Nancy shook her head. “I
don’t see anything.”
“You’re really too
sweet.” Gina put her sunglasses back on. “Do you have any of that rose oil?”
“Sure.” Nancy had made
dozens of bottles of the stuff. “I can bring some over later.”
“That’d be great!” Gina
sighed as one of the dogs at her feet whined and pawed at the leg of her pant
suit. Nancy had never seen anyone dress as well as her neighbor. She wore linen
and heels to walk the dogs, for pete’s sake! Nancy felt like a drudge in her
cut-offs and t-shirt. “Well, I’d better get these beasts their daily exercise.”
Nancy looked, but couldn’t
find any more rose oil in her medicine cabinet. She’d made so much that first
winter she could barely store it all, but after Neil moved out, things got so
shuffled around, she couldn’t remember where she might have put it. It wasn’t
until the following day, just when she was closing up the flower shop, the
day’s last wedding bouquets, funeral flowers and I’m-sorry, get-well or
I-love-you roses delivered, that she remembered where she’d put them.
All three cats—two fat
orange ones named Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Butch and Sunny for
short, Neil’s idea) and a slim, gold-eyed, black goddess named Isis—met her at
the door, threading their way around her feet as she tossed her purse and keys
on the sideboard. They followed her into the basement, a damp, dark cave where
Neil had kept his drum set, through the furnace room. There was a small
refrigerator plugged in back there, and she’d forgotten she put all her oils
and some of her seeds in there when Neil moved out.
When she knocked on her
neighbor’s front door, there was no answer, although the dogs barked like mad,
pawing and scratching and howling at her. Gina’s car was in the driveway, and
she wondered if she might be out back, in the pool, where she seemed to spend
most of her time. Nancy wandered around the side of the house. It was far
larger than her own, three stories instead of just two. Modeling clearly paid
better than being a florist.
“Hello?” Nancy called
when she reached the gate. It was closed and locked. “Gina? It’s Nancy. Are you
out here? I brought the rose oil…”
“Hi there, neighbor.”
Gina smiled, unlatching the gate from the inside and waving her in.
Considering the times
she’d seen the woman sunbathing in the nude, Nancy shouldn’t have been shocked
to find her completely naked, but she was anyway. Gina’s whole body seemed to
defy gravity. Her self-proclaimed age was thirty-four, but she had the body of
a twenty-four year old. As far as Nancy could see, the photographers wouldn’t
have to do much airbrushing.
Averting her gaze, Nancy
held the paper bag up to her neighbor. “Here.”
“Thank you!” Gina took
the bag, peering inside like a kid opening a present on Christmas. “How much do
I owe you?”
“Oh, no.” Nancy waved the
offer away. “Nothing.”
“So how does this work?” Gina
held the bottle up in the sunlight, squinting it at, while Nancy tried to look
anywhere else besides the pink-tipped curve of her neighbor’s breasts and the
fiery V between her legs. She couldn’t help remembering watching Gina touch
herself, and the thought made Nancy feel warmly uncomfortable.
“Just rub a little on
the affected area.” Nancy cleared her throat. “Corner of the eyes and mouth,
you know…”
Gina opened the bottle,
shaking a drop onto her finger and taking off her sunglasses before rubbing the
oil under her eyes. “Ahhh. There. Wrinkles gone?”
Nancy laughed. “It’s not magic.
It will take a week or two.”
“Oh! Speaking of a week
or two!” Gina dropped the bottle back in the bag, putting her sunglasses back
on. “I’m having a pool party next weekend and I want you to come.”
“Oh, no…” Nancy shook her
head. “I don’t swim…”
“I insist. Lots of food
and fun.” Gina pursed her lips for a moment, cocking her head, contemplative. “I
think you need to get out, meet people. Lots of hot, eligible men will be
invited, I promise.”
“I’m not ready for men
yet. My divorce isn’t even officially final,” Nancy reminded her.
It had dragged on two
years, a strangely long, protracted affair, given there were no children and there
was very little property, but it had taken her a year to track him down in the
first place, living somewhere in Florida with the twenty-year-old he’d run off
with.
“Men.” Gina sighed. “It’s
enough to make you want to switch teams sometimes, isn’t it?”
Nancy just blinked at
her. “I really shouldn’t…”
“Oh yes you should!” Gina
insisted. “If you say no, I’m just going to come over and get you, so you might
as well say yes.”
“Well maybe.” Nancy
looked at her neighbor’s pool so she wouldn’t have to look at her neighbor. The
woman’s lack of self-consciousness was disconcerting. “I guess I can get someone
else to run the shop and do the wedding deliveries.” There were always a bunch
of those on the weekend.
“Florist or bridal shop?”
Gina mused, answering her own question before Nancy could even open her mouth. “Florist.
You and plants have a thing.”
Nancy smiled. “Yes.”
“Well come on, get
undressed, we’ll go for a swim!” Gina offered, putting the paper bag on a table
with her umbrella drink and nodding toward the pool.
“Oh, no!” Nancy
protested, glancing up, first at her own house, where her bedroom balcony was
in clear view, then the other way, where the neighbor on the other side must
also have an unobstructed view from the bedroom window. “Besides, Mr. Desoto.”
Gina grinned, coming over
to stand so close to Nancy, she could feel the heat radiating from the woman’s
body in waves, leaning in so she could whisper, “We can put on a good show.
Give him a heart attack.”
Nancy laughed in spite of
her embarrassment, taking a step away. “No, I really have to go.”
“Okay.” Gina shrugged,
and the look of disappointment on her face made Nancy feel strangely guilty for
not taking her up on the offer to go for a swim. “Thanks again for the magical
rose wrinkle cream!”
Nancy laughed again,
opening the gate.
“And you
are
coming
next week, I’m not taking no for an answer!” Gina insisted, following her.
“All right,” Nancy
relented, with Gina right behind her, and that’s when her neighbor leaned in
and kissed her cheek. It was just a sweet gesture, but the soft feel of her
lips, the press of Gina’s full, bare breast against her arm, made Nancy feel
faint, and it wasn’t the heat, at least not from the sun, that did it.
Nancy walked home, her
cheeks flushed and warm. The cats clamored and mewed to be fed, and she dumped
Fancy Feast into their bowls before heading upstairs to take a shower. It was
when she was standing nude before the full-length mirror on the back of the
door, that she noticed the clear imprint of a lipstick kiss on her cheek and it
made her blush.
She stood there looking
at her body in the mirror, the same body that had expelled six of their babies
in the space of three years, all before she was four months pregnant, the same
body Neil had come to loathe, protesting he was having sex with a “babymaking
machine.” He said he felt “used” for his sperm, claimed she only wanted to have
sex on schedule, when she was ovulating.
It wasn’t true of course,
not entirely. And she’d loved him without reserve. But even she had to admit,
she’d gotten a little obsessive about the baby-making. Losing that much life in
such a short span had done something to her. Some part of her had died with
each miscarriage. Some plants you could prune, and they would come back
stronger. Like roses. Some plants, like lilacs, were more delicate. If you
pruned them, they didn’t flower again for a very long time.
Nancy stood in front of
the mirror, she didn’t know how long, contemplating the lipstick mark and
Gina’s quip about switching teams, thinking about the hows and whys and whens
of buds turning to blossoms.
* * *
*
Nancy had started the
party out in the cabana, and that’s where she was ending it.
Her own swimsuit was an
old, faded one-piece affair, nothing to write home about, but she’d forgotten
one of the straps had broken on their last trip to Florida—she mended it with a
safety pin—and there was a hole on the right side along the seam, where she’d
caught it on the edge of a slide in the water park.
Neil had loved that park,
running to the top of the slide with his tube again and again like a little
kid, and all Nancy could think was how great it would be if they actually had their
own little kid, even one of the lost six would have been a blessing and a
miracle. But that was over, and she didn’t have time to buy a new suit, and
when she told her neighbor she didn’t think she could come and the reason why,
well somehow she had ended up in the cabana, changing into one of Gina’s.
It had taken her neighbor
half an hour to convince Nancy to come out after she changed. Outside, Gina had
picked the perfect day for a pool party, the weather in full cooperation, the
sun sinking low over the horizon as dusk approached but the air still plenty warm
enough to go swimming.
“Come on,” Gina begged
from the other side of the door. “You can’t stay in there all night!”
The party was already underway
by then, and Nancy had entertained that very thought—she could just stay in the
cabana. All night. There was plenty of room to recline on the padded bench, and
she could just curl up and take a nap until everyone went home. But it was all
Gina’s relentless cajoling and begging and pleading that finally wore her down,
and Nancy found the courage to open the door, stepping out of the cabana in a
shockingly red bikini.
Gina’s eyes widened.
“Damn! What were you being so shy about? You rock that suit, girl! Let’s get
you a drink!”
Nancy didn’t drink, but
she decided it was a very good idea. Gina had hired a DJ and a bartender, and
her friends were taking advantage of both, dancing and drinking and, of course,
swimming. Nancy thought she’d never seen so much flesh in her life. She gulped
down her first drink, something tangy and fruity and it burned all the way down
her throat to her belly, then asked the bartender for another.
Gina started introducing
her to people, telling them all about her neighbor with the green thumb and her
amazing medicinal garden.
“I’ve been using this
rose-oil stuff on my eyes. Carly, look at this!” Gina blinked at a bleached
blonde with roots desperately in need of touching up and a stunningly
contrasting tan. “Gone! It’s like magic! You should buy some from Nancy!”
Nancy looked between
them, blinking. “Oh, um… it’s…”
“Rose oil,” Gina said,
putting an arm around her neighbor’s shoulder. “It’s just forty dollars for one
bottle!”
Nancy gaped at her, but
Carly seemed very interested, as did her brunette friend, and before she knew
it, Nancy had fifteen women who wanted to buy a bottle of her rose oil at forty
dollars a pop. Gina had already made a list, taking orders at the bar, when a young,
tall, dark-haired guy with a six-pack—not the beer-kind, the body-kind—came
over to tell Gina something about someone throwing up in the house.
Gina sighed, leaning over
to Nancy. “You stay here. I’ll be right back.”
Nancy wasn’t about to go
anywhere. She sat and just watched, gulping down another drink and ordering a
third, wishing Gina would come back. And soon. The pool was a huge, rectangular
affair, all lit up in the darkness, everyone splashing and laughing and
shouting to each other. How many people were there? Fifty? A hundred?
“Let’s play ‘I’ve
Never!’” Carly came up to the bar to order a round of shots. She was followed
by a group of both women and men, who grabbed their shot glasses and tried to
cajole a bottle of whiskey out of the bartender.
“We
need
it,”
Carly insisted. She was already slurring her words. “Otherwise we can’t play
the game!”
“I’ll fill your shots
right here,” the bartender countered. He was older, probably fifty,
salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a Jimmy Buffet Hawaiian shirt with a parrot on
the back, but as laid back as he looked, he wasn’t going to let them get away
with anything.
“Fine!” Carly huffed, and
the group gathered around, half a dozen of them, pulling up and sitting on bar
stools, surrounding and trapping Nancy. “Let’s see… I’ve never…had sex in a
canoe.”
Just one guy stood up and
did his shot.
“Oh my god, Gary!” The
blonde gaped at him. “You’ve had sex in a canoe?”
The curly-haired guy with
glasses—Gary—flipped off the blonde and sat down. “I was a camp counselor at
the YMCA for ten years.”
The crowd laughed.
“You know what they say
about American beer?” The bartender went down the line pouring shots. “It’s
like having sex in a canoe.”
“Huh?” Gary cocked his
head.
“It’s fucking close to
water.” The bartender put a shot in front of Nancy, including her because she
was sitting there, his little joke getting a good laugh.
“He’s going to say
something he’s never done before.” Carly leaned in to explain the game to
Nancy. “You have to stand up and take a shot if you’ve done it.”
“Okay,” Nancy agreed faintly.
If the statements were anything like what had already been mentioned, it wasn’t
likely she would ever have to take a drink, but unfortunately, she couldn’t
slip away. She was surrounded. She glanced over to where Gina had disappeared
into the house, willing her to come back out.
The brunette in the white
biking sitting between Carly and Nancy—she thought her name was Sarah—stood up
and said, “I’ve never… had sex in a confessional.”
“Gary!” Carly exclaimed
as he stood and took another shot. No one else did. “Again?”
He grinned. “Catholic
school.”