Why Did I Ever? by Mary Robison

Author:Mary Robison
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Contemporary, Humour, Fiction
ISBN: 9781582430607
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

280

I need coffee bad, and I need a clothes dryer that’s free. Over there, Mev, squeezing her fingers into her jeans pocket to find quarters for a giant boy. Now wandering back to the Formica table where she’s helping someone fold.

She has sparkle, my daughter—long lashes, soft shoulders, baby skin, the face of a mermaid.

I Was Addicted to Broccoli One Summer

Maybe I shouldn’t permit myself even the one cigarette a week. The end went where? We’re driving up Corina Street. Mev is shouting, “Hot! Flying! Ashes, in the air!”

She used to have an old BMW that she drove to law school and then drove to the women’s penitentiary where she taught street law and learned everything she knows about narcotics. That car disappeared.

I ask her, “Mev? Whatever happened to that BMW you had?”

“Uhm,” she says. “I spent it.”

282

Late, I drift on over to visit the Deaf Lady, maybe see how she is and sit and have a nice conversation with her.

“So, what’s the situation?” she asks, cracking the door.

I say, “I am your dear, dear friend.”

She steps out onto the sidewalk with me. She’s barefoot and wearing a robe. Which I’ve done and it’s not that drastic an error.

A Mustang zooms by on the avenue, horn blaring.

“We did nothing. Why are they honking at us?” she asks.

I say, “They think it’s a compliment. They’re men, we’re women.”

“Then they’d honk at dough,” she says.

She buries her hands in the patch pockets of her robe, walks in a circle and comes back to me. She says, “I’ll tell you what I hate. Something I’ve come to loathe. Boating metaphors.”

“Really? Huh. I guess they’ve never bothered me.”

She rises slightly on her bare toes and holds herself there. “That you’re on an even keel or you’re smooth sailing.”

“Look what the tide washed in? Maybe that’s for a cat,” I say.

“You’re not a little at sea,” she says. “Nobody’s a pirate. This isn’t safe harbor. There’s no ship coming in.”

283

I shouldn’t be, at this late hour, but I’m up in my room, walking all around, and I’ve got my hammer but not a goddamn thing to nail.

And I wasted too much time and spent too much time painting in here and painting everything. Yellow and red? It looks like a Midas Mufflers.

284

I decide to phone Dix up and maybe talk to him.

“Honey, you know what’s good about me is I all-ways tell it straight up,” he says. “I shoot from the hip.”

“You don’t mean shoot from the hip,” I say.

“I sure as shit do. When have I ever lied?”

I say, “By lied you mean, like if you say you’re part Mohican. Or you tell somebody you’ll give her everything she needs. Or if you say to a woman, ‘Wear a miniskirt,’ before she picks you up and then later say you meant nothing by it. Or like the umpteen times you went before a judge and pled innocent to drunk-driving charges even though they had a videotape of you, on your knees, in a circus act, were you, in my opinion, lying? Well, Dix, I guess it depends.

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