Pay It Forward (8 page)

L
oretta sat in Arlene’s kitchen, drinking coffee and brushing tons of thick blond hair back from her forehead. Arlene figured if she had that much hair she’d fool around with it too, but she never would, and also that she could be a blonde just as easy as Loretta but would prefer to go along with what nature intended.

Arlene said, “Did I mention he’s black?”

Loretta said, “No.”

“Oh. He’s black.”

“So?”

“I don’t know. I just mentioned it.”

“Do you care?”

“I don’t know. No. I just mentioned it, is all. I told you about his face, though.”

“More times than I could count. That bothers you.”

“No. Not really. At first, maybe.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

“After a while, I just kinda got used to it. I don’t think about it much anymore.”

“But what about when you’re, like, close, though? Does it bother you then?”

Arlene jumped out of her chair to wash her cup in the sink, even though half the coffee was still in it, waiting to be drunk. Over her shoulder she said, “Well. To be real honest with you. We ain’t never been that close.”

“What about when he kisses you?” Loretta waited patiently for her answer; in fact, Arlene was surprised by how long it took her to give up. “You ain’t gonna tell me you never kissed him.”

“I ain’t?”

“You been out with him four times. Don’t you think that might start to hurt his feelings after a while?”

“Well, I know you won’t believe this, Loretta.” She dumped her coffee and sat back down, leaning close and talking low, a girl-type conspiracy. “It’s not me that’s holding out.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe you. Say. Now, don’t get this question wrong. I ain’t dared to ask it yet. What you dating this guy for, anyway? You give up on Ricky?”

“Of course not.”

“Why, then?”

“Why do you think? How can you even ask me that? It’s been over a year, Loretta. Don’t you think I got needs? Besides, serves Ricky right if he comes back and I been with somebody else. It’s what he gets.”

Loretta rocked back in her chair, more dramatically than was absolutely necessary. “Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh what?”

“That’s, like, the worst reason to date a guy I ever heard.”

“What is? I didn’t say anything about a reason.”

“’Cause it would serve Ricky right.”

“Hypothetically speaking.”

“So this guy’s just for sex in the meantime?”

“Yeah, I know how guys just hate that.”

“Some guys might hate it.”

“Not no guy I ever met.”

Arlene looked up suddenly to see Trevor standing in the kitchen doorway. “Trevor, how long you been standing there?”

“I just woke up.”

“Don’t sneak up on a body like that.”

“I just came for breakfast.”

“Get on out and play, would you?”

“I haven’t had my breakfast.”

“Oh. Right. Sit down, let me fix you something.”

Trevor shook his head in apparent bewilderment and settled at the table, leaning his chin on both hands.

Loretta said, “Well, anyway. Can’t use a guy for what he won’t give you.”

Trevor perked up his ears. “Who you talking about?”

“This don’t concern you, Trevor. And Loretta, little pitchers have big ears, if you catch my drift.”

Loretta shrugged and refilled her own cup at the Mr. Coffee machine. “Anyway. Sounds like a personal problem to me. If I were you, I’d be talking to Bonnie.”

“Nothing to talk about, Loretta. Just drop it.”

She set two toaster waffles in front of her boy, then ran down the hall and called Bonnie on the bedroom phone. The machine picked up and Arlene left a message saying she had a personal problem she’d like to discuss.

S
HE CUT HER WAY
through Bonnie’s little double-wide mobile home, through knickknacks and home crafts and needlepoint and feathers and pottery and blown glass and porcelain clowns. Bonnie liked things and kept plenty of them around the house so things would never be in short supply. Arlene made herself comfortable on the soft couch in a nest of embroidered pillows.

Bonnie said, “So. You finally quit the damn Laser Lounge.”

“Yeah. Guy come and bought the engine off me for eight hundred dollars, so I got two months ahead on the payments.”

“And in two months? Then what?”

“Cross that bridge when I come to it. Least I’ll get caught up on my sleep before I gotta worry. That’s not what I come to talk about.”

“How can you be having relationship problems? I thought we said no new relationships in your first year.”

Arlene sighed and studied the ceiling. “Well, I’m sorry, Bonnie, but for one time I didn’t do what you told me.”

“For one time?” Bonnie’s sharp voice cut the air like a siren. If there’d been dogs in the yard, Arlene figured they’d howl along, but there were no dogs allowed in Bonnie’s mobile home park. “Girl, where’d you learn to count? You don’t never do what I told you. What about Ricky?”

“You see him around here?”

“No, but what if we do?”

“Cross that bridge when we come to it too.”

“In other words, just go on a spending spree and worry about the bills when they get in.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s what I heard. So, what’s the problem?”

“Well. I been out with this guy four times. He hasn’t even tried to touch me. He’s just, like…a complete…gentleman.”

“You poor girl. Men are such beasts.”

“Four times, though, Bonnie. Doesn’t it seem off to you?”

“You never got to know a guy before you jumped in the sack?”

Actually, Arlene thought, no, but she didn’t care to say that. “He hasn’t so much as tried to hold my hand. What’s that sound like to you?”

“Sounds like the guy’s got more sense than you do, not like that’s the hardest contest in the world to win. No offense. Look. You ain’t got but sixty days sober. No time to be adding sex to
more immediate problems, but if you’re gonna do it anyway, and I know you are, for God’s sake take it slow.”

“I guess.”

“Girl, you hear one word I say to you?”

“I’m just so damn sick and tired of sleeping alone, Bonnie. Damn tired of it. And I know he is, too. So, what’s so terrible? I mean, what’s his problem?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Yeah. That’s why I come all the way over here. I’m asking you.”

“Doesn’t that strike you a little odd? To be asking me?”

“You’re my sponsor.”

“So I’m supposed to know what this guy’s thinking that I never even met.”

“You mean, ask
him
?”

Bonnie let out a big, indefinable noise and threw her hands up in a gesture of defeat. “And she thinks she’s ready to have a relationship. Lord help us all.” Then she walked Arlene to the door, since Arlene was going that way anyway, with or without help. “Hey. This the guy you told me about with the scars?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure he knows you want him to?”

“Well, sure he knows. I mean, he must. What would I be going out with him for if I didn’t want him to?”

“You better make sure he knows. Don’t tell nobody I said that. You’re supposed to get a year sober first.”

“Yeah, but you knew I wouldn’t.”

Bonnie rolled her eyes and slammed the door shut.

I
T MADE HER FEEL LIKE A KID,
the way she had to corner him at her own front door, as if her parents were waiting up inside.

Problem was, Reuben always paid for a baby-sitter. Well, it wasn’t a problem, it was real nice, but it was part of the problem, because if she invited him in, well, there the girl would be, and she didn’t have a car, so Reuben had to drop her home.

Arlene hadn’t quite figured a way around that. So when he walked her to her door, which he always did, being a gentleman, she slid up to him and put her arms around his neck.

“I had a real nice time tonight,” she said quietly into his right ear. The muscles in his neck and shoulders felt tight. She waited for him to say the same. Or to say anything, or to relax, or put his hands on her back, but there they hung at his sides while he said nothing at all. “How come you’re so tense?”

“Do I seem tense?”

“Am I making you nervous? You want me to stop?”

“I guess I have mixed feelings about it.”

Discouraged as she’d been, that seemed like a good jumping-off place to Arlene, who figured mixed feelings to be better than no feelings at all. She took two steps to push up a little closer, but he yielded and ended up with his back against the door. Since he couldn’t go anywhere from there, she kissed him. It didn’t feel different from kissing anybody else.

It was a soft kiss. She didn’t know why, since she seemed to be leading, and had never felt a soft kiss before. And it brought up all these soft feelings in her stomach, like little breaths trying to get out, only more fluttery.

She really hadn’t expected to like it nearly that much.

She drew back to look at him, figuring this was the moment to find out one way or another if it bothered her. But he turned his head a little and she found herself looking mostly at the right side of his face, which was handsome and pleasant anyway—she’d always thought so.

“You finally coming in tonight?” It was a hard question to ask because she’d convinced herself she wouldn’t have to sleep alone that night, even though she knew she might be wrong, and if she was wrong she preferred not to know it yet.

“I have to drive the baby-sitter home.”

“You could come back.”

“But Trevor’s in the house.”

She still was mostly pressed against him while they discussed it, with her arms around his neck, listening to the change in his voice and watching opportunities to respond pass him by.

“That kid sleeps like the dead. You couldn’t wake him up if you tried. Once, when we lived in Paso Robles, the house next door burned to the ground. Sirens in the middle of the night, people yelling. I had to take him out to the street in a fireman’s carry, and he just hung there on my shoulder, sleeping. Don’t you worry about Trevor. I’m talking too much, aren’t I?” He smiled, which she found encouraging, so she kissed him again. “So, you’ll come back. Right?”

“Arlene. I’m not sure—”

She put a finger to his lips before she had to find out what he wasn’t sure of. “Don’t you get tired of sleeping alone?”

“Of course I do.”

“Don’t you feel that way about me?”

He slipped out of her grasp and slid around toward the stairs. “Oh, God,” he said. “Is that what you think?”

So he did feel that way about her, but had to get farther away to tell her so. “You’re like a saint, right, and that’s how you got that name. Saint Reuben.”

“No. You have no idea how much of a saint I’m not. If you could spend one minute inside my skin, you’d know.”

“So, come back.”

She took his hand, afraid to lose him before he answered, and he said he would.

From
The Other Faces Behind the Movement

I’m such a jerk. It was right there to see. It’s only five minutes to the baby-sitter’s and five back again, but, fool that I am, it took me
an hour to figure out he wasn’t coming back. It was a bad hour, too, because I minded a lot that he didn’t. More than I wanted to or expected to.

Loretta said I’m so used to guys pawing all over me that the more he wouldn’t, the more I wished he would. I don’t know. I’m not big on psychology. She made it sound like a sickness, like I only wanted what I couldn’t get. Maybe I just liked how he didn’t treat me cheap. Maybe I just liked being around a gentleman for a change.

But then, sitting there, thinking about all the things I was starting to like about him, it just got harder and harder the more he didn’t come back. I ended up sitting in the living room, watching for his car down the street. Every time I heard a motor I’d get this little flutter in my stomach, and every time it drove on by I’d feel a cry right behind my eyes. I had to work real hard not to let it have its way.

Funny how sometimes I’d get involved with a guy because I thought somehow, for some reason, with some particular guy it wouldn’t hurt that much. Funny I still thought it’d work after all that time, because it never had before.

Finally I gave up and called his house. He answered the phone by saying, “I’m sorry, Arlene. I really am.”

And I said, “So that’s it, then? It’s just never gonna be that way?” I was almost crying, and I know he could hear it in my voice, because
I
could. I hate that.

He said, “Couldn’t you just give me a little more time?”

I said yeah, I guessed I probably could if that’s what the situation required, but one thing for damn sure, I was getting a new baby-sitter, and this one had to have her own car.

He laughed when I said that. I was glad he did. It always helps to laugh at a time like that, and if he hadn’t I might never have figured out that he was scared to death.

I guess I can be slow about these things.

So we’re having this nice laugh together, and the next thing I
know I’m crying, full-on, no point trying to hide it. I know, I’m too emotional. Everybody tells me that. If Bonnie had been there she’d’ve told me that’s the perfect example of how I wasn’t ready, but thank God she was not.

“Arlene?” he said. “Are you all right?”

And I said, “Dammit, I just hate to sleep alone so much. You’d think I’d be good at it by now. I get scared and lonely at night, and I just never get no sleep. I quit my night job so I could sleep for a change, but that only made it worse. More time to lie there scared and lonely. Sometimes I think I’ll get up and go on back there, just to make the night go by.” I don’t know if he followed the half of that, though, because when I get to crying it’s hard to understand most of what I say.

He was quiet for a minute. Well, not a minute, but it seemed that long. Then he said, “Do you want me to come over to your house just to sleep?”

And I said, “You know, that would be very nice, ’cause I sort of got it in my head you might be here tonight.”

“Give me ten minutes.” That was the last thing he said.

After I hung up the phone I crossed over to the window and looked out through the trees at this thin little crescent moon hanging yellow over the hill and smiled because it was nice of him to offer. Even though I knew he wouldn’t show. Once bitten. You know. But that man was all full of surprises. I learned not to try to guess him out after a while.