Fine Girl

Sue had a boyfriend who lived in a room on the East side. She wanted me to meet him. She put on her mother’s bra with the lace all over it and a tight shirt and we ducked out the back door. We rented a tandem bicycle from the Sinclair station and pedaled across the Cedar River on the 4th Street Bridge a long ways past the downtown and the library and the jail and the courthouse, the old neighborhoods zooming past us like a filmstrip. Sue sat in front, steering, her hair flipping back into my mouth.

A staircase on the outside of the house led to the boyfriend’s room. He came to the door in a pair of jeans and no shirt. Chest all skinny and white. Sue and I sat on his bed and he sat on a beanbag chair, chomping on an apple under a black light poster of Elton John wearing those great big shoes.

The boyfriend said he wished he could get a job at Deere and make some real money. Just give me a chance is all I ask. Sue and I looked at each other. Sue’d told me he had a mustache and I guess I could see it.

I pulled off my sneaker.

The boyfriend said gross.

I have a pebble, I said, shaking it. The hair on your stomach is gross, too. It curled like a vine from his belly button down into the top of his jeans. The boyfriend was twenty years old. Sue said he might join the Army. She said he might get a car. Sometimes, she said, he called her baby.

The boyfriend motioned with his fingers and Sue got up and sat on his lap. I fiddled with the knob on the radio and found a station playing “Brandy.” I turned up the volume and closed my eyes and danced, imagining I was a fine girl.

Sue’s voice over the music. Jesus, how about some privacy. The boyfriend’s eyes half-closed. The apple lay tipped on its side on the floor, turning brown.

Do you know people make dolls out of dried apples? I said. But all the dolls end up looking like old people. I was still kind of dancing.

Sue said are you going to cry about it?

They went back to squirming around on the beanbag chair and I was wiping my face, thinking of night crawlers when you put them in a can of dirt.

A little kid was sitting in the grass, twirling the tandem’s wheels. He said do you need this lady and I said yeah, but I was a kid like him and he should not call people ladies who are kids. I got on the bike and rode it back across the bridge. The back kept going its own way, tipping me over. I had to stand on the pedals to make it go.

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Kathy Fish’s stories can be found at Indiana Review, Mississippi Review online, Denver Quarterly, Keyhole Magazine, Everyday Genius, Quick Fiction and elsewhere. A collection of her work is available from Rose Metal Press in a book entitled A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women.