The House On Dale Street

Chapter 9

Since we were practically kids, Hazel and I used to horse around a lot. We were playing of course, but sometimes, we could get rough, wrestling around on the bed or play fighting and once, I'd accidentally knocked her off the bed and she'd hit the night stand the television sat on and had gotten a black eye. It was terrible- a big one, purple and black and icy blue. She had work the next morning at the cafe and I told her she'd have to call out but she said that Mary Frances would fire her- that's why they couldn't keep a waitress, because Mary Frances was quick to fire anyone for the least little thing.

"You're going to serve tables looking like that?" I said a few hours later as we both stood in the bathroom mirror watching the color blossom beneath her eye; an eggplant purple and pink.

Hazel looked at me, standing behind her in the mirror. She was leaning forward on the sink, her face inches from the glass, her hands gripping the sides of the sink. She was studying her face. She brought a hand up and touched her fingertips lightly to her eye and then winced.

"You forget you're tousling with a girl," she said, glaring at me in the mirror, but in a playful way.

"Yeah," I said, "we can't do that anymore. That's gonna be a bad one. I don't know how you're going wait tables looking like that."

She pulled back and reached for her toothbrush. She shrugged, "I'll just tell everyone what really happened, if they ask."

She squirted toothpaste onto her toothbrush and began brushing her teeth.

"Oh, they're gonna ask," I said.

_____

Hazel kicked the door closed with her foot and carried the two sackfuls of groceries into the kitchen.

"I fucking hate people," she said, dropping the grocery bags onto the kitchen counter.

I'd been sitting at the kitchen table reading a book. The Prize Pulitzer. It was one Hazel had been reading. She'd left it on the kitchen table, her bookmark clipped near the end. It was a girl's book but I had been reading some racy stuff in it about how this woman, Roxanne, the one who wrote the book, and her husband and about how they had had a threesome with Roxanne's best friend, Jackie Kimberly. Jacqueline Kimberly was married to the Kimberly- Clark multi-millionaire James Kimberly. I would never look at toilet paper dispensers in public bathroom stalls with the name Kimberly-Clark on them the same way again! From then on, whenever I saw Kimberly-Clark, I would think of coke parties and kinky sex and threesomes.

The house was quiet. I looked up. Hazel's eye was black and blue and looked crazy as hell. I still couldn't believe she had a black eye! And that she'd gone out in public!

Hazel pointed at it. "This," she said, pulling out the chair and sitting down hard at the table. She crossed her arms at her chest. She was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and as usual, her dime store hoop earrings. Her eyes were lined heavily in black eyeliner which didn't help the situation as it drew even more attention to her black eye.

"You know that bourgeois couple that own the grocery store? Those assholes? Bunny and Biff?"

Not really their names, but, I got what she meant.

"Yeah?" I said, "what about them?"

"They were whispering to one another the whole time I was in the grocery store, and looking at me, and inspecting me... they think you beat me!"

I shrugged, "Well, you are walking around town with a black eye- what else would they think?"

"And Bunny, or whatever her name is- Bitsy or whatever- when I got to the counter to pay for my things, she was looking me up and down – I mean, who the hell is she? Some small town nobody who owns a grocery store that doesn't even have a freezer! I mean, that grocery store is so shitty- those cans of soup look like they've been there five years. There's an inch of dust on them for Chrissakes! And she's looking me up and down!"