if i was dressed in my best defenses
would you agree to meet me for coffee
if i did my tricks with smoke and mirrors
would you still know which one was me
if i was naked and screaming
on your front lawn
would you turn on the light and come down
screaming, there’s the asshole
who did this to me
stripped me of my power
stripped me down

i used to be a superhero
i would swoop down and save me
from myself
you are like a phone booth
that i somehow stumbled into
and now look at me
i am just like everybody else
i am worse than everybody else

–Ani Difranco

Chapter 19

Hater Heroine

Coco Sweete was delicately gnawing on a Barbie leg. Sasha Obolensky didn’t seem the slightest bit perturbed. She was never bothered by Coco’s oral fixations and other strange quirks. Lenie had followed Sasha’s lead and had overlooked the oddness of Coco kissing nearly every object she came it contact with… hello chair, hello desk, hello locker, hello mirror… to Lenie all that smooching seemed unsanitary and, in the case of silver mirrors, narcissistic. But she kept those thoughts to herself in the interest of playing nice and not getting tossed to the curb. Cousin or no cousin, Lenie wasn’t getting too comfortable, she was distrustful of Coco’s nutty social graces. So she swallowed her treehugger sniggers at the organic outlandishness of Coco sticking tree bark up her nose after she’d just embraced the big oak. Lenie turned to her lukewarm tea in the porcelain teacup when, during the loveliest of linoleum picnics, Coco stuck her fingers into the holes of her swiss cheese wedge. Moaning with mmm’s and yumyum’s as she probed each creamy cavern. Lenie concentrated on her Gianni’s menu, deciding on the Eggplant Parmesan, as Coco pinched a wad of hot wax from a burning candle and stuck it to her forehead, sighing with sensory joy as it hardened and fell off.

This day was no different. Lenie continued with uneven little girl stitches, crafting a floral babydoll dress from a chiffon scarf that Lenie had begged off Gamma. Gamma had given in quickly, glad to see Lenie take an interest in such a girly accessory, hoping to see it tied around Lenie’s neck like a frenchy kerchief. But that would not be happening. Instead it was becoming an acceptable copy of the dress Brenda was wearing in the polaroid propped on Lenie’s tennie. When Lenie was done with the dress, she was gonna knit an a long chunky cardigan like was sliding down Brenda’s freckled shoulders. She proudly announced this plan to the other girls.

Sasha looked up from the skull & roses tattoo she was inking onto a Barbie’s back. “Aww, your Gamma taught you to knit? Cool.”

Coco tossed the teeth-pocked doll back onto the pile. Lenie made a mental note to avoid it while rummaging for parts.

“You knit?” Coco was already ticking off the possibilities this presented for the Punk Rock Barbies. 

“No, I learned from the DIY channel because my Gamma wanted a knit cloche with an over-sized flower on the side.”

Sasha found the idea of a grand daughter knitting for grandmother amusing. ”You’re like Coco kinda. You’re elderly in a kid’s body. Coco is actually the same age as her Bon Bon but like a vampire.”

“My Dad always says I’m really a little old lady cause I worry a lot and love Johnny Cash and play boggle with my Gamma. But I never had this, ” Lenie motioned to the motley crew of dolls and to the shared childhoods. “My Gamma was my girl friend and she was girlier than me.”

“Totally, ” said Coco, cutting the shoulder off a frou frou frock. Most of the skirt followed it to the floor. “Lenie and I are old ladies cause we have two cool broads for matriarchs. Bon Bon and Nougat leave for Florida soon. I want for you to meet them first. Other wise we’ll have to wait to spring. And I refuse to wait.”

Coco passed the new one-shouldered mini dress to Sasha who was blowing on the tattoo in hopes of drying the stinky model paint. Coco leaned forward and sucked up the chemical waft.

Lenie’s nose crinkled with distaste.  ”You’re the Sweete Chocolate family and you call your Gamma & Kappa Bon Bon and Nougat?”

“I’d think you’d be the last to judge.”

“Well, Gamma and Kappa… that’s at least dignified, it’s from the Greek alphabet. And it started cause my cousin Joel couldn’t say Grandma.”

“Yea. Dignified’s not really what they’re shooting for. Not really their thing. ” Coco shrugged . “Employees from like 30 years ago starting calling her Bon Bon and then it was just natural from there. But Nug Nug was jealous so Bon Bon said he could be Nougat and so he is.”

“It’s too bad they hate each other,” mused Lenie, knotting her purple thread at the end of a seam.

“No, your Gamma hates my Bon Bon. Not the other way around. Bon Bon has zero, less than zero, hate. She knows it’s not really about Nug Nug or chocolate or perfume or whatever. She knows her sister just has a lot of damage.”

Lenie’s nape prickled. “Damage? Don’t be an asshole.”

“Yea, from you know, when they were girls, after Grampa Jacque died and then Grandma Fifi married that bastard who like raped Lenore but not Bonnelle cause Lenore made sure of that.”

The prickles turned to red ants who nested into the base of Lenie’s skull, the stinging scurry of ant tentacle legs ran up and down her scalp and over her cheeks. The sting made her skin flush hot red and brought fat tears to her ducts. Before either Sasha or Coco had so much as blinked, Lenie was punching a button on her cell.

“Dad? Come get me. Now. Come get me. Come now.”

Sasha glared at Coco. “What the hell? Why would you do that?”

“I thought sure she –”

“Not every body’s families are like your family, Coco.”

“Lenie is my family.”

“Well, obviously there’s differences. Some people have secrets. Not that you can understand the concept.”

Lenie’s eyes over flowed. Tears plopped on her fiery cheeks.”Secrets? No. We don’t…. That’s not true, what you said about my Gamma.”

“Well… except it is. But did you hear what I said? My Bon Bon doesn’t hate her sister cause she never could cause she knows her sister saved her. Your Gamma is like a hero.”

Lenie hit redial on her cell, wailing when she heard Jack’s panicky hello. “Dad! Hurry! Now!”

“Coco, ” Sasha hissed. “You’re not helping.”

Shocked at seeing the normally composed Lenie LaNannse with a wide open wail, Coco jumped to her feet. She bustled out of the room, returning with Jackie in tow.

“All I did was say how Bon Bon doesn’t hate cause… how… what Aunt Lenore did for her.”

“You lied! You told vicious untrue gossip!” hollered Lenie, hitting redial on her cell. “Dad!!! Now!! Hurry!”

Jackie crouched down and took the phone. “Jack? She’s OK, she’s not hurt, but….are you coming? Can you come? I could bring her home if you’re —”

“Nooo!!! Dad! Now, Dad!”

“OK, Jack,” Jackie hung up. “ He’s already on his way, Lenie, he’s less than ten minutes away.”

Lenie hiccuped. “Did you tell him to hurry?”

“He’s hurrying. Do you… do you want me to answer any questions?”

“About what?”

“About what happened when my mom was a girl, about what happened to Aunt Le –?”

“HURRY!”

His mind was sharp and making speed-of-light connections. Dead ends opened up. Totem animals darted through the trees, leading Jack to new conclusions. He had new ideas and angles for four separate cases which he was anxious to share with Sheppe. But as soon as Jack walked in, Sheppe roared with laughter. Pointing at Jack, Sheppe bubbled and rumbled until he finally began to sputter and spit. Wiping his wet eyes, he excused himself. Jack could hear him howling & hiccupping all the way down the long hall to the men’s room. Eager for answers and retribution, Jack hauled the laptop off Sheppe’s desk and over to his own. 

Dear Venus –

So maybe packing my handkerchief on a stick and disappearing into the night forever isn’t always gonna be as easy as it was at first. I had this terrible flu for almost a week (fully expected to cough up my own beating heart a few times) and in true diva fashion I was disheartened by the reality of being all alone with no one to bring me hot tea. Finally I trudged to the 24 hr phamacy at 3 am and bought a bottle of night time cough syrup and a stack of fashion magazines. Back at home with my chubby stack of Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, In Style and Star… I was glad it was just me and that I could curl up with celebrity gossip without having to hide it like a pile of porn. A teenage boy’s spank bank! I can be shallow or ungodly or whatever and it doesn’t really matter. But did I miss my mother for a few snotty minutes? Yes. And that’s hard. It’s hard to love something that doesn’t truly love you. Not as you truly are.

Meeting friends has not been easy. At all. It’s not that people have been unkind. It’s me. I know this. I worked for so long, my whole life, to be invisible. I willed myself into non-existence. And now all I want is to make contact with somebody anybody. The only thing anybody says to me in any given day is “thank you,”  “your welcome,”  ”hello,”  “goodbye”  and “How many hours a day are you practicing?” And then when I say four, it’s “double that” and conversation over. So now I’m practicing 8 hours a day because there is no way I’m going to wreck this opportunity for myself. I guess I just assumed that once I was ready to be seen that people would see me. And maybe that’s just it — maybe I’m not really ready yet. But I have boobs now and that helps. Boobs! Love ‘em! Cause that whole Judy Blume mantra “I must I must I must increase my bust” just wasn’t enough. Not on it’s own. Hooray for medical technology! Actually, with my musical insecurity of late, I’ve been wondering what I might do if this doesn’t pan out and I’ve been thinking it might be cool to be a doctor or a surgeon. 

I overheard these acne pocked boys talking about their tri-weekly Dungeon & Dragons game and I wanted so badly to have the moxie to approach the Dungeon Master and present myself as an Elf Witch but I just couldn’t get past my insecurities. Did I mention they were zit-faced dweebs? Help! How am I ever going to make friends? Will I ever get past my own hang-ups? Even as I fix the external, it’s like the internal doesn’t change or hasn’t caught up with the change. I feel better, stronger, prettier — with myself — but I can’t seem to fathom even the idea of being seen that way by others.

So no I’m not the butterfly I imagined. Not yet. I’m still in the cocoon. I’m probably still a caterpillar … just inching along.

But at least there’s hope. Rainbows & butterflies are actually, finally, possible.

I’m no longer TRAPPED…. an insect inside of amber, forever frozen.

looking for love, finding myself,

Marchella

“What the hell, LaNannse? Didn’t you see it was open on my desk? I was in the middle of something.”

“Well, now I’m in the middle of something.”

Sheppe glanced at the screen, recognizing the pink neon banner. “Oh c’mon, real cases take precedence over head cases today. She’s dead, right? No hurry now.”

“Yers are all dead too.”

“Well, yea, difference being that there’s a body and someone ‘at knows they’re dead.  ‘Ats what!” Sheppe bent down to unplug the cord from behind Jack’s rusty file cabinet. “Someone ‘ats missin’ ‘em and wantin’ answers. On the horn already this morn, LaNannse. You ain’t even on the job yet but his mama is. Bright and early.”

“No, no. Don’t. I’m using it now. I’m back at square one. I can’t get any of these schools to give me names of music students. Not University of Cinci, not Xavier, all bitches.”

“Oh yea, Justin called Friday evening. It’s a no go on Juilliard. Nothing new there.”

“Sonofabitch. D’you ask him did he turn on the Kentucky Boy charm?”

“He’s fuckin’ Justin LaNannse. Of course he did. Why I’m gonna go askin’ questions I already know the answers to?”

“Well fuck you too. And plug that sucker back in. I mean it. I’m not gonna let this girl rot all over my brain,” Jack glared at Sheppe. “Not now. Got too much to lose now.”

Sheppe grinned. “Oh yea, right. Maybe since you got the in with Redding you can ask her to help me with this strung-up jesus kid.”

“No. No way.”

“What? What you’d just say?”

“You heard me.”

“I thought I heard you say you weren’t gonna do all you damn well can to help me. ‘At’s what!”

“You heard right. I’m not putting that on her plate. And you bettah not either. I don’t want that sick in her head.”

“You gotta be kiddin’ me. That’s how this is gonna be? You think you can protect her from what? From who she is? You never hesitated  to bring her in before. You brought her in for that grissily shit with the hookers and the refrigerated truck. And it was a good thing too! That guy would be on the move still, killing cracky 19 year olds all across the country.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Alright, bitch, who needs you. You bettah give me this right now or I swear I’ll break your bitch nose.” Sheppe swiped the computer from Jack’s desk, tugging at the cord. “I’m onto something here. And you, you just keep your distance. You’re gonna fuck a good thing up, clearly, thinking you have any sway over what’s in her head or ain’t. That’s you though. You love to fuck a good thing up.”

“You’re onto something? Good. That’s good. Solve it without her.” Jack watched as Sheppe settled into his chair, computer balanced on one knee. He wanted to know what Sheppe was onto, he wanted to share his new brain storms, but he’d be damned.

“Yep. Whatever.” Sheppe punched in youtube, wanting to resist the urge to tell Jack what he had in mind but he wasn’t strong enough for that. “You know how we thought that was a titty bar but really it was a blog? That had me thinkin’. There’s this whole cyber world that the kids are living in and we’re not even lookin’ there. And all along, I’ve been waiting for a call, someone heard these little bastards braggin’ on it, cause I saw his smirk, he’s proud of this shit… and then it hit me, fuckin’ youtube, man. I bet you dollars to donuts that shit’ll end up on there, some video they took with some dumbasses’ cell phone.”

Jack sat shaking his head, thinking how Sheppe was right about not being able to dab perfume in Nelle’s mind. Her mind wasn’t his to mind. Her mind wasn’t even her own. She was so plugged into the currents of the cosmos that information was always firing. Nelle surfed the noosphere like a genius-hacker surfs the net. Why just this morning, as he gathered his loose keys and change from the glossy surface of her bedside table, as she curled beside him like a queasy apostrophe saying how she’d loved to fry him a couple of eggs if just the thought of it didn’t make her want to hurl and then he’d bent to kiss her head and she’d said —

“What’s with that? All that?” Sheppe scowled and swatted the air in front of Jack’s face.

Jack leaned forward and lowered his jaw. “OK, here’s the thing. When you find the video, you’ll find a licence plate number reflected in the passenger side mirror… two cars, the mirror of the one in front captures the plate of the one in back for like a second. Nelle sez blink and you’ll miss it.”

Sheppe pulled the computer closer. “Oh hell yea. That’s what I’m talking about. Your dick may come in handy yet, LaNannse.”

Not wanting Sheppe to lose battery power at a critical moment, Jack pulled the plug from the wall and handed it over.

Ev’ryone can see we’re together
As we walk on by
And we fly just like birds of a feather
I won’t tell no lie
All of the people around us they say
Can they be that close?
Just let me state for the record
We’re giving love in a family dose

Living life is fun and we’ve just begun
To get our share of this world’s delights
High hopes we have for the future
And our goal’s in sight
No we don’t get depressed
Here’s what we call our golden rule
Have faith in you and the things you do
You won’t go wrong, oh no,
This is our family Jewel

Life has only just begun, for me, for me and my family

– Sister Sledge

Chapter 18

There Keeps Being More of Us

8:11 pm

 ”Hello there, my fallen angel,” said Kappa, pleased when Lenie settled into the old leather sofa beside his favorite chair. Kappa was even more pleased to see her curling up in the Afghan and scrolling through the tevo options. “I have one for you, my dear. Rings of divinity. 5 letters.”

“Halos, ” said Lenie. “And don’t give me ones that you’ve already solved.”

“OK, OK. Let’s see… Clue is insect comma feminine proper… 7 words.”

Lenie pictured Sasha’s sandy strands of hair stuck with crooked barrettes. “Ladybug.”

“Ah, nice.” Kappa returned to his crossword puzzle as Lenie decided on a an old Hitchcock movie which Lenore must’ve set to tape one sleepless night.

Pleased with his grand-daughter’s good taste, Kappa put his puzzle aside and turned off the table lamp. Tallulah Bankhead whined and pawed Lenie’s hand. Lenie scooched back and patted the sofa, inviting her to hop up. Toolah curled up in the curved hallow of Lenie’s tummy. The birds did not scare man, girl or dog — as all three were fast asleep by the time they made their appearance in the film.

1:52 am

 Lenore perched on the arm of Kappa’s chair, Kappa having eventually kissed both Lenie and Toolah before padding off to bed.

Lenore shook Lenie’s shoulder, “Len? Witchy Poo?”

“What?”

“Do you know where your father is? It’s almost two in the morning and he’s still not home.”

Lenie bolted upright, her eyes gritty with sleep, her gut full of sudden panic. “What? Oh no. What’d Sheppe say?”

“I didn’t call Sheppe. Your father called earlier and said not to expect him, that he’d be out late. But this late?”

“Well, where’d he say he was gonna be?”

“He wouldn’t say. And it’s a Friday night. Do you know anything that I don’t know?”

“So, wait. You’re not worried? You’re just nosy?”

“Aren’t you? What do you suppose he’s up to?”

“Gam, I don’t have a clue. Did he sound OK? Is he OK?”

“He sounded hot to trot. “

“Oh, gross. I think I just threw up a little.” Lenie laid back down and pulled the blanket over both herself and Tallulah. She tugged at Toolah’s cocoa ears. “I can’t believe you woke me up to gossip. You scared the bejeezus outta me. And you get mad if Dad just comes around at night.”

“Well, he’s not around tonight now is he? You don’t know nothin?”

“I know I’m going back to sleep now. Huh, Toolah? We’re going back to sleep, me and Toolah B.” Lenie patted Toolah’s bunched up brow, thinking about how tiring it was to have friends and play punk rock Barbie’s and be alive. But a good tired.

“Oh, a lotta good you are, ” snapped Gamma as she left the room without suggesting that Lenie move to her bedroom or without shooing Tallulah into the cushy dog bed in her puppy crate. Both girl and dog sighed with gratitude.

2:11 am

 In the window, the moon hung like a pocket watch, ticking the night away.

2:22 am

Lenie’s nose tickled with the scent of petit fours and strawberry tea. She found herself back with Coco Sweete who now had a cake for a crown instead of a gold rabbit. In fact the rabbit was dressed in a bow-tie and vest looking rather respectable.

“What’s the occassion?” asked Lenie of the dapper hare.

“Just like to look my best, ” he said. “Find it’s nice to be prepared.”

“Hold this, ” said Coco Sweete handing Lenie a royal blue bowl overflowing with marshmallows. “But don’t eat them. There for her. She’s on a healthy diet of cocoa and marshmallows.”

“A marshmallow diet?”

The icing on the cake crown started to quake and shift… and then it broke open in vanilla crumbles as a small canary pushed its head out.

“What in the world! A bird came from that cake that you’re wearing atop your head like a crown!”

“I know, we’ve been waiting for her,” said Coco Sweete.

“Who is she?”

“One of us.”

“Us?”

 Some come, others go.” Coco frowned, a deep throng of a frown, one like Lenie had never seen on the real life Coco.

“Why do you frown so?”

“Am I frowning? I shouldn’t be frowning. I should be happy. There keeps being more of us. Things open up. Some things close…. but, still, we keep happening.”

The bird shook her new wings, sending aromatic frosting flying like vanilla seed speckled feathers. The bird took a few hesitant steps and then inhaled deeply. “Aaaaaahhhhhhh.”

“What are you?” asked Lenie of the bird still glistening with a sugar sheen.

“One of you.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Same as you.”

This bird was irksome but somehow lovely. Somehow familiar. “But what are you? What’s your name?”

“Same, same!” sung the bird. “Same name! Same same!”

Coco Sweete made apologies for the impish creature. “She’s still a baby. She’s new at words.”

“Same same!”

– Eagles

Chapter 17

Witchy Woman

8:20 pm

“You’ll have to excuse me, I’m having a very carnal day, ” said Nelle as she tore into a marshmallow and came away with powdered sugar lips.

“That kind of day.”

“It’s just I’m so hungry! I can’t keep anything down. That, what you brought me last night? That was my only sustenance in days it seemed. And now it’s all I think about. I’m possessed by marshmallows.”

“How wicked, ” he settled into the couch, stretching his long legs.

“I almost asked you to bring me some but I didn’t want to seem too…,” she hesitated.

“Pregnant?”

“That’ll work.” Nelle wiped away her choco mustache and then wished she hadn’t when she saw how disappointed Jack was to see it go.

“Of course it’s not like you can smoke a bowl. To curb the nausea.” Jack remembered Brenda breaking down and smoking a joint, one bad morning after a week of bad mornings. “Lenore claims that women pregnant with LaNannse babies suffer terrible morning sickness on account of smelling more or too much or some such LaNannse nonsense.”

“Oh, I believe it.”

“When Joellyn was pregnant with Joel, she didn’t spend enough time bent over the toilet for Ma’s liking. She was convinced the baby wasn’t Justin’s. Course now that Justin’s nose ruins Joel’s pretty boy face, seein’ is believin’. ”

“I was thinking it was all in my head.”

“As if what’s in your head is of no consequence, right? I’ve always found fault with that phrase.”

“Oh, but this is weird: I was putting clean sheets on the bed, and I caught this potent whiff of blood oranges when the sheets are only the color of blood oranges and not the actual gory fruits.”

A man had to appreciate a woman who referred to blood oranges as gory fruits. Especially if the man had any poetic pretensions and Jack was one such man. “Clean sheets, eh?”

She pulled a bamboo basket from beneath the coffee table, avoiding his gaze and pretending not to hear. “You should roll the last of this and smoke it up for me. And d’you want a beer? I bought you beer. Two months ago. But beer stays good right?”

Nelle passed him the rolling tray and skunky-scented tin box. She disappeared around the kitchen wall. Bottles clinked in the fridge.

“Oh, nah, I haven’t smoked in years… not since… yea, years.”

“What are you talking about?” she called out. “We smoked together. Last time. That one time.”

His brain bloomed with the misplaced memory. Jack and Nelle, on Nelle’s couch, A/C cranked and splayed out laughing. And then less splayed out. And then she’d pinned him beneath her and smothered him with the intoxicant of her curls. Jack had a thing for curls apparently. Many of his all-time favorite moments in life featured aromatic springy tresses. Right. He’d been high that night with Nelle. His inhibitions lowered. His demon-imp got a foot in the door. His demon-imp had whispered to Nelle, “Drag those curls over his brow and he’s yours.”  They’d slid off the couch, laughing, and had rolled around the floor. She’d bit his shoulder and he was done for.

“Jack? A beer?” Nelle was standing in front of him, arm held out, fluffy black sweater cuffs bunched at her elbows.

He hadn’t even realized that he’d begun to break up the bud on the sort of Victorian frou frou silver serving tray. He had to smile at the winky oddness of it. Nelle loved contrast. He took a swig of ale and studied her face. “What is this? You trying to get me high and drunk? You know this is a sure thing, right?”

“I wanna be sure. Yes, drink up. Smoke up.” She burrowed underneath his shoulder. “Am I evil if I just sit here beside you, you’ll smoke and I’ll smell?”

Jack swiped the paper with his tongue, twirled his thumbs at each end. He pulled Nelle closer and lit up. She laid her head on his shoulder and reveled in the feeling of her body taking in a few calories and a few whiffs of nausea-suppressing weed.

11:08

The room was awash in dim lamplight, blood orange pungency and other rind-fleshy scents. The floor was adorned with blues jeans and violet silks, green suede tennies and black lace panties; fretful piles of books on pregnancy & babies; cell phones with ringers simultaneously & jubilantly turned off. The bed was host to tangled limbs and a dusting of powdered sugar. Nelle’s mouth was full of chewy gooey marshmallow.

She was moaning in ecstasy. “Oh my god, oooooohhhhh. mmmmmmmmm.”

Jack licked a white smattering from Nelle’s bare shoulder. “Yummm yum.”

“I was wishing I could send the message telepathically. While I was in the shower, I even tried to will it in your head. More marshmallows. More. More. You must’ve got the message. Did you? Ya think?”

“I dunno. Maybe. Might’ve been some kinda marshmallow mind meld. But I was also thinking that it was too good a move to leave it to last night. The move wanted to be a move. To moooovvve in and not be pushed out. Rejected! Plus, I didn’t want the deliciousness of Sweete Chocolato to have a bad connotation for you.”

“Impossiible! No way!” She licked the powdered pads of her fingers. “Besides it wasn’t YOU who was rejected. I’m the one who wanted you for like ever and you were like a stray cat who won’t let you pet him.”

“Feel free to pet me.”

“Won’t even slurp the little bowl of cream. Little lady offering. Just scowls & howls.”

“Cream? Where?”

12:13 am

Complimenting Nelle on the witchy allure of her boudoir and on the wondrous softness of her sheets had led Jack down a thorny path. She admitted to having purchased them for him, for him to enjoy or luxuriate or sleep and for him to be, quote “bare assed and mine.” This of course had pleased him mightily and sure, he had smirked with lecherous delight. What man wouldn’t have? But then she’d gone off on some agitated tangent about a trip to Macy’s and yay the sheets sexy sexy ya ya and then he hadn’t called and so the sheets were wasted. He’d tried to point out that maybe the sheets weren’t wasted after all cause hadn’t they made good use of them just 10 minutes ago?  She’d agreed that yes, the sheets had been properly sullied to her momentary satisfaction and had been worth every cent. And he’d said, good so we’re agreed, we love these fucking sheets!  And then she had demanded to know why again was it that he hadn’t called? There was no real answer to that question and he told her so. And she’d said, Ok but why?  And then he’d deep-throated his own foot with the whole fucked up story about what he was or wasn’t thinking while bolting from her bed.

“You make it sound like you got home and kicked off the scent of me like a pair of dirty jeans. Like you stuffed me in the hamper and smashed me down to the bottom.”

“Well… yes… it was kind of like that.”

“Did you shower in scalding water and brush your teeth til your gums bled? Like some rape victim in a TV movie?”

“What? No. I never said anything like that. I never felt anything like that. I felt guilty and chaotic and too… hungry. But, of course, it wasn’t rape. I was willing.”

“Willing? Not exactly willing. That implies some kind of smooshiness. A bit of yield.”

“Well, I wanted it. Yea. I was most definitely wanting.”

“But you weren’t thinking that at the time right? You were thinking you didn’t want me, that you were ambivalent, which is what? Just another word for asshole?” She meant to sound cocky there at the end, at least cheeky, but it came out sounding more pained.

“What do you want me to tell you, Nelle? That I wasn’t trying to convince myself that I didn’t need you, didn’t want you, was better off with out you? Yes, I was fighting it, I was flailing. Swinging blind punches. I boarded up my fucking head like you were a hurricane, ok?”

“Battened down the hatches?”

“Yes. Right. And that’s not easy with you. You’re not easy to resist.”

She smiled, only to have it fall from her face immediately.

“I was telling myself stuff like ‘What do you want to go there for?  Just to move from one haunted house to another, just to worry yourself sick tht you’ll lose her to someone better? Or what, what? Best case scenario, she loves you and she has your baby and then she drives crazy like she does and bam they’re both gone.’ “

“What? Jack! That’s terrible! Why would you say something like that to me?! Never mind think it!”

“No, that was before. Months ago. Just worst case scenario shit.”

“You said best case scenario! And I’m a good driver!”

“Best case scenario inside of my worst case scenario head.” 

“I’m not a bad driver. I’m not. ” She watched as he hesitated a fraction too long, furious at first but then forgiving when she realized that she had been taking less risks on the road ever since finding out about the baby. “That’s some shit, Jack.”

“I was convincing myself of all kinds of bull shit. I was desperate to resist you. For things to be the safe, to hold on to the past. Is that what you want from me? Do you want me to confess to my every moment of cowardice? To say I was blind? That I was less blind than lazy?”

Well, that’s better then no I just didn’t want you, and so –”

“I told you, want was not the issue. Want was the problem as I saw it. The destabilizer, the unequalizer. You told me to my face that you didn’t want to want me.”

“But the I want you  part came first! You see the difference don’t you?”

“Yes. I do. C’mere.”  Jack tugged at her wrist. ”I do. I told you I do. Want you. I do.”

“I’m sorry. I’m acting nutty. I’ve been reading all these books, ” Nelle motioned to the fretful piles beside the bed. ”Y’know how a baby has a soft spot on their head?  Where the skull hasn’t finished closing? You are that soft spot. My soft spot. What if I’m being careless?  I don’t want to end up hitting the cement squarely on that soft spot and then my brains gush out. Not that I have any brains left.”

Jack grabbed the other wrist and pulled her to him.

“For the life of me, I can’t pull away from you.”

“No, no, don’t do that, that’s a bad idea, ” he nuzzled her throat, jaw bone, ear lobe.

“I’ve no idea why I so insist on you.”

“Yes, that. Yes, insist on me. Insist.”

“Shouldn’t I be too good for this? ” She lolled against the head board as he nosed her collarbone. She heard him draw breath, a deep inhale. “To be begging like this?”

Jack put his hands on her hips and yanked her down, over the hump of pillows, beneath him. “Yes, beg. Beg.”

“Shaddup, you ass.” She wrapped her legs across his back and let herself breathe.

1:52 am

 ”Why couldn’t you have put a witchy spell on me if you, y’know, wanted me so damn much?”

“Pleeze! Puh-leeze!” Nelle shoved him with her flexed toes, painted a sparkly disco ball purple. “If I wanted you so bad? Whatever!”

“Oh, no, none of that!” Jack moaned, grabbing ahold of those disco ball toes and examining them for the flaws he knew he’d never find. “I’ve had enough Whatevers  to last a lifetime.”

“Yea? Kid killin’ you with the teenage whatevers?”

“Yea, most defintely. It’s the short somehow acceptable version of and now I shall shut your ass completely down;  the domestic version of a perp lawyering up. Dreaded words, darlin, dreaded words.”

She laughed, actually threw her head back and exposed the pearly undersides of her front teeth. Jack knew it wasn’t that funny but he was willing to take the post-coital aura of complete acceptance. He thought it was crazy how other men took off to escape the cuddle. Fools, all. Except, wait — as she was loathe to let him forget – that had been him last time with Nelle. Losers, every one. What was it really that made him grab his jeans and run? Had to be straight-up stupidity to miss out on all this orange room witchy woman wonderful.

“Hey, so, right, what about that? Why not save me with some crafty love spell?” Jack had been long interested (secretly obsessed) with spell-casting and alchemy after a childhood spent sneaking into his mother’s lab full of beakers, vessels and vials. The smell! Nothing in nature smelled like his mother’s lab or elicited such dangerous swoon in Jack’s psyche. A pre-teen interest in 70′s music had only increased his fascination for witchiness. She held me spellbound in the night. He’d always wanted to be that spell-bound man HELD in the night. Held hostage, captive, down, rapt. Tied to maple bedposts with one or two of Stevie Nick’s many silky scarves. He’d always hoped this would happen to him — that he’d be way laid on his journey to the futile fires of hell by some amarous spook.

He grabbed Nelle’s hand, finger nails painted with the same purple sparkly polish. “Oh, my, sparks really do fly from her finger tips.”

“Ah, be careful… I once usta want that song to be about me,”

“So, why be careful? Spell bound nights? Woman with the moon in her eyes? Raven hair? Ruby lips? I’m up for it. I decided I’m up for it.”

“Yea?” She tipped her head, curls fell forward in a great ruffling of animal attar. “Since when?”

“Just now actually, ” he chirped. Sensing a hidden something behind the veil of curls — Tears? Misgivings? — he added, “My minds made up.”

He pulled her back down, she tucked her head into the crook of his arm. “I’ve wanted it since forever ago but only just now GOT it.”

“Well, then, never mind.”

“Never mind what?”

“About the witchy woman. You seem to be remembering only her good parts. We should go with it.”

“Are we still talking about the song? What bad parts? It was all oh oh witchy woman she’s got the moon in her eyes.  I think you have it confused with Black Magic Woman. Who did Black Magic Woman again?”

“Santana.” Nelle was the secret (or maybe obvious) expert on all songs about witchiness and witchy woman-ness. “No, trust me, it’s you whose confused. But let’s leave it be. The truth could ruin everything. Fuck up this good thing we got going.”

“Oh, so you made a mistake and confused the songs and now you wanna play –”

” ‘Well I know you want a lover, but let me tell your brother, she’s been sleeping in the devil’s bed and there’s some rumors going round ’at someone’s underground and she can rock you in the nighttime ’til your skin turns red.’ “ Nelle recited the lyrics from memory. She would never be able to tell Tonya this story, she’d have to skip this part or never live it down.

“I do want a lover, ” Jack agreed. “So?”

“She’s like cheating on him with the devil.”

“Nah, that’s just poetry for y’know, the magnitude of her magic.”

“She can rock you in the night time til your skin turns red?”

“Again, where do I sign up?”  Jack could not for the life of him percieve how any man could see all that as a bad thing. “Nothing like crazy flushed skin after being rocked in the night time. ‘She held me spellbound in the night dancing shadows and firelight’ –”

” ‘Crazy laughter in another room and –”

“She drove herself to madness with a silver spoon!” he shouted triumphantly.

“That’s my line! That’s not a pro, it’s a con. She’s like a lunatic coke head.”

“No! That’s not it at all! She’s masturbating! She drove herself to madness with a silver spoon! She drove herself to madness with a silver spoon?”

“What? She’s what? With a silver spoon?”

“Yea, with the like bottom, the rounded like… No?”

“Oh, honey, that’s so naive and soooo …. little kid pervy. “

Suddenly she realized how young he must’ve been when he was listening to the song and thinking like who knows what kinda crazy kinky stuff. Nelle saw inside a heady aroma-drenched room with vials and dials and Jack’s little kid face – tippy toes stretching –  peering over the table. Jack reading Hansel & Gretyl convinced that the witch built the candy house out of kindness and was just misunderstood. Nelle’s mind jumped to that day with the book in her kindergarten lap; tracing the intricate frosting details, the stone garden of gum drops, the licorice eaves; wishing there was just one person who got that the witch was only trying to make friends.

Jack gazed down at the bottom half of Nelle’s face, her mouth twitching in a intermittant half smile. Within seconds, a gingerbread house was built in his brain, brick by chocolate brick, graham cracker siding lifted and mortared into place with pink icing.

“Oh my! We’re both such dorks! How many other couples do you think are out there tonight reciting Eagles lyrics to each other like romantic poetry?”

Jack was liking that idea, that coupleness, he liked the cozy sound of it. “Depends. How many other fellas are so fortunate to have seduced a witchy women?”

“Oh, please, I so seduced you.’

“Which brings me back to the question of all questions, if you wanted me all that bad, how come you never cast a come hither spell?”

“You might as well be asking how’s come I didn’t swoop down on my broom and scoop you up?”

“Or that.”

“First of all, I’m not a witch, I’m just psychic.”

“Just just just.”

“And besides I tried to. Cast a spell. Three times.” She buried her head in the sheets from girlish shame. “Three times! As recently as 6 months ago. It didn’t work.”

“Or did it?”

“See, don’t think that way, that’s why I didn’t want to tell you. That’s gonna be such bullshit when you’re MIA and like Whew! Came to my senses just in time. Glad that spell broke!”

“See, Witch, you’re always so sure you can see exactly what’s in my mind, but I was actually thinking that I wish you’d been more aggressive in your spell-casting. Maybe tracked down the most powerful and elusive of all cauldron ingredients: The invisible black cat bone.”

“There was no cauldron, be clear on that.”

“I don’t rate a cauldron? And to think if you’d only tried a little harder I could’ve been in this sweet ass bed a lot sooner.”

“I tried plenty hard. Embarrassingly hard. I shudder to think.” She shuddered to think. “And you were here before, months ago, a lotta good that did.”

He slowly lowered his lewd leer from brow to boobs to belly. At belly he broke into an A-ha! grin. A grin with such life force that it grabbed Nelle’s chubette mouth and took it smoothly backwards in a dance floor dip… leaving lips and their girl breathless. 

She reached across his chest — a beautiful expanse of masculine territory  which caused her to break into a school girl’s blush – after her ipod which was docked on the bedside table.

“Okay, dork buddy, here’s the probably all time best witch song. Are you ready? Get ready.” She scrolled through the titles and hit ‘I Put a Spell on You’ by Screamin Jay Hawkins. Hawkin’s ethereal visceral screeches filled the room with the kissing couple. Nelle hit replay. Three times.

“Do I still get to be your dork buddy if I confess to having never heard that?” Jack peered through wild tendrils of auburn scented like lemongrass into one wolfy golden eye. “I can try to keep up but you’re the Magic Madame, I live to serve you, I am not worthy.”

“It’s okay, I was gonna google ‘invisible black cat bone’ the second you were out the door.”

“Oh, fuckin’ Google. No one need ever admit to ignorance again.”

“Jim Jarmush spent as much to get the rights to use that song in ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ as he did to make the movie. But it was totally worth it. ” Nelle loved every Jim Jarmush movie ever made but she loved Stranger Than Paradise the best. And Mystery Train the second best.  

Jack was holding the strange contraption known as an ipod. It was the first time he’d ever held one. There had been one in evidence once but Sheppe had dealt with it and Jack had bought one for Lenie but it had remained inside the box it came in. It was more straight-forward than he’d expected it to be. He pushed up and down on the arrows, scrolling through Nelle’s song list. Which might’ve gotten her burned at the stake in darker days. No woman of average powers would ever feel the need to amass such a Nec-Romantic playlist.

Season of the Witch. Spellbound. Black Magic Woman. American Witch. Witch Hazel. She’s Haunted. Long Black Veil. Cross Bones Style. Evil Woman. Spellcast.  The TV theme song for Bewitched. Wicked Game. I Hear Voices. If You Have Ghosts, You Have Everything. (Cool. Jack was hoping Roky would be on Nelle’s personal spook-juke). Also, Marc Bolan, Bjork, The Cure, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Stevie Nicks, Bats for Lashes (Look out Google! Here I come!) The Doors, The White Stripes, Dr. John, even the Eagles.

Jack pressed play. Nelle burrowed beneath the blankets, cheeks red at having been discovered. Echoed voices in the night, she’s a restless spirit on an endless flight, wooo hooo witchy woman, see how high she flies.  Jack threw the sexy sateens over his own head and sniffed her out of hiding. It was, of course, easy for him to catch her scent in the covers. Had the sheets been white instead of blood orange they might’ve looked like ghosts tumbling about in the wee hours.

This could be the very minute
I’m aware I’m alive
All these places feel like home

With a name I’d never chosen
I can make my first steps
As a child of 25

This is the straw, final straw in the
Roof of my mouth as I lie to you
Just because I’m sorry doesn’t mean
I didn’t enjoy it at the time

You’re the only thing that I love
It scares me more every day
On my knees I think clearer

Goodness knows I saw it coming
Or at least I’ll claim I did
But in truth I’m lost for words

What have I done it’s too late for that
What have I become truth is nothing yet
A simple mistake starts the hardest time
I promise I’ll do anything you ask…this time

– Snow Patrol

Chapter 16

Sounds & Tastes of Chocolate

Nelle was brushing her teeth and thinking of all the better more poetic things she could’ve said. I’m yours. Come get me. She cursed the spontaneity of email, how quickly that send button gets hit. Not like the old days when you had to find a quiet spot to sit with pad and pen, fold up the pages, find an envelope, tuck the letter into bed, lick the sticky and then another lick for the stamp. Pen the address. If you still wanted to send the letter after all that, well, so be it. You could always reconsider on the walk to the mailbox. She’d gone from apologetic to psycho to pathetic all in one day. I’m yours. Come get me. Can’t there I have been a more elegant mysterious way to say “Yipppeeeee!” than to give him all the power once again? And here she was scrubbing all trace of first trimester sick from her mouth and choosing a suggestive pussy pink lipstick from a tray of more respectable shades. And what if he changed his mind and she never heard from him again? How long would she perch on the sofa arm, ears straining for the sound of his moaning engine? Waiting with Saint Teresa perv naivete to be bathed in the divine illumination of his headlights? She hadn’t been the least bit worried in the moment she’d hit send. She’d erased the part about more hot chocolate and square marshmallows please because it seemed maybe too presumptuous but mainly because it had taken away from the romance novel urgency of I’m yours, come get me. She may have even read that somewhere, in some schlocky bodice ripper from when she was 16 and only dreaming about having her bodice ripped. She decided that no, that couldn’t or wouldn’t be. She also decided against ringing his cell to say “So? You gonna come and get me already? Oh and bring more cocoa!”

She gathered up the snotty robe and the pj’s she worn for two days straight. Stripped the boo-hoo woe is mesheets from the bed. Stuffed it all into the wash on hot. Nelle, nude before her closet, stumped. She caught her reflection in the closet door’s full-length mirror and checked for any signs of a bump. She chose a silk camisole in a dusky shade of violet (it matched her mani-pedi.) To avoid looking too easy, she paired the sexy silk with a utilitarian pair of olive cargos and a shrunken angora cardigan in inky black like the cami’s lace trim. Nelle loved to get dressed, to gather little suggestions and textures, to combine colors and dreams, fashion & fantasy. A gorgeous outfit was the perfect spell. Like a spell, it maybe didn’t work the magic that you’d hoped it might but it made you feel stronger at the time. Which was the real magic behind anything.

She smoothed the bed sheets, the shade of blood oranges. A juicy & spirited hue. The sheets were an obvious choice as they complimented the gregarious grape of Nelle’s nail polish. A tipsy & soulful hue. Which was absurd, of course. More for her than for Jack. Men didn’t notice such things. Especially this man. This man! Oh my! Him!  Nelle mounted the glamorously dressed bed and jumped like all ten monkeys. Jumped so high she nearly bonked her head on the ceiling. She wanted to laugh hysterically, to break down in emollient tears, to call Tonya and read her Jack’s letter aloud. (She’d already done that. Twice.) She settled for upping the volume on the ipod dock and bouncing on the beautiful wrinkly bed. 

The sheets weren’t entirely chosen because of how they looked against her purple nails. Although it really was a beautiful combination and contrast: Nelle had been struck by it as she’d fingered the spicy folds of soft Egyptian cotton and yanked them off the linen cabinet shelf. The sheets were Calvin Klein. She’d run across them at Macy’s the afternoon after the one night she’d spent with Jack. In a moment of romantic indulgence – lusting, nesting — Nelle had splurged on the luxe linens. And yes, while she had wanted very much to see Jack LaNannse naked on those sheets –she wasn’t denying it – there was more to her Visa card justification. She wanted him naked and then she wanted him sleepy and then sleeping. Nelle was a big believer in sleep. Her experiences had shown her that there was so much more to sleep than just a physiological lull. Though that was huge too. Reminiscent of the robes worn by Thai monks, the sheets were especially Jackish — blood oranges, curry, leather, dirt. If Nelle should ever meet Lenore LaNannse she was definitely going to suggest that they branch out into the metrosexual male market. Not that just any man should be allowed to imbue themselves with Cologne eau Jack. That wouldn’t be fair to women kind.

“Listen to your pathos & prattle, grow up, stop jumping on the bed like 10 monkeys,”  said Brain. “Yay! Jumping! Yay! Jack!”  squealed Heart. “Bed? Jack? Jump him!” urged Cunt.

With the loud music and clumsy mattress dancing, Nelle nearly missed his knock and then nearly tripped over her own painted toes getting to the door. She would tell him she was flushed and out of breath from rushing to start the wash. She would not tell him that she was flying their future like a kelly green kite … a tail with ribbons in a rainbow array.

But there was no call for explanations or excuses over pink cheeks and curls in disarray.

She opened the door to a smiling Jack — smiling! An actual unrestrained smile! He passed her a takeout tray with two cups of cocoa and a blue box of marshmallows. She couldn’t have been any more delighted — even if the box had come from Tiffany’s, even were the box a lighter more robins egg blue and tied with a classy white ribbon. As it was she felt like Audrey Hepburn, eyes like chandaliers. A box of marshmallows in a royal blue box beat out a Tiffany’s trinket — silver charm bracelet, bling bling princess cut ring. She curtsied with delight. She set them on the bamboo desk by the door. She’d barely turned around to say pardon my disheveled appearance, was just doing a little laundry  when he crisscrossed his arms over her spine and pulled her hard against his dense chest. He nuzzled her hair and brow, breathing, and then kissed her with dizzying voracity.

“This could be the very minute
I’m aware I’m alive
All these places feel like home”

He tasted like warm milk and chocolate.

It only made a certain kismetic sense that the song blaring in the bedroom was called chocolate but was not at all about chocolate except that it was about Jack.

She’d downloaded it just this morning in a flurry of chocolate cravings and Lenannse lust. She’d already listened to it 20 or 30 times. It was an alright song but now Nelle was just glad to have the real deal. Chocolate, not a song about chocolate. Jack, not just a yearning pop lyrics promise.

The drunken politician leaps
Upon the street where mothers weep
And the saviors who are fast asleep,
They wait for you.
And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinkin from my broken cup
And ask me to
Open up the gate for you.
I want you, I want you,
I want you so bad,
Honey, I want you.

Now all my fathers, they’ve gone down
True love they’ve been without it.
But all their daughters put me down
cause I dont think about it.
I want you, I want you,
I want you so bad,
Honey, I want you.

-Bob Dylan

Chapter 15

The Magic Password

“You got an email from Nelle Redding. I’d already read half of it ’fore I realized it waddn’t work related. Seems kinda heavy duty. Needs attending to, me thinks.”

“Half of it and then you realized it waddn’t work?”

“Look, LaNannse, I’d be glad to give you some more privacy. I’d just as soon not have to attend to all your email shit on top of my own. Luddite like if you don’t wanna wash the dishes just drop the gravy boat on the floor and mama won’t make you wash the dishes no more.”

“Nah. It’s still working for me. But don’t open no more Nelle emails. Just assume it’s personal.” Jack held his arms out, anxious for the machine he usually avoided. “Hand that bitch over.”

“Last I knew I was sposed to assume it was NOT personal. You’re a fickle fella alright. No wonder she’s riled.”

“Now. Now. Give it here.”

Jack was back in third grade having sent a “will you go with me?” note around the room; on pins and needles waiting to see if she’d checked the yes, no or maybe box. Even though he knew it was past all that, that he’d blown it and there would be no exaltation over an X in the maybe box. But it was an email was a line drawn between them and today that was feeling like a life line.

Jack –

I keep going over last night in my head and I’m not liking it at all. There’s many things I’d take back if I could.

I know that my feelings for you are my problem and not yours. But is it too much to ask for a little sensitivity on your part?

I’m especially emotional right now in regard to you, not just because of the hormones but because of having to confront reality as compared to fantasy. Which is never easy.

I’m sick about how I acted last night. It wasn’t the kind of night I ever wanted to have with you and I treated you like I’ve never wanted to treat you. But there-in lies the problem. I want want want. I want you. And that’s not your fault but it makes it hard for me to act composed or even reasonable around you. I just need time to shut down that part of myself.

I’m sorry i can not be the one to help you with your confusion etc but I just need to not be around you or talk to you or see you.  

Nelle

Jacked typed a few words back and hit send with the spontanaety that email allows.

Nelle,

I think any man would be lucky to have you.

I wish that man was me.

Jack

A half hour or so later the computer chimed with Nelle’s reply.

Jack –

That right there is exactly why I shouldn’t have emailed to begin with, exactly why I need to take a time out. Cause I am bound to get my feelings hurt, even when you are only trying to be gracious and gentlemanly. I want to smack you for saying oh blah blah any man would be lucky blah blah oh I wish I could want you too but I can’t blah blah. I will let you in on a little secret if you ever do decide to actually start dating again. Women don’t want to hear how you’d love them if only they were love-able, if only you could find it some where in your heart but you can’t so sorry. Or I don’t anyway.

And yes I am acting crazy, I know. Tell all your friends! I’m psycho! And yes, you were acting like a total ass last night. And maybe always.

Am I sure it’s yours? Yes. I’m 100% certain. There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind. But I realize you have nothing but doubt and there’s nothing I can do to change that. When this baby comes out with its nose itching and smelling the peaches that haven’t even come in yet then maybe you’ll want some contact. But that is not something I’m looking for. Have contact, don’t have contact, I don’t care. I know you were trying last night, at the end, to “do the right thing” but I really can’t have that right now. That will do me more harm than good.

I need time and space to get over you, I need to get to the place where you having contact really will be something that is of no personal interest to me. I need to pull back and get real. But do know that I am not making some hard core declaration that seeks to deprive you of parental rights or of the child’s right to have you. But right now when it’s all the same to the kid, I need the breathing room. I can’t work with you on cases, meet you for “a chat and a snack” or have you showing up on my door step. Really, to be honest, I can’t even hear your voice. That odd almost drawl of yours, that Lee Hazelwood Swedish cowboy thing you’ve got goin’ on… Tonya says I only want you b/c you resemble Lee Hazelwood. I wish it were that simple. I also wish that you didn’t resemble that sexy bastard Lee. No more listening to “Some Velvet Morning”mnb   for me! No more Jack for me! Everything will be okay eventually. You’ll see. N.

Jack couldn’t swallow — bag of marbles in his throat. What the hell? How hard could it be to get a woman who supposedly already wanted you? See, you can’t even communicate with her, that mess is rife with misunderstandings, just fuck it, said Brain. Fuck you, Brain, said Heart. Fuck her and make it a good one, said Cock. Not that she should come easily to him, not that he deserved her and hell he probably couldn’t even handle her. She was probably too much woman for him anyway. Maybe when he was young and virile and more up on music. That stuck in his craw, of all things. Outside of Brenda, every other woman he’d ever so much flirted with had been less educated about music than he was. Sure they knew Elvis and The Grateful Dead and whatever else was in vogue at the time — Guns n Roses or Lionel Richie or Goo Goo Dolls (thank god all that was over.) He wasn’t used to being one upped on that one. Or maybe he was and it opened some Scooby Doo bookcase cum secret passageway in him that filled him with a …. what? A bone-white “boo!” in the pitch black night? Nah. A sadness like a wave in a Japanese watercolor? Nah. The urge to rip off her blouse and maul her boobs? Nah… OK, maybe. Then what????? Life, curiosity, blissful ignorance, hunger, newness, need, and yea that boob thing too.

Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so. Of course you can’t have all that. Just never mind then. Just sit around and wait to die then. Like Townes sings. Jack shoved the lap top away and scooped up his cell and keys. He needed to get the fuck away from that desk, its clutter and its Machines of Misunderstanding. He needed to get some cold air into his lungs which were hot and shooting marbles.

Lunch time. Perfect. He picked up a couple coneys and two vanilla malteds. Lenore didn’t like him to feed her coneys but what Mother doesn’t know won’t hurt. She’d be underneath her locker with a book on her knees, like always. They’d had a couple quick lunches there already, whenever he could manage, whenever 12:30 didn’t slip by without Jack noticing the time. He could tell she was glad for the company, glad to not be all alone in the hallway like a circus freak — “The Girl with the Sonar Sniffer” like they’d joked one day, backs against the lockers, tennies side by side. And it was good that he’d known way back then. It was good that he’d known that he wanted that little someone, that little Lenie LaNannse. It was good to have something left of Brenda. It was good that he wasn’t totally alone in this world. He was lost – completely – but he wasn’t alone.

Neither was Lenie. As he rounded the corner with his box of coneys and his too-cold cups, he encountered the sight of Lenie lunching on a checkered picnic cloth with wicker basket and cloth napkins. The Queen and the Fair Maiden were treating Lenie to a linoleum picnic. They looked so oddly out of place, but so at home with it, that he felt like he had witnessed three fairies feasting on dew drops atop a green leaf carpet. He backed up slowly so as not to spook the nymphs.

Jack started up the truck which whined with displeasure like a dog who’d been hoping for a few pets from Lenie. Sheppe would make quick business of a coney, he thought and punched the digits to Sheppe’s cell. “You done yet? I got us coneys & malteds.”

“You got us coneys & malteds? My ass. You got y’all coneys & malteds, you & the pretty youngin’. And what happened then, LaNannse, be descript, I really wanna picture it. She said, what? Listen up old man you need to get a life and a wife, do something, anything. Go home, get drunk, get laid, get outta here. Smart kid ‘at one.”

Jack smiled at the very thought of descibing the dew drop feast on the green leaf.

“Ya, ‘at’s what I thought. Figgers. Finally. The night time visits will be next, she’ll say ‘For the love of god will ya listen to grandmama already, you old creep.”

Jack’s smile dissipated. “D’you really think it’s, y’know, like that, what you said?”

“I’m breakin your balls. I know there’s nothing off there and we both know I’m the ones with the nose for that kinda off  in a house. Huh? How many times have I smelled that one and you, you wanted to see a grieving father oh boo hoo hoo and what?  She’s in the foundation of Ma’s new greenhouse which Ma wanted 10 years ago after reading The Orchid Thief but now she don’t care less ’bout orchids and aint got no daughter either. Right?”

“I know. You were right. About the greenhouse too. I know.”

“Right. And you don’t want no woman that aint dead Brenda. That’s your sick fuck right there.”

Jack cringed. “Ack. ‘At sounds worse. Remember that perv that liked the daughter cause she was next best to her dead Ma?”

“That’s not you and you know it’s not and she knows it and even Lenore knows it. And I know that you’re good police and a good Dad, just the one thing messes with the other is all. It’s no wonder neither one of us can make a home for ourselves never mind someone else. Speaking of the job, I think I just saw that dick wad come back in from lunch, gonna go ruin his day. I know his kid is part of this, Jack. If youda seen that smirk when I told him how he suffered fo 11 hours up there like that, yea, you’d know it too.”

“Oh. No coneys?”

“Put ‘em on my desk, I’ll swallow them bitches cold, ” Sheppe said. ” ‘Sides Jack, you don’t need me distracting you today.”

“I told you. I’m stuck. Real cases, head case. I’m cold. She’s cold. In my head.”

“I love you, man, but you gimme the heebies sometimes.”

“I give YOU the heebies? You give ME the heebies.”

“Listen, you gotta get it together. You gotta figure out if you want her and then you have to say I want you — not I wish I wanted you, not coulda woulda shoulda. And if it’s No thanks I’d rather let my balls turn black, wither up and fall off,  well, then do like she says and leave her the fuck alone. What have you been doing anyway that’s got her sqawking like that? You better not be the one mutha on the planet who gets a restraining order when he could be gettin laid.”

“Alright, bitch, don’t even bother comin back to the office. Gonna pack up all your shit. Gonna be in a box by the curb. I retain custody of the lap top. Go on. Snicker. You think i’m kidding but we’re done. Wrong. So wrong.”

Sheppe snickered louder. “I popped back in ’bout 20 minutes ago, to check on something, and well, one of us has gotta take care of business. How you like yer Luddite now, suckah?”

Irritated and out done, Jack gave Sheppe’s melted malted and soggy coneys to the geek clerk at Ear This Eye That. Despite the unappetizing appearance the kid was glad to get ‘em. Jack quickly picked out a small stack of CD’s, mainly looking for the album with that Dylan song that goes somethin somethin interrupt me drinkin from my broken cup, somethin da da ask me to open up the gate for you. I want you, I want you, I want you so bad. But, of course, since he was there, he willy nilly picked a few others.

“Hey, that’s funny, ” said the geek clerk as he rang up The Cowboy & The Lady. “You kinda look like Hazlewood. Anybody ever tell you that before?

“Spose.”

“You’re getting Cake & Death too, huh.  Hazlewood fan, huh?  Duh.”

“Know a lady, she’s a fan.”

“Ha, that’s great, she’s the Lady, yer the Cowboy, huh.  Right?  Uh, that’ll be $68.45.”

Jack handed him a twenty and a fifty, scooped up his stack and headed out. Cake or Death. Cake or Death? Indeed.

“Ey, thanks for the coneys!”

Back at the office, Jack popped Cake or Death into the laptop and turned the volume up. Sheppe wasn’t there and they were stuck off in their own little nook. The un-friendly detective with blue sense and porn star ‘stashe who maybe might’ve killed his wife and got away with it. Between that and solving cases for ‘em with either or any of his senses, sometimes common sense, Jack was practically their unsung hero. But they were just as glad to leave him to that other guy who talked too much and was really frankly downright offensive. They were put aside like dildos in a secret drawer — they better be there when you need ‘em but who wants to have to look at ‘em everyday? Not that he’d care if Sheppe were there, he’d enjoy the music more if he were here to bitch about it. The notes would ring melodious next to Sheppe’s bitching. Truth was he kind of loved to hear Sheppe’s voice, didn’t matter much what he was saying, just to know he was there. Sheppe’s voice had been holding Jack up for years, since Brenda, and the only ones ‘at knew it were he and Sheppe. So Sheppe did rude shit. He knew he could get away with it. He knew there’d be no long ugly custody battle over the police-issue lap top, no box at the curb. Sheppe knew Jack had his back and vice versa. Things that might breed distrust in other friendships, blatant boundary crossing between normal folk, all that was just petty luxuries that neither of them could afford.

Now that Jack was thinking about it, Sheppe did have one thing and no it wasn’t much — some son of a bitch getting slapped by his mother, puking on his daughter’s rug, trying to pass off second hand coneys as roses & posies. It was what it was. And for Sheppe, it had been enough. So far. Jack wanted more for Sheppe and hopefully he’d get it but for now it was Jack that was Sheppe’s second thought. Jack hadn’t been willing to face that before. Why? Too much. Shying away from too much could get Sheppe killed. Just like that. Jack kicked back and pulled the computer into his lap. Feet propped up on Sheppe’s file cabinet, feeling suddenly emboldened, Jack tapped at the keys. One letter at a time like bricks in a road. Just like that.

Dear Nelle –

I’ve held back and you haven’t. That’s been part of the confusion and has left you feeling …. lonesome? You’re out there all alone howling at the moon and you want it to be just that easy for me but it isn’t. I said I wish I was that lucky man because I WISH it. There’s no blade. You think you see a blade flashing but you’re wrong. There’s no jab jab! ha ha! got you! There’s no laughing or calling you psycho. I may have said “hoodoo” but that’s fear talking and me wishing that I didn’t WISH. Does that make any sense?

I don’t really want you to say “No More Jack!” Breathing room? You say that and I think of breath and being all up in your face and panting on your skin. Am I ready for breathing room? Obviously not. Am I ready for you? I don’t know. I feel doubtful but there’s not a single thing in my life I don’t feel that way about. Except that I definitely need to change my password and start taking charge of my own email instead of being the same old lazy SOB. And no scooter for the kid. I’m certain of that.

I do know that I’d like to have the chance to try to deserve you and maybe you’ll change your mind in the future and then we can put boxes on the curb. Then. I felt like a box on the curb last night and I hated it. All I could think was WANT — wanting you to drink your cocoa and nibble your marshmallows and let me in. And I see how fucked up that is. You have tossed me the golden key and I tossed it out the car window in a rush to get home and crawl back into my hole. You think I was trying to “do the right thing.” You think you told me the baby was mine and that I came back and handed you hot chocolate as what? A consolation prize? A “Sorry I knocked you up” offering? It was so much more selfish than that. I’m afraid to admit that the baby wasn’t even part of it, not for me, not yet. That’s still not real to me. I wasn’t like my mother “Oh, quick, there’s your blood, better grab it like it’s a gold nugget.” If anything, the baby, in its insane wierdness, was like a Buddhist koan, a sliver that wouldn’t let my mind close. A door jamb in my heart. Propping (prying) me open but still a riddle that I haven’t even begun to answer. As with a koan, I’ll probably always be clueless. Which is okay. Even today my kid surprised me. Took her coneys and she was having like a little girl tea party. Her first one ever, with actual guests that weren’t teddy bears. At 15! I’m all in with your decision, Nelle, but I’m still a few steps behind you. What’s new?

So please believe me when I say I am not expecting you to take some kind of action or even to sway your opinion at this point. I’m just telling you because I haven’t. I want you. I want you. I want you so bad.  Jack 

He hit send before he had the chance to get caught up in regret, fret or typos.

Hours passed.

He checked the in-box repeatedly.

When Sheppe called to say the day had been a wash and he was gonna be in the office late with paper work, Jack said “me too” and spaghetti sounded good as anything. He’d been chasing his tail and there was no point in staying over, except that Lenie was going to his cousin Jackie’s after work and he didn’t have Internet access at home unless he went into the main house and there was no way he was going to let Lenore get a bead on him today. No way. She’d smell the desperation. She’d poke the soft spot and open the cage and let the scared bird out to screech & squawk. He’d have to watch his fear flap its estranged wings. Feathers would fly.

And then — just like that — her name was lit up on the screen. He hit the mouse and held his breath.

I’m yours. Come get me.

The astounding beauty of five words.

When Sheppe showed up with spaghetti, Jack was gone. No coat, no keys, no Jack. Sheppe chuckled and sat down in Jack’s chair. Rubbing his hands together with gleeful anticipation, he pulled up the email sign in page and typed in “karly1031″ which was Lenie’s middle name and birthday. Access denied. What? Sonofabitch had changed the password.

I am not an angry girl
but it seems like I’ve got everyone fooled
every time I say something they find hard to hear
they chalk it up to my anger
and never to their own fear
and imagine you’re a girl
just trying to finally come clean
knowing full well they’d prefer you
were dirty and smiling

I am not a pretty girl
I don’t want to be a pretty girl
no I want to be more than a pretty girl

–Ani DiFranco

Chapter 14

Turns Out

Turns out the “Righteous Babe” sticker on Sasha’s bumper was the name of Ani DiFranco’s self-start record company. Turns out Ani DiFranco was a girl genius who had a telescope aimed straight at Lenie’s starry soul. Sasha played three different Ani Albums for Lenie during the rescheduled Punk Rock Barbie play date. Turns out playing Punk Rock Barbies was pretty much like it sounded but way better. Mostly it was a lotta talking and listening to records.

Sasha chopped a chunk of blond Barbie hair, tossing the golden tresses aside. ”We were, what were we?”

“We were 11.”

“We were 12. And we were bored with our Barbie’s and saying how wouldn’t it be cool if there were punk rock Barbies and then I dug through our dream house and –”

“No, first I made a few outfits and then you gave the one the machine gun arm.”

“Well, whatever, I was the one who said we could deconstruct them.” Sasha’s emphasis on the word deconstruct hinted at a possible future PHD in gender studies.

“Yea, but I made that crazy zebra stripe ballgown out of my Mom’s linen napkin first and then we put the Barbie in it and you said she looked stupid and twee and so you tore her arm off.”

“She did look stupid, ” said Sasha to Lenie.

“Yea,” Coco nodded. “Her machine gun arm brought the whole look together. Totally.”

Sasha gathered up the middle of the Barbie’s hair and had Lenie hold onto it while she lopped off the hair on either side. “Oh, man, your mom was so pissed too, remember?”

“Yea, but then she gave us the other three zebra napkins cause we ruined the set. So it kinda worked out for us in the end.”

Sasha passed the newly shorn Barbie to Coco. “We’ve been playing Punk Rock Barbies ever since. It’s not gotten old yet. Has it gotten old for you, Coco?”

“No, I’m gonna play Punk Rock Barbies for fuckin ever.” Coco pressed down with her purple marker, repeatedly dragging it across the Barbie’s jagged tuft.

“It is fun,” shrugged Sasha.

“Like the best of things, it involves glitter” said Coco as she spurted a big glob of Elmers glue on a magazine and then painted it on to the remaining stripe of Barbie hair which she’d “dyed” purple with the magic marker.  She then dipped it in violet glitter.

“Voila! A sparkly mohawk!”

Lenie sifted through the so-far unmutilated Barbies wishing there were more brunettes or red heads. Or ones with sandy hair like Sasha. Suddenly she seized on the idea of making a Punk Rock Brenda. Brenda had been both flaxen-haired and punk rock. She selected a Barbie and lopped off half her hair but it still looked nothing like the bouncy bob that Lenie had seen in photos. Dissatisfied Lenie tossed the unacceptable thing to the floor.

Sasha tilted her head. “What? Done already?”

“I wanted it to have ringlets.”

“Ringlets? This ain’t Nellie Olsen Barbies.”

“My mom had ringlets and she was totally punk. My Dad sez, You woulda loved your mother Len-len, she was punk rock. So ringlets can rock. Ask my Dad.”

“Oh, no doubt, ” said Sasha picking up the discarded doll. “I’m think if we wrap the tendrils in the handle of this paint brush and then coat it with glue that’ll it’ll hold the curl.”

Coco craned her neck watching as Sasha wound the hair around the black plastic and was ready with a swipe of glue.

Lenie watched as they concentrated on creating a head full of blond curls. As they sung along — loudly and even off-key (Coco) — to Ani Difranco. I am not a pretty girl, I don’t want to be a pretty girl, no I want to be more than a pretty girl. Lenie knew that it would’ve riled just two days ago, watching as two very pretty girls bopped their pretty heads, curling Barbie hair and co-opting an anthem that ought to belong to a real not-pretty girl like Lenie. And to be true it still stung a little, a patch of poison ivy in the waist band of her jeans kinda irritation, but not so much that Lenie considered even for a second (okay, just a second) actually following through with the urge to poke Coco’s Sweete pretty pout with a lone Barbie leg. I am not an angry girl but it seems like I’ve got everyone fooled. Except Lenie wouldn’t have her new anthem if not for the new girl and this new chance to hang out the old new girl. It was true too – though how or why, who knew? — that Lenie was feeling more included in pretty and more open to that part of her which was definitely more than pretty. The lines between pretty and ugly had blurred in a most pleasing way. Every time I say something they find hard to hear they chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear. Coco and Sasha squealed with delight at the success of their sticky spirals. Sasha danced the Brenda Barbie across the carpet, testing the bounce of the curls. Lenie knew intuitively that the real life Brenda had done many such naked dances herself, ringlets sproinging to some fabulous punk rock soundtrack. And imagine you’re a girl just trying to finally come clean. Punk Rock Brenda danced her way up Lenie’s arm and shoulder. Lenie giggled but shied away. She could feel the gift of it — all of it —  but it was hard for her to accept gifts. Not from her Dad or her family but from otherwise outsiders.

Except that Coco Sweete was family, turns out.

– The Gourds 

***********************************************************************************************

Sheppe set the laptop on Jack’s desk. “Okay, she’s only had the blog since August so it won’t be the blog slog I’d feared. What you oughtta do is go into the archives and start reading from the first post and maybe you’ll hit on something. I contacted Word Press and they need a warrant before they’ll release the sign up details which with no body, no missing person report, no crime, well that’s not gonna happen. No biggie though. There’s probably nothing there if she was secretive or hiding like Nelle said.”

“Well, I called Justin so he’s gonna use a little legal strong-arm.”

“And some Justin LaNannse sweet talk no doubt. OK. OK. That’s good. That may pan out. He’ll probably bone that chick I talked to, with the sweet but stern voice. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Jack flashed two intertwined digits. “Fingers crossed.”

“Maybe some of his lady-luck will rub off on us and we can find this girl.”

Jack nodded and turned to the blog slog, starting like Sheppe suggested, with the very first post.

Dear Venus,

So I’m starting this blog because I officially have nothing or no one which was a choice I made and do not regret. A choice I had to make for sheer survival. Lest my soul be completely descimated. The opportunity to save myself came along and I took it.

I was accepted into Juilliard and of course my parents were thrilled. But, behind their backs, in complete secret, I applied to a few other schools with good music programs. And one of them offered me a full scholarship — books, classes, room & board, everything. So I did the math and realized that I could go to college and still keep all the money I’d saved from years of slaving through high school, plus all the scholarships and music awards etc. A girl like me can do a lot with 40 grand — why a girl like me can become a girl like me! Once it hit me that I could have it all now and not have to wait when I probably wouldn’t have made it through, it seemed like a no brainer. BUT BUT BUT my family would have lost it had I announced I was not going to be going to Juilliard, never mind any more radical taboo announcements I might have made. I’ve never been what they wanted me to be. I wasn’t the son they wanted for starters. My very female-ness was all wrong. I was never going to be enough. I was never going to measure up. EVER. So I pretended I was going to Juilliard and kissed them goodbye and a cab came and took me and my cello away forever. I’ll change my name of course. They’ll never find me. And while it sounds so cold hearted keep in mind the cultural burden that would have killed me and understand the simple truth — I was going to be cast out, exiled, disinherited, dead to them anyway. I just beat them to the punch is all. Best decision I have ever made. The only decision I have ever made.

I left for summer school on the 4th of June and I have been livin’ the dream ever since. I have completely indulged myself. I bought a whole wardrobe of mini skirts and flirt shirts and am feeling like maybe sexy for the first time ever. Of course I rarely wear such things — a mini skirt & a cello don’t mix — but it’s nice to have them in my closet and not have to worry. Just a little leeway for my inner slut. Not that there’s anybody to be slutty with but still it’s nice.

I want this blog to be all about my transformation and my quest.

Discovering, becoming,

Marchella

Jack jotted a note on his legal pad, reminding himself to look into students accepted into Juilliard who didn’t end up there. Cellists. Hopefully they wouldn’t want a warrant.

“this dream always ends” I said
“this feeling always goes
The time always comes to slip away”
“this wave always breaks” I said
“this sun always sets again
And these flowers will always fade”
“this world always stops” I said
“this wonder always leaves
The time always comes to say goodbye”
“this tide always turns” I said
“this night always falls again
And these flowers will always die”

Between you and me
It’s hard to ever really know
Who to trust
How to think
What to believe
Between me and you
It’s hard to ever really know
Who to choose
How to feel
What to do

– The Cure

Chapter 13

Hell Of A Gentleman

“To tell you the truth, Jack, you’re pretty much the last person I care to see right now.” Nelle sounded tired, drained, and definitely was not into the idea of meeting Jack for a quick snack and a chat.

“I could come by. I could bring Thai.”

“No, that won’t work.”

“It’s just, like I said, I kinda need to talk to someone who knows about these things. She’s still there. She’s dead but she’s still in my head. And Sheppe has this case, and y’know, with her in my head, I got nothin’ for him.”

“So? You havin’ nuthin aint nuthin new. Ain’t never troubled you before. Does anybody get more than nothin? Anyone whose still alive, I mean?”

“But, like, what’s gonna happen now? Is she gonna rot in there? I think she is, cause she’s in rigor now and well, get this — I’m stiff all over, like my joints are froze up. I’m movin’ around like fuckin’ Frankenstein.”

“Goodbye, Jack”

He held the reciever in his hand, unsure about what had happened. Had she hung up on him? He redialed and got the machine. So he grabbed his keys from his desk, drove to her house and knocked on the door.

She answered the door in pink flannel pjs be-dotted with twin-stemmed cherries. A fashion choice which kinda freaked him out because they were the same pj’s the victim had been found in on the episode of Law & Order that Jack had watched the night before. He knew this for certain cause he’d chastised himself for thinking jammies on a corpse would look cute on Nelle. Nelle was moody and not the best of drivers and even downright nasty (today) but he didn’t at all like the idea of her laid out on the floor in a sticky pool of plasma.

“Look, I told you, I can’t do this. I’ve been queasy for 10 straight hours. I’m not up to this.”

“Oh? You okay? D’you pick up a stomach bug somewhere?”

“Nooooooo,” Nelle pulled out of her door jamb slump, “my cervix picked up some semen and –”

“Lemme guess, down by the docks.”

Nelle reared back, her whole face a giant convoluted question mark. ???. ????. ???.

Jack, itching with discomfort, felt the need to clarify.  “Seamen? Sea? Men?”

“Really?”

“To be fair, it’s uncomfortable being in the presence of a lady whose talking about her lady parts.”

“Yea, Jack, you’re a hell of a gentleman.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I know you told me before, the other day, about your being pregnant, but I blanked. Though I should’ve figgered as much. You’re nauseous, moody, even almost unkind.”

“Unkind?” She started to close the door. “Good night, Detective LaNannse. Thanks for popping by. Uninvited.”

“Wait, wait, ” He wedged his green tennie in between the door and its waiting latch. “I’m sorry. I’m being insensitive. And this is big for you. I heard you the other day, it just slipped my mind.”

“Is this how it it is for your daughter? She tries to talk to you but you don’t listen?”

His hackles rose at the base of his neck. “I don’t see how my parenting shortcomings are any of your business.”

“No? I guess I’m just curious, being as your LaNannse DNA has taken root in my gut.”

Hackles turned to porcupine quills turned to frayed electrical wires. “What?”

“You heard me.”

His mind over-flowed like a bath tub, memories slish sloshing over the porcelain lip, a whale-ish slap against lapis lazuli tiles. The day Brenda and he had sat perched on toilet and tub edge, shower curtain bunched beneath his jittery thighs. They’d peered at the stick watching as the pink plus sign + revealed self and they spent a whole night in frozen fear until he’d gone out the next morning for a drive, while Brenda slept in the dark, and he’d drove until the sun came up over the then shiny hood of his brand new truck. He’d decided, Fuck this truck or fuck the next truck. Fuck concert tickets and spontaneous road trips to see bands. Fuck romantic candlelit dinners & bright red lobsters & pricey bags of kind bud. He swung by Mickey D’s and picked up breakfast in a greasy bag. Brenda loved an Egg Mcmuffin — especially lately. He drove home with the volume up and chick schlock on the radio. He crawled into the — now sagging — bed on his knees and made his case. What they didn’t need? A dozen records a week. What they did need? That little someone. That little Lenie LaNannse.

“Hmmm. I don’t think so.”

“Yea? Well, I know so. Please Jack, go away.  Get off my porch, get in your truck, drive away. Go. Please.”

“What makes you think it came from me?”

“Hmmm. Let’s see… maybe because I remember the feeling — when you had your cock in my cunt — and I felt the spreading warmth when you came and the urgency of those little suckers as they raced for my egg.”

“You knew then?”

“No. Yes. No. But I do remember feeling that and I do remember you being there even if you don’t.”

“I do. But…. that was a while ago.”

“8 weeks ago.”

“But it was just that once. After all those years. After I’d resisted and then just once and –”

“So your repeated rejection was supposed to protect me from getting pregnant?”

“But whose to say I’m the one?”

“I am! I say you’re the one!” She wondered if maybe she should bring out diagrams and charts. Here’s the vaginal canal, here’s the cervix, here’s the uterine wall. She’d assumed he’d already familiarized himself with such illustrations. For a man who hadn’t fucked in a decade, he seemed plenty prepared. Unlike some, he seemed to have a rudimentary intuitive understanding of the g-spot and had known the precise location of the female clitoris with its 8000 nerve endings. “You’re the only one I let in, so to speak.”

“Oh.” He looked down at his shoes, green suede blackened with oil spots. What had made him by green pumas? At his age? Jeesh. “Yeaaaaaa.. see, thing is, I already have a kid. And while I adore her, I really, I don’t…. I don’t recommend it. If you want my advice –”

“I do not. I want nothing from you. I have all of you that I need.” She shut the door with speed and no forewarning, not giving him the chance to slip his foot in again.

Jack pressed against the closed door, feeling thirteen again, remembering how he used to lean against doors and pretend they were the solid bodies of lady beauties. He’d gotten kinda creepy with it for a while there, loving how it felt to press into something else, to give up the sheer heavy weight of his own molecules, he’d loved it so much that he’d started opening his mouth and tonguing the wood (lead paint poisoning be damned!) He’d eventually started masturbating up against the door as stand-in dame. That had seemed pathetic and desperate with the potential for exposure. Just the thought of Lenore’s holier than thou horror had been enough to quit him of that sleaze.

He called out, through the door to Nelle, to the chilly night, to the sad stars. “You wont have another moments peace. Worry will eat you alive. You’ll live every moment of every day petrified, in pain, knowing that at any time someone could sneak up on her in a parking lot. Bury her away where’d you’d never find her.  She could run an errand to the post office and never make it home. It’s hell!”

“Nelle! Nelle!”

****************************************************************************************************************

Nelle dialed her best friend Tonya’s number, needing Tonya to remind her again to get a fucking spine already.

“T? It’s breaking my heart. I can’t do it.” She whispered then placed the receiver against the door where, from the other side, Detective Jack shouted ugly possibilities and past certainties. When she put the phone back to her ear Tonya had already heard enough and was spewing a jaded series of anti-Jack isms.

“Hello! What a fucking creepazoid. What kind of shit is that to tell a pregnant woman? What a pig. Really, Nellie, that’s what you get for sexing a pig. A cop? Yuck. Only if they bum rape me in the back of their squad car.”

“Gross. TMI. And he doesn’t have a squad car, he’s a detective.” Nelle crouched in her tiny hall closet and was surprised to feel a static spark as she jostled the buckle of her red plaid Girl Detective coat which she’d only worn once so far, the day she’d met Jack at the mines. The static spark lit a small fire in her mind.

“No sirens? Does he carry a gun at least? No sex in the back of his squad car like you’ve been a bad bad girl? Then what good is he? Not that he even has sex. Fucking freak.”

The fire began to crackle and give off heat. Nelle tried to press in closer, struggling to make out the meaning in the shadows. She saw a girl’s body lying limp over the feathery flames. Then Nelle, the smaller Nelle reflected in the third eye of real Nelle, turned to find a girl Satyr beside her. Furry legs with hooves but boobs up top. Hooves with nail polish the color of sun-kissed oranges. The boobs — so firm they had to be fake — were displayed alluringly in a string bikini with rainbow stripes. And the hair was not like on the body, strawberry shortcake red, but was instead a violet mohawk set against a sea of blue-green skull fuzz.

“Huh Nelle? Really. I’m at a loss. Why him? Why in hell? You can’t trust a cop. Only creeps want that job. Pervs or power mongers. And he’s not even that good-looking. You only like him cause he looks like Lee Hazelwood. His partner Sheppe is pretty hot though. Like he’s not a real cop but only plays one on TV.”

“Actors are worse,” Nelle pointed out, while suspiciously eyeing the girl satyr’s false turquoise eyelashes.

“That’s true.”

Nelle’s brain began to roar with the heat of the fire. The girl Satyr was calmly roasting a marshmallow over the flames, on the end of a long twig the marshmallow was odd… not round but square and even and dense and especially delicious looking. Sweets again. Nelle was gonna be 300 lbs by the time this baby was born.

“You don’t need this shit, you’re almost 40, girlfriend. He’s been nothing but a waste of your precious time. He’s some kinda damage that you cant fix and fuck you three times for thinking you can. Grow up. You’re about to be somebody’s Mama. Your days of going after dick-dead men are DONE. Done. Say it with me.”

“His dick works fine, it’s, I dunno what it is with him.”

The Girl Satyr was becoming increasingly aware of Nelle’s presence and looked like she might even deign to speak at some point. Nelle did not want to miss a word of that for this lecture, which while well-meant, was getting as old as old lady Nelle.

“Ton-ton…. I think I better go…”

“Wait, wait! Is he still acting like that baby in your belly hasn’t got a damn thing to do with him? Fuckin men!”

“Yea, well, I told him, so, but basically yea.”

“You told him? What dumb man shit did he try to lay on you?”

“Oh, the typical stuff, the whole male script.” Nelle could feel the pricklies on her wrists and in her ear canals. The Girl Satyr was watching her from the corner of her made-up eye. “Bye. I gotta go now.”

“No! Don’t you dare! Do not let him in. He just wants you to ease his tortured mind for him, his fucking girl in a cave shit. Don’t fall for it.”

“It’s not him. It’s…. someone else.”

“Oh. Like? Well, you shoulda said.” Tonya signed off with a series of clicking sounds, leaving Nelle alone with the Girl-Satyr who offered Nelle a gooey melted marshmallow. Nelle took it as her cravings demanded.

“It’s not gonna be easy for him to find me, y’know. And worse when he finally does.”

“Where are you hidden?”

“I honestly don’t know. A hole in the ground. But also, see, I was hiding a long time before that.”

“Just tell me now, as much as you can.”

“Thing is, I’ll be too ashamed to be seen that way. Dead and…. oh, yea, that will be no good. And after all I’ve done to get where I was going.”

“He’s a professional. He sees what you were, not what’s… left.”

“I knew it. Ask him. I knew he was a soul mate. I even thought he might be mine. But he’s yours. Your friend thinks you can do better. She’s probably right. A girl can’t help who she loves. You see what she doesn’t. You see the part of him that sees me.”

Nelle could feel the fire dying down, the restless tap dance of painted hooves. “Don’t go. Tell me your name.”

“Easier asked then answered!” She pounded her hooves and pointed to her limp body. “I usta be a total fairy tale dork. Dork in life, dork in death. Ha Ha!”

Then Nelle’s head was empty except for a pile of smoldering ashes. She jumped up and raced for the door, throwing it open. “Jack! Wait!”

But he was gone already, a puddle of oil where his truck had been parked.

*******************************************************************************************************

“Nelle? Nelle? Son of a bitch.”

He walked down to the curb, craning his neck behind him as he went. He started the engine up with his eyes trained on her door.

He drove around aimlessly eventually stopping at Lew’s Road-side stand for a cheese coney and malted.

He dialed lenie on his cell. “Hey kiddo. You got a minute? I got a work question so no presing for details. I know. It kills you.”

Jack knew she was wrinkling her nose with displeasure. “Well, okay, obviously you have a darker sort of edgier aesthetic, but what about your classmates? Would anyone ever wear something so chirpy as say a rainbow necklace?”

“No. I mean, not really. A week ago it would’ve been a solid no. But now this new girl, this Coco Sweete. She might. Dad, since I helped you, can I get a Vespa?”

“And get mowed down by some self-involved A-hole? No. No way. Never. Not a chance.”

After he’d hung up with Lenie and listened to bad radio for too long, he drove over to Stearns and ordered a Sweete Hot Cocoa with whipped cream. At the last minute he threw in a few fresh Sweete marshmallows, the ones they spread out on flat wax paper and then haphazardly cut into irregular squares. He promply took it back to Nelle’s — so promptly that it was still sloshing hot creamy drips when he held it out to her.

“I thought I told you already. Don’t call me again. Keep your distance.”

“But… I brought you hot chocolate?

Her cravings almost had her caving but she was stoic.  Jack opened up the chinese takeout box in bright blue like from Stearns.  Hot cocoa from Stearns? No fair!  And now this! What was it?  She leaned forward and peeked in, vanilla wafted up and filled her nose with such biggness that she wondered if it was the LaNannse blood inside of her, inhaling, little tiny being taking a gigandamundo whiff. Blocks of powdery white… what was it… was it Divinity nougat like her Mississippi Mamaw used to make?

“Is it… Divinity?”

“Divinity? What?” Everything was spiritual with a woman like Nelle — be it Einstein or TV or marshmallows. “Marshmallows.”

“Oh my god, Jack. The girl, she’s a Satyr and she’s had a boob job and she’s a dork and she’s always hidden so it’ll be hard to find her and false lashes and a purple mohawk with turquoise crew cut and she had marshmallows just like these.” Nelle fished one out and studied its unusual shape and surprising heaviness. It hadn’t been so heavy when it was melty.

“A Satyr, eh? That oughtta narrow things down.”

“Know what, never mind, I know it sounds crazy but crazier things have made sense eventually.”

“I was joking. Jeesh.”

“That’s what you say. You say that but I know you’re looking down your nose at me. You’re thinking what a flake, what a nut and now she’s knocked up with a nutter baby.”

“No, I wasn’t thinking nutter baby, what? I’ve got nutter problems of my own. You should meet my mother.”

“You’ve always done that, you’ve called me when you had no other choice, then you snicker at what I tell you and when it ends up being useful you use it just like you use me.”

“Is this about work or is it –”

“And I say give me your hands and you hedge, you hedge, like we just started working together, like you don’t even know me, like I haven’t proven myself to you repeatedly. Already. And then you say I’m a lotta hoodoo. Fucking hoodoo. Like I’m a huckster.”

How could he tell her that he hedged not because of what he didn’t believe to be there but because of what he KNEW to be there. Not just her ability, but her self — her buzzing coming off the skin bigness. And not even just because of what he knew to be there in her but because of what was there in them. The whole possible story like a fat book whose ending was unknown, whose hero wasn’t brave. “Hoodoo? Are you sure?”

‘Yes, I’m sure! Just like I’m sure that this is your baby.”

“Yea, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking you might be right. We should talk. I brought hot cocoa. It’s getting cold.”

“Look, I don’t need you to cop in here and save the day. Did I say cop instead of come? Wow. Freudian slip. Yea. Well. Yea.  No one needs rescuing here. You can go already.”

“Why are you so pissed off at me? It’s not like I was expecting this. I felt a little blind sided but I got my head together  and I’m ready to try to –”

“I’m almost forty! I’m too fucking old for this!”

“Well obviously not, it took seed.”

“Really? It took seed? Really?”

Jack shrugged, feeling anxious over the hot chocolate getting cold, wanting to go inside and bury his face in her hair and be forgiven for at least five minutes. The force of this desire felt like a new pair of fangs, just having pushed through pink gums, and already fighting the urge to bite something warm and fleshy.

“I’m too old to have one night stands with an emotional cripple who only called me again because he needed my help, er, my hoodoo.”  The cold was sinking through her robe and flannels and into her bones. “I’m too old to be standing on my porch like a teenager.”

“I could come in?”

“No.” The good part about the cold is that it had eased her nausea considerably. She eyed the cup in his hand – hell, the hand too – longingly.  “No. Absolutely not. You cant come in, Jack, because as it is I’m blown wide open. It doesn’t matter how big a bastard you are, my heart still wants to make the bed for you. My liver wants to cook you breakfast. My fucking spleen wants to make you laugh, my solar plexus wants to make you bawl like a teenage girl. My arms want to hold you. My uterus wants to have your babies.”

Jack reached for her, thinking he could gather her up in his arms and be transformed into a new man, like a cocoon in reverse.

She shoved him away violently. “No. No. Don’t. Do not touch me. You haven’t earned that right.”

“Nelle.”

“No. You touch me too much, you touch me without ever gathering me up. You’ve always touched me. I can’t make sense of the effect you have on me. I long for you. For years, I’ve longed for you. And look at you! What’s so god-damned special about you? What kind of fixer up Tom Selleck cop fantasy is this? Your mustache is growing over your lips. Your eyes are holes in your head. Your hair — you look ridiculous. I know that and yet, I swoon. I think you’re just absolutely beautiful.”

He offered her the hot chocolate again, thinking please please take it and take me and be the thing that saves me, because she was wrong when she said that no one needed saving. But she was right about him having not earned the right to touch her.

“Jack…” She looked him in the eyes, imploring, searching. ”I used to think that you were mine and you just needed to catch up. I waited and then I waited some more. Then we shared that night and I actually thought ‘OK here it is finally,’ I thought that we’d started our great life together. Imagine how I felt, thinking that kinda stupid shit and then coming head long into reality which was this person who you gave yourself too, who you think is your future, who you’ve worked with for what 10 years? Yea, he’s not even gonna call you and tell you you’re not for him. Like a college kid cocksucker frat boy. Which shouldn’t surprise me because you’re still there. You’re not a 45 year old man, you’re a fresh outta college newlywed, waiting for Brenda to show back up.”

“43. And I was never in a frat.”

“Shut up! Don’t speak to me. I need you to leave. I need for all of this — this fantasy — to leave. I want this baby to be all that’s left of you. I want this baby to be all I want of you.”

She shut the door and slid down the back of it, holding onto the door knob with a grip that made her knuckles ache. She could feel his weight against the other side of the door. That weight, that dense collection of atoms, those molecules, that man. She wanted to lie beneath that weight. She wanted to close her eyes and feel his breath on her lashes. She wanted what she couldn’t have. He wouldn’t give her what she needed. Him. Tonya was right. She was about to be somebody’s Mama and she had to put that over her own desires. Which were to open the door and bring him inside and take big greedy gulps of lukewarm cocoa. She wanted to tear at the powdery flesh of those marshmallows and than maybe at the man’s flesh. But the man would not give his flesh willingly. The man was not willing.

“I was going to call, ” Jack said through the door.

“You didn’t call.”

“I know. The more I thought about it, the more trouble it seemed. It was just too much.”

“Too much trouble?”

“Too much.”

She wept as he walked to his truck. She ached as he opened the moaning door. She moaned with it. She blew her nose into the lapel of her own polar fleece bathrobe. She had no dignity left. She wasn’t above it. She shuddered as he cranked the engine and pulled away from the curb. She got up and opened the door a crack, watching as his rear lights disappeared around the corner. On the “Welcome” mat sat the cup of hot cocoa and the box of marshmallows. She snatched them up and took them to bed with her. She kicked her snotty bath robe across the floor and climbed between the covers. She tuned around with the remote until she found that detestable but hilarious cartoon with the fat guy in the green pants whose best friend is a talking dog who wants to have sex with his wife. It was just the kind of degenerate humor she needed tonight. She took careful measured sips of the cocoa which was no longer hot but still ungodly delicious. In between cheap laughs, she nibbled at the incredible marshmallows. It was the only thing she’d been able to keep down all day.

– Johnny Cash

Chapter 12

Lenie had slept like a true life sleeping beauty in her Dad’s chilly garage apartment and they had gone off into the day like fierce allies. It was wonderful. She felt well rested and well loved. Not that scones and jam with Gamma or morning crosswords with Kappa made her feel like dog poo. Of course not! But every girl should have a greasy feast in her father’s idling truck with Johnny Cash on the radio. It had done Lenie Karly LaNannse a world of good! She felt somehow prettier today and yielding and loveable. Her nose was favoring the gorgeous smells and skipping over the others like a stone rippling across the surface of a pond. Still there but subtly intrinsic. Good smells and bad smells were all mixed up, even more than usual. Gasoline and potato grease….mmmmmm. Frowzy denim of a one dollar and fifty cent pair of overalls that had Lenie feeling practically curvaceous? Delish! Was it the 4 hours of wondrous shut eye? No wonder Gamma called it beauty sleep. (Though what did Gamma know of sleep?)

It was as if Lenie’s little cosmos had had its own private big bang and now her universe was expanding at a surprising speed — the speed of light. And today it seemed like maybe that didn’t have to be a bad thing. Maybe her soul could use a little expansion.

When Lenie was being honest with herself she understood that she’d inherited more than a powerful sniffer and ensuant perfume empire, she had another birth right:  a highly developed super villian ability to push people away. Even in some sense to push her own — achy hungry greedy desiring reaching — self away. To slap her own wrist, to humble the hand which reached for something lovely …a hug, a dream, a strut, a mother. What ever part of her that yearned  was a source of discomfort … something to pinch off until it turned black and withered, a kink in the hose to allay the jubilant spurt. She could see her father doing this, she could feel it in herself.

When her father nodded off in her bedroom chair, he’d fight against comfort. Not at all like Toolah, who would crawl into Lenie’s bed and plant her sturdy body on a pile of stuffed animals. When Tallulah Bankhead slumbered she’d nose around for the softest place and sigh when she found it, crossing her paws over the top of her wrinkly snout. But when Detective Jack slept he rejected the soft spot, he fought off the sleepy sigh, instead searching with his bony elbow for the carved wood arms. He longed for contact with the hardest place on the chair. Lenie had never seen herself sleep, of course, but she knew intuitively that she was the same way. She’d wake to find her bare legs exposed and chilled to the bone, knowing that she’d strived for that discomfort. Which was partly why her father looked in on her.  She’d feel him slip a pillow between her head and the mattress, pull her hair from her nostrils, take away the books and other hard plastic things she’d brought to bed.

Gamma Lenore loved all things luxurious, cashmere bathrobes and 1000 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. Gamma Lenore admired Tallulah Bankhead’s luxe wrinkles, skin like a puddle of velvet, and tried to recreate them on herself. She wanted to be that. But she wasn’t. She’d roam the house at night, thread count be damned. She’d pace, she’d surf the net, she’d bristle even when she was all alone. She’d shiver and let her teeth chatter for 30 minutes, never reaching for the chenille throw that hung on her chair back.

Kappa had probably been comfy once, someone with snores like mardi gras horns. Lenie could see that ease had been there once but it was long gone. Years of waiting for Lenore to lie down beside him had driven him to move into his own room, all in the vain hope that he would stop expecting her to settle into his arms and go limp with gentle ease. But even in his own room he could feel her restless movement, her struggle against the night. “Gamma will not be seduced by Morpheus” Kappa would say. Kappa blamed Jack’s lousy job even though Jack hadn’t worked the night shift in over eight years. When Jack descended from his garage apartment and started up his truck,  drove off into the night to some gory crime scene, Kappa would stand watching from the window clucking with aggravation — eyes glued to Jack’s break lights as they dissapeared in the distance.

The whole lot of them, each LaNannse living in the house that LaNannse’s had been living in since before Gamma was a born, they moved through the night like ghosts. They had no need for candlesticks or flash lights. The house had been equipped with indoor plumbing before anyone even worried about electricity. The nose rules the night. There’s less distraction, no garish sun like Juliet desparaged. Taste is put away in the ice box for the night. Sight settled down with the sun. Touch craves the simplest of after dark pleasures: a bath of frothy soap bubbles, satin edging of an old fuzzy blankie, a pair of flannel pj’s, skin or fur that is not your own. And some nights, your own will do in a pinch. Stars have a snap-crackle smell. To a LaNannse every night smelled like 2am on the Fourth of July. A persistant celebration in the far off distance.

Coco LaNannse Sweete? Really? But how could that be? Where was her cynicism, her eyes like loaded shotguns, her avid distrust? She looked like someone who intimately knew the face of sleep, who threw herself into Morpheous’ arms with dreamy abandon. She was no sleep walker, no zulu zombie, no gaurded ghost. She was not about to glide on padded feet. She sought to make noise when she walked. 

Coco Sweete was indiscreet. No kink in her hose. A spray of water — arc across a sunny expanse of green grass, rainbows in droplets, winky clumps of tulips.

Tulips.

There were tulips on the toes of Coco’s shoes.  If you could call them shoes and you could not. They were big wooden clogs, painted bright red but chipped here and there. Tulips and windmills. Like the girls in fairy tales with smocks and bosoms and braids. Lenie was cross-legged on the floor of the old theatre — the best smelling place in school, wood and velvet and leather, cardboard and paint. She was finsihing the algebra assignment she’d missed this morning. There was no need to look upwards. She knew exactly who was standing before her.

Not because of the mint julep black currant scent of her perfume. Not a drug store brand. It was a coveted LaNannse scent. Only 700 bottles were ever released in a single year. There was an illustrious waiting list that included the names of middle eastern royalty and artsy A-list movie stars. But it wasn’t the famous familiar subtle sensuous scent — Jazz Siren leaves a rare black orchid on the head stone of her lover’s New orleans tomb. Lenie had helped Gamma come up with the “scent story” in the spring of her 10th year. It was released the following October. It was supposed to smell a little spooky and yet uproarious like a jazz funeral. If Dita Von Teese had not been able to her alabaster hands on a decanter of Vudu, Lenie was at a loss as to how Coco Sweete had managed the feat.

But even if Lenie weren’t from the LaNannse perfume family, with the nose to go with, she would still have known it was Coco — her silly dutch girl clogs practically screamed Hello! It’s Coco! I’m here to annoy the crap outta ya!

“Where’d you get Vudu?”

“My Bon Bon. I have a bottle of every scent ever made in like the last 50 years. I have Juju too. The sister scent? It’s my favorite. But it’s getting low and Aunt Lenore only sends my Bon Bon one bottle of each scent, so I’m stingy with it now. I worry I wont find another bottle. I only dab it on when I really need to see myself. Like if I’m acting nutty or feeling untethered or just blue, I administer a little juju.”

The worry that Coco could be angling to use Lenie for perfume kept Lenie from bursting out with the story of Juju — the lovliest of all circus clowns who had a torrid affair with a gypsy contortionist and then, broken hearted, flees to Paris with Madame Can Can where, while still in grease paint, she becomes a brilliant beatnik poet.  Peonies, black pepper, lemon and cardamon. Lenie’s mother Brenda had come up with the story and Lenore had developed the oddest most ebullent of scents. It had been released the July after Brenda disappeared. She never got to see the bottle of blown glass a dusky shade of persimmon, a curvaceous chubby version of a juggling pin.

Lenie had six bottles of Juju. She didn’t dare dab the scent on wrists or collarbone. That would be wasteful!

It infuriated Lenie that Coco saw herself in the scent. She wasn’t Juju the Clown. How could she be? Juju belonged to Brenda May LaNannse wherever she may be. Probably in Paris with Madame Can Can and sheaths of genius poetry.

Coco spoke. “Catch a ride with Sasha OK? Over to my house. You can meet my mom. Your Aunt. I don’t have two helmets so go with Sash. We’re gonna listen to records and play punk rock Barbies.”

She proceeded to tell Lenie where Sasha was parked and how to spot her car. Duh. A baby blue station wagon with a dash board altar to blue robed Virgin Marys (and not one Jesus. There was one baby in one of the Mary’s maternal arms but he’d been painted red and given tiny nubby horns.) She had two bumper stickers: 1) a metallic baby Krishna with skin like a blue laffy taffy and 2) a girl with flexed arm and beneath that the words “Righteous Babe.” Lenie loved that one, finding it especially apropos. Sasha was indeed a Righteous Babe.

While peeking through the window, Lenie had once spied (floor board, passenger side) an incongruous pair of bright red Dutch girl clogs.  It had perturbed with its out of place offness.

********************************************************************************************************************************

At the frenetic clang of the 7th period bell, Lenie hurried to her locker and then to the quadrant of the parking lot where Sasha Obolensky usually parked her sacred station wagon. Sasha was kicked back against the car and biting into a crisp cidery apple. Her teeth broke the skin with a sour sweet snap, releasing a waft of apple alchemy. A sparkling smell with ripples; green around the edges, golden white in the middle. Lenie made a mental note to mention apples and fire ash to Lenore. Joan of Arc falls in love with fire-eater femme, together they make a demon baby and original sin.

“You ready to play nice, A-Hole?”

The question was rhetorical and Lenie didn’t have to actually say she was ready to play nice in order to play or else the punk rock Barbies would’ve gone on without her. Luckily Sasha didn’t expect her to bow her head and promise good behavior. She just opened the passenger door and let Lenie climb in which Lenie was all too eager to do.

Sasha turned the key and switched Blondie out with Goldfrapp, all under Lenie’s hyper vigilant gaze. She pounded the clutch and shifted into reverse, her hand over the shifter like the Virgin Mary inside a snow globe. Water and glitter sloshed inside the marvelous shifter.

“Where do you find such a thing as this?” asked Lenie. She’d never known that the ball-tops of shifters could be bought. Detective Jack’s had popped off years ago and he’d been using the same one ever since.

“In Cinci. They have all different kinds. With like mexican wrestlers, roses, rock stars, a gold hammer & sickle on commie red.”

“Do they have Johnny Cash?”

“Y’know, I’m not sure. I haven’t listened to him much. Are you a fan?”

“I guess.” Up until very recently Lenie had considered herself to be Johnny Cash’s number one fan. Her room had been wall papered in Johnny posters. Last month, a few days before her 15th birthday, she’d pulled a few down to tack up some Kathleen Hanna pictures which Lenore had printed out for Lenie some late night on the internet. Having a night owl for a Gamma meant that Lenie often woke to the oddest of A.M. treats. “I mean, yea, he’s the most beautiful man who ever lived but lately I like Bikini Kill a lot.”

“You’re getting in touch with your feminine side.”

“I guess.”

**************************************************************************************************************************************************

Coco Sweete’s house was in touch with its feminine side alright. It was painted the color of ripe ripe raspberries on the outside and piled with pillows and cushy spots on the inside. It was practically overflowing with vases of flowers in various states of wilt and bloom. Lenie sneezed six times in seven minutes.

“I know, ” said Coco wiggling her nose (which made Lenie suddenly curious in a Lenore Jacqueline LaNannse kinda way: What ABOUT that nose?)

Coco explained about how sometimes when a lady got divorced from her no good cheating husband (Coco’s dad, who already knocked up a 19 year old in Costa Rica) she saw the need to do strange things like send herself bouquets of roses which led to even stranger things like take Floral Design classes.

“She tried to learn Portuguese and labeled everything in the house but then she decided knitting was more her thing, ” Coco dug around behind the couch exposing a pair of ruffled bloomers like Lenie had only seen on rag dolls. She tossed Lenie a mangled ball of yarn with the needles trapped like porcupine quills.

Lenie’s picked the dust balls from the fuzzy mess. “Is she getting in touch with her feminine side?”

Sasha Obolensky let out a breezy gaffaw. “Tell her about Zen and the art of the motor cycle maintenance.”

“Oh, yea, well, she read the book and got all obsessed and like took a class, except she didn’t have a motor cycle. So as like a joke I asked her if I could get a pink Vespa for her to maintain, y’know for zen, and she said yes. Yes!”

Both girls giggled at the good fortune of ask and ye shall receive.

“Except she can’t ride it after the first ice or snow.”

“Til spring.”

“Til spring.”

“MOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!” Coco hollered. “Lenie LaNannse is here!”

Sasha turned to Lenie and winked. “Whatever disbelief you’re still harboring about whether Coco is your Coz, get ready to kiss it goodbye.”

At the top of three shiny stairs there appeared the strangest of sights, a small framed sullen-mouthed perky-eared woman with dark red hair… not auburn not orange, no copper, no blond, still very much red. Suddenly the ingredients that made up Lenie did not seem so terrible after all. Lenie looked more like Jackie than Coco did. Lenie looked more like Jackie than she did Brenda and there was Brenda in Lenie’s face, she’d looked for it and found it, and Jack too, and Lenore and Kappa. So how could there be so much room in her small face left for the features of this new thing? This stranger. This Aunt Jackie being.

Coco and Sasha shook with laughter and squeals of glee, having clearly kept the resemblance a secret from both Aunt and niece. Their unbridled delight coupled with Jackie’s stunned double take made Lenie feel prickly like a cactus, as though it were all an act of cruelty and she had been lured here on false pretense. Her cheeks grew taut and hot, then wet as tears filled her tawny eyes. Those tears found salty soul mates in another set of tawny peepers.

“No, oh no, don’t mind them, or me, ” Jackie sprung down the steps and put her freckled forehead to Lenie’s, freckles to freckles. “It’s just… wow. Look at you. It’s like seeing my own awkward teenage self standing here in my grown up lady living room. ….Not that you’re awkward…”

“No, I am, ” Lenie wept. “I’m awkward. I’m the awkwardest.”

Aunt Jackie gave a Coco-esque wink. “Well, I may be a tad biased, but I think you are just absolutely crazy lovely.”

Coco chucked her mom on her bony Lenie-esque shoulder. “I knew it! You’re so vain you probably think this kid is about you.”

They never did get around to playing punk rock Barbies however punk rock Barbies are played because Aunt Jackie brought a fondue pan down from a shelf lined in canary yellow stick-um paper. She fired it up and they melted marshmallows on metal skewers. They squashed the gooey bits between Sweete Grahams and decadent slabs of Sweete chocolate. You haven’t had smores unless you’ve had Sweete Smores with fresh-made Sweete Marshmallows which are cut into uneven cubes and dense and creamy and sticky and fucking magical. Then they compared freckles, pony tails, big toes. Before they knew it Lenie’s Dad was calling for directions. While they waited, the four of them devised a plan in which Jackie would answer Detective Jack’s knock and then Lenie would pop up from behind. That time it was four hyper chocolato souls laughing their butts off while one very stunned man stood there looking more worried than amused.