A Dinner Party

This is the first draft of a fiction story. I don't usually post fiction and I'll be back to regular-type posts after this. But trying to figure out what's missing from this story has been driving me crazy. So critiques and suggestions welcome.

A Dinner Party

It is a simple fact that nobody knows the average time it takes a woman to go to the bathroom. That is, the time it takes her to get in, pull down the pants, do her business, zip up, wash her polished hands, and walk through the portal that brings her back to the inevitable reality of things. Nobody knows this because when any woman goes she naturally spends only a tiny fraction of her coveted bathroom time pissing and shitting. The rest is spent letting her mind wander to wherever it dare venture. In other words, she spends it being free.

Charlotte sat on the toilet with her elbows on her pale, freckled knees and her chin in her palms. She had stopped peeing a good 45 seconds ago. She stared at a tiny black dot that used to hold a nail and a mediocre painting of a ship tossed by stormy waves. The painting had dark clouds in the sky and Charlotte remembered that she couldn’t look at it without seeing the shape of a bloated Mickey Mouse in the otherwise threatening rain clouds. She would sit on the cold seat, staring at the painting until the cartoon mouse drove her wild with frustration and she wanted to rip it off the wall. And one day, she did, leaving nothing more than a tiny dark hole for her to fixate on. Charlotte thought about her intention to replace the ship with another work of art, but after a weak attempt to find something else suitable for a place where people piss and shit, she lost her desire altogether.

She sighed. She reverted her attention to down to the upside-down Y created out of the line between her two thighs and the line created where her belly fat rested on the top of her legs. She took the fat in her hands and jiggled it around like water balloon. Charlotte used to be a beauty. Now she was what happens when gravity, experience, and stress get beaten into beauty. The water balloon feeling made her heart flutter and she let out a quick horrified moan followed by another sigh and an impulsive toilet paper grab. She wiped, flushed, and skipped the washing of the hands. Charlotte almost never washed her hands. I suppose it was half out of laziness and half because it felt like keeping a sneaky little secret with herself, and sticking it to all the people who would cringe if they knew she almost never washed her hands. Charlotte wondered how many of those people also almost never washed theirs.

“Oh, Charlotte, back me up on this one! America is ready for a women president,” Molly shouted from the table as she re-entered the crowded dining room. Molly was an over-excited book critic for the New York Times, “Oh! And women would make better commander-in-chiefs than men because they know how to deter missiles.”

“Yeah, but men know how to launch them,” Jim, a waiter to the stars at a swanky Soho bistro rebutted.

“Oh trust me, so do women!” Molly laughed.

“Well not all women know how to deter them! In fact, some women can’t turn them away.” Said Jim, glancing at Charlotte as though he was suggesting something about her.

She seated herself next to Andy, a wannabe novelist-turned-wannabe children’s book writer who was engaged to Molly. Andy and Molly didn’t make any sense as a couple. She was entirely successful at contributing to the failure of writers, and he was entirely successful at failing at writing. In fact, before they met, Molly shot down one of Andy’s dramedy who-dun-its and the book got taken off the shelves before it sold 1000 copies. The couple met at New York University. While he interviewed for a possible adjunct professor of literature position (from which we was turned down) she was in the same office interviewing the department head about the up-and-coming novels of the NYU faculty. Jim was immediately taken by her professionalism and long legs. When they both left the office at the same time, he mustered up the courage to ask her out for coffee.

To both of their surprise, a relationship formed, probably based on their mutual beliefs that opposites attract. Molly repeatedly joked that he aught to give up writing and just perfect his little passion for yoga and make his living teaching that instead. Jim never listened. Now he was working on a kid’s book about a hopping turtle. The turtle got made fun of by all the other turtles for his stupid hopping and became seriously depressed. Until one day, the turtle bumped his shell on a rock. It cracked and fell off. It was then the turtle realized he wasn’t a turtle at all, but a toad, and he lived happily ever after with his many new toad friends. Molly already wrote it off as unoriginal and too unimaginative to entertain a child’s creative mind. The two continued to live in their respective apartments, too, which made it laughably easy when Andy convinced Charlotte to fuck him one night when Molly had to work late and Charlotte was feeling particularly middle-aged and alone.

That night, Andy got a rush out of being with a less-than-successful-woman – someone that didn’t wear the pants. Someone worse off than even him. He felt a strange lust for her and they had sex like neither had since they were young. It was rough, forceful and passionate. Charlotte didn’t stop him from banging her head against the wall, even though it caused a bruise the next day. Charlotte got to spend the night in bed with another warm body. Both felt a little more powerful. When she was with her ex-husband, she almost never felt powerful. Andy poured her a glass of red wine and smiled.

“Anyways, congratulations on your promotion! Wink, wink,” Jim said, giving out a massive cackle that compelled Charlotte imaging shoving her fork into Jim’s eye socket until it couldn’t go any farther. “You know I’m kidding, babe. Cheers!” He lift his cup and the rest mimicked the gesture. “To Charlotte!”

Charlotte took a sip and thanked them. “And the sex with my boss wasn’t bad either,” she joked. Half her guests half snickered. Charlotte wrapped one arm tightly around her torso and took a too big bite of her roasted chicken and struggled to chew it into swallowable parts. She was sure that things were going to look up for her now that she was the high school principal’s secretary, rather than the vice-principal’s.

Snow fell lightly, just beginning to coat the ground, the windows, the city. There were reports of a possible storm, but no one in the house seemed to care. When Charlotte’s daughter, Charlie, pulled her car into the driveway, the flakes shined like cut glass. A gust of chilled air filled the room as Charlie swung the front door open. She kicked off her boots and, chatting on her cell phone, hurried upstairs to her bedroom.

“Don’t talk on that thing when you’re driving!” Charlotte called up to her. A door slammed shut. Charlotte sighed.

Nancy, a young colleague of Charlotte’s complimented her on her cooking. “You have to give me the recipe for these sweet potatoes. They’re delicious!”

“They really are,” Andy agreed. “I never knew you were such a good cook, Char.”

Charlotte thanked them and said it was an old recipe - one of her grandmother’s. She’d copy it down for Nancy later that evening. She knew Nancy would drink so much wine she wouldn’t remember the agreement. Charlotte would never have to reveal that all the food except the lemon asparagus was ordered from the fancy restaurant down the street. Charlotte couldn’t cook, just like she couldn’t choose bathroom art or stay faithful to her squeaky clean, all-around good guy, lawyer ex-husband. What she could do was keep people mildly entertained by offering her home as a frequent dinner-party venue. She was also good at listening to their problems, when each came to her individually on a nearly daily basis. She was good at saying, “why not” when men asked for sex. Basically, she thought, she was good at being like furniture with ears and a vagina.

Molly excused herself to go to the bathroom about the same time Charlie came downstairs to sit and push her food around. Charlotte felt embarrassed. She was sure her dinner guests thought she must be raising a street walker or at least a floozy, the way Charlie was dressed. She was sure Andy gave her the once-over - more than once. Charley wore her long brown hair straightened and hung over her shoulders. Her sweater was form fitting and midriff showing and her eyes were lined in dark makeup.

“Wow, Charlotte,” said Jim. “Charlie’s all grown up! God, you were this high the last time I saw you.”

“You had more hair the last time I saw you,” Charley replied, getting a rise from the guests and another massive cackle from Jim.

“Cheekier than the last time I saw her,” Andy laughed. Charlotte felt blood ooze into her own cheeks.

“Charlie’s an honor student!” She blurted loudly, insighting an inevitable eye roll from Charlie. The guests smiled politely or muttered the obligatory, “that’s wonderful.” They all knew Charley was an honor student. Charlotte talked about her daughter whenever there was a silence in a conversation. In fact, Charlotte talked about Charley so much, she began to wonder why she didn’t have more to tell people about her own accomplishments.

She was an honor student. She was also the captain of the girl’s lacrosse team and the beer funneling champion among her friends. She knew more about the punk rock scene than the entire local steel-toed boot and jean jacket wearing community, and could rattle off facts about any band from The Ramones to Dieing Fetus without sounding contrived. She was sexy. She was young but could outwit anyone twice her age. Charlie looked like Charlotte when Charlotte was Charlie’s age, only better – with her father’s perfectly straight nose and high cheek bones.

She suddenly missed the pre-pubescent pigtailed Charlie who clung to her as they read Where the Wild Things Are at bedtime, then tiptoed to Charlotte’s bedroom in the middle of the night terrified there was a Wild Thing in her closet. Charlotte would often dissipate between pride of her daughter to jealousy and back again dozens of times in a single thought, with no understanding of the strange phenomenon at all.

Charlotte felt her face get hot. “You need to eat more than that. Stop pushing your food around and eat something for once. you’re too skinny.”

“Shut up! I eat!” Charlie yelled. But in the back of her mind Charlotte was sure Charlie would be upstairs in minutes scrolling through the posts on a pro-anorexia website or hunched over the bathroom toilet with a couple fingers down her throat. The truth was, Charlie never gave her mother any real reason to think that. And it was Charlotte, not Charlie who had a secret obsession with following the lives of young anorexic bloggers who whined about eating tow peas today instead of three. She’d read them like trashy romance novels then think about how much better it is to be older - not ridiculously petty and self-obsessed.

“Plus, I’m going out later with Nick,” Charlie added. Nick was Charlie’s new boy interest. He was 19, too old, of course. He was out of high school and not in college. Charlie could never quite explain to her mom what exactly Nick did – something with computers and video games - or at least Charlotte could never comprehend exactly what he did. It wasn’t that Charlotte didn’t like him, just that she was skeptical, like any parent of a teenage girl would be.

She didn’t look at her daughter when she told her she wasn’t going anywhere that night. That there was a snow storm coming in and “a 16-year old who uses the car for ‘joy riding’ has no business taking it out in a snow storm.” Charlotte felt the sudden urge to excuse herself to the bathroom. She decided against it, concluding that two bathroom trips in twenty minutes is embarrassing.

Listening to two family members argue is a little like listening to a compact disc skip. Everyone wants to believe it’s just the techno version. Everyone wants to wait to see if it will fix itself and go on being pleasant. Everyone is optimistic. Nobody wants to be the person to admit to the ultimate conclusion – the music it broken. The disc is past its shelf life. Nancy had a mouth full of potatoes and chicken. When she spoke, little pieces of both spat back out onto her plate. Everybody noticed, but nobody cared. They were all just grateful someone decided to fix the CD. “Oh, Char! Did I tell you about my new puppy? He’s a Cocker Spaniel. Just the cutest thing. I tell you, he’s got so much energy! You know, they say getting a pet is a good way to test out whether your ready for kids or not.” She rambled. Charlotte knew all about Nancy’s new dog. Their desks were in the same cubicle and the day after Nancy took the thing home from the breeder she plastered her cork board with photos. She even put one picture in a frame that said “Mommy’s little angel,” right next to her treasure troll doll and color-coded pen collection. Cleary, Nancy was thinking about, perhaps hoping and praying to get knocked up before her biological clock sputtered to a stop.

“A puppy. That must be a lot of work. How do you find the time?” asked Molly.

“He’s really no trouble at all. Just feed him and throw him a ball and he’s happy as a clam! He just can’t get enough of it.”

“If I were a dog, I’d be happy as a clam too,” said Jim.

“Living in the moment,” adds Andy. “Heck that’s how I live anyways. Always in the moment. That’s the best way.”

“You can’t live in the moment,” Charlie retorted nonchalantly. “How can you live in the moment without being aware that there’s a past and a future that aren’t the moment. Just your awareness of those means you aren’t entirely in the moment.” The guests all looked at her with intrigue. “Plus!” she want on, “if even if you could be unaware of the past and the future, you wouldn’t really be ‘living in the moment’ because you wouldn’t have a choice. You’d just be sort of existing, I guess, which isn’t really living at all.” Charlie picked up her fork, shoved a minuscule piece of chicken in her mouth and chewed vigorously. She didn’t notice all the eyes. But Charlotte did. They were like little reminders of how her cute baby spawn was a better, more interesting version of herself. So were Andy’s comments about how wise she was getting in her old age. She felt embarrassed again, and angry. So angry. In one impulsive sweeping movement she stood and knocked the table to the floor creating a pile of broken dishes and half-eaten food. She grabbed Andy by the collar, punched him in the face and screamed at her guests to get the hell out of her house, before making it clear to Charlie that having a kid was a big mistake. It was Charlie’s her fault her stomach sagged. Charlie’s fault men didn’t stick around. Charlie’s fault Charlotte worked so hard for the much needed promotion that might actually pay the bills for once.

Charlotte watched her daughter push her plate away. She announced she was done, stood up and congratulated her mother on her promotion before jogging herself back upstairs. After a few minutes, the guests began to finish too. It wasn’t snowing too hard. It wasn’t coming down any harder or faster than when it began – just the same. It floated lightly and most of it melted it soon after touched touching the earth. In fact, it looked quite peaceful through the lace curtains. This was exactly the kind of snow Charlotte loved. The romantic kind that glistened then was gone as fast as it came, before the powder could do any harm. There would be no storm. Molly announced that the whole evening was lovely and that she’s really love to stay and have another glass of wine and some more “convo” but it really was getting late and “you know how it goes, work in the morning.” She strutted over to Andy, leaned down to him and kissed him on the forehead before telling him to call her tomorrow and also to let her know if he wanted her to take his shirts to the cleaners. Charlotte watched Molly as she bent down, trying to access the amount of arm jiggle that hung from her limbs and compare it to her own. Charlotte was certain Molly had more. The married couple-to-be exchanged love yous and Molly was gone. Shortly, Jim and Nancy were gone too.

The table looked as though a successful dinner party had just ended. Charlotte started stacking plates to bring to the kitchen. Andy insisted on helping her with the dishes. He grabbed a couple wine glasses and followed Charlotte in to the kitchen. He watched as she scraped the chicken bones into the trash then loaded the plates into the dishwasher. He stared at her ass as she bent over the machine. Charlotte sensed his eyes. They were eyes of someone who was always gazing at something and she felt happy that now it was her. She straightened up slowly and took another stack of plates from Andy’s hands.

“You’re gorgeous, you know that?” Andy said. Charlotte let out a half sarcastic sneer.

“Yeah, sure I am” She said.

“You are. You’re ravishing and I want to spend the night with you.” Charlotte bent over, ass out, loaded the dishes and thought to herself. She thought to herself how they might as well just do it. Charlie was going out with her friends; they’d have the house to themselves. They could do it in her bedroom. Hell, they could living room, on the kitchen floor or on the dining room table.

Then something changed. She slowed down. Something. Charlotte thought, “No. Char, don’t do it. Tell him no” She thought she’d put her foot down and make him leave. She was going to take control. She was going to be in charge.

“Not tonight,” she said. “I’m not in the mood tonight. Why don’t you go home.” Then she kissed him on the forehead like she watched Molly do it minutes before. Andy looked like a puppy dog who had just been threatened with a rolled up newspaper. He pressed his lips together tightly and struggled to come up with some thing to say to woo her. To convince her. To anything. She was supposed to be easy. She was supposed to be his safe bet. He leaned back onto the counter and rubbed his hands over his belly.

“Come on, Char. It’ll be fun.” was what he came up with. Charlotte repeated herself with a little more confidence, but careful to keep a bit of sweetness in her tone. It was getting late and he should head home. Andy didn’t have much more fight in him. Mostly, he was blind-sided by her refusal. He finished helping her with the dishes then quietly and awkwardly thanked her for the evening before showing himself to the door. Charlotte felt something she hadn’t felt in quite some time. Successful. She sat herself down on the sofa and clicked on the evening news. She pulled off her socks and lifted her slightly sweaty feet onto the coffee table. She rubbed them while watching a segment on a car that rolled into a river, then one on a local woman who held the Guinness world record for cutting out the most paper snowflakes.

Charlotte ran her fingers through the spaces between her toes and moved her thumbs in little circles over the calluses on balls of her feet while thinking that woman probably didn’t have men begging to spend the night at her snowflake covered apartment. Charlotte thought she was happy to not be snowflake woman. She chuckled to herself.

After a few moments of Charlotte forgetting there was another human in the house, Charlie thumped down the stairs. She had changed into a low-cut shirt hidden only partially with a puffy winter vest and frayed jean miniskirt which she paired with knee-high boots. Not winter boots, more like the trendy suede kind that would get ruined by the salt that covered the ground to melt the snow.

“Bye Mom!” she blurted as she reached for the door handle. Before she could turn it Charlotte asked her where she thought she was going, young lady. And also, who taught her to dress like that? Charlie crossed her arms and looked furious, which only made Charlotte more confident.

“Can’t you see the snow?” she said. “Don’t you have eyes? You’re not going anywhere. March right on back upstairs because you’re stuck here tonight.” Charlie reached for the door handle and flung it open. Charlotte followed by heaving all of her body weight into the door and blocking it. She lifted her hand as if to strike her daughter. Charlie’s eyes glowed like two firecrackers. She backed away then turned swiftly and trudged back up the stairs yelling a loud “Fuck you!” on the way up. Charlotte lowered her hand. She stood still, like a tree that had just been struck by lightning. She took a long deep breath then rewarded herself with a second. Victory, she thought, and headed for the bathroom.

On top of the cold porcelain seat, she let her body slump, back rounded into a crescent moon causing her breast to fold over her stomach – her stomach to rest atop her thighs. She looked down at her Y. The words she uttered played over and over. You’re stuck here. You’re not going anywhere. You’re stuck here. You’re not going anywhere. They grew louder and louder until they formed a rhythm. Until the rhythm formed a chant.Maybe I should have let Andy stay. After all, I don’t like sleeping alone. What if he never asks me again? Not even when I want it? What if there is no one else? Fuck. Fuck. I’m so stupid. Her feet stomped the floor in one solid thud. No sounds came from outside the door. And now Charlie’s gonna hate me. Well, she already hates me. She’s gonna hate me even more now. It’s not even snowing anymore. No. I did the right thing. She can be in for just one night. Is it that bad staying home with me? Is it really that bad?

The black dot stared through her. She stared back blankly. One minute. Two Minutes. Silence. Charlie thought she heard the low hum of a car pulling up to the driveway. Nothing. Three minutes. For a second, she swore she heard the front door twist open and gently latch shut again. If she listened very carefully, she could have sworn she heard the slight crunch of the thinnest layer of snow when a car pulled away.