Housework is always a drag...
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 1 - Joy of Cooking
Aaron came in early, mid-afternoon really, and found me in the kitchen, peeling and cutting up onions under running water. I glanced at him but I didn't say anything. If you open your mouth while cutting onions that way, it makes you cry anyway and I’d had enough of crying recently.
He took in what I had on, a simple black shirt dress with green placket pockets, low-heel green pumps, and some costume jewelry including a strand of fake pearls around my neck. "About the Beav, dear," he said.
I snorted.
He had his topcoat over his arm and his briefcase in the same hand. He propped the satchel on a dining room chair and dropped the coat over it then walked to the other cutting board and stole a handful of sliced carrots. "Can't get over how good you look in that stuff," he said, stuffing his face with carrot slices. "If you wore your long blond wig, no one would know you weren't Donna Reed's kid sister."
I snorted again. I let him raid the carrots because I could quickly peel and chop enough to replace what he ate. He'd probably had no lunch, he often didn't but now I started to worry about just why he might have come home early.
"What happened?" I asked, sliding the peeled and quartered onions onto a pile of paper towels to drain. I moved my head away from the fumes and kept my nose closed while I spoke. The last thing I needed was to start crying again.
"You first, Willie," he said. "I bet it's more dramatic." He grinned at me, showing a few flecks of orange carrot he hadn't swallowed yet.
"If you're hungry, I can make you a sandwich," I offered, stalling. I made motions at my teeth and nodded toward him.
He considered it while cleaning carrot off his teeth with his tongue. "Poof, I’m a sandwich? Actually, a sandwich sounds good," he said. "Give me time to put this stuff away.” He picked up the topcoat and briefcase again. “Are we having pot roast for dinner?"
"You guessed," I said, deadpan. I already had the meat browned and slow-cooking in my big, deep, stove-top, cast iron oven thingie; the smell filled the room even with the heavy lid in place and I realized that I hadn't had any lunch myself.
He laughed, made a kissy-face at me and went on into the apartment to put his things away. I stuck out my tongue at him but he didn't see that.
While he was gone, I made myself a salad of spinach, cucumber, sliced boiled egg, grated carrot, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. I slid half of the same ingredients, plus some cheese and ham cubes, into the food chopper to make sandwich filling. I slathered Dijon mustard on two slices of wheat toast from a Pullman loaf, filled the sandwich and sprinkled the inside with fresh ground pepper before cutting it carefully in two, diagonally. Then I put it on one of the blue-and-red earthenware plates with a pickle spear and some raw spinach and carrot curls for garnish. I poured a glass of 2% for each of us and had my salad half-eaten before he got back.
I had to laugh when I saw him. He'd put on black slacks, a sport shirt, a baggy cardigan and had a pipe in his mouth. He'd even slicked his hair back, hopefully with water and not that oily goop they'd actually used in the fifties. He had the pipe in his mouth bowl-side down and he said around the stem clenched in his teeth, "June."
"Walt," I said, trying for that plastic sitcom brightness but we couldn't hold it--we both cracked up. He looked like a frame from an old Mad magazine. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and snapped his picture. I didn’t think I had smiled all day and at that moment I loved him for making me laugh.
“If you’ll go put on your wig, I’ll take yours, too,” he said. I made a face at him and shook my head.
He sighed and shrugged and mimed his regret then sat at the table and admired the sandwich for a moment. I'd overfilled it slightly and it sat on the plate, almost three inches high, oozing a bit of mustard and cucumber juice. "Willie, I've always known that someday you'd make someone a wonderful wife--I just wasn't thinking it would be me."
I sneered at him. "You thought up that line in the bathroom, I can tell--it stinks." I ate my salad.
He munched on the sandwich and made faces to show how much he liked it.
"Don't try to get out of it," I said. "You write all your best stuff in the bathroom."
He had to take a drink of milk to be able to laugh. "This is really good," he said.
"Where'd you find the pipe?" I asked.
"In the sweater pocket, don't know how it got there. Didn't you use it as a prop once in some theater piece?"
"Probably," I said. I finished my salad and milk and put the plate, glass and utensils in the sink with other things to wash. Then I retrieved a big turnip from the veggie bin and began removing the harder parts of skin, top and point. After I chunked the turnip, it and the onion would go into the pot with the meat and some red wine. I'd turn down the heat a bit, planning to time the meal to be ready around six. The carrots would go into the pot for only half an hour or so, and some fresh snap beans for even less time. Then I'd move the contents to a serving dish and make gravy with the stuff in the bottom of the cooking pan.
I knew Aaron loved gravy, All American Midwestern boy that he was. I planned on bashing the neeps with some garlic to serve under the gravy with spinach salad and hot dinner rolls and the rest of the bottle of cheap red wine. Vanilla bean ice cream and sliced banana for dessert with coffee.
I cook up a storm when I'm depressed.
Life can be a drag sometimes...
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 2 -- Lonely Forest
Aaron watched me as I worked, eating the rest of his sandwich and lingering over his glass of milk. "So, you going to tell me what happened? You got laid off?"
I shook my head. "Bankruptcy. The marshals actually came in and locked everything up like in an old two-reeler from the Depression. Caught us all by surprise--well, except for the suits in the front office. None of those bastards even showed up today, they knew this would happen but didn't tell any of us. Raelynne's costumes, her white piano, my iMac, tons of stuff that didn't belong to the club--all locked up by the court and we have to fill out claims to get our stuff back along with everyone else the Lewises owe money to."
I hiccupped, trying not to cry again. "The club's gone, Aaron. That moron on the city council and his apeshit District Attorney drove us out of business. Eight years!" Then I did cry.
"Dramatic as hell," he commented.
"Oh, fuck you," I said.
"No thanks," he said, just a bit too quickly, like the whitebread, hetero-straight middle American he really was but with that self-aware ironic twinkle in his eye. I wanted to hit him but I laughed instead, hiccupping again in the middle of my tears. It wasn't his fault, it wasn't anyone's fault probably. Maybe a small Midwestern city just wasn't the right place for a nightclub specializing in drag acts.
We'd done reasonably well. Saturdays at least, Lola's had usually been full, and Fashion Wednesday and Amateur Thursday had gone over well. We had some hot music acts to go with the drag shows and Raelynne had enough talent for any six women, or men. The others varied from strictly comedy to hot stuff. I worked my ass off as stage manager, often ran the lights and sound, held the hands of the girls when they needed it and hadn't been paid my salary in three months.
The city had been after us from the start, trying to get our liquor license, business license or food license revoked. They harassed our customers, they tried to get us on zoning violations, they sent in cop decoys as johns and hookers--we beat them in court time after time and we finally got a $250,000 judgment against them last year for the harassment--but we'd never collected a dime. Five months ago, Jody Lewis, one of the owners, and nearly our second headliner had committed suicide in a messy and public way right in the foyer of the club.
Jody had always had emotional problems but I felt her suicide belonged to those downtown assholes like a wart on an eyelid. Just an ugly fact. Not that they admitted it or even seemed to feel any guilt, in fact, they redoubled their efforts and mentioned the death as one more justification for their jihad on our asses.
Her brothers, Dustin and Russell, hadn't had their hearts in the business. You couldn’t really blame Dusty and Rusty for that, even if I hated that they hadn’t been upfront with us when everything finally went to hell. Suppliers started taking the club to court for non-payment of bills. The restaurant had to close about the time they stopped paying me but we kept drawing crowds on Fridays and Saturdays. Still, you can't run a bar without booze to sell and no club can stay open on just the gate and the sale of beer and sodas two days a week.
I wanted to be mad at someone but I felt too sad to be angry.
Aaron stared at me from across the room with an expression I couldn't read. "What?" I asked. I thought about the fact that I hadn't paid my one-third share of the rent in three months and now I had no hope of doing so until I could find a new job -- a paying job. I'd only paid a third because I did most of the housework and had the smaller bedroom and Aaron got paid a lot more than me, even when I'd been getting semi-regular paychecks.
I felt terrible about the situation and feared that I might say something to start a fight so I could leave without... without him having to tell me to go. My face twisted around my misery and I started to cry again. Maybe I wouldn't have to start the fight, maybe he would. But if I left, where would I go? What little money I'd saved in eight years had already disappeared, eaten up by expenses and "loans" to the girls in my show. And no way could I move back in with my mother.
"Um," he said. He came around the table to me. "Don't get me wrong," he said, "but normally for someone dressed like you I'd be offering a hug." He had a very peculiar expression. "Maybe if you had on that wig and some makeup?"
My sandy brown hair was cut in an androgynous style but it was what I normally walked around with in boy mode. Like any professional drag performer, I kept it short since the reveal at the end is part of the act. Not that I was really a performer but I’d always had dreams. And Aaron had always professed discomfort with any halfway mode.
I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands. "Are you kidding?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "You probably need a hug, it's just ... awkward." He made a gesture with one arm.
I laughed. "A wig and some makeup?"
"Well, it's just ..." he stopped himself. "I mean, from the neck up, you're still Willie Van Koek, the kid who used to climb my dad's fence to skinny-dip in our pool. I know you're a guy..."
I laughed again, startled. "I was what? Eight years-old?" I hadn't thought of that in probably years; that child I had been seemed almost like someone else.
He nodded. "My dad made sure that one of us was always watching when you snuck over. I was in high school and I kind of resented it." He blushed.
I stared at him.
"I mean, you know, watching out for a little kid who was being a nuisance...." He trailed off.
"You used to watch me swim naked? When I was eight years old?" I said.
"Uh. It wasn't my idea? Nothing sexual in it, hey!" He looked offended. "We knew your dad would likely beat on you if we told, so... but Dad, my dad, didn't think we ought to let you know it was okay, 'cause like it really wasn't." He sighed. "You could have gotten hurt."
I shook my head. "We moved away at the end of that summer. I never knew." The idea of Aaron and the other Packards watching me as I played in the shallow end of their pool disturbed me. That had been a very private experience for me and now my memory of it had to change. "I never knew," I said again.
He nodded. "You never came to any of the pool parties we gave for neighborhood kids, either."
"My dad wouldn't buy me a suit. I wasn't going to show up in underwear..." I trailed off.
My father, a complicated man, loved despite myriad unlovable attributes, had killed himself my last year in high school. I still felt guilty about that some times; he'd committed suicide after... well, after a rather public scandal made my oddities public. It took some time for me to forgive him for that; guilt I could deal with, everyone feels guilty when a parent dies. But I'd come close to hating that sad man and it almost destroyed me. Forgiving him was easier after I forgave myself.
"We figured that," said Aaron. He shrugged. "Then ten years later I went back to school to get my MBA and there you were getting a liberal arts degree at State and needing a roommate...." He trailed off.
"You were the one who needed a roommate," I pointed out. "Your girlfriend had moved out."
He grinned. "She poured Liquid Drano on my clothes. Then she took the teevee, the microwave...." He shook his head, still grinning. "She never could cook like you can, who needs a microwave?"
"Hey, microwaves are good for... some things." I noticed we were still standing close together, my skirt almost brushing against his pants leg. Maybe I could stay while I looked for another job. I could owe Aaron the money, do all the work around the house including the things I hated doing like yardwork and windows and ....
He reached out and touched me. "I'm sorry the club closed."
My arm tingled where his hand had brushed my skin. I sniffed. "Knew it was going to happen for months."
He stayed there within easy reach, looking down at me. Even in my two-inch heels, he stood several inches taller than me. I felt some force between us, one that had existed for some time. I didn't want to discuss that or a lot of other things so I said. "Why are you home so early? Your turn."
He turned half-away from me, maybe looking a bit relieved. "If a tree falls in a lonely forest does it make a sound?"
"Huh? What?"
He smiled. "I quit my job and no one noticed."
Chapter 3 -- Voyage to the Bottom
There went my hope of mooching a place to stay. "You quit your job?" I asked, stunned. I leaned against the counter to keep from falling down; my knees were as weak as canned spaghetti.
He nodded. "Went in to HR and turned in my two week notice. They sent me home early while someone decides whether to waive the notice and just let me have two weeks paid terminal leave. I walked out and no one even said goodbye." He looked like he considered this a notable accomplishment.
"Yikes," I said, knowing I was close to tearing up. Aaron had worked for the national headquarters of the local maker of farm machinery since he'd gotten that MBA. He'd worked his way up to director of inventory services and just a few months before he'd told me he had a shot at a vice-presidency if one opened up. "Why -- why did you quit?"
He sighed. "They ordered a twenty percent staff reduction in my department. I had five vacancies I hadn't been allowed to fill, but still, I'd have to lay off seven people. And I can only think of two I'd really want to get rid of. So I told Hi," Hiram Jacks, his vice-president, "that the first person I wanted to lay-off was me since all the management at our company were just bloated ticks anyway."
"Ouch," I said. Even describing a personal disaster, Aaron could make me smile. Hi Jacks and he went way back and could never really insult each other, however much they pretended to. I couldn't figure out why he looked pleased, though. "I thought you liked your boss and your job?"
"I did," he said. "That's why this cloud has a silver lining."
"I don't get it? We're both out of work and, and ...." I couldn't maintain anymore. I burst into tears and ran for my room. Talk about drama, none of my girls at the club could hold a candle to me.
"Willie," Aaron said softly.
A louder voice wouldn't have reached me. I stopped in the hallway and turned back toward him, his image blurry through my tears.
He hadn't moved, still standing in that open space between the kitchen and the dining room. "When you want to hear the rest, come back," he said, his voice gentle. "It's not all bad."
I either shook my head or nodded. Tears ran down my face as I turned to finish running and hiding in my room.
I took my time and cried myself out. The failure of the club had wrecked all of my plans and hopes and now my only fallback position had crumbled, too. Aaron wouldn't have quit his job without a lily pad already picked out and he had talked of moving out to the coast for years. He must have a job offer out there. It would be a good one, probably, but there would be no place for me.
The only future I could see would be moving back in with my mom and that was no future for either of us. All of the girls from the club were already doubled up or living with their folks, none of them had room for me. And frankly, queens and t-girls just have too much drama in their lives. I didn't have the stamina for that life at the moment, I needed a quiet room somewhere and a job that didn't involve loud music, screaming, drunks, cops, and crossdressed divas.
Which really meant that moving in with Mom was out, too. I love Mom but she had never recovered from my father's suicide. She blamed herself more than me and punished both of us by trying to drink herself to death. She hadn't succeeded yet but she kept on trying. I couldn’t move in and just watche her slowly kill herself.
That left only one thing to do. Jody and my father had already shown me the way.
I felt scared. I lay on the bed clutching the plush tiger Aaron had won for me when we'd gone to the Iowa State Fair. I cuddled the big orange cat-shape and kissed it on its rubbery nose. "I don't want to die," I told the toy. "I don't want to kill myself."
I liked living. I liked cooking and I liked managing details for creative people who had no time or mental agility to do it themselves. I liked being useful.
But what choice did I have?
Crying is a drag...
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 4 -- Good News about the Bad News
Aaron found me before I could decide what to do. "Had a good cry?" he asked, standing in my doorway. He looked competent and masculine and my evil heart lurched with the attraction I had felt for years and only joked about.
I shook my head. "No, I had a lousy cry." I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and wished he would go away.
"I haven't told you the good news yet," he said.
"Huh?" I said. I blew my nose again, feeling like even my brain might be full of mucus.
"I got a new job. In California."
I looked up. I knew it. Now he would move away and I would be really, truly alone. I felt a stab of pain in my chest.
He grinned at me, like twisting the knife. "Double the pay, too. And it comes with a house." He looked smug and happy.
"Aaron!" I sat up and stared at him. "A house? In California?" I wanted to be happy for him but I didn’t think I could manage, but I hoped at least it didn’t show on my face.
He nodded. "A little town North of Los Angeles, Rancho Domingo. It's a new company, a Chinese-American consortium called Urban EcoTechnology. They make low emissions construction equipment and tiny little electric cars."
"What will you be doing?" I asked.
"Management," he shrugged. "Probably inventory control. It's what I'm good at. I've got a bachelor's in engineering and an M.B.A., I’m a perfect fit. This is a cutting edge company that's going places."
"Sounds...wonderful," I said, trying to put a little enthusiasm in my voice. I wanted to look away from his happiness but I couldn’t do that to him.
"So, the club closing works out really well for us. I mean, timing-wise." He stammered on that a little.
"What?" I said, not really hearing him.
"Well," he said, trailing off.
I looked up at him. His smile flashed on and off and on and off again. What was wrong with him, I wondered? Had he caught a whiff of the desperation his news had caused in me?
"Damn it," he said, finally. "Will you please put on a wig and some makeup and meet me back in the kitchen? I can't talk to you looking like Willie's head stuck on Donna Reed's body. And you don't have any eyebrows!" He turned and stumbled out of the room.
"What the hell?" I said after he disappeared. At least he had intrigued me enough that I stopped thinking about the easiest, cleanest and most painless way to kill myself.
Chapter 5 -- Blonde to the Bone
I have six good wigs and another half dozen cheapos. At any time, two or three of the good ones are loaned out and I usually end up giving the cheap ones away. Every faux girl needs a good wig or three. But there were things to do before I chose a wig.
I made a quick trip to the bathroom and washed my face. Patting my eyes dry carefully, I looked at myself in the mirror. I wouldn't be twenty-six for another five months but I knew I looked younger. At least, as a boy I looked young. As a girl, well, I didn't look older than my age, and that was a plus. I have an oval face with wide cheekbones and a little round chin, a real asset for a female impersonator. Now if I just had talent, I would not have been working in the backroom of the club, I'd've been on stage. We can't all be divas and there's always room in show biz for curtain pullers.
Sighing for what might have been if only I could sing and dance, I turned on the makeup lights on either side of the mirror and started taking out supplies from my collection of cute little make-up boxes. I stripped out of my little black hausfrau number and hung it up before I began slinging any of the warpaint around, though. Nothing ruins a nice frock like spilling Honey Beige on it.
A little greenish concealer under the eyes and a dab or two on a blemish here and there. Another glob on the upper lip to hide my phantom mustache. A coat of foundation. I debated how far I should go with the makeup. Theatrical, like I helped the girls do before a show? Simpler, like for an evening date the few times I had slipped away to Minneapolis or Chicago? Or even more down the glamour scale? I decided to go for young, suburban chic; enough to say I was wearing makeup but not so much that the makeup became a statement in itself.
I used a thinner coat of foundation over the first one, then I drew on my eyebrows in a delicate arch. Some of the girls have tattooed-on eyebrows, I've thought about it but it limits you to one style. My real ones are blond and so thin as to be almost invisible and I frequently just shaved them off which was what Aaron had complained about.
I giggled, surprising myself. Aaron seemed really flustered today and it didn't appear connected to his news exactly. What was going on with my oh-so-stiff-and-proper roommate?
I finished with my eyes, blue-green shadow would make my grey eyes look bigger, and mascara for that wide-awake frame. I started working on my mouth, a dark lipliner to make my lips look plumper and a two-tone coat of fifties reds. Blush and powder to finish off.
My short dark brown hair gave me a waifish, Audrey Hepburn look, I thought, and made it possible for me to visit my mother in Illinois without a lot of screaming. But Aaron wanted to see me in one of my wigs. I took my blonde Lana Turner model down and tried it on, arranging the curls to fall on my shoulders. Nice. I considered trying the shorter, Doris Day pageboy but I kind of liked this effect. I looked elegant, like a society housewife who stays home to make things wonderful for her man. A sexier June Cleaver look.
Smiling, I freshened my scent with a drop behind each ear then replaced my simple bobs with medium-size hoops. An inch-and-a-half seemed about right, slutty but not too slutty.
Makeup done, I considered wardrobe. Changing clothes often is part of the fun of being a girl, I always thought, and having a big closet helps. I dove into my walk-in looking for just the thing to turn my roomie's crank, a little fuchsia number with a full skirt and puffed sleeves, yellow flowers on the yoke and hem. It screamed wholesome springtime girl-next-door-who-needs-to-be-fucked like nothing else could.
I held the dress up to my reflection in the mirror and decided I needed more bosom to do it justice. Off went my comfy olive and black bra which wasn't an appropriate color anyway. I've been taking hormones since I was sixteen and legally since I was nineteen so my boobies are my own but sometimes they need a little help. I found a yellow Wonderbra in the drawer and with a set of Curves the combination turned my C- into a C+. I changed my panties to match, too, 'cause I'm kind of anal that way.
The little mister has shrunk a bit since I had his two wingmen evicted down in Mexico six years ago. Some of my boyfriends' are a bit disappointed at junior's patent lack of interest in them but the nice thing about being on hormones is I can get multiple orgasms without having a real hard-on. So joke those guys if they can't take a fuck. I tucked El Wrongo back into his hiding place and snugged up my hi-cuts.
I debated wearing hose and decided against. My legs I knew were smooth; we have, or had, an electrolysis machine down at the club and two of the girls even had licenses to use it. Licensed or not, all of us were smooth as silk everywhere we wanted to be. What's a little pain between friends? I’d gotten rid of all my beard too and if my mustache would just stop coming back we’d all be smoother and happier.
Raelynne had gone the full Brazilian, but I’m not that crazy. Besides, I don’t have to wear some of the costumes she wears.
I looked at my image sitting on the makeup stool, for all the world like some teenage crumpette getting ready for a big date and felt the tears coming on. “Damn you,” I said to myself, “don’t you cry over nothing! You’ll have to do all your makeup all over again!”
I don’t know why I never listen to me, I’m pretty smart most of the time.
Winter is a drag...
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 6 -- All Souls
I finally salvaged my makeup and finished getting dressed. I added some bangles to my wrists and changed the pearls for a strand of hippie beads. I headed for the kitchen but Aaron wasn’t there and I caught sight of him on the rear deck.
He stood there, staring at the skeletal remains of the apple tree behind our half of the duplex. The poor thing had yet to bounce back from getting hit by lightning two days after Halloween last fall. All Souls Day when the unrighteous dead are allowed to walk the Earth, followed by a terrible winter. I shivered. A false spring and a late March snowstorm seemed to have finished the poor apple tree for good.
April in Iowa can be very dramatic or numbingly boring. This had been a week for drama, even in the weather. A wind blew in from the prairie, ruffling Aaron’s brown hair and letting the sun break through grim grey clouds to add golden highlights. I caught my breath seeing how handsome he looked, like Brad Pitt cast against type in a suburban comedy.
I went to the laundry room door and opened it a crack. “Aren’t you freezing out there?” I asked.
“It’s going to rain,” he said, having to shout over the snap and whistle of the wind.
“Again,” I finished for him. It had already rained five times this week. “Come inside if you want to talk, I’m not going out there to get cold and possibly wet.”
He nodded, grinning, and came back in past me. As he squeezed by, he put a hand on my ass and gave that a little squeeze, too. “I wonder if they have weather like this in California?” he asked, looking directly into my eyes from not five inches away.
“I....” I had no idea what I had intended to say. The wind tugged at the door, trying to pull it further open or pull me out into the cold and wet. I yanked it closed and decided to glare at Aaron.
He kissed me on the nose. “You’re cute when you pretend to get angry at me,” he said.
I stared.
He smiled. “I can always tell when you’re faking being annoyed. Your mouth frowns but your eyes just look confused.”
We were still less than a foot apart, my breast enhancers almost touching his chest. I felt confused, all right.
“You’re a pod person, aren’t you?” I finally gasped. “What have you done with my roommate?”
He laughed, taking me by the wrists and pulling me into the kitchen. “You know I love you when you get all dressed up, Willie,” he said.
I pulled away, he let me and I took refuge by the warmth of the oven. “What’s got into you, Aaron?” I asked.
He waggled his eyebrows at me. “I’ve been trying to get up the nerve....” He stopped himself, shook his head and said, “Start over. They had one condition about me taking the job in California.”
“Huh?” I said. It sounded stupid and I felt stupid.
“They like to hire married men. Rancho Domingo is out in the middle of nowhere, really. An hour and a half from L.A. and the next nearest big town is Bakersfield. Not exactly the bright lights. They think bachelors would be unstable. So, I told them I intended to get married soon.”
I snorted. “Do they know where you live now? Do they think Elk City, Iowa is some kind of metropolis? Didn’t you say they were Japanese?”
He shook his head and grinned. “Chinese. But the State College is practically next door here. Rancho Domingo doesn’t even have a Burger King.”
“Okay, I....”
Aaron interrupted. “So I thought, I need a bride, a wife. Who do I know who would be willing to live with me and move to California?” He grinned.
I honestly didn’t make the connection until he dropped to one knee.
“Willie, say you’ll marry me?” he said.
Now I knew how the apple tree felt on All Souls Day.
Weddings are such a drag...
by Erin Halfelven
Epilogue
I said yes, of course, but he had to talk me into it. It took him three days and he never once said I should marry him because I didn’t have any better options.
What finally clinched it was when he said, “Willie, you know we love each other and have for years. What kind of sense would it make for us not to get married?”
“You--you love me?” I stammered.
“Yes,” he said, smiling.
Well, that did it. I dissolved into tears for about the twentieth time and he held me close and kissed me, on the lips this time. “I want to make you happy,” he said.
We were on the loveseat in the living room of the house in Elk City. I looked at him, his face just inches away from mine and yet he still seemed so far away. “How can you love me? I’m not a real girl,” I blubbered.
“Willie, you’re the realest person I’ve ever known. Real sweet, real kind, real pretty and real loveable.”
I said I would marry him then if we could work out the sex thing. “‘Cause I know you’re not gay and I’m not going to go under a knife just to get married.”
“I figured that,” he said. “If I hadn’t worked it out in my mind first, I wouldn’t have proposed. And if it wasn’t something I needed to decide first, I would have asked you to marry me years ago. Willie, you’ve always been a girl, you just have a little plumbing problem.”
“You really think of me as a girl?” I asked.
He nodded. “For years now, that’s why the short haircut always bugs me. I know you only do it so you can visit your mom without getting a rash of trouble.” He took my hand and kissed it.
Of course, I had on my pageboy blond wig, the one modeled on Doris Day. I blinked, not sure if I had tears in my eyes. “We’d better find out if we’re compatible in bed before we do anything like send out invitations.”
“Ayuh,” he said, doing his Gary Cooper impression. Then he picked me up and carried me to the bedroom.
I did take off the wig before we had sex, just to be sure it wasn’t all based on some weird kink he had for blonde 50s movie star impersonators.
* * *
We managed to get permission to use the club for the wedding. I wore a bronze gown designed by Raelynne who served as my maid of honor. I had a new wig, waist-length, blonde of course.
Hi Jacks was Aaron’s best man, both wearing traditional boring tuxedos but what are you going to do? It is after all Iowa.
The girls invited friends from as far away as Denver and Cincinatti, it was a big wedding. We painted the place with our tears, remembering everything that had happened there and would never happen again but it was a great send-off for the old place.
* * *
We spent our honeymoon in San Diego and had some very nice sex in a hotel near the water. Afterwards, we drove up to Rancho Domingo to pick out a house. His favorite was one on a cul-de-sac on the hillside.
“It’s got four bedrooms,” I pointed out.
“For the kids,” he said.
“Kids,” I almost squeaked.
“We’ll have to adopt, of course. But I know you’ll make a great mom, think of all the mothering practice you got with the girls at the club?” He grinned. “And me.”
I smiled at him and he wrapped me in another hug. “Can we get the place repainted? Beige nauseates me. And gray trim, yuck.”
We kissed. “Anything you like, June. The house is your department, just wear your pearls when I come home for dinner.”
I laughed and we kissed again. “Anything you say, Walt.”
“Ward,” he managed to say while choked up with laughter. “I think Mr. Cleaver’s name was Ward.”
“Walt, Ward,” I said, “what’s the difference?”
“Okay, then you must be Jane.”
I kissed him again. “You Tarzan, me Jane?”
“Mmm,” he said.
“Mmm,” I agreed.