Tom Mendicino - Probation

“Yes.”

When I remember to fill the prescription.

He flipped through my record. My hated medical record. He tapped the pages with the tip of his very expensive pen.

“Well…we adjusted the doses six weeks ago.”

“It makes me groggy.”

“Are you sleeping well?”

“Like a baby.”

Just like a baby. Waking up two, three, times a night. Thrashing on the mattress. “If we don’t see some improvement soon, I want to try a different class of antidepressants.”

Whatever you say, Doctor.

Steve’s face was puffy and his eyes watery when he answered the door Saturday night. His forehead was clammy and warm. He’d told me to wear a coat and tie. He was wearing a suit. A knubby gray worsted with too few natural fibers. His shoes were poorly made and warped from many seasons of puddles. His outfit made me want to protect him. I was sure I loved him.

It was an engagement party for one of his colleagues. Cocktails and a buffet supper at the chief resident’s new town house. There was one other obvious gay there, a nurse from the hospital, the only guest who arrived alone. It was obvious Steve had told his friends about me, apparent that he had spoken of me with affection. They sized me up, seeing how I would fit in their group. Steve was quiet, smiling but not very animated. I must have embarrassed him. He stayed on the sofa, nursing a beer. I made eye contact with him but no sparks flew. I felt out of place. The outsider. An intruder making his one and only appearance. I walked over to the sofa and sat at his feet. His dress socks were too short and a band of white skin peeked beneath his cuffs. He touched me on the head. He took my hand and our fingers intertwined. I berated myself for being so insecure.

He persevered through the evening. We were among the last to leave. Soon I would have my arms around him and feel his deep breaths against my chest. But in the parking lot of his apartment building, he turned sheepishly, red-eyed and sweaty, and asked sweetly if I minded if he went upstairs alone tonight. I spoke without thinking, blurting out we didn’t need to do anything. He was gentle, but firm. He needed to sleep this off. He couldn’t risk missing work. Of course, I said, back in control. He asked if I was free tomorrow night. Can’t, I said, my sister’s in town for a funeral and I have a family dinner to attend. Maybe we can meet at the Carousel afterward, he suggested. Yeah, maybe, I said. He called in the morning to tell me he was feeling great. He would be at the bar with a friend after his shift. Who? The potbellied nurse from the party?

The family dinner was a tense little pas de deux, Gina and me, our mother having begged off with the excuse that she didn’t want to miss that new Patty Duke movie on the Hallmark Hall of Fame. But my sister and I knew it was an excuse to force us to spend time together alone. Decisions loom in the near future that we will need to agree on; best to get it settled now at a nice, quiet dinner at the golf club when we’re both calm and rational. No one but my mother would ever consider the possibility that her two children might act calmly and rationally.

“I just can’t get over Randall Jarvis,” Regina announced, pushing the iceberg lettuce through a sludge of bright orange salad dressing. “You know, Andy, we didn’t have to come to this shithole if she wanted to stay home and watch television.”

My sister’s life in Florida has made her contemptuous of the frayed provincial charms of Gastonia country club dining.

“Maybe you would have preferred the Waffle House?”

“I don’t know how you can live here. I’d lose my goddamn mind.”

Then get on the next fucking plane back to Boca Raton. Go back to fucking paradise. Tomorrow morning you can jump in the Benz and drive over to the strip mall for a quick Botox injection before you meet up with some bony, bleached, tanned bitch for a Caesar salad at the Palm, flaunting your new tennis bracelet and pretending your hound-dog husband fucks you more than once a year on your anniversary. Your goddamn cell phone will ring and you’ll say you need to race back to the office for a big closing when you’ve actually been summoned to your oldest son’s middle school because security found marijuana in his locker. And don’t forget to stop at the pharmacy on the way home because you need a refill of your Ativan and you won’t be able to fall asleep without it since the bastard called to tell you he won’t be home until after midnight again.

But I wasn’t in the mood to be kind and said something I knew would inflict far more damage than a full-frontal assault on her life.

“Well, I won’t have to live here much longer.”

She dropped her head and whimpered quietly.

“Gina,” I said, feeling like a complete shit and reaching across the table for her hand.

I was startled by how soft and vulnerable she looked when her eyes were wet with tears. For a brief moment she was the lovely little doe she’d been not so very long ago, the girl who strangers stopped in restaurants and airport terminals, remarking on her resemblance to Princess Diana. But she quickly composed herself, her face once again the tense mask she’s worn these past few years.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “You don’t need me dumping on you. I can’t believe how much this Randall Jarvis thing has upset me. I wish you were going to the funeral with me, but I know you didn’t like him.”

How could I have disliked Randall Jarvis when I’d seen him only once since her wedding, and then only briefly, in the incontinence aisle of Walgreens several months ago, so gaunt and sallow I didn’t recognize him when he called my name. I’d hemmed and hawed, promising to call, knowing that I wouldn’t since the last thing I wanted to do at this sorry juncture of my life was relive old times with a man who’d obviously come home to die.

“ Regina, that’s not fair. What do you think that fucking asshole boss of mine would say if I asked for more time off? He’d have fired me already if he wasn’t afraid I’d sue Shelton/Murray because it wouldn’t give me my family medical leave. Thank you, Bill Clinton.”

Actually, it might have been worth getting fired to see the look on the Born Again National Sales Manager’s face if I had cancelled my appointment with a VIP prospect in Connecticut so I could attend the funeral of a flamboyant fashion designer now known as Randy Sainte-Villaneuve, a man who had once danced with supermodels in the pages of People.

“Besides, he was your friend anyway,” I said.

“That’s not true,” she insisted, insulted by my casual rewrite of Nocera family history. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how close the three of us were.”

You bet your ass I’ve forgotten. I wouldn’t admit it under the pain of death. Not a bit of it. Not that he was “Barbie,” sloe-eyed, his face all cut glass angles and deep shadows, and she was “Midge,” the “best friend,” a natural born sidekick in corrective shoes with a half-moon pee stain on the seat of her pants. They spent days, weeks, entire summers, playing out his extravagant fantasies of Hollywood movie sets and European castles with her Barbie collection, all resplendent in outfits designed and stitched by a precocious little boy that were far more beautiful and elegant than the cheap costumes packaged by Mattel. And me? I was “Ken,” the man in the henhouse, sometimes fussed and fought over by the “women” in my life, other times so infuriated at being excluded from their nasty secrets that I tore up the bridal gown Randall had spent a week sewing for Redhead Ponytail Barbie and etched fuck and me into Blonde Bubble Cut Barbie’s tits with a ballpoint pen.

“I’ll never understand why you turned against him,” she sighed. “He was always such a sweet boy who loved you so much.”