Toeing the Line

by Teresa Jones

 

So we're in her house, sitting on her new sofa with a pizza between us watching the news coverage of Desert Storm, the original Gulf War.  You know how it is, some things never change.  But anyway, it's the first time I've had five minutes with her in six months, and I'm feeling good, you know, like things are back on track, like whatever she was mad about she's over.  So I'm tamping down the cherry root tobacco in my pipe, stretching my legs out.  "Yeah," I'm thinking, "the fucking world's at war, but we're OK." Kimberly turns sideways, pulls her knees up, swings her hair out of her face, and I think, "God, this is perfect."  She had on a white T-shirt and cut-off jeans.  I wasn't even wondering whether she had on underwear.  I was just sort of feeling, "This is it, this is the way it should be."

            Then she says, "Jeff?" like, you know, she's uncertain, like she's answering a knock in the middle of the night.  She pushes her hair away from her face, hooks it behind one ear.  Here it comes.  "We need to talk."

            Shit.  Goddamn.  Why don't people just say, "It's time to fuck you over"?  I suck on my pipe and flip through every channel until we get back to CNN, and then I say, "OK."

            She says, "I think you need help."  Jesus Christ, you know, why doesn't somebody just kill me?

            "You think I need help?  What kind of help?  Think I've got a tire iron in my pocket?"  I'm laughing at her now.  I mean, she's got to be kidding, right?  "What is it?  You think I'm psychotic? Afraid to leave me alone with the kitchen knives?"

            She's not laughing.  I'm thinking, Take me, Jesus, just go on and take me.

            "No," she says.  She is so fucking calm.  "No," she says and sips her Diet Coke.  "I don't think you have a tire iron in your pocket, although you may, but I do think you're very angry."  She's not looking at me yet; she's warming up.  She's about to be sensitive and caring; she's about to lay down the rules.  I've seen this show before.

            She says, "I think," and then instead of finishing the sentence, she very methodically and precisely folds the top of the pizza box into the bottom.  Then she gathers up napkins, plates, and this is great:  knives and forks.  Kimberly eats pizza with a knife and fork.  So I'm following her to the kitchen and she stops in front of the sink and stares at the garbage disposal.

            "Jeff, I think you're decent and compassionate.  I think you're smart. I think you're funny.  No, I'm minimizing.  The plain truth is," and here she straightens her glasses and, as nearly as I can tell given the glare from the ceiling light, looks right at me, "you are the only person I have ever wanted to slap, and one of the few people to ever make me laugh out loud."

            I smile in a way that I hope reminds her I know her better than anybody.

            "OK," she says, "no one else ever made me laugh the way you do, but the point is, Jeff, it's your friendship I value, the friendship you extended a long time ago when there was no one I could talk to the way I talked to you."

            I'm a fish on the line, a big old bass.  She's reeling me in the way she always does.  Yeah, I'm thinking, I make you laugh all right, 'til you can't sit up straight, 'til you have to whip off those glasses, and wipe those pretty eyes.  Yes ma'am, I rub those aching shoulders, and slap Band-Aids on those little knees.  I'm the one all right, but you have a hard time remembering all that when somebody else has got you smiling, and those muscles ain't so sore.

            "But that's good," I say like I'm trying to convince a kid it's a good idea to share. "That's what friends are for, right?"  And I want to scream, "REMEMBER?"

            She nods like a social worker reassuring a child molester who says, "I didn't mean to hurt them little girls.  They was pretty little things."

            "It is good," she says. She wipes off the counter and restacks a perfectly neat pile of mail.  "But I think maybe your concern for me, your interest in me, sometimes works to your detriment."  She holds up her hand like a fucking stop sign.  "I'm afraid your way of caring is obsessive, Jeff.  I'm afraid you'll explode and it scares me."

            Goddamn it, motherfucking, son of a bitch, shit.  Kimberly Renee Cleveland doesn't know what it means to be scared.  I'm 6'2" and 185-90 pounds.  I know some mean motherfuckers, and I've been so scared piss ran down my leg.  I know what it means to be scared, but I'm telling you Kimberly has never even had her mouth go dry, never had a reason.

            So I say, "Scared?  You're scared of me?  Kim, I would paint myself black and sleep on the interstate before I would hurt you.  You know that.  Shit, you know that."  Sometimes talking to Kimberly is like slapping yourself in the face.  You know something is wrong, you know you ought to stop, but somehow you keep hoping it will start to feel good.  So I pull way back and make myself remember that dealing with Kimberly is like dealing with a cat.  You may have played with it and fed it and let it sleep on your face forever, but if it suddenly cowers when it hears you and shudders when you stroke it, you can't just slam it against the wall, even if you want to.  You have to put out catnip toys and cat food treats, and then you have to fucking wait.  So I apologized.  Start with what you know, right?  Bottom line:  she didn't buy it.  What's new?  She said I'd have to get help.  Said she couldn't be around me until I did.

            I said, "Fine," and let my eyes water.  She patted my arm and asked me to think about it.

            If I had to pick one word to describe Kimberly, it would be this: appropriate.  To give you a little contrast, the word for me is "inappropriate."  Kimberly comes from small town, Southern Baptist stock.  Her daddy owns the hardware store in Autaugaville, Alabama, and always has. Her mama sews or cooks or, hell, I don't know what the woman does, but she was always home when Kim and her brother got home from school, and dinner was always on the table at six.  They are what you call "fine people," all four of them.  They're as normal as, I don't know, whatever is normal these days—a baseball game?  A Walt Disney movie?  I don't know.  Anyway, they're so completely who they should be they could pass for stereotypes, except for Kimberly who somehow shot a little wide of the mark, but I'll get to that later.  I come from a bag of lunatics.  We had one of those middle class ranch houses in the middle of a mid-sized city called Montgomery.  Apart from tall grass and sheets at the windows, everything looked all right until you noticed that the boys never brought friends home, and the mother never left the house until she nutted up, and then she didn't go past driveway.  Honest to God, I came home from school one day and my crazy fucking mother was laying out rows of socks on the driveway. Why?  She said they needed to dry.  We didn't have a washing machine.  How could they need to dry?  Hell, I guess she sprayed them down with the hose.  I was sixteen.  My brother was twelve.  As for my father, he's an asshole.  Details:  he made good money that we never saw, and he used his fist for a reprimand.  I never, not once, saw my father kiss my mother, but I sure as hell heard him fuck her.

            I was twenty-three when I met Kimberly.  It was at the Montgomery Little Theatre.  I was in the audience with some girl who wanted to spite her boyfriend by dating someone tall and, since I was a good eight inches taller than he was, I figured she might want to spite the hell out of him, and I was ready.  Until I saw Kimberly.  Kimberly played Irma.  The show was Light Up the Sky, a 1940's gangster-style romantic comedy.  She wore gold lamé and she had some sort of plumes, peacock feathers maybe, coming out of her hair.  The reviewer said she was "sweet and believable with good comic timing."  Bullshit.  She was magnificent.

            The next night, I was on the front row alone.  The night after that I had to bribe a guy for tickets with his girlfriend standing right there whining, "But you promised."  I said, "I owe you one, bud," and I think he understood.  I saw all fourteen shows, including the Sunday matinees.  The last night, I went backstage to meet her.  She didn't scream when she saw me, but she didn't drop her pants either.  She graciously thanked me for my "curious but faithful attendance" and for the "beautiful roses."  Then she handed me off like a basketball to the male lead, a guy I already hated because he kissed her in the third act.  I waited outside.

            Kimberly was the last one out.  I was across the street, leaning against my hand washed 1972 Monte Carlo, casually tamping down cherry root tobacco.  She studied the empty parking lot as though she were trying to remember where she left her car, but with more concentration, like she couldn't be sure what her car looked like.  I lifted my pipe to her.

            "Misplace your car?"

            "More like my affections, I'm afraid," she said and kind of laughed.

            I walked over to her, extending my hand.  "I'm Jeff Burns.  I met you backstage."

            "My performance may not show it, Jeff, but the truth is, I have an excellent memory.  I often go whole minutes without retraining.  At least," and here her smile began to reach her eyes, "without extensive retraining.  Thank you again for the flowers."

            She was a scrawny little thing with weak eyes, and a bushel of red hair hanging down to her butt and, Jesus Christ, just thinking about it makes me sick.  She was so damn cute, I couldn't decide whether to hang her from my rearview mirror, fuck her in the parking lot, or marry her.  OK, OK, OK, that's how I feel about her now.  At the time, I just wanted to spread my jacket over potholes for her or maybe fight a duel or, at least, stand in her front yard and sing Frankie Valle songs.  She was just that kind of girl, and I was just that kind of asshole.     

During the next two weeks, I called her often enough to find out she lived with her parents, often enough for her mother to recognize my voice, but not often enough to catch her at home.  I could have been on a testosterone high, but I don't think so; there were other girls.  I think it was more the way she seemed to be right there with you, like what you had to say was the most important thing in the world and, at the same time, someplace else—not just with me, but with everyone.  I drove by her house on average two or three times an evening, but saw her only once.  I was parked half a block up the street, listening to the radio, smoking my pipe, when a blue Honda pulled up.  A huge pecan tree that had already uprooted the sidewalk and needed to be cut down blocked the street light, so I couldn't see who was in the car, but they sat there for almost an hour.  I memorized the tag number.  When Kimberly finally stepped out, the Honda was already in gear.  Before she reached the porch, the Honda was gone, and I was moving in.

            "All right," I called to her, "you've had your big date.  Now how about coffee with a buddy?"

            "I need more than coffee tonight, Jeff."

            I couldn't believe it.  She actually turned around, jumped in the car and said, "Anywhere that stays open all night."  She turned up the radio, rolled down the window and lit a cigarette.  "I'm not even going to ask why you're here.  I'm just going to assume you're not a killer, and count myself lucky."

            "I'm not a killer."

            "Whatever you say, Jeff.  Whatever you say, so long as you keep talking."

            "That I can do," I said, and headed for Howard Johnson's.  Once we settled in, I really opened up.  I told her that my favorite literary and cinematic hero was James Bond.

            "Really?" she said. "Why?"

            "Well," I said, "obviously the films are clever and exciting, and Sean Connery is a tremendous actor."

            "None of that is obvious to me," she said as she picked the ham off her ham and cheese sandwich.

            "How can it not be obvious?"

            "I guess it's hidden behind the sexism and stupidity."

            "Sexism?"  This was 1976.  I was twenty-three.  "What sexism?"

            "Pussy Galore."

            "Kimberly," I became avuncular, "it's a joke."

            "Oh," she said, "it's supposed to be funny.  The way it would be funny if your name were, what?  Asshole?"

            I let her slide on that one because she had me, and because I was much more interested in the Honda than the politics of filmmaking.  I leaned back in the booth, stretched out my 34" legs casual style under the table, and tried to sound bouncy.  "So.  Who's the guy?"

            With her mouth fish-lipped around the milkshake straw, she rolled her eyes up at me, and took a breath.  "What guy?"

            Already I knew she wasn't stupid, so I suspected evasion, and evasion signifies only one thing: something to hide.  I glanced around the restaurant as if I needed the waitress, and then leaned my elbows on the table.

            "In the Honda.  Who's the guy in the Honda?"

            She pulled the straw up and sucked the shake out of the wrong end.  "A friend of mine."

            "What kind of friend?  The kind who doesn't show up for your last performance?"

            She shrugged.  "The failure to show was an aberration brought about by difficult circumstances.  But, what kind of friend?  I'd say a very dear friend, an old friend from college."  She pushed her dishes to the edge of the table and lit a cigarette.  "I think I'll go track down some coffee."

            I motioned to the waitress.  "Here it comes."

            Kimberly held her coffee cup in one hand, her cigarette in the other.  She alternated bringing each to her mouth while she stared first at the counter, then at the list of ice cream behind the counter, then the other patrons, and finally the emergency exit.

            "Friend or lover?"

            "Well," she said, closing one eye and then the other as if she were testing her visual acuity on the giant E in Exit, "a lover is a friend, right?"

            Her face was pulpy, as if there weren't any bones behind it.

            "No," I said, stirring my coffee like what I was saying was sad but true.  "Lovers come and go," I told her, "But, friends, Kimberly, friends, remain."  I felt very wise and also as if I were about to bag a good one, but I knew I couldn't rush her.  You can't rush women.  It doesn't work.  They always think the one who just left is the one and, as such, deserves a considerable period of mourning and affectional and sexual fidelity.  That's how they avoid feeling like fools and sluts.  I understood all that.

            "The bastard," I said.

            "No bastards."  She squeezed a drag out of the filter.  "No bastards, no bitches, no lies, no deception."

            "Well, he's a fool and an idiot."

            She laughed.  “I don't think so, Jeff."

            Over the next three months, we went out repeatedly, to movies mostly, but we also saw Harry Chapin that fall and, I think, Peter Frampton.  I kissed her a couple of times.  Actually, I kissed her twice exactly, and she was gracious.  She was so gracious that I didn't understand that "Let's not do that" really meant "Keep your fucking hands off me."  So I was patient.  I introduced her to my favorite music.  I told her about my crazy family.  I told her about my affair at nineteen with the twenty-eight year old woman who took up with a buddy of mine while I was out buying tacos.  Tacos, for God's sake.  I wasn't gone fifteen minutes and I get back and he's putting it to her and she's making noises like she's never come before.  "Jesus God," I'm thinking, "what do I do with this food?"  No, really, I'm pacing back and forth across the twelve foot living room trying to figure out how to make the bags get out of my arms, but they won't let go.  Then it's like the Taco Supreme says, "You're fucked," and the burrito snorts out, "Yeah," and I wake up two days and a pumped stomach later telling some clown intern, "I don't know, codeine and beer, I guess."  My point is, I told Kimberly everything, and she told me next to nothing.  She always laughed when I meant her to, said "I'm sorry that happened to you" when I didn't expect it, and added "You deserve better than that" when I didn't think I deserved a damn thing worth having.
    

            Kimberly worked at the bookstore downtown.  She ran two miles around the track at the "Y" before work and five miles after work.  The rest of the time, she read.  I tried calling her instead of waylaying her at the bookstore, at the "Y," or at her front door at midnight, but once she was inside the house, she was always "busy."

            "Reading is not busy," I told her from the Exxon station pay phone around the corner.  It was our ninety day anniversary.  "Reading is what you do until the telephone rings."

            She disagreed.

            "Kimberly," I lowered my voice and spoke very slowly, "you're becoming Emily Dickinson."

            "Virginia Woolf."

            "What?"

            "I'd rather be Virginia Woolf."

            I was missing something.  I knew I was missing something.  "Didn't she," I was struggling, "didn't she go insane and kill herself?"

            Kimberly is not prone to melodrama.  She is argumentative, obstreperous, and belligerent, but she is not now, nor was she then melodramatic.  She said, "Killing herself may have been an act of sanity."

            Well, I had been there, hadn't I?  I knew how it felt to stand in the living room with my arms full of Taco Bell bags and not know how to put them down.  I knew how it felt to overhear fucking in the next room.  I knew how it felt to want to scream and be unable to, to want to smash the television and not know how, to need to kill somebody and realize the best and only candidate was me.  I had to stop her.  I dropped the telephone and ran.

            When she opened the door, she said, "Or, as I was saying before you left me chattering to myself, it may have been an act of desperation, it may have been a giving up, it may have been the acting out of a tormenting dream.  I'm not a proponent of suicide, so I can't say I wholly support her decision, but I do think it's unfair to reduce her reasons and her experience to the glib summary we term insanity."  Then she invited me in.

            "Are you going to kill yourself?"

            "When?"

            "Tonight, ever, right now?"  I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, then leaned over and braced myself with my hands on my knees.  I thought I was going to throw up.

            "Is that why you're here?"  She spread her thumb and index finger across her forehead as though a headache were imminent.

            "Yes.  That's why I'm here."

            "Then you may leave.  I'm reading Saul Bellow and I fully expect to survive the night."

            Did I mention that she could be infuriating?

            "Kimberly," I said, "please talk to me.  I know you're unhappy.  Let me be your friend."

            Thirty minutes later, we were sitting in a booth at Denny's.  We were waiting on coffee, I was trying to get my pipe going, and she says, "The guy in the Honda was a woman."

            I was clenching the pipe stem between my teeth and starting to unscrew my lighter to replace the flint.  "What guy?"

            "In the blue Honda, in front of my house."

            I always carry extra lighter fluid and flint, but I couldn't find either.  I had just started rummaging in my inside jacket pocket when she handed me her lighter.

            "Did you hear me, Jeff?"

            You know how when you've got one thing on your mind it's hard to pay attention to something else?  Well, I was thinking about how my brother must have been stealing my stuff again, and I was getting really annoyed.

            "Yeah, Kim, I'm listening.  The guy in the Honda.  What about him?"

            "Nothing, Jeff."

            "What?  What about him?  Tell me.  What do you think, are they grinding coffee back there or growing it?"  No, it wasn't my brother.  It was my fucking mother, playing scavenger fairy.

            "My ex-lover, Jeff, the one from college, in the blue Honda, was a woman—not a man, Jeff—a woman."

            If thoughts come together like pieces of a puzzle, my 2000 piece landscape just collapsed in a landslide.

            "What do you mean?"

            She just looked at me.

            "What are you telling me, Kim?"

            Kimberly turned the bill over, and started counting out change.  When she had $4.36 stacked on the table, she looked up.  "I'm a lesbian."

            I don't know if you've ever had the experience of seeing someone turn out to be somebody else, but it's like meaning to kick a pile of clothes out of your way, but slamming your toe into the bed frame, instead; it's like looking up in traffic to realize that tractor-trailers really do make wide right turns and the front of your car is coming off.  But it's more than that.  It's like you're humping away saying, "Baby, baby," and the woman clutching your ass rears up and whispers, "You can call me Mom."  It's like, damn, you know?

            So I'm sitting here with this girl who looks healthy and normal, and I'm thinking I really like her and she's been dumped by her boyfriend and that's a shame, but I can be a shoulder for a while and then move in on my white horse, and let's face it, nail her.  No, if it had been like that, I would have tossed a couple of bills on the table and split, but it was worse than that.  I had already been thinking about a bunch of two feet tall redheaded kids in glasses who look just like her and call me Daddy.  I'd known her twelve weeks and already I had decided to go to college, get a real job, join the PTA, go to church, call her parents by their first names, and trade my 1972 Monte Carlo for a station wagon.  It was that bad.

            I sat there musing while Kimberly lit one cigarette off another. 

            Finally, I said, "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"  Translation:  What the fuck is the matter with you?

           Her hands were trembling.  These were the seventies.  This was a big deal.  Her face was red.  When she reached for the coffee, she knocked the cream over.  When she grabbed a napkin, the coffee spilled onto the seat, and two cups went spinning toward the edge of the  table.

            "How was I supposed to know, Jeff, that you would ever need that information?  How was I supposed to know that one day of your omnipresence would turn into a lifetime of surveillance?  How was I to know you would never go the hell away?"

            And then I had this epiphany, the blinding kind that hits hard, fast, and usually too late:  Jeff, you're fucking up.  You've got her riled, now, and for what?  Look at her.  So she's a lesbian, so what?  It could be worse, my man, it could be worse.  She could be a vegetarian or a Catholic or, Jesus Christ, an animal rights activist!  Those people are lost, Jeff, but a lesbian is not lost, so much as waiting to be found.

            When I let her out, I circled the block and parked in front of her house, her parents' house.  It was a two story, white frame with black shutters.  An open porch curved around the front and down the left side.  Ferns hung from the ceiling.  Azaleas and hydrangeas crowded the steps.  There were pecan trees and oak trees, and at the right corner of the house, where a driveway should have been, a huge magnolia tree flooded the yard.  Two weeks before, her Dad had put his hand on my shoulder and said, "You're becoming a regular fixture around here, aren't you, boy?"  I liked the sound of that, but I still scrambled out of his recliner, and tried to hand him his TV remote control.  He waved the remote control away, and nodded toward the chair.  "Keep your seat," he said.  "I'm just passing through."

            I don't know which he found harder to tolerate, my being there every time he walked in the door or my touching his things, but I trailed him through the dining room to try to make it better.  "Mr. Cleveland," I said, "I noticed you've got some dead limbs in the back."

            He kept walking.

            "I'll be glad to help you take those down, if you've got a chain saw, or any kind of saw, I guess."  Asshole.  Potato head.  Like I can chop wood with a friggin' jigsaw.

            "That's quite an offer, Jeff.  I expect if I need you, you'll be close by."

            Then he trundled into the kitchen and told Kim's mom that I needed to go home or start paying rent, and she said, "Hush, Charles, he'll hear you."  And he said, "He needs to hear me."

            I almost ran into the kitchen with paycheck in hand.  I would have gladly worked two jobs and given him all my money to stay there.  I belonged there.  At Kimberly's, there was Kimberly.  But besides that, the washing machine worked, roaches didn't creep across table tops and skitter across walls; beer bottles and "Fuck you's" didn't land on a naked mother who cried from the assault, but cried just as hard in response to, "Let's throw away these old newspapers."  At Kimberly's, everybody played ball.

            In the days since then, I not only helped her dad cut down limbs, but I carved a walking stick out of one of them.  I keep it in the trunk of my car.  Then, I helped him paint the house, and he finally said I could take the brushes with me, which I did.  For Kim's mom, I had gone to the post office, stopped by the grocery, and taken out the trash.  Some of that trash was pretty nice, like the mailbox Kimberly had decorated in Vacation Bible School.  I cleaned it up, and installed it under my dashboard.  It's handy for paper and pens.

            It seemed to me, sitting in my car that night, that I was a son-in-law in the making.  Her father's reluctance to embrace me as such was simply the reluctance any father would feel toward the man who planned to marry his daughter.  But he was softening, the way Kimberly's mother, who probably knew she had a lesbian for a daughter, already had.  That left
only Kimberly.

            I devised a plan.  It consisted of one rule:  Don't be a prick.  I didn't tell Kimberly that.  I told Kimberly that I wanted, more than anything in the world, to be her friend, which was mostly true, inasmuch as it was a start.

            In the spring, Kimberly returned to school in Montgomery to finish her master's degree in Speech Pathology.  I initiated an independent program called "Know Your Lesbian." 

I read Psychology Today, and I photocopied articles for Kimberly on lesbianism and women's sexuality in general so we could talk about them, increase our knowledge.  I bought her The Joy of Lesbian Sex and a book of Sappho's poetry so that I, we, could understand the existence and expression of love between women.  When the War Widow, a show on PBS about the "romantic friendships" between women that formed while the boys were away fighting World War One, was on, I insisted we watch television without telling her why to surprise her, as a friend.  I stole the library's copy of The Well of Loneliness , and asked her if she identified with the heroine/hero and, if so, how?  If not, why not? 

            She said, "Jeff, I identify more with a cross-section on a slide."

            That might have sounded like a complaint from some people, but I know Kimberly.  I knew she liked the attention.

            Nine months later, with an internship coming up in Birmingham in January, and only three more weeks to live at home, Kimberly decided it was time to go to the bar.  Montgomery had only one gay bar, and I had to almost literally kiss ass to find out about it.  I sat on her bed and talked to her while she put on make-up in the adjoining bathroom.

            "Kimberly," I said, as I fell backwards and stuffed a pillow under my head, "just marry me."

            "Why?"

            "Why not?  We have fun together, we talk together, your parents like me.  I don't care who you sleep with."

            She leaned around the door frame with a mascara brush in her hand.

            "First of all," she said, using the mascara as a pointer, "my parents do not like you.  They tolerate you because you're male, and they live in hope."

            God, she was beautiful.

            "Second, and this is far more important: you'd want to live with me.  I have to hide to get away from you as it is."

            "I'd go out when you had company.  I'd have my own bedroom in the basement."

            "Jeff, you didn't let me finish, did you?  Worst of all, you would touch my things.  I know it sounds harsh, but Jeff, stop shaking your head; you aren't listening when you shake your head."

            She was going out to find a woman.  She was so excited, I couldn't help being excited, too.

            "Tell me the worst of it, Kim.  I'm ready.  I can take it.  I'm a man, remember?"

            "That's probably the worst of it right there, but I was going to say that, sooner or later—“

            I waited.  She was brushing her hair and deciding how many buttons on her shirt to leave undone.  I voted for all of them, she ignored me.

            "Sooner or later you’d want to use my toothpaste, and that would be bad enough, but then you'd want to use the washing machine or the iron or the refrigerator.  Then you'd bring your clothes over and whatever else you own, and everywhere I looked, I would see evidence of you.  Then, one day—you would lie and say it was an accident—you would buy a recliner and your own remote control, and as you signed the charge receipt, you would refer to me as your wife, and, as you know, I would hate that.”  She flipped off the bathroom light and stepped to the center of her bedroom smiling, waiting for me to say she’d done good, she looked good, she could have her pick of women.  “Do you see what I mean, Jeff?  It's impossible."

            I saw all right.  Jesus, God.  I gave her a shadowbox to the shoulder to make her laugh.  “You got it, babe,” I said.  “There’s nobody could turn you down.” 

            On January 3rd, I moved her to Birmingham.  I pulled the U-Haul, she led the way in her '72 Nova.  Her apartment was one of four in a converted house on the southside.  From her screened porch, you could see through the trees, down the mountain, to all the lights of the city.    

            She said, "This could be romantic, don't you think?"  I set up her stereo.

            I tried commuting to Birmingham for almost a week.  It didn't work out.  Travel time allowed Kimberly time to make other plans.  I got a job in the produce department of A&P and found a room halfway between Kimberly's apartment and UAB where she was working.  I called her every day, took her clothes to the laundry, delivered snacks when she was studying, pumped her up when she was sure, as she often was, that she would fail.  I waited for her at the Speech lab, at the Learning Center, at the library, at the bar, the women's bar a classmate had told her about, offered to take her to, but "She's just a friend, Jeff."

            Like so many things, status can change overnight. Every time I showed up, there was a Nissan blocking the drive.  Whenever I called, it wasn't "a good time to talk, Jeff."

            "Who's your buddy, Kim?"

            "You are, Jeff, but I really need to go."

            I could hear dishes clattering in the sink and someone laughing.  The woman could cook.  Handy.

            At the end of the term, with degree in hand, she got a job, "A real job, Jeff!  With money and benefits and vacation and everything!"

            I was proud of her, pleased for her, but mainly glad to hear from her.

            "That's great, Kim.  Where?  UAB?"

            "Baton Rouge."

            Baton Rouge?  Louisiana?  “Well, all right,” I said, “Baton Rouge is good, lots of Cajuns and crawfish.  Now that I'm thinking about it, I've always liked Baton Rouge.  Always have." 

I wanted to put a boot through my head.
            "Don't follow me, Jeff."

            "What are you talking about?"

            "Come on, Jeff.  There aren't that many men smoking pipes in the back corners of women's bars.  There aren't that many men reading water meters at midnight and 2 a.m.  Don't follow me, Jeff."

            I did not follow her to Baton Rouge.  I sent letters.  I sent letters, postcards, telegrams, photographs, Fourth of July cards, birthday cards, Labor Day cards and Halloween cards.  When she opened the twelve inch tall Casper and a six inch heart bounced out to say "Boo!  Guess hoooos missing you," she called me.

            "What's going on, Slick?"

            "Not a thing," I said, "not a thing.  Just waiting for your call.  What's going on with you?"

            "I'm in love, of course."

            "Great.  Anybody I know?"

            "I'm not really in love, but I am seeing someone."

            "How's the sex?"

            "You're crazy.  What are you doing for dinner?"

            "Sucking crawfish heads with you, if you'll let me."

            "Come on," she said, and I did.  I went the way salmon swim upstream, the way some people adopt children, the way others climb mountains, jump out of planes, and go to work every day; I went because I had to, and because I wanted to.  She called me for the same reasons.

            Kimberly boiled crawfish until they turned to nuggets.  I swatted them off her balcony with a nine iron until she relented and took me to New Orleans to eat Shrimp Po' Boys and listen to Dixieland Jazz. I downed a Hurricane at Pat O'Brian's and things seemed to be coming together.  I paid a guy $25 to vacate a seat in Crazy Shirley's, sat down, grabbed Kimberly by the waist, pulled her stumbling onto my lap and whispered in her hair, "You is loved, girl."  Kimberly laughed, untangled my arms and said, "And you is drunk."

            I stayed the weekend, left Sunday afternoon.  In fact, I was backing out as she, the girlfriend, was turning in.  She smiled and waved.  Why not?  She was going in to get some, while I was going to fucking Alabama with a penis the size of her arm flopped over like an old dog worn out from doing nothing.

            "That's all right," I said as she pulled the door closed behind her, "you'll be gone before the warranty expires."

            I was right.  She didn't last long.  I knew she wouldn't because I know Kimberly.  We see the world the same way.  Sex objects are good for two years or thirty thousand miles.  That's it.  Then you've got to have a break.  That's where I come in.  "Who's your buddy?  Who's your pal?"

            I wasn't invited back to Louisiana, but I drove down often enough to know just about exactly when that little mud bug was swept back to sea.  An empty parking space tells a lot.  I drove by, I called and wrote and, a few times, I called her from the Chevron station half a mile from her apartment, told her I was in New Orleans with friends and wanted to stop by before heading back to Alabama.  When my timing was perfect, she said, "Come on."  Other times, I would have done better to sit on the curb and drink sewage: Was that my car in the parking lot last night?  Why didn't my letter have a postmark?  How did my friends get to New Orleans?  Walk? 

            "Give me a break, Kim," I'd say, "give me a fucking break."  And then she would say, "Don't do this, Jeff," and I would want to tear the phone off the wall.

            Five years ago, Kimberly moved to Atlanta.  I switched from A&P produce to B&B construction, and relocated myself to Atlanta a very few days later.

            "I'm not following you," I told her.

            We were standing in the parking lot outside the gym where I had coincidentally, I assured her, happened to notice her Subaru, and thought I might as well wait a second or two and maybe talk to her for a minute, but, "I was not following you."

            "Jeff, where do you live?"

            She had on shorts and a tank top.  Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail.  Her glasses were sliding down her nose.  She was flushed and sweaty.  She looked good.

            "Where do you live, Jeff?"

            "Midtown."

            "Why do you live in midtown, Jeff?  Why do you live in Atlanta?  Why are you here?"

            "You know I've always liked Atlanta.  I don't know, the time just seemed right."

            "The time seemed right because I moved here.  That's not a good reason, Jeff.  That's a sick reason."

            Some women are usually so calm, so composed, so reserved, that when they finally get all worked up, it doesn't matter what they say, it's mesmerizing all the same, like watching energy burn.  She opened her car door and threw her sports bag onto the passenger seat.

            So I said, "Do you want to get some dinner?"

            "I need to leave, Jeff.  I really need to leave, but before I take myself to the presumed safety of my home, I would like for you to tell me exactly where you live.  Can you do that?"

            "Sure I can, but I'd rather show you."

            "Tell me, Jeff."

            "I've got an efficiency on Yorkshire."

            Her teeth were so tight, her cheeks were quivering.

            "Do you know where I live?"

            "I've got an idea."  I tried to look appealingly sheepish, but apparently there was some
malfunction between intent and result because she slammed the door, got right in my face, and got loud, real loud.

            "You son of a bitch.  You know exactly where I live.  For all I know, your stupid apartment is right next door, and you're peering through my windows and rifling my mail.  We've been through this, Jeff.  We've been through this.  Am I right?  Didn't we reach an understanding before I moved to Baton Rouge?  Maybe we didn't.  Maybe I'm insane.  Maybe you lived in the crawl space.  I don't know, but I do know I don't want you to call me, I don't want you to come to my house, I don't want you to send me any mail or flowers or anything.  I want you to leave me alone."

            Well, she was mad.  I hated that because I had hoped to spend some time with her, like old times, you know.  But to help heal the breach, I did move to an attic apartment on Monroe.  That way I wouldn't be living on her street, but I could still see her lights and her driveway from my outside landing.  I left a dozen roses on her front steps with a card saying she was right and I was sorry and I wouldn't do anything wrong again.  She had forgiven me before.

            For a while, I didn't expect to hear from her.  There were too many different cars in her driveway.  I understood that.  Eventually, I sent a few cards, not really that many.  I called occasionally, but not all that often.  I was always cheerful.  We would talk a few minutes, and I'd let her go.  No arguments.  No demands.  It wasn't so bad.  Then the Toyota came.  Then there were two bikes on the patio.  There were fucking flowers in the yard.  Leaves were raked, gutters were cleaned, shutters were painted, and two people left for work every morning and kissed good-bye, and two people came home every night, and there was never a "good time" to talk, and dinner or a movie was always somehow "impossible, Jeff, but I hope you're doing well."

            You hear that shit too many times, you get restless.  People think you're angry, think you've lost sight of what it means to be a good friend, say they're scared of you.  I'm not the one who lost sight.  I never lost sight.  I'm sitting on a ragged sofa the color of leftover hash browns and the texture of sprung wire.  Why?  Because Kimberly and I sat on this sofa in her parent's house about a thousand times.  I have ticket stubs, programs, T-shirts, posters from every concert, movie or play Kimberly and I ever saw together.  They're stored in the old oak desk I inherited from Kimberly when she refurnished her study in teak.  The black walnut coffee table came from Kimberly, as did the 8-tracks and the discarded stereo, the milk crate bookcases, the orange velvet bed rest, and the red bean bag chair.  She was sitting on the bean bag chair the first time a woman kissed her, and not just any woman, but the woman from college, the blue Honda.  As she dragged it to the street, she said, "It's the kiss that matters, Jeff, not a piece of vinyl."  Not a piece of vinyl, not the flannel shirt she used to sleep in, not the half-empty bottle of "Charlie," not the notes left on the windshield.

            Tonight, with the help of my friend Jim Beam, I've been figuring some things out.  I explained to Mr. Beam here that I believed our Miss Kimberly had made an error in judgment.  I said, "Jim, my man, she has become rigid in her thinking, narrow in her view." 

            He said, "It's lack of experience, boy.  She's never been where you are.  Sometimes you have to teach a woman how to say yes."

            And I thought, that’s right.    

            By the time I got to her back door, I expected it to be open; I expected her to be waiting.  I expected her to know that tonight, if I had to, if she made me, I would take the door down.  She had to know.  I tried the doorknob, but it didn't turn.  I tried it again, and then again.  "Goddamn, Kim.  I just want to talk to you," I said and rammed my shoulder against the door.  "I just want to fucking talk to you."

            I kicked a lawn chair off the patio and into the yard.  It bounced.  The fucking chair bounced across wet grass, and the grass fucking glistened.  "This is too much," I said, "too fucking much."  Everything sparkled:  the flowers, the cars, the bikes, the windows, even the fucking moon, and I thought what I always think:  Kimberly should see this.