Not Tonight, Honey: Wait 'til I'm A Size 6. Susan Reinhardt
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love ’em. I imagined he’d called a fleet of us on his list, the girls from his personal recycling bin.
“What’s up?” squeaked my old flame, who didn’t like me quite enough in the ’80s but somehow thought he might whistle a new tune now.
“Oh, not much,” I said. “Just two kids, a mortgage, a marriage, and a mild case of going to pot.”
“You got some pot?” he asked, and I remembered then how much he loved being stoned twenty-four hours a day.
“No. You know I don’t mess with that. What’s up with you? Why the call after nearly twenty years?”
“I’m divorced,” he chimed as if I’d be deliriously overjoyed.
“I’m so sorry. Hmm. Wasn’t she that sixteen-year-old you met a few years ago? That’s the word on the street and in high school parking lots.”
“She was almost eighteen,” he said. “I see your sharp tongue hasn’t mellowed.”
“I guess you remember now why you dumped me.”
“No, you dumped me.”
“Wrong,” I said. “You traded me in for the California Hemp Queen. Remember?”
“We were just friends. She had good weed.”
“That’s right. Dumb me. I forgot friends sleep together for a year and a half.”
“I don’t want to talk about her. When can I see you?” he had the nerve to ask. “I think about you all the time.”
“It’s been almost twenty years,” I said. “Twenty years!”
He cleared his throat and sniffed a few times. Obviously spring had rendered the guy 100 percent insane or divorce had shoved a Roman candle up his sphincter, certain to send him rocketing for the altar. That’s one more thing I must mention. Divorced men, as I’ve said, are fairly easy targets for one who is really hungry to marry. You don’t even have to pretend to be moving to another area or leading a glorious life to snag a commitment from them. I’m told divorced men make good husbands because they’ve learned a few hard lessons and are beat down enough to know it won’t kill them to say, “Yes, dear,” and keep their mouths shut on other topics first husbands can’t leave alone. The other bonus is the captivating children he’ll bring to the mix, stepchildren sure to love you so much they plot daily the various ways to make your life a living hell.
For a good long while, I sat in shock and silence on the phone, not ready to answer this old flame with the sudden urges to go through his little black book. I wondered how many he’d called before he got to my name.
“I miss you,” he said unconvincingly.
“How did you find me?” My daddy had run this particular fellow off in 1984, a year before I met Mercury Man Truitt. And then I remembered the wonderful new world of Finder’s Keepers—the Internet. Google.com.
“I’ll bet you look exactly the same as ever, don’t you?” he said.
I put a hand across the flesh mountain that used to be my flat stomach. “Oh yes. Unless you figure in the twenty pounds and teats that hang like two old-lady stockings. Not to mention the fact I could very well be a candidate for a future front ass.”
He laughed and it was so high-pitched I heard two dogs barking in the background. It was the same pterodactyl cry that used to cause my eye muscles to twitch and left arm to seize. “I saw your pretty picture online.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him the photo was taken seven years ago.
“I’m not getting any younger,” he said.
“Neither are your wives,” I countered, feeling mean saying such.
“Seriously. I’m going to be an old man with liver spots by the time I finally get to see you again. I won’t have any hair and my back will be covered in moles. I guess I’ll be calling you from the old folks home. Maybe then you’ll see me.”
“Maybe in the summer of ’42—2042. You might want to brush up on your shuffleboard and bingo. Keep flossing your teeth. The men with original molars seem to get all the rest home babes.”
“That’s pretty mean, Susan. You used to be the nicest girl I ever dated. That’s what I tell everybody.”
“Oh, right. Your sisters laughed at my shoe selections and your bipolar poodle bit a hole out of my ass while your mother sat there and did nothing but pet the killer dog.”
“Come on. Let’s just get together for old times’ sake.”
“I’m sorry, really. Memory lane isn’t my destination of choice. It’s just that I’m completely married and up to my scalp in debt. My husband has an eBay addiction and we’re paying off the fourteen trumpets he ordered in addition to the Lexus with no bumpers or hubcaps; plus there’re the PTA meetings for the next ten to twelve years. I’m on the covered dish committee, along with my volunteer work with Hospice and the Leukemia Society. There’s no time for fraternizing with old flames, hon.”
He cleared his throat and I swear I could hear the swoosh of pages flipping in his little black book. I felt his defeat in the silence.
“You got any single friends?” he asked, and all I could do was take pity on him. I knew how he felt. This is how women feel when the men we have given our lives and years to won’t budge on the issue of marriage. It’s frustrating and heartbreaking.
“Maybe if you act like you’re moving away,” I kindly tell my ex, “the girls will come rushing back begging for your attentions. Or better yet, go to Sears and get the best front-loader and matching dryer money can buy. I’m told that works like a charm. A girl just can’t resist a man with Maytags.”
Mama’s Bridge Biddies
As a child I learned many of life’s lessons eavesdropping on Mama’s bridge club parties. I loved those late nights when the ladies I’d known only as someone’s mother became real people, characters who did more than drive us to school and yell when we didn’t clean our rooms.
They became almost like celebrities on bridge nights and worthy of study from a hidden perch at the top of the stairs. This was where my sister and I camped and learned the secret worlds of grown-up women.
I can close my eyes and still see their animated faces, their lacquered hair and nails, the spirals of smoke that built as evening wore on.
My sister and I gazed as if at a fashion show at their clothes and accessories: bell-bottom pants and midriff tops, pastel shifts, and short dresses, wide patent leather belts, and big wooden beads. We inhaled the strong scent of Maxwell House percolating in a silver pot, the coffee burbling in dark waves against the glass knob and making a sound we could hear three rooms away.
I was twelve or thirteen, and to me, their trilling laughter was like nothing I’d ever heard, this layered and multioctave mirth that seemed rich enough to tell its own story. I wondered why my young friends had never laughed in that way, what could be so funny to these “old” women who had to be way into their thirties. I’d strain to hear their whispers and to smell their Kents and Salems as the tobacco smoke mixed with the perfume de jour—Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew.
On bridge nights after the biddies had finished a couple of Bloody Marys, I heard stories I knew I wasn’t supposed to ever know. Stories of divorce and cheating, stories of gambling, debts, other women, children gone astray, and the message that stuck with me most—that if you get fat and let yourself go to pot, your husband will likely run around on you.
I learned there were times in these other mothers’ lives when they didn’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning and doing the day, putting on makeup and superficial fronts. I learned about nervous breakdowns and people falling apart—how that for a woman of a certain age and circumstance, it was as expected as a man’s midlife crisis. He gets the red convertible and home-wrecking