. . .
A woman named Barbara who is friendly with my mother sells health insurance, and when she arrives at our house to try to interest me in a policy, I get anxious. I don’t do policies. I don’t do forms. But I like Barbara. We bond over our appreciation of the festive charm that our neighbor’s still-lit Christmas snowman brings to the summer nights. Betty, on the couch, coughs. She wants to hear everything we say, but I talk softly, to get her goat, and Barbara follows my lead. Betty frowns.
“I’m not hard-sell,” Barbara says. “I just want to help you make some decisions. Important decisions.”
I look at her with terrible seriousness. “I don’t care what you say,” I tell her. “I am keeping my baby.”
The line is a risk, but I am desperate for attention and figure we might as well test this relationship. When she laughs, I know that I have found someone and reach down to a shelf under the toaster shelf. “Would you like an Oatmeal Creme?” I ask. They are made by Little Debbie and are, for me, a crack equivalent. “I’ve been moderate today. I’ve only eaten about eleven.”
“I don’t think so,” she says. “I’m kinda semi-dieting.”
Barbara looks at me in a kind of hopeful way, asks about New York, says she had always wanted to take her stepson for a visit. “He is artistic,” she says. “You know, like that.” I get the signal. Who wouldn’t? But I want no heart-to-hearts today. I want to have fun. Laugh. It’s so nice to have someone here.
When she begins to talk about the policies, I can tell she is as bored as I am. She is originally from Minneapolis and misses sushi: yellowtail, spider rolls. I say I like tekka maki, but am disgusted by roe.
“Why did you come to Paris?” I whisper to Barbara. She says she married someone here, someone I knew in high school. Then she blurts out that her stepson is gay.
The boy, a year out of high school, lives in Jeff City, where he waits tables and acts in some kind of theater troupe. He never comes home. “I was the one who had to tell him that I knew,” she says. “He didn’t come out to us. I wanted him to know he could trust me.”
I like this woman. She helped the kid out. “His father,” she says, “doesn’t want anyone to know. He’s ashamed. Worried about what other people will think.”
I hate Barbara’s story. I hate how I fear it is going to end, with everyone losing and distant and wondering. She looks like she knows too, like maybe she doesn’t believe that the boy and his father are ever going to get things right. “I love him like he was my son,” she tells me. “It’s harder for my husband. Sometimes it’s not so easy to be stuck in the middle.”
“Are you eyeing my Oatmeal Creme?” I ask before I begin to natter on, saying a lot of boring stuff about how not everyone can make the leap into someone else’s kind of life. I like to think my father would have made the leap, but sometimes I think my mother has hesitated, waiting at the boundary of ever really trying. I think probably because I was scared to lead her, scared of not being perfect.
Barbara asks me if it was hard for me, growing up here. When I cannot think of a joke to make, I tell her that it was maybe a little tough to be alone with it all.
“But I survived,” I say quickly. She looks at me as if uncertain this is the case. Then she pops the big question, the one I hate most: “Do you have”—she eases into it tentatively—“a significant other?”
I tell her that I do better with insignificant others, but say I think I may be getting a dog, before picking up a paper and choosing the least expensive insurance plan; it covers an hour in a free clinic and a couple of cold sores. I am ready for Barbara to go now, but she has more of the form to fill out and begins to ask me more questions that get under my skin.
“Do you see a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Since 1983.”
She looks troubled. I add, “He’s grown dependent. I can’t get rid of him.”
“Do you,” Barbara ask, “take any pharmacological medications?”
“Are you kidding? I was used for testing.”
When she completes her questionnaire, I am certain that I will be denied coverage, but she is optimistic. “I have seen them,” she says, “give it to people with cancer.”
. . .
When I decide to take a nap, Betty, disgruntled over my indulging myself, slams doors loudly and stomps down the hall, raising every bit of racket she can to keep me awake. Unsurprisingly, I fail to doze. I imagine Mr. Dog in my room, tearing out strands of the carpet, stretched out beside me on the bed. I look for my pal outside, but our neighbor, who has seen us earlier, tells me that the police have taken the puppy to “Doggy Jail.” I eye her suspiciously “It wasn’t me,” she says. “I swear. I didn’t call them.”
. . .