New York that was, what avenue and street.
She was struggling with her eyelids, her voice fading. “This is a trip. I’d given up feeling this good for working long hours and months of celibacy. Geesh. What the hell was I thinking?”
“You sound extreme.”
“I am extreme, I guess.” She jerked, made herself wake up. “I’ve lived hard. When I love, I love hard. Know how to hate hard too.”
Then she was asleep. I changed the channel when her show went off, switched over to Fox and checked out the last half of The X-Files. While that fiction played, I kept her warm body close, touched all the soft parts I’d missed touching for so long.
That’s the way it always starts out.
We were moving so fast. And it wasn’t just me. It’s never just the man pushing the envelope. Yes, we have an agenda, and mine extends beyond the desires in my loins. But women help propel a relationship where they want it to go as well, they strip away their clothes, put down their defenses, slap on blinders, and race toward their own Fantasy Islands at warp speed. No, we don’t live in the times of my folks, where dating was a slow-burning candle. Now we move faster than technology.
3
Dana
I was in Manhattan at the Moonstruck Diner. Dishes clattering, cash register cha-ching-ing, heels clicking across the gray tile floors. At a table by myself. A little uneasy, but I didn’t know why.
A sweaty Italian waiter dressed in a white shirt and black pants, thick arms, and a big belly yelled, “Gimme a mash to go.”
Pancakes, sausages, eggs, hash browns, all of that was sizzling on the grill. I saw it, but I couldn’t smell a damn thing. I inhaled to see if I was catching a summer cold, but my sinuses were clear as the sky outside.
I stared at the Italian man. I was about to get pissed off because of the way he winked and leered at me, but then I looked down and saw that all I had on were dark panties and a satin bra.
“Dana?” My name came from everywhere at the same time. “What are you looking at? Don’t stare at people.”
I blinked and turned around: “Momma?”
Momma and Daddy were on the other side of the table, laughing and touching. Momma had on a satin housecoat; Daddy was dressed in khakis and a bright polo shirt, chewing on a bagel the size of a loaf of bread, like the ones I used to get from Joe’s Bagels on Fourteenth Street and Tenth Avenue.
Daddy said, “Dana, you know what the secret to the bagels are?”
I was confused. “What do you mean, the sec—”
“The water. The New York water is what makes the bagels so damn good.”
Momma was eating Homegirls Potato Chips. I know because of the four spunky sisters dressed in four different colorful styles on the bright pink package. Momma was crunching. My mouth watered, my stomach growled, and I wanted to taste what I was missing.
Humidity and smiles were all over my parents’ faces. Everybody who came in had sweat on their faces, dank under their arms, across their dark suits. Momma and Daddy kissed, touched each other like nobody in the room could see them. My mouth wouldn’t open. I want to yell out, You two aren’t together anymore. Daddy has another wife, Momma. Another life.
Momma grimaced at me, read my mind—I could tell by the way her brows raised up. She didn’t like the pissed-off expression on my flesh. She opened her mouth to snap at me, and her voice rang like a telephone.
My eyes went to a yellow clock, it started melting.
Momma’s lips moved, the sound of a phone ringing again.
All around, clocks started melting, the numbers falling to the floor in silence. The room started to get blurry, was going away.
My good old telephone was ringing me right out of New York.
I jerked awake, pulled my head out of my pillow, tried to get my head right and answer like I was wide awake: “Good morning.”
“Dana!”
“Who’s call—” I tried to focus my eyes and make out the number on my caller ID box. It was a 212 area code. In bold letters, her name was shouting at me from the digital display. One of the last people on this earth I wanted to talk to. I said, “Renee, that you?”
“This is a trip! I actually found your butt!”
Renee lived in the city I had left behind. Hearing her squeaky voice surprised the