The Dictionary of Failed Relationships Read online

  There are rules about park beaches, too. The ranger comes to order us off the beach, and he takes our names and addresses. We all give fake names. The owner of the cooler complains loudly when he sees that it’s empty. My sister and I slip away when no one is looking, and we hide for an hour in the showers. The light inside the showers flickers as if it’s about to go out. My sister asks me if I made love to my boyfriend, and I say no. She believes me. Rules matter for her.

  We hitchhike back to the docks. A man with a wooden leg picks us up. He drives a jeep, and my sister and I squeeze in the front seat while my boyfriend shares the back with his guitar, his friends, and the sleeping bags. The man’s wooden leg sticks straight out in front of him as he drives; it rests on the rearview mirror. He hardly looks at the road. He shouts at us over the sound of his engine, screaming as he guns it up over the steep hills, telling us about his life as a German pilot during the war. His accent is so heavy that we barely understand him. He says he shot down thirteen English planes. The jeep swoops downhill and barely misses a tour bus. The man laughs and tells us he keeps a Mauser in his glove compartment. He drops us off at the docks and tells us to be careful of strangers.

  On the ferry, I watch the white foam slipping by the hull, and I catch glimpses of flying fish skipping like silver disks across the water. I want to rest my head on my boyfriend’s shoulder, but I don’t. I wish he’d put his arms around me, but he won’t. He’s made up his own rules about love, and I follow.

  When we arrive at St. Thomas, I manage to brush a kiss on my boyfriend’s cheek. He tells me that he’ll call me sometime, gets into his mother’s car, and doesn’t wave good-bye. I watch the car drive away. Sunlight flashes on the rearview window, and I realize he won’t call me—that it’s over, and I’ve failed again, somehow, to follow the rules. My sister and I hitchhike home. A rich lady in a BMW picks us up. She tells us we shouldn’t hitchhike. In the car, leaning against my sleeping bag with my face in the sun, I wonder what other people do for Easter break and what rules govern their lives.

  My sister sticks her hand out the window and talks about school. I think about stealing this car and flying to the moon.

  JUSTICE

  By Kathy Lette

  jus·tice ’js-ts noun [Middle English, from Old English & Old French; Old English justice, from Old French justice, from Latin justitia, from justus ] (12th century) 1: the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments. 2: vindication. 3: revenge, when achieved against a lover. Extreme acts are eminently permissible. See also: DISHES BEST SERVED COLD.

  Looking back, I blame it on the man shortage. In Sydney, all the men are either married or gay. Or married and gay. And the rest have a three-grunt vocabulary of “nah,” “dunno,” and “errgh.” Apart from the occasional Pommy poet passing through town, there is nobody. Nothing. Zilch.

  That’s how I ended up having a close encounter of the grope kind with an M.M.M. (middle-aged married man). As happens in most of these scenarios, I didn’t know he was married until I found the teething ring in his pocket. But by then it was too late. He was tall, dark, and bankable with biteable buttocks and . . . I fell in love.

  But did I fall—or was I pushed? I was too young to know that when a man says his wife “doesn’t understand him” that what it means is that he wants you under, not standing.

  There were drawbacks, of course. He was forever pulling away from my passionate love bites with a panic-stricken cry of “Don’t mark me!” After a night of heartfelt declarations of adoration and devotion, the next morning I’d pass him in the sandwich line at the deli . . . and he’d stare straight ahead, as if he’d never laid eyes on me. Let alone laid me.

  Even worse was never knowing when he was going to drop by. Invariably it would be the night I was in my pajamas, was covered in acne lotion, had one eyebrow plucked, had my hair plastered in henna, and was wearing an organic face mask. A knock at the door would send me torpedoing down to the bathroom. Not wanting to waste my precious R-rated moments with him, I’d hack and scrape away at my legs with a blunt razor in the shower, simultaneously inserting my diaphragm and spraying the old bod with aphrodisiacal unguents. Slashed, trailing blood, and covered in Band-Aids, I’d stagger breathlessly up the stairs and into his arms. (It was all right. He loved my “girlish charms.”)

  He promised he’d leave her. He promised we’d live together, forever, with a his-and-her harbor view. Marriage was in the air.

  Well, I thought it was marriage. What it turned out to be was the car exhaust of his Alfa Romeo as he sped off into the sunset.

  I truly believed my M.M.M. loved me, but it seemed I was merely a distraction—a little something to break the monogamy.

  You can imagine how I felt when he did leave his wife a few weeks later. For a woman even younger than moi (a case of upward nubility). And ensconced her in a penthouse apartment with a his-and-her harbor view.

  There was only one thing to do.

  I enlisted the help of a girlfriend who lived on the less salubrious side of the street. One balmy evening, while she distracted the building superintendent, I snatched the keys to my ex’s apartment. Once inside, I took down the bedroom curtain rod. Removing the stoppers at the ends of the rod, I stuffed the hollow cylinder full of raw shrimp, replaced the stoppers, and rehung the curtains. Now all I had to do was wait. . . .

  It was a heat-wave summer. From my girlfriend’s flat on the cockroach-riddled side of the street, we watched through binoculars as the lovebirds tore apart the flat, looking for the source of the odor. Within a week, my ex had called the Rent-a-Kill exterminator man. Fumigation was followed by a new carpet. Then, a complete rewallpapering. We watched them have their first fight. We watched as the new girlfriend started sleeping in another room. She then began to refuse to go back into his stinky apartment. Next, she moved out altogether. Shortly after, the apartment went up for sale.

  Revenge is sweet. Sweeter than tiramisu. And, let’s face it, with a broken heart and wounded ego like mine, it was cheaper than therapy.

  We watched the moving men pack the van. And, the real beauty of it is this: They packed the bedroom curtain rod.

  KID

  By Martha Southgate

  kid ’kid noun [ Middle English kide, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse kith kid] (13th century) 1: a young person; especially: CHILD—often used as a generalized reference to one especially younger or less experienced . 2: the biggest reason for staying, going, or overall responsible decision-making.

  I wanted him the minute I saw his hands. He had long fingers and wore three silver rings, two on his last two fingers and one alone on the other hand. The rings looked delicate against his skin, unexpected and graceful. He had long fingernails, wide and smooth, that looked like they’d been sanded down, maybe by holding wood or working with paint and steel. I wanted to touch those hands the way I always want to touch the sculptures in the museum but never do. I imagined them moving over my hips, shifting me this way and that as he kissed my stomach, feeling the rings brush against my flesh.

  He was just a baby. That was the scariest thing. It was like walking into a wall, this desire, and who was it I wanted? A long-haired white kid, maybe twenty-two years old, whom my husband and I were hiring to paint the house. I could almost hear my mother’s voice, “Suzanne, this is not the way we raised you. We are not that trash living down there in Cabrini-Green.”

  My mother had a horror of our acting like those other black people who lived over in the projects. To hear her tell it, all they did was throw bottles filled with half-drunk Orange-Crush into the piss-smelling corners of their building and sit around shooting up. She had grown up poor on the South Side of Chicago, but she’d married my father and escaped to a neat, politely segregated black suburb that was a lot like the one I live in now. She always told me and my brother how when she was coming up, even if you
were poor, you could keep your place nice; but once the trash moved in, there was no hope. She spent most of her time guarding against trashy behavior in us. When I was little, “acting trashy” meant raising my voice or getting excited about anything; once I was older, it meant certain things about boys, too. When I was thirteen, my mother finally gave in to my begging, begging, begging to go to a Jackson 5 concert. I was convinced I was going to marry Michael at the time. I brought a friend, and we screamed like maniacs for the entire show. My mother didn’t say one word all the way home. After we got into the house, with her voice like an ice shard, she said, “I hope you’re happy with the performance you put on there tonight.”

  The house had needed painting for about six months. John had heard so many horror stories about contractors who put drop cloths everywhere for six months straight but who never finished the job that he felt we had to be extra careful. So he made me take a long time looking for someone. That was my job— anything to do with the house had always been my job—but John picked the color. The way we finally settled on C&M Contracting was that three of our friends had used them. I remember waiting a little nervously for the doorbell to ring that morning. Dealing with people who do things to the house always frightens me.

  I jumped a little when the doorbell buzzed, but composed myself quickly and let him in. He said his name was Seth Jacob-son. If I had seen him on the street, with his long, Indian-straight dark hair tied under a painter’s hat, I would have said he looked kind of like a hippie. He had a nice face, though—hazel eyes and a sort of charming, avid look. His jeans had holes at both knees, and he was tall—more than six feet. He smelled of turpentine and Ivory soap.

  As we sat down and he looked at me, I suddenly felt very conscious of my body, the even-brown tone of it, the long wavy hair that my mother always said was so good. I didn’t usually think about my body much. It got me where I needed to go, I took it to the gym regularly, John liked it OK. The only time I had ever felt really connected to this muscle-and-bone package was when I had my kids, first Daniel, then Janie. A lot of women hate being pregnant, but I loved it. I loved watching my belly grow larger and smoother. I was fascinated by how my nipples spread and got darker and how I could smell everything around me. I didn’t get sick, and I wanted to make love all the time. It wasn’t that I wanted John specifically—I’d never desired him that way—but I just wanted to do it, to have the swelling and that release, to feel hands moving over my newfound, warm body. John liked it at first, but after a while he was downright alarmed. He couldn’t figure out what had happened to the demure girl he’d married. But she came back after I had the kids. I transferred all that passion to them.

  I hadn’t felt that heat since Janie was born, six years ago now. But this kid was making me feel that way just by sitting in my kitchen, looking at me, drinking water, and flipping color swatches around with those beautiful hands.

  Finally, he came up with a color that was close to what John and I had talked about, a soft blue-gray, a settled color. So I said, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s just what we were looking for.”

  He smiled. “I thought so. That’ll look really nice. We’ll have to mix it, but I can be back in a couple of days to get started. I mean, if the price is OK.” Seth slid an estimate sheet over to me. It was a lot of money. But John, in his usual, methodical way, had already quizzed our friends, and the estimate wasn’t much more than they’d had to pay. He would accept it. And I wanted Seth to come back. I liked the idea of those hands painting my house.

  John and I were married eleven years ago, when I was twenty-four. He’s an engineer—one of the few black ones in this area. We met when I was at Spelman and he was at Morehouse. He was bookish and orderly and wore neat, wire-rimmed glasses. He had dark skin and very clean, precisely cut fingernails. He was actually quite handsome, but most girls saw those glasses and the heavy book bag and passed him by. I looked behind the glasses and saw something I thought I could live with. When we were dating, he told me I was like a still mountain lake, quiet and cool. He didn’t say romantic things like that often—less and less as time went by—but it impressed me.

  My mother approved when we got engaged. “I’m so pleased you got yourself a man like John,” she said. “He’s really going to make something of himself. You should be proud.” I was, I suppose, but my marriage was not some grand accomplishment; I was doing what was expected of me. I fell in love with whom my mother thought was appropriate, I married whom she thought was appropriate, I never felt much that she wouldn’t have approved of.

  I had a good job at a public relations firm in the Loop until the kids were born, then I stayed home with them, just like I was supposed to. I never knew passion until I had my children. When Daniel was born and they laid him on my stomach, he started looking around for my breast in that determined, desperate way, and I thought, I would do anything to hold onto this moment. It was the same way with Janie. They were always separate people to me, but separate people whom I adored so much that it hurt to look at them sometimes. I’m embarrassed to say how much time I spent kissing their unused, honey-colored feet when they were babies. Daniel was always sturdier—John used to call him the Tank. When Daniel first learned to walk, he would make his way around the house like a blind man. He seemed to feel that nothing was there until he touched it.

  Janie is more like me, placid and light colored. She is impassioned about some things—her blankie, Trolls, Ramona the Pest— but her passions are few and carefully chosen. She has small hands and frizzy, half-straight/half-kinky hair. I think her curly hair is beautiful. My mother thinks I should straighten it.

  It’s funny, now that I think about it. I never observed John that closely, the way I looked at Seth or the kids. I knew John was handsome, that he had efficient hands and a warm laugh and a pretty mouth, but I never sat fascinated by each thing, as if each part of his body was revealing some elusive, crucial facet to me. We looked good together. And we had fun together sometimes. But it never hurt me to look at him. I never sat gazing at his hands, feeling my tongue behind my teeth.

  The night after Seth’s first visit, the kids were in bed, John and I were on the sofa, watching TV. I was also folding laundry, and we weren’t talking until John pulled me toward him suddenly and began nuzzling my neck. “What do you say we go to bed ourselves?” he purred. Often, especially during the week, I put him off when he did that kind of stuff. I just couldn’t be bothered. But this time, I put aside the laundry I’d been folding and stood up quickly. He looked a little surprised but walked behind me to the bedroom, kissing my neck and fooling with my hair. When I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, I was thinking about Seth. I imagined feeling his hair spill forward across my face and breasts, hiding both of us, so different from the short, kinky hair I’d always touched before. I imagined what he’d smell like, the sharp, oily odor of turpentine and the baby smell of soap, and how I’d move under his hands.

  Afterward, John rolled off me with a slightly bemused grin. “You haven’t been like that in a while.”

  “I know. I guess it was just time.”

  “Well, it was nice.”

  “Thanks. It was for me, too.” I kissed him and turned over to sleep, feeling like a liar.

  When Seth came back on Thursday, he asked me to go with him to make sure he picked the right color. I thought it was a little weird, but I agreed to go. I liked the idea of riding around in his truck. John would freak: I could hear him now, “Don’t they know what kind of paint they’re supposed to get? What are we paying them for anyway?” I decided I just wouldn’t tell him.

  When Seth started the car, music leapt out of the stereo. It was so loud that I felt it in my chest. He turned it down but not off.

  “What was that?”

  “Six Finger Satellite. They’re this band from Rhode Island. I really like them.” He paused for a minute. “I’m in a band myself. We play over around Northwestern sometimes. It’s called Triphammer.”

  “Yea
h? That’s nice.”

  “What do you think of them? I mean this music.”

  I listened for a minute. I could feel him looking at me. “It’s kind of loud, isn’t it?” I listened a little longer. “I don’t hate it, though.” I didn’t either. It was nothing like the jazz that John loves so much—but maybe that’s what I liked about it. “I think I’d just need to get used to it.”

  “I bet you could get to like it.”

  “I’m probably not your usual type. Of fan, I mean.”

  “There’s no type. You just have to feel it.”

  I wanted to get away from this “feeling” stuff. I was feeling too much already. “Do you want to be in a band for good? What do you want to do?” I said in my briskest, most motherly tone.

  We were at a stoplight, and he looked at me for a long moment. I imagined his hand resting on the back of my neck. “I don’t know yet. I’m still thinking about it,” he finally said. It didn’t sound like he was talking about his career.

  I looked out the window. This is a kid, I thought, a house-painter in one of those noisy, unwashed MTV-type of bands. My mother would be appalled. John would be appalled. “Where’s the next place you’re playing?” I asked softly, not turning back to look at him.