Chapter 54
Perpetual
The next day, in the morning, Ethel sat in Laura’s bed and flopped back with her arms spread. A bed. This was a bed. She rolled right and grabbed up two soft, mushy pillows, hugged them to her face, and smelled.
They smelled like Laura. She rolled left and right intoning, “Bed! Bed. Be-eh-eh-duh. Bed.” She sat up with static causing half her hair to poof out in a purple and blonde crackle.
Surveying the discolored hardwood floor anew, her eyes lit nonjudgmentally upon discarded socks, unopened business envelopes, and a slick or two of what once were sugary drink spills but now were fuzzed-over with dust like mini dried up lakebeds. A pink tumbler lay on the floor on its side gathering cobwebs. Four tissues with dark lipstick and makeup smudges stood nearby like frozen ghosts. Three slender lifeless aluminum cans congregated beneath a bedside table that used to hold something carbonated, she guessed. The room was dry, though, not humid or smelly. A window sill at the foot of the bed dripped with hardened pink and white candlewax. The windowpane glass was cracked. The ceiling fan’s blades were dusty; its pull-chain cobwebbed. She inhaled.
“Bed! Bed! Bedbedbed,” she rolled back and forth again, planted her face in a balled up comforter, sighed, and extolled a final “Bed,” into its heavy softness. She sat up and pushed her hair back. Laura was awake now too.
“It makes me happy to see you happy in a place I just think of as a regular old boring bed and trashy bedroom,” Laura said.
“I can’t wait to eat, shower, go to the bathroom, and try on all your other clothes. I’ll sweep up and do chores too. You just . . . you just relax and float and don’t be afraid at all,” Ethel said. The upswing in her vocal tone was not as babydoll as before. Ethel’s Wisconsin accent, however, verged in that ner’Norwegian zone that only the oldest of old school citizens employed. “Oh, ya-dere-hey,” and such.
Frozen in mid-prance on the bedside table was a plastic model horse, the kind many young girls might own. Brown painted, white breasted, six inch figure—a little on the bland side—nobody’s idea of a main gift. More like an impulse buy that parents allow their children at the pharmacy. Horse in clear plastic, hanging from a peg board; $4.99. Only this horse had a larger-sized baby doll head placed over its original head. The baby doll had its eyes painted red with sparkle-red nail polish and wore a pair of antlers created by fusing together melted red cocktail swords. Ethel poked the babydoll face lightly on the cheek to see how securely it was mounted to its equine base. Ethel wrinkled Laura’s nose incredulously.
“Gosh, Laura. Did you make this?”
“Yup.”
“Unsettling. I mean it’s cool. It’s creepy though.” They both realized at the same moment, which, certainly wasn’t hard to do; what with them occupying the same brain, that Laura was the creepy one being possessed by a little goody-goody.
“I’ll admit that I was hoping you might spin my head around backwards, help me slam doors shut with my mind, and climb walls like a spider.”
“Blech, no. Let’s do this instead.” Laurethel sat back in the center of the bed cross-legged, grabbed one of her monkey-sweatshirt sleeves and pulled her arm inside. She squirmed and pulled her other arm inside and wriggled around. She held the bottom of her sweatshirt down both tucked under her butt and held with her foot heels. Inside was warm and felt like a dark egg.
“Ow. Oh my god,” she muttered, elbows moving, and neck twisting. Her hand poked out from under her sweatshirt pockets holding her black bra. She tossed it on the floor and returned her hand inside. She scratched herself all over, medium-lightly, inside her sweatshirt. Her long, sharp, black fingernails made little raspy “shush” whispers as she scratched.
“I knew grown-ups would feel lumpy like this, you know, instinctively. But Gawd! So weird.” Ethel caressed her and Laura’s leg stubble.
Laura nodded agreement. Couldn’t argue with that.
***
Knock . . . Knock . . . Knock: on the front door.
“Yes?” Laura said cautiously from the inside.
“Laura? It’s me. Ron. Can I come in?”
“Um . . . I was about to take a bath.”
“I know. I can hear the water running. I thought you might wanna . . . you know. Have some company?”
“Jesuschristjesuschristjesuschrist,” Laura said to herself. The slide lock was engaged and then the door opened a crack. “Don’t-don’t-don’t-don’t-don’t,” her inner voice advised outwardly.
Laura wore a big plush towel around herself and a matching one up and around her hair as though it were 1962. Her mermaid tattoo peeked out over the towel’s edge on the left.
“There she is,” Ron said, possibly to the tattoo.
Ethelaura squinted at him. “Ron, is it? Ron.”
“Laura,” he began—playing along—until he realized she wasn’t. “What’s with the door lock?”
“Laura, who is this?” she said to herself. “Ron,” she replied. The images starting flashing before her eyes and matching up to events within her muscle memory. “Oh! Oh my goodness!” She reached a hand tentatively through the breach and toward his chest. “Oh my goodness. This is Ron. You’re like Paulie only more. And more recently.”
He did a half laugh through his nose. “If we’re doing role-play, give me a safe-word and let’s go for it.” He noticed something about her face just then and switched gears. “Are you wearing contacts?”
She retracted her hand suddenly and closed the door.
“Go away Ron, I’ve got too much going on in the next couple days to bother with your old manliness.” Her thoughts drifted, reliving some experience. “Oh! Oh my goodness. . . . Wow,” she gushed. Then, “. . . Oh, gross. Dagnabbit, the bed. Oh, the bed. Yuck.”
“Yeah, it’s not all hummingbirds and bliss,” she reminded herself.
“What? Laura, you sure? I’m clean,” Ron plead. “I used the cream as directed for thirty days. ‘You need some?”
“Ulp. Don’t make me upchuck. Is this why we’re so itchy?” Ethelaura said.
“No. Shh,” Laurethel replied.
“Alright, I’ll see you later?” Ron sounded deflated. “I guess. I’ll text before I come down next time. Uh … sorry.”
“Crimney girl, get some clothes on the washline,” Ethelaura muttered to herself.
***
Ron sat in his kitchen with his shirt off, wearing nothing but sweatpants. He drank coffee from a silver thermal coffee cup and listened intently. Laura’s voice drifted up through the vents and the floorboards.
“Seriously Laura! Clean clothes. Clean!”
“Here we go. The honeymoon ends on day three.”
“Dear lady, shirt/pants. That’s all I’m saying! Shirt/pants. Shirt/pants. Or overalls. Heck, let’s wear your work uniform.”
“It’s like having a grandma, a mom, and a little kid in my head all at once!”
“I just… rather I think… I mean. We shouldn’t go out looking like a freak.”
“If we look like my usual freak, however, dear, then nobody will think twice if we walk around talking to ourselves like a homeless schizophrenic.”
“Ugh!”
“I know it’s counter-intuitive, but trust me, the freakier you look, the less people want to make eye contact with you.”
“I can appreciate a certain amount of flamboyance, darling, but I shant abide giving the impression that we are a slobbering and mottled racoon rising from a pile of broken toys and oily garage rags.”
“Ethel, look, lets get one thing straight. . .”
“Ugh!”
Thump-thump-thump Ron watched the floor as his downstairs neighbor’s footfalls crossed below him and to the bathroom. The faucet squeaked off and the pipes made groaning metallic adjustments in the wall.
“You don’t have to ‘darling-darling’ me. I’m in your head and I know it’s a front.”
“I talk like I wanna talk!” her voice registered at a pitch a few notes higher.
“You can be yourself. You can be a little girl,” Laura’s normal husky voice said.
“I’m not a little girl. I grew up!” a baby-doll voice replied. “I’m an old lady now!”
Ron scratched his chin, looked up, and refocused outside scanning trees and power lines worriedly. He heard Laura tapping her toothbrush on the sink edge and the scrusha-scrusha of toothbrushing.
Copyright (c) 2023 Matt Schumann