Dan’s forehead wrinkled, processing the voice, the words, and John looked like he’d been gripped by food poisoning. After several seconds he found his voice again. “Second base?”
“Well, it was before I met your father. Not that I was a virgin then, but it took me a while to really get rolling. Twenty, no, nineteen. I was nineteen when I met… what was his name?” Stella seemed to drift off as she searched her brain for the missing name of her first lover.
Mara tried not to smile. No woman forgot her first time, even if she currently wanted to forget Dan entirely, and wasn’t Stella a dear to spin such a great pack of lies?
John looked around the room for some reason to flee. “Gotta run an errand, a—”
“Me too.” Dan bolted for the front of the shop right on the heels of John.
Dylan took a swig of soda, cut a chunk of soap, happy in his soundproof world.
She looked up at Stella and mouthed,
thank you
, and Stella winked at her and returned to her office. God, she did love women. She loved them all.
Mara called up to Celia from the alley. “Ready with the rain?”
Celia leaned out of the loft’s bathroom window holding a gray spray nozzle in her hand, the attached green garden hose snaking out of view behind her. “Ready.” She depressed the curved handle and after a second’s hesitation, water misted out.
Mara watched the fine sheen disappear on its way down. She’d need more than that if it was going to show up in the photo. “That’s not enough, Celia, could you spin that little dial? We need more of a downpour.”
Celia dipped her head to fiddle with the sprayer. “It’s kinda stuck, but I think I can get it.”
Mara turned her attention to Renny, who despite her tough looking eyes, seemed to channel Audrey Hepburn with her high poof of hair that ended shoulder length in two fanned out pigtails. The false eyelashes were visible from several yards away. And it was several yards away that she’d deemed safe the camera. Renny’s eyelashes really said sixties, and so did the tan trench coat, buttoned, belted, and knee-length. The whole look captured the wildness ahead and the conservative hang-over of the nineteen-fifties not yet gone in nineteen-sixty-one.
“Everybody ready?” She took a deep breath. “We’ve only got one take here.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry, I didn’t know it before, but I’ve always wanted to say that. Renny’s all set, and Celia? Got the rain?”
Celia pointed the nozzle out the window like a gun and nodded.
“Gretchen, ready with the cat?” She motioned her towards Renny.
Gretchen walked across the alley hefting a large orange and white tomcat.“I prefer to be called Gretchen, the animal wrangler. I didn’t know it before, but I’ve always wanted to say that.” She handed the tabby off to Renny who held him in the crook of her arm with limited affection.
“You don’t like cats?” Mara wondered why it surprised her, cat-like didn’t mean cat liker.
Renny smiled at her. “Is it a deal breaker?”
Gretchen rolled her eyes, and Mara decided to ignore everything but the shoot. “Have you seen
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
?”
Gretchen spread her hands wide. “I sell vintage clothing. Durow and Richard Shepherd produced the film. Ask me anything.”
“Wow, okay. You know how Holly holds the cat inside her coat at the end?” She tucked her hand in the left side of her blouse to demonstrate.
The animal wrangler approached Renny again and took the cat back, so Renny could pull her left lapel away from her body. Mara saw her cringe when Gretchen shoved the big rear end of the cat in, but she did put her arms around the animal. “I saw the movie too, and I’m not kissing the cat.”
“Fine, we’ll draw the line at cat kissing.” Another line she’d never thought she’d need to draw, still she admired the scene and knew it was just right. She lifted the camera. “Okay, Holly Golightly, you’ve decided to settle down, name the cat, and stay with George Peppard.”
Gretchen moved further to the side to stay out of the frame. “Paul but Holly called him Fred, remember?”
“Right. Renny, you’ve chosen Fred.”
Renny snorted, but Mara ignored her and hollered up to Celia. “Give us rain.”
Celia’s thumb cranked down on the sprayer, and Mara held her breath, finger on the camera button. Nothing. She waited another second and then looked up at Celia, who shrugged and shook the sprayer until water shot out and rained down on Renny and the cat.
Mara jumped back and started clicking pictures. The cat hissed, but Renny gripped it tighter, and it settled into the exact same pissy look the cat had possessed in Audrey Hepburn’s arms.
She took picture after picture, and with all the water, even the cement blocks of the building’s wall and the mangy collection of garbage cans looked good. And Renny looked amazing. Despite being soaked and gripping an overweight tomcat, she had something, something Mara knew she hadn’t yet figured out.
Confidence
wasn’t it. Confidence sounded like a label for a banker or a motivational speaker or an indicted rapper. Renny just knew who the hell she was, and Mara had captured it. She lowered the camera. “Celia, you can turn off the water now.”
Celia let up on the handle, but the stream of water now puddling in the low spots of the alley, didn’t stop.
“Celia!”
She shook the sprayer, but it only changed the pattern of the water raining down. “I’ve got to shut it off at the sink.” She dropped the hose over the window sill, disappearing into the bathroom.
The hose thrashed around, and Gretchen took a shot to the face, her scream muffled in the deluge. Mara shoved the camera down the front of her shirt and held it in her bra as water nailed her, plastering her hair to the side of her head. She tried to move away from the blasts, but with her eyes blinking closed in the downpour, it was hard to see. The whole alley took on a watercolor blur, grey pavement, Renny’s tan coat, orangey cat fur. And then in another blink, it stopped.
In the silence, Mara, hair drippy but eyes open, surveyed Gretchen, Renny, the murky river running into the storm drain. She pulled the camera out of her bra. Dry. All was well.
Renny pushed her sopping hair out of her eyes. “Glad you weren’t shooting
Titanic
. Someone woulda lost an eye.”
Celia appeared in the window. “I am so sorry.”
But Gretchen held up a hand, instantly taking some responsibility. “I’m out of the vintage garden tool business right now.”
Renny took off one of her high-heeled pumps and poured out more water than Mara would have guessed a shoe could hold. She opened her coat, and shook the lapels. Gretchen took a step toward her and stopped. “Where’s the cat?” She scanned the alley. “Shit. That was a loaner cat.”
“I’m coming down,” Celia yelled out the window before disappearing again.
Mara gripped the camera and promised herself she wasn’t going to do a photo shoot involving water ever again. She walked further into the alley to see if the cat had found shelter behind garbage cans. Gretchen made some
here Kitty
sounds that indicated she’d owned a cat or two in her life, and after Renny emptied her other shoe of water, she searched among the wooden crates piled against the walls. Celia ran breathless into the alley and joined the manhunt, lifting up the crates to get a better view behind them.
Mara bent over to look beneath a stack of cardboard boxes and felt some secret sense come over her. She knew, like she knew her own name, that someone stood behind her at the mouth of the alley, someone watched her. She straightened slowly because it was just like in the movie. The cat was lost, and the heroine turned to meet the gaze of the man of her dreams. They would stare for a moment with the love, the passion, the new beginning all communicated. It would be then, just then, that the cat would appear to meow his approval.
She closed her eyes and turned to face him, but who would he be? Her eyes fluttered open and there, in the great romantic tradition of Hollywood endings, stood her mother-in-law.
Mara blinked. God damn it all to hell, it was Lois standing there and ruining her
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
alley dream. Before she could say anything out loud like
God damn it
or
hell
or
no-fucking-way
, the tomcat appeared, just like in the movie. She waited for him to meow his blessing and be scooped into the heroine’s arms, but this tom eyed them all with his ears pinned to his head and his tail puffed. Then, in an orange blur, he shot to Lois, ran up her pantsuit leg, and froze at mid-thigh. The ear piercing screams, as Lois batted at him and shook her leg, only made him dig in more.
Mara took a step closer to help, but Lois took off down the street at a pace shocking for a woman her age and certainly faster than Mara could manage. It didn’t take her more than two blocks to outrun the cat’s ability to cling.
They all watched him fly off of Lois’ thigh and sail into the next alley. Gretchen trudged off to retrieve him, Celia stood with her mouth opened, and Renny turned to Mara and just said, “huh.” Mara considered that she should run to her Mother-in-law’s side, apologize to probably everybody, help Gretchen locate the loaner cat, and return the beast to someone who presumably loved it. Instead, she just smiled at Renny. “Huh.”
It took an hour to corral the tom, thirty minutes to find an anti-biotic cream for Lois’s cat wounds, and, Mara estimated, a lifetime to ever hear the end of it.
Dan tipped his head toward the bathroom door. “Janie. Can I talk to you a minute?” She knew it was a rhetorical question, but she’d take a second and give it some thought anyway. She looked over at Lois, who sipped tea and sniffed in disapproval of the couch, the loft, and the questionable Canadian medicine she’d been slathered with to prevent infection from an alley cat. Going with Dan seemed marginally better than staying in the living room with a scratched-up mother-in-law, so she followed him. Once she got into the bathroom, she’d just kick him out, lock the door, and escape two stories down by using her spidey powers.
He must have anticipated her escape plan. He ushered her in the bathroom, locked the door, and stood between her and the window of freedom. “You were soaking wet in an alley with lesbians, and my mother was attacked by a feral cat.” He waited for some explanation.
There were a lot of elements there to explain, maybe she’d start with the easy part. “It was a loaner cat.”
He waited.
“Celia’s not a lesbian.”
His eyebrows shot up in the alarming way it did when something was on fire. Not that she’d ever seen Dan’s reaction to a fire situation herself, but when the coffee maker in the teacher’s lounge shorted out, she’d heard he’d been very collected. “
Celia’s
not a lesbian?”
What was he was getting at? He knew Gretchen was, so surely he’d sensed in that secret guy way that Celia wasn’t. “Oh!” She pointed to herself and watched Dan’s eyes dip to her cleavage. “I’m not.”
His eyebrow lowered to its
convince me
position, and she did know that one.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to be.” He made a choking sound, which she ignored. “You saw Renny. She’s really something, beautiful, and you’ve never even heard her sing. She sang
No Guilt in My Bed
for me, and she’s very good. You just don’t get to pick your team.”
“Pick your team?”
She leaned back against the vanity and waved him off. “Don’t be obtuse.”
He seemed relieved by that and relaxed by the door. “Now that’s a word you would use. You wouldn’t have used it on me, but maybe you’re coming to your senses, finally.”
She straightened. “I’m coming to my senses alright. My senses, not yours. And not your Mother’s.” She felt like poking him hard right in the center of his chest. “What kind of man calls his Mommy anyway?” He had the grace to blush and that made her feel an ounce better.
“I didn’t.” He ran a hand through his hair and messed it up in a way she’d never seen it before. “I talked to her when she figured out we weren’t answer the home phone because we weren’t home, but I didn’t ask her to come. She bought the ticket and told me that when Dad took Logan fishing, she was flying in.”
“And you said
no
?”
“I, uh…”
“Of course not. You drove speedy-quick to the airport, picked her up, and dropped her off here to straighten me out.
You
sent her directly into the clutches of a mess of lesbians and a feral cat.”
“I did not.”
“And now you’re blaming me for what befell her. How’s that,
befell
? Do you like that? Does that sound like Janie? Well, you can befell your own ass.”
His eyebrows came together in confusion.
“I don’t know what it means either, but you know what I’m getting at.” She felt her breathing speed up in that shallow, bad way as anxiety began to wash over her. She didn’t want to make Lois any harder to get along with. She didn’t want to ruin the life she’d have to go back to. She just wanted some air. She needed it. “Take your mother and get her out of here. I’m not dealing with her or you right now. I don’t want to burn any bridges, and I know I’ll be dealing with her until one of us is dead, but I have seventeen days, and I’m going to take them.” She pushed him aside, unlocked the door, and swung it open to see Lois laying on her bed.
“I’m going to have a little rest before we go out for dinner.”
Mara spotted the suitcase, sitting empty beside the bed and her own clothes emptied out of one of the milk crates, replaced by several pair of wrinkle-resistant slacks and a couple of sweater sets.
She turned to Dan, his arms crossed over his chest, an unmovable wall of a husband. She may not be an alley cat with the capacity to run up his leg and scratch the be-jesus out of him, but he wouldn’t walk away unscathed.
“The other reason I think I’m not lesbian…”
He leaned in closer.
“I hardly felt anything when Renny kissed me.”
Mara poked at her chicken fried steak. She should just enjoy the free protein. She probably was short on iron, given her sketchy diet, but the chain steakhouse felt like the equivalent of the kind of mass-produced bubble bath she used before Abundance. It fell flat and remained so ordinary she knew she’d forget the experience before it had even ended.