May Day (2 page)

It all started with
a cockroach.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d had bad days before in Minneapolis, but this one was the mutha of all bad days. I had moved to the Twin Cities straight from high school, on the run from Paynesville, the small Minnesota town where I’d first played hide-and-seek in a cornfield that stretched for miles, and where I later learned the guilty pleasure of drinking stolen sweet wine in an abandoned farmhouse and the delight of wearing Guess jeans with a rainbow shirt while I curled my bangs into the perfect tube. Then I grew up but quick and headed east to Minneapolis the minute it was legal, high school diploma in hand. I was tired of the small-town gossip and people referring to me as “Manslaughter Mark’s daughter.”

In Minneapolis, I quickly learned two things: anonymity is lonely, and being able to make the perfect curlicue on a Dairy Queen cone didn’t cut one many breaks in the big city. I was more than a little fish in a big pond—I was Bananarama in the land of Hüsker Dü. I grew out my perm and let my dark hair flow long and natural, I stopped wearing mascara and eye shadow to bring out my deep-set gray eyes, and I started smoking clove cigarettes before switching to the real ones. I even relaxed enough to cease being a walking foot watcher when I realized nobody within a hundred miles had heard of my dad or cared that I had gone to the prom with Linda Dooley, the girl who always smelled like farm, because no guy would touch me with a ten-foot fishing pole. I blended in and earned my BA in English in under six years.

Somehow, though, I morphed into one of those slack-eyed West Bankers who waited tables during the day so they could afford to drink at the music clubs at night. I squeezed in a few graduate classes so there seemed to be a point to it all, but I started to feel like I was back in Paynesville, only with more places to drink. My dad had been a heavy boozer for as long as I could remember, and I knew I would have to make some changes soon, before my denial card expired.

Enter the cockroach, who set in motion a sequence of key events that slapped me on the ass and sent me to Battle Lake, the land of no return. I had been discussing my day-to-day existence with Alison, my supervisor and friend at Perfume River, the Vietnamese restaurant where I’d waited tables for six years.

“It just seems like I’m not where I’m supposed to be, you know?” We were wrapping silverware in paper napkins for easy grabbing during the lunch rush. It was a sunny March day, and the fresh-mopped floor was soon to be a salty, slushy gray.

“What about Brad? I thought you two were doing great.”

“I don’t know. He always seems distracted when he comes over, which now he only does after bar close.” Brad and I had been dating for five months. He was cute, in a blonde-Jim-Morrison sort of way, and he was in a band. That had been enough.

“Maybe you should get a tattoo.” Alison put the last silverware package on top of the pyramid as the first customers walked in. “I got ’em,” she said, heading toward the man and woman at the door.

She seated them in my section, and I grabbed a couple glasses of ice water and strolled out.

“How are you two doing?” I could tell from her immaculate makeup and his manicured fingernails that they weren’t the regular college crowd we drew.

By way of an answer, he sneered at me. “What are your specials?”

“All our meals are $4.95 or less. We think everything is special.” I capped this off with my best perky smile.

The woman gave a slight eye roll and turned her page. “How many shrimp come with the shrimp and bamboo shoots?”

“Six.”

“Well, isn’t that special.” She flipped the page again. “I’ll take your vegetarian spring rolls, no carrots in them, around them, or in the area they are prepared in. Do you understand?”

I could feel the skin at the base of my neck crawl. “Sure.”

“Then why aren’t you writing it down?”

I wrote down “VN1,” the code for spring rolls, and made a mental note to rub a whole carrot up and down both rolls like it was their wedding night. “Got it.”

“Can I see it? What you wrote. I need to make sure you got it right.”

I glared over at Alison, who was wiping out ashtrays. She raised her eyebrows and gave me a better-you-than-me look.

“Sure.” I handed the woman my pad. As I did so, a black cockroach peeked at me from behind the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle. Its shivering antennae felt the air, possibly sensing the tension and wondering if it should come back at a better time. I had seen cockroaches at the dingy Mexican restaurant I worked at when I first moved to the Cities, but never at Perfume River. Ba, the owner, was meticulous about order and sanitation in his kitchen. I shook my head at the little guy.

The woman grabbed the pen out of my hand, scribbled “no carrots” next to the “VN1,” underlined the words three times, and handed the pad back to me, a smug look on her face. “You must not work for tips.”

I think I may have actually been leaning forward to spit in her hair when the cockroach darted to the middle of the table and stood stock-still, basking in its public premiere. The no-carrots woman screamed and jumped up, knocking the table over. The soy sauce crashed to the ground just as a table of ten walked in.

“You horrible, dirty people! Dirty people! I’ll call the health department. I’ll have you shut down!” The woman’s shrieking reached a glass-shattering pitch.

The man with her handed me a card out of his wallet and said, “Expect to hear from me,” and like that they were out the door.

I looked down at the card. “David Jones, Jones and Jones Law Offices. Somebody’s Gonna Pay.”

It was at that point that Ba rushed out of the kitchen. When I
explained what had happened, he was so upset that he made me go home. Forever. It didn’t do any good to tell him that it wasn’t my fault. I was now and everlastingly associated with cockroaches in his mind.

I walked home with my hands thrust in my pockets, my face down against the biting wind. I was so intent on not thinking that I almost ran down a man in a street-length sheepskin coat.

“Sorry. I didn’t see you.”

His close-set eyes lit up when I addressed him. “Wanna buy a guitar pedal? I have reverb. Fifty bucks.”

“What?”

He opened his coat and showed me a bag of colorful electric guitar pedals. His breath smelled medicinal up close.

“I don’t play guitar.”

“Maybe you could learn. Or what about your boyfriend? You gotta have a boyfriend.”

“No thanks.”

I tried to walk around him, but he put himself back in front of me and dropped his pants, quick like a wink. “How about some of that?”

His cold weenie stared sadly at the ground, looking for all the world like an overcooked green bean on a big, white plate. Before I could think of a suitable response, someone brushed past the Bean Flasher. He packed up his treats, gave me the peace sign, and ran off in the other direction.

“Thanks for making a shitty day a little bit shittier!” I yelled at his back. I stomped the two blocks back to my Seven Corners apartment, where I had lived since moving out of the dorms. A gray cloud with a black lining lumbered over my head until I saw Brad’s bicycle parked by the back door. My doubts about dating a man who biked in the winter gave way to relief that there was someone at home for me.

Brad didn’t have a key and he wasn’t out front, so I figured he must have gone to the store. I entertained thoughts of him right now buying flowers to surprise me with or fixings to make dinner for us both. He wasn’t normally the romantic type, but after my day so far, I deserved to dream.

I went inside to wait for him, passing the two other apartments on the second floor on the way. My three neighbors and I all lived above an art supplies store, and our apartments were actually refurbished offices. They had fifteen-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, and cheap rent. One neighbor was a law student, and the other was a professional saxophone player in his sixties. His name was Ted, and we had had many great hall conversations in passing. His niece had been watching his apartment for the last month while Ted was on tour, and I was surprised to hear from the music wafting from 1B that she was home in the middle of a weekday.

As I turned the key in my door, I realized it wasn’t just any music I heard coming from Ted’s apartment. It was the very hard-to-find music of Portuguese flute players that I had special-ordered for Brad’s birthday last month.

“Oh no you dih-unt,” I whispered to myself as I tiptoed over to the door kitty-corner from mine and slapped my ear to it. I couldn’t hear anything inside except the music and some rustling. I kneeled down to peek through the old-fashioned keyhole on the leftover office door that served as Ted’s front entrance but could only see prisms of light glinting through the houseplants.

The quiet part of my brain that some people might call my common sense told me that Ted’s niece could also like Portuguese flutists and that I should just go in my apartment and wait for Brad to show up. I rarely listened to that part of my brain.

Instead, I tiptoed back down the hall and tried the door handle to Ted’s outdoor garden space. I had seen his patio area from mine and knew that it was directly in front of his apartment’s skylights, a feature my apartment didn’t share. His patio door was locked. I considered breaking it down, or just knocking on Ted’s front door, but both ideas lacked the stealth I was after. I was feeling crazy, but not crazy enough not to know it.

I thumbed through my keys and found the tiny one that unlocked my patio door. I hadn’t been out there since I had cleaned my herb and tomato pots in October. The area was small, maybe ten feet by five, and it was covered with brittle March snow accented by a chute of gutter ice. There was also a rusty ladder leading to the roof. Before the quiet part of my brain could organize its arguments, I climbed up the ladder, hauled myself onto the roof, and crawled over to Ted’s side of the building.

The March wind hit me like needles up this high, but the rush I always got from acting instead of waiting kept me moving forward. When I was by Ted’s skylights, I army-crawled over and peered down. Staring back at me was my second penis of the day, and here it wasn’t even noon. Brad was tied up to Ted’s loft, about four feet from my face, and if his eyes hadn’t been closed in ecstasy, he would have seen me staring down at him.

Ted’s niece, whose name I was really going to have to find out, was swaying toward him like a naked snake charmer, only she was on her knees because there wasn’t enough headroom in the loft to stand. When she got to him, she put her mouth near the top of his penis, and from my angle, I swear it looked like she was blowing and tickling him at the same time. For an absurd moment, I wondered if she was one of those poor women who had taken the term “blowjob” too literally, but then I realized what she was doing. She was playing Brad’s flute, accompanied by the nice Portuguese musicians I had bought for his listening pleasure. I had seen enough.

I crawled carefully back down the ladder, the March wind no match for the fumes coming from my head. I considered storming into the apartment and demanding an explanation, but Brad wasn’t clever enough to juggle shame and an erection at the same time. Besides, I hated confrontations. The shitter was I had been thinking of breaking up with him, and now he would get the last word. Or the last note, in this case.

No, clearly there was only one way this could end well for me. I let myself out the back door, removed the nuts holding the front tire onto Brad’s bike, and went for a walk. When I returned home that night, having decided nothing except that my life sucked and today would forever be known as Cocks ’n’ Roach Day, I was grateful to get a call from my good friend Sunshine Waters. Sunny and I had met when my college roommate freshman year, Cecilia, took me to her hometown of Battle Lake, Minnesota, over Christmas break. Battle Lake was a town of 798 people three hours west of the Twin Cities and two hours north of Paynesville. Sunny had stayed around there after high school because she had emotional ties. Her parents had died when she was young, and the land she’d inherited from them provided her comfort. It was 103 acres of rolling hills, hardwoods, and lakeshore with a doublewide trailer—gray with maroon trim—in the center and various outbuildings sprinkled around it. That’s where I had first met Sunny, at a Christmas party at her place, and we had hit it off instantly. Sunny was smart, funny, and not afraid of chocolate.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Mira! It’s me. Sunny. What’s up? You sound funny. You OK?”