WHEN BELINDA arrives in the ladies’ room, the redhead is standing at the sink, wiping her face with a wet paper towel, snarling at her reflection in the mirror and saying “Bitch!” and “Cunt!” Belinda scoots into a stall, locks the door, and pees as quietly as she can.
The redhead begins whining, imitating the Chinese girl. “I’m so worried about the ozone layer,” she says, and then in a louder voice she calls out, “Can you believe that dyke?” Belinda knows that she’s talking to her, but she says nothing, pretending that she thinks the redhead is just asking a rhetorical question. The redhead knocks on the door of Belinda’s stall and says, “Hey! Did you hear me? You must have heard what she was saying. The ozone layer? All that shit?”
Belinda says, “Well, I — did hear something about that — ”
“Yeah, you’d have to. You’re sitting right next to her. I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to grab your knee.” She waits a moment and says, “She hasn’t, has she?”
Belinda laughs. It’s a nervous, forced laugh.
“Just kidding,” the redhead says. “You’re probably not her type. I say ‘probably’ because I think she’s omnivorous.”
Belinda laughs again, because she thinks it’s expected of her. She hopes the redhead will leave, but the woman wants to talk. She says, “Do you believe that, that crap about the ozone?”
Belinda sighs. “I don’t know,” she says. She decides that she might as well come out of the stall, figuring that if she washes up and makes some agreeable noises, she may be able to get out quickly. She’s trembling a little. She tells herself, as she has before, that she shouldn’t be so uncomfortable with lesbians, but she’s always afraid that they will say or do something that will embarrass her, specifically that they might make jokes about her that she doesn’t understand, making her feel ignorant and horrible. Every now and then, she thinks that perhaps she should go to bed with a woman just so that she’ll know something about it, so that she’ll be protected from feeling ignorant.
She flushes the toilet and pulls herself together, takes a deep breath, and comes out of the stall. The redhead is gone. Belinda washes her hands and looks herself over in the mirror, though she tells herself that this is probably a mistake. For the last year or so, whenever she looks in a mirror she feels almost sexless. She has been finding it difficult to imagine that she’s still attractive, or even interesting-looking, to men — or to women, for that matter. This isn’t exactly a problem of aging; in fact, it strikes her as funny that she sees her young self more and more in the mirror, that the face she had when she was a girl is there, with some not-so-welcome new details — wrinkles, lines, spots — but still there, the same girlish face, and it amuses her sometimes to notice how incomplete Leila’s face is, a pretty face, but characterless, like an apartment with white walls and no pictures, something like Matthew’s apartment.
She decides to do something with her hair. She brushes it all over to one side. The effect strikes her as pretty odd, but she knows that odd is a look, and it seems somehow livelier now than it did before. She likes it. It makes her smile. It’s kind of crazy.
When she emerges from the ladies’ room, the redhead is talking on the pay phone in the hallway: “I’m just very worried about her, Mrs. Chu. Very, very worried. I’ve never seen her so crazy. Do you understand what I’m saying? She’s just — she’s really irrational. She’s going on and on about how she’s worried about the ozone layer? In the sky — in the atmosphere? The ozone layer? It’s some kind of gases — ”
She nearly blocks the narrow hallway. Belinda couldn’t get by without rubbing against her, so she says, “Uhm, excuse me.”
The redhead turns around. Her face is blank for a moment, but then she winks at Belinda and points to her hair and raises her eyebrows and grins, still talking into the phone, saying, “She’s irrational, Mrs. Chu. I really think you should come down here. She’s been like this before, but never this bad. It scares me, I mean it really scares me. I just don’t know what she might do. I can’t take responsibility for her. I really wish you would come down here and take her away. Take her home. She needs help, Mrs. Chu. She really does.”
Here’s something new. You can now listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” complete and uninterrupted as an audiobook, or read the text as you listen to it in an “audiovideobook,” embellished with some visual surprises.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies and Herb ’n’ Lorna.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
🎧 422: When Belinda . . .