13thWR

GIRL'S NIGHT OUT / by Patti K. See

She carries a rosary in her purse next to her coral lipstick because her mother did, though she doesn't remember which holiday brought her to church last. She is a worker bee who helps you buy beads for your son's science project, one whose purpose is to find exactly what you need. You know the type. She says "Hey" when you walk into a store, and you want to believe she knows your type too. Her name is Marjorie or Marlyce or Mona, a spinster name that hangs on her loosely like a borrowed funeral coat, a name for slippered aunts, a name she hated until a boy said it softly in her ear. She is much older or younger than she looks. She works a high school job that went full-time the fall her boyfriend left for college. Later she was promoted to assistant manager, a gold bar on her blue smock at twenty. She met her husband at the bar down the street. Happy hour. It's ironic now. Mona told me once that the only time she touches herself is when she's home alone whatever night her husband plays recreational league basketball or flag football. She told our other friend Dawne that it's a dart league. Part of her charm is making everything in her life tackier than it is. When all of us were sixteen we took a Cosmopolitan sex test. One of the questions asked "How many times a week do you masturbate?" "Is this for men?" Dawne said. We checked the sub-title of the test. Women age 18 to 25.

"EEEEWWWW," Dawne screamed, a bad Lucy Ricardo impersonation.

"No way," I said.

"Why?" Dawne said, tossing the magazine, "would a girl want to do that?" Mona explained it to us. Still, masturbation was something adolescent boys did, chicken-hatted older brothers in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, college students with scrunched up eyes, old men without partners or whose partners had sagged into hefty bags of cottage cheese. It was not a discovery of sexuality. We heard the stories: boys with hairy palms, pimples, insanity. Even in our ignorance, the consequences for girls were unimaginable. Dawne and I worried about Mona. Like many Catholic girls, the mechanics of our bodies were as mysterious as stigmata. I didn't believe arousal could be more than a slow dancing, heartbeat in my throat, Love's Baby Soft on my neck, tingle in the pit of my stomach. Mona was the first person who taught me what a ping was-a flutter spot she felt since she was a girl, one that moved up through her stomach as she waited on the front steps for her date or thought of his lips afterward, alone in her canopy bed. She told me that when he was the right boy, she felt a ping all the way up to her breasts, an inside jagged line that her husband taught her to get at from the outside. Now I imagine her lying in her marriage bed in front of her mirrored closet doors, all twenty feet of them distort her. She's never bigger than she is then, eyes-wide, inside big with nowhere to go. Sometimes she wants to laugh at her figure, laugh till the doors shatter. Mona still goes out once a weekend a month with the friend we've known since first grade -- Dawne with an e, how she has always introduced herself, thirteen years coming to this bar. It starts the same, one calls the other on a Saturday afternoon, says, "Tonight." They end up around nine turning their lives into news for each other, two women who can still make a barstool feel like a throne. They often invite me, and tonight my husband encourages me to get out of the house, reminds me that my friends and I have known each other through pigtails and training bras and virginity, husbands and babies and some gray hair. We sit at the horseshoe bar-Dawne, Tessa, Mona. Dawne drinks imported beer, stuff that's dark as root beer and just as foamy, in her attempt to look classy or simply to feel like she's treating herself. Mona and I drink wine, and I feel the first glasses going down and the warmth they bring. At our age, only our necks still blush, a mood ring of flesh when we are drunk or nervous or aroused. My alive spot is how I think of it, a pinkness that shoots through me and shows on my skin like a spilled liquid spreading across my throat and sometimes even my collarbones. I see it on Mona only when we drink together. A flash of flesh on otherwise pallid skin. Mona says to me, "Wouldn't you like to kiss a boy again?" Dawne and I look at each other and back to Mona.

"No," I say.

Mona looks to Dawne, who shakes her head. "Just once, softly and sweetly on the mouth?" she says. I think of Blanche DuBois, but no one would get the allusion. Mona goes on, "Someone with bangs and a blank face?" Dawne and I shake our heads again. I wonder what makes Mona think she can kiss a 21-year-old-boy. Someone she saw here before? Someone she met at the drugstore? He might be an engineer or an accountant or an assembly-line worker, but he's read the Oprah-picked book she's reading, and she thinks she might be able to like him. I know this kind of wanting for what you don't have, one that makes the familiar bearable.

I saw a prospect for Mona, a baby-faced man who came in alone. He's drinking vodka and tomato juice, something exotic for this place. Dawne motions him down the bar to us, and she drapes her arm around his shoulder. For a moment I think she's read my mind, found someone for Mona. Dawne says, "Guess who babysat this babe when she was twelve?" She nods as a clue to Mona and me, as if we'd guess anyone but her. I can almost remember him, but I keep thinking disposable or cloth, and all I remember is that the whole world has started calling me "Ma'am." He has the whitest teeth I've ever seen. Mona flirts a bit, but she's out of practice and doesn't seem to notice or care. Her hand flutters to her throat. After depositing this young man with us, Dawne works her way around the bar like she always does after seeing a brother or a cousin of a guy she dated or wanted to. With Dawne I often feel like she's Diana Ross and Mona and I are her Supremes. She comes out with us to have a chorus, a backdrop. Mona and I are alone with the boy, though over the music, I can't hear anything he says. He moves closer to Mona and blames the jukebox. I watch them and try to listen. Mona tells him her theories about women and men, the inside and outside of it. Sex is just exercise, I hear once. Sex is love. I imagine this is what she thinks about when she stocks shelves, ideas she's picked up from years of innumerable customers, three bosses, two husbands, and, of course, talk shows. With this boy, she holds back parts that are abstract until she gets to them-how to know a man's a scoundrel and what's really wrong with America. After four glasses of wine, I'm ready to reflect on this myself, nearly offer my own ideas. But Mona is entertaining me, so I listen. She promises him truth and light for next time-what happens when two strangers kiss in a bar like this and how she learned this lesson. I have to laugh to myself. She's good. She knows she'll never see him again. I know she learned this trick from her mother: always leave them wanting more.

Dawne watches from the other end of the bar, singing a solo to a man in a fringed leather jacket. I give her a look. Come back. When the boy gets up to leave Mona shakes his hand, a firm one like at the end of an interview for a job she thinks she wants, but driving home she knows she doesn't. I wave to him as he walks away. I move my stool closer and say, "You're still looking, aren't you?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Mona snaps. We used to be close, which means I still give myself permission to ask her questions like this. My last year of college I drove home once a month to drop by her apartment when her daughter was a baby, timed my visits so I'd get there just as her husband was leaving for his second shift factory job. I knew how much she needed me then, even if she'd never say so. I say, "Still looking for the one. For someone. Anyone who'll fill you up."

"I don't know what you're talking about. You turn everything into something more than it is." I know she used to like that about me, and I've drunk enough wine to take a chance.

"Okay," I say. "How about this. Even as this young man was leaving, you considered all of the ways this could turn out different. Maybe you could have touched his leg like he touched yours and tell him you like him, hokey and straight to the point. Maybe you could tell him things about yourself." I remember a story Mona told me years ago. "That you have Catholic school slacks hidden in the back of your closet that you try on each birthday to remind you who you are. That you use the word slacks." I drag it out like Sister Mary Simon used to, and Mona laughs.

I add my own details. "Maybe you'd tell him that just last week you were brushing your teeth and noticed lines around your lips that don't go away even when your face is slack. That you still dance in front of your full-length mirror to 'Tupelo Honey.' That you've never tasted clams or beluga caviar or vodka straight out of a bottle, and he'll never taste you." I'm on a roll, and Mona is still laughing. "But knowing he wanted to, his white teeth grinding above your dark muff you trim to look like you've got a fifteen-year-old's patch, is enough." I say the last piece dramatically, part Dorothy Parker, part Bob Dylan. "That the edge is where the pleasure is." Mona laughs. "Is that a poem or something?"

I'm drunk. "No, honey," I say, all Dorothy Parker this time. "It's my life." She laughs harder. Dawne slides onto the boy's stool. "What did I miss?" Mona and I shrug our shoulders. "Why you really seeing a counselor?" Mona asks, a diversion. Dawne says, "For my head. Why else?" They speak to each other's reflection behind the bottles. "I just gotta clean out my attic," Dawne says. "That's all." Mona puts her lips to a glass of wine the boy ordered for her. Even at closing time we're still not ready to give up the night, so Dawne finds a house party on the way home. I glance at my watch and think, I'm doing it, something as hackneyed as being conscious of my own breath at 3 a.m. I don't stay out this late anymore and that in itself makes this an adventure, watching a kitchen full of small town barflies catch their second wind. Mona sits at the dining room table trying to light her cigarette when some guy tells her he's her spirit guide. He tells her that whenever she needs him, to call on him with her spirit, and he'll be there. He's older than her father would have been. She nods, because she doesn't know what else to do. We've all seen him around, on and off for years. He called Mona "Little lady" once just like John Wayne. The bartenders call him "Chief." His name is Bill or Bob, he knows my husband. You can trust a guy named Bob, I nearly say. He puts his hand on Mona's head, an absolution, and mumbles, "Two ears with which to hear. . . one mouth to speak . . .use your mouth, my child." Some northern Wisconsin pick-up line we'll laugh about later, but right now Mona's face says she almost believes. I haven't seen this expression on her since we were kids.

"Sweat lodge," Dawne says. She reaches for the Indian's hand. Mona's lips purse strangely, as if she is relieved that someone else sees him. "Take me to your sweat lodge and help me find myself," Dawne says. She lays one finger on his silver braid. He doesn't know how serious she is, maybe only I do or ever will. "That's not quite the way it works," the Indian says. He is kind but perhaps bored with dispelling myths.

"Just because we're Caucasian," Mona says out of her haze and the side of her mouth, the way she does when she's drunk or sarcastic and now she's both. Her tone surprises me. He says slowly in Mona's direction, "Just because that's not the way it works. She has to believe like you do." Dawne looks from the Indian to me, her lips drooping, her eyes squinting into focus, as if I have some magic trick for finding a spirit guide or for finding myself. I don't want to be here anymore, watching Mona picked out of a crowd, Dawne on the edge of pathetic. I like to watch the people, anyone out this late has to be looking for something. I want us all to be anonymous as beer. An hour or so from now Mona will curl to her husband in bed as if she's just rolling over. She'll feel the fit his folds make with hers, a wife after two thousand nights. Dawne will sit in front of her 102 channel-TV and pass out in her recliner, where Todd or her daughters will find her in the morning. I will sit on my porch and drink one last beer alone and after a night as a Supreme, I'll almost feel normal or at least content with my familiar, dull life. But we all stay here, half-feeling, half-knowing something we've never been able to name. Like the séances we held in a basement when we were twelve and each of us took turns believing one of us felt someone brush against her hair, Marilyn Monroe or Elvis or Jesus or just a guardian angel. Days later I couldn't recall if it was Mona or Dawne or me who felt a presence, and for days afterward everything was important or seemed it. Then at thirteen, we became brave enough to light candles on a bathroom vanity, each take a turn saying Bloody Mary three times into her own reflection. I don't know what we expected anymore, if it wasn't the Virgin's or a witch's face. Would our nubs turn back to nothing, would the lines in our faces never appear? I can't tell either of them, can't tell anyone, I still think I saw, I felt something then, because if I didn't I'd be a fool.