Mourning Glory (2 page)

Also that morning, she had learned that her bank balance,
hovering somewhere around a paltry eight-hundred dollars, was frozen, lost in
computer hell, and she was getting turn-off notices from the telephone and
power companies. Taunting her further, she had painfully banged her big toe
kicking the ATM machine, which had swallowed her bank card after the third try.

The good news, a highly exaggerated rendition, was that she
had just put the monthly car payment for her three-year-old, bottom-of-the-line
Volkswagen into the mail, which meant that she had merely one year to go before
she owned outright what was destined at that time to be a pile of junk. She had
also paid down just enough of her Visa and Master cards to restore her credit,
a mixed blessing.

But these were mere details, which ignored the total State
of the Union of her life, which was abysmal, not to mention the harsh fact of
marching time. Her thirty-ninth birthday was just three months away, an event
that promised a day of unrelenting self-pity.

She hated birthdays. Her thirty-fourth, the day she threw
Jason out from her bed and board, was supposed to mark a new beginning. It did;
the beginning of another phase of the downward spiral. On the horizon, on the
cusp of her fortieth year, was yet another harsh reality, the onset of early
menopause (she was sure of that) and a future of emotional and financial
insecurity.

She'd light the birthday candle in a Twinkie and make a wish
for some imagined act of deliverance to lift her out of her marginal existence.
After all, she could never allow herself to abandon hope of some miraculous
windfall.

"What I meant was," Grace said in a desperate
effort to assuage the frowning scarecrow in her pink Armani silk pants outfit
and diamond-studded clawlike fingers on the other side of the counter,
"...that you should lead with your best shot. Play to your strength."
It was a thought that barely made sense to her, but somehow, under the circumstances,
it seemed appropriate.

"You mean emphasizing my wrinkles and thereby
illustrating my character, right? How well I lived my life, right?" Mrs.
Milton-hyphen-something said.

"Exactly," Grace said hopefully. "Present to
the world an honest look."

"I don't need you for an honest look, lady. I see it
every morning in the mirror. What I need you for is to find me a dishonest
look, which means hiding my wrinkles."

"I've already tried the best we have to offer,"
Grace said. "They're too..." She was tempted to say "too fucking
deep." Instead she added: "...well-established."

"Well-established. Good. I like that. Cosmetics were
invented to soften and hide them, to make you look better, not worse. To do it
right takes talent," the woman sneered sarcastically. "In your case,
the talent is missing."

"Perhaps one of my colleagues..."

"Colleagues, you call them. That's a good one. Clerks,
you mean."

Grace failed to find either the humor or decency in this
confrontation with a seventy-plus gnome who had wandered in from creamy Palm
Beach's Worth Avenue determined to either find youth in a magic vial or,
barring that, validate her alleged superiority by kicking the most accessible
and vulnerable unfortunate in her range of motion, which was her, Grace
Sorentino, the failed daughter of the barber Carmine and the silent,
fanatically devout Mama Rosa, the Sicilian papal groupie from
"Ballimer," Maryland.

"You people just don't know what you're doing,"
the woman said, frowning at her feral image in the mirror.

"It's in the eye of the beholder," Grace said,
the pasted smile faltering.

"What is that supposed to mean?" the woman
snapped, her face frozen, her eyes still searching for the magic light.

"It means," Grace said, sucking in a deep breath,
determined to show a patient, pleasant visage, "that you might be noticing
things that others would overlook. We normally don't observe each other with
reading glasses."

The woman shook her head in exasperation and looked around
the store, filled now with the army of mostly middle-aged bottle blondes with
considerable disposable income, relentlessly avoiding the skin's mortal enemy,
the ultraviolet ray.

"Do you always insult your customers?" the woman
asked. "I detest salesgirls with an attitude."

"I hadn't meant to be..."

"Hadn't meant. Hadn't meant. People do atrocious
things and then retreat into hadn't-meants," the woman snickered. Beneath
her bleached-white look, Grace could detect the hot flush of anger.

Whoa there, Sorentino, Grace cautioned herself, valiantly
holding her pasted smile, although her facial muscles were beginning to hurt
with the effort.

"I'm sorry," Grace whispered. "There's just
so much that can be done with makeup."

"Are you calling me an old crone?" the woman
snapped.

"Old is a state of mind," Grace said.

"And crone?"

"You're putting words in my mouth," Grace said,
feeling her smile collapse.

The woman's eyes blazed with anger.

"Do you know how much money I spend at Saks?" the
woman said. The anger had forced her face to express itself. Nests of wrinkles
emerged everywhere. Her skin seemed prunelike.

"I'm not privy to such information," Grace said.

"You needn't be sarcastic," the woman said.

At that point, the woman stood up from the high stool in
which she had been sitting, removed her glasses, shook her head and sneered.

"I can't let this arrogance pass," she muttered,
turning abruptly and moving through the crowd.

"I need this job, you old cunt," Grace muttered,
wondering if anyone had observed the confrontation. She had no idea what she
had said to tick off the woman. Not that words were necessary to convey the
truth of the encounter. The woman was a miserable, unhappy, frustrated bitch,
determined to cause pain. Grace had been as good a target as any. Wrong place,
wrong time, she sighed, preparing herself to be figuratively taken out and
shot.

She looked through the plate glass at Worth Avenue, that
fantasyland of upper-crust consumerism glistening in the late morning sun. How
had she wound up here, one of the minions to the wealthy? Jason, her unmourned
departed ex, had brought her and Jackie to West Palm Beach to pursue yet
another of his irrational certainties, another franchise to oblivion. And so
they had remained, left to rot in the tropics, along with the coconuts and
seagull droppings.

She had managed to make a marginal living for her and
Jackie, mostly at retailing, where she could hustle for commissions and use her
personality and good looks to sell.

Unfortunately, this modest selling talent was not effective
enough to secure another relationship with a man. She hadn't exactly been a
passionate seeker. In this age of the independent woman such yearnings were
supposed to be an insult to her gender and, for a time, she had tried to live
by that caveat. It was not an attitude that had contributed to her happiness.

The fact was, she had concluded, that most people come in
pairs. Wasn't that the immutable law of nature, proof positive being the
anatomical construct of the human body, however it had to be rearranged to
accommodate same-sex copulation. It was a subject considered every time she
reached for the vibrating dildo she kept hidden in the bottom drawer under her
heavy northern clothes.

But after five years, with the looming realization that
Jackie would be leaving home, hopefully, for college, she had opened herself up
to the possibility of another permanent round with a male of the species. The
fact was that she hated the idea of preening and detested the various routines
of flirtation, the small talk, the dating and mating rituals.

She had made a number of forays into that world, forcing
herself to be open to such experiences. She considered herself a lusty woman,
and in her years with Jason, especially the early ones, there was a cornucopia
of sex.

Trying to be brutally honest on such an intimate subject,
she considered herself, at least from a mechanical point of view, a reasonably
efficient lay. Not that she had exposed herself to any recent reviews on that
subject. Certainly not lately. Jason hadn't voiced many complaints on her
performance in that department, although its frequency had diminished
considerably over the fifteen years of their marriage. He had simply lost
interest.

She concluded finally that the thing she dreaded most was
the initial phases of the mating game, the obligatory résumé, the verbal
fencing, the various elements of the seduction scenario, the anxiety of—there
was no other satisfactory and honest way to describe it—the first fuck, and all
initial side issues and embarrassments, the adjustment to the whole range of
this new partner's sensory activities, his odors, the sound of his breathing,
his body temperature, the observation and necessary inventory of his body
parts, the touch of his flesh. And her own exposure to such inspection by him.

Such obligatory rituals inhibited promiscuity at her age,
which was, she supposed, a blessing and certainly safe. It also threw some
mental barriers in the way of flirtation as her imagination cranked out vivid
scenarios of this dreaded initial phase. Strictly as a biological necessity,
her vibrating dildo catered to her needs. It was a far cry from paradise, but
it did the job.

She did manage one casual and lukewarm affair with her then
dentist. In the age of AIDS, considering the precautions he took while she was
in the dentist's chair, mask and surgical gloves, she felt reasonably safe,
although she still insisted that he wear a condom. But the act had been more a
validation of her femininity than a passionate experience. Most of the time she
hadn't had an orgasm and was reticent about instructing him in the
technicalities of her specific construct and the best method to achieve its
effect.

The so-called affair lasted for exactly how long it took to
put in three new crowns. He did offer a trade-out on future work, but she
declined and went to another dentist, a move she had reason to regret. Despite
his shortcomings in the sexual area, he was an excellent dentist.

Because of her lackluster and probably indifferent attempt
to attract mating possibilities, she determined that she was
"unlucky" when it came to men. Perhaps she had simply lost the skills
of engagement. She felt incapable or unable to separate the shells from the
peanuts. Did men perceive her as a hard case, or uppity, or too challenging or
not challenging enough, or unwilling to enter into a relationship? Or all of
the above and more?

Why was opportunity passing her by? Why wasn't there the
slightest hint of serendipity in her life? Was the mating system itself, like a
drain covered with rotting leaves, too clogged with young hard-body competitors
to allow for some free flow into the pool for the nearly menopausal set. The
fact was that the mating distribution system was patently unfair for a working
woman heading in the wrong chronological direction? Yet she still had a good
figure, and her face, with her expertise in makeup, could still appear youthful
and attractive. Men did look her way, their glance, she sensed, occasionally
lingering, as she swung past. But was she perceived as a willing objective? She
doubted that.

All right, she conceded, she could tell herself that little
white lie that she was liberated and independent enough to do without the
comfort of male companionship. But hell, she wanted to be fucked by a live
instrument, caressed by manly arms, supportive and supporting. She wanted
someone to bounce thoughts and decisions against, wanted someone to help her
skirt the minefields, someone strong and loving and manly and loyal, someone to
fuss over, who fussed over her, someone to respect, someone to share the
burden. Her experience with her ex had given her insight and experience into
winners and losers. She could, she believed, if given half a chance, separate
the wheat from the chaff.

She considered herself intelligent, if only modestly
educated with one year of junior college. Even her most stringent
self-assessment gave her a sound sense of curiosity, an excellent sense of
humor, a glib tongue. Everybody said she had the gift of gab. She read
The
New York Times
every Sunday and was an avid reader of the
Palm Beach
Post,
which gave her some passing awareness of politics, current events and
the entertainment world. No one could call her a dummy. Besides, she knew more
about cosmetics and fashion than most people.

People said she was a good conversationalist and men showed
what seemed an interest in her, at least in a first encounter. The problem as
she saw it was that she found the men she met mostly boring, which led her to
wonder what had happened to the gender in the nearly twenty years that had
passed since her courtship and marriage. She had concluded that her own lack of
interest in them was a turnoff, which the men sensed, and rarely called her for
a second date.

Comparing herself to the women who came into the store, she
could not understand why she had fallen through the cracks while others of
lesser looks and brains and personality had found a secure domestic haven.
Something was definitely missing in her strategy. Was she sending out bad
vibes? Had repeated discouragement inhibited her social skills? The fault must
be hers, she decided.

It was worrisome. It wouldn't be long before the forties
arrived. Then what? Would she be heading to the blue hair pastures, her glasses
held around her neck by a chain, her jowls drooping lower each year, her neck
wrinkling like old parchment, her tits heading downward with the force of
gravity, her hips and belly thickening, her morning routine washing down her
estrogen replacement pills with orange juice.

It was dangerous to let imagination run away with itself.
But there were just too many examples of people left at the post in southern Florida. All it took to set her thoughts going was a trip to any mall where the army of the
aging bored marched in endless battalions. It took all her willpower to keep
from falling over the edge into heavy depression.