| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** David Jordan is a former newspaperman and teacher turned fictionwriter/poet. He lives in Portland, OR. His stories and poems have appeared in more than eighty literary publications, including Ballyhoo Stories, Rattle, Thema, Nimrod, Comstock Review and Pangolin Papers. He operates a weblog at http://writeright.blogspot.com/. |
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| © 2007 zygoteinmycoffee Ink. |
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| by David Jordan |
| A high school cheerleader frozen in time by a senior-year pregnancy, Becky Hess had black hair that hung to the small of her back, glossy lips, dazzling teeth and a trim body for a thirty-year-old woman with two kids. She lived with her husband and the children in a tract house on the northern edge of Eugene.
Becky and my wife, Gretchen, worked together at a small bank downtown. They were tellers. About the same age, they became close friends. They took coffee breaks together, lunched together, bought each other Christmas gifts and birthday cards. They revealed to each other the secrets of their lives. Apparently. Because Gretchen repeated to me things Becky told her, and a lot of what I heard seemed as if it ought to be secret, even if it wasn't. I guess women share such things. In the beginning, Becky's husband worked in a gas station. She quit school and stayed home to give birth, then care for the baby. Soon she became pregnant a second time. After the youngest child started school, Becky earned a GED and went to work in the bank. Her husband, meanwhile, had bootstrapped himself into a job selling insurance. They began to make financial headway. And when they did, at her husband's urging, Becky agreed to christen each new material sign of their progress in a special way: with sex. They had sex on the new couch. It's spindly wooden legs walked a third of the way across the living room. They had sex on the new kitchen table. The formica chilled Becky's buttocks. They had sex on the new clothes washer -- while it was running. The vibrations tickled Becky's legs. After buying their house, they initiated every room with sex. Not so bad in the three bedrooms and the living room, but the kitchen table remained cold, the garage was drafty for a woman with a nightgown hiked to her waist, the carpet in the dining room rubbed the skin off a man’s knees, and lying on a bathmat gazing up at the underside of a toilet bowl was not very romantic. I would see Becky Hess when I stopped by the bank to talk with Gretchen or to pick her up from work, and I marveled at what my wife had told me. This perky cheerleader, mother of two, has sex on top of washing machines? People, it seemed, could be very odd in private. How odd became even more apparent when Gretchen informed me one day that Becky’s husband had never seen her naked. "You’re joking," I responded. "They've been married, what, a dozen years? They have two kids. They screw on top of kitchen tables, for Christ’s sake. They screw standing up in garages. How could he not see her naked?" "She doesn't let him." Gretchen shrugged. "She hasn't let anybody see her naked since she was a little girl. They only have sex at night, in the dark. She makes him turn off all the lights. Then she goes in the bathroom and takes off her clothes and puts on a nightgown and a robe. Sometimes she takes off the robe, but she never takes off the nightgown." "She told you that?" Another shrug. "Yeah." "Wait, though. She got pregnant in high school. I'll bet there wasn't any bathroom to hide in then. If they're like everybody else, that baby was conceived in a car." "So? All she'd have to do is lift her skirt. She wouldn't even have to take off her underpants, if she didn't want to. I can remember times when you --" "Okay, okay," I cut her off. It was another year before Becky's oddity truly peaked. Her husband walked out on her that February, moving to an apartment off Coburg Road with a twenty-year-old girl who worked as a receptionist in his office. Becky cried a lot during bank coffee breaks and lunch hours. Gretchen, ever the sympathetic listener, gave me a running account of her marital misery. In April the weather turned warm and Becky's husband stopped by their house one Saturday afternoon to retrieve some short-sleeved shirts he’d left in a bedroom closet. Neighbors called police when they heard shots. Officers found Becky standing naked in the living room, her husband's .30-30 deer rifle in her hands. His dead body, fully clothed, lay at her feet. A story in the newspaper the next day said she surrendered without resisting. |
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| Jan. 2007 |
| 76 |