Maddie
Maddie worked as a customer service rep. for Sears and at work, no one knew that she was a lesbian, or so she thought. It’s not that she was ashamed of her sexual identity; she just kept her cards close to the vest. Friends had been discharged from other jobs for just being suspect in terms of their sexuality, and she needed this job, particularly if Nancy moved out. Thirty reps manned PCs and telephones in the “big room” at the delivery center, handling customer concerns about deliveries made by the mammoth company. It was 1997 and no prohibitions then existed to prohibit blatant discrimination based on sexual orientation. The LGBTQ logo was itself only a few years old. And Maddie, being an attractive young woman, regularly sparred with prospective partners — of both sexes.
“Hey, Maddie,” said Ron, her desk mate. “I’m going fishing on Saturday; you wanna tag along? Bluegill is biting, girl,” he said with a wolfish grin.
“Thanks, Ron, I’m spending time with my daughter on Saturday.” The two co-workers then exchanged current information on their respective children and they happily returned to their tasks.
“Madelaine,” rumbled Joe, the office manager, his giant shadow looming over her desk, “would you come to my office for a minute?” Maddie nodded. Joe was the only one in the office who called her Madelaine. Turning off her phone, she followed the corpulent man into his corner office and took a seat in front of his desk. “Do you know why I asked you here?” he inquired.
Maddie shook her head. She had literally no idea. She had worked for Sears for almost two years, since she was 28, and had always gotten along with her co-workers, received positive job evaluations and all the rest.
“It has been brought to my attention,” Joe went on in his fog horn voice, “that you’re no longer living with your husband.” He gazed speculatively at her.
“Mark and I were divorced nearly two years ago,” she said, not knowing where this was headed. “I wasn’t aware I had to report the change. I’m not on the company insurance program, so there was nothing to report.”
“But, you had listed him as the person to contact in case of an emergency. We just like to know these things,” said Joe.
“Why?” she asked reasonably.
“We…just do. We’re a family here, Madelaine, and I don’t think that you should question our motives. You’re in no position to,” he asserted.
“What do you mean?” she asked next.
“You’re not full-time,” he reminded her. “You don’t get insurance and the other bennies that full-timers do.”
“But, that comes automatically after two years of consecutive employment,” she pointed out, citing the employment manual. “And I’ve got 22 months of full-time work under my belt already. Are you saying that’s in jeopardy?” she asked uncertainly. Where was this going?
“It would be a shame,” remarked Joe cryptically, “if, after nearly two years of consecutive service, you were to fall short by a month or two.” He peered at her over his steepled fingers. It was as though he could see through her clothing, and Maddie felt dirty. “Do you know what I mean, Madelaine?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he summarily dismissed her. “You’re excused,” he said. She went back to work.
. . . . .
“How long has this been going on?” asked Maddie of her live-in lover of six months. Maddie had only recently discovered that her partner had been unfaithful.
“That’s the title of a song, isn’t it?” replied Nancy lightly.
“Everything’s the title of a song,” Maddie came back. “Answer the question, please. I think you owe it to me to be honest at last. I find out you’ve been having an affair with my ex-lover and I think it’s natural that I’d have questions. Now, give me the lowdown, Nan’.”
Nancy bit her lip. Normally she was the dominant one of the couple, at least according to Maddie’s shrink, whom Nancy had talked to during one of her lover’s appointments, as part of Maddie’s therapy. This turnabout in roles was discomfiting, to say the least. Nancy considered her options, and found them wanting.
“What if I don’t want to talk about it?” she asked boldly.
Maddie just stared blankly at her. Uh oh, thought Nancy, she had really inflicted some damage on her and Maddie’s relationship. And this wasn’t the first time; Nancy had strayed before. She liked the chase, enjoyed the conquest of a new partner, even when she knew it imperiled the most significant relationship in her life. She loved Maddie–maybe. Nancy shook her head uncertainly and blew out a breath. She wondered how Maddie had discovered her secret. She’d have to come clean.
“It happened only a week ago,” she lied glibly. She looked at her lover’s face and Maddie clearly wasn’t buying it. In fact, Nancy thought she spotted the beginnings of a derisive smile.
“You’re so full of shit,” observed Maddie calmly. “I checked your cell and Phoebe’s name and number were entered in March, and that’s four months ago.”
Nancy dropped her head and nodded. “You’re right, Maddie, it’s been going on for almost that long.” She braced for the fallout, but was surprised at what she received.
“Alright,” said Maddie, glad to finally hear the truth. “Do you think you’ve gotten it out of your system now?”
Nancy blinked in surprise. “Out of my system?” she echoed. “What…what do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Maddie, “is that after the pursuit, and the conquest, and the domination I know you so like to feel, are you satisfied? Or do you need to go back to Phoebe again? Do you need more vindication? It’s a simple question,” she observed.
“Well….”
“Let me put it another way. Are you in love with Phoebe? I mean, I used to be, and I know it’s easy to fall.”
Nancy’s chocolate-brown eyes opened wide. “No!” she exclaimed positively. “I’ve only in love with you, Mad’.”
“I talked to my doctor about us again, Nancy. She said that you have some kind of profound desire to cheat on me, to prove that you can…do you understand?” Nancy frowned and nodded. “She said this will likely continue to play out until you finally get your bearings and overcome your insecurity and then agree to respect me, the way I respect you.”
Ouch, thought Nancy. That damn doctor got it right this time. Nancy was so afraid of being abandoned that she preemptively abandoned her partners, to forestall the humiliation of her own rejection. And she did this by cheating on them. She had been in therapy before, too.
“Sounds like you and Dr. Quack talked about me quite a lot,” said Nancy, feeling like a bug on a slide.
“Our relationship is one of the main issues in my life,” stated Maddie. “The doctor says I gravitate toward cheaters, almost as a defense mechanism,” she continued. “That maybe I seek out failure in relationships.”
“Why did you and Phoebe break up?” Nancy had to ask.
“She cheated,” replied Maddie. “Over and over again.”
“I…I didn’t enjoy it with Phoebe,” said Nancy rather lamely. “It was dull.”
“Nan’,” cautioned Maddie. “Don’t bullshit me. Phoebe is a beautiful, healthy, sexy girl with an almost unquenchable sexual appetite. It was all I could do to keep with her.” Nancy could well believe this. So, Maddie was well aware of everything that Phoebe and Nancy had done. Now Nancy felt vulnerable, exposed. “Come to terms with the situation, Nan’,” said Maddie. “I’ll give you some time. I think our relationship is worth salvaging, but you have to want it too.”
. . . . .
The next day there was a scheduled visit by Maddie’s ex-husband, Mark, and Sally, their six-year-old daughter. These visits were always the highlight of Maddie’s month. She let them into the apartment.
“Baby,” gushed Maddie, scooping her daughter into an embrace. Sally was subdued, as she was most visits. “What do you know for sure?” Maddie asked. Sally lifted her shoulder in a little shrug. “Whenever someone says, ‘what do you know for sure?’ ” repeated Maddie for the hundredth time, “you say, ‘a snake can’t straddle a rock.’ ” Maddie laughed with delight. Sally was the most important thing in the world to her.
“Oh, yeah,” murmured Sally in a small voice. “I forgot.” Spotting Kitzhaber, Maddie’s huge orange cat, she streaked off to play with him.
Maddie looked up into Mark’s face. “Hi, Mark.”
“Maddie,” he replied with a little smile.
“Is everything alright?” she asked.
“Sally’s been asking questions — about your roommate,” he said with a sigh.
“What does she know?” Maddie asked.
“Only that you live with another woman and that it’s — different.”
“What have you told her?” she asked.
“That Nancy shares the expenses for your place, but that she has a life of her own, apart from yours. I didn’t tell her you sleep together,” he said bluntly.
Maddie’s cheeks burned for an instant, and then she regained her equanimity.
“I spoke to my therapist and Dr. Qua…” — she corrected herself — “Dr. Felder said we could introduce her to the idea that Nan’ and I are a couple.”
“Are you — a couple, I mean,” asked Mark. “Is this the real deal, or is it like Phoebe and Sandy,” he said, recounting failed relationships in Maddie’s recent past.
“You dated for a while after we split up,” Maddie pointed out, but without rancor. “You had a number of girlfriends before you settled on Marilyn.”
“I didn’t settle,” remarked Mark with a little edge.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Mark. You know I like Marilyn; I think she’s good for Sally. She grounds her, something which at the moment, I can’t do.”
“Trouble?” asked Mark.
“I don’t know where Nancy and I are going,” she admitted ruefully.
“Well,” said Mark with a twinkle, “if you want me to set you up with a nice — guy — just let me know.” Maddie smiled. She would always love the father of her daughter.
“C’mon,” she cried in Sally’s direction, “let’s eat.”
. . . . .
A week later, Maddie and Nancy had not discussed further the latter’s surreptitious relationship with Phoebe. Maddie had told her: “Do your soul-searching and lemme know what your plans are, and I’ll do the same for you. Okay?”
So it seemed to be something of a resolution to the crisis when, Friday night, Maddie answered a summons at the door and encountered her ex-lover, Phoebe. Maddie blinked in surprise. Phoebe was the last person she expected to find on her threshold.
“Phoebe?” she asked in a perplexed voice.
“Right the first time,” cackled the other woman in a loud, inebriated voice, bending her athlete’s body at the waist.
“What…are you doing here?” asked Maddie.
“I’m here to pick up Nancy,” she replied as if nothing were amiss. “We’re going to Nova’s,” she added, referencing a bar with a large LGBTQ customer base. Maddie had gone there several times with Nancy. When Maddie didn’t respond, Phoebe said, “Is she ready?”
“Just about,” Maddie said shortly. “Come in and sit down and wait for her, if you like.”
Phoebe followed Maddie into the apartment and dropped onto the sofa and immediately began rolling a joint. “Wanna get high?” she asked.
Maddie shook her head no and proceeded to the spare bedroom, where Nancy kept most of her clothes. She knocked on the door. A muffled voice spilled out and Maddie said through the door, “Nan’, your date is here.”
A moment later, the door opened and Nancy stepped out, looking beautiful as ever. Maddie escaped into the kitchen. Nancy slipped through the doorway after her.
“Maddie, Phoebe and I are going to Nova’s; you want to come with?” said Nancy, trying to make it sound innocent — a girls’ night out. Maddie only shook her head and Nancy winced, “I didn’t know she was going to show up here tonight. We were supposed to meet at the tavern. I’d never rub it in your face like this.”
“Maybe not, but Phoebe would,” said Maddie pointedly.
“You told me I could have some time to figure things out, remember?”
“I won’t wait forever,” Maddie cautioned her.
“I’ll let you know by Monday,” Nancy promised. Three days, thought the other woman. How much insincerity and humiliation and embarrassment would she be forced to absorb in that time?
“Good night, Mad’,” said Nancy, unthinkingly leaning in for a good-bye kiss. Gently, Maddie pushed her away.
. . . . .
At work, tensions didn’t relax. Joe told Maddie to accompany him on a business trip over the weekend. “You’ll get compensatory time off,” he told her, as if that were the real issue at stake. She had never been on a business trip for the company before, but she had a pretty good idea of what her duties and responsibilities would turn out to be. Joe would drive a Sears fleet car and Maddie would ride shotgun. The venue was Kansas City, Missouri, some four hundred miles distant, not really far enough to fly, Joe remarked.
As they entered the confines of KC, Maddie noted that it was almost four o’clock. The meeting was the next morning, at nine a.m. They would secure lodgings for the night. It was just too cute by half, thought Maddie. Joe booked them into a Holiday Inn and told Maddie he’d meet her for dinner at seven. Lugging her tiny suitcase into her room, she considered her options: relent and succumb to Joe’s blatantly obvious carnal designs on her, or forfeit her future with the company. She had worked assiduously to join the rolls of the insured. Could she throw all that away? She wasn’t getting any younger — she was 30 — and if her mother and father provided a pattern for her future, she would need insurance sooner rather than later. Mark had insurance on Sally, so that was good. But Joe: his repulsiveness was nearly overwhelming. It wasn’t so much that he was obscenely obese, but rather that he was, simply, a dick.
They met for dinner promptly at seven. Joe was seated when she arrived in the dining room and he didn’t bother to stand. He was swilling some foul-smelling libation with which Maddie was blessedly unfamiliar. “Wanna drink?” bawled Joe, clearly already in his cups. She pondered the question: a drink might make the rest of the evening go down better. In the end, she declined. “Your choice,” croaked the big man, downing another glass. A waitress materialized as if from nothingness and, without asking, Joe ordered for both of them.
Maddie found that she was ravenous, in spite of the circumstances, and she attacked the whatever-it-was that Joe had ordered. She found with pleasure that it was a steak. She dug in.
“Um, Joe,” she said between mouthfuls, “this is good.”
Ninety minutes later, following four desserts — three for Joe and one for Maddie — the meal came to a conclusion. Joe burped, but didn’t excuse himself. “Madelaine, come up to my room at ten sharp,” he ordered. She stared at him. “We have to look at the…Fullock contract…” he muttered. with a little smirk.
Maddie knew there was no Fullock contract, but she nodded curtly and excused herself from the table and went up to her room. At ten o’clock, Maddie turned up at Joe’s door — improbably designated Rm. 69 — and knocked softly. Without a word, Joe, clad in a laughably voluminous robe with a ridiculous crest — and nothing else — stood aside. Wearing a sweatshirt and skinny jeans, Maddie felt herself being undressed by Joe’s eyes.
At last Joe spoke: “Come in and get comfortable. This might take a while.”
. . . . .
Monday morning found Maddie popping awake with a start. Her heart was hammering in her chest. What a crazy dream, she thought breathlessly. In her nightmare, she heard an unearthly clatter coming from the spare bedroom, and when she knocked on the door, Nancy and Phoebe emerged from the room, wearing clown suits and slapping each other loudly on the head with rubber bladders. Maddie wondered, Nancy wouldn’t really dare bring Phoebe home with her after a bar scene, would she? Well, it would resolve the issue that lay between them, she thought, though not in the way she’d hoped. Nancy was supposed to tender her decision today. Had Nancy spent the whole weekend with Maddie’s one-time lover? Well, it would all come out in the wash today.
That afternoon, Mark and Sally were scheduled to visit again. Of the two pending engagements, the latter was by far the most important to Maddie. As usual, she fixed lunch: burgers and fries, Sally’s favorite.
They sat around the table, eating and talking. Sally was, for once, a party to the conversation and chatted gaily while chewing her fries. “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” admonished Maddie gently.
“Now you sound like Marilyn,” observed the little girl. “Won’t have to listen to her no more, though,” she added.
Maddie’s head snapped up. “What?” she asked.
“Sally,” said Mark, “I said I’d talk to Mom about that. Just eat your food.”
“Talk about…” began Maddie, but Mark signaled an end to the discussion.
“We’ll talk,” he promised.
After lunch, Sally pranced off to play with Kitzhaber, leaving her parents alone at the table. Before Maddie could say a word, Mark told her,
“Marilyn moved out.”
“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Mark. What happened?”
He lowered his head and spoke softly, so that their daughter could not hear. “She left me, Maddie,” he said.
“You’d been together for more than a year,” she remembered.
“Fourteen months,” he agreed. “She just didn’t get along with Sally,” he revealed unexpectedly.
“But, I thought they loved each other,” protested Maddie.
Mark shook his head. “Marilyn began dropping not-so-subtle hints about giving custody to you. And talking to Sally, too, telling her ‘wouldn’t you like to go live with your mom?’ “
“I literally had no idea,” said Maddie. “She had me fooled. So what now?” she asked.
Mark leaned forward on his elbows and said, “You want a roommate — two of them?”
“What?” she squawked. “No! I’ve got a roommate…or, well, I think I might.”
“Did you and Nancy get everything straightened out?” Mark asked.
“Today’s the day,” she told him. “I gave her ten days to get her shit together.”
“Huh! You only gave me a weekend,” he remembered with a smile. “Getting mellow in our old age, are we?”
“Sally was just three,” Maddie remembered. “I was determined to have her, though I didn’t know how I’d support her. I hadn’t worked in the years we were married. I was busy being a doctor’s wife. I didn’t know anything else. In the end, it was better she went with you, but now…” They both grew quiet.
At length, Mark spoke. “Do you want to come back to being a doctor’s wife? I still love you, Maddie.”
Maddie swelled with gratitude. It was so sweet. But she shook her head. “You’re just hurting, and lonely. No, Mark, you can’t go back. You know that.”
Mark nodded sadly. They talked about Sally for a while longer, till Mark said, “Gotta grab the kid and go home.” he looked in Sally’s direction, “C’mon, kid,” he called and in a few minutes Maddie got her hug from Sally, and the rest of her erstwhile family departed.
. . . . .
“How was your weekend, Maddie?” asked Nancy acidly. arriving at six on the dot, the time of their scheduled meeting.
Maddie cocked a brow. “What?” he asked.
“Mrs. Fulgham called this morning and asked after you,” said Nancy venomously.
Mrs. Fulgham? thought Maddie — Joe’s wife! “What did she say?” she asked.
“More than you ever did, bitch!” snapped Nancy. “She said you spent a weekend with her poor, overworked husband and, I quote, ‘led him astray.’ Business trip, my ass!” Suddenly and without warning, Maddie laughed. And laughed some more. “I hope you got your coverage,” added Nancy with rancor. “You were so concerned with that.”
Finally, Maddie stopped laughing. “No, Nan’,” she said. “I didn’t get my insurance.” Nancy stared at her disbelievingly. “I got fired,” added Maddie. Now Nancy stared at her in puzzlement. “Joe came on to me,” she admitted, “in very sharp fashion, too.”
“What happened?”
“I failed his test,” replied Maddie. “I’m not a trained seal, Nan’, and I’m not a prostitute, and I have nothing to prove — to nobody! You know what I’m saying?” she asked.
“Then you do love me, Mad’,” gushed Nancy, rushing forward to embrace he lover. Maddie didn’t hug her back and Nancy fell away from her again. “Don’t you see, this is good news,” said Nancy, trying to stir some excitement. But it fell flat.
“You’re going to have to move out, Nan’,” said Maddie. Nancy opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. “Unless you think you can afford the rent and utilities on your own. Because I’m moving out; I lost my job.”
“But, where will you go?” asked her ex-lover forlornly.
“I could do anything,” Maddie replied wistfully. “I could move back in with my parents, get a student loan and go back to school. I had a year’s credit when I married Mark. Hell, maybe I’ll run away and join the circus or crawl into a convent and become a freakin’ Catholic Nun. We’ve got fourteen days until the rent is due, plus we paid a month in advance. Hey,” she said lightly, “you could still stay here; maybe Phoebe will become your new roomie. I warn you, though, get the rent before you let her move in. Lessons learned,” she murmured sagely.
“Are you sure, Maddie?” asked Nancy.
“Not really,” Maddie admitted. “But, new doors will open, now that I see which ones are closing. And several just closed today.”
