Sutton Strother
Chuck Woolery, that smug prick, won’t quit smirking. A week into his sick leave, Randy starts keeping a tally of smirks per episode while he watches Love Connection. By the second week he reckons he can make a drinking game out of it. He tries it out that Thursday with a bottle of Maker’s Mark but gets so hammered he stays rooted to the sofa for the rest of the night, save for one obligatory piss in the moldy downstairs toilet. Just as well: his body aches all over, and the cushions know his shape.
The toilet. Jesus. And the ants coming through the hole in the windowsill. The dry cleaning. The kitchen trash. There’s so much to keep up with, no good excuse for failing. He’s not even sick, really, just single, which feels like a kind of sickness, or like having a tumor excised, except the surgeon forgot to sew anything up after. Allie gave him seven years. Without her, he feels raw, ripe for infection.
He still hasn’t told the kids she left, not that it’ll mean much to either of them. They liked Allie well enough, but she’s not their mom or even their stepmom, because Allie’d been somebody’s wife once and swore she’d never do it again.
Like a dog to its vomit, he returns to Love Connection on Friday, lets the smugness fuel some engine he suspects he might possess. The funny thing is, he and Woolery could’ve been pals. They’re from the same town, not too far apart in age. He imagines Chuck taking him out for a beer, patting his shoulder like a contestant after a bad date. “Tough luck, buddy,” Chuck would say, but he’d say it so unconvincingly, while that over-tanned face oozed so much self-satisfaction that Randy would swear the bastard already had designs on Allie.
Allie would hate Chuck Woolery. Randy takes some comfort in that.
Whatever. It’s there, the engine, and it runs. By Sunday night, he’s laid out gym clothes, and on Monday morning, first thing, Randy drives to the YMCA.
He begins on the treadmill but can’t bear the sound of himself huffing for air when, six feet away, bodybuilders deadlift barbells twice Randy’s own weight. A pretty young woman in a leotard, here for Jazzercise, watches through the glass partition between the equipment and aerobics rooms. When she smiles at him, it looks like an apology.
When he returns on Tuesday, he moves to the indoor track–an improvement, dimly lit and often empty–but his knee begins to ache then, by Thursday, to scream.
The kids would have solutions. Dan’s been fit since his ROTC days, and while Sabrina never saw the point in fitness, somehow managed a C- in high school P.E., her partner Harmony is a triathlete, or was before she got pregnant. But Dan’s in Bosnia, unreachable. Sabrina’s got her work, the girls.
On to the indoor pool, then, and its chlorine stink. This is where he should’ve started anyway. Randy’s always been a strong swimmer or, if not strong, at least capable. It’s just that it’s been so long since he’s taken his shirt off in front of anyone who wasn’t Allie. She’d rub a hand over the hairy mound of his potbelly and ask if a baby was on the way. Other men might’ve minded that, but not Randy. It was just a silly private joke, one of the many they shared, never meant cruelly. Allie never did one cruel thing in her life. Randy wonders if another person will ever look at him that way again: a man with a full womb, a living miracle.
Fortunately, because it’s one-thirty on a weekday, there’s hardly anyone here to assess him. An old woman bounces along the perimeter of the shallow end, a pool noodle wound around her arms like a feather boa. On a bench across the room, a young mother drapes a crying toddler in a Big Bird towel and kisses his head. Not even the young lifeguard, perched in his chair, bothers to acknowledge a new arrival. Randy claims a table near the swimming lanes, sets down his towel then, resigned, peels away his T-shirt. He expects to feel something–exposed, possibly even free – but the room is so humid it’s almost like wearing a wetsuit anyway. He watches the others. None of the others watch him. He folds the shirt, lays it on top of the towel, and heads for Lane 3.
The water is warmer than he expected and feels so much like a hug that he wants to cry. Instead, he kicks off the wall and begins to pump his arms. They’re stiff at first but loosen up with each stroke. Randy hasn’t swum since the last family trip to Myrtle Beach. That was three years ago now, just after Dan graduated high school. Funny how easily it comes back, how his body knows just what to do, how to move and when to take a breath. Muscle memory, like when Sabrina comes home at Christmas and sits at the piano to play the same carols she’s played since childhood, no sheet music, rarely stumbling. One lap, another. It’s tiring business, and he’s got doubts about his form, but it’s good to remember this body can do more than he’s given it credit for.
Halfway through lap nine, he comes up for air and hears something that sounds like birds in a thunderstorm but couldn’t possibly be. It’s coming from the hallway that connects the locker rooms to the pool room. The noise grows louder, until finally the door bursts open, and in pours a swarm of children. Their shrieks echo off the high ceiling and the tiled walls. Their little legs propel them forward too fast, so that one of their minders has to call out a warning. The lifeguard, on alert at last, pops his little red whistle into his mouth, ready to blow should the children carry things too far.
Summer day camp. Sabrina had done this one summer, back in elementary school. He’d forgotten that. He’d pick her up on days when Janice, his ex-wife, had to work late. Each time, Sabrina would have something new to show off: a gluey craft, a bruise from the playground, some new karate moves when a guy from the local dojo came to visit, and always, Randy would have a fun-size candy bar wedged in the passenger-side visor so that, when Sabrina climbed into the car and pulled the visor down, the candy would tumble into her lap. Sabrina had never been good about saying Please or Thank You to anyone, especially to Randy or Janice, but her laughter was thanks enough. It was breathless, almost startled, like she couldn’t believe her good fortune. Her adult teeth were just growing in, braces still a few years off. They’d been so big and crooked, and when she laughed, she showed every single tooth in her mouth.
Maybe she still laughs like that with her own daughters. Randy can’t call the image to mind, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
He should’ve known they’d turn up sooner or later, these day camp kids. The old lady with the noodle, as they cannonball inches from her puckered face, shimmies toward the stairs by the shallow end. Now the lifeguard does blow his whistle, but he puts barely any air behind it so that it makes a weak, rattling trill. Randy’s fairly certain the kids aren’t permitted in the lap lanes, but they’re too much to take on his first day swimming, too many eyes and too little filter. He recalls how cruel kids can be. Even Dan and his friends used to bully this neighborhood boy with Downs Syndrome until Janice put a stop to it. Randy’s not taking chances. He swims to the ladder closest to the table where he left his things, towels off too quickly to make a difference, then pulls his t-shirt on. He considers leaving, but he’s not ready to go home, back to the TV and the cratered couch cushions and Woolery’s knowing smirk.
On its north side, the pool room opens onto a sundeck. He takes himself out there to wait out the children, but he’s not alone: a man in a Speedo, slathered in tanning oil, is cooking himself on a lounge chair. Randy thinks of duck l’orange, a dish he’s never eaten, only ever seen on TV or in the little recipe books Allie used to pick up in the grocery checkout lines. The man strikes Randy as indecent, pornographic. There are kids here, he wants to holler but doesn’t, though even as he thinks it, the man turns onto his stomach to reveal how little of his backside the Speedo truly covers. The man reaches back to tug at it ineffectually then gives up and pillows his head against his arms. Randy’s attention moves to the windows that look in on the pool, but through the smoky glass, he can’t tell if the kids have taken any notice of this man’s half-bared ass, whether they’re scandalized by it or traumatized or just think it’s the funniest thing in the world. And probably, if anything, it’s the latter, right? Randy decides it’s funny, too. He laughs inwardly then, before he can stop himself, does it out loud. At the sound, the man in the Speedo lifts his head an inch. Randy clamps his mouth shut, swallowing what remains of his amusement as he panics over how he might explain himself to this guy, imagines what words might stave off conflict with this–while, yes, a little older–far fitter gentleman who, now that he thinks of it, he almost certainly saw in the weight room on Monday.
Before his imagination can carry him far at all, the door bursts open with the kind of force that might suggest Emergency, but when Randy looks at who’s come through, it’s only a little girl: dark-skinned and tall for her age, with sticky-outy ears and a determined set to her brow and mouth. A face like a soldier, the face Dan used to wear when he did marching drills in the high school gymnasium, the face Dan wears in every photo he sends home. It frightens Randy a little, that face; sometimes he wants to call Janice and ask if it frightens her, too. It frightens him now, on this little girl who, to Randy’s surprise, takes swift, deliberate steps in his direction.
“Is your name Hank?” she asks him. Randy shakes his head. “What is it?”
“It’s Randy,” says Randy.
“You sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure.”
The girl pivots and megaphones her hands over her mouth before shouting, “It’s Randy!”
When Randy peers past her, he sees that the door never shut behind her. Another girl leans her weight against the bar that opens it. She’s chubby with stringy blonde hair, and she’s wearing a pink swim mask that covers her eyes and nose.
“That’s Mary-Catherine,” says the first girl. “She thinks you’re her dad.”
Randy squints and feels a little stupid. “Why would she think that?”
The girl shrugs, dropping none of her intensity, which makes Randy wonder if maybe his name isn’t Hank after all and he’s forgotten. Maybe Randy was a guy he invented in a dream. Maybe he invented Allie, too, and Janice and Dan and Sabrina.
He swallows. The back of his tongue tastes like chlorine.
“My name’s Randy,” he says again, feebly, this time to the girl in the doorway, Mary-Catherine.
She shakes her head. “It’s Hank.”
“I’m Priyanka,” says the first girl, poking her thumb into her sternum.
“Priyanka,” Randy repeats then says, “Mary-Catherine,” looking to Mary-Catherine, then he points to himself. “Randy. My name’s Randy.”
“Is not,” says Mary-Catherine. She crosses her arms and bumps the door hard with her hip once, then again, hard enough to bruise herself. Randy almost tells her to stop it, but his concern feels paternal enough that it startles him.
“Is this a joke?” His eyes flit between the two girls, both unmoved. “This some kind of prank?”
Kids are bullies, he thinks again, then wonders where the hell that word, bully, came from in the first place. From bulls, maybe, the way they gore and trample, but it’s a hard word to take seriously, conjures other unserious words like silly or jolly or belly. He lays a hand over his own belly, thinks again of Allie’s hand set there and, for one wild moment, lets himself imagine a Hank (himself? a doppelganger? a total fiction?) heavy with child then giving birth to this girl who frowns – no, now she’s crying, she’s even lifting up the swim mask to wipe tears away – in the doorway.
“Do I look like your dad? Is that it?” He tries to make his voice sweet, the voice he once used with Sabrina when she would cry, but he’s out of practice with kids, so it comes out patronizing and feeble.
“You are!” Mary-Catherine sobs. “Stop it!”
Even Priyanka is at a loss. The tight ring of her mouth has gone slack. She cracks the knuckles on one hand, then the other. Such an adult habit for a kid of, what? Eight? No more than ten, surely. My own daughter’s like that, too, he wants to tell her, Sabrina cracks her knuckles and clears her throat and smooths down her hair when she’s anxious, but the present tense of the thought makes him feel like a fraud. Sabrina doesn’t do that anymore, or maybe she does, Randy can’t remember, but if so, she’s grown into reasons for nervous tics. Kids of her own now. His kid has kids. Randy is a grandfather. How could this little girl, hiccupping through her tears, upper lip lacquered with snot, ever mistake him for her dad?
Before he knows he’s doing it, Randy’s on his feet, moving past Priyanka toward Mary-Catherine. His arms are open like he means to hug her, but he can’t remember when he decided to do it. Call it parental instinct (I dare you to call it that, Janice’s voice barks in Randy’s mind, Go ahead, I dare you, and then explain where the hell you hid it all our marriage). Call it, rather, some better angel dragging him into action by the front of his damp t-shirt. But when he gets close enough to touch her, Mary-Catherine’s eyes bug, and Randy wonders if maybe she’s seeing who he’s not and, oh god, who is he? Just some old fogey with a paunch in wet clothes lumbering toward her like a Frankenstein monster, blinking eyes dull as a cow’s eyes. She sniffs an epic glob of mucus back up her nose then, without so much as a warning cock, lands a punch smack in the middle of Randy’s soft, unsuspecting belly.
The punch knocks the wind out of him. That hasn’t happened in years. What a hateful feeling, like dying without having breath enough to say goodbye.
Before his breath ever returns, Mary-Catherine’s gone. The door bounces shut in her wake. He lays a hand over the spot where she struck and does not think of Allie this time, or he almost does but forbids it. He might turn around to explain himself to Priyanka, but she darts around him like he’s nobody to her, which of course is true, he’s nobody to anyone here, and slips back into the pool room. Randy looks for her, and for Mary-Catherine, but all the children are small, frantic, interchangeable shapes beyond the tinted windows. Any one of them could be anyone else.
He stands there waiting, half-expecting a camp counselor to burst through the door demanding explanations. He’s got to explain himself to someone, doesn’t he?
Nobody comes.
“I’m not her dad,” he tells the man in the Speedo. The man’s still lying on his belly with his head facing Randy, though he’s wearing reflective sunglasses, and Randy can’t tell if his eyes are open or shut. “She thought I was some other guy. Some Hank.”
“You sure you’re not?” the man asks.
“I’ve got ID in the locker room.”
The man in the Speedo shrugs. The movement of his oiled skin against the plastic lounge chair makes a squeak like a fart.
“Did you go to Fairview High?” the man asks. “You look familiar.”
Randy shakes his head. “Ashland. Class of ’64.”
“Mmm,” says the man.
“I mean, I’ve got kids,” says Randy, unable to stop himself from whatever this is. Name-clearing. Absolution. “Just not –.” He gestures back inside. “They’re older, my kids. Way older than that one.”
“Mmm,” the man says again, then, “Married?”
“Divorced.”
“Hell,” says the man. The muscles of his gleaming brown back expand with a deep inhale then sink on an exhale that sounds like sympathy but might also be commiseration. Probably not. Probably this guy’s got his shit together, and anyway, the sadness he might’ve heard in Randy’s voice has nothing to do with divorce, with Janice, who left so long ago that it hardly matters now, except when it does. The sadness is for Allie–not Wife, too old to be Girlfriend, she always said, sometimes My Old Lady or My Girl, though mostly they’d avoided labels. “Just call yourselves like me and Harmony do,” Sabrina once said. She meant Life Partners, a label that suggested, all but advertised, an alternative lifestyle. Perhaps his and Allie’s lifestyle had been alternative in these parts, living in sin all those years in a town full of bible thumpers and busybodies. But a label, any label, was a claim, Allie said, and a ring was a cattle brand. She’d worn both before and they’d nearly killed her, not the slow death of the spirit like his marriage to Janice but the real thing, a critical-condition-in-the-ER kind of thing. What had he ever been but another lead ball shackled to her leg?
Randy nods again, hopes the man takes it as Thank You, then sinks back into his own chair. He waits long enough to hear the whistle blow inside, to see the kid-shaped shadows climb from the pool and form two lines, to watch them disappear as abruptly as they came, taking all their clamor and life with them. He smiles to his new friend, but the man is on his back again, staring up into the midday summer sky. Randy takes himself inside, down the stairs, to the car, home again.
On the kitchen counter, a fruit fly buzzes around last night’s McDonald’s bag, too unwieldy to stuff into the overflowing trash can. He resolves to take it out before bed. Maybe he’ll remember to replace the bag when he’s finished.
Love Connection’s almost over. On the stage beside Chuck Woolery, a young woman in coke-bottle glasses makes a corny joke, and Chuck laughs in that smarmy way where you can’t quite tell if he’s laughing at you or with you. Fuck Woolery, thinks Randy, and although he never uses that word out loud, he enjoys the rush of hearing it inside his own head.
He flips the channel. Guiding Light will soon give way to the local news. TCM is halfway through Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He never liked this one. Humphrey Bogart’s too sinister, too ugly, not at all himself. But there are lots of Bogies, aren’t there? Just how many Bogies are operating on the stage of World War II alone? One’s sticking it to the Vichy in Casablanca. Another’s doing pretty much the same thing in To Have and Have Not. And they’re both making eyes at beautiful women. Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall. He thinks of the real Bogie, who got it all wrong a few times before getting it right with Bacall.
The thing about Love Connection is that when you make a bad match, sometimes they let you try again.
Later, he’ll call Sabrina. He’ll tell her about Mary-Catherine. Priyanka, too, the knuckle cracking. The Speedo man, whose name he never caught. After dinner, that’s when he’ll call, and after that, he’ll take out the trash.
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Sutton Strother is a writer and teacher living in Queens, NY. Their writing has been featured in several publications. You can read more of it at suttonstrother.wordpress.com and find them across social media @suttonstrother.