The place was a cheap ranch-style house with an old gray dog sleeping in the yard. It was evening. Birds circled around. I had a headache.
“I made us dinner,” Terri said. She was short and big hipped and seemed shy standing there in jeans and a blouse with frills around the throat. I walked up the porch steps and took a good look. She had blue eye shadow on and a necklace with long red stones dangling on it. Her chest was large but looked like it would just sag and splay all over the place if it wasn’t hoisted up into a bra. I tried to imagine what those art students ever saw in her. I looked around her face. It was round and brown and had a scar running down from her left eye. I had a not-so-good feeling. Her hair was thick and pulled back in a ponytail. Her nose was squat and wide and had little pimples around the nostrils. I tried not to stare at them. “Are you hungry?” she asked, smiling. She had yellow, nubby teeth. I tried to see past her teeth into the inside of her mouth. “I’ve got cookies, too,” she said. She pointed into the house through the screen door.
I didn’t know what to say to her. The house smelled like garlic and laundry. She led me through the living room, where the sofa was covered in plastic and the furniture was white and gold and tacky. She pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and turned off the small black-and-white TV on the counter. I guessed she sat in front of it and ate cookies all day. I thought maybe she’d be okay looking if I put her on a diet, bought her some workout DVDs, got her teeth fixed. She was not the girl I’d been picturing, but there was something sweet about her.
“Do you have a family?” she asked me, setting down a plate of Nutter Butters. I put one in my mouth and nodded. “Brothers and sisters?” Terri asked. I shook my head. She got up and poured me a glass of water from the tap. The glass was from Disneyland.
“I have an uncle,” I said, taking another cookie.
“I just have my mom,” she said. “She’s sleeping. All she really does is sleep.”
Terri’s face looked puffy and sad. I figured she’d improve after a course of diuretics, some benzoyl peroxide. I ate a few more cookies.
“Are you hungry?” she asked again. I tried to imagine getting on top of her. I imagined it would be like resting on a water bed.
“Better we do it before we eat,” I said, pushing the plate of Nutter Butters away. Terri blushed. I knew I was better looking than her. I knew she would be grateful no matter what I did to her. She stood and led me to her bedroom. I watched her struggle with her jeans. Her thighs swung around as she crawled onto the bed. She kept her bra on, thank God. “You’re so handsome,” she said. I stood above her and took my shirt off. Terri reached up to touch me. I wasn’t all that interested in being touched. I didn’t want her to feel my rash. What I wanted was to put my fingers in her mouth. I closed my eyes and felt around her face and stuck my index finger inside. She used her tongue on it and sucked it, and I put another finger in. She kept sucking on my fingers. It was such a good feeling. It was like coming out of the cold and stepping into a cozy room with a fire going. It was like stepping into a hot bath. I wanted to put my whole hand in her mouth. I held the back of her head with one hand and reached down her throat with the other. She choked and tried to speak, but I just kept shoving my hand down there. I could see my hand bulging in her throat from the outside. Eventually she stopped struggling. “Good girl,” I wanted to say but didn’t. When I looked down, I could see something twinkle in her eyes.
Afterward I didn’t kiss her or pet her or anything. It wasn’t like that. We got up and ate the food she had made: spaghetti and meatballs and chocolate pudding. Then I threw up and said good-bye. I told her I’d call her. She stood on the front porch in a pink robe and watched me drive away.
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Later, when my uncle asked me how the date went, I told him all the details.
“Terri is the most beautiful woman in the world. Luscious brown hair, little button nose, eyes like a baby deer. She’s classy, you know. Not like all these sluts down here. And she’s fun, too. We really did it up. We had a great time.”
My uncle grumbled and adjusted the seat-back angle of his recliner.
“Be careful with women,” he told me. “All they want is love and money.”
“Terri’s different,” I said. “Can’t you just be happy for me?” I put my hands in prayer position and held them up to my uncle, as though I were making a plea. Ever since Malibu he acted like everything I did was stupid, like everything I did rubbed him the wrong way. He wouldn’t look at me. He just stared straight ahead at the television.
“If she’s so great,” said my uncle, “why isn’t she here spooning us up some Neapolitan ice cream? Where is she, anyway?” He took a handful of peanuts from the container in his lap and let them trickle down from his fist into his mouth. I watched him chew and poke at the colostomy bag. I never answered his questions.
Later we watched The Maury Povich Show and One Life to Live and a movie about people who live in the New York City subway tunnels.
I mowed the lawn again.
THE WEIRDOS
On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients’ theories of light, how it streams at angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water. I asked what the point of it all was, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Lying on the grass outside a tennis arena, he held my face toward the sun, stared sideways at my eyeballs, and began to cry. He told me I was the sign he’d been waiting for and, like looking into a crystal ball, he’d just read a private message from God in the silvery vortex of my left pupil. I disregarded this and was impressed instead by the ease with which he rolled on top of me and slid his hands down the back of my jeans, gripping my buttocks in both palms and squeezing, all in front of a Mexican family picnicking on the lawn.