Wilma & Betty. Episode II
The Further Adventures of Wilma & Betty
Episode II: A Beautiful Afternoon
Wilma had been unsettled for weeks.
“What’s been eating you?” Betty asked. The two of them sat in Wilma’s kitchen sipping coffee. In the backyard, Dino clawed the base of a wide, gray tree. Above him, in the branches, something moved. Dino yipped. Wilma and Betty watched through the open kitchen window.
“You know what’s eating me,” Wilma grumbled.
“Well,” Betty said with a wry grin, “hopefully it’s Fred.”
Wilma groaned. “Don’t even start me on that,” she said. “It’s been months. He can’t get it up no matter how many Diamond Hards his doctor prescribes. And, to be honest, even if he could get it up, I’d rather read a book.”
“Well, I feel for you,” Betty said. “My Barney’s a dynamo though. He may not look like it, but I’ll tell you, Wilma, the man’s a carnivore in a thousand different ways.”
This was old news to Wilma. This was old news to everyone in the Wilma’s neighborhood. The air around Betty and Barney’s house was always filled with guttural groans and the thick, musty scent of sweat and arousal. On warm summer evenings the neighbors often sat, quietly, on their rooftops listening—never speaking. Sometimes they smiled at one another.
But Wilma was never one of those neighbors. Neither was Fred.
“Yeah, yeah,” Wilma said. “Barney’s made of stone in all the right places. A cock as hard as Clive Owenstone is handsome. I’ve heard it all before.”
In the backyard, Dino clawed the base of the tree. His necked craned upward at the thing hidden in the green, prickly branches. He yipped louder. “I wish I had a gun,” Wilma said, staring at Dino.
“Jesus Wilma!” Betty roared.
Wilma sighed herself to near tears. “Why do you do it, Betty?” she asked. “Why do you stay?”
“Like I told you. He’s a dynamo.”
“And when he’s not being a dynamo?”
“I wait.”
Quickly, and completely by accident, Betty had whittled Wilma’s discontent down to two common, often used words: “I wait.” Wilma and Betty’s lives had both become gentle affairs of waiting: waiting for their husbands to go to work, waiting for their husbands to come home from work, waiting for the children to make a mess, waiting for the children to grow up and move away, waiting to go shopping, waiting to wear out the things they bought, waiting for the bills to come, waiting for the spring garden, waiting for the autumn harvest, waiting for the summer rains, waiting for the winter frost, waiting to be taken out to dinner, waiting for bad sex to end, waiting for good sex to begin, waiting to be understood, waiting to be loved, waiting for the next life when there was no need for wait. Wilma and Betty were women carved from wait.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Wilma said.
Dino sank his claws into the tree bark. The thing in the branches above him hissed. It snarled.
“I could have been something else,” Wilma continued. “I could have been a marine biologist. I’ve always loved fish and whales and the water. I know women, women I went to grade school with, who grew up and did the things they always wanted to do instead of sitting around, day in and day out, buckled into lives that they never really wanted. Lives where they never do things but have things done to them.”
“Don’t give me that,” Betty interrupted. “Anything but the ‘I once had other dreams’ speech. Please. Everybody had dreams. Everybody has dreams. But then life wakes them up.”
“Maybe that’s our problem, Betty,” Wilma replied, rising from the table, emptying her coffee mug in the sink, palming it in her hand, staring through the open window at Dino and whatever treed animal he besieged. “Our tragic, sufferable problem, Betty, is that we’re both pitiful bastards who wake up every fucking morning fully able to remember the dreams we dreamed, but completely unwilling to speak them.”
And with wondrous effort and skill Wilma tossed her coffee mug out the window and into the branches above the yapping Dino. The mug struck with a muffled thud and—from the branches—a snarling, black mass of fur and teeth and claws was ejected from the tree. It fell and landed, churning with fear and rage and vengeance, on Dino’s surprised, unprotected face.
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