Gloria Kitchens

All the jeans at JCPenney made Joan’s hips look wide and boxy. Joan stood in front of the mirror that enclosed the claustrophobic dressing room space. An ad of a thin woman in dark purple sunglasses with her midriff showing mocked Joan as Joan contorted her body, looking for a flattering angle.

Joan twisted her body so that the right side of her hip stuck out. Then, she sucked in so that her stomach laid flatter. When she couldn’t hold her breath anymore, her stomach untensed and was pinched by the waistband of the jeans. When she released the button from its clasp, she felt a huge relief fall over her as she let her stomach hang out. She’d never gotten used to the way that the fat had left her hips and ass and somehow floated onto her midsection, forming a well-sized pouch. But it’d made its way there along with a flurry of stretch marks and wrinkles that would only become more visible as she aged.

This wasn’t what a housewife was meant to look like, she thought to herself. She was thinking of the skinny 1950s models from magazines that had their dresses cinched to their waists without a problem. The pair of Spanx that covered Joan’s hips just below her belly button was meant to help her fit into clothing rather than spill out of it.

She’d just go up a size, again. Nick wouldn’t notice. If he did, he at least never said anything about it. 

Joan put her clothes back on. They were big enough to hide inside. A flannel shirt that just fell over her straight-legged pants. She got to the register and told the cashier that she wanted every pair of jeans that she had tried on in a size 18. She was sure that she heard the young woman sigh as they walked into a backroom.

“How rude.” Another customer stood in line next to Joan. The other cashier acted like they didn’t notice what she said.

The customer was another woman in her fifties but looked like she’d spent her whole life drinking green juice and doing yoga. At a glance, she could pass for thirty-something, but Joan couldn’t be fooled. The crow’s feet developing around the ends of her eyes gave it away. She was beautiful but even she couldn’t stay young forever.

“These girls don’t know how to treat anyone these days,” Joan said.

“I know. You’d think their parents would’ve taught them just a little bit of respect.”

“Ma’am?” The cashier finished ringing up the woman’s items. They looked bored.

The woman took out a light brown faux leather wallet that was darkened at the edges. A small buckle sat in the middle. It looked expensive. By the time that Joan’s cashier had returned, Joan was embarrassed to dig into her clunky black handbag for her credit card. As the cashier folded her plus-size jeans into a glossy tan bag, the customer that she’d been chatting with was already walking out of the door. And her ass looked a lot better than Joan’s.

Joan grabbed her bag and walked out of the JCPenney. Her foot hit something on the ground and she looked down to see a wallet with a metal buckle on the side of it. Joan picked it up and looked around for the woman she had been talking to, but she’d already gotten herself lost in the sea of people walking down sidewalks. Joan opened it to look for a phone number and a picture of the woman sat in the wallet. But it wasn’t only her. There was a young boy sitting next to her, his cheek was squashed against her arm and his brown, bowl-cut hair fell right above his eyes. On the other side of the boy, was a man with a rugged jawline and a cowlick on the left edge of his hairline. He made Joan think about Nick. They could’ve been siblings with how similar they looked.

The family in the photo looked happy. Joan felt a sharp edge threatening to slice her heart open and turn it inside out. Nick was all she could see in the man in the photo. It looked like Nick and his son enjoying an afternoon together with the perfect woman. And she wondered what Nick’s son would have done next.

---

It was the summer before Joan’s senior year of high school when she met Asher at a hotel resort in Florida. They’d met in the arcade room at the pinball machine. Joan leaned against it while he played. After the game was finished, Joan and Asher spent the rest of the trip together.

Asher was tall and dark-skinned, with hair cut into a box that sat on top of his head and faded down at the sides. His dark brown eyes were intense. And he knew so much about the world. He knew Spanish, French, and Italian and Joan didn’t know if he knew any other languages because her tongue was already down his throat. Their warm air intertwined, and she imagined it floating up into the shape of a heart. This had to be the love that they talked about in movies. Intense and all-at-once.

The taste of Asher’s lips lingered on hers as she lay in her hotel room, listening to her parents pack their suitcases for the trip back home the next day. Hot tears streamed down her cheeks, drenching her pillow as she thought about having to say goodbye to Asher and the prospect of never seeing him again.

The next morning, she met Asher in a wooden cabana, and she’d started crying again. She scrawled her home phone number on a piece of paper and shoved it at him, begging for them to stay in touch. With a hand on her back, Asher soothed her worried cries and told her that they’d always remember each other. That they’d shared these precious moments together and now it was time to say goodbye. He leaned into her, kissing her, and wiping her tears away. Their tongues swirled around in a dance that Joan thought she’d never be able to mimic with anyone else. His hands moved down to her hips, sliding her shorts and panties down, and then he laid her on top of the bench of pillows. When he finished, he left her in the cabana alone after pulling his orange swim trunks back up and giving her a soft kiss on her forehead.

When the bright red that she expected didn’t fall from her for a week, she sat on the toilet looking at an empty pad wishing to bleed. After another seven days, she finally mustered up the courage to buy a pregnancy test. And the double lines that she feared appeared so effortlessly. It felt like her lungs had stopped breathing, her heart had stopped beating, and her brain had stopped thinking. She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t. She just cried and after she finished, she rolled the pregnancy test up into a mound of toilet paper and took it to the garbage bins outside.

One night, when her parents were away, she drank cans of her father’s beer, hoping it’d burn the thing inside of her, but she knew that she needed something stronger than that. So, she lurked through her parents’ liquor cabinet that sat high above the refrigerator and she took an already open vodka bottle. It burned her throat. It felt like she’d eaten an alcohol wipe. And after a minute or two of waiting for the taste of it to leave her mouth she tried another swig. This one hurt too but not as bad as the first and she found herself able to drink it as easily as she was able to drink beer. That would surely send this thing into the depths of hell, she thought.

The next morning, she woke with what felt like an anvil on top of her head and as soon as she stood up, she threw up onto her bed. And all she could do for the rest of the day was lay on the floor so that the world would stop spinning. She didn’t go to school that day.

She had dreams of having the baby while she sat on the toilet. At the end, she dunked its head deep in the water until it stopped moving. Once she flushed, it was gone, like it never existed. She wore baggy sweaters to cover up her bloated midsection and after her mother kissed her before Joan walked to school one morning, she walked to a bus stop and rode through three cities until she finally made it to a planned parenthood. 

She made it back home in time to kiss her mother on the cheek as she got home from work. Asher never called.

---

Joan pulled into her small, cracked driveway and let her hands scrape against the dark red and brown bricks of the house. The air was stale, and she couldn’t remember why she’d wanted to buy this house anyway. She laid on the faded black couch and stared at the white popcorn ceiling thinking of a side of Nick that she’d never get to satisfy. A fulfilled father without a care in the world. Her wedding photo with Nick hung on a wall in the living room. Joan noticed that the baseboard was slightly bent away from the wall. Their smiles promised a happily ever after that never came.

The name of the woman who dropped her wallet was Katherine. Joan imagined her neighbors calling her Kathy and her close friends calling her Kat. She was just as slender as she was in the store. Joan and Nick had made the perfect couple, Joan had once thought. But now, seeing Katherine and the man who looked like a much better version of Nick she realized that they made a much better pair. Joan and Nick looked like soft, brown decaying apples amongst crisp, fresh ones. They were always the last to be chosen.

Katherine seemed to have one thing that Joan could never have. A bright blue-eyed boy with brown hair who had the same wide-eyed excitement that Nick had towards almost everything and everyone. Joan was sure that she could never make anything that beautiful. She couldn’t tell how old the picture was. But the wrinkles hadn’t fully burrowed into Katherine’s face yet.

The familiar screech from the brakes of Nick’s Cadillac turned into the driveway. It was late. But he was always late on Wednesday nights. Those were nights where he told her to not bother cooking. He’d get something on the way home.

She sunk the woman’s wallet into her own purse and waited for the key to enter the lock.

The smell of Chinese food floated through the front door and Nick’s briefcase struck the side of the doorframe like it always did.

“Hey, sweetie.” Nick held papers in his mouth that muffled his words. “Ya hungry?”

“Starving.” Joan hadn’t thought about food the whole time she’d been home. She hadn’t put away her clothes from the store.

“I got the usual. Sesame chicken and broccoli for the lady and orange chicken and fried rice for me. You went shopping today?” Nick moved around the kitchen slinging bowls out of cabinets and knocking things together in his haste.

“I got some jeans,” she said.

Nick was back in the living room, sitting the food, bowls, and silverware onto the coffee table.

“I had to get a bigger size,” Joan confessed, and she felt like she was almost betraying her skinny desire by watching Nick take the food out of the bag.

“Oh, babe you know I don’t care about that stuff. Come here,” he said.

Joan sank into his arms expecting to feel some type of comfort, but his touch only stung her, and it looked like he was going to say something when she pulled away prematurely but then Joan sunk her fork into her chicken and stuffed it in her mouth. The sweet taste clung to her tongue for a moment, and she already made a promise in her head to eat better tomorrow. Once she finished, her stomach felt full, and she felt disgusted. She leaned back on the couch and stared at the ceiling again.

“Do you regret marrying me, Nick?” she said.

“What?”

“Do you—”

“I heard what you said. Why would you ask that?” Nick stopped eating even though he still had half his bowl left.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Look at me, Jo,” he said. “Look at me.”

She finally obeyed his command and she saw Nick staring at her looking as if he might cry.

“I wouldn’t be with you for twenty years if I wasn’t happy,” he said.

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious, Joan. Are you happy?” he said.

The question felt innocent enough, but Joan couldn’t think of a time where she’d truly ever been happy.

“Yes,” she said.

She leaned against the side of his arm as he finished eating. Nick talked about a new coworker that looked like he’d rolled out of a crib every morning. Nick went to shower while Joan put the dishes in the sink. She called the woman from the store to set up a time to return her wallet.

---

Joan met Nick at a frat party on a cool night in October. She ran into him, splashing her beer onto his light blue shirt. After a while, she found herself in the bathroom inhaling the sweet apple-y beer from his breath as he pressed his leg between her legs. His thick-framed glasses pressed into the bridge of her nose and his hand slipped up her side and Joan imagined their breaths fogging up the bathroom mirror behind them.

After that, they’d take turns sleeping in each other’s rooms night after night. They mostly stayed in his room listening to the parties bustle below them as Nick laid on Joan’s legs and she stroked his hair back. And the first “I love you” came as the music boomed through the house and the other one came as cheerful screams bellowed from below.

One evening near graduation, Joan came by the frat house to drop off a graduation gift that she’d been scrounging up the money for for a few months. It was a briefcase. Nick had talked about going to law school. And all Joan knew about lawyers was that they always had briefcases. It wasn’t one of those fake vegan briefcases either. It was made of real leather. A cow was killed just so she could buy it. Circle of life, she supposed.

When she opened the door to his room, his clothes were off and so were the clothes of the girl right under him. When Nick looked at Joan, he looked angry at first. The briefcase felt as heavy as lead as it slipped out of her hands. Nick tried to cover himself and the best he could do was put a shirt over his crotch leaving his butt exposed. She felt like she should’ve expected this to happen. 

Years after, they reconnected at a small coffee shop in the middle of a small town in Georgia. Nick had flunked out of law school. In fact, he’d barely made it in. It only took a year for him to realize that he wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer. He ended up at an advertising business making pretty good money. Joan worked a desk job as a receptionist for the county courthouse. That was as much as she’d been able to get with her English degree. She hadn’t dated much since college. Touches just didn’t feel the same anymore and she’d stopped looking at herself in the mirror.

They talked like they had before, and the sting of betrayal began melting away. And she was finally noticing how rugged he looked. How much more mature he’d become. There was even a dent in the bridge of his nose when he took his glasses off, revealing dark blue eyes that had seen just enough of the world to be tired of it already. And suddenly, it was Joan and Nick again.

They married only a year later and bought a house together with plans for a baby room. However, every time she’d get high from the excitement of a positive pregnancy test, she’d find herself on the bathroom floor clutching herself as another pregnancy failed. When that happened, Nick held her in his arms as they sat against the side of the tub. “Maybe it just wasn’t the right time. Their time would come,” he’d say. After the third time it happened, he stopped saying anything.

After a doctor told Joan that she was the one that was broken she was sure that it was karma for what she did when she was seventeen. She’d had her chance then and she threw it away. And she’d been happy to throw it away. Joan stayed in bed for days. She was fired but she would’ve quit anyway if she felt like leaving the comfort of her bed sheets. She imagined that she was a fetus being protected from the outside world by the womb of her bed sheets. Then a long surgical knife broke her sheets open pulling her out.

---

The outside of Katherine’s house was covered in soft vibrant green grass, each blade cut evenly. The walkway up to the door was lined with purple and pink flowers and dark red roses stuck out of the bushes right under the huge window that looked into her house. She was walking around from corner to corner adjusting a pillow on the couch and then straightening up magazines on the dark oak coffee table. Joan couldn’t tell what was there to clean. From the driver’s seat of her car across the street, she could tell that it was clean enough.

Katherine wore light pink pants that cupped her buttocks just right and tightened at her waist. Her figure was elegant. Katherine stopped in front of a large mirror that sat next to the window and perused her figure before going back to cleaning.  Joan opened her sun visor where she kept the family photo. She looked at the young boy that stood in between his parents. He looked proud and hopeful. Like he didn’t see a single fault in his father.

Joan walked up to Katherine’s door and knocked. And suddenly, she felt out of place in her oversized greenish-brown sweater that clung to her belly and choked the fat at her neck.

“Hi!” The door opened, and Katherine’s lips were lathered in a dark sensuous shade of red that made her teeth look even whiter than they already were. She saw the wallet first and was already reaching for it and Joan had to stop herself from holding onto it.

“Katherine.” The name felt odd on Joan’s tongue. “Sorry that I couldn’t get this to you yesterday.”

“Please, call me Kathy. I was driving myself crazy all night wondering where I must’ve dropped this. You’re a real lifesaver.” Kathy nestled the wallet on the inside of her wrists without checking if any money or credit cards had gone missing.

As Joan began turning away, Kathy grabbed her arm.

“Where are you going? Please, come in for some coffee. It’s the least I could do.” Wrinkles covered the outer parts of her eyes, but her eyes held such a fervor that Joan was afraid to know what would happen if she denied the request. So, she didn’t.

Joan walked into white carpeted floors. Much cleaner than Joan could’ve seen from outside.

“Leave your shoes at the door, please. I’m one of those people.” She giggled but Joan couldn’t figure out what was funny about that.

Joan left her tan flats at the door and her cream-white socks looked like dirt against the carpet.

“Make yourself at home. I’ll put a fresh pot on.”

“Thanks.” Joan strained a smile.

Kathy walked down a hall towards a staircase before taking a left into what Joan assumed to be the kitchen.

Joan made her way into the living room. She looked out of the window amongst the roses and tulips and freshly cut lawn and felt like a queen in her own castle for only a second. Then, she looked at her car outside on the curb and remembered that this wasn’t her house. Joan’s house wasn’t even her house. Once the disappointment settled in, she found herself glued to the fireplace made of white marble and the mantelpiece dancing with memories that Kathy wanted to show off to anyone who walked in.

Kathy walked back in and set two mugs down on the table.

“You have a beautiful son,” Joan said.

“I know. Isn’t he just the cutest?” Kathy stood next to her, grabbing a young picture of her son. From what looked like middle school. He had an awkward brace-faced smile that Joan hoped that he’d grown out of.

“He’s too old now. Too old,” she said, setting the picture back down. “He looks just like his father.”

The whistle of the tea kettle floated in from the kitchen. “That’s my cue,” she said, and she was already out of the room.

Joan didn’t see any pictures of the father on the mantelpiece. It looked like it was just her and an older set of people that looked like they were her parents. Her mother looked like she was keeping in impeccable shape too.

Kathy walked back in with a bottle of Folgers Classic Roast, boiled water, and a spoon and sat on the leather couch. She dumped a spoonful of instant coffee into each of their mugs and let the hot water dissolve it. She stirred the mixture and the metal spoon hit the side of the glass cup.

“Are you from around here?” Katherine said.

“I live here, but I’m from Forsyth,” Joan said, sitting in the white leather chair across from her.

“You’re kidding,” she said. “I’m from there too. Where’d you go to school?”

“Forsyth County High School. Class of ‘85.”

Kathy smiled.

“Same. Class of ‘86 though,” she said. “We probably crossed each other in the halls a few times.”

It was probably true that they had but Joan couldn’t remember Katherine at all.

“You remember Mrs. Danvers, right?” Kathy said. “11th grade English teacher.”

“She was the worst.” Joan laughed. She remembered the first day of class with Mrs. Danvers when she announced to the class that no one would get an A. Because no essay could ever be that good. “So pretentious.”

“I know. I know.” Katherine laughed too. “She was the wench of the west wing. I wish I knew about you a lot sooner. I don’t meet many people from back home.”

“Me too,” Joan said. She relaxed in her seat and took a sip of her coffee. It tasted like coffee water and had the texture of sand, but Joan kept a still face.

Katherine looked down at Joan’s hands.

“You’re married.” She looked intrigued.

“Yeah,” Joan said. “Twenty years, this year.”

“Congratulations! How the hell did you make it work?”

Joan almost choked on her coffee so she decided to set it back down on the table in case Kathy asked more questions that she couldn’t help but laugh at.

“I have no idea. We’ve just always been happy together,” Joan said. It wasn’t a lie. Nick was happy and Joan was less sad when she was with him. “He works in advertising and I just stay home and watch the house while he’s gone.”

“Any kids?” she asked.

Joan looked at her coffee and said, “No.”

“Sorry to hear that. At least you have a great husband by your side. I still can’t believe it. Twenty years. That would’ve been impossible for me and Jimmy’s father. I’d have blown my brains out, by now.” She snorted and took another sip of her coffee.

“How long were you married for?” Joan asked.

“Five years,” she said. “We got married pretty much as soon as I knew that we were having a baby.”

“Where is the father?” Joan asked.

Katherine didn’t look up. She was still stirring her coffee.

“He’s wherever the hell he wants to be.”

When Joan didn’t say anything back, Kathy finally looked up at her with a worried look on her face like she might’ve said something wrong.

“Oh, sorry.” She smiled again. “I’m over it.” She took a sip of her coffee and winced probably realizing how bitter it was. She left a red lip mark on the side of the cup. “He only comes around when Jimmy is in town. And when Jimmy leaves, he leaves too. He was a real deadbeat husband but a decent father, I guess.” She took another sip.

“Well, at least you have, Jimmy,” Joan said. She didn’t know why she was trying to make Katherine feel better. The perfect-looking fifty-year-old mother wasn’t as perfect as she seemed.

“Damn right. Jimmy was worth it.” she said. She sank back into the cushions of the sofa, holding the mug in her hands over her lap. They talked about the years that they spent outside of their hometown and realized that they had mutual friends.

Joan left Kathy’s house around six and didn’t get home until seven. She found Nick fast asleep on the bed with his shoes still on and his tie loosened. An open Styrofoam box sat on the nightstand from last night’s leftovers. Joan threw the box away. She untied his shoes and set them on the floor and then unraveled his tie from around the collar of his light blue shirt. She took her own shoes off and took her sweater off and slipped in behind him, snaking her arm around his waist, letting their breaths fall into sync. And she was just happy to be there.