Please Don't Go (17 page)

She sighed, looking into Zephyr’s eyes, but quickly looked away again. “It’s just a little bit of everything, you know? I’m late on the electric bill. Again. I don’t even have enough money to put gas in my friggin’ car, so I’ll need to borrow your lovely deathtrap for my Gothic lit class tomorrow. And I’ve got this awful hemorrhoid.” At this last bit, Zephyr laughed aloud, snorting to himself, holding back a violent fit that would cause chow-mein to spill from his nose. The bills and the car loan were one thing, they were easily taken care of with very little pain involved. A hemorrhoid, though, presented an entirely different situation, a more bulbous, painful one. Though Zephyr found an ample supply of humor in her itchy, swollen butt pains, she was not in the least receptive to this reaction. She glared at him. Zephyr held back his laughter, biting at his lip and dipping a spring roll into duck sauce to gloss over his laughter.

His reaction was only harming the situation, pouring salt on an already gaping laceration to her pride. One more talking point against him dropping to his knee by the end of their dinner. “Oh, come on,” Zephyr said, reaching his hand across the table, pushing aside her plate to grasp her somewhat unwilling mitt. “It’s not so bad. I’ll get the electric bill this month, so no worries. As for the car, you can have it tomorrow. I took the day off from work and I don’t have class until nighttime. By the time you’re home, I’ll be ready to go. So don’t sweat it. You get paid Friday, right?” She nodded. Jackie worked as a tutor for elementary and middle school children, primarily with math and reading skills. The pay was relatively scant, but it gave her freedom in scheduling her work hours versus her ever-shifting academic classes. She only tutored the kids that she could pack into her usually brimming day, and the pay was regular enough to manage her bills with a dose of watchful frugality. Though her mother and father helped out quite a bit with her educational expenses and with some of her domestic bills, she was moving closer and closer to fashioning herself into an independent adult, step by step, inch by inch. When they were married (
if
they were married, which seemed out of sight and out of mind by this point), she would need to further sever herself, financially speaking, from her overbearing parents. Zephyr would have it no other way, and Jackie, he believed, would agree on that matter. They were sitting on the threshold of adulthood, and they would make all the right moves because they were intelligent, able-bodied, able-minded people. No such thing as a free lunch, although free Preparation H may have been nifty. “And as for your ass,” Zephyr added with a creeping grin, “I have some powerful stool softener in the bathroom cabinet.” He grinned.

She pulled her hand away from his, delivering a loud slap to the back of it. “You’re awful,” she sneered, not in the playful
you’re awful
sort of way, but in a more grievous tone. “It’s just really hard on me right now,” she said, a wetness building at the edge of her eyelashes like liquid icicles. This was not at all like her. Even in the hardest of their times together, though they had really just begun their relationship, she had never broken under circumstance. No matter the exertions of pressure, she had only always moved forward with her head held high, and without even a pinpoint of gripe. When something challenged her, she saw it as just that—a challenge. The definition of the word alone seasoned her for action. A challenge was not a hindrance, but a call to arms to step up her will power and adapt to that new and troubling situation. Without fail, she saw her way out of every corner she was backed into.
This
, though, was not the Jackie he knew and loved. There was more that troubled her, that which she refused to let on about. The gas, electric, and hemorrhoids were a mere smokescreen.

“
Can we just eat this hot garbage?” she posed to him, shoving her food around with an angry fork, eating faster now to expedite their painful date night, “And go home? I’m just not feeling this whole out-on-the-town thing. We should have just worn sweatsuits and watched home videos of people getting kicked in the nutsack.”

“
But what about the movie?” Zephyr shot back, his face worried at the implications of their faltering evening. He expressed an outward confusion about skipping the film, a throwback run of the 1979 Werner Herzog interpretation of
Nosferatu
. They had planned on seeing it for days, but what he really meant to express was:
What about my master plan? What about me taking you as my wife?
His heart was dashed by the whole crux of it, by the untimely death of his well-intentioned meandering into adulthood. He reached into his pocket, touching the ring with a childish wish that doing so would cure everything, that Jackie would break free of her sulking devasatation. He envisioned the princess kissing a frog. Perhaps
that
brand of magic still existed.

She shook her head from side to side. “I can’t deal with the damned German subtitles. Not tonight. I know you wanted to see that movie on the big screen, but I can’t take it tonight. Maybe this weekend.”

“
Yeah, that’s fine,” Zephyr replied, crushed beneath her disappointing heel. Jackie would interpret his defeated tone as relating to the German flick, but in reality it was that his hopes had been systematically obliterated by her rare attitude issues.

“
I’m sorry,” she said, wiping away the package of tears that was begging to descend her face. “I love you,” she added, faking a smile through her weighty discontent. She meant it. Her tragic demeanor had not derived from anything that Zephyr had done, of this he could assure himself. In response, he reached out and clutched her hand again. If this was how the evening was to spin, then he would roll with the punches, though it troubled him to a degree. She squeezed back to ease Zephyr’s looming break-up worries, that emotional turmoil that every man went through when his girlfriend simply did not want to talk about what was draining her emotional battery.

“
I know,” he replied, secretly referencing Han Solo, and without fanfare. “I love you, too. We’ll be just fine.” At that, Jackie smiled a bit. Just a bit.

At the adjacent table, a middle aged man with long black hair vomited into one of the wooden nooks of his pu-pu platter. Several anxious waiters rushed over with hot, wet rags, chattering at each other in rapid-fire Chinese, trying to contain the splashy mess as the man offered apologies through the repetitive wet lurches that followed.

And so it was sealed, with a fitting grand finale, that this was not to be Zephyr’s Big Day. Perhaps, he consoled himself, it would be better to take his time and plan something special, something more elaborate. A debatably mediocre Chinese restaurant in the great flourishing metropolis of Bangor? What had he been thinking, anyway? Now, as a matter of uncontrollable course, he would have sufficient time to plan something more intricate, to inject some flair into his riveting moment of marital conception. With a bit of creativity, he could finagle his short-term defeat into an eventual triumph.

The wrenching man vomited a second time, at which Jackie had to cover her eyes due to her inability to look away from the terror of it all. “I think this place is officially ruined for me,” she stated, half laughing at the sickly dinner guest. The twittering chitter-chatter of revolted Chinese waiters came scrambling from their holes once again, with a new supply of clean towels. “Completely ruined.”

Zephyr agreed; it was indeed ruined. All of it.

19.

I cursed myself and offered a tepid smile.

She fiddled with her keys and allowed me entry.

The steps were steeper than advertised and I plodded up them with a heaviness on my mind that would not subside with my better intentions gone awry. Aleesha kept one step ahead of me, rambling continuously about her home, her daughter, and their collective history; none of it felt pertinent to my escape though, and none of it permeated my consciousness.

As we stepped through the door of Aleesha’s upper level apartment, I first noticed a sweet smell that filled my nostrils, a sort of sugared peach coupled with ground cinnamon sticks. It was absolutely enthralling, but I refused to allow myself mental gratification in this undesirable situation. Here, as with our scampering walk through Galway, I would cast my eye upon each and every open window with a longing to flee. What a fool I had been.

The kitchen was formal, but leisurely. Though it was not dirtied, it was quite untidy, as I would expect was the case with any single mother, more so than I would allow in my own home with a stranger visiting, although Aleesha could have never predicted me when she set out that morning. Or had she? Something inside of me felt that there were bigger hands at play in our supposed chance meeting. The scents of her home were toying with my brain. I had never believed in higher powers or predestined futures, but all of it felt like cogs in a machine.

At the cluttered kitchen table sat the lilliputian imp that I had just recently come to know as Emily. She looked up to me with a docile observance as I entered their abode, her simmering judgmental eye scanning every inch of me. She looked back and forth between myself and her mother, laying her judgment upon us both, or so it seemed. “I ate all of my dinner,” Emily announced to her mother with an air of disgust. “Laura is in the bathroom. Pestering with her hair again.” Her formal tone unnerved me. She spoke as an adult would, I thought immediately, wondering if I should dispense with the baby talk brand of conversational banter I had prepared for her, that which revolved around her favorite color or whether she liked
The Wizard of Oz
. Emily looked to be around seven years old, and not a day over that. But she carried about her an atmosphere of an adult, or at the very least a virulent-tongued teenage girl.

“
Thank you, dear. Have you had your bath?” Aleesha asked with shifty eyes, that brogue tone swelling my senses again, though the logical half of my brain stomped that instinct away like a cigarette butt on a cement sidewalk.

“
I’ve bathed. I’ve bathed twice today, in case you were wondering,” she informed her mother.”I bathe because I am bored.
You
bathe because you are filthy.” Emily shot a bitter eyeball in my direction. She seemed quite knowing of how filthy her mother was, that which I could also attest to in my hotel room.

“
Wonderful,” Aleesha replied, ignoring the second half of her daughter’s inciting comment, looking to me with refreshed eyes. “Let me go check with Laura, see if everything is okay,” Aleesha said. She turned and brushed past her daughter, touching her shoulder with a gentle finger.

What the bloody hell was this woman doing to me? I felt as if I had been cast beneath the wheels of a barreling school bus, crushed and tattered by the sandpaper of the road. Could she not see that the gravity of this situation made me uncomfortable? Could she not see our rampage of lust had come to a grueling end, that I had already moved on from her in the mental sense, but not yet in the physical? I could not leave, though. There was a valve or switch inside of my brain that I could not budge. Did I hold on to that passion of ours, hoping that our molten romance would resurface?

When Aleesha was well out of sight, drifting down her lengthy hallway to confer with her babysitting comrade, Emily addressed me directly. I felt the air suck out of the room, as if by an invisible vacuum, and I fidgeted where I stood, glancing around for excuses to avoid the young lady’s social approaches.

“
You’re very tall. And very American.”

What brand of infernal child spoke like this? “I am both. Yes,” I answered her, tapping my feet and moving in awkward circles around the kitchen, first tinkering with her electric can opener and then studying their cookbook collections. In all my life, I had never wanted so badly to abandon a social situation. I could leave. Of course I could leave. Aleesha was away, and Emily could break the terrible news to her mother that they had been left in the wake of another hesitant male role model.

“
You want to leave us. You are worried. I can practically smell it on you and it’s quite despicable,” Emily said in a matter-of-fact voice. She was perceptive, as most children were. Her adult vocabulary, though, was not typical and resoundingly unexpected. Her tongue lashed in twists and turns that I could not reconcile.

“
No, that’s not true. Your mother is a very sweet woman, young lady.”

“
You’ve had your fill of her, now be gone with you.” She glared at me.

I felt challenged by her vicious words. Her insisting that I take leave only motivated me away from that very intention. I no longer hoped to escape this stuffy peach-smelling apartment, as though I was committing to a reverse psychology, going against the very wishes of this young lady with the ill-fitting tongue. “Well, my sweet, we are the adults. You are a child. Your mother and I, and nobody else, will decide when I leave,” I said, the scolding tone feeling quite obtuse to my personality, and especially on my tongue, as I was inexperienced with the direction of youth. I had spent a day of thoughtless actions and so I continued on that beleaguered, albatross-laden path.

“
You best leave. Once you’ve stayed, you stay forever. This is the way of women. The way of women- that is, of my mother.” She spoke of her mother as though she was common trash. The look upon Emily’s rosy-cheeked face was troubling to me, as though she was on the verge of spitting on the ground and cursing me for all eternity as a wronged gypsy would. “Men are all the same, a trail of pain left behind their swaggering tails. You’ve had my mother in carnal ways, and so I free you of that bond. Cast no more shadows upon my door.”