Lucy's Launderette

“Just what do you mean by that?”

I held the menu high in front of my face. “I really shouldn’t be having all this fried stuff but I just can’t help myself. It’s all so yummy and tempting.”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Madison. Just spit it out.”

Sky looked fierce. She was already a dark, scrawny, pointy little person with spiky techno-punk black hair, and when she became fierce, she was like a Jack Russell terrier, hanging on to the object of her passion until she had ragged it to death.

“I love you, Sky. You’re my best friend in the world, but if Max handcuffed you to the bed, beat you with rubber hoses, then drove over you with his car and left tire tracks, you’d still look better than you do now. He’s been staying at your place these last few days, hasn’t he?”

Sky blushed, and she’s not a blusher.

“He’s so…so…”

“Gay?”

“That’s one facet of Max’s personality. Besides, he’s celibately gay. For the last few years anyway.”

“That’s a good one. Celibately gay. Except for the fact that he had sex with you. Or am I presuming too much? Did you have sex with him, too? It was sex he had with you last night, wasn’t it?” I stared at a bruised area on her neck and raised my eyebrows.

Sky looked even fiercer. “Don’t get worked up about it, Madison. In case you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly leaping out of the woodwork these days. Men I have something in common with, I mean. I’m as surprised as you are that he’s good in the sack. But it’s not just the sex either. It’s a business relationship, too. He’s looking at other boutiques around Vancouver. We might be…you know…expanding and consolidating.”

“I think I need to start worrying about you.”

“You don’t get it. I don’t really count. I’m unofficial,” said Sky.

“Ooo, ouch. Let me think on that one for a minute. YOU DON’T REALLY COUNT. It’s time you started listening to your mother, Sky. All those talks of hers about self-esteem and so on.”

“You’re not listening to me, Luce. Shut up for a minute. What I mean is, I’m something new for him. I’m exotic. By comparison, I mean. You know, by comparison to being with men.”

“Sure you are, dear,” I said in the voice my mother used on me when I was eight.

“And Christ, Lucy, you should see the way he looks in a suit.”

I wanted to see the way he looked in a suit. A suit of armor. Dropped into the ocean, with him in it.

Sky always had been a sucker for a nice garment. Her degree is in theatrical costume design. We met when the university theater department roped me into doing a little set painting for a production of Peer Gynt. During that particular show, she was fighting with the director, who’d slept with her then refused to acknowledge her. She took revenge by using weak seams in strategic places. A few belly dancers accidentally bared their nipples during the dance sequence and some trolls had codpiece problems while trogging around in the Hall of the Mountain King. We giggled like idiots from backstage. Apart from that, it was an uneventful production.

Sky had had a lot of boyfriends back in the university days, but none of them had left her with the day-after evidence that Max had.

“I can’t resist him.” She shook her head, then grimaced and stuck out her tongue at me.

“When are you seeing him again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course I don’t know. Why would I know? He’s a busy man. So stop asking me trick questions.”

I didn’t remind Sky of that drunken evening just after I’d gotten rid of Frank. The one where Sky and I started out delicately sipping white wine and ended up falling headfirst into gallons of tequila sunrise, sloppily guzzling and making a lot of drunken Never Again promises. Never Again would we go out with men who were lechers, men who were leeches, men who were misogynists, men who were polygamists—our list was quite long and we pretty much eliminated half the human race.

After all the Never Agains, and since Mr. Perfect still hadn’t shown up, it was just a question of choosing one of the guys off the Never Again list.

I said, “Let’s forget about him for a minute. Let’s not let men ruin our lunch.”

“Good thinking.” Sky suddenly looked like her old self again.

I launched into all my news. Jeremy’s funeral, Paul Bleeker’s big show and small advances, Connie. When she heard the Connie part, Sky said, “I think you need to talk to Reebee on this one. You might need a shot of voodoo.”

Reebee Robertson is Sky’s mother and my creativity expert. In her forty-seven years of life, Reebee has been Rolfed, Reike-ed, Shiatsu-ed, acupunctured, transactionally analyzed, regressionally analyzed, re-birthed, de-birthed, Jung-ed, Freuded, Adlered, Kleined and Winnicotted. These days she offered up her own kind of psychological hodgepodge. Her techniques may not have been highly regarded by the head-shrinking intelligentsia but they worked for me.

For a small painting, she would leave me thinking how wonderful I was and get me unstuck when I was blocked and unable to paint. Of course, I had to put up with Sky snickering on the sidelines at what she called all that New Age drivel.

Reebee had turned a life’s worth of experiments and hapless wandering into a psychology degree. Then she had added a whole lot of other elements—myth and superstition—to her treatment. In her New Age way, she had renovated and furnished her Kitsilano house with favors.

She traded her way through life, something that Sky couldn’t tolerate. “Give me the delicious feel of cool hard cash any day,” Sky was prone to saying, punctuated with, “I’m a material girl.” Sky lusted after clean sheets and her own pristine space. It was hard to blame her really. Reebee had dragged the protesting toddler from a Salt Spring Island commune to Victoria group house to a California Hari Krishna plantation to a hammock on a Maui beach, before finally dumping her with the grandparents back in Vancouver when she decided to go back to university.

The waitress brought our orders and just before Sky threw herself on the club sandwich, she said, “Really terrible about Jeremy. Easter’s going to be awful without him, isn’t it? God, I can still remember that year when we all went out to Cedar Narrows for the big meal. I nearly peed myself laughing, Jeremy making all those Jesus jokes, and your dad turning scarlet with rage.”

“That was Jeremy all over. A terrible tease.”

“Where are you spending it this year?”

“Don’t know. My parents’ place in Cedar Narrows as usual, I guess.”

“You could spend it with us. Reebee will probably be doing something obscene with tofu but there’ll be lots of good wine.” Sky became emphatic. “She really wants to see you. I’ve been keeping her up-to-date, but she wants to see you in person.”

“I don’t know about Easter.”

“Call her.”

“I will.”

“Promise you’ll call her today, when you get back to work.”

“I promise. But I’ve got to do something about the Dirk situation. I’ve got to see my parents and get this thing sorted out. He might show up. I should go out to Cedar Narrows and act as a decoy. Big holidays always bring out the worst in him. If only he’d just come out and behave badly and we could have him arrested. And there’s one other thing about going to Cedar Narrows for Easter.”

“What’s that?”

“Having to show up alone and unmarried when that walking hormone of my cousin and her perfect husband will be there. You know Cherry. She’ll be front and center with Michael and her entire demon spawn and probably pregnant with triplets if I know her.”

Sky nodded and then a wicked smile crept across her face. “You could ask Paul Bleeker to Easter at your parents’. I’m sure he’d appreciate your mother’s collection. All that marvelous sculpture.”

I swatted her with the menu.

I took my time getting back to the gallery that afternoon. Max was far from perfect but at least Sky had someone to stroke all the skin off her arm. All I had was a vague possibility that Paul Bleeker might, if he happened to remember, ask me out again. And even at that, there was no guarantee that he’d show up.

When I got back to the gallery, Nadine’s office door was open and she was moaning into the phone. “So did I, darling, so did I…so are you, darling, so are you…it was, darling, it really was…it was so…what, Night Porter?…no, I rather think Last Tango in Paris.”