Strings Attached

The afternoon light coming in from the window cast a buttery glow over the decades old décor of the small hotel room. It softened the lines on their skin and washed out the grey of their hair. Cora felt as if they were in a Rubens painting and through her half-closed eyes, the chipped and stained walls were made of marble and the floral duvet and carpet were a real garden.  The fading light meant that John would be expected at home soon, so she gently nudged him awake and told him she was leaving.

As Cora drove home, she looked in the mirror to catch a glimpse of the pink and orange brightening behind her and thought for the hundredth time that day that she loved being “a mistress”. A month ago, she would have been sitting on her sofa in her pyjamas eating three-day old Chinese food and watching a re-run of “Law & Order”. The same night she’d had again and again for years. What made her giddy was that she would still go home and put on her pyjamas and eat take-out but with the adrenalin rush of the rendezvous still buzzing inside her.

John, too, was driving home though with a bit more unease than his recent companion. He looked in the mirror and saw the kind of asshole he never wanted to be. But it was fun, dammit, and he wasn’t ready to stop yet. And besides, Cora said they would stop immediately when it became “cringy or boring”.

The fact that Cora worked with John’s wife did not make the situation very easy to ignore. They’d met at a work function, waiting at the bar for a drink. Cora asked him how he’d been screwed into coming to one of the infamous “booze n’ snooze fests” and when John said he’d come to keep Kathy company and get free drink, Cora replied with an “Office Space” impression that made him spit out his drink in laughter.

When John returned to Kathy with their drinks, he said he’d met her colleague Cora. Kathy said she was someone who was a bit odd and kept to herself but always had people in stitches when she made fun of the managers.

The next day, John found himself on the company’s website, looking at the contact information for the staff. When he found what he was looking for, he sat in his chair for a very long time pretending to weigh pros and cons, but knowing exactly what he was going to do.

Cora had waited until five minutes before she was due to leave work to reply that an early matinee and a drink sounded like the perfect way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. She then sent an email to her boss stating she had a dentist appointment the following day and would be leaving early. The two emails made her giggle and she wasn’t sure if she was more excited to skip work or to meet a stranger in a darkened cinema.

They spent the entirety of the film looking straight ahead, their fingers barely touching over the chasm of the drinks holder. After as they walked down winding back streets, he pulled her into doorways for a long kiss, breaking away before they started groping. Over a pint in an old man’s pub, they talked and joked easily, their lack of familiarity with one another loosening any inhibitions. He ran his fingers up and down the inside of her thigh, thankful she’d worn a dress just this side of slutty.

John got them track phones and when hers vibrated in the early afternoons, she tried not to look in the direction of his wife’s desk as she tapped out her reply, heart racing and face flushed. When she did occasionally pass Kathy in the corridor or on the way to the staff toilet, she felt a shame that gripped her intestines and stopped her breath. But as she sat on the toilet, staring at the screen of the phone she justified the disgrace by reminding herself and later John, that their meetings were temporary and only physical.

That all changed the moment Cora walked into the staff canteen and saw John sitting across from his wife, a half-eaten salad on a tray between them. Her fork was poised gracefully over the leaves as she smiled and spoke animatedly. He sat, nodding and laughing. Suddenly, Kathy paused as she noticed the strings attached to her blouse at the cuff had come undone and were dangling into the salad bowl. John immediately put down his fork and gently grabbed his wife’s arm and tied the string into a delicate and perfect bow.

Cora’s hands shook as she took out the change for her bag of popcorn and Diet Coke and didn’t stop until she was back at her desk. As she munched and scanned news headlines, she tried to ignore the thoughts of John’s tenderness towards his wife.

At their next meeting John was surprised when Cora put a foot on his lap and asked rather seductively if he’d put a plaster on the blister on her pinky toe. He wasn’t about to touch anyone’s foot, especially one that had been crammed tightly into a shoe all day. Cora continued to make odd requests—shoulder rubs, splinter removals, and zipping up her dress, which he’d seen her undo on her own just 10 minutes ago.

She daydreamed about moments where he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear or kissed the tip of her nose. But they continued as usual---sneaky pints and hotel rooms that felt dingier as the sun began to set sooner. She began thinking about what to get for dinner before he even finished. They put their clothes on in silence, ignoring the creak of old springs. They didn’t kiss good-bye.

When she ended it, he was relieved, but had to know why.

“I guess I want strings attached after all.”

 

 

Tale of the Coveted Shoes

Beth wanted more than anything to hate Whitney. Whitney with her shiny blonde hair, two missing front teeth, a pack of older brothers and sisters who adored her, and two parents who were still happily together. But mostly she hated that Whitney had a perfect pair of black and white saddle shoes.  

What Beth didn’t realise was that they were Whitney’s only pair of shoes—in fact, only piece of clothing—that wasn’t handed down from an older sibling. She’d saved money from her paper route every day for three months during the summer so she’d have the shoes when school started in the fall. After school, she cleaned and buffed the shoes until they looked new again.

When Beth begged and whined for a pair of her own saddle shoes, her mother reminded her that she already had a perfectly good pair of sneakers that she had picked out just two weeks ago. Besides, she’d have them ruined in a week or would get tired of them.

“Remember the jean jacket you had to have? Remember when you used it as a rope to climb a tree and ripped the arm off?  Go play outside and leave me alone. I don’t want to hear another word. Got it?”

Beth stormed out of the house, making sure to slam the door and giving an “I hate you” as a parting farewell.  She then went and jumped in every mud puddle she could find and rubbed grass all over the sides of her sneakers. But her mother didn’t budge.

In late October, Whitney’s family hosted a Halloween party for all the neighbourhood kids. Though Beth and Whitney didn’t talk much at school, they rode bikes around the block and played gymnastics on an old mattress in Whitney’s backyard. Beth always felt out of place with Whitney’s funny friends, but she was too bored not to go.

The night of the party, the house was decorated with fake cobwebs, candles, posters of witches and skeletons, and scary noises were coming from a scratchy boom box somewhere in the kitchen. Whitney’s mom made the kids put on blindfolds and touch eyeballs, brains, and teeth which turned out to be grapes, spaghetti, and chiclets.

The boys were dressed as pirates, cowboys, and vampires, and the girls, princesses, black cats, and witches. Beth was covered in a white sheet that had two holes cut out for eyes. Her mother had made two large circles around the holes, using her liquid eyeliner. She liked that nobody could see her face and she didn’t have a mouth cut out, so she didn’t need to talk.

At one point, they were herded up to go out to the “haunted garage” which involved Whitney’s dad and older brothers jumping out from behind stuff and scaring the living bejesus out of everyone. The kids squealed and ran out to run and hide behind trees, which as it turned out, sheltered more scary brothers. They ran around and around, laughing and dizzy on their own fear until Whitney’s mom told them to come back inside.

“And take off your shoes this time! There’s a lot of mud out back”

Beth was one of the last to add her shoes to the growing pile near the backdoor. As she threw hers down, she noticed the saddle shoes sitting neatly and pristinely apart from the others. The kids all went into a large family room that had two worn sofas and several pillows on the floor. Whitney’s mother had made popcorn balls and was setting up the VCR to watch “It’s A Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”.  Beth wanted to plop down with the others but there was something she wanted even more.

Heart pounding, she quietly went out of the room and towards the back entrance. She grabbed the white and black prizes and stuffed them down her pants under the white sheet. As she put on her own shoes, Whitney’s dad came in and said, “What you up to, Kiddo?” She said that her tummy hurt, politely refusing the Dad’s offer of escorting her the half-block to her house.

Once outside, she started running, feeling the soles of the shoes scraping her skin, the dangling laces tickling her thighs. The air was colder and the trees much taller and more menacing than before. She felt if she turned around, she would see Whitney chasing her.

Her mother wasn’t surprised to see her home early. Beth often had enough of social events before other children. She was glad that Beth had gone at all.

Beth shoved the shoes in between the box spring and the mattress and didn’t sleep at all for fear they would somehow walk out into plain sight. When her mother was in the shower the next morning, Beth was horrified to find that they were too small. It hadn’t occurred to her that Whitney’s feet would be so much smaller than her own even though she was about three inches shorter.

She thought about bringing them back to Whitney’s and saying she put them on by mistake, but realised they would ask about her own shoes, which she hadn’t left behind. She thought about just putting them on their porch but was terrified someone would see her. With the kind of logic that only comes from childhood panic, Beth decided to throw them in the gutter on the corner.

The next Monday, Whitney arrived at school, wearing grey canvas shoes that were probably once white. After school, they rode bikes around the block and Whitney didn’t say a word about the shoes.

At night, whenever the phone rang, Beth’s heart nearly exploded, so convinced was she that the shoes with her fingerprints were discovered in the gutter. Each day she crouched down and peeked into the dark hole and saw the white tip of a lone shoe. The stab of guilt and fear became a part of her daily routine, even after the spring rains washed the evidence away.

 

Crushed

Lora couldn’t quite bring herself to call Nanthap a stalker. Though he brought her mangoes and langoustines each day before class and added a heart as his only comment to her facebook statuses, he never actually spoke to her or seemed to want anything from her. In class, he sat apart from the others, dutifully copying words whose sounds he couldn’t form and whose meaning might as well have been Greek philosophy. Yet he copied and attempted repetitions and smiled blankly when called upon.

“Hello, Nanaphat. How are you?”

“19.”

“Nanaphat, what do you do?”

“How do you do, Teacher.”

“Thank you so much for everything you’re given me. I really like that part of you.”

The other students fell over themselves not because they had mastered these basic greetings themselves, but because Nanaphat replied in the same breathless tone of wonder usually reserved for rendezvous on balconies.

Lora had initially assumed Nanaphat was taking the piss. After all, she was 15 years older, 5 inches taller, and likely 50 pounds heavier than the boy. She sweat profusely in the sauna called a classroom, making her made up eyes rather clownish by 11:00 am. She felt awkward in this room of 35 engineering students, 32 of whom were males, which made her act all the more school-marmish. Yet there he was day after day, a young man earnestly admiring her.

As the semester wore on and the students finally started to grasp a few coherent sentences, Nanaphat’s advances became more verbal. Upon her desk where ripe fruit was once presented as a token of adoration, now were short notes written in a shaky scrawl.

“Teacher you like garden person. I am vegetable. Thank you.”

“Song meets bird then bird fall earth world. You are song.”

“Please give good score.”

After class he carried her books from one building to another and gave her rides to the teacher flats after school, she sitting side-saddle and he beaming at the front. Lora found she began to like the attention and assured herself she was not on the path of Mary Letourneau and wasn’t doing anything to encourage the young boy’s passion. 

One of the teachers, delighted to know the slang phrase, always made jokes about “Teacher’s Pet,” suggesting that she demand more of the student such as lunch for the staff and collecting all the photocopying for the day. Lora just smiled and said that she liked all her students equally and only wanted them to learn to not be afraid of English.

But in reality, Nanaphat was her favourite student. It was a strange existence being the only white female in a town of 50,000 people. 50,000 pairs of eyes watching her every move, laughing at her attempts to buy shoes and trousers that fit, laughing at her freckles that seemed to multiply every day, laughing at her inability to remove chicken from the bone with a spoon. They shouted to her in the street, “You you!!! USA!! Hollywood!! Jack and Rose!! My heart go on!” and there was no point explaining how she was just an ordinary woman from an ordinary Midwestern town.

Though the students were generally respectful to all teachers, Nanaphat seemed to regard her as more than an exotic foreigner. He treated her like a human.

That is, until he saw her with Mark, a retiree from Canada, who spent his days drinking and fishing or drinking and reading, depending on the weather. Lora had met him when a sudden downpour forced her to take shelter in a beachside cafe.

“I love Inspector Moltalbano! A witty man with an appreciation of good food.”

“Not to mention good at solving crimes.”

“That too. I’m Lora. Do you mind if I sit here for a while? It’s raining buckets out there.”

Lora was never this forward with a man and especially not a white man in Thailand, as they were certainly not there to meet tall, pudgy white women pushing 40. But there was something about the graceful way his legs were crossed and the slight furrow of his brow as he read that were instantly endearing. As the rain continued to fall in sheets, they sat and shared big bottles of Leo beer. Like most ex-pats who found themselves in the tired southern town, they glossed over some chapters of their history while spinning wild tales from others. Though he never said it, regret was his catalyst and lack of purpose hers.

As with many stormy afternoon trysts, theirs ended in a small non-descript room, in this case one that also had a kettle and a hot plate. He explained that he was living as cheaply as possible to stretch the retirement money to its fullest but lamented not being able to cook. He smiled sadly as he recounted afternoons spent getting the gnocchi just so.

“Now, it’s instant noodles and coffee.”

“Just like a college student.”

“You make me feel like a college student.”

She didn’t mind nor really notice the age gap and he didn’t seem to mind nor notice that she wasn’t a young, slim Thai girl.

On the way home the next morning, she forgot to tell him to take a route that would avoid the roads used by the students. She saw several familiar faces and hoped her mascara wasn’t too smeared or hair too mussed. She wondered if they knew the expression, “the walk of shame” and how she could ever possibly explain it.

When she arrived in the teachers’ office, she saw the teachers look from her to her desk, expressions giving away nothing. She heard a buzzing noise and saw a basket of rotten fruit.

Under it a note, the last English words ever written or spoken by the young Thai man. Words that made Lora turn crimson; words that led to whispers, laughter, and eventually banishment.

“You were lady of day but now lady of evening. You were bird in sky but now fallen lady. You are true American.”

 

The Waterfall

By the second night, Anne was sprawled out in the middle of the bed, limbs bending and stretching in every direction. It was the best sleep she’d ever had. Delicious and luscious, like being nestled in a noiseless, weightless cocoon. The feeling of not wanting to ever move disturbed only by a throbbing bladder.

Anne was supposed to be in this huge bed in the cosy bungalow with her partner of eight years. But as she’d expected for a long time, he’d found another big bed, belonging to someone not younger or prettier, just not her. “More present” as he had put it.

Her personality had swallowed itself in the last few years. Each day a vat of wet cement to be trudged through. The listening, smiling, nodding, and replying required hollowed her to the core. Anne sometimes glimpsed at him as she watched soaps in silence, wondering when he’d put the withering thing out of its misery. She couldn’t be bothered to do it herself.

Anne went to the rooftop for the complimentary breakfast and as she drank her coffee and stared out to the sea, she thought about when she and Mike had last eaten breakfast together. They usually spent Saturday morning at a greasy spoon called Heartland Café, where they watched couples in various stages of decay, newspapers as buffers. They’d wondered if the silence was companionable. Was everything already said? They’d vowed in those first years to never be like those couples. But on that last morning the only sounds between them were the scraping of knives on toast and the slurping of coffee. She thought about asking him what he thought these people were going to do after they paid their bills. He would have answered animatedly, making her laugh with his turn of phrase and unpredictable ideas. But she said nothing and neither did he and after they paid, she went to the library and he went for a ramble through the city.

After breakfast, Anne went to the appointed spot for a trip she booked to a waterfall. As she awkwardly climbed into the songthaew, she saw that she was the only customer and felt a stab of fear and loneliness. Then she remembered the last trip she had taken with Mike, each of them in different seats on the train so they could “both have a window view” and feeling lonelier when they were forced to sit together on the way back.

 The palm trees were unnaturally tall, like redwoods and the layers of green suggested untameable places with snakes, spiders, and all types of horrifying insects. When Anne was a child, her father brought the family out on Sunday drives out in the country. She would project herself out the window and watch herself run in the tall grasses and fields, her arms held out, face turned slightly towards the sun. On this ride in the jungle, Anne feared any projection of herself would be strangled and consumed by all that green. But she imagined it anyway.

She heard it before she saw it. Louder than any thunderstorm and strangely calming. She laughed at the enormity of it, a wall of white that stretched as far up as she could see. In the sun the droplets of water shone like diamonds.

The driver slid out of the truck and lit a smoke. He looked at Anne and then seemed to scold his young companion, who shyly beckoned with a skinny arm for her to follow. He didn’t smile or look at her and she imagined that he’d much rather be hanging out with his pals in an internet café than schlepping a middle-aged white lady through the jungle.

As the climb became more difficult, she noticed how deftly the barefoot boy jumped from rock to rock, spotting the easiest route for her to take. The boy frequently held out his hand to help her over steep and slippery spots. At first she felt weak and reluctant to feel his small, slender almost bird-like grip on her but as the energy drained from her legs, she welcomed the boy’s strong and gentle hand and found herself not wanting to let go.

In the beginning, she and Mike had always had their fingers laced or at the very least, touching. Walking down the street, sitting on the old broken sofa in their favourite pub, at night when falling asleep. She had known every line, vein, and callous of his hands by touch. Why had she started burying her hands deep in her pockets and sleeping with them curled under her chest?

As Anne struggled to breathe in the thick air of the jungle, she gasped at the realization that the simple act of withdrawing her hands had been the first act of sabotage. The gradual silence had followed.

Anne and the boy were now at a relatively flat area of the mountain, a giant bench that had been carved out and covered with a soft layer of grass. The water was shallow and there were large smooth stones shining in the sunlight. Anne slowly trudged up and over stones and climbed onto a large rock. She felt the spray of the waterfall behind her and could see the sheer drop before her. She let herself be surrounded by the noise before beginning to sob into her hands.

She suddenly felt two hands covering her own as the boy hugged her from behind. He rested his head between her shoulder blades and she could feel his mouth on her skin whispering kind words in a language she didn’t understand.

As Anne walked back to her hotel hours later, the boy ran to her. She immediately thought she should give him a tip and began digging in her bag. He put his hand on her arm and with a smile thrust a small, smooth stone into her hand. He said something, which could have been anything, really, but for her was always, “Don’t let go.”