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Last Stall

Lydia Conklin

    Waiting for her boyfriend, Carrie lifted her tank top to adjust her belly button ring. The ivory bubble of her stomach popped out as she peeled back the fabric. Since she and Ty began to date she had gained thirty pounds and now stretch marks fanned out from the center of her belly in dark red lines. When she first noticed the marks, sitting up naked and shiny from a hot bath, she thought it was her parakeet’s claws that had done it.
    Across the parking lot Ty moved slowly, stopping to talk to the grass seeder. They were spraying the teal mush all over Regis today: up the hill, around the paths and right to the edges of the convent and class buildings. The machine sputtered as the guy turned the dial down to talk. Ty’s job cleaning went year round, and the only people left now were summer school students and grounds workers.
    Today Carrie had parked the car far from Ty’s building so she would have time to think after his dark, heavy body emerged and smeared across the white rectangle of the dormitory door. When he stepped onto the lawn she thought about the day they met. The way she dropped a notebook in the hall and he swept it with his broom into his plastic pan. When he took it out he turned as if to dust it off but really wrote his number across the front with an industrial sharpie. The digits, black and thorny, corralled together against their will. It wasn’t until she raised her eyes from the cardboard cover that she really saw him. The grey patch over his nipple that said Tyrone in stitched cursive, his round shiny eyes like brown marbles.
    “Now you got my number, baby,” he said. “And I hope you use it. Otherwise it’s taking up that notebook for no good reason.”
    Then he turned on his heels and lumbered down the band of sunlight that skunk-striped the linoleum hallway. She didn’t call, but she did think of him. She saw his marble eyes watching her like she could so easily make his day, like she was a pet dream of his.
    A week later they were in the elevator together, Ty standing with his yellow slop bucket and mop. As they ascended, the water in the bucket slapped the sides in gentle, dusty waves. He did nothing until the other girl got off – one of the many that didn’t acknowledge Carrie that first semester. But once the doors slipped closed and their reflection came back together into one piece, he bear hugged her.
    At first Carrie was terrified. She thought he was going to flip her on her back and rape her. But he just kept hugging. A minute or two passed in his soft body and she started to feel calmed, like wearing a lead apron at the dentist. It was such a chaste gesture, she felt like his kid, like she’d made him proud. She wanted to stay with him longer. But then the door opened and Petra walked in.
    Carrie fumbled out of the embrace as Petra whisked herself to the corner of the elevator. Her eyelids drooped as she mumbled on her cell phone. Then she clicked it off and dropped the phone in her bag, swaying and humming. Petra was a celebrity freshman; her name weaving in and out of conversations of all topics. There were rumors that she was serviced orally by the theology professor, that she masturbated with a gold lamee belt around her neck, that she lost her anal virginity in eighth grade. Carrie had stood outside of circles and listened to the Regis girls with their hooded sweatshirts and diamond promise rings squeal about Petra.
    The three of them watched their shadows on the steel door as the elevator climbed through the levels of girls. Carrie got off first. She rushed into her cinder block dorm room and flopped on the bedspread. She kept her face in her quilt for ages listening to her roommate type up a document one key at a time. At five o’clock Carrie ignored the magazine swatting at her back.
    “You’re going to miss dinner,” her roommate said.
    She did.
    But that evening Petra approached her at the smoking corner. It was a dark green night and the corner was tiled with slimy leaves and wormy orange cigarette ends. Petra squished over and pricked Carrie’s shoulder with her finger.
    “You dating that janitor?” she asked, smoke escaping her nostrils. She appeared hopeful, pulling both ends of her scarf so it tightened around her neck. Carrie hoped she wasn’t preparing to masturbate.
    “Yeah,” Carrie said. “He’s Ty. I really love him.”
    Petra ashed her Marlboro Red and grinned.
    “Good taste. My boyfriend’s in maintenance, too. It’s better to have a man that works with his hands, if you know what I mean.”
    Carrie called Ty an hour later. The three of them had rarely spent a night apart since, double dating with Petra’s endless queue of men at Lemon Flower and complaining about the stuck-up Regis girls.
    “It’s like she doesn’t know what money is,” insisted Petra once of a girl with a flat screen TV in her eight by eight dorm room. “She thinks it’s free or something.”
    “Like you are?” Ty asked, a cup of jasmine tea hovering below his bottom lip.
    “Hilarious boyfriend,” Petra said to Carrie, but she was smiling.
    Carrie pulled Ty’s heavy arm over her shoulder and they beamed around the tabletop. The whole restaurant was watching them.
    Carrie tried not to think of those good times as Ty plodded nearer. She tried not to think of Ty holding her through the night, engulfing her with his arms as she slept dreamlessly, watching her in the mornings as though she was a star that had fallen into his orbit to preen for an instant before going on to bigger things. If she didn’t tell him this afternoon, as planned, she never would. They could drive up to Saugus, go to the restaurant, but if she didn’t tell him before he lifted that first bite of greasy Chinese to his puckered lips he would never know what happened after her accident two weeks ago. Once food fell into his stomach and they started eating together, it would turn into every other delicious date before that. Carrie was happiest when warmth was filling her and she was remembering how many meals she had eaten in her parents’ house alone, all through high school, kneeling on her quilt with an order of garlic bread while a gourmet smell floated up from below. That time was over, because now she was an adult. Her parents would never again be chewing under her knees, happy she wasn’t with them making everything difficult. Carrie felt her stitches coming loose in her hair and waited.
    Ty raised his hand but he was still far off, just now hitting the lip of the concrete. She waved back, trailing the smoke of her cigarette down through the air. From this distance, no one would know Ty was thirty-four and overweight. No one would know he had accepted a maintenance job so he could take classes at an all girls’ school to meet people outside his neighborhood. People, as he said, on a higher level. No one would know his near-black skin was pock marked, his black hair was freckled with white, that he didn’t dress to hide his fat and that he had a tattoo circling one elbow that said BIG MAN T from when he was fifteen. Once people put together these details they would stare rudely or scuff their feet and look away. But if Ty wanted he would get them back with his odd charm or an off-color comment, and then they would reluctantly begin to like him. Or, as it happened with Carrie, love him.
    Carrie had come to Regis at eighteen to study nursing. She arrived relieved to see that there were only girls spilling over the grass and that even nuns glided up and down the hill in small groups like an old movie about boarding school. She never had a boyfriend in high school, just a bad collection of kids who rubbed up on her one week, leaving with unfocused eyes and stains on their shorts, and laughed about her the next. Before she met Ty she never had someone to gather her bleached-out hair, rub her pudgy thighs, threaten anyone who stared. She tried not to think about Ty’s soft body, his smooth talk, the way his presence at dinner transformed her parents into deferential fools. She tried not to remember Ty batting the cringing back of her father and joking that Carrie was ripe for marriage.
    “You gotta get them before they hit twenty,” Ty said. “Otherwise they change their damn mind.”
    “Right,” said her father, his head bowed like an out-ranked dog.
    Carrie was a person who made decisions when Ty came for dinner, not the girl whose reports showed rows of C’s that could be nested into each other endlessly like sets of bowls or commas. Not the girl whose only friend in high school had been a sixteen year old with a baby, with whom she fought as nastily as the girl fought with the baby’s father. Carrie had a real life now away from her parents that took place at night and was lit with burning cigarettes. This life implicated people like Petra, who everyone talked about, and she smiled through those tense family dinners in Concord. Ty, her accomplice, her pillar, sat on her parents’ chair at peace, coating everything he was served with pink blankets of hot sauce.
    “You know, birds are dirty,” he said once, tipping his fork at the parakeet that sat on Carrie’s mother.
    “Excuse me?” Her mother said, her head listing away from Leopold as she spoke.
    “They carry diseases,” Ty said. “Hepatitis, for one.”
    Carrie’s mother rolled her eyes when Ty went back to the hot sauce, but the next day Carrie walked in on her bending over the kitchen sink, scrubbing between Leopold’s claws with a toothbrush.

     When Ty arrived at the car he grinned and held open his colorless palms. Carrie was supposed to fall into his hands, let him hold her for a while, because they hadn’t seen each other since last week when school ended and she moved twenty miles away, back home for summer. She was supposed to lie against his belly and feel him hard down there and say I missed you baby. And she would not have been lying if she had.
    “We’re going to Noodle Kingdom,” she said instead.
    “What’s that? Whose kingdom?”
    “On Route One. I’m starving.”
    Carrie was not supposed to say that part. She was supposed to tell him Noodle Kingdom, and that’s it. She wanted to just say never mind, and get in the car. She wanted to drive and drive and let him wonder why they were driving so far. She had to be harsh because it was the only way she could keep from grabbing his belly and sinking into it. She was used to letting his charm burn up her anger. But she didn’t want that to happen today.
    “Whatever you say, girl,” Ty said, and got in the car.
    That wasn’t right, either. Carrie had wanted to get in first, click the door into place while his fingers were still twitching and waiting.

    They pulled out of the campus and rode through Weston until they hit the highway. Noodle Kingdom was up in Saugus, alongside the ugliest stretch of road in Massachusetts. Carrie had chosen the place for its distance, for its unattractive drive and tacky interior. The night of the accident, two weeks ago, she was there drunk with Petra. What she remembered most was the mildew smell that bothered her even while she vomited Lo Mein into a scarlet toilet. She wanted Ty to notice the smell. She wanted it to be worse than the one in his mother’s grim apartment in Roxbury. She wanted to tell her story with gold plastic dragons curling on the walls behind her, with the booth shedding flakes of red under her ass, and with a cheap lantern hung crookedly between them. She wanted this ending to be an anomaly, not a summary of months of lies.
    Carrie liked the way Noodle Kingdom sounded, disembodied from the grim building they were heading to. She imagined a castle woven from thick udon, windowpanes of uncooked Chow Foon, hanging doors of undulating lasagna. Route One was a hill, almost a mountain, with Noodle Kingdom glistening at the top. She kept her eyes on the road and plowed upwards.
    “Why do we have to drive way up here? If you want Chinese, there’s Lemon Flower right by school.”
    “That’s not Chinese. It’s Korean.”
    Ty was staring at her but she didn’t turn her head. She kept her eyes on the highway and the last outliers of the plastic herd.
    “Are you kidding me?” he said. “What’s the difference?” He slumped to the side.“Never knew you to be so persnickety,” he said.
    Since they started dating they had eaten every meal out at Lemon Flower, which was Korean-owned cheap Asian fusion. The place was full of palm trees and jaunty music. Ty always ordered Buffalo wings and beef with black bean sauce, two orders of crab Rangoon and sometimes Japanese beer, which Carrie sipped furtively whenever the waitress disappeared. When they ate in, Ty made spicy meatballs, rolled pork with pepper and flour and other powders from the red-lidded vials in his pantry. Carrie was sick the first times they ate together, not used to so much heavy food. Eventually she slipped into the rhythm of the two meals, rocking between them with ease. She learned which days were meatball days and which days were Lemon Flower days. She’d even craved the meals during the short time she’d been at home.
    “I’ve been there before with friends,” Carrie said. “It’s festive.”
    Ty snorted. Carrie knew she sounded like a socializing WASP, when really all she had was Ty and Petra. And the girl in Concord with the baby, maybe, but they hadn’t spoken in months, not since the girl told Carrie she was overwhelming and that they needed time apart.
    “You crack me up,” Ty said.
    They drove up the highway in silence. The hill got steeper as they went, until the car was almost traveling vertically. The station wagon was a rollercoaster approaching its summit. More and more the hill grew sheer enough to tip the car belly up, crashing them back down all the way to Regis.
    Ty was panting from his walk across the parking lot. It was the same way he breathed when they messed around on her dorm bed, hoping her roommate wouldn’t return. They came close to having sex many times, but never did. Each time she found herself naked with him in the sheets, usually drunk with the right parts pressing, she told him no.
    “Come on, beautiful,” he’d say. “You’re giving me blue balls.”
    Carrie would giggle and turn her head, but he would keep pressing. Usually she would just go to the bathroom, lock herself in one of the stalls her floor of girls shared that Ty couldn’t use (he had to travel downstairs to the employee facility.) She would sit curled in his t-shirt in the last stall. By the time she returned the mood would have passed. Ty would be popping in a video in his underwear, a pouch of Butter Lovers swelling in the microwave. But lately it hadn’t worked.
    “Are you serious, girl?” he said the last time she let it get that far, rising up from her bed, pastel sheets wrinkling around him. “You date me for five months and you won’t let me put it in you? Is there a problem here?”
    “Maybe,” she mumbled.
    
    When they reached the restaurant Carrie jerked off the highway. The building was small and set in from the road, with a bib of cement that accommodated far more parking spots than the restaurant had tables. Inside, rank velvet hung down in place of the glowing starch that Carrie imagined. The kingdom was empty.
    “This place is a dump,” Ty said, peering down the long room. It was nothing like the bright lights and white napkin peaks at Lemon Flower.
    From out of the gloom the hostess approached, kicking her miniscule shoes across the golden shag, her black bob a gumdrop floating through the air. Carrie took in a breath. She realized she’d hoped it would be closed.
    As they walked down the golden path to the back of the restaurant, Carrie rubbed at the stretch marks that embossed her stomach and tried not to look at her boyfriend. They sat across each other at a circular table. There weren’t dragons behind Ty, but there were lions, their faces clumps of bubbles. Some were laughing, others sneezing. One of them kept its sharp mouth in a permanent O. Carrie didn’t know what was behind her.
    “Motherfucker,” Ty said, picking up the menu. “No beef with black bean sauce.”
    “Big whoop,” Carrie said, keeping the mood light. “Get something else.”
    She tucked her hands between her legs. She felt the bulk of a heavy pad pushing at the fabric. It looked bulbous under her tiny shorts. She wondered if people thought she was a hermaphrodite. The problem was that she was afraid to use tampons. She couldn’t have explained why until now, but there was a tiny private warmth in the tube of her vagina that she never wanted opened up before.
    Ty ordered chicken wings and crab Rangoon and also deep fried shrimp and beef teriyaki. It pissed Carrie off that they had come all the way to Noodle Kingdom and he hadn’t ordered noodles. He snapped the menu shut without even flipping to the section. When the food eventually came it sat in meaty piles in front of him, all shellacked in the same shade of shiny brown, and she didn’t lift her fork. She noticed only, against her will, the way his broad hands could raise so airily the tiny teacup.
    “A toast to the girl who drove me forty minutes for this garbage.”
    They clicked their cups over the steaming grease. Thumbnail versions of the neon lantern flickered in double in Ty’s eyes. They bobbed, as if in water, and disappeared. Then Ty lifted his chopsticks. He balanced one on the shelf of his index finger, and as he was about to cross it with the second Carrie remembered the promise she made herself. She needed to tell Ty before he ate any food.
    “Hold on, baby,” she said. “I’m going to the bathroom. You’ll wait for me?”
    “With pleasure,” he said, opening his arms in an exaggerated gesture and placing his chopsticks back on the napkin.
    As she passed him he pinched her thigh. The flesh stayed between the pads of his fingers for just long enough to stop her. His marble eyes glinted and she wanted to kiss him on the forehead like she would have kissed her father if she ever wanted to. But then she broke away and hurried down the same path she took the night she was sick with her friends: to the back of the restaurant, around past the steaming stainless steel of the kitchen, through the beaded curtain, and down the back stairs. She remembered being wasted and doing this, scrambling to find any sign of a bathroom - a stick figure, an arrow – and letting loose a few mouthfuls of throw up that led her back out later.
    As always, Carrie chose the stall farthest from the entrance. When she was little she had a fantasy about a last stall that had a door to an even more secluded stall, and then a door to another and another, until she found the actual toilet beyond all these doors, concealed and dim somewhere far away. More recently she had a dream where the stall doors disappeared and women teetered precariously, exposed to each other on their porcelain seats. She awoke from it wet and agitated.
    Carrie pulled the door closed and yanked down her shorts. The pad in her underwear, an extra-strength model, was blank except for a short brown smear. She wore them even when her period was long over, fearing it would return suddenly. The smear reminded Carrie of her accident, and the tiny point on her scalp throbbed.
    Two weeks ago, standing with her pants down in the same stall, Carrie didn’t know she would be back so soon. She returned upstairs, to her table of friends. There were three of them: herself, Petra and Petra’s roommate Beth. Petra had officially become the only girl at Regis Carrie liked, the one she drank with in the woods outside the dorm. When they were together Petra amped her up – letting Carrie’s anxious energy become, for once, a social grace. Petra taught her to mix Coke with red wine, which Carrie would never have believed would have tasted so sweet, so summery and perfect. Carrie would talk about Ty, though she never told Petra about her chastity, skirting the issue of sex with clumsy winks.
    Petra had many boys in her life, mostly ones in Ty’s position who worked crappy jobs somewhere on campus. All of the boys were poor city boys; some were the very ones that had been bused to Carrie’s public school in Concord. They were ones who, if they had lived in Texas near Petra’s ranch, would not have been bused anywhere, not even to the mediocre parochial school Petra attended. Carrie and Petra did not have the lean end of the bargain. But still, they never bought wine bottles that cost more than five dollars.
    When their boys weren’t free they would run down the hill and trip over other couples, sneak up to the windows of the nuns’ quarters and spy. Once a sour nun had peered out at them, so close to Petra’s face against the glass that they were almost kissing. The nun screwed up her eyes and steamed a cloud on the pane with her breath, but couldn’t see Petra.
    “I want to teach her how to fuck,” Petra said. “She doesn’t know what she’s missing. I’d give it to her for charity”
    “That’d be sweet,” Carrie said.
    The night of Noodle Kingdom Beth drove them to Saugus when, already drunk from their burgundy concoctions, they found it in the phone book and demanded a ride.
    “Isn’t this name awesome?” Petra said. “Is that even real? I bet it’s super nasty.”
     “Yeah,” Carrie said. “It sounds amazing. We have to go.”
    Although Beth didn’t get along with Petra, she owed her a favor (Petra had supplied Beth’s last party with alcohol) and agreed to the drive. She regretted it instantly, though, and sat with folded arms while Carrie and Petra dug through plate after plate of brain-shaped mounds of noodles. When Carrie returned from the bathroom Beth had already ordered the check, and she rushed them to the car so fast that Carrie slipped in the parking lot, falling so hard she needed stitches on her scalp. Carrie and Petra laughed all the way to the hospital and back. They sat in the foam green doctor’s office and jammed the ear instrument into each other’s navels, and by the time they returned to Regis just before dawn, Beth was so angry that she demanded Petra sleep somewhere else.
    “So I can finally get some fucking sleep,” she said. “The one night I’m not sex-iled.”
    “You snobby twat,” Petra said. She made to spit on Beth’s flip-flops, but didn’t.
    Since Petra didn’t have any boys at the time, Carrie took her home. Her own roommate, a girl almost as big as Ty, was away like she was every weekend, back at her parents’ house in Springfield. Carrie expected Petra to climb into the other girl’s bed, which was bowed in the center like a ship, but Petra wedged her way in with Carrie instead.
    The light blinked off and Carrie felt for the first time that her scalp stung.
    “My head hurts,” she said, feeling stupid. Because of how Carrie’s body filled the bed Petra was almost on top of her, their bare legs suctioned together. Whenever either one moved there was an elastic pull and a snap as their skin stretched apart and separated.
    “I’m sorry, pretty girl,” Petra said.
    Then she leaned her face up and kissed the spot where the next day Carrie would see the black threads crossed like insect legs.
    “Does that feel better?”
    Petra’s breath cooled the sting, and her open lips slid down Carrie’s face.
    That was the night that Carrie spread out her insides, still drunk but not gone enough not to think of Ty watching her. Petra kissed her stretch marks and below, down her legs and nipped her hipbones. Carrie lolled her head and let it happen, let Petra stay down there, her body swerving beneath the sheets, for much longer than she should have.
    Carrie didn’t sleep. Her chin pointed to the ceiling all night, propped skyward by Petra’s sleeping head. She didn’t move because she didn’t want Petra to spring awake and realize where she was. All night Carrie stared at the ceiling and listened to the girls walking to the bathroom and the boys slipping by the student on duty. When the dorm hallway reached its morning volume Petra raised her head, knocking Carrie’s stiff chin to the side.
    “Where’s your roommate what’s-her-face?” Petra was frowning. “She didn’t come home last night?”
    “She’s at her parents’,” Carrie said.
    Petra shrugged.
    “Nice frog crap.”
    Carrie’s roommate had a poster of poison dart frogs and a poster of a toad leaping across a chasm that said “Jump Towards Your Dreams!”
    “Yeah,” said Carrie.
    Petra flipped onto her stomach and stared at Carrie for a long time. Carrie felt the grains of mucus itching in her eyes but couldn’t do anything about them.
    “You’re so funny,” Petra finally said.
    She left the room without even changing out of her pajamas, and then Carrie began to worry. It would be hard to lose Ty, who was better than a father but worse than a boyfriend. She understood now why he had never really been her boyfriend, and why she had fought so viciously with the girl with the baby. She remembered the last time she saw that girl, her red hair whipping around the bald head in her arms, screaming at Carrie.
    She didn’t let the last fatigue of joy dissolve, didn’t even replay the night once, before she began to plan her last meal with Ty.

    Carrie pulled up her shorts and palmed the pad through the fabric to center it. She flushed the empty toilet and left the bathroom.
    Ty had waited for her, as promised, his hands folded in his lap and his eyes aimed at the cooling food. She had the feeling anyone could come up and kick him now, really hurt him, and he wouldn’t budge.
    “I have to tell you something,” Carrie said. “That’s why we came out here.”
    Ty scratched his head, loosening a tiny snowflake of dandruff.
    “Well I’m glad there was some reason, however mysterious,” he said. “You sleeping with the waiter or something?”
    For a minute Carrie thought he meant the candy-headed lady that brought them to their seat. But then she looked over his shoulder and saw the boy who took their order, nervously swaying at the kitchen entrance. He sensed the tension.
    “Maybe I am sleeping with that guy. What’s the difference?”
    “There’s a world of difference. If you’re sleeping with someone I want it to be me. And you won’t. Even though I love you, and you love me, you won’t do it.”
    Ty brought his fist down on the table. The shrimp jumped a little, but nothing spilled. The waiter tipped up on his toes but didn’t come over. It should have been a scene, she wished it could be a scene, but it just wasn’t. It was too small.
    “I didn’t sleep with that kid. I slept with Petra,” Carrie said.
    Ty looked at her, his eyelids wrinkling. He chuckled.
    “I’m surprised she could squeeze you in, with that schedule,” he said.
    The memory dissolved. Petra’s ghostly limbs, pretzeled and swaying at Carrie’s disposal, faded into the post-midnight of her cramped dorm room.
    “Sit down, tell me another. I get a kick out of you.”
    Carrie didn’t sit down. Her muscles vibrated against her bones. She looked at Ty’s grin and knew that Petra would never sleep with her again. The idea of them together had sounded ridiculous when she said it aloud and it stayed ridiculous when she looked at Ty now. Petra had returned to her ranch in Texas a week ago, lifting her hair out of her eyes to say goodbye. Carrie thought there was a chance for them in September, tried to imply it with her hug. But when Ty laughed at her she knew there wasn’t. She would tell Ty the truth later, break it off gently, try to stay close to him. For now she picked up a piece of beef, shook the gelling sauce back onto the plate and kissed it to his laughing mouth.

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