The Do-Over (21 page)

She studied them and knew they were her. They were just a couple of decades down the road, and they resembled each other in more than their purple and hats. She watched their faces crinkled up extra in the fun of seeing young men strip. Apparently even seventy-year-old girls just wanna have fun. She forced herself to check on Lois, who wore no purple, no hat, and no expression. Her eyes, though, were aimed straight at the stage. Well, well, well. Mara had to stop herself from smiling. There was no reason not to enjoy the show.

She sat back, sipped the rummy lime of her drink, and soaked in the blond and two brunettes. It sounded like the start of a joke, but the studs on stage were no jokes. They were beautiful and the kind of five-ten male that came in perfect proportion. From the battered cowboy hats on their heads that spoke of manly work on horseback, to the sharp toes of their cowboy boots, they were ideal specimens. And what came in the area between hats and boots would make a hundred-year-old woman drool.

The blond took the front position. Evenly tanned, with the whitest teeth Mara had ever seen, he exhibited a playful quality as he flexed his impressive biceps. Someone had possessed the foresight to rip out the sleeves of all three men’s western shirts and oiled up the revealed skin, of course.

She heard herself hoot and had to stop from saying
excuse me
. It wasn’t as if she’d burped. She took another slug of her drink. She was just getting into the spirit of the establishment, and the brunette on the right could get into just about anything he wanted to. As he reached down to pull off his boots, his jeans rode up into the V of his legs, and she had to reassess her initial impression that he was in proportion for a guy five-foot-ten. “God bless America!” How loudly had she said that? Just in case, she looked at the shipping crew and shouted. “God bless Canada!”

“Canada!” Stella yelled, then stood up and waved her arms in the air like she was leading a revival meeting.

Mara turned back to the real show in time to catch the blond cowboy toss his shirt into the crowd. Oil really was a nice choice of clothing for a man. If that man was a dancer and the light caught his smooth skin and the way his six pack of stomach muscles undulated and the…

“Holy shit!”

Had
Lois
said that? It sounded like Lois. Mara made a mental note to verify that later. She didn’t want to be distracted from what the brunette on the right would do in strip-off retaliation to blond cowboy losing his shirt. And sure enough, brunette cowboy ripped his right off. The buttons popped with the violence of his need, his desire, his…

“Yeeeeeehhhaaaaa!”

Okay. That was definitely Lois. Knit pant suit Lois was cheering on half-naked men.

Her breath caught as brunette cowboy smiled right at her and tossed his shirt across the stage. “Yes!” Shit. “Okay, that was me,” she confessed to the side of Stella’s head, but Stella failed to hear her, so she turned back to the show. Damn, she’d missed the button pop on his faded tight-as-sin jeans, but watched as he boot scooted closer to the edge of the stage and reached for his zipper. He played long and hard with that zipper. His bedroom eyes said
I will, but I’m gonna to make you work for it
. And when the brass caught the light, Mara felt an electric zing run the length of her body and mouthed, “take it off.”

Oh, yeah. He smiled at her now for sure, smiled and pulled the zipper down a quarter of an inch. She could practically hear the teeth release one at a time as the zipper gave up the goods, and he slid his jeans down his trim hips. The top of a leather thong appeared so low on his body, she could see every muscle connecting his pelvis to his upper half. And what kind of muscles were they anyway? She didn’t have anything that ran diagonally from her hip bones. Were male strippers endowed with extra things? It made her pant just to think about it.

He continued to slide his pants down lower. A miracle. A miracle was the only way to describe what occurred when the denim made it over his thighs. They were huge, like brown tree trunks you wanted to lick. She didn’t or anything. But Stella, who leaned against her to try and stay upright in all the excitement, Stella probably thought they were lickable.

Oh and he was turning around. Even his sides bulged with oiled muscles. And the back? She tried to blink away the spots of light in her vision. Less oxygen. Less oxygen. She slowed her breathing and ogled a rear view for the ages, a Michelangelo’s David of butts. A, well, she couldn’t think of any other famous ones, but this one had to be the best one in all of Canada, maybe the western hemisphere.

Stella sighed, and Mara realized the music was fading if she could hear a sigh. The cowboys danced further away, and she fought the urge to rush the stage, take on whatever bouncers they’d employed, and beg for an encore. Instead, she matched Stella’s sigh and collapsed back in her seat, feeling her blouse stick to her skin. She never got sweaty. She also never went to strip clubs, wore purple or hats, kissed a woman, or made out with a man covered with bath soap, so clearly some change was afoot. Lots of women probably experienced an awakening later in life, even one of a sexual nature. Heck, there were bound to be at least a couple of shipping crew ladies who’d just figured out their bodies had an on switch.

The women chattered and slammed down their drinks. Okay, these gals were born with an on switch. Lois, her disapproving face back on, sipped her ginger ale. And some women never found the on switch. But she had, and it was better late than never. Who was she kidding? It was better never, better never, better never. She’d just stop it, but she felt her body hum, a vibration of blood pounding through her and a pleasant dizziness in her head. There was no off switch. If there was, she didn’t know how to operate it. Hell, she didn’t know how to operate the on one, why would she have mastered its tricky reverse?

She reached for her handbag and pulled out her cell phone, dialed, and listened to it ring.

“Hello?”

“Dan, when you put your mother on the plane, I need you at the loft.”

The shipping crew filed into Stella’s apartment in a mature version of an elementary school post-recess line-up. Mara brought up the rear and avoided the stiff back of Lois, who was apparently going to act like she hadn’t just gotten an eyeful of male strippers. 

Lois might blame her, but it wasn’t like the evening was her fault. When Stella said
put on purple and come along
, Mara couldn’t have known the shipping crew was the wild bunch. She couldn’t have guessed that saying
yes
meant oiled up pecs and glutes flexing and flexing. And she couldn’t possibly have avoided the post strip party. These were all seasoned mothers. When they made you an offer, you couldn’t refuse. Mara knew she didn’t have
don’t mess with me
down the way they did. Would she ever have what it took to be in the mother mafia?

Once through the doorway, the women spread out, clearly used to Stella’s gatherings. Two of them shot for the living room where they lit up and inhaled so deeply half of the cigarettes instantly turned to ash. These gals did everything full out. The two Marthas joined Stella in the kitchen and pulled out elaborate plates of appetizers with red flecks of pimentos and the browns of potted meats. Mara felt like she was living large in the nineteen-fifties. The chink of the martini brew being shaken in the next room added to her sense of time travel.

Stella handed her a stack of turquoise plates emblazoned with silver spiky stars. They were so perfect it made her look forward to eating a pimento puff. Maybe that was her problem. She’d been born in the wrong time period. She needed the structure, the clear cut rules of the fifties. She’d never have ventured from home in that decade. She barely managed it as it was. There was no way she’d have been on the brink of trouble back then. She wouldn’t have dared.

She set the plates on the dark wood buffet and spotted the pictures along the dining room wall. Stella, a good ten years younger, with her head hung upside down, and two strapping Irishmen supporting her as she kissed the Blarney Stone. In the next picture, the green warmth of some tropical island, lured her in for a closer look. Stella, even younger than she’d been in Ireland, stood arm and arm with a silver-haired man. John’s father. Well, John would still be handsome at sixty.

Stella and her husband seemed to have traveled the world. Australia, some place that looked like Greece, Egypt, and Italy, with the sun all reddish gold behind them and the trees skinny and tall like they’d been painted on the skyline.

Stella stood beside her and smiled at the couple on the balmy beach, her weathered face reflected in the glass. “Frank and I saw what we could in the years between the kids leaving home and when he got sick.”

Mara felt herself tear up. Long married happy people. Who didn’t want to be part of that? “That’s wonderful.”

“I was always faithful to him.” Stella tossed it out like she was talking about the weather, and Mara felt the terrible guilt hit her like a wave. She’d kissed the son of faithful Stella. And then Stella put her arm around her shoulders and Mara tried not to cringe.

“He was great in the sack,” Stella sighed.

Mara turned in confusion.

“Listen, hon, I don’t think it takes a special kind of woman to be faithful. I think it takes a special kind of man to keep her happy.”

“Really?” What kind of coming-of-age film had Stella seen in junior high school? Hers consisted of hygiene advice and a box of dancing maxi pads. It certainly hadn’t covered sexual satisfaction and fidelity.

Tiny Sadie came up on her other side quietly munching a saltine spread with ground something. “I slept with the milkman.”

“Ha. Good one.” Mara moved away from Stella and scanned the place for Lois, who, thank god, must have left in search of a bathroom.

One of the Marthas, swigging a martini, joined in. “Don’t get Sadie started, or it’ll be nothing but
Clarence this and Clarence that
. From the way she talks about him, you’d think he’d been as fine as one of those stripper boys.”

Mara felt Stella give her arm a squeeze and step away to fill a plate. Mara took the moment to escape to the bar and grab a martini. But Sadie followed, and Jennie joined them, smiling in the reassuring grandma way none of the others had mastered. “We’re about half and half.”

“Excuse me?”

Sadie filled her in. “Keeping faithful to our husbands.” Her voice, like an angel on helium, sounded totally at odds with the discussion. “We’re about half and half in the cheatin’ department. Maybe sixty-percent, but if you count by Velma’s rules it’s fifty-fifty. Velma says that even when your man’s dead you gotta keep the goods to yourself. I don’t think you can cheat on somebody that’s dead, but that’s just me. It’s only an affair if they’re livin’. And Clarence… that man was livin’.”

She needed to stop the conversation before Lois showed up. She leaned over the top of Sadie’s head, and it was like looking down on a really old fifth grader. “Ixnay on the affairay.” She realized instantly that even pig Latin had failed her. No way did
affairay
not sound like
affair
. What good was a code that didn’t code things? Then she felt, not saw, Lois close in behind her, so she held her left hand up in defeat. With the right one gripping a martini, it might not say
surrender
like she wanted it to. “Lois.” She turned to face the mother-in-law.

Lois stood and waited. They all waited. Stared and waited. And ate. She could hear one gal sucking down a pimento bite. She tried to swallow but her throat was so parched, she needed the martini. She resisted lifting it to her lips and cleared her throat instead. “I don’t want to do anything that will ruin my life, Dan’s life, or certainly Logan’s life. I want everything to go back to normal.” That didn’t sound right, not that it was a lie so much, it just wasn’t true. “Okay, after I get this little break, I will want my old life back.” That seemed better. The possibility of that being true still existed out there, somewhere. “I don’t want to ruin things. I so don’t.” The truth of that she felt all the way to her heart.

The shipping crew ladies nodded in support, and she took a step closer to Lois without even being aware of it. “I just can’t go home yet.”

One of the ladies spoke up. “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and an affair is the same thing.”

She tried to figure that one out because really it seemed like a pretty big stretch, but she couldn’t afford to dismiss advice at this juncture of her life. “Thank you.” Suicide lady had to be Velma, who thought you could cheat on a dead man.

“Harvey Lehman asked me to dance at the Red Cross Ball.”

Every head turned to Lois.

“I said yes. It would have been rude to decline.”

Several women murmured in agreement.

“He had previously looked at me in what I thought was a suggestive way. Still, I said yes. I am responsible for that.”

Mara felt her body lean forward in anticipation. Was Lois confessing?

“We danced. Mood Indigo.”

The women sighed. Apparently it was a great song.

“At the very end, his hand slipped down and rested on my buttocks. I…” Lois took a deep breath. “I didn’t immediately pull away.”

Mara waited. Then? Then what?

Lois reached for a martini glass, nodded a thanks to Stella and took a sip.

Oh. That was it. A man put his hand on her butt. Okay, she could work with that. Maybe, like inflation, the story would be a lot worse by today’s currency. A guy copping a discreet feel would currently correspond to a full-out kiss. She and Lois may be equally fallen women. That thought triggered a moment of fondness for her. In fact, confessing a stray hand at a dance may be the nicest thing Lois had ever done for her. “Thank you.”

“I’ll expect you home in sixteen days, taking care of my son and my grandson.”

She raised her martini, felt the slight tremor in her hand. “I expect the same of myself.”

She’d dreamed all night long, and it had been a long, long night. She yawned and tried to keep her eyes open as she watched the old aluminum percolator continue to bubble, the watery brew not nearly strong enough. She’d tried to blame her restless sleep on the couch. Every time she shifted, she’d wake up to make sure she wasn’t going to roll off the narrow cushions. But it was really the dreams that kept waking her up. She’d snapped out of REM every time an odd image flew through her mind. There’d been Logan at seven, upset because a fellow first grader called him Slogan. She’d forgotten how sensitive those years were, and how the littlest things had rested in the center of his universe.