an Emma Bovary, but Jack had shaken his head and angrily drawled, as only the Southern disgruntled can, “Who in the cornbread-Hell is Emma Bovary?”

Three weeks settled, I walked out of the two-bedroom portion of the fourplex I occupied, splayed my legs onto the rich, buttery bricks that served as the porch’s column, and set my glass of Southern Comfort on the table. I opened a tattered, dog-eared copy of Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady to its preface. “This is the story of my years on [Grandmother’s] anvil,” King wrote. “Whether she succeeded in making a lady out of me is for you to decide, but I will say one thing in my own favor before we begin. No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street.”

Ah, yes. This was more like it. Even as a child, I enjoyed reading so much that whenever I acted up, all my mama would have to do was threaten to “take my book away” and I’d be putty in her hands. I had gone through my small collection of French literature within a week of moving out: Flaubert, Proust, Balzac, and Zola. I had read them with relish, but was eager to read literature from saucy Southern wildcats.

At eight years old, I had stolen both Gone With The Wind and a Huey Long biography off my parents’ bookshelf and read them both in earnest. I liked Southern literature because it was easy to read: it was always funny and there was usually at least one crazy person in each book annoying the hell out of everybody else. Lined up and ready for me to pounce on were O’Connor, McCullers, Flagg, and Dillard. On top of them were Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and William Alexander Percy. Books that uplift. I also had Jong’s Fear of Flying, but didn’t dare read it. Not yet. If I were ever insane enough to spread bad-girl wings like that, I wanted to make sure I did so as Electra Richot and not Isadora Wing.

I had lightheartedly told Jack that he could keep the T.V. because if I took it, I’d never read again. That all I wanted out of the house were my books, statues, art, and parlor grand piano. Those were things I had brought into the marriage from singlehood, anyway. The statues alone were worth fighting for, had it come to that. The glorious figures now held court over the hardwood floors of the two-bedroom: manning the windowsills and standing guard over the hundreds of books that warped the cheap bookshelves with the weight of their words. There was a bearded, manic Zeus, a curvy, violin-shaped Venus de Milo, an immense and disheveled Beethoven--cast with a frown more severe than his own life mask had revealed, an Athena, and a Michelangelo David bust which I had painted in vibrant colors.

There were collections of opera librettos left over from college days...at thirteen, I actually tried to teach myself Italian by translating Turandot and La Boheme. The only thing that resulted was that I had memorized “Nessun Dorma” and could sing along with Pavarotti up until he bellowed that last sonic boom of “all’alba vincero!” which I would screech high in a voice that cracked like a flea-market record-player.

And I could write again. Nanci and I shared a love for writing “poem-letters” and went back and forth weekly, trying to outdo the other in an undeclared concrete-metaphor war. We always used perverted letterheads with which to greet each other...letterheads with matching envelopes that were supposed to shame us in front of our respective mailmen.

Double Bend
Pornographic Stunts, Inc.

Dearest Electra,

Writer...conjurer of the summary scrape of chairs and the hot, heavy lights of drunken fireflies punctuating the night, evoker of flamingo-colored bursts of azaleas and locusts singing opera and voices carried across deep lawns. My dear Southern gal who loves Louisiana in all its wilted beauty. You know what I mean. You always know what I mean.

You must come to Austin...You would absolutely adore it. We'll drive to Enchanted Rock with its huge, pink, marbled shoulders that speak to the moon. It expands from heat during the day and contracts as it cools at dusk, the rock cracks and complains and pops through the night...

I went riding yesterday. Oh, Electra, there are so many beautiful places to ride in Austin. They not only board horses, but will rent them out by the hour. There are four places scattered on the outskirts of the city and I’ve been to them all. I wish you were here to hold my hand and ride through the fields with me, as we did when we were teenagers.

Whatever happened to that property after old Mr. Angelo died? Did someone buy it? Are there still horses on it? I don’t know what I’m going to do if it’s been bought and is now some awful department store. Working with you at Angelo’s was one of my fondest memories: breaking horses, getting screamed at for not cleaning their hooves properly (remember that?), and riding side by side talking about all we planned to do with our lives. And here we are and something’s missing. Is it possible to let yourself go without letting yourself go?

I wish we still had that--bronze grass and wildflowers so vivid, so striking--they watched us ride and were jealous of our sunflower hair and buttercup cheeks the way deep lawns envy magnolias and vice versa. But we loved those wildflowers and I think they knew it.

Nanci

My golden cowgirl. We met at Tom Angelo’s the summer we turned fourteen. I wanted a summer job that would afford me an informal education with horses, which I had always been interested in. The idea of taking something wild and gentling it overwhelmed me. I wanted to understand their mystery and, perhaps, hold it for awhile. Nanci had the same idea and had been at Angelo’s only five weeks when I applied for a job as a wrangler.

Angelo was old and rugged, with skin like beef jerky. His legs were bowed and his back hunched like a coat hanger. You could tell be was a real cattleman by his hands. They were gnarled tree-branches with stubby, squared fingernails. Both middle fingernails were missing.

"Are you scared of ‘em?" Angelo had asked, gruff and hoary, squinting at me through a pair of sparkling blue eyes.

"No, and I’m not scared of getting hurt, either," I responded.

The old man smiled. "Well, then," he said, "Guess you done got yourself a job."

He put his fingers to his tongue and whistled so loud, my ears rang. "Nanci’ll help you learn the ropes," he said.

"Who’s Nanci?"

"He nodded over my shoulder. I turned around and saw a girl galloping toward us through a sprawling field of amber. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Even the horses tied to the fenceposts turned to watch her. She skidded to the gate, slid off the dun gelding, and threw his knotted reins over the post.

"What’s up?"

Angelo tossed a thumb toward me. "This is Electra."

Nanci looked at me, eyes skittering over my whole self before landing steadily on my face, as if to say, yes…and?

"Hi," I said tentatively.

Her eyes swung back on Angelo. "What, does she want? To rent or buy?"

"She’s just started work here. I expect you’ll show her what to do."

Nanci’s mouth fell open and she looked at me for a long time. Finally, when I was about to pop off and say something about it being unnecessary to be a bitch, she smiled.

"C’mon," she said. "We’ll saddle up Ginger for you."

I knew how to saddle a horse, but Nanci did everything, from showing me how to tighten the girth to teaching me how to tell a horse’s age. While nudging the bit into Ginger’s mouth, she said, "See this lower corner incisor?" She peeled Ginger’s lip back. "It’s narrower than the upper. This creates a notch, which is sometimes called the ‘seven-year notch’ or ‘seven-year hook,’ depending on who you’re talking to."

"So Ginger is a seven-year-old?"

"Yep," she said, wiping her hands on her jeans. "Okay, sister, you’re all set."

I followed her back over the field, where we came upon a small circle-pen that held a single palomino. She hopped off the dun and headed for the animal. "This is Bette Davis," she called back to me. "I’m breaking her, now. Had to hobble the little heifer because she is ornery unto it. Like a Pomeranian on latté. Her real name’s Peanut, but I changed it when I took over her gentling process. I mean, Peanut is an insult."

"Why Bette Davis?" I asked.

She disengaged the hobble from Bette’s legs and carefully untied her reins from the fence. "Whoa," she murmured. "Whoa, Bette."

Like a pistol, Bette threw her head back, jerking Nanci forward, and began whinnying.

Nanci had not had time to loop the reins around her hand, therefore, Bette had effectively freed herself and was ripping and snorting around the small pen.

"Shitballs!" Nanci cursed. She fumbled for the rope that hung from her jeans and began swinging it. Her arms, sinewy and tan, were flexed with the intensity of hopeful precision. She swung the lasso loosely and deliberately, finally looping it around Bette’s writhing neck on the third try. Bette shrieked angrily over having been caught and tried to extract herself by rearing back over and over.

"Shhhh," Nanci cooed, pulling the rope slowly through her gloved hands. "Shhh…"

It seemed an hour passed before she actually reached Bette, who, by that time, had stopped breathing heavily but appeared to be glaring at us with hatred. She didn’t move when Nanci touched her between the eyes, even when her hand moved slowly to her muzzle. Then Nanci turned around and took a few steps toward me, still holding the rope, but loosely.

"What are you doing?" I whispered.

She looked right at me. "Well, I usually don’t even try to rope ’em when they go nuts like that, unless they’re trying to jump over the fence or something. Most of the time, I just let ’em wear themselves out…shut themselves down. But I wanted to show you that there will be times you’ll have to use a lasso on a horse. Get you used to the idea that it’s something you might have to do here and there."

"What are you doing now?"

Nanci smiled. "Is Bette looking at me?"

"Yes."

"How about her ears…is one of them kind of cupped toward me?"

I looked. The left ear and eye were intently on Nanci.

"The left ear and eye."

"Good," she said. "That’s exactly what we want."

"Why?"

Nanci didn’t answer; instead she turned and slowly made her way to Bette again. Then she stepped back and walked toward the fence. Bette followed obediently. Nanci touched her nose and looked at her for a while, reknotted her reins and turned to me.

"Whew."

"That was incredible," I said.

"Hmph. She may seem tame now, but you just wait until I try to get a saddle on her!"

She giggled, eyes glistening through her dusty face. "I’ve put saddles on horses before and they’ve tried to, literally, jump on me and ride me. Gotta be careful."

"What were you doing earlier? All that moving back and forth?"

"Oh, that," Nanci said. "Well, I behave according to what a horse’s ear and eye is doing. Both move independently. When they’re both on you, that’s a good sign. They’re actually paying attention instead of running buck wild around the pen. They’re interested in you. If you stand in front of a horse and then back up, they’ll come to you. Never go toward them a significant amount. It’s aggressive. Better to walk up and put a hand on that space between their eyes and retreat."

"Isn’t that invasive?" I asked. "I always heard that a hand on the neck is better."

"That’s not true," Nanci said, shaking her head. "The neck is where a predator would try to go for. That whole neck business will scare a horse. Face is better, unless they’ve been abused before. After that, they’re what’s called ‘head-shy’ and that’s a bitch to try to break a horse of. Sometimes they never get over it." She put a finger on my nose. "Now, darlin’, what do you say we show Bette what a saddle is?"

That day I worked harder than I had ever worked in my life. I watched Nanci wrestle the buck and romp out of Bette like lunch money. We took turns getting bucked off and before I knew it, the sun was on its way to Australia and we were soaked with what Nanci called the "sweet grime of summer."

"Nothing better than being dirty, dusty, and sore after being around horses all day long," she said. "I need a beer."

I had never tasted alcohol before, but was so thirsty I was ready to drink pond water if I had to.

"Let’s go see if Angelo’s gone," she said.

We rode to the stable slowly while Nanci talked.

"Sorry if I was kind of bitchy earlier," she said. "It’s just, I usually don’t get along with girls that great. They’re cookie-cutters. You seem to be okay, though. I think we might even be carved from the same cloth. I mean, you fell down like a girl, but you got back up like a boy. I like that."

I was pleased but didn’t say anything.

"La, la, la!" she shouted. "Angelo’s truck is gone. It’s Miller Time!" She kicked the dun into a lope and I followed on Ginger.

We took the saddles off our horses, brushed them down, and smacked their bottoms. "Go get some water girls," Nanci hollered, "I’ll feed you in a bit."

"I usually feed everybody as soon as I get in, but it’s been a long day and I’m gonna sit right here, drink myself a beer, and watch what’s left of the sun go down, before I do another damn thing."

She tossed me a beer from Angelo’s small refrigerator and we perched ourselves on the fence. She cracked her beer and took a long swig. "Gotta drink it fast before Mama comes to pick me up," she said.

"Won’t Mr. Angelo miss two beers from his refrigerator in the morning?"

"Nah, he knows I drink one every evening, but we don’t discuss it."

"That’s nice of him." The beer was slushy cold and so good I drank mine up before Nanci had a chance to finish hers.

"He’s cool, Angelo is," Nanci said, watching the last glimmering sparks of the sun cast its glow onto the trees. "You’re gonna learn so much. He’s a horse genius."

"I want to learn everything there is to know," I said.

The crickets had begun whirring and humming, as run by tiny motors. Somewhere in the pasture, the donkey brayed.

"Hey," Nanci said, suddenly, hopping off the fence. "I almost forgot. I need to water my plant."

She filled a bucket with water and I followed her to the edge of the fence where we encountered a large tomato plant surrounded by clumsily-placed chicken wire.

"This is Tom," Nanci laughed. "The tomato. I’ve never grown anything before, but I heard tomato plants are the easiest to start with, and it’s true. Look how big he’s getting! And I don’t do shit but water him…and that’s only when I remember to do it."

Tom was almost knee-high, with bulging orange billiard-balls hanging from him as if Mars and a few of his brothers were suspended from a great, green shoelace.

"Do you eat tomatoes?" she asked, pouring the water gingerly over the plant.

"Sometimes, if they’re salty."

"Well, then these are yours. I can’t stand tomatoes all by themselves. Gotta be in pasta or something. Since you like them, I’ll grow ’em just for you."

I smiled. "Thanks."

Nanci knocked the last bits of water out of the bucket and onto Tom, then we headed back for the barn, where we fed the pig, who lay swooning in mud like an antebellum matron. "This is Brownie," she said.

"Brownie?" I asked, wrinkling my nose. "But she’s pink."

"So?" Nanci replied. "I’ve always wanted to name something Brownie. Always. I never had a pet and Angelo bought Brownie three weeks ago and said I could name her. He just laughed and laughed when I picked that name. Shrugged his shoulders, called me a Silly Willy, and told me to make sure I didn’t forget to feed her along with the horses. That was it."

She leaned back toward Brownie and cooed to her. Brownie lolled around for another minute before she realized we were there to serve her supper. Then she sallied over to inspect it, grunting softly like a miniature locomotive.

"This pig is my heart," Nanci said, making kissing noises through the fence. "Doesn’t she look exactly like a cream puff?" She erupted in a jelly of giggles. "I threw her some pecans once—still in the shells—and you know what she did? She cracked them with her teeth and ate the meat part and spat out the shell part, just like a nutcracker!"

"What else does she like to eat?"

"Girl, she’s nothing but a mouth. She’ll eat anything. And she can run faster than a dog. She got out once and man, she was harder to catch than a greased tick on an ice-rink."

"How’d you catch her?" I asked.

"I lured her back with a hotdog, if you can believe that."

We laughed, then went back to pick up our beer cans. We stepped on them, left oats in the trough for the horses, and then Nanci’s mom arrived and gave me a ride home.

That night, I lay in bed sore to the core. Tan, leathered, and weathered from the Louisiana sun. And that was the beginning of Nanci and me, our summers of grime, poetry, and the occasional skittering chicken. I came to discover that Nanci’s equestrian skills were only exceeded by her poems. She loved words and knew how to use them. She often said--and I don’t know whether she was quoting someone or whether she thought up the comparison herself--there’s “no money in poetry, but then, there’s no poetry in money, either.” She was a grand writer who reveled in penning letters that showed me her experiences, instead of merely telling me of them.

We had decided to become cowgirls after reading Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. As teenagers, we fought over who got to be Sissy Hankshaw and who was Bonanza Jellybean but, when adults, shifted to who was going to marry Tom Robbins. Nancy had longer eyelashes, but I had bigger lips. Alas, neither of us had thumbs worth a shit.

Seven Year Itch
Phthirus inguinalis (Crab Louse) Crisis Center

Nan,

Sweetheart, there is no place to ride anywhere. I try not to drive past our crumbling childhood estate of barns and stalls because it hurts too bad. The place is in absolute disarray--nobody will ever buy it. The “for sale” sign is so old I don’t think you can even read the realty company on it anymore. I am so sorry.

On a happier note, I have been thinking more and more about hopping in old Towanda, the sensible, matronly, four-door, and just letting her lead me to Austin like an accommodating hostage. She just got new tires and is now galloping and bucking around like a little blue pony.

I loved so many of your images in the letter-poem...your “opera-singing locusts and fireflies punctuating the night!” However do you come up with such perfect descriptions? Descriptions that make me say, “Yes! That’s it exactly!” We will definitely make a pilgrimage to Enchanted Rock. It sounds Nabokov-esque. My English professor and mentor, Dr. Sobdue, gave me Nabokov’s entire collection of short stories for Christmas last year, but Lolita is the only piece I really like. Anyway, we shall go to Enchanted Rock and talk of Lolita...a nymphet standing four-ten in one sock...

Speaking of Dr. Sobdue, I just signed up (last-minute!) to take his linguistics class again. I wanted to take a night class and it was either that or theory, but now that I’ve begun teaching piano at the Crescendo again, I decided to go with linguistics. I like grammar and language so much more than theory, anyway...

You must meet Sobdue next time you are in town: he speaks seven languages, including Gothic, (which is dead for chrissakes), and knows everything about etymology imaginable. His hands are an abacus--his fingers are absolute rods--with knuckles for movable spheres. I swear they’re not opposable...which only goes to show what I’ve known all my life: opposable thumbs do not make the man.

I am hurting and lonely right now. I want to call Jack and smooth his scratches. I am glad I haven’t seen him out. There are already rumors spreading about our separation/impending divorce. One of them is that Jack walked in and I was with another man. An even more ludicrous one is that he walked in on me with a woman. Can you believe it? Why can’t people just let you get divorced in peace. Jeez, it already hurts bad enough as it is.

But I am adjusting. It is good to have a job, again and be independent. Oh, I am so proud of us! We’re career women. When I come to Austin, I will be sure to surprise you when you’re all suited up--hair pulled into a severe bun and tossing that head of yours like a surly thoroughbred...

Electra

And I did feel terrible. The whole thing had been wrong from the start. Jack was everything to me, except butterflies. He was kind, handsome, intelligent, and in love with me. I loved him, too, but not in a way that sent me into orbit. It was a love connoting a deep friendship. I thought it would be a lovely arrangement at first, but it wasn’t long until I began feeling like a failure. What kind of newly-wedded woman didn’t have passion for her husband? Especially one as good as Jack. He deserved to meet and marry someone who would scream his name at the top of her lungs into the night sky. I was horrible and ungrateful.

Here was the first man who had ever been truly good to me and I didn’t even love him the way he deserved. I was nebulous when the topic of having children arose and even more so when Jack expressed a desire to move away from Dixie for good. I was too selfish to contemplate children and uncomfortable around infants.

Young adults get married because they are in love and are passionate: it’s all about a racing heartbeat and panties twirling from the ceiling fan. Old people get married for companionship. Was I old?

I rose from the porch to put a stamp on Nanci’s letter. As I passed from the living room to the study, I caught myself in the mirror. I looked old. I was already twenty pounds lighter and the weight was still falling off, steadily. I had no appetite. Sometimes, on days when I felt good and confident about my new single life, I could eat and enjoy food, but when I questioned my decisions and missed Jack, I couldn’t eat. It was as if someone had removed my stomach. No hunger pangs or anything. Oh, I grieved.

We wrote back and forth, I on my porch and she on her desk at home. The porch was my favorite escape, with its brick floor, six mismatched chairs, and small, rickety table. The table, however modest, was capable of supporting the essentials to Southern-sitting: a crystal glass holding a dollop of Southern Comfort in it, an ashtray for a cigar, and one of those immense citronella candles that never succeeds in keeping mosquitoes away, but smells like summertime.

The fourplex had been built in 1932; back when the geometry of a building mattered and architecture was interesting and diverse. I liked to think of it as somebody's opulent old house, but was told it was actually built to accommodate four tenants. It was a huge and yellow Frank Lloyd Wright knock-off, with a driveway that split the building into halves like a gridiron.

I have a strong sense of nostalgia, even when the nostalgia isn’t really my own. I enjoy thinking about times past and this fourplex illustrated, with its temperamental space heaters and archaic air-conditioners, a time when men still wore hats and women left pies to cool on windowsills. A time that made me long to have seen that abstracted era when my grandmother was a child, spinning in a tire swing in scuffed saddle oxfords.

The porch area, as a whole, was a grand old Magician who played with light and shadow. In the evenings, after the sun faded, a looming light appeared over the driveway that cast a strange eclipse over the building and its surroundings.

It reminded me of the movie To Kill A Mockingbird. That movie, though black and white, had a strange yellow glow about it that I have never seen in any old black-and-white movie. Yet, the glow was manifest each evening on Spyglass Street---shining over the building’s rickety screen doors with their broken wooden teeth, and gleaming off of the massive oak tree that loomed over the driveway with big, soulful arms. Even the meat of the bark glistened. Sometimes, after drinking a glass of Southern Comfort, I would halfway look for Scout in that tree.

It was there I was born at half-past twenty-six years old; born into a womanhood I thought I already possessed. It was there, too, I was born into camaraderie with people who would exchange their life stories with me and give me the kind of conversations for which I had always longed.

It was on Spyglass Street I would read The Fountainhead and see it as not quite as brilliant as I had seen it at twenty, and on that street I would rejoice at being both young and Southern while I was still young enough to appreciate the glory those two elements could afford a girl. I alone possessed the key to my apartment and I alone unlocked and relocked the door behind me. When the telephone rang, the calls were for me. I washed my clothes, ate what I bought, and slept when I felt like it. No obligatory routine. Just me to walk around the small, but strangely spacious, apartment and revel in my Oneness.

The woman who lived above me taught elementary school, but I didn’t get to know her until later, so Nanci was my only real friend when I first moved into the fourplex. As far as my family was concerned, I was a sort of domestic anathema. They couldn’t understand why I would voluntarily divorce a sweet Southern boy who would do anything in the world for me. The fact that I had been unhappy wasn’t a factor to them. Too, I was somewhat eager to dive into Lake Dixie and swim in its society, but too depressed to want to leave the piano. I had been out of the social rodeo for so long, I didn’t know quite where to begin and wasn’t sure I was ready to begin, anyway. So I relied on the good favor of Nanci, Beethoven, and my books to occupy my time.

Nanci had written me that day and I waited until I had bathed and made a steaming cup of tea before I opened and began reading her glorious letter.

Volcanic Eruption
Sperm Donation Services, Inc.

Electra,

I am sorry to hear about the property, but if I ever decide to change careers and become a trophy wife, I’ll buy that damned thing. Just kidding, but what else can we do but take it lightly at this point? The alternative is worse.

As for the rest of the letter, it was satisfying...like getting a whole Popsicle, breaking it in half, and eating both pieces in front of your kid sister. Austin is wonderful. It’s dry and scrubby and the rocks sit jutting their chins at me. I’ve found love in these hills and in the arroyos of the greenbelt--the colors here are ochre and charcoal and pass into chalky frescoes. Texas has Roman colors while Louisiana has Parisian ones.

The smells here are different, too. Louisiana has a rich, verdant smell...plums, clay, blood, bourbon, an old lady’s brocade couch in a shadowy room. Texas smells like dry, useful wood--clean but dusty, too. Louisiana is a grand old bitch with lots of money, a drunken debutante getting eaten out in the back seat. Texas is a saloon with a card-cutting whore and an upright piano, played all tinny and warped like a wet music box...

Nanci

Her opulent descriptions tugged at me. I was safe with her, could trust her. We looked up to each other, which made us about the same height and impossibly tall in our friendship. I knew we would never let the other drift into the wan dimension of Everyone-elsehood.

But enough of that. Let’s get to the goods, shall we? Though Nanci’s truest talents lay in business, equestrian matters, and written expression, her favorite hobby was man-eating. She was a swami of heartbreakers. She one of those absurdly beautiful people; the kind where, when entering a room, men and women alike would whisper, “who is that!” At the same time, they would have had a litter of kittens had they been privy to half of the vile things that erupted from that pert mouth. Nanci aspired to be like George Sand, a career woman with a string of lurid affairs. She was well on her way: her wit alone was such that one often wondered whether there was a forked tongue working syllables within those butterscotch lips.

And so it was Nanci who decided that the best way of lifting me from my depression was to play a game. An interesting game that would keep me occupied and “heal” me. A Mr. Miagi to my Karate Kid. It was she who tried to coach a girl (who tended to marry everyone she dated) how to play the realm of Singlehood. How to keep ’em coming back for more. When to be aloof and when to tease them to distraction. A game I ended up failing miserably. One I realized that, like poker, I had no interest in and even less talent for. But then, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Nanci had moved to Texas only six months before I left Jack and refused to return because, as she put it, she'd laid everyone worth laying in Dixie and didn't want her own sloppy seconds. Typical. We had read Six Degrees of Separation and always joked that Dixie had only one-sixth degree and that Nanci knew it for a fact.

With me, it all started with that first man-eating letter. “Electra,” Nanci wrote, “I have the perfect idea. You need to get your skinny ass off that piano stool and onto a bar stool. I will tell you what to do. You need a rebound. Girl, you should always keep a “couple of victims rattlin’ around your pipeline. Blondie, the only thing boys are good for is oral sex and hauling around heavy furniture. Gotta have three so you can pit them against each other. It is imperative you have a little talent on the side. Oh, and you must oscillate between being an Ice-Princess and an affectionate sixteen-year-old…just enough to make ‘em crazy. Kiss them sweet if they’re good, but give them the old Greta Garbo if they try to mess with you.

Look, here’s what you do. Find the first man (and do it soon! Your next letter to me should include your first filthy exploit!) you find that is handsome and just take him out. Wrap your legs around him and release everything on him. That’s when you’re the sixteen-year-old. Have yourself a good time and leave him thinking you’re the most free, fun girl he’s ever known. Then don’t answer the phone when he calls. Transmorph into Ice-Princess mode. This is your first assignment. Do not disappoint me. Plus, it’s really fun!”

Great. How was I supposed to do all of that? On second thought, what did I have to lose? It did sound exciting. I decided to go that very night. I was a little giddy when I went, less than two hours later, to a neighborhood bar. I looked around, but I didn’t look very hard. I don’t think I really wanted to find anybody. I felt like a social virgin.

It was slim-pickins, anyway, because all of the boys looked the same with their button-down shirts and khakis. Ho-hum. I drank two Diet Cokes, smoked three cigarettes, and called it a night. I would just wait, even if that meant Nanci didn’t get a reply letter from me for the rest of the year. I wasn’t going to have sex for sex’s sake alone.

Maybe I typed that last sentence a little too soon. The next day, it happened. Amazingly enough, I was ready. Adam Aucoin was the first guy I saw who didn’t make me sick to my stomach. He wasn’t wearing khakis, for one. I like boys, but I tend to be repelled by them far more than I am attracted to them. They’re either ripped and luscious but dumb as a toilet seat, or else they’re sensitive and smart but have some kind of cosmetic damage. That may sound cruel and I feel emotionally topical writing it, but it all comes down to this: if a boy doesn’t give you a hot flash, he just doesn’t. In any case, I was scared my repellent attitude would make “victim accumulation” hard as hell. Adam played football for the Dixie Gators. He was probably a whore himself, but not as wretched and felonious as Nanci encouraged me to be.

I met him at a convenience store of all places. It was late August and hotter than Satan fucking in a microwave. I was on my way to work and stopped in to get my usual breakfast of a pack of Marlboros and a large black coffee. He was behind me in line, buying a honey bun and a carton of chocolate milk.

"That's nutritious," he commented, eying my purchases.

"Touche," I replied drily, raising an eyebrow and nodding at his honey bun.

He smiled and clutched the bun to his chest. "They're good," he said.

I held my coffee in the air, as if to declare a toast. "I'll bet the rush I get after I drink this will outlast the sugar-rush you'll get from that."

He laughed. "I'm not eating this for the rush. I'm eating it because I'm hungry." Men. The bastards can eat anything and not worry a whit about fitting into their skinny jeans.

"Well," I said, "...enjoy."

I couldn't think of anything else to say, plus, he was making me late for work.

But, as it turned out, I ended up being really late for work that day because I was busy nailing him in my apartment an hour later.

I know, I know...I went from a good girl to a completely hedonistic existentialist in less than an hour. But consider, I’m learning a new game. Going through a phase. Nanci always said that the old saying about “sowing oats” isn’t cliché because lots of people don’t go through it. It’s just that it’s usually spoken in regard to boys. “She’s a slut” is the phraseology ascribed to girls who sow oats. But it’s all really the same thing, isn’t it?

Which brings me to my next (er, existentialist) point and that is: the one thing to be said for football players is that they have the most sawed-off, cut-up bodies you can imagine. Adam was golden and as bronzed as Baal, with a neck like a tree-trunk and arms as smooth and tan as boat paddles. His hair was child-at-the-beach blond and he wore it surfer-style with the back trimmed short, but shaggy over the forehead.

He was intelligent, too, which I hadn’t expected. He actually enjoyed reading and knew Electra had been written by Sophocles, which is a fact not very many people have in their mental encyclopedias. He had talked me out of the convenience store and into the parking lot, introducing himself as we walked. He asked where I lived and I told him around the corner in one of the old fourplexes. He gave some excuse about “admiring architecture” (which I believed) and wanted to see it so I said sure, and he followed me back to Spyglass Street.

He walked to the building slowly and squinted, as if deeply contemplating its anatomy. I unlocked the door so he could look around, all the while thinking, Electra, what in hell are you doing? I sipped my coffee--glad to have something to do with my hands and moronically wondered about his honey bun. Maybe he had eaten it in the car on his way over.

After giving him a tour, we sat on my couch and began talking. I was preoccupied; I knew I should really be getting to work but, thankfully, had an “in-service” day at the Crescendo, which meant I would spend the day in meetings with other music teachers drinking more coffee and talking about methodology. Bleah.

After flopping on the couch, he pulled out a little joint and kind of waved it around.

"You smoke?" he asked, winking.

"Sure," I lied.

I hadn’t smoked weed since college, but something in me, suddenly, really wanted to smoke that joint. Maybe I was nervous and wanted to take my edge off, but, for whatever reason, we lit it and sat passing it until we were both giggling like schoolgirls.

After sucking my burned fingers from inhaling the last little bits from the roach, I decided I had better go ahead and call in because I was so stoned I couldn’t have made it out to the car if a chauffeur had offered me a piggyback ride. The phone call itself was awful--I decided to complain of a case of horrendous cramps, yet laughed hysterically the whole time I tried describing them to George Jinks, the headmaster of music at the school. George was one of those nervous, squashy, pasty little men who flirted shamelessly with women and was so blubbery if you poked him with your finger it would probably sink in like a mound of biscuit dough.

George fancied himself a proper gentleman, despite his glittery-eyed perversion, and had a tendency to giggle and trill his r’s when he spoke. He was also terrified of homosexual men. There were only three gay men out of the eleven male teachers, but George flinched and cowered away from them in passing as if he were about to be publicly raped. He liked me because I acted as his phobic liaison. He would tell me--wringing his hands and stammering--to relay school-oriented messages and I happily obliged. I like gay men...they usually have twice the personality of heterosexuals.

So when I got him on the phone I wasn't too concerned about pulling off a good lie, which was fortunate because Adam was splitting his sides laughing in the background.

"You don't sound like you're hurting," George said.

I swallowed a guffaw. "Don't you know about Freud and the whole hysteria thing?" I said, feigning indignance.

"Marginally."

"Well, you should read up on it and I'm not kidding. You couldn't know anything about it because you're a man and don't have to bleed through the best years of your life."

"Okay, okay," he said, embarrassed. "I'm sorry...all I said was that you didn't sound sick, that's all. You're right, I don't know anything about women and their--their--well, their personals."

"In that case," I said, as miserably as possible. "I'll see you tomorrow. Right now I have to go to the store and get some medicine for my cramps."

I hung up and Adam and I hit the floor howling. He, I came to learn, smoked all the time, therefore, was much better off than I. I felt like playing music and turned on Lyle Lovett. It was the best music I had ever heard in my whole life, but he’s my all-time favorite, anyway.

I felt like singing, so I did. "If I had a boat, I'd go out on the ocean; and if I had a pony, I'd ride him on my boat..." My singing made Adam laugh harder and watching him laugh made me laugh. We sat on the couch and roared until he leaned over and kissed me. And then, if that red couch could talk...

Before I knew it, we were naked and smoking another joint---chuckling evil and polluted like a couple of criminals. I don’t remember passing out, but I do remember the long trip afterward to the bathroom: disheveled hair, lipstick smeared up one side of my cheek and across the bridge of my Choctaw nose, naked, woozy, and trying to figure out how hot that shower would have to be to hose the whore off of me. I turned the water on and crawled in. My eyes were clenched shut, washing the conditioner out of my hair, when I felt arms circling my waist.

"What did you say your name was?" Adam teased.

I sighed. "Lolita."

He laughed. "You were a one-girl Wild Kingdom documentary. When was the last time you had sex?"

I felt so guilty. Jack. But I shook it off. This wasn’t indicative of the game I was trying to learn. “I’ve been on permanent sabbatical from my marriage as of August the third and haven’t had sex since a couple of weeks before that. So I guess that makes about a month and a half.”

Adam blinked hard. "You haven't even been separated a month?"

"Yep."

"That's not very long."

I shrugged.

"So I guess you're rebounding, right?"

"No," I said. "I'm enjoying a post-sex shower with some stoned guy whom I randomly met at a convenience store."

That's cool," he said. "Hand me the soap."

We sat on the porch and talked while I let my hair air-dry. My hair is ashy-blonde and so thick I could supply toupees to every bald man on the planet and still have plenty left over for bald women, children, and animals. As we talked, an aromatic blend from the restaurant over the fence beckoned and we decided we needed its lunch special, which consisted of a gigantic slab of chicken-fried steak, collard greens, and a brick of cornbread a foot wide.

I put on a pair of old hospital scrubs and a T-shirt and we walked over. We were still a little giddy from the hooch and paranoid everyone knew we were stoned. Especially when our food arrived and we ravaged it like a couple of silverbacked gorillas. After cleaning our plates and slowly sharing a huge wedge of pecan pie, we staggered back to the porch and fell, bloated, into the chairs and talked until dusk began to settle and a car pulled into the drive.

The girl who got out had a backpack over each shoulder and a purse slung around her neck. I had seen her a few times and knew she lived in the apartment above mine, but had never formally introduced myself.

"Hi," I said. “I’m Electra Richot. I just moved downstairs.”

She dropped the backpacks at her door and fumbled for her keys.

"Oh, sure," she said, brightly. "Sadie Logann. I hope I don't stomp around too much up there, but with hardwood floors you just can't help it."

"That's okay," I said.

She looked at Adam through a pair of enormous brown eyes and he extended his hand. "I'm one of Electra's oldest and dearest friends," he said. "Adam Aucoin."

She shook it. "Nice to meet you."

Actually seeing Sadie for the first time, I couldn't believe she could make as much noise stomping around upstairs as she did. She was tiny: not short, but slight. The kind of girl you'd be scared to hug too hard out of fear of breaking her in half. Her brown hair flipped up on the ends and I noticed she, too, had an Indian nose. She smiled at us and it made her, already pretty face, instantly beautiful.

"Well," she said, unlocking the door, "I'm sorry I didn't come down to say hello when you first moved in, but the school year just started and my first-graders have been wearing me out. Don't be a stranger, ELectra. We're neighbors. If you need anything," she said, "just bang on the ceiling."

"I'll do it."

Adam stood and stretched. "Well," he said. "I have been a total slug all day. I missed practice and should probably get home so I can call the coach with a convincing lie of some sort, like you did. But I really had fun today...will you jot your number down for me?"

Thank God. It would have been bad enough having a Jongian zipless fuck, but if he had gone without getting my phone number I would have felt like an even bigger slut. We went inside and wrote it down on a New Yorker cartoon that pictured a man and a woman in bed together with the man looking exasperated. The caption read, "Could you please not call me Bill this time?" Adam folded it and put it in his pocket. Then he kissed me so deeply I forgot everything and wanted to drag him back in the door.

"I'll call you," he said.

And I won't answer the phone for a week, the Ice-Princess answered in her head.

Nanci's eyes were going to bug out of her skull when she read the first chapter of this girl's sordid Olympic burlesque. That was the day I crossed over. Let the games begin.

Look for The Sweet Grime of Summer coming in 2002!

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