[Editor's note: be sure to read the first installment of this lengthy story.]
“My mother is flashing her vagina at me, and I don’t know what to do,” Tandy says.
“You need to get the hell out of that place,” Tandy’s friend Marlys says. She teaches watercolors and tap dancing at the senior center. She once tried teaching them at the same time due to great personal depression at working with old people, so convinced that some of them were going to die before they made in to both classes ... she combined them to only such great disaster as tap dancing near bowls of water will provide ... there were casualties in the way of 3 broken hips.
“I don’t know how to get out of that place,” Tandy says, defeated. “You know the money we make here.”
“Bachelor’s Degree in a non-essential major?” Marlys says. For some reason she thinks sociology opened doors for her personally.
“English,” Tandy admits.
Marlys shakes her head. “You’re doomed.”
Tandy gets up earlier, pushing all of her routines up an hour. She gets one good day, but her mother catches on, figures it out, and starts coming down the stairs an hour earlier too. The legs are spread farther apart, further than one would think possible without them completely breaking off. Tandy can feel her mother’s vagina staring out at her from the housecoat. She tries to concentrate on her breakfast. But the eggs seem limp. She wonders if it’s how she cooked them or if it’s the chicken they came from. She can forget the cereal; it’s just not going
to happen. She puts the spoon down. Yellow goo from the egg shines in a puddle. Tandy wonders what the spoon is made of; that’s just not something they teach you anywhere in school. There are plastic spoons and the ‘good’ silver spoons for holiday, but what about the everyday silverware that is not really silver at all? Flatware is probably the political correct terminology now. Tandy guesses ‘vagina’ is the term most commonly and graciously used these days, but once she heard someone call it a ‘woman hole’ which was funny because of the word ‘manhole’, but maybe you had to be there.
Christoph works at the senior center too. He teaches tap dancing and Broadway medleys. His classes are very popular, so much so, that he has been pallbearer at 8 funerals and tap danced in memoriam at 6, the latter of which is just starting to catch on. The yodeling teacher has
yodeled at only 1.
“Your mother’s got some issues,” Christoph says. “Serious issues.” All the s’s run together in a slide whistle. “Your mother is taking a vaginal stance.”
Tandy doesn’t understand. “What?”
Christoph postures. It is amazing that he can walk, let alone do anything in the tight jeans that he wears. “Vagina stance. She’s top vagina in the house. You went away to college a kid; you come back a woman. Your mother’s vagina is marking its turf.”
“The kitchen is her turf? She doesn’t even cook anymore. She makes my father take her out or they bring back in. This is insane. Are you sure?”
“I’m telling you. She’s queen vagina,” Christoph is telling her. “And she’s letting you know it too. Kind of a really icky reminder, if you ask me, and that has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t personally do the vagina ride. Listen to me when I say you have to get out of there. You do not, I repeat, lather and rinse, want it to come to vagina versus vagina. Vagino - a - vagino. It would be like when the mother eats her young. I would miss you, Tandy. I seriously would. There’s not many a person that can get me to drone on about vaginas like this. Oooohhhh. Mrs. Lipsky, there’s Mrs. Lipsky. Heyyyyyyyy Mrs. Lipsky. I’ve got to go. She’s seriously my best tapper but when it comes to Broadway medleys, well therein lies my work. I’ve got to help her find her inner Ethel Merman.” Christoph shrieks a high note at the end, meaning for it to be melodic, but it is ear devastating instead.
Tandy goes to the senior center office to check her cubby. A small paycheck sits in an unmarked envelope. It is meager, but everything all at the same time. A lone glove is underneath, potential candidate for lost and found unless its owner is met. Right now it looks like it’s trying to hold onto the paycheck, to keep the small numbers company. A paper list is taped to the cubbies not assigned owners, like farming fields left vacant to materialize minerals. The list contains the names of classes cancelled, supposedly due to the usual budget cuts, but there has been talk of dying enrollment, no really, dying enrollment, and the next group of people getting their senior papers handed to them are doing the country club/moving to Florida thing instead. Fortunately, none of Tandy’s classes made the list but she only teaches 4, still 2 of Marlys’ classes are listed. “You need to stand up to that vagina. Stand up to it good,” Marlys says to Tandy later, before she has had a chance to see the class loss.
Not much is known about the inner life of a vagina. Sure, doctors know a few things. Artists know a few different things as well. Comedians know other things. But this is a mother’s vagina — is it necessary to know anything at all? English majors look for metaphor in everything and Tandy is no different. She tries to imagine why her mother would sit like this,
breakfast after breakfast, open housecoat after open housecoat, exposing the view. Tandy decides that she is going to get to the bottom of this, pun unintended because English majors don’t do puns, a poor man’s strategy of seemingly clever but in actuality ridiculous word play. And Tandy’s not going to do her mother’s vagina at breakfast anymore.
At the very next breakfast, Tandy address the vagina, unwrapped in a stiff new housecoat with the print of floating pineapples everywhere — upside down and right side up, carelessly cascading into the fabric. Tandy figures that a pineapple farmer somewhere is scratching his head. A pineapple farmer’s wife must be scratching her head too, for a few more reasons than he.
Tandy’s mother stares, her head high above the whole fruit on her figure fiasco. Tandy clutches the day’s newspaper, cupping the words in her hand. What do you say to a vagina, folded all up on itself like a monster of skin, especially if that vagina is not your own? This is no time for how do you do’s for after so many breakfast mornings together, beating around the bush is a waste of more time and an equally poor pun; death to all puns, there is no point.
“What do you want?” Tandy asks it. She glances quickly down at the vagina, unaware of exactly how an answer will come out. Maybe it will come out with a little pee.
“Who the hell are you talking to like that?” Tandy’s mother asks.
“Vaginas aren’t like tea leaves,” Marlys says. “You don’t just read them.” But then, she thinks better of her statement and shrugs instead. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not exactly like I know much about vaginas anyway. Or mothers for that matter.” Marlys and her mother had it out on a regular basis, the latter remorseless with her critical words. “So what did your mother’s vagina say?”
Tandy recalls the breakfast. “Nothing. My mother’s vagina didn’t say a thing.”
“Nothing?” Marlys is xeroxing copies of her resume. It’s the least she thinks the senior center can do, though she waits until the activities director is out of sight. “Oh well. I guess maybe you’ll never know, you know? If her vagina doesn’t want to talk, well, I guess you can’t make it do anything it doesn’t want to do. That would kind of be rape-y, you think?” The xerox machine jams and Marlys is in a panic, potentially a pickle too, if she doesn’t clear the paper before someone else needs to use it. Tandy wonders how many places are too many that a person has to get out of here from?
The next few mornings are cold enough, the fall turning into winter with quite a showy spectacle of frost in the morning, prompting the weather forecasters to warn about potted plants and pets being left out overnight. “Bring your green and furry loved ones in” they rally-cry. Tandy thinks for sure her mother’s vagina will have a pair of panties [are they still called that when you get to a certain age or is underpants the more, less weird, acceptable word?] as a cold cover-up, or a bathrobe or something. When an afternoon class gets cancelled due to free flu shots down at the center, Tandy sneaks home and slinks around her mother’s dresser drawers to confirm the presence of undergarments [sounds better] and robes with proper cover-up potential. Like an archeologist discovering shards of prehistoric bone and pottery fragments, Tandy is cautiously overjoyed at her find. However, the next few mornings, her mother’s vagina still appears, in all its maybe former glory but in all its present day puckered pinched self. Over time Tandy just pretends it isn’t even there.
“I still think it’s trying to tell you something,” Christoph supposes. “Do you think your parents still have sex?”
Tandy makes a squishy face. “Oooh.”
“Well I don’t know,” Christoph says. “Just because a body gets old doesn’t mean it doesn’t have desires.” He thinks a moment before adding, “though vaginas are wrinkled anyway even when they’re new. I’m so glad I’m not a girl. That whole mother-daughter thing.”
“Has nothing to do with the wrinkled vagina thing at all ages?” Tandy asks, dipping her face.
“Oh please,’ Christoph offers. “Wearing a little lipstick does not a twat make.” And he snaps his fingers at her. “Just ask her, or tell herself to cover up, for god’s sake. That’s why god invented clothes. And antacids for the indigestion you must be getting from looking at her thing while you eat.”
Sharon Goldner is the author of numerous fiction pieces, including George Stories over at dispatch litareview.
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