Leopoldine Core - When Watched - Stories

Frances had seen the man approach her car. She stood outside the gas station with a miserable look of concentration, holding her dim green travel mug and a bag of pretzel sticks. Frances imagined confronting him. Of course he would think she was Peanut’s mother, or maybe her father. Probably he would stare stupidly, trying to decide which. Frances was continually challenged to educate those who oppressed her, to talk openly about her genitals, and because of this she often resisted the urge to confront them at all. Frances found it ludicrous that she be perceived as a parent. She was no kind of parent and never had been. Harrison Ford really is a father, she thought. Possibly even a grandfather, but he will never be called this. In quiet agony, she sipped her coffee and considered man’s eternal separateness from progeny.

Once inside the car, Frances tore open her bag of pretzels and ate several sticks, stealing glances at Peanut, her little foreboding face.

“What did that guy say to you?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“I saw him. He was standing by the window.” She ate another pretzel.

“He just stared. We didn’t talk.” Peanut said, deliberately aloof. “He had a Bush/Cheney ’04 bumper sticker on his truck.”

“It really seemed like he was talking to you.”

“Well he wasn’t.”

The sun was almost gone and this made them both feel worse. Frances started the car and looked over at Peanut as they peeled out. “You have crumbs all over your shirt,” she said.

“Look at yourself.”

• • •

In Marietta they checked into a Best Western hotel, which was run by a bunch of smiling Christians.

“So, two single beds?” the blonde woman behind the counter asked. She wore a hideous white button-down blouse with a pink chest pocket.

“No, one king,” said Frances.

“It’s the same price for two singles,” the woman said firmly, still smiling, determined to believe the two were poor and not perverted.

“One king,” Frances repeated and the woman’s face changed. She was the sort of idiot whose thoughts may as well have boomed from a speaker on her forehead. Peanut and Frances watched her think about them.

The woman stared in amazement. “Alright then,” she said, collecting herself, and tensely typed something into her computer. She put a plastic card on the counter and pointed vaguely. “Up the stairs on your right.”

Frances wanted to smile. This is the great thing about capitalism, she thought. Christians selling queers a bed. Nothing in the world exists but profit.

They dropped their bags off and went across the street to Outback Steakhouse. Peanut ordered a baked potato with sour cream and bacon bits. Frances ordered a full steak dinner. She had always been able to eat heartily under stress and Peanut found this unattractive, too warlike.

Peanut slouched, letting her long brown hair fall over one eye. Lewd, tawny light lit the exposed half of her face. “So you’re not going to talk to me?” she asked, pissed to be the first to speak.

“You aren’t saying anything either,” Frances said impassively.

“Well, I don’t know what to say to you when you act like this.”

“What, like mean?”

“More like heartless. Like a piece of statuary.” Peanut stared at Frances. “It’s like you’re autistic.”

Frances smiled like a wolf. “Do you know what that means? To be autistic?”

“Of course I do. Don’t quiz me.”

“Just tell me what you think it means.”

“It means someone who can, you know, rattle off all the prime numbers, but not, like, say hello.”

Frances chewed her steak and swallowed. “I’m like that?”

“Yeah.”

Frances was surprised by how much this hurt her feelings. She continued to eat and wanted to cry.

“I just wish you would speak,” said Peanut. “You could say anything.”

“No,” Frances snapped. She set her fork and knife down. “You want me to say something specific . You want to have a conversation where you write both sides, like a play.”

Peanut looked at her potato and wanted to shriek. It was true that she often staged conversations with the hope of eliciting particular responses from Frances, but for this she felt no remorse. It seemed to Peanut that Frances didn’t know how to talk to people. She could be unduly frank, accidentally mean. She needed help.

• • •

On the table in their hotel room there were cheap butter cookies in a plastic wrapper. Beside them a card read, To Our Guests: Because this hotel is a human institution to serve people, and not solely a money-making organization, we hope that the peace of Jesus Christ will rest on you while you are under our roof.

“You believe this shit,” Frances muttered. On the card she wrote: This is actually really offensive to Jews and Muslims, then sat in a maroon chair and ate both cookies.

Peanut was too tired to maintain her cold exterior. She turned on the television and took off all her clothes, then poured herself stomach-down into bed.

Frances apologized from the maroon chair, though she still didn’t know entirely what for. She walked to the bed and stood there.

White sheets covered Peanut’s ass and legs. Blue TV light blinked on her back. She peered over one shoulder to see Frances’s expression and then put her face back on the pillow.

Frances sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her head and back carefully, as if she were touching a terminally ill animal. Peanut’s mouth fell open. She let out a little groan, loving to be touched this way, like she was sick and precious. She cried in a small way that soon opened into a breathy sob.

Peanut was flipped over and explored. She continued to cry and it felt fantastic. Between gasps she explained that the last few hours had been lonely. “And you should have called me back in San Francisco.”

Frances nodded sincerely. She was moved to see Peanut cry.

Peanut wiped her face with her fist and sat up, relieved enough to notice how uncomfortable she was. “I hate a tucked sheet,” she said and began tugging the sheets loose.

“I like it tucked.”

“I like one leg out.”

“Well, you’ll like menopause then. That’s all it is. One leg out all the time.”

• • •

Later the two lay naked in bed, idly touching each other’s bodies, lights out.

“You sound like you’re crying when you come,” said Peanut.

“That’s so embarrassing.”

“No, I like it. It actually sounds somewhere between crying and laughing.”

“You sound like a puppy being rolled off a cliff.”

“No I don’t,” Peanut laughed.

“You do. And your back tenses. It has this great indent like an ass or a peach. A long peach.” Frances held Peanut’s jaw. “Please spend the rest of my life with me.”

“You mean our life. Spend the rest of our lives together.”

“No, my life. I mean, yours will go on after mine,” she said in an oddly casual way, as if she was talking about someone else’s death.

“You don’t know that,” Peanut said and a restrained sob entered her voice. “I mean, there’s no way of knowing that.”

“It’s easy to assume.”

“I could become very sick. Maybe I’m sick right now and it’s invisible for the moment.”

“I bet you aren’t.”

“Or what about that volcano? It could cause a global holocaust.” Peanut took a breath. “I think about you dying all the time and it feels so stupid. I mean, I’m basically stunned the world isn’t over. It could end any day. So why, you know, dwell on any moment beyond this one?” She made the monstrous near smile of someone about to cry, and then squashed the expression on Frances’s shoulder. Peanut stayed there for a moment and then withdrew her face with a great breath. “When people make plans to, you know, meet someone their own age and get married and have a baby and then, I don’t know, have some synchronized death, it just seems like this denial of what we know to be true about life. That it ends. And we can never know when.”