Mary let herself be pounded with hot water. The shower she took was impersonal. Mary used a washcloth instead of her hands and felt afraid of her body and the things she had done to it. She could not notice the subtle imperfections in her body the way should could when she rubbed the bar of Yardley Lavender soap directly on her skin. Mary inhaled the steam and let it collect in the bottoms of her lungs until it couldn’t be contained anymore and the warmth of the air entered into her blood stream. It ran through her, navigating her veins and capillaries until it ended up back in her lungs, where she decided to let it out.
She stepped out of the claw foot tub and onto the shagged bathmat. With her wet hair suctioned to her body, she reached to the rack for her towel. She squeezed the excess water from her hair because she enjoyed the sound it made against the bathroom floor and wrapped the towel around her. This was her least favorite part about taking showers, because Mary only had one towel and hated the way her long hair stuck to her back when it was wet.
She reached for the pack of cigarettes that was on the coffee table but remembered it was empty just as she picked it up. She dashed over to her freezer and rejoiced as she grabbed the last pack out of her carton. The first drag of the first cigarette out of a pack of frozen cigarettes was always Mary’s favorite because it was the only one that did not taste like a cheap cigarette. She squinted her eyes as she lit it, cupping her hand around the flame from her lighter, as if a magic gust of wind was going to suddenly blow through her home at just that moment. She slid gracefully over to her couch and ashed in a beer bottle. She could afford an ashtray, but liked the aesthetic of the bottle better. She could also afford a bigger place but liked that she could use the excuse of not having any room for company, especially her mother.
She walked out of her studio and lowered her sunglasses. She often thought that this was why sunglasses were invented, to help with hangovers. Her hair was still wet from her shower but this was okay because she didn’t want to be mistaken for a girl who didn’t shower, since her mother always told her those were the girls that ended up smelly and alone. The setting sun bothered her. Her eyes squinted even with the sunglasses so her feet walked her body east, away from the sun. Her hands dangled at her sides as she floated down the sidewalk and to her spot, the Café 59. She opened the door and placed her things at a table next to the windows. Mary retrieved her dark roast, in a mug, and sat herself in her chair. She pretended to open the book she brought, but not to read. Her book was simply a mask she wore in public, like a pair of white earphones, or a newspaper. She liked to use these things to keep herself alone in crowded areas and carried these things with her at all times.
Mary had taken to watching a couple that sat on the upper level in the far corner. She knew they were on a first or second date because she over heard them say things that made them sound like they were interviewing each other. Mary wanted someone to ask her these types of questions. She had really good, thought out answers to these questions. All Mary got to do was sling cheap, Greek, food at drunks at 4:00 AM and flirt with men in suits that would never think to ask her on a date. She didn’t quite understand what her mother had that she didn’t. However, Mary assumed her mother still did not know about her last boyfriend, the one that Mary had neatly scooped up after her mother had left him feeling very poorly about himself. She felt like someone else finally knew what her mother was; a cougar in every sense of the word.
Mary saw the couple get up to leave. The man helped the lady with her coat. Mary pretended to sip her black coffee as they were leaving. He opened the door and she smiled approvingly. Mary estimated how long their relationship would last and gave it only a few months on account of the man looking too much like her brother. Fucking crack-head, she thought, even though she knew Johnny would never touch real drugs. Bored and lonely, her gaze searched the lobby until she found another man to look at.
He was a dark man with dark hair and dark eyes that mimicked the ones her father had given her. He had no paper and no earphones but sitting in front of him was a book by Nietzsche. Mary looked at him while he was looking at her and this made her eyes race down to the book she had just realized was not open. How embarrassing, she thought. Mary had been caught. She hurried to open her book before he had time to figure out what was going on. She would glance up frequently to find this dark haired stranger’s intent dark eyes temporarily locking with hers. She felt the book she was pretending to read was sending him the wrong message about her. Or more so, she heard her mother say, “Jesus Christ Mary, what the Hell are you doing?” She put away the collected works of Sylvia Plath in search of something better. She roughed up her bag for a bit but before her hands had landed on, “The Essential Foucault,” he had actually opened his book and began to read from it. Damn.
The disappointment of being caught reading the wrong book had put Mary in an anxious mood. She walked to the bathroom. She didn’t even have to pee, but she wanted to let people see her walk to the bathroom so they would know she was either well hydrated or bulimic. This was not a trait she enjoyed, but one that her mother had thrust upon her since childhood, as though if Mary did not use the bathroom at every opportunity she might piss herself and wind up smelly and alone. She sat on the toilet with her pants up. Mary wondered when she would be able to look at a man and know. She didn’t know what she would know when she looked at him, but she figured people have to know something they’ve never known before to spend their life with one person. Mary barely had enough love for herself and her rat, let alone another person. She thought she might want to get out of the bathroom before people thought she was a person who shit in public bathrooms. No one likes those people.
She stood in the doorway and stared at the man and noticed he had closed his book again. He was digging through his bag and didn’t appear to be looking for anything. She sauntered to her table, making extra sure to bump the air with her hips. She sat down and glanced up to find him still staring at her. He grinned and put his head back in his bag as he pulled out “The Road Not Taken.” This is getting weird, Mary thought. She bolted up and silently stormed over to his table and fell into a chair.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“The same thing you are doing,” he replied.
“I doubt that. I would never try to pick someone up at a coffee shop, that’s just, so,” she paused. “Besides, how do you even know what I’m doing?”
“You couldn’t be more obvious if you were sitting there with your Walkman on,” he said while grinning at the look of feigned confusion on her face. “And why would I want to pick someone up when I could just look like I’m picking someone up?”
“So that maybe you could meet someone else who doesn’t really want to pick someone up? Why are you reading that? Is it any good?” she motioned towards his book.
“No. Maybe, I haven’t read it,” he blurted. How do you feel about G.I. Joes?”
“I haven’t played with them in years,” she said. “My mother threw all of mine out because, well, she didn’t really need a reason.”
“I have some in my pocket; do you want to play with them?”
“Mmm… Not here.”
Mary’s eyes followed him to the bathroom before her body. She knocked on the door before she entered but opened the door before he replied. She entered the door head first, her tiny fingers clutching the door as she slinked in, perhaps worried that the bathroom floor might give way with the weight of two people on it. She locked the door behind her and sat with this man on the floor as he pulled out his G.I. Joes one by one. Mary did not yet know anything new, so she assumed this was not the man she was going to marry. This did however give people an opportunity to see her walk into the bathroom with a man so that they would know she was not a lesbian. This was less of a concern of her mother’s than it was of Mary’s since she was often hit on by women. At least she thought they were women. He pulled a flask out of his jeans pocket, unscrewed it, and took a swig. He motioned it towards her but she pulled out her own, smaller silver version, from her bra and sloshed it in her mouth.
“What are you shooting,” he asked?
“You.” She motioned her head towards her first infantry, which she had neatly aligned, and prepared to invade his territory. She had never met a man with this many G.I. Joes, perhaps even more than her brothers had combined. But this might have been because her dad was a Navy S.E.A.L. and having army men in the house would have made him very upset. Mary dated a Marine once, and her dad would get very proud whenever he came around. He would get out of his chair, which grew increasingly difficult towards the end, shake his hand and exclaim,
“Semper Fi!”
Mary was not sure what it was exactly. She knew some of it though. The man was significantly taller than her, but not tall enough to make them an odd couple. The man wore fitted clothing. This was very important because if he did not, she might have failed to see the fledgling gut starting to form under his shirt. She did not love his gut, but it also went to show he was not afraid of it. Perhaps most importantly, he was dark. His eyes were glassy and deep set so he looked like he never got enough sleep, he was tanned so he must have been the Middle-Eastern kind of Jew, rather than the curly red-haired kind, and every time she thought about this it made her feel warm. But that was all she could account for. Beyond those superficial things, she had no idea what she was about to get herself into.
Mary sat with this man for an indeterminable amount of time making “Pow! Pow!” and “You’re dead!” come from the little men and laughter from the big man. She was deciding whether she was drunker than the man, which she was sure she was since she was very small and had not eaten anything yet, when a pounding shook the door. Mary and her man looked at each other in terror. They couldn’t leave the bathroom like this, not with all of these G.I. Joes spread all across the bathroom floor and the stench of booze sitting on their shoulders. And how could they get out anyway, they were drunk. He nodded at her and she put the G.I. Joes in her bag quickly, but still one by one, there was still some need for order. She stood up, dropped her pants and fell on to the toilet. The man poked his head near the door and calmly told the woman knocking that his girlfriend had no bowel muscles so he had to hold her body in a way that her waste could fall out of her and that sometimes this took a while. The woman shook her head at the sight of Mary’s naked bottom leaned over and walked away. He closed the door softly behind her while Mary pulled up her pants. The man stared at Mary as she buttoned her pants, half smiling, half something else. She grabbed her bag and they strolled out of the bathroom together like they were sober. The man sat back down at his table and Mary kissed him on his whiskey warm, red, cheek as she walked out of the café.
On her way home Mary purchased a bag of army men with parachutes and tossed her books into the book drop at the library.
