Tats Too (15 page)

“I don’t talk like that, you’re just trying to make me mad so I can’t argue. And, it is a good idea. It not only saves on time, it saves water. And you brush your teeth in the shower, so what’s the difference?” I throw back at her.

“I don’t want to stand in your piss is the difference!”

“Pppphhhh…” I blow at her and flap my hand. “Pee is sterile when it comes out, everybody knows that.”

She crosses her arms and smirks like she just ran a category on
Jeopardy
. “If that’s true then why don’t we take baths in piss?”

I am simply not going to dignify that so-called logic with a response. I put on my other sock and don’t look at her.

“Oh, no…” she says, quietly. “Don’t tell me you pee in the bathtub, too?

“Nooo.” I overact so she won’t know I’m lying.

She grabs the shoe out of my hand and whacks me in the arm with it, saying, “Goddammit, Lee, you’re so gross. I can’t believe I ever took a bath with you!”

“I don’t pee in the tub!” I protest, grabbing the shoe back. I add, softly, “It just happened that once when I was so pregnant I couldn’t help it. And you weren’t even in the tub. Very long.”

She makes some kind of noise that sounds like “Aaarrrggghhhh,” slings her big red bag over one shoulder and slings over the other, “I also hate the way you put on your socks and shoes.”

“What?”

“You do it wrong. You put a sock on your right foot, then a shoe on your right foot. Then you do the left foot.”

“So?”

“That’s not how it goes!” she yells exasperatedly. “It goes sock sock shoe shoe. Not sock shoe sock shoe.”

“My way’s better,” I explain with a great deal of patience. “That way if the house catches on fire or something while I’m still putting on my socks and shoes, I have at least one foot socked and shoed and I can hop on it out the door without burning my feet. And I do my right foot first so I can hop on my best foot.”

“Are you actually telling me that you sat down and thought all that shit through?”

“Well…yeah.”

She throws both hands in the air like she’s given up. “That’s what else I can’t stand about you! You think about shit like that!”

I grab her elbow and pull her to me, saying in my sexy voice that I know she likes, “Wanna have makeup sex now?”

She pushes me away, saying under her breath, “You’re going to be lucky to ever have sex again.” She heads for the door.

Now that’s not playing fair. That’s a blow below the belt. So, I feel completely justified when I say, “You mean with you.”

She freezes in the doorway, one foot already outside and arches her back like a cornered alley cat. Shit. I probably should not have said that. Out loud anyway.

She turns around to face me and slowly flips each of her words at me like she’s one of those knife-throwers at a carnival. “Were you planning on having sex with somebody else?”

Vivian, the knife-thrower, just popped all nine balloons outlining my body. And she’s still holding one last knife.

I resist the urge to cover my face with my hands. “No. Of course not,” I say, weakly.

“Is that next on your list of things you hate about me? You don’t like me in bed?”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Maybe you’d like to tell me exactly what you find so despicable about me in bed.”

I have a feeling she just backed me into a trap. And nothing I can say is going to get me out of it. I plop down hard onto the bed and put my face in my hands.

She urges, with a fake-sweet voice, “Go ahead, Lee. I’m listening.”

“Nothing. I wouldn’t change a thing,” I manage to squeak.

How did this happen? It was only a few hours ago when we were having a great time in bed. I lick my finger, raise my pant leg and pretend to be absorbed in wiping the blood off my shin. Maybe she’ll see the blood and feel sorry for me.

“Don’t lick your wounds like some damn dog,” she says. “You’ll get worms.”

I give her my biggest, brightest smile like I just thought of a really good idea. “Hey! You wanna have makeup sex?”

Her answer is a sour look that curdles my insides.

“Oh. I already asked that didn’t I?”

She spins on her heels and marches back to the open door. I guess that means we’re not having makeup sex. “I don’t get it. I’m the one with a skinned, bleeding shin and scalded hide, but you’re the one who gets to be mad.”

She turns back around and points one finger at me. I hate it when she points at me. Nothing good ever happens when she points at me.

“You know there’s plenty of others out there who would have me in a heartbeat,” she threatens.

At least it sure sounds like a threat. Plus, I know she’s right. I think the best thing I can do right now is pretend to be dead. I flop back on the bed, throw my arms above my head, exposing my soft vulnerable underbelly and say, “I don’t want to fight anymore.”

“Fine,” she snaps. “Let’s just go get the fucking diamond.” She quickly places her hand over her mouth and looks at me all fake and wide-eyed. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I say the word fucking?” Her voice changes to a growl, “I didn’t mean to remind you that that’s what you won’t be doing anytime soon!”

She slams the door behind her.

I grab the pillow behind my head and throw it as hard as I can at the door.

Shit. Why do women always do that? They get mad and the first thing they do is refuse sex. That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m a woman, but I don’t refuse sex. That would be like punishing myself.

I almost yell at the closed door, “Too bad you weren’t around for women’s suffrage. You could’ve led them in a ‘no sex till we get to vote’ movement and we would’ve been voting one hundred
years earlier!”

And then I think about screaming, “I bet you can teach women all over the world to clamp their legs shut and there won’t be any more wars!”

But I don’t yell either one of those things because #1: They sound really stupid, and #2: I hope to eventually get laid again.

The door slams back open and I sit straight up. Vivian throws her purse into the chair and puts her fists on her hips.

“It was just a pillow,” I say. “And I waited until you were out the door to throw it even.”

“I have something to say.”

“Okay,” I intone, waving that one little word around like a white flag.

“I’m pregnant.”

Money shot on Vivian. Camera moves in for a close-up. Her lips quiver, her eyes tear up, she takes one long, shaky breath.

Commercial break.

My mind goes blank for three minutes.

When my mind comes back, it finds me standing in a pile of feathers with a shredded pillow in my hand. The dresser is lying on its side. The artwork has been pulled from the walls, leaving huge bolts sticking out. And I don’t even know where the bedclothes went.

Vivian is standing exactly where she was. “Are you through now?” she asks, throwing her purse back over her shoulder.

“You just had your period.”

“No,” she says. “I spotted a tiny bit is all.”

“You lied,” I say and throw a handful of feathers at her. They make it about one foot in the air before floating to the floor.

She looks at the feathers and says, “I thought I was. But I wasn’t. I didn’t think I was lying when I lied.”

“Who’s the father?” I ask numbly.

“You.”

“Fuck you!” I scream. “Who’s the fucking father?! Who have you been fucking while I was busy having our baby and feeding our baby and…and…all the other baby stuff?!”

“I haven’t been fucking anybody except you and not much of that!”

“Well, I don’t have sperm!”

“I don’t know, Lee! All I know is my tits are swollen, I’ve been throwing up, I’ve gained ten pounds and I’m not bleeding!”

“You must’ve fucked somebody! Unless it’s another immaculate conception, and I don’t even believe in the first one.”

“I can’t believe this,” she snarls. “I should’ve known this would happen. One little snafu in our relationship and you won’t even FUCKING BELIEVE ME!”

She slams the door so hard behind her that one of the hinges pops out of the frame.

“This is not a SNAFU! A snafu is throwing away my Miracle Whip! This is not a SNAFU!” I take three giant steps to the door, open it and slam it as hard as I can about fifty billion times. When it completely pops out of the frame, I heave it onto the bed.

And she’s just out there sitting on the back of the bike with her purse clutched across her tits like she’s waiting for a Sunday afternoon drive.

***

We’re on the bike, heading northish. The cool desert air puts goosebumps up and down my arms, but the rising sun is toasty on my back. It won’t be long before toast turns to roast, though, so I want to make as much time as possible while the desert’s still bearable. The lonely two-lane road serves up mirage after mirage, and I cut through each one at ninety miles per hour.

I’m trying like hell not to think about the whole pregnancy thing. Usually when a problem rears its ugly head, I bury my ugly head in the sand and hope it won’t see me. But this problem just keeps poking me in the ribs.

I want to believe her, but there’s just no way in hell. I keep trying to think up ways she could get pregnant without actually doing the deed with somebody. Sit on a dirty toilet seat? Swim in a warm pool? Maybe when she went for her pap smear the doctor didn’t wash his hands and he had jizz on his hands? It’s all so friggin’ far-fetched that even my overactive imagination isn’t buying any of it.

The last time we had a fight this big is what I refer to in my head as The Great Miracle Whip Debacle. I had just changed the oil in Hell Camino, washed my hands at the kitchen sink and Vivian was chopping vegetables at the kitchen counter. I sneaked a peek at the vegetables she was slicing and wrinkled my nose. I slapped together a couple pieces of bread around a slice of American cheese.

“You’ll spoil your supper,” she said without even looking at me.

“Fine with me,” I replied.

She shot me a look and that’s when I realized she was holding a big-ass knife in her hand and maybe my answer wasn’t the one she wanted. I quickly amended, “I’ll be hungry again by the time you finish mutilating and boiling the healthy stuff.”

I opened the fridge door, rummaged around for a while, then finally asked, “Where’s the Miracle Whip?”

Vivian gestured with the knife. “The mayonnaise is right there.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said, “you’ve neatly arranged the whole condiment family in the fridge door from tallest to smallest. But the Miracle Whip is missing. It should be here right between the sugar-free ketchup and the kosher mustard.”

“Use mayo instead,” she said, emphasizing with a couple of hearty chops.

“There has to be Miracle Whip. I picked some up at the store yesterday.”

“I threw it away.”

She had to be fucking kidding me. “But Miracle Whip doesn’t go bad.”

She turned and pointed the knife at me.

Okay, maybe she didn’t exactly point a deadly weapon at me, but it was still in her hand and inferred in my general direction. She said with heavy sigh, “Which is exactly why I threw it away. It’s full of yucky, bad-for-you chemicals, and I don’t want us eating anything that can’t go bad.”

“You don’t get to do that, Vivian. Just throw away things that I like.”

“This is my kitchen. You don’t get a vote,” she said in her ultracalm voice that she uses to signal the end of an argument.

I stomped my boot and crossed my arms. “I
should
get a vote. I’m a grown-up. I’m even a landowner.”

Vivian slammed the pointy end of the knife into the cutting board and left it sticking up. “This is not a democracy, Lee. I shop for groceries. I cook the groceries. I do the dishes. All you do is eat my hard work. Therefore, I rule the kitchen.” She used both hands to pull the knife out of the cutting board.

“So this house is an autocracy?”