Shakespeare’s Trollop

Chapter Five

Thursday was biceps day in my personal schedule. Bicep curls may look impressive, but they’re not my favorite exercise. And they’re hard to do correctly. Most people swing the dumbbells up. Of course, the more swing you put in it, the less you’re working your biceps. I’ve noticed that in every movie scene set in a gym, the characters are either doing bicep curls or bench presses. Usually the guy doing bicep curls is a jerk.

Just as I put the twenty-five-pound barbells back on the weight rack, Bobo Winthrop walked in with a girl. Bobo, though maybe twelve years younger than me, was my friend. I was glad to see him, and glad to see the girl accompanying him; for the past couple of years, even after all the trouble I’d had with his family, Bobo had been convinced that I was the woman for him. Now that Bobo divided his time between college in nearby Montrose and visits home to check on his ailing grandmother, visit his family, and do his laundry, I seldom got to visit with him. I realized I’d missed him, and that made me wary.

As I watched Bobo start working his way around the room, shaking hands and patting backs, I moved from free weights to the preacher bench. The short young woman in tow behind him kept smiling as Bobo, shoving his floppy blond hair out of his eyes, introduced her to the motley crew who inhabited the gym at this early hour. She had a good, easy, meet-and-greet style.

The early-morning people at Body Time ranged from Brian Gruber, an executive at a local mattress-manufacturing plant, to Jerri Sizemore, whose claim to fame was that she’d been married four times. As I put weights on the short curl bar at the preacher bench, I marked Bobo’s progress with a touch of amusement. In his golden wake, he left smiles and some infusion of joie de vive.

What did it feel like, I wondered, to be almost universally known and liked, to be attractive to almost everyone, to have the backing of a strong and influential family?

With a shock like a dash of ice water, it occurred to me that I had once been like that, when I’d been about Bobo’s age: before I’d gone off to live in Memphis, before the media-saturated nightmare of my abduction and rape. I shook my head. Though I knew it was true, I found it was almost impossible to believe I had ever been that comfortable. Bobo had had some hard times himself, at least in the past year, yet his long look into darkness had only made his radiance stand out with greater relief.

I’d finished my first set with the curl bar and returned it to its rests by the time Bobo worked his way around to me.

“Lily!” His voice was full of pride. Was he showing me off to the girl, or the girl to me? His hand on my shoulder was warm and dry. “This is Toni Holbrook,” he said. “Toni, this is my friend Lily Bard.” The gaze of his dark blue eyes flicked back and forth between us.

I waited for my name to ring a bell with this girl-for the horrified fascination to creep into her gaze-but she was so young I guess she didn’t remember the months when my name was in every newspaper. I relaxed and held out my hand to her. She stuck her fingers up against my palm instead of grasping my hand firmly. Almost always, the offenders who shake hands in this wishy-washy way are women. It felt like getting a handful of cannelloni.

“I’m so pleased to finally meet you,” she said with a sincere smile that made my teeth hurt. “Bobo talks about you all the time.”

I flashed a glance at him. “I used to clean for Bobo’s mother,” I said, to put a different perspective on the conversation. I’ll give her this, she didn’t flinch.

“What you want on there, Lily?” Bobo asked. He waited at the disc rack.

“Another set of dimes,” I told him. He slid off two ten-pound discs, put one on each end of the bar, and then added clips to secure them. We were comfortable working with weights together; Bobo’s first job had been here at the gym, and he’d spotted for me many a time. This morning, he took his position at the front of the bar and I straddled the seat, leaning over the padded rest, the backs of my hands toward the floor so I could grasp the bar to curl up. I nodded when I was ready, and he helped me lift the bar the first couple of inches. Then he let go, and I brought it up myself, squeezing until the bar touched my chin. I finished my ten reps without too much trouble, but I was glad when Bobo helped me ease the bar down into the rack.

“Toni, are you here for the rest of the week?” I asked, making an effort to be polite for Bobo’s sake. He slid the clips off, raising his blond eyebrows interrogatively. “Dime again,” I said, and together we prepared the bar.

“Yes, we’ll go back to Montrose on Sunday afternoon,” Toni said, with equal politeness and a tiny, clear emphasis on the we. Her smooth black hair was cut just below chin-length, and looked as if it always stayed brushed. It swung in a lively dance when she moved her head. She had a sweet mouth and almond-shaped brown eyes. “I’m from DeQueen,” she added, when her first sentence hung in the air for a second or two. I found I didn’t care.

I nodded to show I was ready, and Bobo gave me a little boost to get the bar off the stand. With a lot more difficulty, I completed another set, making sure to breathe out as I lifted, in when I lowered. My muscles began to tremble, I made the deep “uh” that accompanied my best effort, and Bobo did his job.

“Come on Lily, squeeze, you can do it,” he exhorted sternly, and the bar touched my chin. “Look at Lily’s definition, Toni,” Bobo said over his shoulder. Behind his back, Toni looked at me as if she wished I’d vanish in a puff of smoke. But I was honor-bound to complete the next two reps. When they were done, Bobo said, “You can do another one. You’ve got it left in you.”

“I’m through, thanks,” I said firmly. I rose and removed the clips that secured the weights. We began putting the discs back on the rack.

Toni wandered over to the water fountain.

“I need to talk to you this weekend,” Bobo said quietly.

“Okay.” I hesitated. “Saturday afternoon?”

He nodded. “Your place?”

“All right.” I was doubtful about the wisdom of this, but I owed it to him to listen, whatever he wanted to say.

My forehead was beaded with sweat. Instead of searching out my towel, I lifted the hem of my T-shirt and dabbed at my forehead, ensuring Bobo saw the horrendous scars on my ribs.

I saw him gulp. I went on to my next exercise feeling obscurely vindicated. Though Bobo was handsome and wholesome as a loaf of good bread, and I had once or twice been tempted to take a bite, Toni was from his world. I intended to see he kept my age and bitter experience in his mind.

Janet was doing shoulders this morning, and I spotted for her while she worked on the Gravitron. Her knees on the small platform, the counterweight set at forty pounds so she wouldn’t be lifting her whole body weight, Janet gripped the bars above her head and pulled up. She was working pretty hard the first few reps, and by number eight, I wandered over to hold her feet and push up gently to lighten the strain on her arms. When she’d finished number ten, Janet dangled from the bars, panting, and after a minute she slid her knees off the platform and stood on the uprights. Stepping off backward, she took a few more seconds to catch her breath and let the muscles of her shoulders recoup.

“Are you going to the funeral?” she asked. She moved the pin to the thirty-pound slot.

“I don’t know.” I hated the thought of dressing up and going into the crowded Shakespeare Combined Church. “Have you heard if the time’s certain yet?”

“Last night, my mother was over at Lacey and Jerrell’s when the funeral home called to say the coroner’s office in Little Rock was sending the body back. Lacey said Saturday morning at eleven.”

I considered, scowling. I could probably finish work by eleven if I got up extra early and hurried. If I ever got around to getting my clients to sign a contract, I decided one of the clauses would be that I didn’t have to go to their funerals.

“I guess I should,” I said reluctantly.

“Great!” Janet looked positively happy. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll park at your house and we can walk to the funeral together.”

Making that little arrangement would never have occurred to me. “Okay,” I said, struggling not to sound astonished or doubtful. Then I realized I had a bit of news I should share.

“Claude and Carrie got married,” I told her.

“You’re… you’re serious!” Janet faced me, astonished. “When?”

“At the courthouse, yesterday.”

“Hey, Marshall!” Janet called to our sensei, who’d just come out of the office in the hallway between the weight room and the aerobics room where we held karate classes. Marshall turned, holding a glass of some grainy brown stuff he drank for breakfast. Marshall was wearing his normal uniform of T-shirt and muscle pants. He raised his black eyebrows to ask, What?

“Claude and Carrie got married, Lily says!”

This caused a general burst of comment among the others in the room. Brian Gruber quit doing stomach crunches and sat up on the bench, patting his face with his towel. Jeri yanked her cellular phone from her workout bag and called a friend she knew would be up and drinking her coffee. A couple of other people sauntered over to discuss this news. And I caught a blaze of some emotion on Bobo’s face, some feeling I found didn’t fit in any category of comfortable response to my trivial piece of gossip.

“How did you know?” Janet asked, and I discovered I was in the middle of a small group of sweaty and curious people.

“I was there,” I answered, surprised.

“You were a witness?”

I nodded.

“What did she wear?” Jerri asked, pushing her streaky blond hair away from her forehead.

“Where’d they go for their honeymoon?” asked Marlys Squire, a travel agent with four grandchildren.

“Where are they gonna live?” asked Brian Gruber, who’d been trying to sell his own house for five months.

For a moment, I thought of turning tail and simply walking away, but… maybe… it wasn’t so bad, talking to these people, being part of a group.

But when I was driving away from the gym I felt the reaction; I’d let myself down, somehow, a corner of my brain warned. I’d opened myself, made it easy. Instead of sliding between those people, observing but not participating, I’d held still long enough to be pegged in place, laid myself open to interpretation by giving them a piece of my thoughts.

While I worked that day, I retreated into a deep silence, comforting and refreshing as an old bathrobe. But it wasn’t as comfortable as it had been. It didn’t seem, somehow, to fit anymore.

That evening I walked, the cool night covering me with its darkness. I saw Joel McCorkindale, the minister of the Shakespeare Combined Church, running his usual three miles, his charisma turned off for the evening. I observed that Doris Massey, whose husband had died the previous year, had resumed entertaining, since Charles Friedrich’s truck was parked in front of her trailer. Clifton Emanuel, Marta Schuster’s deputy, rolled by in a dark green Bronco. Two teenagers were breaking into the Bottle and Can Liquor Store, and I used my cell phone to call the police station before I melted into the night. No one saw me; I was invisible.

I was lonely.