(Governor Tom's Note: Like "Erik's Last Will," which I published last month, I originally wrote this for a creative writing workshop my senior year at Temple U. in the fall of '97. Oh, the nineties...)
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She sat with her pale legs folded beneath her on the wide wicker chair. The chair was padded with cushions decorated with pink and green floral designs. She ran a finger over the thin green of a stem, the nail on the finger gnawed until the skin just above was red and raw. The color of the stem she was tracing was closer to seaweed than its true green because of the July sun being shut out by the blinds. The pillow of her fingertip was tickled by the fabric of the cushion as the stem she was tracing got lost in the bloom of another flower. “Pretty,” she smiled, using her other hand to swipe away a few strands of red hair which fell into her vision. She tried in vain to secure the hair behind her ear. It was only a matter of time before it fell in front of her eyes again.
There was movement on the queen-sized bed at the other end of the room. Sam was rolling over onto his back, looking at her from eyes lodged in black pits. “Are you playing with the damned flowers again?” he said, scratching his fingers through the black forest covering his soft, swollen belly. “That’s an ugly chair, Janine.”
She ignored him and concentrated on the patterns. He was always grumpy after sex. It would pass. At the start of their relationship, two years ago, such a remark would have set Janine’s temper off. She had had this chair for as long as she could remember. Her mother had gotten it cheap at a garage sale when Janine was still very young. Soon after, it was put in her bedroom. Now, twenty years later, the chair was still never boring to look at. Part of it was her wild imagination, she knew. She had grown up without siblings. Her earliest memory was her father having a raging argument with her mother. Just as it seemed he would strike her mother, he walked out. When she was older, she learned he had left for another woman. So being alone for most of the time while her mother juggled two jobs, even three at times, the chair became her friend. It spoke to her at times when even her mother was too angry to talk to her, like when Janine failed a chemistry midterm in tenth grade. Her mother had always pushed her to do well in school, and when she failed that test, her mother grounded her. It seemed like the world ended after that. But the chair comforted her, told her that all would get better in the end. And indeed the chair was right. It had become most valuable after her mother passed away a year ago. Sam hadn’t known her mother well. They had never gotten along when together. So Janine was left to mourn alone. She knew Sam was secretly celebrating when her mother passed. The chair had told her so.
“Hey,” Sam said. “You listening to me?”
She looked up at him from the flowers. “What is it, sweety?”
“Never mind,” he said, his frustration subtle but evident. He rubbed his eyes and yawned.
“Come on over here,” she said in as soft and delicate a voice as she could. It was the voice she would tease him with in bed. “Come on, sweety, I’m not through yet.”
“I’m tired, babe,” he said, yawning again. “Maybe later.”
The chair started talking to her about Sam’s long hours at the family practice where he was one of the physicians. Janine gnawed her fingers and curled her toes tightly as the chair whispered its thoughts into her ear. “Honey?” she said, waking Sam as he was dosing off.
“What?” he snapped.
“Do you think......maybe you could ask for lesser hours at work?”
“No,” he said right away.
“I mean.......it doesn’t seem fair that you have to work so many hours–”
“It comes with the job, Janine,” he said, his eyes closed again. “Come on, we’ve gone over this before.”
“Yeah, but...”
“Janine, enough already,” he said.
She gnawed her finger tips as the chair spoke again. It was telling her that his hours had become more and more than what they usually had been at the start of their relationship. When they had first met, Sam was putting in ten hours a day, six days a week at the family practice. Sunday was his only free day. They’d met on one Sunday when Janine had gone to a baseball game with her mother. Sam had been a few seats down in the row in front with two of his colleagues. He’d spotted her before the game, and they’d established a regular interval of friendly eye-contact. Occasionally he’d turn around to look at her, and she’d look and smile back, noticing his attempts at furtively eyeing her breasts, crotch, and legs while pretending to be interested in her eyes. Whenever the home team which the three of them were rooting for scored, his two friends would shout “Do it again, group!” That’s when Sam would look at her, blushing in embarrassment, shaking his head, and she would quietly giggle, more interested in him than in the game. She’d been charmed by him, by his failed attempts at secretly admiring her body, his embarrassment, his spilling peanut shells onto his soft tummy. They’d talked after the game and soon after started going out.
He had continued his normal six-day-a-week work schedule for over a year into their relationship, but over the past few months, the chair reminded her, his hours had grown steadily. There were some days now where he’d leave at seven in the morning and not return until midnight. Her teeth worked hard to get a bite at one of her nails, but they had all been chewed down too low for her jaw to get a good grip. So she just bit down gently on the skin, occasionally poking it with her tongue to lubricate it. The air conditioning had turned itself off, and now her nude body was coated in a thin film of sweat as she curled her toes tight.
Sam was snoring.
She knew he wasn’t putting in extra hours at the practice. Not long after he started coming home later than usual, the chair urged her to see what he was up to. At first Janine refused because she didn’t feel comfortable spying on anyone, especially Sam. But after his long hours persisted, she went out one night to pay him a surprise visit at work. She brought along some cookies she’d baked during the day. Sam wasn’t there. The receptionist said he’d left a couple of hours ago. She dropped the cookies on her way out of the family practice and didn’t pay attention to the voice of a limping patient call to her that she’d dropped something. She went home and told her chair about Sam’s absence and what the receptionist had said. The chair told her not to tell Sam she’d been looking for him and ordered her to go earlier the next night when she was sure he would be there.
“You had no right to go spying on me,” Sam said, his eyes still closed.
“I care about you,” she said. “I was worried.”
“You were spying. If you were so worried, why not talk to me about it when I was at home and let me know you were worried.”
“You don’t think I tried? I’m glad I finally had the nerve to go following you. It was justified, now that I know what you were doing. How could you go and fuck one of your patients, Sam? What a miserable bastard you are.”
“Oh spare me the damn name-calling, Janine,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with a man having more than one woman. It’s not like we were married.”
“But we were living together.” Janine curled her toes so tight they were burning. One of her legs fell over the front of the chair onto the soft cream carpet as she leaned forward and began pleading with him. He was still lying motionless and indifferent, his eyes closed, his hairy body only half covered by the sky-blue sheet. “Living together is definitely a big step toward marriage, Sam.” The film of sweat was growing thicker. Her heart began hammering her chest with more force. “You could have respected that.” A moment of heavy silence went by. It seemed to block the sun out even more. “Unfaithful son of a bitch.”
Sam burst out laughing. It was as if he’d been holding it in but couldn’t control it any longer. His hairy hill of a stomach shook up and down, sending rolling waves up and down it as he guffawed and picked his hairy nose with his thumb. “Oh Janine!”
“What’s so God damn funny?”
“You’re just trying to find an excuse for what you did so you don’t feel so guilty,” he said as the laughing died down and his face went serious again. “You’re trying to justify your actions.” He opened his deep black eyes and turned to her. His voice was so soft now that she wouldn’t have thought he was really speaking if she hadn’t seen his lips moving. “You can’t justify what you did to me.”
“Yes I can,” she said. Her voice was shaking because he was getting out of bed. She pulled her loose leg back up and under her. Her hands were shaking too much for her to gnaw on her fingers so she held them together in a quivering clasp to make them stop. He took his time as he lumbered around the bed and walked toward her. Black hair blanketed his entire overweight nudity. As he came closer to her and the light behind the blinds, the darkness of his eye sockets was revealed. The eyes weren’t there at all but were replaced by bloody holes. The deep gashes Janine had made in his gut were there too, fresh and wet as if she’d just inflicted them. She’d also gone even lower with the blade, turning his bulging sex into a red pit. And now he stood there in front of her, carved with every wound she’d made to affect his undoing. If his eyes had been there, they would have been glaring at her with indignation.
“The guilt won’t go away, Janine,” he whispered.
“I didn’t want......I didn’t want to go through what my mommy had to go through. I wasn’t going to let it happen to me. It wasn’t supposed to happen to me.” That’s what her mother’s chair had told her.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’s done is done. Now you’re going to be miserable for the rest of your life.”
She stood up and was about to strike him when a voice to her left called her. “Hey Sherrard!” called the black man’s voice, addressing Janine by her last name. Sam disappeared. Her bedroom was replaced by her eight-by-ten cell. She wasn’t naked but was wearing her prison fatigues. She looked over and saw Monroe, one of the prison guards, standing outside her cell, looking at her through the bars with a cold distance. Yet there was a hint of sympathy in his gaze because, Janine knew, he thought she was a genuine lunatic and felt sorry for her. That used to bother her when she first came here two months ago, but now she couldn’t have cared less.
“What?” she said with the irritation of someone having been interrupted during an important meeting.
“Chow time.” Monroe was holding the cuffs and patiently waiting for her to stick her hands through the opening in the bars.
Janine looked back at her cot which she’d substituted for the bed when talking to Sam, as well as the pillow arranged vertically under the covers so it would resemble someone lying there. She turned around where her special chair would have been, but all she saw was the small bench-like thing which protruded out of the plaster wall like a cancer. It couldn’t offer her any words of comfort like her chair could. Who knew where that chair was now? It had probably been sold off in another garage sale. She turned back to Monroe and walked toward him with her arms out, hands balled into fists, wrists together so he could cuff them.
Later that night she tried to hang herself with her underwear. She wasn’t able to suffocate herself before a guard walked by and rushed in to save her life. She was transported to the hospital where she remained in critical but stable condition over the next few days. When she came back to prison, they kept her under constant surveillance. Sam never talked to her after that. Neither did her chair.
