October 19 - Jealousy

Angie Miller Reede was born at 10.52 pm on August the seventh. Angelica, (for whom the baby was named), had been ambivalent about having the child from the moment she found out she was pregnant. She had hated the morning sickness, loathed the ache in her lower back and her ankles, and above all, abhorred the changes to her distended belly, the stretch marks, the heavy breasts filled with milk (Milk? Humans shouldn’t be full of something that can be found in the refrigerator, she often thought). Yet the moment Angelica Miller stopped screaming away her larynx in a hospital bed and looked over at the white-coated doctor so casually snipping away her baby’s umbilical cord, something else came over Angelica.

“No!” she cried out. “Give her to me.”

Startled, a nurse placed the mewling babe in her mother’s arms, and had to insist ten times before the child was relinquished to the overnight care unit. “You’ll suffocate your child if you sleep with her, Ms. Miller,” the nurse said again and again. Angelica thought it might be better to suffocate her child than leave it in the care of someone who wouldn’t be as diligent as she.

Indeed, when Angie Miller Reede arrived, wide-eyed and silent, to her parents’ home, Angelica wouldn’t let anyone else hold the baby. Not her parents, or Nick’s parents (even though, between the four of them, they had seen eight children reach adulthood). Nick, the anxious father, laughed uneasily when friends commented that the baby would only think it had one parent, because Angelica still hadn’t let him hold his offspring. At night, Angelica would stay up as late as possible, watching her baby sleep. She learned to jolt from her sleep if Nick crept from their bed in the middle of the night, tiptoeing to his daughter’s cradle in the hopes of getting a moment of her time.

“No!” Angelica would snap. “Nick, you won’t know how to hold her properly.”

Nick frowned with worry. “I won’t know if you never let me.”

But Angelica was unmoved. She guarded over her child jealously, frightening other mothers from playgroup once Angie was a bit bigger with her insistence that none of their children were healthy enough or smart enough to vie for Angie’s attention. She shadowed her on the playground, even taught her a secret, whispered language that Nick tried to catch onto but couldn’t, so Angie’s first words were in this strange, foreign tongue. Angelica ensured that no one but she could answer her child’s needs.

“I don’t understand,” Nick said to his own mother, who had watched the drama from the sidelines. Priscilla Reede crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair and just shook her head.

“Jealousy makes people do crazy things,” she said, and then sipped her tea.

* * * * *

Matthew Diaz adored his wife. He had adored her from the moment they began dating in the twelfth grade, adored the way the sun played on her auburn hair, adored a shadow across her cheek, adored her wide, white-toothed smile. They had adored one another all through college – both had chosen to attend a state school together lest they risk not being accepted to the same, more prestigious private institute – and everyone had smiled secretly and known that they were the kind of couple to beat the odds, to graduate from puppy love to marriage.

Matthew adored his wife on their wedding day, watching her trail down an aisle of grass in her parents’ backyard in a short white sundress, daisies in her fists, and he often thought, even years after they were married, when he woke beside her, that she still looked as beautiful as a bride.

Katie gave him one, two, three children in rapid succession, and at first, he assumed that her lack of attention towards him was the normal wear and tear on any couple adapting to having other human beings thrust into their loving twosome. Matthew thought the kids were fun, and had no problem taking on his half of the parenting. As time went on, though, he noticed that Katie stopped devoting her attention to him as she had in the old days, and doted on her children in a way that went beyond being a good soccer mom. She no longer had time for their Saturday night dates out, or to go for romantic walks with him, to the museum or to the movies.

“Only if it’s G-rated,” she would say absently when he suggested the latter, smiling dotingly at where Alex, their youngest, was playing with legos.

“What about just the two of us, Katie?” he asked, reaching out an arm to her waist but she slipped away easily and knelt by her child. Matthew stifled a flare of jealousy. He couldn’t be jealous of his own kids! He shook his head at the ridiculous thought.

But he was, he realized, and not just for the way they demanded all of Katie’s time; they ate up her affection for him to. When he realized he couldn’t remember the last time she had shared his bed, it was the last straw. He stormed home from work, found his wife washing dishes at the kitchen sink while the children played two rooms over in his study, and he shoved her roughly against the counter. He hiked up her skirt and took her right there, a hand over her mouth. Katie’s eyes popped and she tried to nip at his palm, but she didn’t dare cry out because then the children would come running from the other room to see what was wrong.

After that, it was the only way Matthew could have sex with his wife. She never made time for it otherwise, and she began to hide from him when he came home from work. When she announced, two months later, that she was pregnant again, Matthew didn’t understand the satisfaction in her eyes. A few months after that, she began to show, and Katie wielded her growing belly like a weapon, shoving it towards the bursting erection held in by his pants with satisfaction. Matthew retreated, and fumed as he watched his wife leave for a museum with the children. They had won again.

* * * * *

Nitza loved to go dancing with her girlfriends. When she and Tom began dating, he thought it was adorable. It showed she was independent; it showed she had good friendships; it showed she was comfortable maintaining a life separate from their identity as a couple – all good things. Tom had dated one too many women who only wanted to cling on, and it didn’t interest him at all. Nitza loved her nights out dancing, and she’d giggle as she dressed, a broad smile on her face. It piqued his curiosity. A few months after they began dating, Tom dared to ask.

“What if I come along dancing tonight?”

Nitza froze in the middle of fastening in an earring. “You must be joking,” she said, lowering her chin, the sign that she was annoyed. Tom laughed and said, “Of course. Joking.”

The preparations for the Friday night dancing always took hours. Nitza would select what to wear, which jewels to accompany which materials, which heels, which jewelry. Soon, Tom grew to despise the sight of a lipstick tube, grew nauseated every time he walked past the makeup counters at the department store. He couldn’t believe she was dressing up for her girlfriends alone.

He began following, after she had left her apartment at night. He would wait at the coffee shop on the corner, and when he saw her saunter past in her heels, he would slink along in the shadows, ducking back if she glanced over her shoulder. Did she frown worriedly, that one time? Had she seen? He became more cautious. He would watch her enter the club – always the same one – with her girlfriends, arm-in-arm, five abreast, like a line of Siamese twins, but he didn’t dare enter. Once, he screwed up his courage and went inside, expecting the worst. He blinked in astonishment once his eyes had adjusted. It really was just her and her girlfriends, her fingers wiggling in the air as she held her arms up over her head and swayed back and forth to the rhythm, laughter erupting forth as one of the girls leaned in to say something in her ear. Tom stood up straighter and stared in astonishment. He saw her eyes narrow.

“Shit!” he yelled, startling a boyfriend and girlfriend – or perhaps they had just met – who were grinding against one another. He pushed to the door, made it to the sidewalk and vomited heavily. The revelers on the sidewalk picked their way around him without losing step. “Oh shit, man,” one guy said, but he, too, walked swiftly on.

Tom turned, wiping his mouth, and saw Nitza, hands on hips. “You followed me here? “ she shrieked. “You followed?”

Tom tried to mumble something, but she stabbed a finger towards him. “You don’t trust me,” she said. Her eyes changed from anger to pity. “Go back to your apartment, Tom. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

Tom wept as he walked home.

* * * * *

Every night after work, Marlene’s husband went to the one bar in town to hang out with his buddies. Tony, the bartender, Jack who worked at the diner in town and always came in for a few cold beers after he turned off the hot stoves and the grill for the night, Marty who worked construction on an irregular basis whenever he could convince one of the wives in town to feel sorry for him and hire him to do an odd job or two. Every night, Marlene would wait for Jim to come home, and think bitterly, “Tony knows more about my husband’s life than I do.”

She understood that he didn’t go because he was friends with the guys who frequented Tony’s Bar. He went because he was in love with the green glass bottle of beer he drank there. Oh, she had seen the way that he caressed his beer bottle, his thumb flicking up and down on the sweat beads that formed on a hot summer’s evening.

She didn’t remember the last time he had made her sweat.

That wasn’t even enough. When he came home from Tony’s, he still didn’t crawl into her arms, still didn’t plant a kiss on her lips, nipple, hand. “Anywhere!” she moaned to herself. No; he opened up the fridge, where a collection of those smirking, gleaming green bottles waited at perpetual attention for his whims. And he would come home, and the crack hiss of the bottle opening would scratch at her ears, and she’d run upstairs to their bedroom so he didn’t hear her cry.

She opened the fridge to see if there was any chocolate. That might make her feel better. Her stomach heaved when she saw those self-satisfied bottles just waiting.

“I hate you!” she screamed at them, giving the base of the fridge a little kick. “I hate you I hate you I hate you!”

And one by one, she took every last beer bottle in the fridge and smashed them out the kitchen window onto the pavement below, each shattering with a satisfying spasm of glass and liquid and foaming froth, semen exploding at the moment of orgasm. Only after, did Marlene catch herself, both hands holding onto the windowsill, her breath coming in heavy gasps.

Irrational, of course, what she had done. How could she be so jealous of an inanimate object? But she was, she realized with a soft cry, she was. When Jim came home, hours later, and found his wife sitting there, he couldn’t decide whether his wife was laughing or crying.

* * * * *

Monica loved watching her boss. The way he walked with such suave confidence, the way that his pant suits hung perfectly on his svelte but muscular frame, the stern voice he used with clients who came to the office and thought they could get the better of him. And of course, she loved watching because she could picture the naked flesh underneath, the dark curly hair on his chest that she loved to run her fingers through. She found her eyes trailing down to the crotch of his pants and had to keep from smiling at the image that floated to mind of what lay under the fabric.

Monica had been fucking Paul for six weeks now. It was always in a hotel, always quick, always tinged with the faintest hint that what they were doing was wrong, illicit, dirty, but that hadn’t stopped her yet. She found herself pausing in the middle of typing up a report, caught in the reminiscence of the way his hands had caressed her, or the way his lips had stolen a kiss just yesterday morning in the conference room when no one was looking. She bit her lip now until it bled, shivering. She couldn’t concentrate at work anymore, couldn’t stop thinking about when the next time would be. Jumping up from her chair, Monica thought to go to his office on a pretense, find a way to ask him. God, just the sight of him would get her through tonight!

Paul wasn’t in his office, the swiveling leather chair standing pompous and empty, the awards lined up in a compulsive row on his desk. Monica sighed and turned to go, and then caught sight of the smiling, silver-framed photos of his wife and family that flooded the space.

Why hadn’t he taken them down? She thought angrily. Surely, surely, these six weeks between them had been so magical that it was time for him to start thinking about leaving his wife. There was no way that what he and his wife shared could have been as intense and pure as everything they did, no matter that her six weeks were far shorter than Jane Horowitz’ eighteen years.

She voiced this to him two nights later at the hotel, clutching the grimy hotel sheet up to her breast and looking at him with tears in her eyes.

“You’ll leave her soon, right?” she begged, her voice trembling. Paul laughed as he pulled up his trousers, tapped her on the nose.

“You can’t be jealous, kitten. You’re the one who’s cuckolding my wife.”

But not the one who gets to sleep in your arms tonight, Monica thought bitterly. Oh the thought burned, it burned, it burned…

Paul saw her expression, frowned. “You can’t be jealous, kitten,” he scolded. “Or you’re not cut out to handle this the way I thought you were.”

After he was gone, she threw all the pillows and bedding off the bed, then tore down the one, glum painting that hung on the wall as an afterthought. Jealous? Jealous? She sobbed on the piss-scented carpet of that shitty motel room long into the night.

October 18 - A hideout

The club was quiet for the moment, or, comparatively quiet, just the loud speakers blasting, but no musicians rocking out on stage, no amplifiers amplifying or guitars flooding the black-walled, black-floored, black-ceilinged space with however many megahertz of sound. She was sitting at the bar, looking incongruous and out of place. She was dressed up in a velvet blazer and neat black pants, a sharp contrast to the rocker tees and leather around her, and she sipped red wine with her pinkie out, while everyone around her ordered shots and plastic cans of PBR. And she was alone; everyone else had come in the company of twos, threes, more.

“You come here often?” I asked. I hated the stale line; it never really worked, as a pick up line, but it was an opener none the less.

She turned to look at me with flat eyes, then nodded. “All the time,” she said, as though at confessional.

“It’s a great place to have fun,” I tried. Her stare, if anything, grew flatter.

“It’s my hideout.”

I laughed. “A strange place to hide,” I noted, gesturing at the press of bodies that made it difficult to hear, see the stage, breathe. “Hundreds of people who could notice you here.” She shrugged.

“Depends who you’re hiding from.”

I was hooked. I squeezed into the narrow opening between her stool and the next without waiting for the invitation. She looked startled a moment, then went back to sipping red wine.

“Forgive me for saying it,” I continued. “But you don’t look like you belong here.” Both eyebrows shot upwards, nearly to hairline.

“Don’t I?” she asked. “And you assume you know who I am after only three seconds of conversation?”

“I-” I began.

“You,” she cut me off. “If you claim to know so much about me, tell me this. Everyone in my family would be horrified to find me in a place like this.” Her vague wave took in everything from the beer on the floor to the dust in the corners to the hipsters in leather jackets. She wasn’t just talking about the bar, I gathered, but everything within a ten block radius and a lifestyle to go with it. “I grew up one way,” she continued, “and over the past five years, I have steadily tamped down every desire that springs from those days. Call it my work to reject every bit of what that childhood meant. So how do you know whether or not I belong in this place?”

“I-”

“You don’t. See what you don’t know is, my parents waited five days after I left for college before they divorced,” she pressed on. “Five days, because they didn’t know what to do with themselves once they had the option of being loud when they fucked at night. They grew up where it wasn’t polite to use the word fuck, understand?”

I thought I understood.

“I’ve been fucked a hundred ways,” she said, then arched a brow, “and don’t think I mean that literally. And don’t think I don’t. So does that mean I’ve rejected who I am? I have money at my fingertips but I live in a loft in this neighborhood because it makes me feel more comfortable in my skin, understand? And at the same time, I have the luxury of not working because I come from that money, and I wake up to guilt every morning. So does that make me a farce or a reality? Or a contradiction or both? What if I said I’m a feminist but I’m submissive in bed, or that I loathe buying material goods but can’t resist shopping endlessly for gourmet food? Would you pigeon-hole me then? Do these contradictions mean I’ve rejected who I am? If I skip the jack o’lantern carving and WASP-y traditions of my youth, does it mean they’re still not indelibly etched into my skin?” She scratched at her wrist and I noticed a tattoo of a lily twining about her slender bone.

She paused for her first breath.

“And you think you know whether or not I belong in this place.”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. This was not a pick up as I had intended. I liked a pretty face and I liked the clothes that hugged her body, but her mind was going about fifteen times faster than probably anyone else’s in the joint. Didn’t people come to clubs like this to have fun? She read my thought.

“Sometimes I feel I’m too pensive for the rest of the world,” she said, sipping from her red wine. Pinkie out again. “No; that’s wrong. I know I am. So tell me this; am I manic if I can’t tell you how many times today I’ve been back and forth between never wanting to stop living and thinking that I truly cannot take it for another minute?”

I was too afraid to tell her yes, but I shook my head no.

“So yes, this is my hideout. Maybe what you don’t get is that I’m not hiding from my past or my future or my present. Maybe I just need a place to hide from my own brain.”

She turned; it signaled an end. I backed gratefully into the anonymous crowd, sipped a PBR that tasted bitter and stale, but heck, it was what one was supposed to drink in a place like this. I watched her sitting in her bubble at the bar, eyes on the paint-speckled curtain, shut for now, the scuffling of the next band’s shoes audible every once in a while, a practice tap or two on the drums, a heavy guitar chord thrumming through the dense air. When the curtain parted, she would metamorphose again, stop sitting daintily at that stool, start to dance at the front of the stage with her hair whipping back and forth and her wine sloshing unnoticed over her hand until she lifted it up to her mouth to suction it off like she was sucking off blood. No, I admitted to myself; I didn’t understand.

October 17 - When I opened my mouth to sing

“Erica can sing,” Pete piped up. “Why doesn’t she do it?”

Four heads turned to look at me. Dad’s eyes were stern and calculating, Mom’s, only recently down-cast and teary, became wide and hopeful. My aunt’s eyes crinkled to slits beneath the thick frames of her tortoiseshell glasses, and Pete’s were practically shining from the dim lighting in the back room of the club, speckles of gold among the blue.

“I…” My voice caught, and I tried again. “I guess I could do it.” Aunt Lydia’s eyes narrowed further; some of the hope was dashed from Mom’s. “I know I can,” I said as forcefully as I could.

It had all begun with a phone call ten minute earlier. My family owned a popular venue for cabaret, and Friday nights always featured a headlining singer, tickets often selling out weeks in advance. Tonight, at the last minute, Madame Ladybug, as she was known, had called in.

“Mr. Mangini,” she rasped into the phone. “Bad case of laryngitis. There’s no way I’m gonna sing for yous tonight.”

Madame Ladybug was an even bigger deal than most of the singers that my family was able to book; she was popular in cabaret circles, and we had talked of nothing else for the days leading up to tonight. We were expecting full capacity of two-hundred head. Now, half an hour before doors were to open, Mom and Dad had made frantic phone calls to everyone in their little black book, but what singer could dash over on such short notice? Half our acts lived in far away cities; the other half worked other jobs. Twenty minutes now until the doors opened wide, and we were at a loss. That was when Pete said:

“Erica can sing. Why doesn’t she do it?”

I could sing, yes, this was true. I loved to sing! I was a shower diva, a sing-along-to-the-radio aficionado, a closet Broadway showtune belter. I had always longed to get up on stage, imagined it at night, pictured an audience in the place where my mirror was as I sang into a hairbrush ‘microphone’. But I had never actually performed in front of an audience more attentive than my bedroom mirror. Each time Dad had offered, that same pain had grabbed my belly, and I laughed the offer aside. Now, I looked nervously from Dad’s waiting eyes to Mom’s pleading ones, to Aunt Lydia’s squinting dare.

“I can do it,” I peeped, hardly a note to be struck in public.

Pete nodded, already assuming his role as the new patriarch of the family, since Dad frequently retreated into the background and gnawed on an eggplant sandwich in the back room while playing computer mahjong instead of attending to the account books. “That’s settled then,” said my younger brother. “Erica will sing.” He clapped his hands sharply, and Dad’s bulk, an extra forty pounds in the past two years alone, gave a startled shake. “Everyone to their places!”

The nightclub had been in my family’s purview for three generations, founded by my great-grandfather in the days when these things were known as speak-easies and were hush-hush, under the radar. Now, two generations later, it was known within a three hour radius as the venue for a Friday night out. Madame Ladybug was hard to book, normally frequenting joints in New York City, London, Paris, but tonight she was supposed to be here, and tonight she had coughed into the phone and scratched out to Dad, “Bad case of laryngitis, doll.”

Fifteen minutes later, the audience had filled their seats. The low hum of their voices, like a distant hive of bumblebees, drifted backstage. I kept trying to swallow and kept tasting the chicken piccata that Mom had made for dinner.

“You all right?” Mom asked me, placing a hand on my shoulder, I gave a start.

“Fine, fine…” Chicken. There had been capers in there. I swirled my tongue around. Garlic.

Mom nodded as though it was the truth. Pete walked by and clapped me so hard on the shoulder that I pitched forward. Instinctively, I grabbed at my stomach. “You’ll do great!” he said enthusiastically. “You look great.” This last with an appraising eye, like I was a new purchase for his home.

Expecting to see a green reflection, I turned to look at myself in the mirror. Except it wasn’t myself anymore. This woman was rouged and primped, mascara-ed and glossed. Fat, blue, faux gemstone earrings the size of goose eggs dangled at either side of my neck, and my body had been squished into a blue sequined gown that looked like a bad mixture of the Blue Fairy and Cleopatra.

This is it, I told my reflection fervently. You’ve been waiting for this for years.

“It’s now!” Aunt Lydia hissed from her position by the curtain. Dad was out on stage, still the titular head of the family, making his announcement.

“...special surprise, ladies and gentlemen,” he crooned in his Sinatra purr. “My very own daughter, my flesh and blood, will be the special guest entertainer.” There was a startled clamor, couples turning to whisper to one another, friends to twitter. The chicken piccata climbed further up my esophagus.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Dad said with a verbal ta da, “I present, Erica Mangini!”

Aunt Lydia hauled on the rope and the curtain parted wide.

The room was in front of me, swimming in the dim lights, the spotlight a giant sun on my face, melting my makeup. I took two steps to the microphone, which waited for me at the edge of the stage. I gripped it with both hands, pulled my mouth to it. I could hear the audience’s silent hush of expectation. People leaned forward inadvertently. I could hear their chairs creaking, the absent cracking of knuckles, the hair on their heads growing softly. All these sounds, but not my voice.

When I opened my mouth to sing, nothing came out. I heard my breath rattle at the back of my throat, then stop there, like a vacuum had suctioned out the sound.

“Aw, go on!” someone heckled. A low round of boo and hiss reached my ears. I squeezed my eyes shut.

You’re standing in front of a mirror, you’re standing in front of a mirror, I instructed myself. I tried to picture them as hazy glass, but still only saw the men’s smoking jackets, the women’s shining cocktail dresses, the tables and the bottles of wine, the cigar smoke drifting into the air. They were too real and they looked too little like me. I remembered another anecdote a professor had taught me once.

“My first lecture,” he said crisply in a British accent as clean as a white handkerchief, “I was so nervous that the only way I could get through it was to picture the audience in their underwear! And quite suddenly, seeing them all in their skivvies and tighty-whities, I thought, ‘What do I have to be embarrassed about’?”

I opened my eyes and this time didn’t try to see my reflection, or my shower curtain, or my stereo player. I imagined I really did see ladies in thongs and men in boxers, eagerly leaning forward, some shifting awkwardly, all of them saggy and exposed in nothing but their underwear.

“What’s she smiling at?” I heard Aunt Lydia ask Mom in the wings.

I opened my mouth to sing.

October 16 - You're driving in your car

The wet light on the pavement was thin and shimmering in the rain. She was fairly sure she shouldn’t be driving, but she couldn’t remember why. Rain sleeted down against her windshield and the wipers whipped to and fro with ferocity, making a thudding whomp whomp sound with each rotation of the tires. Her fingers flexed nervously against the wheel.

“I shouldn’t be driving,” she said out loud, then began to sing along to the radio, a tune from the seventies that reminded her of college and sit-ins and wearing her hair down to her butt. Shouldn’t be driving, but she was, and she remembered why now. She had gone to the bar with Bill, and he had laughed over his first bottle of Stella, his second, his fourth, his sixth. On his seventh, he had growled at her to shut up when she tried to make a joke. On the eighth, he had lunged across the table and grabbed her collar so her sweater tightened about her windpipe. She liked when he did that at the moment of orgasm; not in public. He had stuffed his face close to hers, the alcohol fumes leaking from the sweat on his brow.

“Bill,” she had choked in protest. People had averted their eyes then, as they did when, on his tenth beer, he grabbed her bicep roughly and pulled her into the hallway that led towards the restrooms, slamming her head against the wall.

“Don’t you dare look at him,” Bill had ordered. Look at who, look at who, she had pled, because she hadn’t been looking at anybody, but Bill didn’t believe her. “I’ll fucking kill you if you look at him again.”

Bill was scary drunk.

So the moment he got up to order his twelfth beer, she snatched up the car keys, got in the car, and she drove. It was either leave with him and risk a beating, or leave without him and risk the road.

Whomp whomp went the wipers. Sheila squinted because she knew she was drunk, and the rain looked like it was shooting up from the pavement, not splattering down onto it, and it made her dizzy. She was glad no one else was on the road, and she decided if she just drove slowly, she’d make it home okay.

A burst of red entered her vision, and she saw the cop lights behind her.

“Shit, oh shit.” She considered putting pedal to the metal like they did in chase movies, but knew she’d end up in a ditch. She inched to the side of the road and grimaced when the officer tapped on her window.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” he asked casually, snapping bubblegum in his teeth.

“I’d say a bit over the speed limit, officer,” she said with a guilty hiccough.

He frowned. “Fifteen miles per hour. In a forty zone.”

“Oh.” She blinked and couldn’t decide where his suit ended and the air behind him began. She considered grinning to show her contrition. The cop snapped his gum again.

“You’re driving in your car.”

“Yes, officer,” Sheila agreed. “I can see that.”

“But you’re wasted.”

Sheila raised a protesting hand, waved it around in front of his face. “No you see… You don’t understand. My boyfriend, he was threatening me back there in the bar, and I thought I’d be safer, see, to risk driving” – shouldn’t have used the word risk – “than to go with him, see, so I… See?” He didn’t look like he saw. Or he looked, his eyes wet and vapid, staring into the neckline of her sweater. Sheila coughed, tugged it up a bit higher, but his hand snaked out and grabbed hers until her fingers let go.

“That’s better, see,” he said. Snap snap went the gum. Whomp whomp went the wipers. “Now let’s say you and I here make a deal.” The officer said finally. Sheila squirmed in the car seat.

“A deal?”

“I’ll let you off without a ticket or an arrest or any of that nonsense, if you do me a favor tonight. All right, sweetheart?”

“Favor?” Sheila was sure she was supposed to understand, but the sound of the wipers was giving her a headache. She raised a hand to her temple. The police officer was unbuckling his belt. She watched in horror as the zipper flap opened and he fell out to hang in front of her face like a limpid noodle, the wrinkled skin shining in the streetlight. Sheila shook her head.

“No thank you, officer,” she stammered, suddenly feeling a bit more sober. “I think I’d like to drive on home now. Or drag me into the station if you must.”

“Aw, go on now,” he said, his voice suddenly soft. “Bill won’t mind.”

Something he had said tugged at her. She thought she had it, groped for it, it was gone again. The rain sounded very loud on the windshield.

“...and if you don’t,” the officer was saying, “I’ll tell him you did anyway. And I don’t think Bill would like that any. Can’t imagine what he might do to you.”

That was it. She sat up straighter. “How do you know his name?” she asked. “I never told you his name.” The silence was filled by the rain drops. Sheila saw him, then. Remembered the man who had sat with one leg up on a chair most of the night, in the corner, slowly nursing a pint of Guinness, no more than two or three all evening, watching over the rim as Bill had laughed, watching as he had grabbed her sweater, watching as he had slammed her head into the hallway wall. He knew. He had known she was drunk when she got in her car, and followed her this far because he knew he’d find her here on the empty road, and he knew she had no choice.

Risk speeding away drunk in the dark or risk what this man will say to Bill if I don’t.

She leaned her head forward. “Go on now,” said the officer. “There’s a good girl.”

October 15 - A promise made

“Eek!”

I was alarmed to find that, given my first occasion, the sound I produced upon finding a mouse was exactly that from the comic books. I wish I could say I had gasped an “Ooh!” or let out a “God damn!” but no; the reality is that, the human being, when suddenly confronted with a scampering mouse, let’s out a solid: “Eek!”

I wasn’t even afraid of rodents, you understand, that was what galled most about being reduced to girlish shrieks.

“Jeff,” I said into the phone, instantly dialing my boyfriend. I was standing safely atop one of my kitchen stools for safety, then remembered that I wasn’t afraid of mice and sheepishly descended, glad Jeff hadn’t seen.

“What? What’s wrong?” he asked, concerned, no doubt picturing house fires, robbery, the loss of a favorite earring.

“There is a mouse in my house.”

“Uh oh.”

“Uh oh?” That was his sage advice? “I’ve never had a mouse before. What do I do?”

I heard him sigh. “You’re going to have to get a trap,” he explained.

“A…” My voice faltered. “Trap? You mean kill it?”

Reader, remember, I like mice! Think they’re cute even. One of my best friends in childhood once got two pet mice, small cell-phone sized things with pink noses and long fuzzy whiskers. The pet store assured her and her mother that they had received two males so there was no chance of reproduction. A week later, there was a litter of bald, blind mice in the corner of the cage.

“Remember the mouse I named Fred?” my best friend asked, taking me up the stairs to her room.

I nodded remembrance.

“He was a she.”

“Ooh.” (I could make the sound, back then). Transvestite mice, I thought.

“You mean kill it?” I repeated now, staring wildly into the corners of my studio apartment. I didn’t see a space that looked large enough for a chubby mouse (and this one had been a porker) to squeeze through, but then, I had read that rodent bones could nearly flatten. I shivered.

“It’s the only way to get rid of them,” Jeff explained sadly, knowing my predicament. “Then call your landlord on Monday. He should be dealing with this. But for the weekend? Traps.”

Traps. I clicked off my cell phone and sat and stared at the wall, listening for the sound of scampering or the sniffling of a rodent nose. Any flash of movement – a shadow across the floor, a pigeon outside the window, made me give a start, utter another low cry. I tucked my feet up, not wanting little mouse paws scampering across me.

But I couldn’t, simply couldn’t get a trap.

You see, I was vegan. I didn’t eat animals. I didn’t kill animals. How could I kill a mouse?

I walked glumly to the hardware store. Normally, I am a purposeful walker, but this time, the clip clop of my heels was decidedly dreary.

“Hello,” I said as brightly as possible to the man behind the desk. “What’s the most humane way you have to get rid of mice?” I envisioned a spray, perhaps petal-scented, that mice were averse to. One of those machines that emitted a high pitched noise beyond the range of the human ear. A magic dust I could sprinkle around the edges of the studio that would make a mouse sneeze and say, “Better find cheese elsewhere…”

“Humane?” coughed the man. He pointed. “There are traps around the corner, there.”

“Right,” I said sheepishly. I rounded the corner and saw hideous cartoons of squished mice with their tongues sticking out. Mouse be gone! No more rodents! Instant death! they proclaimed cheerfully. I shuddered.

After about fifteen minutes of reading labels and disposal of body instructions, I selected the trap with a cover so I would never have to see the dead carcass. Out of sight out of mind. If I never technically knew I had killed the mouse, perhaps it would count as not having down so…

“Just this,” I said, unable to make eye contact with the salesman as I laid my instrument of death up on his counter. I was sure he was smirking.

I opened my door cautiously, waiting for that flash of a tail to enter my vision, to hear the scurrying footsteps.

“You’re not afraid of mice,” I reminded myself, entering the rest of the way and flicking on the lamps. No mouse in sight. Sure; I wasn’t afraid, but that didn’t mean I wanted it in here with me. Fred the mouse and his partner Tommy had been cute when they were caged in a childhood bedroom. It was another thing to know an errant mouse was eating your Power Bars.

I sighed, read the instructions on the trap again.

Insert bait – cheese or peanut butter – into opening.

I had no cheese. I was vegan, remember? Peanut butter it would have to be. I wondered if rodents liked the organic, all-natural kind.

I liberally smeared the peanut butter into the trap, then turned it so it clicked in my hand, and instantly gave a small yelp. It felt like holding a live bomb.

Cautiously, I placed the trap down by the wall, near where the mouse had seemed to disappear directly into the flooring. Heaving a sigh – it was out of my hands – I sat cautiously at my computer. And froze. I heard the scurrying footsteps. Heard a sniff sniff sniff. My body tensed and I winced, waiting for the jaws of death.

Don’t go in there! I wanted to cry. I sat, the blood drained from my face, listening to the animal contemplate its own death. I was poised, ready to give a shuddering shake if I heard the machine clamp down about the animal. Would it squeal? Scream? Shriek?

I jumped to my feet, grabbed a coat, and hurried from the apartment. I couldn’t be a witness to death.

“I need a glass of wine,” I choked out to the bartender at the bar downstairs. Unfiltered wine, reader. This was a good, all-organic restaurant of which I speak, with unfiltered vegan wines.

Two hours later – that had to be enough time for death to work its magic – I tiptoed back up the stairs. I slowly flicked on the lights. I bent my head down over the trap, waiting to smell a stench of decay, to see a twitching rodent paw.

The indicator on the trap was still marked at “Set” not at “Mouse Caught.” It hadn’t fallen for the bait!

I stifled a surge of indignation. What had gone wrong in my hunting? Why wasn’t I successful?

For the next three days, the tension grew. Every time I came home, I eagerly trotted over to the trap, horrified at my own anticipation, a gnawing sense of glee at what I might find, and then, feeling the leaden sinking in my belly when I saw the trap was still just “Set”, the keen taste of disappointment. I was sick of jumping at ever y noise, of moving my Power Bars to a different cabinet every few hours in an attempt to foil any mouse-y visitors, sick of wearing shoes around the house so no mouse could dart across my bare toes. I wanted a catch! I wanted success! I stopped recalling that this was murder, and started feeling antsy.

I ate my vegan dinner those nights seasoned with the thick taste of hypocrisy.

On the fourth day, the mouse had become unreal. I had seen neither hair nor whisker of the thing since that first “Eek!” and hoped he had moved on to cheesier quarters. Out of habit now, I tiptoed up the last flight of stairs, lest it was near the trap and my steps would alert him, and I opened the door as silently as I could. I leaned down low over the trap, not expecting much anymore, and my breath caught in my throat.

“Mouse caught” the indicator told me.

“Jeff!” I shrieked into the phone. “I killed it. It’s dead. What have I done?”

Jeff shushed me and immediately came for mouse disposal. After, the trap out of sight, the dead body buried in the garbage can on the curb (I said a prayer for its soul), Jeff and I sat drinking vegan wine at the bar downstairs.

“You know,” I said. “I have a guilty confession.”

“What’s that,” Jeff asked, the incident already forgotten. He hated mice.

“When I saw that I had caught the mouse, I had this moment of… satisfaction.” I choked on the word. I had envisioned myself as a hunter, almost comprehending the thrill of the chase, the ecstasy of capture, the adrenaline pumping and the lure of the power of I had to inflict death. I shuddered. “Does that make me a bad vegan?”

Jeff roared with laughter. When he finally managed to catch his breath, wiping tears from his eyes, he patted my hand gently. “I promise,” he said. “It doesn’t.”