After ice cream, sitting in the front seat of Chic's mother's Plymouth four-door sedan, Diane stuck her mouth on Chic's and gave him a big lip-to-lip smooch-a-roo. She pulled away and giggled, wiped her mouth. Then she asked, “What do you want more than anything in the whole wide world?” Her voice was full of the type of confidence that made Chic shaky.
“A big dog,” Chic said.
“No. I mean in life.”
He thought about this. A big dog would make things a little better. Big dogs made happy families, and for the past ten years, his family life had been in shambles. When he was eight, his father went outside behind the barn and sat down in the snow and, no kidding here, froze himself to death. Diane knew about this. Everyone did. And they all looked at Chic a little bit out of the corner of their eyes as a result. He pretty much didn't let himself think about it all that much. He just thought about having his own family someday, and that big dog. That seemed to be the way to handle things like thisâkeep marching forward and don't look over your shoulder. That's what his mother had done. The day after his father's funeral she was riding around in Tom McNeeley's Dodge Fore-Point pickup. What did heâChic Waldbeeserâwant more than anything? That was easy if he let himself think about it, but he pushed it to the back of his mind, way back where the spiderwebs grew and there was the constant sound of a dripping faucet. But since she asked, since she was Diane von Schmidt, daughter of a math teacher, a real Sheba, he was going to tell her. “I want a normal family,” he whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“A normal family. A normal life.”
About a year later, Diane's father shelled out for a big wedding. Blessed Sacrament, the Catholic church in Middleville, Ilinois was stuffed full of Diane's aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, and third cousins. Chic's mother sent a fruit basket and card that said she couldn't make it. She was down in Florida learning how to play tennis. She had moved down there with Tom McNeeley the day after Chic graduated from high school. The lone invitee on the Waldbeeser side was Mr. Kenneth Waxman, a friend of Chic's father; Mr. Waxman was squeezed off on the far side of the church next to Diane's third cousin Mary Lou from Junction City, Kansas, and her seven children.
An elderly uncle on the von Schmidt side, a longtime resident of Middleville, leaned over to his wife and said, “Now, what exactly did the Waldbeeser father do?”
His wife said, “Committed suicide, maybe ten years ago.”
“Yeah, yeah . . . I know that. What did he do,
do
, I mean.”
She shrugged. “Worked at the cannery probably.”
Chic's brother, Buddy, stood at the altar next to Chic with the ring in his pocket. He'd recently returned from out East or West, or someplace, whereever it was. He wasn't too forthcoming. When he returned, just in time for Chic's high school graduation, he had a wife, an Indian woman, who, because she was Indian and dressed in a sari and wore flip-flop shoes that showed her toes, caused the townsfolk to whisper. Buddy was a long boy, tall and lean like a two-by-four. In a crowded room, his was the only face you'd see, but that's where the metaphor for head and shoulders above the crowd stopped. He had gotten mostly Cs in high school. He was shy. At the reception, he got lit up on the spiked punch and, during his best man speech, slurred his words and blabbered on about his father and his father's father and his father's father's father from Germany, Bascom Waldbeeser, who had founded Middleville with his wife Kiki, and their son, Bascom Jr., after the couple came north from New Orleans.
The people seated on folding chairs looked at each other. Every Middlevillian knew R. S. Archerbach and his sons had founded Middleville and started the cannery in 1880-something. There was a book,
Middleville, Illinois: Our Town, Our Lives, Our Story,
put together by Mrs. Ruth Van Eatton, an English teacher at the high school. The book had black and white photographs of the Archerbach family and other first Middleville families and the pumpkin cannery (which is now a National Historic Landmark) on Main Street circa 1884 and the railroad stop on Jefferson and First Street that connected Middleville with Peoria, twenty miles to the north. Diane leaned over and asked Chic why his brother was claiming the Waldbeeser family was responsible for the cannery. Chic shrugged, pretending not to know what his brother was up to, but he knew. This was what their grandfather had told them when they were young, a fairy tale meant to give Buddy and Chic incentive to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and to go forth into the world and chase down their destinies. Or, at least, that's how Chic interpreted the story.
After fifteen minutes, a ten-year-old second cousin switched off the lights, and the entire reception hall went black. Aunts and other women gasped. Someone whispered, “Thank god.”
When the lights came back on, Buddy was in the middle of the dance floor, wavering a little bit, drunk. He held up his glass. “Congrajewl . . . ” He burped. “Congrajewlations.”
Diane's father guided him out a side door to the parking lot, and someone started the jukebox, Patti Page singing “All My Love.”
With the reception getting back to normal and people grabbing the hands of their loved ones and dragging them to the dance floor, Chic found himself standing behind Lijy, Buddy's wife. She was picking lint off the front of her sari. The whole reception, Chic had noticed Diane's aunts and uncles nudging each other and whispering about her. Other than pictures in books, she was the first Indian anyone in Middleville had ever seen.
On Main Street, when she went into Witzig's, the department store across from the Dairy Queen, Buick Roadmasters literally screeched to a stop and eight-year old kids in backseats rolled down their windows and pointed. Standing there on the fringe of the dance floor, Chic pressed in, getting close enough that he could smell her hair. It smelled odd but goodâearthy and spicy, musky maybe. She reminded Chic of a doll.
She turned around and cleared her throat.
Chic immediately noticed the bulge of her breasts under the sari. He hadn't noticed them before, but there they wereâabout the size of grapefruits. “I was . . . ” He quickly looked at his wingtips and tightly closed his eyes. She'd seen him; she'd seen him staring at her breasts. “Sorry,” he whispered.
She wasn't even paying attention to him. She was looking through him, beyond him, to where Buddy had disappeared through the side door to the parking lot. Chic glanced over his shoulder, and there was Buddy, coming back into the reception, Diane's father behind him. Buddy was wiping his mouth with a hanky and his tie was loosened. He was pale, like he'd just vomited.
“Do you want a back rub?” Lijy asked.
Chic wide-eyed her.
“Did you hear me?”
Was she serious? He scanned the reception. On the dance floor, Diane was doing some sort of high knee thing while a guy played an accordion. Family members had made a circle around her and were clapping along. Lijy grabbed his forearm and led him to an empty table and told him to take off his tuxedo coat and sit down in the chair. Then she laid her hands on him. They were cold, but she did this trick where she rubbed them together, then shoved them back up his shirt and squeezed his shoulders, and it felt goodâbetter than good.
Chic didn't know this because he was too busy nearly drooling, but while Lijy rubbed and kneaded and massaged his back,
she kept a sharp eye on Buddy, who hadn't even noticed that she had dragged his brother, the groom of the gosh dang wedding, to an empty table and was giving him a back massage. She watched Buddy stumble up to the punch table, where some woman ladled him a glass of punch. In one swift motion, he downed the punch and held out his glass for another.
“This is your ansa phalak,” she whispered into Chic's ear. She moved her hands to the middle of his back. “The vrihati. Your parshva sandhi. Your katika tarunam.” She hoped Buddy would turn around. She willed him to turn around.
Chic thought about Diane looking over, but then that thought floated out of his mind because the back rub felt so good; it just felt so good. “Keep doing that,” he whispered. “Right there.”
But then Lijy stopped and brushed past him, leaving him sitting in the chair with his shirt untucked and his tuxedo jacket tossed on the table. He saw Buddy going out the side door to the parking lot; Lijy followed after him.
Chic was exhausted in the motel room after the bus ride to Pensacola. Plus, Diane still wasn't talking to him. After they brushed their teeth and tucked themselves into bed, he lay in the dark thinking. The entire wedding day he had fended off the jokes from Diane's uncles and cousins about the honeymoon. And now here they were, and she was mad, and he was nervous. Her back was to him. He nudged up behind her and threw his arm around her. This would do it. This was it. Only a matter of time now. He waited. Her hair didn't smell like Lijy's; it smelled like bus and cigarette smoke. He nuzzled closer, spooning her. He counted to ten. Then he counted to twenty. The motel room's window was open and the drapes billowed in the ocean breeze.
Diane opened her eyes and looked at his hand on the mattress. He still had his watch on. She rolled out from under his arm and went into the bathroom, closing and locking the door.
This was it. She had gone into the bathroom to freshen up, to get ready, to maybe put on something more appropriate, to turn
into the real Sheba that Randy had told him about. Chic slid off his boxers and lay there in the dark with a steaming erection. Then he felt weird lying naked on a motel bed and put his boxers back on. He listened to Diane in the bathroom. He couldn't hear much. Maybe she was putting on some perfume and was going toâany minuteâthrow open the door and strut into the room and hop on him and get this honeymoon rolling.
The Seashell Inn, a pink stucco motor lodge, sat behind Jack's Hamburger Shack. Jack's was a drive-through with a bevy of waitresses hustling hamburgers, hot dogs, and French fries to tourists' cars. Below their motel window was Jack's back screen door, which led to the kitchen. Two cooks were standing outside the screen door smoking cigarettes and talking about going to a place called Mo's Cantina after they cleaned up the kitchen.
After twenty minutes, Diane hadn't come out of the bathroom, and there was no sign that she was going to.
“Diane?”
She didn't answer.
“Honey.”
She still didn't answer.
Chic stared at the ceiling, thinking about Lijy. He imagined her in the bathroom pulling a brush through her long black hair.
“Honey, did you see something at the reception?”
She didn't answer.
“I can explain that.”
The sink was turned on, then it went off.
“It's not what you think.”
When Chic woke up the next morning, Diane still hadn't come out. Chic got up and knocked on the bathroom door, but Diane didn't answer him. He imagined her sitting on the toilet. He knocked again. “Honey.”
Nothing.
Fine. Be that way. Be mad. It was just a back rub, a lousy back rub, and besides, he had apologized. Besides that: it only lasted
like two minutes. He threw open the drapes and let the Florida sunshine flood the room. He wasn't going to let this ruin his honeymoon.
In the motel lobby, he ate a complimentary orange, then he walked down the Pensacola Beach pier. He had all this fenced-in sexual energyâhis honeymoon, the back rubâall of it bouncing around inside him like a pinball. He felt like a rocket on the launchpad smoking and fuming. He had a headache. The entire morning his left testicle throbbed, or actually, throbbed wasn't the right description. It felt heavy, a boulder testicle swaying back and forth while he walked down the boardwalk. He knew what he needed to do. He ducked into the penny arcade and found the bathroom back by the Skeeball. He stepped into a stall and locked the door behind him. He unzipped himself and, standing over the toilet, masturbated quickly, thinking about Lijy, thinking about her hands on his back and her grapefruit-size breasts, thinking about Diane, too, and what Randy Rugaard had said about her.
That afternoon, Chic went tourist. He walked up and down the boardwalk with purpose. He was pretty much strutting, although he felt a little shy and found it difficult to look anyone in the eye. After all, he'd masturbated in a public bathroom. But, physically, he felt great. Better than great. The best. Wonderful. Relieved. He checked out the casino and the souvenir stands. He ate a stick of cotton candy. He bought a guayabera shirt and rolled up his khakis and walked along the water so that his feet got wet. He didn't like wet sand squishing between his toes, so he went back to the boardwalk. He ate lunch at a place called the Katy Hooper and drank a Spearman's Straight Eight Beer. There were posters on the wall advertising an upcoming Friday night boxing match between Bruno Schneider and Jimmy Dixon. In a rack of tourist brochures, Chic spotted a brochure for Gatorland and grabbed it and stuck it in his back pocket.
When he returned to the Seashell Inn, Diane was still in the bathroom. Chic flopped on the bed and unfolded the Gatorland brochure. There was an albino alligator. He heard Diane wring out a washcloth. He suddenly felt guilty for what he'd done in the penny arcade's bathroom. He told himself any other guy would have done just what he did. What if someone saw him? That would be embarrassing. No one saw him. He'd checked for feet under the other stalls. He was fine. It was over. He had to do it. He unbuttoned his new guayabera shirt and let air from the open window breeze over his bare chest. He heard the dull, incomprehensible muttering voices of the drive-through patrons outside Jack's Hamburger Shack. He wondered what was going on back in Middleville. He thought about his job at the pumpkin cannery. Mr. Meyers, his boss, hadn't wanted him to take such a long time off.