Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

My friends tell me I’m an idiot; well, I say, no. They say she’ll never die and I’ll do this forever and I think they’re right but I still can’t stop driving that familiar ride to the hospital with the weird three-way stop that takes too long. I tell my friends that I like that emergency room nurse. That it’s all a big scam to fuck the emergency room nurse. With her white shoes and bouncy tits and thin knee-highs and my tongue up her dress.

You know the truth: the nurse is in fact old and tired and gives me looks like I’m causing the overdoses, right. Me, the nicest person on the face of the earth. Like I’m the problem as I sit there and read the same magazines over and over. When I look for the crossword puzzles, they’re filled in, and worse: they’re filled in by me. And I can’t even correct myself because I still don’t know the same answers I didn’t know last time I was here.

My girlfriend comes out from the back this time with that tag on her wrist and she crawls in my lap and kisses my neck and I grumble to the air.

She’s telling me a secret.

We all know what it is.

“Never again,” she whispers to me. She thinks I’m so dumb. Like it would even matter. “This is the last and final time.”

On the way out the door she wants a candy bar but has no money so we go into the lobby shop and I get her a Snickers and I get myself a coffee and we walk arm in arm to the car. At the car door I find I don’t have my keys.

“Wait.” I keep checking my pockets, one two in the back, one two in the front, top of shirt. No jingling.

“I’ll go get them,” she says, “they must’ve fallen out while you were sitting.”

She’s so helpful now. Her skin is very pale; she looks diluted. I sip my coffee.

“I’ll look,” I say, “you stay here.”

I race back and the nurse’s eyes widen or at least I think they do and my keys are sandwiched in the pages of a magazine causing a pregnant lump and I’m back at the car and Janie is gone. Am I really surprised? She does this all the time. And like usual, there’s a little note in my windshield: Took A Walk. See You At Home. Plus a little heart shape. J.

I’m supposed to be mad again. Instead I am interested in the traffic laws. Car on the right: go. Yellow means slow down. Use your blinker.

I use my blinker. I find myself using it to go into the left left lane and getting on the freeway. This is not where I live. But I love those green signs. I love that they picked green instead of black.

I drive to my friend Alan’s house. He answers the door in a towel. I think he’s been having sex with his new girlfriend, Frieda from Germany, who he says is the hottest ever. She is walking around the living room naked and her breasts are different, un-American. Oblong. She waves at me. I wonder, Why did he answer the door?

“Just stopped by to say hi,” I say. “I was going to bring you that book but I forgot.”

“Lunch?” he says.

“Sure.” I go into the kitchen and Frieda spoons cereal into a bowl without milk and then leaves again. I can hear her crunching in the living room. Alan gives me a cold barbecued rib and some pear slices and a piece of paper towel and a glass of milk.

“Wow,” I say. “It’s the perfect lunch.”

He leans closer to me. The only reason he let me in is because he wants to talk about her.

“It’s so good,” he says, rolling his eyes, gripping the table, “I mean: fuck. I mean: go to fucking Germany now and get yourself a girlfriend.”

I’m gnawing on the rib and loving how it sticks in my teeth.

“Maybe it’s not Germany,” I say. “Maybe it’s just her.”

He nods and grips the table harder. “Then,” he says, grinning, “you are fucking out of luck.”

The skin of the pear is abrasive and rubs the rib juice off my lips.

“Janie?”

“Still alive,” I say, “just got back.”

“Pills?” He looks away.

“Yup,” I say, “same darn pills.”

“And you?” He leans back now. He is a decent guy.

“No pills for me.”

“No, I mean how are you holding up.” He takes a sip of my milk; it’s a big sip and it sort of makes me twitch because I was saving it for last. Even though it is rightfully his. Still. I like milk.

“Like I said: no pills.” I drink the milk until only one very slow drop is climbing up the side of the glass. I consider how I will back out of his tricky driveway. Make a perfect S shape, with one arm across the back of the front seat, like the seat is my girlfriend. A careful release on the brake while he goes to Frieda and kneels between her legs and the crunching gets louder and louder.

Back home, Janie is in front of the television. It’s not on, but she’s looking at her reflection in the greenish glass. She doesn’t ask me where I was. She’s not too good at noticing things like that, like the fact that it took me an hour and a half to get home.

I go into the bathroom and get dental floss. There are rib twigs between all my teeth. How I love to pop them out. One goes flying into the carpet.

“Do you hate me?” she asks. She has her legs tucked underneath her and her head against a pillow and I can see the line of her thigh all the way up. I still think she is beautiful. She won a beauty contest when she was six.

“Nope.” I keep flossing.

“Come here,” she says, and I go lie down next to her and keep flossing.

“Stop,” she says, laying her head on my chest. “I can hear you doing that.”

“No,” I tell her, not touching her yet; I won’t touch her yet.

She presses her face down hard. I stroke her head with my available elbow and her hair is shining like gold in the sunlight through the unopened window. It all makes me very sleepy.

“The thing is,” she says, voice muffled out through my T-shirt, “what I said before, you know, never again, I can’t really promise that.”

“I know,” I say.

“I don’t really know what will happen.”

“I know.” I wrap the floss around my index finger like a ring and watch the blood shift. The tip of my finger turns waxy and purple.

“What would I do without you?” she says, and I get the floss around my wrist this time.

“Same thing,” I say as my hand darkens.

When I go to bed I think of Frieda but after a while I get bored. I don’t know what Frieda’s like. Janie, who I do know, is asleep. All her pill bottles are locked up in the trunk, and I own the key. It’ll take her a while this time to find where I hid the key; I’m getting better and better at stumping her. Last month it was floating in the bag of walnuts, and it would’ve taken a long time for her to find it except I forgot that she loves walnuts. Now we both hate them; Janie because of the taste in her mouth, me because when I found her, they were scattered all over the floor surrounding her and for a second I actually thought they were tiny shriveled lungs with all the air sucked out of them.

This time, the key is hidden under the bathroom counter. Where the lip of the counter rises above the floor? I have taped it. You only notice if you’re lying flat down on the bathroom rug, relaxing, or if you’re running your hand along the rim. So this round should take at least a few months. One of these days, I’ll just do my duty and make a scene and dump all the pills down the toilet like I’m supposed to and Janie will cry and cry and then find herself a new boyfriend.

Until then, it’s our best time together. She plays with my hair. She sits on the sofa in the slanted light with her guitar and sings songs with my name in them that she makes up on the spot. When she was six, she won that beauty contest talent competition by singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking” with a pretend guitar slung around her shoulder and a dance routine. All the adults cheered as she stomped about in her country-western outfit. All the other kids started crying backstage when they heard the thunderous applause. We still have the trophy; it’s locked inside the trunk with the pills tucked inside the cup part like a sordid story in a celebrity magazine at the airport. The boots she wore are in there too; they’re really little, made of thin yellow leather with fringe on top and a silver badge on the side. I didn’t have anything special to add, but just to be fair, I put my report cards from junior high school in the trunk too. I got all As. I have always been a good student.