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The Old MaidThis story may contain adult content. |
| Written by Jason Pandel | |
| Friday, 15 February 2008 | |
It was now 7:30 AM. The first rays of the twilight began to filter through my milky-white see-through drapes. Such a ridiculous concept. The drapes when fully closed allowed in all sunlight, and permitted out a good portion of my privacy. Somewhere in a Chinese factory, short men with slanted eyes were contemplating a drape that would be of even less use to someone with a hangover. The drapes were marginally less annoying that morning than they were on most. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity I had someplace to be before midday. Days earlier, without even a glimpse of foresight I had phoned in an appointment with a mechanic. My car, badly in need of a service. Such a poor decision. It could have been argued that drinking nearly a half a case of beer the night before was the bad decision. A habitual drunkard I preferred to view the situation from a different perspective. If I hadn’t made this ******* appointment I could stay here hugging my pillow, drifting in and out of sleep, until I’m damn well ready to stop. That was exactly what I did. Laying on my right side, my left side, my back, my stomach, in between my stomach and side. It was a creepy habit born in the mind of a lonely man. I liked to think of the pillow as a small canine, perhaps a Yerkie, that through some streak of genetic luck had the ability to sleep through damn near anything. Merely a weirdo’s socially acceptable alternative to the teddy bear. The time had now past quarter to eight. If I was going to make the appointment it was then or never. Still fully-clothed from the prior night’s drunken rampage there was little to do. I put on my shoes, tied loosely so they slid on and off like a pair of giveaway flip flops from a Orioles game. I drank a pint-glass of room temperature tap water. I was off. Aside from the reappearing nausea that encouraged me to vomit up the water as if it were ever clear, the drive was rather nice. It was the February of a mild, damp winter. The winter wheat along the highway had absorbed the rains and the snows and had turned an almost neon-green color. Looking westward out the window of a moving car, for a miniscule fraction of a second I was able to see each individual row of wheat. For some strange reason the fields of winter wheat were tranquilizing. The rows reminded me of the children’s books that looked like a cartoon when the pages were flipped quickly. Marshall and son’s auto repair sat in the median of a sometimes-bustling highway that ran the length of the Delmarva peninsula. Sixty miles to the north suburban Philadelphians were creeping through traffic in route to a day sitting behind a desk drinking coffee. At two till eight the lower Delaware highway was nearly empty. The shop was crammed into maybe a half acre between the north and southbound lanes of the highway. The structure was made of brick that had been painted white. It was fairly obvious that it needed repainting, white flakes peeling off the brick exterior made it look a little like an extremely pale man with burgundy freckles. It had three overhead doors, which at the time were closed. On the left side of the doors was a small office. At 8:00 sharp I entered the office to find a tall heavyset man with a thick mustache sitting in a pleather chair behind the counter. On the right side of the counter was an inexpensive coffee maker brewing the beverage of choice for tired mechanics and bored costumers alike. Beside the coffee maker were several pounds of Dollar General brand coffee in a metal tin, and a stack of plastic cups. The thin plastic cups were not designed for hot beverages like coffee. The heat from the coffee would make the cup flimsy, and a careless java drinker who picked his cup up too fast may of landed in the hospital with a very embarrassing condition. For this reason I passed on the coffee. The mechanic behind the desk knew why I was there. The appointment had been made. Without opening my mouth the gentle looking man with funny facial hair said “You must be here for the oil change.” I nodded and he asked for my keys, which I handed him. The mechanic left the office and guided my car through the overhead door furthest from the office. With the office to myself I sat down on the wooden bench opposite the counter where the transactions took place. The bench would have been a very unappealing place to sit, except the owner had placed seat cushions for costumer comfort. The cushions were the sort they sell in concession stands at high school football games for 5 dollars. This particular seat cushion was tar heel blue, with “GO SPARTANS” written in bold white lettering. It contained an ad for, among other businesses, Marshall and Son’s garage. No sooner did I sit on the plastic-coated piece of foam did a stunning woman walk gracefully in the door. She looked to be around forty, it was hard to say because she was better at applying makeup than the shop owners were at hiring a painter. Her fake blonde hair hung off the brunette roots where it was parted, which made the top of her head look like a stripe on the top of some kid’s “custom” dodge neon. She was dressed more like a 20 year old than a middle-aged woman. Her tight stonewashed jeans clung to her legs and backside like a latex glove on a dentist’s hand. She had either gained a little weight or liked to show off her ass, probably the latter. Her top was a blue and yellow polo shirt, with a business logo on the upper left breast. Her husband’s? Boyfriend’s? The polo had spots for two buttons, the top one had apparently fallen off and the bottom one was left unbuttoned, probably intentionally to show the cleavage created by her smallish breasts. What difference did breasts size make, the fact that they existed, however tiny, was enough for me. Until the Mechanic came back from moving my car I didn’t know the true reason why she was there. Common sense suggested that she was there to pick up a car and I had to avoid staring only for a few more minutes. The mechanic stood behind the counter and they spoke with one another quietly like old friends. The woman’s voice was what I imagined a waitress at a Tennessee truck stop would sound like. It was definitely a southern accent, not the Delaware variety which sounded as much like the urban mid-Atlantic as it did the deep south. There was something very enticing about a southern accent. Something that made me focus more on how sexy she sounded when she made an “I” sound than what she was actually saying. It became clear after about a minute of talking that she and the mechanic were not lovers, siblings, and probably not related at all. They were friends, and it sounded like they were good ones. The woman had come not only to have work done on her car but to work herself. From what I could gather she was there to clean the office, and have a radiator problem looked at. After the conversation ended the mechanic left briefly and returned with a small white bucket filled with some sort of cleaning solution and a rag. A few nice words and the mechanic walked into the garage section of the building, shutting the door behind him. First she walked around the room cleaning the crevices where the walls met with a long plastic rod that had a duster on the end. When she got to my section of the room she politely asked me to move. “You better move or the dust might fall onto your head.” I stood up for a few seconds as she got the crevice above my head. This didn’t take her very long, she was no cleaning novice. Although I was only 21 I had a weird affection for women around her age. I told friends who caught me eye-humping mature women I didn’t know why I liked them, that I just did. This was a lie. I knew why I found them so attractive and that reason forced me to look into my soul, an churning ocean of self-loathing and self-pity. It wasn’t an issue of their attractiveness, but rather a reflection of my self esteem, or lack thereof. I was a young man and still in relatively decent shape. In my opinion I felt I had a rather attractive face. The reason I felt like so terrible about my appearance was over the previous year I had gained nearly 20 pounds binging on cheap beer and take-out. What woman would love me? Lets take this a step further. What woman would want even be willing to **** me? A step further yet. What woman would even consider ******* me without drinking a fifth of Kentucky Gentleman? Sitting on the bench hid my beer belly and A-cups nicely. I was still wearing the black t-shirt from the job I had quit the day before. A seven dollar souvenir from a three day trip to the underworld. At least it didn’t make me look fat. Because of this deeply rooted inferiority complex I had always liked to fantasize about women between thirty-five and forty-two years of age. For a forty year old man I looked pretty ******* good. I hadn’t lost any hair, and my teeth were as white as the snows that occasionally fell in the Delaware winter. For a forty year old man I could have been described, as, dare I say it, thin. Just like that I shut my eyelids and played out what I would do to her given a night. Who was I kidding. A half of a ******* hour. It was no secret that men had thoughts, that if they were to say out loud would land them in court for sexual harassment. It seemed it was time to clean the two one foot by six feet shelves mounted to the wall behind the counter, roughly seven or eight feet off the ground. The beauty grabbed a step ladder that had lay hidden behind the counter and opened it under the right side of the shelves. Carrying the bucket the mechanic had brought her she climbed to the second of three steps on the ladder and placed the bucked on top of it. The lowest shelf would be first. She picked up the die-cast model of a Hess tractor trailer and began wiping it with the slightly wet rag that probably made her hands reek of chemicals. Next to be cleaned was the space on the shelf that the truck had occupied. All the while her buttocks were displayed in the air like a mounted TV in the corner of a pediatricians waiting room. Don’t look you stupid son of a *****. Don’t stare! Don’t stare! More importantly don’t get caught staring! She was now bent over placing the rag back into the bucket to remove the dirt that had accumulated on the rag. Was that really necessary? She had wiped maybe a few square feet of surface area. It didn’t matter how dusty it was up there, that rag did not need cleaned off, not yet at least. Maybe she really did need to clean off the rag. Hell, what did I know about cleaning? At the time it was more comforting to believe that she liked the idea of a boyish man, beer gut or not, wanting her. Sexual denial, a candy-coating of wishful thinking, contoured around my body like a blue blanky around an infant boy. To be happy you needed to lie to yourself about what was going on around you. She wasn’t doing her job, she was seducing me. Bending over wasn’t a necessary part of cleaning the shelves, it was a directly intended to turn me on. Lies, lies, lies. Whatever it took to sleep at night. Whatever it took to feel like a real man and not a twenty-one year old college dropout with no social skills and few friends. Deep down I knew the truth. So typical of a younger male to think that every woman standing in suggestive positions had some premeditated master plan to bed him. Unlike most I was too timid to ever do anything about it. This wasn’t to say I never got lucky. I wasn’t that unattractive and on a good day in the right situation I could be quite funny. Two years before an experience had changed my life. One of the defining moments that molded my fragile psyche like a piece of white clay that hadn‘t done it‘s time in the kiln. Sleeping on my stomach, on the adequate but uncomfortable foam mattress of a college dorm. The door flung open and I was awoken. A girl stood in the doorway, a short brunette. Although she was heavy for a college girl, she had without question one of the prettiest faces I had ever seen. The fluorescent lighting in the corridor flowed through the open door and cast her shadow on the walls in several places. Personality aside I likened her to a goddess. My roommate, the Vermont Yankee in Satan’s court, was out searching for good times. The smell of bad liquor and aura of impending sin filled the room like Pabst filled the pewter mugs on mug night at some shitty college bar. When you’re sober the smell of booze jumps out at you like the background images in some psychedelic poster. Jumping on my back she started dry-riding me. One thing led to another and in the morning I was no longer a virgin. We were not friends and never spoke of it. Perhaps she didn‘t remember or didn‘t want to. That was the moment, after taking advantage of a girl I disliked, so drunk she could barely have sex, that I decided I wasn’t going to heaven if it did in fact exist. The maid, still cleaning, had probably been at least as gorgeous as the brunette when she was 18. There was no way she would have done it with me then, but now that was irrelevant. Fully clothed she had the body of a teenager. It was probably a magician’s illusion created each morning when she picked out what to wear. Dehydrated from beer in a tight black t-shirt even my body looked okay. Avoiding the sexual frustration associated with the maid I shifted my focus onto the three pictures that hung on the wall next to the door to the garage. In the first picture there was a man with a young boy sitting on his lap eating what looked like a slim jim. They looked so, happy. I had been happy once. The second picture, moving leftward was of the same man and the same boy only they were both older. The man wore a redskins sweatshirt and the teenager wore an eagles one, a house divided. They still had the genuinely joyful look that I had lost somewhere along the way. The third picture was of two men, the boy was now an adult with a funny mustache and the daddy was now an old man. The three photographs showed well how fast time moves in retrospect, and how slowly it moves in the moment. The bottom shelf was finished. Fifteen minutes of sexual frustration had nearly killed me. A line of baseball hats ran the length of the upper shelf. The layer of dust made it seem as though the fabric on the row of hats had been faded by years of wear in the hot sun. A faded rainbow. The maid picked up the first one on the left, a blue Napa hat, and sat it next to the bucket on the top of the ladder . Reaching down, again bending over, she removed the rag from the bucket. She wiped the shelf dry and once more bent over to put the rag back in the bucket. The dust had now been evicted from the space on the shelf where the hat had been. Her solution to clear the layer of dust from the hat was her most irresistible act of cleaning. Grabbing the hat with her left hand she began spanking her backside with the hat. Not once, not twice, but three times. Was that really happening? This had gone too far. Hey lady, you need to either tone it down or get naked, I can’t take this ****! There were still 6 hats and 6 corresponding areas of shelf space to be cleaned. After that, I was sure whatever she did next would not involve her body on display. The lower shelf in comparison involved only a few model trucks and cars. Of course there had been the constant leaning forward. That I could deal with. That was something that probably did need doing. The spanking? The goddamn spanking of her suspended ass with the hats was not. She had to know what she was doing to me. Had she forgotten there was a boy, barely out of his teens, sitting right behind her. Had she forgotten that males liked to stare. The hats were now more than halfway done, four down, three to go. I had almost managed to suppress my desires through the entire ordeal. I had nearly escaped! Nearly escaped the fear of getting caught staring. Nearly escaped some bad attempt at flirting with this specimen of beauty and sexuality at least 15 years my senior. The mechanic entered the office from the door that opened into the garage area. Calmly, amazingly without staring he took a seat in the pleather chair behind the counter, directly in front of my fantasy. “Mr. Parsons, your car is finished. Give me a sec to print out a receipt and you’re good to go.” The keyboard of some hidden computer clicked away. About a minute later I heard one loud click. Probably the enter button signaling he was ready to print. The printer sucked up the paper. I had escaped! I had escaped! The printer spit back out the paper it had eaten. Altered with ink he put it on the counter. One signature and I was free of this burden. Standing up I heard the door open behind me. The biggest , butchest, ugliest, most repulsive example of femininity entered the office. Her yellow teeth looked as though they had been filed to their pointed shapes. Two rows of a candy corn and a adolescent male’s mustache. Short black hair and a eyebrow ring. “Hey baby. I missed you. Thought I’d come visit you at work” she said. The beauty climbed down from the step-ladder. Both leaning across the counter they kissed the way I imagined me and the beauty would before I knew the shocking truth. Surely there was tongue involved. Instantly I imagined other places my beauty’s mouth had been. Did that really happen? No ******* way. Coolly I kept my expression uniform. One signature and this nightmare was over. I signed the receipt and told the mechanic to have a good day. Walking to my car I somehow knew that later that night I would consume the second half of the case to expel that disturbing image. The image of a gorgeous woman with her head between the legs of a woman I wouldn’t **** for ten grand. Copyright 2008 Jason Pandel |
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