Don't Waste Your Love On Me
by Kyle Hemmings
I promised myself I could make a hard-headed woman trip over her own defenses. Whoever said not to trust a dyed red-head with a fall-out childhood? And would self-hatred spread from her like something radioactive and unnoticed. Well, Baby Doll says to me as we're waiting in line at Taco Bell for two guacamole salads and two extra large cups of diet Sprite, would I like ranch, Thousand Island, French, Ceasar's, or sour cream? Sometimes she gets misty-eyed when she speaks to me like I'm her bastard child whose father ripped her off of one too many Sunday mornings. Even though, my bank account is dry, I tell her I can read. Flustered, she drives us back to her apartment, chintzy, but a lived-in flavor, like a pair of chinos you wore for days. She asks me if I want a glass of ice tea, then doesn't speak for minutes, just opening and slamming doors to the cabinets above the kitchen sink. What's wrong, I say. Is it because you're always treating me? I promise to pay you back and more once I get work. She screws up her face at me like she's the last survivor of some Alamo and is about to tell me how I don't appreciate what I have, which is mostly her. Even though she's approaching fifty and insists on wearing short skirts showcasing her overabundance of thigh, white as the taffy I used to suck on as a kid. How could you embarrass me like that, she says. Scolding me in front of all those people? I didn't deserve that. I'm good to you. She scampers off to the bedroom and I hear the rustle of her under a duvet. I stand over her, not exactly searching for the right words. It's just that I hate the feeling of standing in potholes and dust. Maybe you should find somebody else, she says, sipping the tea. You keep telling me I'm a control freak. And maybe I am. Maybe it's the age difference. No, I say, it's not that. It's just that my last girlfriend was Vietnamese and she had black hair and this habit of pinching me whenever she wanted me to speak up. She was always so self-conscious of her English. It drove me nuts that I had to do her dirty work. It doesn't seem to register with Baby Doll. There are things about you, she says, that bother me. Like what, I say. Like the way you never take off that stupid ten-gallon cowboy hat in restaurants, like the way you mumble in front of my brother, like the way you gawk whenever a hot chick passes by. Like I'm dog shit. Anything else? I say. I'm waiting for her to recount all the nasty things her brother did to her as a kid, or the time his friend forced himself upon her behind an old school bus in El Paso. She takes another sip of iced tea, closes her eyes, pulls the cover over her head. And with that I turn around and leave. In my apartment, across town, I sit on the sofa, watching Jerry Seinfield on the TV. On top sits a miniature replica of a red cinnabar tree that my ex-girlfriend, the Vietnamese one, gave me for a birthday gift. Actually, cinnabar is also a kind of rock, someone had once told me, mercury in its purest form. This is what I'm thinking about as I wait for Baby Doll to call, incanting that she's sorry, sorry, sorry. It happens like clockwork.
Kyle Hemmings likes to cook, burn food, fantasize he can draw like R. Crumb and loves listening to The Beach Boys sing of an endless summer. He lives and works in New Jersey and can be reached at sacerb@yahoo.com.