Her front door is open a crack. You say hello and step inside.
She’s wearing a housedress that exposes every bone in her chest. You could ball her up like a piece of construction paper. Her maid asks if you want anything to drink and you say a Coke please and thank you and thank you again when she delivers it, your politeness so polite it is condescending even though you don’t mean for it to be condescending. You only mean to be polite.
The two of you sit on either side of the window, where you look out at your street.
“The Mexicans are moving in,” she says.
“There must be a dozen in the green house on the corner,” you tell her, but you don’t care if the Mexicans are moving in, or the blacks, or the polka-dotted people, as your mother used to say when she wanted to demonstrate her sense of equality—they could be polka-dotted for all I care. Just then the Mexicans’ dog ambles past, jauntily. He’s a yellow Lab and there’s nothing remotely Mexican about him but he’s always loose, unleashed. On the small table between you, your glass sits on a coaster. Next to your glass is her checkbook. The old lady is rich, you are sure, though her house is always hot and her Coke always flat and the only baked goods come in plastic grocery store containers. You wonder if she will leave you any money. You know she won’t but you like the idea of it. She has no one and you have no one, but this isn’t true. You have a lot of people. You run down the list of them in your head: a mother and a father and a brother and a sister and a husband and a boyfriend and at least four friends you could call up and pour your heart out to, but what would they say? They are always running late. She will leave her money to First Baptist, or to the university where her son taught. Maybe it will be enough to buy him a wing.
You finish your drink and tell her you have laundry in the dryer but her hearing goes out again so you sit there fingering the tablecloth. She asks if you like it and you say it’s pretty and she says she’ll teach you to crochet but her hands are gnarled. She holds them like a pair of socks. You look at her grandson’s senior portrait on the wall—gorgeous and long-haired, eighteen years old—and wish you’d known him then, in the backseat of a Buick, perhaps: his hands on your thighs, your breasts, his teeth on your neck. Now he’s in his fifties and chews with his mouth open, food falling out. Not even his eyes give it away.
You stand at a window that is halfway open, watching an assortment of middle-aged women drink coffee and flip through a picture album and talk on the phone about car repairs and birthday parties. No one looks up. They all want to see who will give up first. Your husband stands beside you. You look at him: you will never have his baby and that baby will never have his eyelashes or his thick, wavy hair.
You say something—you have to go to the bathroom, you’re thirsty, will these bitches ever shut up?—and he’s angry because you ate garlic. He backs away and you put a hand to your mouth and the lady with the picture album walks over and asks how she can help and he hands her the paperwork he filled out at the dining room table, calling you over every few minutes to sign your name as if he were doing the taxes.
On the way home, he pulls into the parking lot of Quiznos and you go inside and order while he waits in the car. He doesn’t have to tell you what he wants because you know what he wants. You have no idea what your boyfriend would want. He could order the tuna and you wouldn’t be surprised.
There’s a line of people in business clothes to remind you it is Thursday. Every day people get up and go to work whereas every day you are relieved to see another blank square on the calendar you got free at the Indian takeout.
The stocky guy with the beard says, “What, no cookie?” and you say, “Not today,” and he smiles as he shoves a wad of napkins in your bag, but other days he acts like he’s never seen you before in his life.
Your boyfriend reads books and watches videos on how to pleasure a woman, how to make her squirt. You don’t squirt, nor do you have any desire to squirt. You can barely change the sheets as it is. But your boyfriend wants to make you squirt because no one else has. He sends you a link to a video, which you watch together: a woman lies on her back on a table and a professional-looking man puts two fingers inside her and begins jerking up hard. “It doesn’t hurt,” your boyfriend says. “It just looks like it hurts.” The man on the screen is explaining the mechanics as if he were taking apart a toaster and then the woman goes into convulsions and a liquid pours out of her. “Disgusting,” you say, but you get him off the phone quick.
Your parents come on Saturday with a U-Haul and you load it up with heavy bookcases and china and—since you are the one leaving—all of the wedding pictures and videos and whatever other burdens that will fit. The last thing you take off the wall is the framed photograph of yourself as a child: curly hair and a pink crocheted poncho, an oversized Raggedy Ann doll in the chair next to you. He loves the picture because you look foreign—you are his little foreign poncho girl. You ask if he wants to keep it and he turns around and walks into the kitchen.
Your father doesn’t know what’s going on, only that you are unhappy, which he doesn’t consider reason enough for anything.
Your mother knows there is someone else. Crazy sex brain, she calls it.
You follow behind them in your car, singing along to Sheryl Crow, who writes soundtracks for this sort of thing. You are free, you tell yourself. You are in love. You put your sunglasses on and crack the sunroof so you can hear the truckers blow their horns at you as you pass.
Outside Birmingham, your father pulls the U-Haul into Wendy’s. You emerge sweaty and rumpled. You lift your arm and sniff and then run your fingers over your scalp, which is bumpy like a topographical map. You looked it up on the internet and determined that it was psoriasis: an immune disorder resulting in the overproduction of skin cells. Regular skin is on a thirty-day cycle whereas your skin is replacing itself every three or four days, intent upon starting over. It is a disease. There are support groups for it. Other than Brownies, you’ve never belonged to anything and you like the idea of having supporters, a group of people who sit around in a circle and drink coffee and maybe have sex with each other afterwards.
You tell your father you want a grilled chicken sandwich with no honey mustard and a Diet Coke and go to the bathroom while they wait in line. You look at yourself in the mirror. You feel sorry for yourself like you feel sorry for pretty girls in wheelchairs, like you felt sorry for your friend Angela’s dad, who was so big he never left the house.
When you come out, your mother and father are seated by the window.