The Nightgown

      

            1994. Grapevine, Texas. She’s wearing his mother’s old nightgown –– a Christmas present along with a candle and ‘monkey butt powder.’ “You put the powder in your gym shorts to keep from smelling when you sweat,” his mother had said.  The boy and girl together two or three years depending on which you ask. A serious relationship, you’d say. Given the circumstances. 

            In bed, the girl grips opposite elbows under her small breasts. Still wearing the green, silk nightgown. It’s how he knows she’s  ‘mad’ –– an adjective she finds too monosyllabic to describe anything she’s ever felt in her life. Mad?  Never. Aggravated? Closer. “Mad is for delinquents,” she’d once said.  In scrabble, she refuses to make three-lettered words unless they’re for triple scores.

            Tonight, the boy is too tired to try seeing one of the girl’s points enough for her to relent, take off the damn nightgown. It’s when you know what to do to make your lover feel okay but don’t do it that you also know the ‘honeymoon phase’ has disintegrated –– like a tablet in water. Still you drink the cloudy liquid because of a promise that it would make it even tastier and healthier. Most of the time, yes. And, most of the time, ‘most of the time’ is enough.

             The girl: “Move just one inch to the left?”

            The boy: “Can’t; I’ll fall off the bed. Literally. I’ll fall.”

            But she nudges him over anyway.

            And he doesn’t fall. Does anybody ever?

            10 pm, and the couple in the unit above are bowling again. At least that’s the sound of it. They yell in what the boy calls ‘Mexican,’ which the girl says is rude for them to do and rude for him to say. Rude like when he flosses in the kitchen, which she’d had it with earlier that night. (The girl: “It’s just not the place for it.” The boy: “I’ll tell you what: when you start cooking the food, I’ll quit.”).

            Now, she slams the pillow over her head. No pillowcase because, weeks ago, she’d assumed he was waiting for her to put on the cases to prove a point. (Let’s be real; men don’t care about pillowcases. They sleep the same with or without them. When they’d met, this particular guy was sleeping in a camper on a dank mattress with no sheets). But, to prove that he hadn’t proven his supposed point, she’d never put on the cases. Because she believed that if she let him believe she didn’t do enough for him, he’d abandon her. The disfigurement of reason quick among women who, as children, failed to serve their deranged fathers well enough to earn their love. Good at sports and art, but when she gets with a boy she forgets it all. She becomes a different sort of 'mad.'

            The girl lifts the pillow and turns her head to study the terrain of the boy’s face –– as inexplicable in the dark as the high plains of Wyoming. He could be anybody: her astrophysicist ex-boyfriend, the mailman, that Swiss model she went home with years ago. Then the light from a passing car slashes through the slits in the window shades, and the boy’s high cheekbones and pretty nose remind her he’s the one she loves. (Her astrophysicist ex-boyfriend had undesirable nostrils). She loves this one now beside her in bed and wants to serve him well enough to keep him showing up as other men had failed to do. (Even mailmen had quit her; in search of a stable home, she’d changed her address so many times they no longer delivered her mail. She did, however, get $10 from the Hardware Store with each change-of-address, which had satisfied her until she realized she didn’t need anything from the Hardware Store. Material things never having been what she needed. Especially not ‘monkey butt powder,’ although she did appreciate the gesture).

            Now the girl gets close enough to whisper in the boy’s ear but not enough for him to feel her body against his and think she’s over the argument in the kitchen. She starts: “You really think I don’t cook enough?”

            “Let’s quit talking about that and go to sleep, okay?”

            “Easy for you to sleep.”  

            Motionless, eyes still closed. “Well I let things go. It’s like ––“

            “I know, I know.” She presses her palms against her own closed eyes until her eyeballs hurts. “You’ve said it: it’s dropping the bundle of stick you’ve gathered to kindle a fire you don’t need.”

            Nothing.

            “God.”

            Snoring.

            She jabs the boy in the ribs with her elbow.  He rolls onto his side, mumbles about Halloween even though it’s February, and reaches over to rub her thigh: “Go to sleep baby, okay?”

            The girl exhales, closes her eyes again. The girl re-opens them. The girl throws off the covers –– hot in his mother’s nightgown and wishing he’d just take it off for her. The couple upstairs still make loud enough bowling sounds to keep her aggravated on top of it all, but, she thinks, at least they’re interacting. Interaction having always been what reminds this girl she’s real and valid: seeing and being seen, touching and being touched, hearing and be heard.

            The girl: “Can’t we just talk a minute?”

            Now swelling in her throat the same desperation she’d felt as a child. She closes her eyes, sees herself begging her father to stay and tell a story. Him in her doorway in his tightie whities: “You’re causing me so much stress I might die. One day, this will come back to haunt you.”

            The boy she loves now groans. “What do you want to talk about?”
            “Anything. Like what we did today. Like today, for example, I stopped at the bank for the peppermint patties they keep in that basket by the door. But they didn’t have the peppermint patties. Just smarties. I asked the banking man about it, and he went to check in the back but didn’t find any. So I left. Now your turn. ”  

            “Okay. Today I went to work. In six hours, I go to work again. So either it’s you quit talking or one of us goes to the couch.”

            “Well I just can’t sleep.”

            Quiet even upstairs now except for the Mexican pissing loud in the toilet.

            “Are you asleep?”

            “Jesus.” He sits up. “You’re killing me.” 

            “Please don’t go. I’m sorry. Please. I’ll quit talking. I’m sorry.”

            He lies down again.

            The girl doesn’t swallow. The girl doesn’t even breathe. Arms down by her side now. Is this what it would be like to live in a vending machine? Then: “Won’t you just hold me?”                       

            “First you wanted me to move over. Now you want me to hold you. Okay.” He throws an arm across her chest. She removes it and holds his hand, which is how the boy and girl most nights fall asleep. Another car passes below –– slashing strips of light across the painting she made him for his birthday and that he’d hung on his wall.

            Whispering in his ear again, but this time letting her body press against his: “Are you mad?”

            Nothing.

            The girl sits up, folds back the covers, crosses the room, and stands in front of the painting. Running her fingers across its surface to touch and be touched, she expects to feel the canvas shredded by the light. But still it is smooth. The painting she’d made while sitting alone by a lake in Wisconsin now hangs independent and intact on his otherwise empty wall. One of her favorite paintings. She decides that, after so long, tomorrow she'll make another. And, for tonight at least, she decides to end this story with no resolution other than that she finally accepts 'no resolution.’ On her own, she takes off the nightgown.