“I could take you kids out for a late lunch,” Ashley said, slowly holding forth the glass of wine, inching it toward Lee, tempting. “Pot roast at Upstream.”
Lee shook his head at the wine glass and, speaking with his mouth full of cinnamon loaf, said, “I’m on a hunger strike. Food is toxic.” He went to the closet for his thin, death-defying jean jacket. “Besides, you have your pervy little party to get ready for.”
“Maybe I need to cancel it,” Ashley said, “under the circumstances.” One of Ashley’s favorite things to do was cancel plans at the last minute, leaving her with a few hours of unexpected time.
“Nope,” he said, opening the door.
“Oh, Lee Lee Lee Lee, pleeeeease put on some real shoes,” Ashley said. “You think you’re only killing yourself with those flip-flops in the snow, but you’re killing your mother is what you’re doing.”
Lee pulled a pair of Converse sneakers over his sockless feet. “You never dress for winter either,” he said, sneering, and Ashley said nothing more as he left. She leaned back in the cushions of the sofa, drinking the rest of the wine, warmed by the fact that her son, who’d grown so distant in recent weeks, still cared enough to point out the failings they shared.
Peach
Peach could hear that the rest of the writing students had left Ashley’s apartment, but she continued to sit in a rickety wooden chair next to the partially open window, blowing her smoke out, sipping dregs of cold coffee from a china cup she’d found on the kitchen counter. Troy, Ashley’s husband, Peach’s secret lover, always cooked his coffee to a deep black in a dinged-up percolator his grandmother had owned decades ago, and Peach could sometimes taste the acrid bitterness of it on his breath.
“Class dismissed, sweetie, but take your time, relax, just finish your cig,” Ashley said, stepping into the kitchen. “Oh, but don’t drink that slop, it’s the worst. Never touch the coffee in this house.” She took the cup away from Peach, then poured her a glass of wine.
The coffee felt thick in Peach’s throat, and she now found it hard to swallow. She noticed her cigarette and its smoke shivering with the shaking of her hand, so she put it out in the ash-stained saucer on the windowsill.
Troy had no idea that Peach was enrolled in his wife’s class. He always spent Saturdays at his office, where he put in six or seven days a week as an editor at the Omaha Street, outlining everyone’s social obligations, playing to the fires of liberal angst. Every week, Peach read the dire thing from cover to cover in the hopes of getting to know her lover better, to divine something personal from his stories about city council zoning ordination scandals and children sick from licking poisonous lead monkey bars in a park.
Ashley sat at the kitchen table with a colander of apples and a paring knife. “Did you ever play Truth or Dare?” she asked, peeling, and the sound of the sleet that salted against the windowpanes ran a chill up the back of Peach’s neck. She wanted to take a drink to calm herself, but her hands were shaking even more, gently sloshing the wine in the glass. What am I doing here? she thought. I’m no good at this sort of thing. No Truth, please.
“Yeah,” Peach said. “I guess I did.”
“‘Finger-bang’ made me think of it,” Ashley said. “I’m thirteen, fourteen, sitting in an old, leaky, inflatable pool with my friend Deedee, our bikini tops off, reading the dirty parts from my mom’s Harold Robbins novels out loud to each other. We thought we were pretty hot stuff. We started playing Truth or Dare, and I dared her to go ask the neighbor’s lawn boy if he’d ever finger-banged a girl. I just remember thinking it seemed like, I don’t know, the height of dirtiness or something. Finger-bang.” Ashley froze mid-apple, lost in memory.
“Did she do it?” Peach asked.
“Do what?”
“Take the dare. Did she go ask the lawn boy if he’d ever finger-banged a girl?”
“You know, I don’t even remember,” Ashley said. “But I do remember my mom wasn’t home, so we snuck some liquor from the cabinet. We didn’t know what we should drink, so we drank Campari because it was a pretty ruby color. Have you ever had that? Campari?”
“No.”
“I’m trying to remember what it tastes like because it tastes like something specific. It had a kind of candlewaxy taste, or a taste like . . . what was it called? Oh, Zotz is what it was, Zotz, that candy that sizzled on your tongue as you sucked on it? How adorable, Peach,” she said, pointing her paring knife at her, moving it up and down, referring to Peach’s dress, too slinky and cool for winter, patterned with flowers the ice-creamy brown and pink and white of Neapolitan. “Did you get that here in Omaha?”
“Actually, just from down on the corner,” Peach said. “Nouvelle Eve.” Actually, Troy had bought it from Nouvelle Eve in an effort to beg forgiveness for being such a wretched cliché of a married man.
“I love that shop,” Ashley said, “but sometimes I feel like I might be a little too old for it.”
“Don’t be silly,” Peach said, standing to go. “You’re not too old for anything. You’re not even forty, right?” Peach knew full well that Ashley would be turning forty in a few weeks. Ashley had coerced Troy into booking a trip to New York for a long, celebratory weekend. They’d have steak frites at Café Charbon on the Lower East Side, see Blossom Dearie at Danny’s Skylight in Times Square, and stay in a little room in the Village with a kitchenette and an unworking fireplace. Peach had made Troy describe the whole itinerary to her in full detail after taking a tumble with him at the Rubberneck one late night on a floral-print sofa with yellowed antimacassars, on the stage set for the theater troupe’s reworking of Streetcar Named Desire, updated to post—Hurricane Katrina.
“Thanks for the wine,” Peach said, setting the glass on the table without having taken even a taste of it. “I’ve got to get back to the bookstore.” The sad fact was, Ashley was lovely in anything, even in her old T-shirt with her nerdy horned-rims hanging from a chain around her neck librarian-style and her jeans with the ’70s-era patch on its knee of a cartoon souped-up VW bug. Peach had always been jealous of the quirky girls, the charming nut jobs who could dress off the floor and be absolutely eye-catching.
“Peach,” Ashley said. Peach stopped in the doorway. “I’m kind of, I guess, uncomfortable bringing this up . . .”
Peach couldn’t breathe.
“. . . but did I say anything in class that upset you last week? When we were discussing your story? Because if I didn’t say so before, I really do think it has a lot going for it. The characters are so tragic in a way that’s really very heartbreaking. . . .”
“Thanks, thanks,” Peach said. “Really, thanks, no need to . . .”
“You feel for them because their situation seems so hopeless, and there’s this vulnerability, that’s, well, it’s tragic, in a way. . . .”
“Yeah, you said ‘tragic’ already.”
Ashley paused for a moment or two, biting the tip of the paring knife. “Here’s the thing. The reason I bring it up, and this is kind of embarrassing, but I saw my book in the bargain bin at Mermaids Singing. One dollar. And I guess, maybe, I might have . . . kind of . . . taken it personally.”
Peach had indeed, personally, put Ashley’s novel in the “Last Ditch” box. Its jacket was an obnoxiously distinctive shade of Pepto-Bismol that snagged her sight every time she walked down that aisle.
“We have a new part-timer,” Peach said. “This very cute unwashed dope addict boy-poet. We put him in charge of ‘Last Ditch,’ and he probably didn’t realize . . .”
“Oh,