Chili con corpses, p.2
Chili Con Corpses, page 2
“You don’t need to lose any more weight,” James offered. “You look terrific.” It was the truth. Lindy had had her long black hair cut just above her shoulders. Layers snipped at sharp angles softened Lindy’s round face, and she wore subdued makeup that enhanced her latte-hued skin and enormous dark eyes. Though Lindy was still quite curvaceous, especially around the bosom and hips, she had lost enough weight that her new and improved hourglass figure was strikingly voluptuous. Lindy had gone from being pudgy all over to being soft in all the right places.
“I wouldn’t kick you out of bed for eatin’ pork rinds,” Willy teased as Lindy blushed.
“That’s two resolutions for the new year then.” Bennett raised his coffee cup in the air. “Here’s to you bagging your man, Lindy. Me? I’m trying out for Jeopardy!”
Willy looked at James. “And what about you, Professor? You five always do stuff together, so you must be planning something big, too.”
James shook his head and stared fixedly at the light brown drips swimming around in the bottom of his mug. “Not me. I’m fine with the status quo.”
But he was lying. There was something he would very much like to change, and for once it had nothing to do with his appearance. Suddenly, James felt the beginnings of a major headache coming on. He never used to get headaches, but lately they had been plaguing him more and more frequently. Rubbing his temples, he said goodbye to his friends and climbed into his old white Bronco.
For a moment, he gazed at his own reflection in the rearview mirror and then answered Willy’s question truthfully. “I’d certainly like to change something. Yes, indeed. I’d like to know what a guy’s gotta do to score with his girlfriend.”
“I have an announcement to make,” Lucy Hanover declared after she tapped a pair of wooden chopsticks against her glass of Chardonnay.
“It must be big news, too,” Lindy interrupted, “since you’re springing for the tab for this extravagant feast.”
The members of the supper club group, who had adopted the self-effacing moniker “the Flab Five,” had been pleasantly surprised to accept Lucy’s invitation to change the location of their meeting from her house to the Dim Sum Kitchen.
The Dim Sum Kitchen was famous throughout the Valley for its authentic and delicious Chinese cuisine, but because it was so small, reservations were required for any party larger than two. Located in a tiny brick house, which had formerly been home to an interesting group of businesses including a dentist’s office, a psychic, a barbershop, and, in the 1800s, a ladies’ hat shop, the building’s Colonial architecture seemed unsuited for an ethnic restaurant.
Luckily for the area inhabitants, Mr. and Mrs. Woo disagreed. They gutted the space, installed bright red carpet, painted the walls gold, and hung paper lanterns and several magnificent dragon kites from the ceiling. After hanging a simple plaque outside the front door in jade-green lettering, the Dim Sum Kitchen opened in the middle of a three-day blizzard. Folks slowly became aware of the restaurant’s debut and, bored by the storm, piled into their four-wheel drives and filled the place to capacity from eleven in the morning until ten at night. The Dim Sum Kitchen became an instant success.
“This sure beats cooking,” Lucy said, her face breaking into a grin as she stared up at one of the dragon kites. “Besides, I’m not going to have as much time to cook as I used to.” James thought he had never seen her so happy. She was glowing like a new bride or an expectant mother. “You see,” Lucy continued, “I passed both the written and psychological exams and am now only one step away from becoming a deputy for the Shenandoah County Sheriff’s Department!”
Bennett, Gillian, and Lindy clapped heartily, while James followed suit in a mechanical manner. He was torn between sharing Lucy’s joy and feeling hurt that she hadn’t told him about her triumph first. Ever since Lucy had been employed as an administrative assistant for the sheriff’s department, she had longed to exchange her computer keyboard and telephone headset for a pair of handcuffs and a firearm. All summer and into the early fall, Lucy had studied and exercised, preparing herself for a challenge she hadn’t felt ready to face until now. James was proud of her, but he was upset, too. Wasn’t he her boyfriend? Wasn’t he supposed to be privy to all of Lucy’s life-changing events before everyone else?
Lucy accepted the praise of her friends and pointedly avoided meeting James’s eyes. Biting into a crispy won ton, James thought back to their last date. As usual, they had gone out to dinner at a restaurant where they could select a healthy meal that wouldn’t require them to spend the entire next day on the treadmill. Afterwards, they had seen the latest movie that had generated the biggest buzz in Lucy’s beloved People. The film was a dud, in James’s opinion, as it had a weak plot and stilted dialogue unsuccessfully disguised by expensive special effects and a group of staggeringly beautiful actors. Of course, Lucy had completely loved it and called James a snob in what he hoped was a teasing manner.
Back at Lucy’s house, after she had barricaded her three enormous German shepherds called Bono, Benatar, and Bon Jovi in the kitchen, she and James settled down on her fluffy sofa. Pretending that they were going to watch Seinfeld reruns on Lucy’s ancient TV, they barely made it through Jerry’s opening monologue before they were fervently kissing. Trouble arose as it would always invariably arise at this juncture, for this was the point during each date when James would attempt to unhook Lucy’s bra. As predicted, Lucy twisted her back away from his determined fingers and whispered, “Not yet.”
As he had done several times before, James repositioned himself on the couch and Lucy got up to collect two glasses of water from the kitchen. They both downed their glasses of water as their overexcited hormones calmed down and then watched an episode of Dukes of Hazzard, which Lucy loved and James fell asleep to. After this date, James climbed into his old white Bronco and wondered, for the umpteenth time, what he had done wrong. He hadn’t gotten up the courage to ask her why she refused to allow him to touch her in a way that would take their physical relationship beyond a PG rating, but he knew he had to soon. His physical and mental health depended on her giving in, as their current state of limbo was slowly driving him mad.
Watching Lucy now as she speared a snow pea with her chopsticks and chattered with their friends, he took note of her wide blue eyes, her caramel-colored hair, and her creamy skin. His eyes traveled down her neck to her alluring cleavage and then to her shrinking waistline. From there, his examination was blocked by the wooden table, but he had no difficulty picturing the round curve of her hips and the soft cushion of her thighs. Like Lindy, Lucy’s body had diminished by a dress size or two, but she was not skinny. To James, she had a perfect feminine physique, and he longed to claim her like some kind of primitive caveman, but he lacked the guts.
“So tell us what some of the psychological test questions were like, Lucy,” Gillian said as she shoveled spoonfuls of vegetable fried rice onto a porcelain plate decorated with cherry blossoms. James noted that the orange hue of Gillian’s hair almost matched the koi swimming around the outside of the rice bowl.
“Yeah, did they ask you if you wanted to kill your mama and sleep with your daddy?” Bennett teased.
“No.” Lucy scowled. “They weren’t easy questions, though. You had to answer true or false to almost five hundred questions and some of them … well, let’s just say there wasn’t a simple true or false answer each time.”
Her friends were intrigued. “Give us an example,” Gillian pleaded.
Lucy hesitated. “I don’t know if I should.”
“It’s not like any of us will be taking the test any time soon,” James argued, trying to sound playful even though he felt genuinely combative.
Lucy finally fixed her gaze on him, and James felt as though she were really looking at him for the first time since he had picked her up from her house. Her blue eyes sent out mixed messages of tenderness and irritation in an infinitesimal amount of time before she sighed and said, “Okay. One of the easy ones was Do you often have nightmares? I don’t, so the answer was false.”
Gillian helped herself to an egg roll and, after taking a bite of the crispy dough, swallowed and said, “I’m sure there must have been some questions that probed into the deepest corners of your psyche. Those difficult ethical and moral dilemmas we must all face. After all, to uphold the law, to be placed in a position of judgment upon your fellow human creatures, you must be resolved of your own internal struggles.”
Bennett raised an eyebrow at Gillian. “I never know what you’re talking about, woman, but there must have been some juicier questions on that test than whether you’ve got nightmares or not. Come on now, tell us a tough one.”
Lucy took a gulp of wine. “Oh, fine. I admit that I had a really hard time answering two questions. The first was Did you ever steal anything when you were younger? And the second was Do you always tell the truth?”
“Did you steal something when you were a kid?” Lindy raised her black eyebrows inquisitively.
Lucy colored. “Yeah. When I was in the eighth grade, a bunch of the cool girls were swiping little things from the drug store. That was back when those glitter pens, the ones that had sparkly ink, first came out. We all wanted to write with those.”
“Your poor teachers,” Lindy clucked her tongue. “The ink is so pale you can barely see it.”
“Exactly! That was part of the fun.” Lucy drank another sip of wine. “Anyway, this new girl had joined our class. Her name was Claudia and she was from England. It took all of five minutes for her to become the ‘alpha’ girl. I wanted to hang out in her set so bad that when she dared me to steal something just for her, I did it.”
Gillian’s eyes rounded. “What was it?”
Lucy mumbled, “A unicorn air freshener.”
“Your first taste of crime was pocketing an air freshener?” Bennett cackled gleefully.
“Yep.” Lucy grinned sheepishly. “It had a rainbow on it and Claudia loved rainbows. I got caught, too. The store manager saw me tuck it in my pants. I got such a licking when I got home. Lord, I don’t think I sat down for two days.”
“So, did you put down true as your answer to that question?” James wondered.
Lucy shifted in her chair. “Yeah, sure.” She added, “But that was hard. It’s not like I could say I was a kid or that it was an item worth less than a dollar. All they’d see is that I stole something.”
“That second question is totally unfair,” Lindy said, twirling lo mein noodles around with her fork. “There isn’t a person on this earth who tells the truth all the time.”
“You got that right,” Bennett agreed. “Sometimes you gotta tell a little white lie to keep things peaceful. Just the other day, my boss showed me a picture of his new grandson and asked if I didn’t think that that child was the most beautiful baby ever born. Well, all I saw was a red face with wrinkly skin and a bunch of black hair wrapped in the middle of about a thousand blankets. Shoot, looked more like one of those little Mexican dogs than a kid, but of course I said he was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.”
James laughed. “You’re right. There are some questions you could never answer truthfully, especially if you’re a man. Like, Do I look fat in this? or Don’t you wish my mother lived closer?”
Lindy poked James with her chopsticks. “Or when men ask us women questions about our ex-boyfriends. We have to lie and tell you that they were all unattractive, acne-covered wimps or you’ll obsess about them.”
Gillian took a sip of green tea. “That test question almost feels like a trick. Who can be truthful all of the time, unless you’re Buddha? Lucy, you poor thing, what did you put down in the end?”
“I stared at that question until time started running out,” Lucy answered quietly. “Unfortunately, they asked that same question using different wording about ten times throughout the test. In the end, I just kind of circled an answer without really looking and handed in the test.” She shrugged nonchalantly, but James saw the tension in her shoulders by the way she slumped slightly forward in her chair. “Guess whatever the answer was, it didn’t keep me from passing.”
The table fell silent. No one fully bought Lucy’s tale of blindly answering her test questions, but none of them felt as though they could have answered a similar question with more ease.
“I think the worst lies are those of omission,” James spoke into the silence. “The ones you don’t even admit to yourself. I didn’t see those kinds of lies until I met all of you and starting thinking about all of the things I was burying inside my layers of fat.”
Everyone nodded in empathetic agreement.
He continued. “And I discovered one truth about myself when I was at the Y with Bennett. I want to take a break from being obsessed with dieting. I’m having so much fun tonight eating what I want and focusing more on the company than on counting calories.”
Gillian sighed theatrically. “Oh, James! I am so glad you shared that with us! I too feel bogged down in the predictable, the routine food that we eat now. I love my exercise walks and my closet filled with new clothes,” she indicated her kelly green shirt covered with a design of yellow and brown spirals, “but I long for more spice in my life! I want exotic. I want my tongue to be reawakened, my nose to be invigorated, my senses to be transported to other places!” Gillian’s armful of silver bangles clinked noisily as she gesticulated wildly during this speech. “I want to savor the experience of eating! My friends,” she said more quietly, her energy spent, “I spend my days with animals. I love them, don’t misread me, but I need something more. Like the dying autumn,” she gazed out the window and sighed, “I feel as though my days have become more and more colorless.”
At this poignant moment, the waiter appeared like a puff of silent wind and placed the bill on the corner of their table, quietly slipping away again without removing any of the dishes. He must have sensed the change in tone that had fallen upon the dinner party.
Lindy began rummaging through her purse.
“This is my treat, remember,” Lucy scolded her. “Because we’re supposed to be celebrating,” she added a bit ruefully.
Lindy withdrew a strip of newspaper from her bag. “We know, Lucy, and we’re so proud of you. You’re the only one who is looking forward to a major change, a new chapter in your life. The rest of us are feeling kind of like sticks in the mud.” She beamed her hundred-watt smile at the rest of her friends. “I can’t fix everything, but at least I can bring some zest back into our dinner meetings.”
“Oh, wonderful!” Gillian squealed. “How, my dear, how?”
“Once a week, on Saturday nights, we’re going to take a break from all of this dieting,” Lindy announced. “We’re going to stick to our light and healthy routines during the rest of the week, but on Saturdays, we’re bustin’ loose!” Her brown eyes twinkled with anticipation. “Pack your bags, my friends, ’cause we are about to embark on a culinary trip around the world!” Her eyes flickered over the piece of newspaper. “Well, the Spanish-speaking world, in any case, but get your aprons cleaned and gas up your cars. Next Saturday, we’re heading out on a new adventure!”
Even though he didn’t have the faintest notion what Lindy was talking about, James found himself spontaneously clapping in response. Here was the change he had been looking for. He had no idea what it was exactly, but he was ready for it. At least it would allow him to delay doing what he dreaded most: giving Lucy an ultimatum.
James opened his eyes in the dark. He rolled over on his side and tried to read the clock, but the neon green digits blurred into the black background. As he fumbled for his glasses, a familiar throb assaulted his temples. Another headache was coming on. James peered at the clock through the water-stained lenses of his glasses. 2:14. He let his body fall flat against the bed and closed his eyes. He didn’t feel tired at all.
Sighing, James threw back the covers and slid his cold feet into a pair of ragged slippers. He then put on his robe and tiptoed out of his room and into the hall, though he could have marched through the house banging on a bongo and his father wouldn’t so much as blink in his sleep. The old man can’t hear anything beyond the cacophony of his own snores, James thought as he turned on the bathroom light. He helped himself to four ibuprofen liquid-gel capsules and stood in the weak light studying the box.
“Someone should just invent an ibuprofen shot,” he muttered at the rubber duck sitting on the tub ledge. “They could sell it at all the coffee bars, beer joints, pool halls, libraries.” He filled a glass from the tap and drank it down.
Back in his room he checked the clock again. 2:21. It was going to be one of those nights. James had had three of them over the past week. He woke abruptly after a few hours of sleep, restless and yet drowsy at the same time. His mind would review the day’s events, make lists of tasks that needed to be accomplished at the library, ponder over what to eat for breakfast, and fantasize about Lucy appearing at her front door wearing a filmy robe made of white silk, her mouth curved in a seductive smile as she beckoned him inside. This vision was immediately followed by a headache. Tonight, to James’s disappointment, the headache had arrived before the Lucy fantasy sequence.
By 3:35, James gave up, switched on the reading lamp clamped to his headboard, and delved into The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. There was something about the simple purity of the writing that soothed James and distracted him from making scores of mental lists that he would forget by morning. Just before dawn, James fell asleep to the image of a large caravan at rest in the midst of crossing the interminable Sahara. He absorbed the sense of the vast, star-pocked sky stretching over the quiet desert. As his room seemed as cold as the desert night, James half believed he was lying down beside the shepherd boy of Coelho’s tale.
He had only been asleep for about two hours when he was awoken by the clanging of pots and pans downstairs in the kitchen. Feeling totally out of sorts, James pivoted the clock and was horrified to see that it was almost eight. He was going to be late to work if he didn’t get a move on.
