“Yo! Coco!” Chet’s salty voice vaulted out of Coco’s voicemail with a full-gainer and half-twist, and stuck the landing in her good albeit nondominant ear. “Me and Violet are quits. Can I see you?”
Coco froze, an odd response during this heat wave. She melted onto the sofa, her emotions boiling over, thus soaking the middle cushion. There they absorbed the vagaries of her situation AND a stubborn coffee stain, before slithering back into her body as easily as orange jello without the fruit cocktail.
So, he and Violet were through? Coco supposed it was possible. But, for oil in tents and porpoises, he was a mean little Chet, with a lung history of violets.
A natural multi-tasker, Coco cradled the phone and a nursed a newborn hope, while do-si-doing with a full-figured panic that it was just the same old Chet. Bell curves clanged warnings in her head! Probably in the temporal lobes. But she swallowed her pride, raised her hopes, and lowered her standard deviations to his level, though she knew first-hand that his deviations were far from standard. Should she take him back?
On one hand, Chet had scarred their history with gallons of stabbing pain. But on the other side of the coin, could a saprophytic rebirth of their tangled crimson emotions, as such, spawn the fiercely winged seedling of hope?
Yes, indeedy! Her innermost heart of hearts spasmed with the honeyed hope that in the blackened dungeon of Chet’s primrose pathos, a toothless ancient languished in the chains of his vociferously silent bosoms of pain, pretty darn hungry for rescue. Her mind roared like a rogue caterpillar down the velvet façade of the past, tasting memories that were, oh, so bittersweet. With a hint of lime.
Despite posted municipal ordinances prohibiting antelope in urban dwellings, Coco found herself caught on the horns of a dilemma. Bummer. But hey, that can happen with exotic pets.
So she set off to present the dilemma to her shrink. With co-pay in one hand and cattle prod in the other, she arrived at his office, in a medical center called Thoracic Park. There she unbottled her feelings, poured out her heart, recapped her progress, and spit out a residual mucilage from her Inner Child, obviously ill. The therapist probed her psyche with aplomb, and his ear with a ballpoint pen, quickly getting to the point.
THERAPIST: As I recall, when you began treatment, your life was Chet.
COCO: Yes, but I’ve come to own my past, my feelings, my power, and even a used Hyundai.
T: (Grunts in a healing manner)
C: I’ve learned to set goals, boundaries, and also my hair. And last week I made my virgin jump with the local chapter of BITCHES.
T: You have a virgin?
C: No, I have a dilemma. It’s tied outside to a parking meter.
T: Would you elucidate?
C: What, you’re asking me out? We BITCHES are the Broads in Transition from Codependence to Hedonistic Skydiving!
T: Whatever bakes your cake or shakes your cookies, snookie. Lookie, Chet preyed on you.
C: Holy Chet! I never thought he prayed at all.
T: You’re a bipedal rescue squad with the cellular configuration of a Coco doormat. I just hope this Chetty phonecall doesn’t make you fatuous.
C: (Feels her waist.) Hmm, I do have a bit of a muffin top….
T. then sighted data from a double-blind study to correlate Coco’s progress with the likely duration of her insurance coverage.
Leaving the session, she was drained-emotionally, financially, and molecularly, as adverbs go. But upon removing her morose-colored glasses, she realized the dilemma was gone! A good thing, for the beastie was never housebroken. Now, her burgeoning self-hood burst from the bucolic belly of her angst, pausing to coagulate her thoughts before she began the final leg home on foot.
She used to savor the cycles of life-mostly Krebbs, some lunar and Perma-Press. In fact, she loved cycling so much, she trained rigorously last year for the Ortho-Cyclen, only to discover it was a birth control pill, not a bike race. Oh, the heartbreak! She began to realize that “safe sex” meant more than an evening alone with the small kitchen appliances.
Then Chet happened. She remembered what a hot Chet he was, snaking his way up the corpulent ladder, leasing dolphin-friendly cubicles to disinterred Social Security clerks. But he was a predator in disguise-the classic wolf in cheap clothing, trying to look cool in a unisex His ‘n Hirsuite with wide lapels.
It was Chet in the daytime, more Chet at night. He flexed his rippling biases and rode her seething caverns in a supercilious scree of emetic emerald passion. No, really. He called her a “lucky little love lacuna,” an alliteration meant as a backhanded condiment. Each intellectual satyriasis left them basking in the afterglow of prophylactic acid buildup in their striated muscles. They watched the president’s speech televised from, what was that room? The Offal Office? They even dabbled in cross-dressing, wildly mixing Thousand Island with French.
They’d spent time in states of mania, confusion, and chaos, eventually settling in Oklahoma. Coco suspected he was a cart-carrying member of the elite Illiterati. For, when she took a job in the criminal penal system, he went ape about her not touching nobody’s penals.
And when she confessed to being a Sufi proselyte, the idiot anapestered her for days. (“Please, oh, BABE, take me NOW!”) He wanted to do “them kinky Sufi moves” on a mat. But she was hip to the ways of linguists. They might tolerate a plain mat for a while, but eventually they want it onomatopoeia.
Then everything had fallen apart at the beach, when she caught him in a graphic, Violet scene. There he was, in a satin paralegal brief, while Violet wore a skimpy French diphthong and Army Surplus sandals with Achilles heels and plunging toe cleavage. What did punctilious social etiquette dictate? And could Coco transcribe it? She was riveted where she stood. Not an easy feat on sand.
Well, Chet hit the fan! How odd that he brought one to the beach. Under all the bad Chet, Coco still saw a scared, chicken Chet, yet feared their love was secretly clandestined to fail.
But, enough already with the backstory. Now, back in her apartment, Coco gave him a ring, i.e., she called him, e.g., Chet.
“Babe,” he begged, “take me back. I’m, like, so nonviolet now.”
Not a prolix chic, she hissed, “Heck, yes, I guess, Chet. Let’s.” Six syllables sailed in succinct and sebaceous sibilance across the symbiotic silence separating their alliterative, non-lisping souls.
“Atta girl. Four o’clock. The Moebius strip mall. Bring cash.”
They hung up, and Coco spied the lilting, dark notes of a Baltimore Oreo, migrating toward milk. Her misty eyes flew to the window, but snagged on the drapes. She tried again, and this time her gaze pierced the angry fog outside that roamed the alleys like a gang of wet sheets and pillory cases. Egyptian cotton, 400 count.
Then in a frenzied ballet of womanhoodedness, she proactively interfaced with her walk-in closet phobia in a quasi-quest for that gold spandex dress-the one so tiny it would hug the hips of a chipmunk. She often set traps, just in case. Oh, how Chet loved that dress! With each wearing, it had carved for them an enchanted, magical miasma.
Golly, she hoped it still fit him.
Copyright © 2008 by Mary Tompsett
