Bill kept it all innocent. He simply stroked her back and her hair. He was tender about it, soft and quiet. He lay facing toward her somewhat. She lay on her side some and her stomach some.
“That feels so good,” she said. “But let me get my bra out of the way.”
Arlene hoisted herself up and unbuttoned the blouse. When it was open she slipped out of the bra one arm at a time.
Bill did not even bother to look. In other circumstances, at any other time, he surely would have. He would have looked and he would have reached out with both his hands and spread the blouse open so he could not only see her breasts but could touch and kiss them too. Feeling as he did, calm and at ease from the Quaaludes and the wine, it was a thought, a sensation, even a desire. But he did not act upon it even though he could feel himself getting aroused.
Arlene sat a moment as she was. She tossed the bra to the floor unceremoniously and looked at Bill. The blouse sat open but not spread wide. She reached for her wine glass, but because the motion was awkward from where she sat, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. This way she was facing away from him, her feet on the floor.
Bill wondered what she was thinking. He wondered what she wanted. He thought about what he wanted. He surely did not need another sex partner. He certainly did not need to get laid. No matter what he and Arlene did, he’d probably get laid tomorrow at work or tomorrow after work. Maybe it’d be multiple times, each time with a different partner.
Ain’t it funny how the night moves, he thought. When he needed a partner he couldn’t get one, sometimes months and months at a time. Then when he had a partner, now that he was a broiler cook and in control of the kitchen… Well, go figure.
He watched Arlene finish the wine in her glass. Then, since she sat a bit to the side, he saw her reach for his glass. She turned toward him, handed him his glass. As she moved, the open blouse fell away from her, not all that much but enough that Bill could see her bosom. He took the glass but looked away.
“Finish your wine and I’ll pour you some more,” Arlene said.
Bill sat up in the bed. He finished off the wine in one gulp then reached out to hand her the glass. She took it back, set it down, refilled both glasses. Then she stood and faced him.
“Why do you keep looking away from me? Don’t you want to see my tits?” Arlene put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you want to see me naked?” she asked. “Do I not appeal to you?”
Bill stood up and came around the bed to where Arlene stood. He stepped close to her and grabbed the blouse with both his hands, one hand on each side where the buttons and button holes were.
He said, “It’s not that at all. It’s that you’re vulnerable and emotional and I don’t want to…
“Be presumptuous,” said Arlene. “You’ve said that multiple times already.”
“I just want to be clear what I’m doing here. I want to be clear what you want from me and what you need. I want to make sure that you won’t think I took advantage of you.”
“Let me be clear for both of us,” said Arlene.
She turned them so that Bill’s back was to the bed and she had some room behind her. Softly she removed Bill’s hands from her blouse and stepped back two short steps.
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originally posted in September 2018
So let me get this right: Congress has a slush fund that taxpayers fund to pay off the women they’ve sexually abused and we, the taxpayers, are supposed to trust them as they judge over Brett Kavanaugh?
It just gets worse and worse. Just when you think we’ve come to the bottom of how low the government can go, we look at what we’re looking at now. The insanity and hypocrisy being pushed in front of our eyes are absolutely, incredibly unbelievable.
Once again, I rarely talk about myself using the word I when I write opinion pieces. But I have to say I’ve been writing fiction for about 50 years. One of the first rules of fiction is that it has to be believable. So writers talk about how the real truth sometimes cannot be written into fiction because when you see it in words in a piece of fiction, it becomes absolutely unbelievable.
The example I generally use is about the man who’s committing adultery (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a man) and goes into the very depths of a distant borough in NYC to meet his girlfriend at a restaurant for a dinner out. When I talk about this I generally use the borough of Staten Island because that one is pretty far out of the way for many people.
On the particular evening they are having dinner, the man’s wife meets up with her sister who has a friend that lives in Staten Island. The sister has plans to go and meet her friend and the wife tags along because her husband is working late. Lo and behold, don’t you know, they happen to walk into the same restaurant where her husband and his girlfriend are.
Now on some level, given that there are somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand restaurants in New York City, for the wife to walk in on the husband like that comes up to being almost-winning-the-lottery odds and therefore is pretty much unbelievable. Of course it could always be the truth and what really happened. But to a reader, the reader automatically thinks about the likelihood and says, “yeah, right.”
So we have a group of senators and congressmen who are telling us all this crap. The lefties attack the righties. The righties spend a lot of time defending themselves, which they should really stop doing, and then go on and accuse the lefties of playing the racist-sexist-all-the-other-ist cards, and on and on. At least a portion of senators and congressmen are guilty of all the same things they accuse others of. And as said up on top, we the taxpayers fund their slush fund.
No, you can’t really make this stuff up.
Into the mix come all the lefty bigwigs, Joe Biden, of course Hillary, and the great Pooh Bah Obama. Along with the biased media, they go on and make the most outrageous statements anyone could ever hear as if they are matters of fact. If this isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is.
So there you have it. I’m not even going to talk about the Kavanaugh issue. What’s going on with Kavanaugh is simply a reflection of where our country is at. We can look at the whole of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings as a metaphor for what’s going on in our society today.
I’m going to close with something that my father-in-law used to say: Man is by nature selfish and greedy.
What scares me most is that we’re beginning to see the true nature of what we are as a species. It ain’t pretty.
Pick up a copy of my published works here:
Books by Peter Weiss.
“Yeah, shit,” said Arlene. “I’m way too young to be all alone and my mother is way too young to die. She just starting dating about six months ago, and if I were to venture a guess I’d say she’s been getting some lately. More than I can say for myself.”
Bill made himself comfortable on the pillows. He scooched a touch closer to Arlene so their thighs were touching.
“What’s gonna happen at Cleveland Clinic?” he asked.
“We’ll get a second opinion and they’ll either suggest a different course of action or confirm the one we have. I’d prefer if we could just do chemo but I’ll make sure we do whatever promises the best results.”
Arlene moved to match Bill’s move. Now they were not casually touching thighs, they were pressed tightly against each other.
They lay touching until Bill got up to get his wine. He didn’t climb over Arlene but got up on the side he was on and walked around the bed. He stood beside the bed, finished the wine in his glass and refilled the glass. That done, he handed Arlene her wine and helped her sit up so she could sip it.
“How you feeling?” Bill asked.
“Sweet,” said Arlene. “Creamy and smooth. You?”
“Pleasantly relaxed.”
“Getting ready for a shower?”
“Soon, I guess. Why?”
“Cause you told me you wanted one.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to be held. I want to put my head in your lap and be stroked by you. I want you to tell me it’s all going to be okay.”
“So let’s do that,” said Bill.
He finished the wine that was in his glass before he returned to his spot on the bed. He made sure he was close to Arlene then leaned in over her and kissed her once on the forehead then once on the lips, closed-mouth kisses.
Facing him, Arlene leaned up on one elbow and kissed him on the cheek. Then she helped him put his arm around her, leaned herself on him and tucked her head into the space made by his extended arm. Bill pulled her even closer so that her head was more on his chest and began stroking her shoulders.
“I just feel like crying all the time,” said Arlene.
“I understand completely.” Bill turned to face her. He could smell her hair since it was close to his lips. Lavender. She was soft to his touch but he could feel that she was tense.
“And I feel so alone. I wonder if anyone can understand how I feel.”
Bill did not say anything. He squeezed her softly about her shoulders and adjusted her and him so they were less sitting up, more laying down facing each other. Situated this way he put his other arm around her and held her firmly within his arms.
“I think you’d be surprised. I think there’s lots of people who understand exactly how you feel. You just haven’t run up on them yet. Well, just me, and as it happens, I do understand.”
Arlene moved herself so close to Bill that she was almost upon him. Now Bill could feel the impression of her breasts against him. He could also stroke her back, which he did, over and over, softly but firmly. After a while, he tugged her blouse out from her skirt at the waist so he was able to reach up underneath it and stroke her bare back.
Arlene did not object in any way. She did not object in any way when he unhooked her bra and let it fall as it did. This way he could stroke her complete back unobstructed.
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Bill heard some fussing in the bathroom, the toilet flush, some more fussing. A little bit later Arlene returned. She was still wearing her waitress outfit, black skirt and white blouse, but her legs were bare and she was barefoot. Bill noticed that her toenails were done in a French pedicure and were shiny-clear. Seeing that, he checked her hands, what he could see of them, to note that her fingernails were done the same way.
Arlene said, “You could have laid down. I wouldn’t have minded.”
Bill said, “I didn’t want to be presumptuous, again, so I just waited.”
“I think you should stay the night,” said Arlene, “especially if you don’t have to go home. No pressure however. We don’t have to do anything and I don’t have any expectations other than to have you here to talk to.”
“If I stay the night I’d like to take a shower,” said Bill.
“Like I said,” said Arlene, “make yourself at home.”
Arlene sat on the bed next to Bill. First thing she did was put her hand on his thigh. Then she reached over and kissed him softly, a closed-mouth kiss on his cheek. With the hand on his thigh, she took his hand in hers and placed them both, her fingers clasped in his, in her lap.
“We could take a second Quaalude if you like,” said Bill.
“I’d like that,” Arlene said. “That way I’m sure I’ll sleep soundly.” She squeezed his hand gently and pressed it further into her lap so that he could feel the impression at the juncture of the thighs. “I’m starting to feel that first one and it feels good. I’ll bring the wine bottle in here.”
They both stood up and left the bedroom. Arlene went into the kitchen. Bill went to his coat. They met up and walked back into the bedroom together. Then they both sat back down on the bed. Arlene topped off their glasses of wine. Bill opened the pill bottle, popped a pill in his mouth and handed one to Arlene. Then he sipped his wine, except he didn’t sip it. He drank half the glass. He set the pill bottle on the night table.
Arlene sipped her wine too. She did sip, kind of daintily. Then she patted the bed and fixed it so they both lay down. She fixed the pillows and the throw pillows to make their heads comfortable.
“You really think you can fix my shifts?” Arlene asked.
“I’ll speak to Tommy in the morning,” said Bill. “Of course that’s independent of anything that happens here and you should definitely know that if you told me to go home right this moment and never spoke to me again I’d still speak to Tommy about it in the morning. I can’t promise that Tommy can do anything, but if he can’t, I’ll speak to Robert and see what he can do. Robert can supersede Drenovis and he can pressure Mr. Bowman.”
While Bill was speaking Arlene’s hand found its way to his thigh. Bill did not move away from her and felt himself stirring somewhat.
“What do you need in terms of shifts?” Bill asked.
“As much as I can get,” said Arlene. “My mother’s cancer is pretty pronounced. She needs at least one operation, maybe more, and then chemo on top of that. Even then the prognosis isn’t good.”
“When did you find out about it?” Bill asked.
“My mother’s been complaining for a while,” said Arlene. “She hasn’t been able to put her finger on it, but she’s felt queasy and weak and tired all the time. Then she started vomiting, mostly for no reason at all. That was about two months ago. That’s when I told her she had to go to the doctor immediately. I went with her and one thing led to the next and here we are. We’ll be going up to Cleveland clinic soon.”
“Shit,” Bill said.
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Doom and gloom!
For longer than two years now the only narrative we’ve heard in America is of the evil Trump presidency. More than 90% of all mainstream media articles about the President are negative. He is called every ist in the book and then some. His family is demeaned. The first lady is denigrated. His children are the subjects of vile threats and horrific statements that would never be tolerated if aimed at any left-wing politician.
Contrast that to the Obamas. The Obamas have always been treated by the media with kid gloves, respect and decency. There have been moments, of course, but they are few and far between. Michelle is treated like a queen. Barack is treated like a deity. Michelle and Barack’s children are never in the media and never were for as long as he was president and beyond. Their only media shoots were those their parents chose for them.
There’s something wrong with this picture!
What’s wrong with the picture is not about the Trumps or the Obamas. It is about the media. The media which was once a fair and honest media is no longer that. Because it is no longer that, because it is now a much-more-than-biased media, America is in peril.
Go to the land of dictators. Go to countries where there are coup d’états. The first thing any dictator seeking to take power does is blackout the media. S/he keeps the media blacked out until s/he controls it, and once controlled it is only allowed to broadcast what the new leader wants broadcasted.
The reason for this is quite simple. The incoming dictator knows that controlling what the people see and hear will give him/her power. Control the media, control what the people think. Oh, you might not control what the people think. But you can certainly control the information they receive. When information is controlled and limited, a great number of the people will surely follow the narrative being given. Control what is said. Say it over and over and over again, loud enough, often enough. Make sure nothing else is heard. This is the way to control people, to make them believe what it is you want them to believe.
Only in America can the news media hide under the protections of the Constitution, claim themselves to be a free and honest press when clearly they are far from that. For much, much longer than Donald Trump, the media have been selling the American people a left-wing narrative that is clearly false and definitely misleading.
The case of Jim Acosta and CNN is a metaphor for the biased press claiming to be a free, fair press. All one has to do is look at it, see Acosta’s behavior and listen to his words. Then one would see he is far from being an honest journalist. He is an opinionated hack hiding under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The fact of the matter is the Democrats through the biased mainstream media control the narratives the American people are being fed. This is dangerous, more so than any external enemies. Thus it is one of the greatest threats to America’s freedoms.
Pick up a copy of my published works here:
Books by Peter Weiss.
One thing led to the next and at nearly 2:00 AM Bill found himself calling home to tell his fiancé he was staying out in Whitehall, which was true technically since Arlene’s apartment was in Whitehall, the same actual city the steakhouse was in. Except there was no answer at home. So he imagined she was sleeping, which wasn’t all that likely because the phone would’ve wakened her, or that she’d gone to babysit Tim once again. This was the most likely of the alternatives. Either way, in effect, he could breathe easy.
Arlene kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet under her where she sat on the sofa. Bill sat as he had been sitting, relatively close to her but not imposing on her space. A time passed where no one said anything.
In the silence Bill thought about how since his mother had died he’d been afraid of everything all the time. He thought about how, worse than being afraid, for a long time he wasn’t aware that it was fear he was feeling. In reality, most of the time in his life thus far he had no clue what he was feeling or why. There was just this cloud hanging out there over him and this lead ball of near-nausea that endlessly sat in the pit of his stomach. On top of those was his impulsivity. His impulsivity was what got him busted and ultimately why he was sitting here with a waitress instead of at home sleeping with his fiancé. He wasn’t consciously aware of his impulsivity issue either. If he were, he might have already been a…
What-if was a dangerous game. Bill didn’t play what-if yet because he was too stuck in the here-and-now. His life was his life and here he was in it. He did things because they were there to do or because they needed to be done and that was it.
“So…,” Arlene finally said, “a penny for your thoughts.”
“How about you first.”
“I was wondering, since there was no answer at your house, if you were planning to stay the night.”
“That’d be presumptuous, don’t you think?”
“What would?”
“My planning to stay the night.”
“Why?”
“We went out for coffee, to talk.”
“And here we are. So let’s have a glass of wine and some Quaaludes if you have them and let’s lay down on my bed and talk.”
Later in his life, quite a bit later in fact, when he was in his mid-thirties, a waitress would ask him if he wanted to go bowling. Bill would discover that bowling was a euphemism of sorts, a type of code. It really stood for going to bed together. He would discover that he was her trophy and that even in his mid-thirties and married he was gullible, able to be seduced like a naive child.
He had gone bowling. Boy had he gone bowling.
Except he was not being seduced now. He got up from the sofa and went over to his coat. Arlene went into the kitchen. He took a bottle of pills from his pocket and sat back down on the sofa. Arlene came back with two glasses of red wine. She handed him a glass. He handed her a pill.
“Come on,” she said. She reached out for his hand and led him into her bedroom.
The bedroom was typically female. The bed was made tight, magenta covers and comforter, frilly and soft. Throw pillows were settled over the bed pillows, neat like ducks in a row.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
Bill sat on the edge of the bed. He placed his wine glass on the night table and untied his shoes. He was unsure whether or not to put his feet up, so he sat on the edge of the bed and waited.
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By Peter Weiss
Arlene led him to a small all-night diner. She waited in her car until he had parked next to her then they entered the diner together.
“I come here sometimes with my mother,” said Arlene. She led him to a corner booth where they sat facing each other. We usually have lunch, sometimes dinner. Saves my mother from having to cook.”
“My mother died when I was kid,” said Bill. “I’m only telling you that because I want you to know that I feel for you. I hope your mother still goes on and lives a long life.”
“She has cancer,” said Arlene. “They’re going to operate but the prognosis isn’t all that good.”
“I’m really sorry,” said Bill. “I’ll pray for both of you.”
Arlene reached her hand across the table signaling for Bill to give her his hand. They were holding hands across the table when the waitress came. They both ordered coffee and sat without speaking.
After awhile, Bill asked her if she had any other family. Arlene said she had some cousins but they all lived far away.
Bill didn’t know what to say. He held her hand until the waitress brought the coffee and then he let go. It was an awfully awkward moment. Arlene looked as if she were going to burst into tears. Bill hoped she wouldn’t, but he wouldn’t have blamed her if she did.
“Want some ice cream or something?” he asked.
Arlene said, “I just want to be held. What I’d really like is for us to be somewhere quiet, alone, where I could just cry on your shoulder.”
“You have a place to go?”
“Sure. My place.”
“Is it close by?”
“Very.”
They drove in separate cars, Bill following Arlene, to where she lived, a small apartment. When they were inside Arlene showed him where to put his coat and then led him into the living room.
First thing, Arlene kicked off her shoes. She motioned for Bill to sit on the couch and asked him if she should start a pot of coffee. He said no, that he’d had plenty. He told her under ordinary circumstances he’d ask her if she wanted to get high, but he didn’t figure this was a time for that. He also said he had some Quaaludes and that she was welcome to a couple if she wanted to really relax later on.
Then they were both settled on the sofa and Arlene was looking at Bill in a way that he didn’t quite understand. He couldn’t figure exactly what she wanted from him and he was very unsure as to how to proceed. He sat back and shifted away from her but did not actually move. He hoped she would read his body language but he wasn’t at all sure his body language was clear because he wasn’t sure that he was clear about what he was doing there or about what he was feeling.
He said, “I guess I should put this out on the table. I’m not sure why I’m here and I’m not clear about what you want from me. So if there is anything you would like me to be doing or you’re expecting me to be doing, just let me know.”
“I don’t have many friends,” said Arlene. “The friends I had were at the University. When I grew up I wasn’t one to have many friends. Then my parents got divorced when I was fourteen. Not many families had divorces in them so I was kind of a pariah.”
“We all have stories,” said Bill.
“I am so scared,” Arlene said.
Pick up a copy of my published works here:
By Peter Weiss
originally written in 2013
No one disputes that humankind has evolved or that the first premise of evolution is survival. Typically, we think of survival on an individual basis, but few people are wholly isolated or individually apart any longer. Instead, we live in vastly institutionalized societies. Barnard (1938) compared organizations to living, breathing organisms and he extended his analogy to view an organization’s attributes as human in nature. After all, since human organizations are made by humans, they are innately human.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Service’s Welfare programs inclusive of Food Stamps, Aid to Domestic Children, Section Eight, and most others, were begun with the best of intentions: an unequivocal desire to help the needy, the unfortunate and the unprotected in our society. But these intentions and desires have been usurped by survival. Staying alive, the simple rule of existence, has trumped and replaced original human concern and altruism. Along the continuum, the prime directive of these institutions has become survival, pure and simple, and just as the original main objectives of these institutions have been altered, so have their directions and, most important, so have their current effects on the very people they were created to serve. By far, these programs are now harmful to their clientele and detrimental to our society and the taxpayers who ultimately fund them.
Child Protective Services (CPS), although it has many names nationwide, under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), demonstrates a similar evolution. Formally begun in the early 1900s with the purest intention of helping children in need, CPS is now a vast, fifty-state bureaucracy that has deleterious effects upon the children and families it is supposed to help. The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) asserts that CPS has an 80% failure rate and that 75% of comparably maltreated children not removed from their homes fare better than those children placed in foster care. However, since a major part of Federal, State and local economies in the United States are financially dependent upon CPS subsistence, little is done to reorient it toward its original missives.
No matter what the acronym, CPS has a department or division in each of the fifty states. They all suckle on federal funding through HHS, Title IX and Social Security, and while this might not sound too bad at first, cost wise this is just the tip. Attached to this are all affiliate services, service organizations and all the connected State Agencies which are needed to enable CPS to operate. Below is a bare-bones, simplified chart to offer an idea of how CPS sits atop a mega child-industry, the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, supporting a wide-spread array of privately contracted agencies and other state agencies.
Prevent Child Abuse America (http://www.preventchildabuse.org/index.php) estimated that direct expenditure on child abuse and neglect for 2012 would be approximately $33,333,619,510. Indirect expenditure, it estimated, would be $46,926,791,578. The total cost of child maltreatment, according to Prevent Child Abuse America, was estimated at $80,260,411,087. (http://www.preventchildabuse.org/images/research/pcaa_cost_report_2012_gelles_perlman.pdf).
In sum, the total cost of child maltreatment in America is slightly less than 25% of the total United States budget, and HHS and CPS as the distributors of this fortune in tax dollars fails 80% of the time.
References
Barnard, C. (1966). The Functions of the executive (30th Anniversary ed.). Cambridge:
Benson, C. (Ed.). (2003). America’s children: key national indicators of well-being, 2003. Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, Washington DC. Retrieved April 17, 2005 from http://childstats.gov/ac2003/pdf/ac2003.pdf.
Clark, M.A., Shreve, K., & Stone, C. (2004, December). Taking stock in children: collaborating to promote success for low-income secondary students. National Association of Secondary School Principals. NASSP Bulletin (88), 61-73. Retrieved July 8, 2006, from Proquest database (ID 788921681).
Crosnoe, R., Mistry, R.S., & Elder, G.H. Jr. (2002). Economic disadvantage, family dynamics, and adolescent enrollment in higher education [Electronic Version]. Journal of Marriage and Family 64, (3), 690-702. Retrieved June 11, 2006, from Proquest (146863841).
Deal, T. E., & Peterson, K. D. (1999). Shaping school culture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Dickens, W., Sawhill, I., & Tebbs, J. (2006, April). The effects of investing early in education on economic growth The Brookings Institution (Policy Brief No. 153). Retrieved July 2, 2006, from http://www.brookings.edu/ comm/policybriefs/pb153.pdf.
Fass, S., & Cauthen, N. (2005, September). Who are America’s poor children? National Center for Children in Poverty. Retrieved July 9, 2006, from Columbia University National Center for Children in Poverty website, http://www.nccp.org/pub_cpt05b.html.
Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pick up a copy of my published works here:
By Peter Weiss
So there they were. Arlene went into a whole monologue describing exactly what was wrong with her mother and what it meant to her. Bottom lines were simple. Her mother was very sick, maybe not going to live for much longer and the treatments she needed were very expensive. This meant Arlene was going to have to work nights and days and be away from her mother much more than she wanted to be.
“Life sucks,” she said.
Bill didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know why Arlene was telling him this. He wondered if she had told Tommy or any of the other waitresses. He wondered if she had other family who could help out. He clearly agreed that life sucked.
He listened. He had a bottle of beer in his hands and sipped at it slowly. He looked to his feet and shuffled his butt a little as he sat on the metal milk cases.
“You closing girl?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Arlene. “But I’m not making any money tonight. No one is.”
“Check the basketball schedule,” said Bill. “When the buckeyes are playing we always have good business. Make sure you get those shifts.”
“It’s not that easy,” said Arlene. “I don’t have any seniority and I don’t have any pull. I know Tommy will help me out when he can, but there’s not much he can do. If I want the good shifts when I want them, I have to screw Drenovis.”
“Life does suck,” said Bill. “Let me see what I can do.”
“What can you do?”
“Give me a few days. I’ll do it quickly.”
“Think anything will happen?”
“Like what?”
“With my shifts.”
“Of course it will.”
“That’s not why I came out to sit with you,” said Arlene.
Bill said, “I didn’t think so. You want a piece of pie?”
“Sure.”
“What do you like?”
“Cherry.”
“Lexi knows you’re out here, right?”
“Yeah. She told me to take my time.”
Bill got up and walked through the kitchen over to the pantry station. He helped himself to a piece of cherry pie then stopped to see what Esserine was doing.
“You eating pie now?” she asked.
“It’s for Arlene. What you up to?”
“Hanging out. Deciding whether I should start to cleanup or not. What’s up with her?”
“I’ll tell you more later,” said Bill.
Esserine said, “You don’t need another girlfriend.”
“It’s not like that,” said Bill.
He walked through the line back into the hall, handed Arlene the plate with the pie on it and sat back down.
He said, “When you go back out, bring me another beer and ask Bebe what she wants for dinner.”
Arlene took a forkful of pie and ate it. Bill watched her, gave her the once over although he couldn’t say why. He wanted to ask her if she wanted to talk but he was hesitant. It seemed, and it felt logical, that she did. Otherwise, he thought, she wouldn’t have said anything in the first place.
Arlene was conscious of him watching her. She shifted on the lettuce cases and made sure her legs were not wide open.
“Pie is good,” she said.
“You’re not supposed to be eating it,” said Bill.
“Yeah, I know.”
“So,” Bill said, “you want to go somewhere after work and talk?”
“I think I do,” said Arlene. “Something tells me you’d be a good person to talk to.”
Bill was about to say something when he heard the automatic doors open in the kitchen. He was about to say that he didn’t know if he were a good person to talk to or not, but he would certainly try to be. But he didn’t get the words out. He heard the bell a second after the doors opened and he stood up immediately.
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Bea got more and more bitchy. Mary got more and more needy. Bill started getting bored. He wasn’t bored with Mary. He was in love with her. He was in love with her and he was in love with his fiancé. This was a conundrum, to be sure.
Bea’s bitchiness stemmed from the fact that she was losing control. The loss of control was not in any one given area but just a general malaise that rose in her and spread throughout.
As she became more bitchy she became more demanding in all regards. She demanded that Bill go downstairs with her at all different times, usually for no reason. She demanded he carry up the silliest little things for her, even at times when he was occupied doing other work. The more Bill and Mary cared for each other, the more mean Bea became.
Tommy saw what was happening. He didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what was happening. Tommy saw it. The waitresses saw it. Mary saw it and told Bill that she would talk to Bea about it. Bea didn’t want to hear anything and told Mary nothing was wrong.
Sooner or later, it had to come to a head. Sooner or later there had to be some sort of catharsis, as it were, or a catastrophe. Mary told Bill that in their discussions she asked Bea if she was having the change of life. Bea almost smacked her.
Arlene and Bill did get together, but not the way either of them thought it would happen. Per their original conversation about it, Bill had thought they would have arranged a time and a place to actually meet. Given that he was busy with Mary and of course his fiancé, he thought that was going to take some planning and not be as easy as it might be for someone who was unattached. But that’s not the way it happened at all.
It happened one night when the business was unbearably slow, several weeks after they had that moment in the kitchen. Arlene had only worked nights two more times. This night was the third.
Bill was sitting out on the milk cases where he always sat. Jimmy and Grandma had left about fifteen minutes earlier than usual. Arlene and Lexi were the two girls working and Lexi was early girl. Bill had already fed the waitresses and given that there were no orders but it was still early, he had nothing to do but hang out. It was too early to start any cleanup.
Bill had called home and told his fiancé he would be on time, a good thing, he’d decided, since with her studies and her busy schedule centered around UDC they had not been spending much time together. Unlike Bill, his fiancé was a clearly-focused, no bull shit lady. She knew what she wanted and was unafraid to go after it. She knew how to get what she wanted, knew what she had to do and did it.
Bill was quite the opposite in some respects. He was conflicted, overly cerebral, clearly ADD. He had been taught not to ask for what he wanted, that other people were always more important than him. These teachings would not serve him well, but he would not discover this until later in his life. More immediately, they would serve certain needs of his but not the key ones. And the drugs didn’t help anything, but you couldn’t tell him this.
After Arlene had eaten, while Lexi was still out on the floor, she came into the kitchen and found Bill out in the hall. She sat herself on the lettuce cases, the same ones on which Bea always sat. The stack was lower now since most of the cases of lettuce had been used.
“What’s up?” Bill asked.
Arlene looked down to her feet. “My mother’s really sick,” she said.
