Tim Sandlin: Social Blunders

I tried holding my hands, casually, so they covered me without it appearing that I was covering myself on purpose.

Chet lifted his face to look straight into my eyes. “I know you’ll do Pete right by your eulogy.”

Behind my back, the toilet flushed. The commode stall door opened and closed and Toinette said, “Can I tag along when you go to cut the Christmas tree?”

My manhood disappeared in a black forest of pubic hair.

“Looking at a woman as an object you can give pleasure to is just as bogus as looking at a woman as an object that can give pleasure to you. It’s still looking at the woman as an object.” Maurey downshifted on a grade, then hit the flats and punched the gears back into fourth. The woman was fearless in four-wheel drive. Ice meant nothing.

“But it makes me feel worthwhile when I save a woman.”

She rammed back into third for a corner. “You can’t save a woman by giving her an orgasm.”

Words to live by. “Even if she isn’t getting them in her normal life?”

“Right. Have you slept with this Gilia girl?”

“Of course not.”

“What ‘of course not’? You’ve slept with half the heifers in the Confederacy. It shouldn’t be unreasonable to ask if you’ve slept with someone you actually like.”

“Gilia’s a friend.”

“Since when are friends off limits?”

I looked out at the red willow wands sprouting from the snow crust and tried to come up with an explanation. “Friendship love is real; romantic love is conditional—don’t sleep with anyone else, don’t be a constant drunk, get a job, don’t commit social blunders in front of my parents, love me back—and romantic lovers are based on chemical attraction; to me that isn’t very important compared to real love.”

Maurey ripped back into fourth and shot around a snow plow. She said, “I can see now why your wife left you.”

“Me too.”

Far to the south, the sun was setting with all the power of a weak flashlight beam. The dash clock said 4:30 and I remembered from some book that this was the shortest day of the year. Across the valley, green lights flickered on as an outline for the runway. I said a small prayer to Whomever to bring my daughter safely out of the sky.

“Do you think it’s possible for people to change?” I asked.

Maurey glanced at me, then back at the road. In the soft pink light of the alpenglow her face was the same as I pictured it from twenty years past, when we were lovers.

“I did,” she said.

“But you had alcohol you could quit. People with concrete problems like alcoholism or obesity or an abusive husband can solve the problem and, ultimately, change themselves. What about us poor stooges who are vaguely miserable, but don’t have any real monsters to battle against?”

Maurey downshifted and hit the blinker behind a line of cars turning into the airport. “Everybody’s vaguely miserable sometimes,” she said, “and most people are vaguely miserable most of the time. The trick is to scrap your way from the most-of-the-time to the some-of-the-time category.”

“How?”

She ticked off on her fingers. “True love, kids, mountains, exercise, and work you think matters. If none of that does it, I’d consider antidepressants.”

Maurey flashed on her brights and pulled to within a car’s length of a new Ford pickup, seemingly intent on blinding its driver. She said, “Speaking of vaguely miserable, that’s Dothan ahead of us.”

I peered at the spotlessly clean truck with the bumper sticker I still didn’t get. “You think Dothan’s miserable?”

“Deep down inside, Dothan can’t stand himself.”

“He hides it well.”

“None of the valley women will touch him with a stick. Dot says he’s flying in some bimbo from Denver whose husband is in chemotherapy. Even you never sank that low.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

Dothan Talbot beat me up in the seventh grade. He rubbed my face in the snow and twisted my arm around my back, then he became Maurey’s boyfriend after I had already impregnated her. He knew I had impregnated her and I knew he was touching her with his grubby fingers, so it was only natural for us to evolve into lifelong enemies. Plus, Dothan was, and still is, a Class A jerk. He’d have been in the Mafia if he had come from a town of over five hundred people. As it is, he sells real estate.

I ran into him in the airport bathroom. Shannon’s plane was late, like they all are in winter here, and I was nervous about seeing her. Up until then, I’d been fairly numb over what a mess I’d made of life, but now with Shannon’s arrival I was going to have to start feeling again, and I wasn’t sure I was ready.

When I’m nervous I need to pee every five minutes, so I left Maurey in the terminal and went to the bathroom, where I found Dothan standing in front of a mirror, combing Brylcreem into his hair. He’s worn his hair the same way for as long as I’ve known him, which means he must have greased out ten thousand pillows since junior high.

He glanced at me in the mirror and grinned the way people will when they hate your guts. “Hello, Callahan.”

“Yeah, right.” I needed to go pretty bad but I wasn’t about to pull out my pecker in front of Dothan. Standing in the middle of the room doing nothing felt stupid. The only alternative was washing my hands at the sink next to him.

“Still Maurey’s puppy, I see,” Dothan said.

It was one of those water-saving sinks where you push a button to get water but the moment you let go of the button a spring or something pops it back up and the water flow stops. This works fine if only one hand is dirty.

“You know the whole town laughs at you behind your back,” Dothan said.

I pushed the button with my right hand and squeezed soap from the dispenser with my left. Dothan’s primping style also took two hands—one for combing and one for patting grease.

He said, “I’m telling you as a favor. No one else in the valley will tell you the truth but I can give it to you straight. They all know you slipped the meat to Maurey once twenty years ago and you’ve been following her around sniffing her panties and being pitiful ever since.”

I lathered my hands.

Dothan stared at me in the mirror. “Maurey’ll never let you have sloppy seconds. Everyone knows she takes your money and doesn’t give shit back.”

I held the button with my left hand and rinsed the right, then switched off the other way.

“If I paid for her queer brother’s funeral, I’d at least get a blow job,” Dothan said.

Holding my hands up, I walked to the hot-air dryer and punched it on with my elbow. Over the whir of blowing air, I said, “Dothan, you’re never going to have a friend in your whole life.”

Dothan laughed heartily as he headed for the door. Halfway through, he turned back and said, “Maurey’s laughing at you, son. Just like me and everybody else.”

Dothan’s bimbo was first off the plane and across the runway. She had zit-red hair with black roots and wore a yellow halter thing and tight pants that were totally inappropriate for winter. The two of them kissed and rubbed against each other in a disgusting public display of affection made all the more poignant by the fact her husband was off in a hospital somewhere with cancer.

“Are we friends?” I asked Maurey.

She was watching Dothan and the tramp. “Of course we’re friends.”

“You aren’t laughing at me behind my back?”

Maurey touched my arm. “You’ve been listening to Dothan again. When are you going to learn he’s nothing but a dildo with ears.”

“You’re right.”

“There she is.”