The Night I Escaped From The Zoo : 4 / 5

By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

If you consider the topic Making Good Choices in Life, you would not normally include the idea of riding buck naked on a child’s bicycle in broad daylight through the suburbs on a Sunday morning. However, if you consider that the alternative was allowing a legalistic and judgmental suburban church-goer to have me arrested, I think that riding buck naked, etc., etc., was the best choice I could make under the circumstances.

Think about it: the police would find themselves wondering why I’d crawled naked from the river, which means I’d have to tell the story of the boat. Naturally they would want to know how I came to be alone in a rowboat at night, and that would lead to -- well, I could leave out the bathtub, but could I leave out the meth-lab fire? For sure, I’d have to leave out the aliens and the perverted state trooper, but if they wanted to retrace my steps last night, what parts would I be able to tell? I don’t think I could construct a big enough lie that would get me from Ross’ pickup truck to the rowboat.

And so, to avoid the police and their questions, I pedalled as hard as I could out of that driveway, naked once again. I would have stopped and put that dress on if I could have, but the mother was hot on my heels, shouting things like, “Sean! What have you done? What have you DONE?” and “Bill! Grab that girl! GRAB her! Don’t let her go!” and “911? 911? Don’t hang up! DON’T HANG UP! I’m not done talking yet!” That’s why I jumped on that little bike and pushed off without getting dressed first.

My idea was to put a little distance between myself and that woman, and then to slip the dress on. Across the street and down a ways I spotted a high hedge, so I swooped in behind it. I stopped, and put both feet on the ground.

Yes, I did. And then I looked up. The hedge shielded a driveway. I had expected that much. What I didn’t anticipate was that the driveway led to a parking lot, and in the parking lot was a great big church. There was the church, there was the steeple, the doors were all open, and there were the people, milling around in the parking lot, gaping at me.

None of them were near enough to grab me, so I quickly pulled the dress over my head and shoved my arms into the sleeves. Not the ideal circumstances for putting on a dress, but I had no reason to expect the situation to improve. I pulled the hem down as far as my belly button before realizing that I’d put the dress on backwards. So up it went, baring my breasts again. I pulled my arms out, turned the dress around, shoved my arms back in, and tugged the dress all the way down to the middle of my thigh.

Finally! I was dressed! I had clothes on, like a normal person! And I didn’t look half bad, either. The dress fit as though it were made for me. I have to say, the black and white stripes hugged my curves in a very flattering way. Fraught as that moment was, it was the first moment that I not only enjoyed wearing women’s clothes, I delighted in wearing them.

The churchgoers were nowhere near as pleased as I was. In fact, they were shouting at me. Mostly they were saying “Hey!” and “HEY!” but a few of them managed to let off some longer phrases, like, “This is a house of GOD!” and “How DARE you!” and “Cover yourself! What’s WRONG with you!”

I know that for the church people, my nakedness was an unexpected addition to their habitual religious practice. I knew that I’d invaded their morning: my appearance was a great big deal, maybe the story of the week or the story of the month, but for me it was only one fleeting moment in a long, crazy trip home. A trip that had grown pretty old by now. I’d had enough. Frankly, I was pretty well pissed off. I understood that they were upset and angry and offended, but it was just an accident! I wanted to shout, Get over it! Grow up! but I didn’t. None of this was their fault. So, rather than shout back, I settled for sticking out my tongue at the church people before I turned and pedaled away. Okay, so maybe I ruined their Sunday church experience, but at least I didn’t give them the finger or swear at them. Above all, I had done my best to keep my exposure to a minimum.

At the end of the driveway, I stopped for a moment and took a look down the road. When Sean said “hill,” I didn’t think much about what the word meant, aside from my being able to coast to the bottom. Now that I was about to start my descent, my heart skipped a couple of beats. The hill was pretty damn steep and pretty damn long. It’s called Bellen Avenue in Duxbridge, if you want to look it up. I want to say that it was a 45-degree slope, but honestly I feel that it’s steeper. I rolled down a little, experimentally, so I could test the brakes. An older couple was climbing the hill, so when my dress ballooned and flew up, she gasped, “Oh my!” and he said, “Quite inspiring,” in a goofy voice.

The good news was that the brakes worked fine. I apologized to the couple. The man smiled like a child with an ice cream cone, while the woman commented, “You know, you can’t go around like that. You may think it’s funny, but it’s not.”

“Believe me,” I told her, “I don’t think this is funny at all.”

She harrumphed in disbelief, and they continued their trudge up the hill.

I pulled the dress tight across my thighs, gathered it behind me, and sat on the scrunched-up part. Then I rolled down the hill without fear of making a spectacle. I pumped the brakes the entire way down. I couldn’t risk going fast -- my poor bare feet would be torn to shreds if I had to use them to stop. Accompanied by the frighteningly loud squeal of the bicycle’s brakes, I made my way pretty quickly to the bottom of the hill.

Another sound accompanied my descent: it was only in my head, but it was as persistent as the high-pitched screech of my brakes. I didn't know at first how it got there, but one line from a Bob Dylan song kept going on a loop and I couldn’t make it stop: Lay lady lay / Lay across my big brass bed. It was driving me crazy. It took a minute or two to figure out how that particular tune got started, but then I got it: the man who said “Quite inspiring” had a weird dippy voice, just like Dylan’s in that song.

As I said, the hill was incredibly steep, which made me think that the river must decline at a similar angle. A slant like that would account for the speed and violence of the current.

As I neared the bottom of the hill, I began to recognize a building here and a corner there, and soon I knew more or less where I’d ended up. I knew that Bellen Avenue was the big main street in Duxbridge. Even though it’s the town right next to mine, I don’t know Duxbridge very well. I’d only been here once or twice. It was only when I reached the very bottom of the hill and saw the bike rack and the apartment building mentioned by Sean, that everything clicked in my memory: I was in front of the building where Charlotte lives! One of the last times I’d seen her was when I helped her move in.

I coasted up to the bike rack and pushed the front tire into it. For some reason -- maybe because the tires were much smaller than an adult bike, or maybe because I was doing it wrong -- the bike didn’t want to stay upright. I had to move it to one of the end slots and lean it against the bike-rack’s frame. While I bent over to wrestle Rebecca’s bicycle into a stable position, an unexpected breeze lifted the back of my dress, exposing my legs and derriere and everything else all the way up to the small of my back. Of course, a random man who looked like an overgrown frat boy was passing close by at just the right moment. He saw the whole show. When I straightened up, blushing with embarrassment, he smirked and said, “Don’t feel bad. You have the most beautiful backside I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh, do fuck off,” I told him, and the smirk fell from his face. I pushed past him and trotted up the stairs into the apartment building.

By the way, that was the last time that the wind caught me unaware. From then on, I developed a seventh sense: I was always aware of the state of my skirt vis-à-vis the flow of air.

I didn’t remember Charlotte’s apartment number, but I did find her name: RAFFLYAN. There wasn’t any answer when I pushed the button, so I waited a minute, then buzzed her again. After I tried a third time, I saw a car pull up at the end of the building’s walkway, next to the bike rack. Rebecca and her father, Bill, got out of the car and walked up to her bike. I didn’t have anywhere to hide; there was nothing but the walkway and the glass of the entryway between me and them. I tried the inner door. It rattled loudly, but it was locked. I buzzed Charlotte with a little more urgency.

Then Bill looked up and saw me. His jaw fell open. He was enchanted; it was easy to see. He reached down and turned Rebecca by her shoulders so she faced her bike with her back to me. Then Bill waved, with a wide-eyed, empty-headed look. If I could have, I would have smacked him, but I couldn’t. So I waved back. I tried to smile, but my lips put up a struggle against it.

I want to say, for the record, that I do (still) feel guilty about stealing a bike from a little girl -- “borrowing without asking” is no better. It’s no excuse. Rebecca may be pushy, suspicious, and unwelcoming, but she is still just a little girl.

Then, I was saved from Bill and Rebecca: the door behind me opened. A man was going out, and with a smiling show of gallantry he held the door open for me. I scurried inside, smiling and saying thanks. As I brushed past him, he involuntarily jerked away from me as if he’d been struck. I saw him stiffen. His eyes widened. He tried to smile politely, but he shot out of there as quickly as he could. I was puzzled, but I retreated from the entrance until Bill and his daughter were no longer in view.

That’s when it hit me -- or hit my nose, rather: I was finally in an environment where the air was still. Until now, I guess I’d been upwind of myself. What I mean to say is, I stank. I reeked, in fact. That’s why the man at the door changed so quickly from gallantry to get-me-out-of-here.

I don’t why I smelled so bad. After all, I’d spent an entire night in the river, and that water seemed clean. Before that, I was soaking in a bathtub. It was clean by definition.

Then I remembered: I had rolled around in some mud and rotten plants. I did wear that disreputable jacket. And who really knows what’s in the river? In any case, no matter how I came by it, I was putting out a military-grade stench.

So, where was Charlotte’s apartment? I glanced at the elevator and the door to the stairs, and then it came to me: the third floor. We said it often enough during the move, when we were lugging her stuff upstairs. I pushed open the door to the stairs: Someone was waiting for the elevator, and I couldn’t inflict my funk on them. Once I climbed to the third floor, I was guided by the memory of hauling all those boxes and pieces of furniture: turn left, left again, all the way to the end, last door on the left. There it was: 319, Rafflyan.

I rang. I knocked. I listened. It didn’t sound like anyone was home.

Okay. So I didn’t truly need to stop at Charlotte’s. Sure, I smelled awful. Yes, I was hungry and had no money. HOWEVER, I wasn’t naked any more. That was one huge problem out of the way. I could simply walk down the streets of town all the way to Mayda’s apartment. Getting home, which was my other huge problem, was not such a big deal any more: It was only about two miles. Still, it would be nice to shower, maybe change, maybe eat something, possibly borrow a pair of shoes, before trudging across town. Charlotte would let me do all that. Or some of that. Probably.

Then too, it might be better to NOT see Charlotte. I only ran into her building on impulse, to hide from Bill and Rebecca. I came inside because I didn’t want to be arrested for stealing a little girl’s bicycle, along with all the other crimes Rebecca’s mother had listed.

Did I really want to see Charlotte? Charlotte was a complicated person, to put it mildly. She could be very kind, helpful, and giving. She was also my ex-girlfriend, and she could be intensely, obsessively jealous. I broke up with her a few months before I started seeing Mayda. Charlotte had become too difficult. I got tired of walking on eggshells. She started reading things into every little word I said, until finally our relationship became a series of mind games that I never wanted to play.

Something else about Charlotte that I didn’t see it at first was that she kept creating situations where I’d have to choose between her and… well, between her and everything else. We’d been going out for about three months when she mentioned her “heart thing.” One day she was on a bus when she suddenly felt palpitations in her chest. She broke out in a sweat and became very frightened. She asked the bus driver to stop in the middle of the block to let her off. An older woman helped her off the bus and sat her down near a fountain to try to collect herself. “The lady dipped her handkerchief in the fountain and used it to bathe my head,” Charlotte told me. “She took my pulse and said it was very irregular.”

“So, have you been to the doctor?” I asked. Charlotte had shot me a look that said, What the hell are you talking about? Aren’t you listening to me?

After that, her “heart thing” would pop up occasionally. She was pretty smart about it; she didn’t play the card too often. The first time, we were going to have dinner with my parents, but she had “an episode.” I had to sit next to her, take her pulse (which was normal), and put cool compresses on her head. We ended up not having dinner with my parents.

The same thing happened when one of my best friends, Jack, enlisted in the army. I was going to see him off, me and a bunch of the guys. He was heading out in the morning, but Charlotte’s “heart thing” intervened. Instead of saying goodbye to an old friend, I ended up refreshing cold compresses for Charlotte and feeling her pulse.

I know I might sound heartless, but I looked up the symptoms of heart attacks, and they were nothing like what Charlotte described. Also, she didn’t seem to be in any real distress. But the thing that convinced me that they weren’t serious was Charlotte’s refusal to see a doctor about it.

Finally I had enough. It wasn’t until after we broke up that I understood how she drove a wedge between me and the other people I loved. At the time I was just tired of this convenient malady that kept us from doing things that *I* wanted to do. Her “heart thing” never once came up when we were doing something she wanted to do.

I decided that the next time she had “an episode” that I’d take her to the emergency room. I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The day it happened, the last time she ever had her “heart thing,” I was about to go to football practice. In my whole life, I have never missed practice. Never. Not even when I was sick. Charlotte asked me to get a compress for her forehead and to feel her pulse. Instead, I called a taxi and bundled us inside.

The ER doctor did an EKG, took some blood work, asked her describe the symptoms. In the end he told her that she’d had a panic attack. “Your heart is fine,” he told her. “It’s perfectly healthy.”

I didn’t say anything on the taxi ride back, but once we reached her house, I took off to practice. It was nearly over when I got there, but I had to make the effort. I had to at least show up.

That was the beginning of the end. Charlotte moved from the “heart thing” to talking about marriage and children, and that was the final straw. I realized I didn’t want to be tied to her for the rest of my life, and I broke up with her.

So… considering all that, it was probably better to give Charlotte a miss. My stomach rumbled; I knew I smelled bad, but oh well. Time to start walking.

I turned my back on Charlotte’s door and made my way toward the elevator. The light for floor number one winked out and number two lit up. I caught another whiff of myself and realized that I’d better take the stairs before the person, whoever they were, arrived. The light for floor number two winked out and three lit up. As I pushed open the door to the stairwell, the elevator doors opened, and Charlotte emerged, dressed in hospital scrubs and looking tired.

“What are you doing here?” she asked in a sullen, suspicious tone.

Then it hit me: I was a complete idiot. In spite of everything I just said, Charlotte probably would have come to Ross’ rescue. But I wasn’t Ross any more. When I knocked on Charlotte’s door, I was thinking as though I was still him: In my mind, Charlotte was my ex-girlfriend. She might help grudgingly, but she would have helped -- Ross. But Mayda? Charlotte hated Mayda. In Charlotte’s mind, Mayda was the bitch who stole her man. She’d said it several times. She blamed our breakup entirely on Mayda, and now *I* was Mayda. Charlotte would happily burn me alive and laugh about it.

But then, an idea occurred to me. There was a card I could play. It might work. It would probably work. But oh, man! If it didn’t, I might as well hightail it out of here.

Charlotte repeated her question, with a bit more venom.

I swallowed hard and told her, “Ross dumped me. For good. I didn’t know where else to go.”

Her face lit up, like a child on Christmas morning. Her hostile demeanor fell away. A smile transformed her face. She zoomed over to me and grabbed my arm. Then she immediately recoiled and backed away. She wiped the hand that touched me on her pants, while she pinched her nose shut with her other hand. “Oh my God! Did you swim here through the sewer? What the hell?”

“I, uh, fell into the river,” I confessed.

“Listen,” she said, ignoring my reply. Her tone was gleeful and excited. “You have to come inside. Take a shower, get cleaned up. I can rinse out that dress and hand-wash it. It’ll take all of fifteen minutes. We’ll have some breakfast, and you can tell me all about it.” She turned and started walking toward her apartment. With her back to me, she groaned in disgust and said, “No offense, but you really stink. I mean, you stink like mad. I can even smell you with my nose shut. You smell so bad I can taste it. Yuck!”

Once inside, with a face full of revulsion, she pulled my dress off me and roughly pushed me toward the bathroom. “Oh, come on,” I protested. “I can’t smell that bad!”

“OH MY GOD!” Charlotte exclaimed. “You DO smell that bad, and then some! Please, for the love of God, get in the shower. I’ll wash your dress in the kitchen.” I was about to shut the bathroom door, but she stopped me with her hand. “Make sure you wash your hair,” she said. “But be quick. I worked last night and I need to eat and sleep. But I want to hear everything about the breakup. Hurry!”

She pushed me into the shower, then she grabbed a bucket and a bottle of Woolite. She carried them out of the bathroom with my dress. When I finished washing and turned off the shower, I saw that she’d hung a bathrobe on the door. I wrapped my hair in a towel, the way I’d seen Mayda do, and gratefully put on the robe. I say gratefully because it was wonderful to once again have clothes to wear, and clean clothes at that. Charlotte was sitting at her little table with a breakfast spread before her. I sat at the place she’d set for me. My dress was draped over the back of the chair, drying. I sniffed it. “It smells clean,” I commented. “Thanks!”

She gestured at my plate and said, “Dig in!”

She’d prepared eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee. It was perfect. As we ate, I told her a highly-edited version of my evening. Of course, I left out the aliens, the groping trooper, Lemon and her flying bathtub… Even if she had believed me, she wouldn’t have listened or cared. The only part she wanted to hear about was the argument and the breakup. So I told her. I reversed the roles, saying “I” and “me” instead of “Mayda” and “Ross” and “him” instead of “me, myself, and I.” I started with the dinner, explaining how I’d managed to land us at Ebbidles. I even said, as Mayda had, that “I wanted to eat there since forever.”

“Ugh! That shitty vegan place?” Charlotte cried. “He hates that stuff!” She shook her head knowingly. Clearly she saw Mayda as a selfish idiot, and that was fine with me -- at the moment, anyway.

I told her how Ross wanted to walk along the river, but I insisted on driving to the desert. She gave me a look that said You are a complete imbecile.

When I got to the part about my moving to Barcelona, she didn’t care about Spain or playing soccer as a professional. The only thing she heard was me saying that I had dumped Ross, and she refused to believe it. “No,” she said, “No, no. No, no, no. You didn’t dump him. That couldn’t happen. He dumped you.”

“Nobody dumped anybody,” I told her. “We weren’t engaged or anything. We were just dating and then we stopped.”

“OH MY GOD!” she shouted, "YOU ARE SUCH A FILTHY LIAR!" With her hands in her hair, she rose to her feet. My heart froze. I suddenly felt as though I’d been thrown back in time to other occasions when I’d seen her throw a fit like this. With her hands still clutching fistfuls of her hair, she walked over to a strictly ornamental fireplace. There on the mantle… oh God, a chill ran through me… in an embossed silver frame, was a photograph of her and Ross.

Thunderstruck, I blurted out the obvious: “You’re still in love with him!” The words fell out of my mouth. I was astonished. (At least I managed to say him instead of me, which was the horrific element here.)

“Of course I’m still in love with him!” she shouted. “He’s my soulmate! He’s my one-and-only! He’s the man I’m going to marry, and he knows it, too! But you, YOU just had to steal him away, with your long stupid hair and your sports. You had to get in between us!”

“Okay,” I said. “If that’s true, I guess that’s why it didn’t work out between us.” Here I was, walking on eggshells again.

“What do you mean if that’s true? Of course it’s true!”

“Okay,” I agreed. “That’s why we didn’t work out.”

I looked around the room and -- as if they were hidden before -- many pictures, all of them framed, of Ross and Charlotte. I counted six. For the first time, I was honestly grateful that I wasn’t Ross any more.

“That’s right!” she said. “That’s right! It didn’t work out with you. Because you aren’t his soulmate!”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I told her, “You’re right. I admit it: you're right.”

She went on for another ten minutes. While she ranted, she gathered up the dirty dishes and pans and threw them violently in the sink. It made a lot of noise, but somehow nothing got broken. When she finished describing her imaginary relationship with the man I used to be, she took a deep breath and looked at the woman I am now.

“So where is he now?”

Oh! That was a question I wasn’t prepared for. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess he’s out there, somewhere. You know, in his truck.”

She frowned. “You mean he’s driving around?”

“Probably.” This was no time for frankness. I wasn’t going to tell her that Ross (who wasn’t really Ross any more, but was now the woman Charlotte hated) had flown off in a spaceship, and was now on his way to be an exhibit in an interplanetary zoo. I was sure that the truth wouldn’t go over well at all. Instead, I said, “Why don’t you call him?”

“That’s a good idea,” she replied, with a thoughtful look.

“I’m sure he’d be glad to talk to you.”

“Of course he would! What a stupid thing to say! I talk to him all the time. He always calls me -- even when you two had your little fling. He would call me.”

I knew that none of that was true, but I said, “Wow, I had no idea.”

She smirked and told me, “You had no idea about a lot of things, missy. Let me tell you.”

I picked up on her hint and asked, “Are you saying the two of you were sleeping together--”

“While he was seeing you? Yes. And it was hot.”

Another lie, but I pretended to be surprised and a little hurt.

“Look,” she said, feeling triumphant. “You can wait for you dress to dry. If you want, you can crash on the couch. Just close the door when you go, and don’t wake me up. I’m going to get some sleep.”

With that, she walked into her room and closed the door. I moved some of the couch pillows to the floor and lay down. I was pretty tired. Through Charlotte’s door, I heard her leave a message on Ross’ voicemail.

“Hey, Ross. Hello, honey. Do you miss me? I know you do. I miss you, too. If you want to talk, you know how to find me. If you want to see me, you know, um. Okay. I’ll talk to you soon.”

I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for lying to her, and for going along with her lies. I had no idea that she’d constructed this fantasy relationship with me. With the old me, the previous me. I sighed.

Then I started thinking about Barcelona and soccer. There was so much I needed to learn, and I needed to learn it in a hurry. Spanish and soccer. Mayda’s training schedule. Mayda’s friends and family. Oh, boy. I was going to need a great big chart and lot of checkboxes. I wish I’d paid more attention to her while she was with me.

As crazy as Charlotte is, one thing I learned from talking with her is that as Ross, I’ve been a selfish, self-absorbed lout. Charlotte, and then Mayda, were just add-ons in my life. I never really thought about who they were, how they lived, what they wanted from life, how they fit into the world, and how they related to the people around us. All I really knew was Ross, and only knew him from the inside. Until now, I didn’t really know how others saw him.

While all this circulated through my head, I fell asleep. Deeply asleep. And I had a dream. I dreamt that I was back in high school. It was early morning, and I was dressed in hospital scrubs. It was the typical anxiety dream: there was a big test that I wasn’t prepared for.

There was a weird twist to the dream, though: I wasn’t Ross. I wasn’t even Mayda. I was Charlotte, and I was frantic. And the test? The test was that I had to find Ross.