Patchwork People XXIII Strange Geography
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Patchwork People XXII: The X-factor free porn video
XXII. The x factor.
It was a strange council they made that evening sitting on Grace's
porch. Walt and Marcia, Claire, and, of course, Grace herself, puttering
about busily, trying to make everyone comfortable. It brought to mind
those old photographs of Yalta, where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill
posed with forced congeniality for the camera, the most unlikely and
unnatural of allies, each of them knowing full well that their
cooperation was only temporary. That the moment the immediate goal was
met they'd fall back to being perpetual enemies.
"More lemon bars anyone?" Grace asked, offering the plate around.
Walt took another but both Marcia and Claire declined. Claire, Marcia
noticed, had stopped eating her first one right after Grace proudly
announced that Marcia had made them.
"Aren't they delicious?"
Marcia cringed. Fishing for compliments, Grace meant well, hoping to
break the ice. But she knew that Claire would rather starve to death
than take the bait. Marcia quickly tried to change the subject--in vain.
Walt, barely having finished lemon bar number two, took a third,
declaring that he just couldn't get enough of the things they were so
"goddamn delicious."
"She's the best baker in the world," he announced, beaming. "Best
everything in the world," he added, giving her a knowing wink and her
thigh a suggestive squeeze.
Out of the corner of her eye, Marcia saw Claire stiffen. Then stiffen
further. She had started the evening already stiff.
Once again, Marcia couldn't help feeling a little sorry
for her. It couldn't be easy for her to be here, on Marcia's home turf,
surrounded by Marcia's friends, and, knowing what they must have known,
how they regarded her as the enemy.
Walt, in particular, had taken an active dislike to Claire from the
moment he set eyes on her. Of course, he already disliked her sight
unseen, merely from having heard the old tales, what few Marcia could
bear retelling as representative of the life she and Claire had shared.
But seeing the woman in the flesh hadn't mitigated his dislike, or
humanized Claire in his eyes. If anything, he suspected that Marcia had
spared him the worst of it, hadn't accurately portrayed just how
unpleasant Claire could be. This, despite the woman being on her best
behavior, he thought he could infer himself.
Well, that was all such a long time ago, by Marcia's reckoning. Not only
in actual years, but in psychological time. Marcia felt that she could
afford to be magnanimous, if not spare Claire a little bit of sympathy.
Even if now was the optimum time for revenge, the time when she could at
last lord it over the woman who'd always, on her own home turf, made
Marcia feel so uncomfortable, so inadequate, so much a freak. But that
was the thing about revenge. By the time the opportunity to dish it out
finally came around, you'd very often lost the taste for it.
Maybe it was having known so well how it felt to be in Claire's position
that made it impossible for Marcia not to empathize. She might have
hoped that Claire might be learning now the same lesson, if their roles
were reversed again in the future, but Marcia had her doubts. Seeing
Claire sitting on the porch now, almost visibly fuming, it was more
likely that her ex was storing up her rage against the day. She would
pay Marcia back with interest for having been made to feel like the
outsider, a freak among these "freaks" that Marcia had taken up with. As
if Claire herself weren't the normal one!
If Grace and Walt had thought that Claire would reconsider her opinion
of Marcia seeing her first-hand in her new life, in her well-adjusted
role as a woman, surrounded by loving friends, they were wrong. Marcia
knew the more likely reaction. Giving credence to these people, to their
obvious affection for her ex, would have meant reevaluating Marcia, all
right. But it would also have meant reevaluating their marriage and
Claire's own less than blameless role in their divorce...it would have
mean revaluating everything, because once you reevaluated one thing it
could start a domino effect. Claire, like any good cold warrior, knew
you simply couldn't afford to let that first domino fall.
Walt had brought a clipboard with a sheet of paper attached on which
he'd thought to sketch out their plan of attack in locating Phoebe. But
after a half-hour of sporadic talking the page had remained
distressingly blank. Only one thing became clearer: they had no plan.
Claire, who'd decided not to turn around and head straight back to New
Jersey, after all, as Marcia had hoped, was decidedly unhelpful. Except
for reiterating what she'd told Marcia at the airport about Phoebe's
escape from rehab, she had no further clues as to their daughter's
whereabouts. Or none that she decided to share. The intelligence she was
able to gather on Phoebe came mainly by hijacking the girl's social
media accounts and grilling her latest ex-boyfriend. They ended when
Phoebe grew suspicious and crashed these same accounts as well as
discarding her old cell phone.
"She's been here the last several days," Claire said pointedly. "If
anyone had the chance to check up on her it would have been you."
Meaning it was Marcia's responsibility to snoop around among Phoebe's
things, read, presumably when the girl was asleep, her text messages,
incoming and outgoing. Never mind that the girl slept with the device in
her hand, not six inches from her face. Even took it into the bathroom
with her to shower. When did Claire manage to sneak the device away is
what Marcia would have liked to ask. Never mind that Marcia wouldn't
have done it anyway. She never would have eavesdropped on her messages
even if Phoebe had left the phone unattended.
"It goes against my principles to invade someone's privacy," she pointed
out, as if Claire needed reminding.
"Principles," she snorted, not quite under her breath. "As if one stood
on principles with a child."
You wouldn't, Marcia thought, the silent riposte crackling through her
brain like lightning.
"More coffee anyone?" Grace asked cheerily.
Walt cleared his throat and tapped his uncapped pen against the still
blank paper attached to his clipboard. "Let's stay focused on what we're
going to do. Rather than on what we didn't do, okay?"
Everyone agreed; that was the best, most constructive thing to do in the
present situation. In any situation, Walt might have told them. The
problem was that they didn't know what to do. They sat there on the
porch as the sun put on a garrulous display of oranges and reds behind
the tree line. The crickets began to chirrup in the pachysandra and the
first stars pricked the darkness directly overhead.
Claire announced that she was tired and wished to return to her hotel
room and a warm bath. Walt suggested that they reconvene at the Blue Cat
the following morning. He advanced the optimistic notion that things
often stood out clearer in the light of a new day. Grace seconded him on
that, but without a great deal of conviction. What else could one do in
a hopeless present but hold out hope for tomorrow? Marcia suspected that
come morning things wouldn't look any clear. They'd only have lost
another day. And Phoebe, like a space capsule floating off into empty
space, would be that much further away.
* * *
Marcia, the depressive realist, was never so sorry in her life to be
proved right. As she expected, nothing became clearer in the morning.
Nor in the several mornings that followed. In this way, the better part
of a week dragged on with no word from Phoebe. Calls and text messages
went unanswered. That could mean anything, including several
possibilities that no one wanted to consider. At least not out loud.
Everyone tried to stay hopeful.
Meanwhile, Claire guardedly filled in the blanks regarding Phoebe's
substance abuse problems. She was obviously anxious that their
daughter's problems not be walked back to her, but that the
responsibility fall, wherever possible, squarely on Marcia's shoulders.
"Were you aware that she has an eating disorder as well?" she asked,
accusingly.
"It came to my attention. The short time she was here I don't think I
actually saw her eat an entire meal."
Claire squinted sideways at Marcia and pursed her
lips.
"I wonder where she got that from?"
I wonder, Marcia thought, since I haven't seen her in years and you've
been in charge of feeding her all this time. Marcia kept her mouth shut,
though. She was determined not to turn this reunion into a duel of
finger-pointing.
Reunion? It felt more like a hostile invasion of aliens.
"I can't stand it much longer," she later complained to Walt. "I see the
woman everywhere. At the grocery, at the bank, at the drug store...I
went to the park to read and have my lunch and who do I see sitting on a
bench beneath the Birdwell statue? I swear, it feels like the town has
been taken over by an army of Claires."
Walt laughed. "Well it is a small town."
"I'm serious. I honestly don't think I can take much more of it. She
even stopped by the Blue Cat yesterday afternoon. It turns out Grace
invited her to pay us a visit. I could have strangled her."
"Which one?"
Marcia shook her head. "I couldn't decide. That's probably what saved
them both."
"Well if anyone can talk some sense into her, it would be Grace."
"I don't know Walt. The woman, even after all this time, doesn't want to
come to any understanding. I'm still to blame for everything and I don't
think her world-view can survive anything less than seeing me as the
personification of evil within it. In the end, I don't think she's going
to accept what Grace has to say anymore than what I have to say."
Marcia described a lunch they'd taken together, ostensibly under a flag
of truce, two days before. They'd gone to the Peacock Grille. The
waitress who served them had given Marcia a friendly welcome, as she
always did when Marcia ate there. They chatted for awhile, exchanging
pleasantries, and did so throughout the meal. Marcia could sense that
Claire was growing more and more annoyed. At first Marcia didn't
understand why Claire was so agitated and then it struck her what the
problem was.
She was angry that Marcia was being treated as a normal person, that she
had a job, friends, even someone who loved her. To her, Marcia was an
embarrassment; she literally was a freak and Claire couldn't understand
how everyone else didn't see it too.
"I'm certain she must look around her in disbelief," Marcia said, "as
if Hope Crossing were the setting of a Twilight Zone episode she'd
managed to blunder into. She can't understand how a monster like me is
being treated like a normal person. She doesn't understand why none of
you see it as clearly as she does."
Actually, it was even more complicated than that. Claire was embarrassed
to be here in the role of Marcia's ex. Just being associated with Marcia
put Claire in a suspect position, questioned her own normality. How
could any normal woman ever have been married to Marcia without there
being something seriously wrong with her? Claire was weird by
association, that's how her ex saw it. Coming here had been an enormous
sacrifice for Claire. One that, added to all the others, she would never
forgive Marcia for all but forcing her to make.
"They don't know you like I do," Claire had complained bitterly. "They
didn't live with you back in the old days. They wouldn't have liked you
so much back then, I can assure you. Do you remember the ranting and
raving, the rages, the panic attacks? Because I sure do."
"I was really unhappy then Claire. I was sick. I don't deny that. I was
probably having a nervous breakdown. That was why I had to leave. I know
I was no good for either you or Phoebe. I wasn't good for myself
either."
"So you think you can just waltz out, start a new life, and leave the
one you wrecked behind you, as if it just doesn't exist anymore? Like
it's erased? Forgotten?"
"I didn't say that."
"That's precisely how you're acting."
Marcia remembered what Grace had said about revising one's life. Was
Marcia correcting her life or, as Claire claimed, merely erasing the
parts she didn't want to acknowledge anymore. In Claire's world, no one
ever got the chance to change. How could one, if they were to be forever
after chained to the sins and shortcomings of their past? Every scene
you wrote was indelible; you had to relive it to the letter in
perpetuity.
"I never would have come here. Ever," Claire had practically spat the
words, "if I knew this was how it was going to be."
Marcia pointed out that no one held her here in Hope Crossing at
gunpoint. She was free to go at any moment. In fact, no one had asked
her to come here in the first place.
"I came here because our daughter--my daughter--was in trouble and for
some goddamn reason she thought it was a good idea to see you. Which,
obviously, it was not."
Walt grimaced. "Doesn't sound like it was a very pleasant lunch."
The conversation had, in fact, from that point on managed somehow to
repair itself. In no way did it tend towards reconciliation, but at
least it did grow more civil. Both of them reminded each other once
again that full-blown warfare was not in either of their best interests.
More importantly, it wasn't in Phoebe's interest. They had to cooperate
with the enemy; which meant, they had to cooperate with each other. It
was simply an unpleasant necessity.
When their meals came, they both ate as if they had eating disorders,
barely pecking at their plates. They had just as little appetite for the
small-talk that followed over coffee, as if they were both trying to
find edible morsels in the bitter leftovers of their relationship. No
matter how closely they scrutinized what remained on their emotional
plates there seemed to be no nourishment between them.
It was when the bill came and Marcia looked into her purse to pay that
realized that her bank card was missing.
* * * * *
Author note: I plan to publish "Patchwork People" in its entirety in
weekly installments here on Fictionmania. In the meantime, the complete
novel is currently available as an Amazon Kindle ebook for $2.99.
For more of my writings, drawings, erotica, and photos please visit my
blog Bad Pussy
sissyforlife(dot)blogspot(dot)com.
Leela
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