She just didn’t know what to do about Buttons. Her ex-boyfriend, Leo, intermittently gave him spare change when they left the market with their groceries. Sometimes when Buttons would ask for change she would smile and blush as if Buttons had just asked to see her underpants. Leo would say, nope, sorry, got nothin’.
Other times they’d be leaving with their groceries and Buttons would be waiting, sitting with his little Chihuahua, Frank, and he would ask for wine money. She would feel brave and try to copy Leo, say, nope, sorry, got nothin’. It came out in a tinny, shrill, horn-like voice that resembled a cartoon version of herself as a mouse. These moments Leo suffered a rash of generosity and reached into his pocket to gallantly extract fifty cents and a couple pennies. He would sweep his hand down to Button’s coffee can as though he were dropping in a wad of hundreds. Buttons and Leo would share a look, the oppressed and the oppressor coming together, sifting through life’s challenges. They were right out of a sugar-coated version of life on the mean streets. A polished dentist’s hand with gold pinky ring and a grimy, black finger-nailed street hand clasping in peace and unity. All this while she stood there, lame, the last of got nothin’ still hanging on her lips, like a hook.
After Leo left her for the buxom receptionist at his dental practice, she had trouble remembering how to do things on her own. When he told her, he held her hand softly, like she might shatter or burst into flames. She discovered that nothing had been real. She stared at his pinky ring and tried to use it to orient herself. Gold pinky ring on a pale pink, well manicured hand slipping into starched white shirt, on a brown leather couch against eggshell walls. She just sat and listened as he cried. For what, she wondered. Her head tilted like a Cocker Spaniel. She wanted to take the fire poker and run him through with it. Her eyes were bleeding, not crying.
Instead, she hugged and patted him as he wiped his eyes and sighed.
“Well,” he said, as he smoothed his chinos and stood up. He led her gently outside, hoisting her to the curb for the garbage. She let herself be led, all the time watching her hand wrapped inside his smooth, almost translucent skin. The pinky ring glinting in the sun as he opened her car door and nearly lifted her inside. A returned parcel—the box checked for wrong size/color/shape/overall dissatisfaction—she sat behind the wheel watching him take the stairs two at a time back to his front door. She wasn’t even sure she knew how to drive the car or find her route home.
She avoided everything she could for as long as she could. It wasn’t with sadness or mourning. It was with a complete dislocation, like a shoulder getting wrenched from its socket. These things do happen. But now it was as if the ground beneath her was on two different planes. Things that she naturally did on her own were no longer simple. Life, wading through thick mud.
She was able to avoid seeing Buttons for a month. She wasn’t sure she would be able to deal with him on her own. He had become the one quintessential aspect of her life with Leo, bowing to Leo’s whims, whether or not to give Buttons and Frank fifty cents and a few pennies. Without Leo she would be alone with her tinny voice bleating either yes or no, both sounding wrong, lonesome and flat.
The day she had her root canal, she went back to the market. The drugs made her dizzy and sick, and the ghost of the roots in her mouth made her reckless, like a part of her had died when she wasn’t there to notice. Was I ever there?
She pulled into the lot with shaky hands, feeling the beads of sweat under her arms and on the back of her neck. She got out of the car too quickly, whirling. She put a hand to her head, a convincing steadying gesture, swaying incrementally less and less until standing in a casual Mountain Pose.
Inside the store she made herself fill the basket with everything she was avoiding: flowers, chocolate, wine, strawberries. She thought she could suffuse color back into her life this way; the reds, the purples, the browns mixing together in the basket. Life had been a flat grey self-portrait since the day Leo led her down to the curb.
The drugs from the root canal were stronger than she was used to taking. The floor wouldn’t stop pulsating. She put a hand on the wine rack to steady herself, the sweat making a highway down the middle of her back. The manager walked by as she was trying to stand on her own. She smiled, lopsided, and made her way to the checkout, her basket banging against her thigh.
She left the store with a bag in each hand, walking slowly, concentrating on making it to the car. She didn’t even see him as she rounded the corner.
“Spare any change?”
Buttons on his plaid blanket. Frank curled up tightly next to him. The threadbare black duffel bag next to them and a coffee can in front.
“Hey, I remember you,” he said, “Where’s your boyfriend with the pinky ring? Huh?”
She stopped, turned, politely asked her stomach to keep from heaving its contents onto the sidewalk.
“We broke up. He left me for his secretary,” she said this as though this was the hundredth time she had sent out the memo to the world. In fact, this was the first time she had told anyone.
“Got any change or what?” Buttons asked. He gave Frank a scratch on the rump, which activated a motorized kicking back leg.
The bags were heavy, her shirt plastered to her back, her knees leaning in on themselves.
“No, sorry, I’ve…”
She stopped, nothing felt authentic. She felt dizzy, or really, sick and alone.
“What’s in the bag?” Buttons pointed to the grocery bags.
“I’m not telling you what’s in my bags.”
“Just tell me.”
She peered in the bags so she didn’t have to look at his hair, his skin, or at Frank, sitting on the worn plaid sheet.
“There’s wine and flowers, which you can see, and chocolate and strawberries. And I just had a root canal and I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
Buttons leaned back against the wall, pulled out a packet of tobacco and rolled a cigarette.
“Maybe you should sit down then.”
The sunlight was now a pinwheel. She didn’t have a choice. She slumped down next to Buttons, her bags at her feet. Frank stood up and cautiously approached her, she put out her hand and he crawled into her lap.
“You ain’t got no toilet paper, dog food, soap?”
As he spoke, she tried to breathe and regain her place on the ground but it was lost. Have I always been so alone? A young couple with a baby walked by and dropped a dollar in his coffee can. Buttons nodded and smiled at them.
Finally, she looked at him, almost, a bit to the side. She was afraid of the eyes and the mouth and what was once, still was, underneath the layers. Maybe there are no layers.
“I thought he made me happy,” she said finally. It sounded to her like a call from a ship offshore.
“How about I sell you something,” Button asked. He wasn’t quite looking at her as he finished his cigarette and put it out on the wall.
He dug through his duffel bag and before he pulled anything out, she knew she was going to buy whatever it was he had to sell.
“How about I sell you this toothbrush?”
It was cracked. The bristles were flattened and grey. It reminded her of the toothbrushes that her father used to shine his shoes.
“How much,” she asked as she stood up. Frank jumped out of her lap. She gathered her bags, felt herself standing on the ground.
“How much you got?”
She looked in her wallet. She had a couple dollars, a twenty and some spare change. She took out the twenty and handed it to him. He handed over the toothbrush.
At home she took off all her clothes. Two steps into the entryway felt like too far—shoes, skirt, underwear, shirt, bra—all in a heap. She opened the wine, began to eat the chocolate and strawberries. She felt color coming slowly back to her, felt the world stretching around her like a compass.
She got a vase for the flowers and gently clipped the stems, arranging them one by one. She added the toothbrush last, centering it among the purples, greens and yellows. It was its own valentine.
BB
