“You have to give us a chance to win our money back!” Eleanor says, pointing at the cylinders of stacked pennies on the kitchen table. “In Vegas, they’d break your legs for taking off after clearing everyone out!”
I had hoped to sneak upstairs and call Lenny without everyone leaning in and giggling. Instead, I grab some Swedish meatballs and pickles and sit back down.
As the unmarried one, the other ladies had put me in charge of bringing mix for the liquor. They did all the cooking. Not to mention the thankless task of calling the men for dinner while they continue watching sports and yelling, “just a minute.”
Audrey hollers over from the HiFi that she is putting on Paul Anka. I don’t complain about how sexist that new “Having My Baby” song is since that will just get them making fun and calling me a women’s libber.
“You know, if Lenny wasn’t sick, he’d be right here kicking all of our tushes!” Barbara says as Audrey plunks herself back in her chair. Lenny is an excellent poker player — the only one of us that’s actually been to Vegas. He must have a sight at those card tables, with buxom showgirls probably hanging over his shoulder and him looking so handsome, like a less inebriated Dean Martin. “You mean Ol Red Eyes?” he had laughed when I told him which celebrity I thought he most resembled.
Eleanor smirks, “Of course he’d be at this table! Nothing Lenny loves more than being one of the girls.”
Barbara scowls. “Just one frigging second. What exactly are you implying about my brother?”
Flushed and fortified by the Black Russians, Eleanor elaborates. “Well, he is a forty-year-old unmarried man, Barbara. He has no interest in sports. We never see him dating. Why do we keep denying what he is?”
“Nobody’s denying Lenny’s a bachelor, Eleanor,” I jump in.
“Lots of bachelors these days,” Audrey says, tapping her cigarette and smoothing her bouffant. “Pierre Trudeau didn’t marry until he was in his forties. There’s Jack Nicholson. Warren Beatty.”
“Paul Lynde!” Eleanor laughs.
“I’m warning you to knock it off right now, Eleanor!” Barbara says. “Your mean flapping mouth could ruin a person’s reputation. Even get a person hurt!”
“I’m sorry. Maybe I’m just getting a bit tipsy and foolish,” Eleanor offers.
Audrey dumps the ashtrays and offers us more drinks. Poker resumes. Ice cubes clink in the highball glasses. The topics change to new recipes they have found. To plans for the upcoming summer.
When Audrey’s husband comes in for more food, she scolds him. “I’ll fix your plate. You go back and sit down.”
I can imagine myself fussing that way over Lenny: “Oh, no, no, Dear, you stay seated.”
Audrey tells us how worried she gets since her husband had that heart attack. That she has to be so careful about what she feeds him and about him getting overexerted.
“Does that mean things are shut down, you know, in the bedroom?” Eleanor asks.
“Eleanor!” Barbara cries.
“It’s ok. Between the concern about his heart rate and the medication, yeah, things are pretty much caput.”
“You must be so sad, to lose that part of your lives,” Barbara says.
“Ha! This is the first time in ages I haven’t had to deal with him tomcatting around! What can’t get up, can’t get out, right?”
As the women whoop, I sneak away for the phone upstairs. I can’t imagine Lenny carrying on like these men. Ignoring calls for dinner. Disrespecting marital vows.
I hear them chattering as I walk down the hall. “Bet she’s gonna call Lenny,” Barbara says.
“God love her,” says Audrey. “If that man wanted her, she has made herself more than available.”
“Someone needs to tell her she’s barking up the wrong tree,” I hear Eleanor say.
I want to yell at them that not every man is a degenerate Don Juan. Lenny’s lived alone for a long time and he’s pretty stuck in his ways. But they weren’t there when he took me in his arms and waltzed with me at the Legion. Not pressing right against me like the brazen ones try but holding me close enough that I could feel his breath on my cheek and hear him softly sing along to that song we both love.
Angela James is a middle-aged woman with fond childhood memories of eavesdropping on adult conversations at get-togethers. She lives in a small community in Ontario, Canada. Although new to publishing her work, she has had publications in Blink Ink, Cowboy Jamboree and Flash Fiction Magazine.
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