Sylvia

 by

 K.M. Breay

She tells me she loves me and I want to kill myself. Kill myself for a thousand tiny reasons; mostly because this thing, this unspoken thing between us, is now out in the open, and I thought I’d left that part of me back in Providence, locked tightly inside a massive hope chest of shame.  This was two dead-eyed marriages, one cesarean and three muddled, desperate careers before. And now, in a dilapidated bowling alley of all places, surrounded by a haze of menthol smoke and third-generation teamsters, stinking of Hennessey and wearing an oversized Santa hat, right here near the women’s room, she tells me she loves me and in an instant I’m twenty and dumb all over again, dreamy faced and sitting cross-legged, sunburn and stoned off my head, on the roof of Brody Hall, listening to a communist English Lit major from Shaker Heights tell me I’ve got eyes like Greta Garbo and the soul of a slightly less cerebral Gloria Steinem – whatever the hell that means – and knowing that we’d end up drunk and half naked lying on the fluffy, fuscia floor of her off-campus apartment, listening to Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, pretending we were revolutionaries, agitators mooning the establishment, when in fact we were just two doctor’s daughters,  sheltered and predictable in every way except one.

I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear her, say something stupid about how many people have worn these Goddamn bowling shoes. But instead I brush her hair aside, gently place both hands on her shoulders, look straight down into her eyes and say, “I love you too, babe. Always will.”

Sylvia exhales, fills the air with tiny webs of Marlboro smoke, finishes off her tonic and vodka, squints her eyes and says, “Um, did you just say ‘I love you’?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t…I mean…what are you…I don’t get it…what are you talking about?” she says.

Oh, Christ, don’t do this, Sylvia, I think to myself. Let’s stop pretending

“Isle of View”, she says. “Isle of View. It’s a film from Canada. I asked if you’ve seen it.”

Typical, oh so typical. Still in diapers before my first marriage, Sylvia doesn’t yet have the capacity to recognize, let alone deal with her feelings for me: telling me she loves me one minute, and then, like a confused coward, hiding behind some bogus movie title the next.

But who am I to judge, really? There’s my twenty-two year old doppelganger standing right beside her, repressed and confused, a dog-eared copy of Forbidden Love Abroad hidden in her frayed backpack.

“I don’t think I’ve seen that picture,” I tell her. I say picture instead of film or movie. One of my ex-husbands used to say it sounded pretentious. My daughter Zoe says it sounds dated, like saying ‘movie house’ instead of ‘movie theater.’ She also says I shouldn’t wear Birkenstocks in the winter if I want anyone reasonable to take me seriously. I tell her reasonable people stopped taking me seriously after her father showed up at her bat mitzvah, naked and full of Stoli vodka, fuming about the injustice of alimony.

She tells me he wasn’t drunk.

“I saw it last week at the art house annex on Broadmoor,” Sylvia says. “It’s about two women who live in the Midwest and work at the same school, just like us.”

“Sounds fascinating,” I say.

“Both of them are miserable, alone and in debt and everything. And, um…one of them owes something like sixty grand on her Visa or whatever because she keeps taking these courses from some shady Internet university or something.”

A thunderous crackling of pins followed by a cacophony of whooping near lane two interrupts Sylvia’s dubious film summary. Isaac, who wears a jerry-curl, has flames painted on the hood of his Cutlass Supreme, and provides security at our slug factory that calls itself a high school, is doing a little dance, and pointing triumphantly at Ron Slade, a Central High lifer who teaches phys-ed and last year mortgaged his house successfully defending himself against statutory rape charges, brought on by a heavyset sophomore who used to sit silently in the back of my honors English class, dressed in black, carving demons out of soap.

“So she spends all this money taking these classes on her computer and the other one is in debt from gambling on soap operas,” Sylvia tells me, ignoring Isaac’s revelry.

“You can gamble on soap operas?”  I ask, nudging her impressive imagination into a corner.

“I guess, yeah. Like there is some site where you can bet that one character will file for divorce or have an affair or slap somebody else within so many episodes or something.”

“The beauty of capitalism and progress,” I say.

“Right. So they both need money and, um…one of them reads in the newspaper that a ship with treasure sunk near this place called Isle of View in Lake Superior or somewhere. So they head up there with some scuba gear and go diving for these like coins from the Civil War times or whatever,” she explains, dissembling without shame. 

But I don’t care.

I’m not listening, focusing instead on her big, Puerto Rican brown eyes, her long fingers, her soft little smile and thinking about her taut, only seen after May, sprinters legs.

“But with this gear they can only go like, um, twenty feet down so they end up camping on the beach and meet some locals -- who are these nasty dudes with long hair who all talk with lisps and kill fish with spears -- and it turns into a beautiful musical with the two women and the locals doing this big kinda, um, like Chorus Line number at the end singing about how living off the land is, um, like, righteous. Is that the word?” 

“Perhaps. Either way, it sounds very accessible,” I tell her, thinking to myself that instead of squandering her bullshitting talents as an audio-visual aide in a high school media center, Sylvia should run for state senate or maybe even a congressional seat. I’d hold a backyard fundraiser for her, set up a little Chardonnay bar on the patio and have the whole thing catered by Cliftons or that Italian place on Griggs. The biggest donor of course would be me. But my donation wouldn’t be marked by a check, it would come in the form of unconditional support and love: rubbing lotion into her aching shoulders after a grueling day of door-to-door campaigning, listening attentively over morning tea as she vented (quite rightly) about the unfair coverage from the reactionary, fascist Grand Rapids Press and shaving her legs as she unwound in the bathtub, peering through her glasses at the issue papers I’d carefully arranged on Zoë’s old handcrafted music stand.

“Yeah. So anyway the movie was really cool and it’s based on this book by some woman who teaches at Black University and I know you went there and thought maybe you’d want to teach the book next year or whatever.”

Initially, I’m impressed that she’s stretched the lie into including a book.

Then I almost correct her, almost point out that I graduated from Brown, not Black, and that as far as I know, there is no Black University (there are, of course, historic African-American universities – wonderful places like Grambling and Howard and Morehouse State – fine institutions, quite needed actually, where people of color can study instead of attending an establishment school, where they might find the oppressive shackles of racism chaining them to tiny, bigoted desks of defeat. Or worse, go the way of that Grand-Master-Ass Clarence Thomas, and get locked inside a collegiate Uncle Tom’s cabin, emerging afterwards a full-throttle member of the step-over-you class, spending the rest of their lives waving to neighbors named Whit, the other hand clenched tightly around the neck of their brethren, squeezing them into failure).

But I just smile and nod, thinking to myself that despite her youth and naivety, Sylvia looks gorgeous in that simple, black leather jacket, her onyx hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. I think about hugging her, bringing her close to my chest and asking her to slow dance right here next to the ladies room. I think about asking her to leave this bowling alley and bullshit behind and live with me at my cabin near Sarniac.

Then Ted Rogers, wearing a fake red nose and reindeer horns, stumbles up to us and says, “Think I’d weigh more if I got on a scale with a hard-on?”

Ted Rogers. Ted has been our athletic director for the last seven years, having spent the previous fifteen steering his family’s porta-pottie business into, well, the toilet. I heard Ted lost his biggest account, Barnes Construction, after someone mailed Chuck Barnes a Polaroid of his wife fellating Ted underneath a bridge.  I think Ted still owes somebody a lot of money. At last year’s Christmas party, his wife, Theresa, spent a good deal of the night trying to get me to invest in an Alpaca farm.  Not having a clue what an Alpaca was, but desperately needing to break away, I attempted to end the pitch by telling her my mother was mauled to death by an Alpaca. Undeterred, she reached into her purse and unveiled a brochure, on the front of which appeared a deeply tanned man, wearing a luminous white suit and standing triumphantly in front of what looked to be a South Florida mansion. She asked if I knew you could make a fortune selling long-distance services. I told her I was late for my Amway meeting and walked away, glancing back over my shoulder long enough to see her looming over Dick Pickett’s wheelchair-bound wife, spelling out, as though she were addressing a toddler, the word ‘Alpaca’.

“It just stands to reason, doesn’t it?” Ted continues, with a dumb, cheapest beer grin on his face. “Why wouldn’t I weigh more with a hard dick?”

“I dunno, Rudolph. That’s certainly a very interesting question.  Let’s spend the next hour talking about it,” I say.

Ted just stands there smiling, neither taking me seriously nor detecting my sarcasm, just smiling, like the too dumb and content kind of guy he is. I loathe guys like Ted: guys who stroll amiably through life wearing esteem blinders, moving casually from one disappointment to the next, without a hint of second-guessing or remorse, trotting to the next backyard barbecue, the next tee-time, the next According To Jim episode.

A piercing whistle comes from somewhere near the bar and we all turn to find Isaac sitting on the corner stool, smiling broadly and holding up two shots of what looks to be whiskey. The glow from the straggly Christmas lights is reflecting off Isaac’s heavily lubricated jerry-curl, giving the impression that he’s woven his own string of lights around his head.

“Almost last call, ladies,” Ted says, winking at Sylvia. “We’ll have to discuss this another time.” And with that he belches softly and walks with his green sweat pants and red wresting shoes over to the bar.

I roll my eyes and turn back to Sylvia, wondering if I’d left my HRT out on the bathroom counter and whether or not we should leave in separate cars or come back tomorrow morning for hers.

“Ted’s kinda weird, huh?” she says, deliberately avoiding the pronounced sexual tension between us.

“He’s a binge drinking Piltdown man,” I reply, intending to sound like Dorothy Parker, then thinking Sylvia has probably never heard of Dorothy Parker and likely thinks a ‘Piltdown man’ is someone who works heavy labor at the city dump. I wonder for a moment if I’ve made a mistake, if I really, truly could love a woman who thinks Dorothy Parker was a country singer or country and western singer or a figure skater. But then I think about our new life together: the foreign films we’ll rent, the books we’ll read and discuss, the love we’ll make in every county in the state and the New York Times crosswords we’ll pass back and forth over hazelnut flavored coffee and scones.

I imagine a private, garden civil ceremony and an estate plan.

I sit for a moment and absorb what it feels like to be in love again, or perhaps for the very first time. 

“I have to go,” she says, checking the time on her cell phone. “I guess I’ll see you in January, after the break?” she says, almost as a question and playing hard to get.

Which is just fine with me.

I smile knowingly and watch her walk across the red and black checkered carpet, through the near empty bowling alley, past Ron Slade, a stranger dressed as an elf, the jukebox, a table full of empty Coors Lights, and finally, through the cheaply made glass doors and out into the cold, dead parking lot. I figure I’ll give her a few minutes, let her imagine the emptiness of a life without me, then casually stroll outside and rap my knuckles against the window of her idling car, as she rubs her hands together and checks her lipstick in the rear-view mirror, stalling for time.

I walk over to the bar to settle up and sit down next to Isaac, who is tapping the end of his Menthol on a shot glass with one hand and fingering his jerry curl with the other. Just for the hell of it, just because I have a few minutes to kill while I put Sylvia on ice, just for the pure comedy of it, I ask him if he’s seen a movie called Isle of View.

“Nope,” he says, just as I expect.

Of course he hasn’t seen it. Why would I even ask?

I let myself smile and reach down below the stool to collect my purse.

“But I did read the motherfuckin’ book it’s based on,” he adds. “Some weird shit about a couple a white women singin’ on some island with a bunch a long-haired dudes.” And then he rises up, very deliberatively places eleven dollar bills on the bar, adjusts his diamond pinky ring and leaves the building.

I drop my purse and sit there staring at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. There I am, menopausal and nearly sixty, the wrinkled face of a twice divorced quarter-century smoker, a tiny cluster of mustard between my upper lip and nose, my hair an unruly flotsam of tight, kinky brown curls sitting atop a waterlogged, unrecognizable fat person’s head. I think about my ex-husbands and their wives and golden-haired children. I think about teaching Isle of View next year. I think about Alpacas. I think about that magical day in Providence nearly forty years ago, when I thought I knew myself and might live forever.

But mostly I think of Sylvia.

I think of all the hot chocolate I’ve brought her during fourth period. I think of her shaking the snowflakes from her hair as she stomps the slush off her boots inside the concourse. I think of the first time I saw her, gracefully pushing a television past the faculty lounge, laughing into her cell phone.

And then I look up and see the bartender crushing out his cigarette, cursing quietly to himself and turning down the lights.

End

K.M. Breay is universally recognized as the greatest and most entertaining showman America has seen in the last seven or eight years. His traveling burlesque and light show has left people of all stripes and shapes trembling and convulsing with genuine (not fake) laughter. He's been profiled by thousands and thousands and thousands of magazines.  He's currently writing a multi-volume history of his own hair.