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  I unfolded the stiff paper sheet across my lap, swinging my legs like a kid at the dinner table. The doctor, at least, was nicer than she was. It was Lauren’s gynecologist, not my usual one. Mine had moved the previous year after his partner lost his license for improprieties. Lauren loved this guy, swore by him. “He’s like a grandpa,” she had said. That had given me a mild case of the creeps, but I’d made the appointment anyway. I couldn’t totally reconcile the idea of getting a Pap smear from a grandpa.

  “Birth control, huh,” he said, peering at my chart through his bifocals. “Any preferences?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the Pill, I guess. I’m not totally sure what’s available.”

  “That’s fine. Let’s get the exam out of the way and I’ll explain it all to you. Lie back, please.”

  The nurse was still hovering in the corner of the room—liability, I supposed. I thought of my previous doctor, the whole scandal with the other guy kissing his patient. Maybe it wasn’t all that uncommon. It had to be difficult to be doing that particular job all day long and—

  “Ow!” I yelled.

  “Sorry, did that hurt?”

  “Yes.” I stared at the ceiling, wide-eyed. There was an Ansel Adams print of a waterfall taped crookedly to the tiles. Through the pain, I thought of Jerry’s bedroom. I couldn’t remember a pelvic exam ever hurting this much. I’d been getting them every year since I was seventeen, just like I was supposed to. Maybe I was shrinking in my old age, from sheer lack of use. My sister used to tease me about that, back before I got a real boyfriend and she started assuming I was doing what everyone else had been doing for years. The doctor took one of those long scary Q-tip things the nurse handed him and, a second later, blinked in alarm.

  “Have you ever had intercourse?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Apparently not.” He turned around and looked at his nurse. “Did you ask her?”

  Her mouth opened and closed a few times, quickly, like a fish. “She’s twenty-nine years old,” she said.

  “What difference does that make?” I asked.

  “She’s a virgin. Get me the other speculum.” He let his breath out through his teeth and clinked the first one into the metal can beside the examining table. Instantly all the pain went away. “Ask next time, will you, Nancy? Good gravy. Sorry about that.”

  I went home that day with a prescription for the Pill, a box of free samples, and a stack of literature three inches high that the nurse had given to me on my way out. At the first stoplight I flipped through the brochure on the top of the stack. How Pregnancy Occurs, it said. It was illustrated with colorful pictures like Disney cartoons. You cannot prevent pregnancy by jumping up and down after sex. I rolled my eyes. I had a master’s degree, for goodness’ sake. In a way, though, it was funny. You get to a certain age and everyone assumes that you’re sexually active. Then, if they find out you’re not, they assume you’re mentally retarded.

  I toyed with the idea that perhaps I should stay a virgin for the rest of my life, purely as a form of social protest. Jerry and I would get married and adopt a dozen children and never have sex. They’d interview us on 60 Minutes. We’d give lectures all over the country, and people would crowd in to see us, staring at us like we were carnival freaks. But then, I doubted if Jerry would go for it. He wanted to make love, I could tell. And he’d want kids who looked like him. That was okay. I was starting to want kids who looked like him, too.

  Sometimes I wondered if maybe my sister was a little more clever than I gave her credit for. Jerry, for example, could see things in poetry that I couldn’t see; he could also look into a spice cabinet and instantly know ten things that would taste great when thrown into a bowl together, and get all philosophical about the meaning of a song called “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter.” Other people could understand the intricacies of tennis, or the symphony, or how elections worked. I didn’t get those things. Usually I saw my sister as, at best, an airhead, and, at worst, a bimbo. But occasionally, her bimbo-ness was so transcendent that I suspected it was a gift I simply could not understand.

  Take Thursday night, for example, as Jerry and I sat in front of the TV with a plate of microwave s’mores, watching her duke it out with the other five remaining debutantes. The first thing she did was cry. The producers had arranged a heart-to-heart around a crackling fire in the parlor, lit softly by candlelight from the sconces along the walls. The girls all curled their bare feet up under them and pressed their glossy pink fingernails against their mouths and talked, really, about nothing in particular, but cried the whole time. Or at least, they sort of cried; mostly they looked upward and blinked back tears to spare their mascara, occasionally running a curled index finger beneath the bottom lashes, their upper lips pulled down the way men do when they’re shaving.

  “Oh, the pathos,” said Jerry. “I should have made this homework for my seniors.”

  Madison was the worst of all of them. “I just think of all those little girls in my class back home,” she said. “They’re just like I was, you know? Every little girl wants to meet a handsome prince who makes her feel just like Cinderella dancing at the ball.”

  Jerry looked at me. “Is that true?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I didn’t. I wanted to marry a zookeeper so he could take me to work with him and let me feed bamboo to the pandas.”

  He nodded understandingly. “You know, I remember Stella used to say she was going to marry this kid named Nick who lived across the street. He had this really cool go-cart that his dad had painted up to look like the Dukes of Hazzard car, but he wouldn’t let her ride in it because she was a girl. She thought if she married him, he’d have to, the way my dad had to let my mom drive his El Camino once in a while.”

  “Maybe some girls have that fantasy. I think it’s kind of a myth, though. It’s mostly middle-school girls who have those kinds of fantasies. I mean, I wanted to marry C. J. Anastasio, but you don’t see me crying into my popcorn because he never showed up to carry me away.”

  Jerry gestured to the TV. “Well, they are.”

  By the end of the scene, one of the Rebels had moved over to sit next to Madison on the sofa. She handed her a tissue, which Maddie crushed down in her hand as she hugged her. Maddie didn’t need it. It would have just smudged her makeup, anyway.

  Naturally, they saved the cliff-hanger for the last five minutes of the show. In ghostly blue night vision, Madison slowly opened her bedroom door, peeked up and down the hallway, and ran down the hall wearing satin mules and a short silk robe with marabou sleeves. Somehow, as luck would have it, there was also a camera upstairs by Rhett’s room. Madison took a last look around, huddled up against the door, and knocked; Rhett answered wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

  “Grace,” he said, surprised. “Come on in.”

  “She is not,” I said, aghast.

  Jerry reached for the last s’more. “Uh, I think she is.”

  Next thing I knew, Rhett’s back was moving up and down in shadow, the bedsheets electric blue and shiny. “Oh, no. Oh, I hope my mother isn’t watching.”

  “Wow,” said Jerry, his mouth full of s’more. “I haven’t seen a porno that bad since the Paris Hilton video.”

  “Stop it. That’s my sister you’re talking about. Oh, Madison, how could you? You just totally ruined your career!”

  “Are you kidding?” asked Jerry. “She just made her career. Who’s ever going to forget her now?”

  A week before the Christmas finale, it all came out. Rhett’s real name was Colby McGeever, and he was a plumber from Deerneck, Missouri. A master plumber, the studio said in a statement, like that made a big difference. He’d never even visited Charleston. He’d also spent some time in prison for fighting, solicitation of prostitution, illegal gambling, and failure to pay child support.

  The studio was unconcerned. “We haven’t been the least bit deceptive,” said a spokeswoman. “We chose the male contestants ba
sed on their attractiveness, acting skill, and similarity to the beloved cultural icons.”

  I was less concerned about Ashley, since Madison didn’t stand a chance with him, but he was getting even more tabloid attention than Rhett. His name was Les Applebaum, and he was an unemployed actor from Long Beach, California. Apparently he was fairly well known in the local gay community, although his friends and associates made sincere, emphatic statements to the news media insisting that he was not gay, only bisexual, and really a wonderful person and a great friend. A few days later there was a smaller item on Access Hollywood mentioning that his parents were second cousins.

  “We stand by our original statement,” said the studio.

  It was a huge scandal. USA Today had a column about it above the fold, splashed across newspaper boxes all over the country. Has Reality TV Gone Too Far? A woman from the Center for Media Responsibility spoke on one of the evening shows on the Fox News Channel. A couple of girls from past seasons of The Bachelor were on one of the network channels, offering their take on things. Rhett’s mother gave an interview with Barbara Walters. One of Ashley’s former lovers gave a tearful account of their relationship, standing with his hand on the doorknob of his house in San Francisco and speaking into a microphone. Jerry finally gave up and shut off the TV.

  “You want to play Scattergories?” he asked.

  We played until bedtime, my phone playing “Für Elise” beside us like a CD on auto-repeat.

  My stepbrother, Pete, called the weekend before Christmas, several days into the Belle of Georgia publicity bonanza. He and Dominic were in town visiting my father and stepmom for a few days before they had to get back on the ship and head for Nova Scotia. I was over at Jerry’s, cleaning up the kitchen while he was on a run to the grocery store to buy ingredients for a crab-cake recipe he’d torn out of the newspaper.

  “Happy holidays,” Pete said.

  “To you, too. Are you going to watch the finale of Madison’s show?”

  “Are you kidding? I haven’t missed a single episode. Have you caught any of the publicity about the Ashley character?”

  I laughed grimly. “Have I? I can’t even get a cup of coffee at 7-Eleven without seeing six different versions of it. What do you think of it all?”

  “I think it’s a lot of fuss over nothing. Like anyone couldn’t tell that the man was gay. Excuse me, bisexual. He discussed Barbra Streisand movies on three of his dates. I mean, what more evidence do you need?” I could hear Dominic yelling in the background. “Hold on,” said Pete. “Dominic wants to talk to you.”

  I heard the phone being handed off and then Dominic’s voice came on, talking rapidly in his Tagalog-accented English. “So annoying. Such a terrible surprise, right? Oh no, gay fiancé. Maybe reality TV relationship won’t work out. My sister called me from New York and asked me if I know him. Like I know every gay person in United States. Let me look him up quick in my big Gay White Pages. The show been running for eleven weeks and now they realize. What else can he do, put on Indian headdress and sing ‘YMCA’? Hold on, Pete wants to talk.”

  “Sorry about that,” said Pete. “Dominic’s got some pretty strong opinions about Belle of Georgia.”

  “That’s okay. Are you guys going to be back in town for Christmas?”

  “Not this year. We’ve got a fourteen-day cruise from San Diego to Alaska and then back to British Columbia, and then we’re laid over for a couple of days before we head down to South America. We don’t get a real vacation until the middle of February. Speaking of holidays, I hear there’s a new man in your life. Mom says you’re going to Florida for Christmas. That sounds pretty serious.”

  “I’m keeping my fingers crossed,” I admitted. “I could really see myself settling down with this guy, Pete. He’s good with kids and he likes to cook and he’s responsible with money. He goes to church. He’s about as perfect as a guy can get.”

  “Nobody’s perfect, Fee. Everybody’s got something.”

  “I guess, but so far, so good. We just really enjoy each other’s company. He’s got everything I want in a guy.”

  “Does he love you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve totally got it for him, but I don’t want to scare him off. We’ve only been together a few months, and you know how guys are about that stuff.”

  “Well, I wish you guys the best of luck. How are things working out with your housemate?”

  “Oh, Lauren? Fine. She’s found the man of her dreams, too. I’m over at Jerry’s right now, but she’s supposed to be going out with him again tonight. She’s been acting like a total goof-ball for weeks now. She just sits around reading relationship books and talking about how compatible they are, Myers-Briggs-wise.”

  “What?”

  “Some personality test she’s really big on. Oh, I hear Jerry coming in the door. Have a great Christmas, Pete. Give Dominic a hug for me.”

  “I will. You have a good holiday, yourself. And tell your housemate I said congratulations.”

  Unfortunately, the man of Lauren’s dreams turned out not to be so dreamy after all. She told me on Sunday afternoon, the night after their third date, almost as soon as I walked in the door from spending most of the weekend at Jerry’s.

  “In his underwear,” she said angrily. “Can you believe that? I should have racked him.”

  “I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

  “He didn’t even have all his clothes back on yet, and then he tells me. Like it’s nothing. Like I should have known. ‘Oh, and by the way, I won’t be around next weekend because I’ll be spending Christmas with my parents and my girlfriend.’ And then he pulls his pants on and says, ‘I think I’m free the weekend after, though.’“ She smacked her commuter mug into the metal kitchen sink and turned on the water. The force sent a spray of water droplets across the counter.

  “I guess you weren’t up for that, huh?” I asked over the rush of water.

  “What the hell am I supposed to say? Not unless you dump your girlfriend? Then what? So I can get the guy who’ll do the same thing to me whenever he’s out of town?”

  “You don’t want that.”

  “I can’t believe it. That’s totally against the rules. If you’re going to drop the news that you have a girlfriend, you either do it right at the beginning, in the car, or on the phone the next day if you’re really a piece of shit. You don’t drop a bomb like that when you haven’t even left the bedroom yet. The bedroom’s a sanctuary from that kind of crap. People have been killed over things like that.” She grabbed the towel hanging from the refrigerator door, thin white terry cloth with the word PRILOSEC on it, and angrily wiped up the water.

  I moved out of her way as she stomped off to the living room. “Don’t overreact.”

  “Overreact? How would it be possible to overreact? That asshole. He totally misled me. I hate men. I’m just going to give up and become a lesbian.”

  “Good idea.”

  She flopped down on the sofa and put her hand against her forehead, staring at the ceiling. “Except that sex would be a problem.”

  “Well, I’m sure your medical resident will probably still be available for that, if you still needed him.”

  She gestured angrily toward the ceiling, a jerky little karate chop of frustration. “He was so perfect. I looked at everything, Phoebe. He should have been exactly the one for me. An ESTJ, a Virgo, a Dog—”

  “Sounds like he was a dog, all right.”

  “Ugh. I’m so pissed. I’m glad I’m not going home for Christmas. I don’t want to deal with my mom and sister after all this.” She looked over at me. “Are you going to your mom’s or your dad’s?”

  I sat down on the edge of the coffee table. “Um, actually, I’m going down to Florida with Jerry to meet his parents.”

  She raised her head a bit from the sofa pillow, her eyes getting buggy. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. We’re driving down on Christmas Eve. I was actually going to ask you if you’d watch the animals for me, but I g
uess this isn’t the best time.”

  She dropped her head back against the pillow and closed her eyes. “Go out and get us some Chinese food before I strangle you.”

  On the drive down to Florida, we talked about things. Big things and little things. Smart things and dumb things. Driving on the interstate, Jerry was completely at ease. His hand rested on the gear shift, rubbing back and forth like putting chalk on a pool cue, the palm of his left hand easy on the bottom of the steering wheel. We talked about the kids in our classes. About John Dewey and Savage Inequalities and what we liked about teaching. About my sister and reality TV in general and what it said about our culture. About whether, in a package of Fun Dip, it was the flavored sugar or the sticks that tasted better.

  “Definitely the sugar,” insisted Jerry.

  “No way. The sticks are the best part.”

  “The sticks are a gimmick. An accessory. You know that originally the sticks weren’t even there? You ate it with your fingers, and your fingers would turn green from the dye.”

  “There’s no green anymore. It’s a color-changing one that starts out green and turns blue.”

  Jerry shook his head. “What’s this world coming to?”

  We stopped at a gas station in North Carolina and took two bags of potato chips from the metal clips beside the register, one cheddar, one salt and vinegar. Jerry’s Southern Maryland accent grew thicker as he talked to the cashier. He put his arm around my waist when I handed him his root beer, and when the cashier called me “the missus,” Jerry only smiled. His slate-blue eyes crinkled at the corners when he looked at me, and I took the breath that was meant to come out as I love you, but then exhaled without a word. If I say it now, it’ll make everything awkward. No sense in ruining Christmas with the impatient truth. And in any case, I was happy.