Mrs. Pedersen

Now this is some story. This is vintage Doing Dishes in the Dark. I challenge any of you, dear readers, to email me and tell me what was going on here. Because I have no motherfucking (this expletive is appropriate if only ironically) idea.

Back in the very early 1980’s—yeah, that long ago, OK?—I was an instructor in the English Department at Auburn University. It was such a fun time. I was so happy in my teaching job, I played on the faculty softball team, I had golf buddies, I had drinking buddies, and there was so much sex.

Yet by the fall of 1980, I had gone without sex for six months. It was embarrassing, but all these years later I realize the truth: no one noticed, and no one cared. They were too busy obsessing about not having sex themselves.

Then a new woman came to town. Her first name was Hilda, no kidding, and her last name was Danish, Pedersen. She was tall, thin, and brooding. She had an issue with her parents in that she wouldn’t take any money from them. She lived in a rickety apartment carved out of an old house, typical of off-campus places in Auburn: worn siding, threadbare lawn, no sunlight through the pines.

For heat she had one small gas-burning stove. It was smaller than a toaster oven but slightly taller, sat in the middle of the living room, burned blue and orange, and grudgingly gave off as little heat as possible. As a result, Hilda spent days in her car where the winter sun, though weak, warmed the space more comfortably than her apartment heater.

Courting her was difficult. Theoretically she was an Atlanta girl, but her parents were Kansans and something odd—Mennonites, I think. Hilda had a mild southern accent, laughed easily, but she was defined by a kind of cold silence. In that time, in a typical English Department, people had sex with everything that wasn’t nailed down. But not Hilda. She was obsessively involved with her career, and sex was a distraction. But you could see her thinking, well, still…

Finally, an article I had written was accepted for me to present at a conference in Pittsburgh. Constant readers of this blog will recall Gloria as the woman I went to see in a sad effort at nudging an unrequited love. We had a good though awkward time during the afternoon after I gave my paper. Her husband went with us for dinner. I arrived back at my hotel somewhat deflated: was she just using me to make her husband jealous? She’s not married to the fellow anymore, so who knows.

But somehow Hilda learned about my meeting Gloria—college campus gossip. A day after I arrived back in Auburn, we had sex. I was too young and feckless to realize that she was worried about what I maybe had going on with ole Gloria. What a sad thing; now I feel that I unintentionally urged her into it.

Fast forward maybe a year, to when OPEC forced us all into lines to gas up. Somehow I travelled to Wilton, Connecticut, to see Hilda and, for some related reason, meet her parents. Now it seems like something neither of us would countenance. I was making no more than $55,000 in today’s dollars, so I’m not sure how I swung the plane ticket. I have no idea how I got there or when or why.

(A number of readers of this blog have commented on my extraordinary memory for details, which surprised me. Nancy said that, over our 38 years together, she never noticed it, but now it’s coming out. I think it probably says something about the PTSD that this event induced that I have trouble remembering much about it.)

The Petersens had a large and lovely house, though white and sterile, despite the noisy presence of a little brown, furry dog. I’m no longer naïve about such things, but even then I realized that I was confronting real wealth.

Hilda’s father, Alvin, was a senior vice president of something or other at Avon, once mighty but now rather embarrassingly reduced, with most of its sales overseas. Alvin has gone on to his reward by now, as well as his wife, Gerry, who is the subject of this story.

It is no doubt a fault of mine as a crafter of narratives that I have waited to introduce her so late. The rule is that if you have a prospective mother-in-law, which I suppose she was, you must hang her on the wall in the first scene so she can explode later. I have taught this truth to student writers. .My apologies. This is why I don’t have a cushy appointment at an MFA program somewhere.

Hilda was inordinately proud of her father, to the extent of praising him for what sounded to me like suppressing unionizing efforts. According to Hilda, the employees gathered around Alvin when he appeared and wept tears of joy and gratitude to him for his virtue and kindness.

They ground out one weird home routine. Alvin would come home, we would have dinner, then he would retire to his reclining chair in front of the television and doze until it was time to go to sleep. When everyone left the house, Gerry left the radio on for the dog, who, if anything was probably annoyed. Somehow Hilda and I managed to have sex on the living room rug when everyone was gone one day.

Having, as I said, no real memory of this incident, I shall draw on my prior failed career as a fiction writer to fill in what may be a depiction of what may have happened. The essential fact of this story is, however, undisputed, and the main character is no longer alive to dispute me—excellent luck!

Somehow, Gerry, Hilda, and I had to spend the night in a motel somewhere in Connecticut. OK, even my fiction writer’s memory can’t pull up what that was about. I suppose I could email Hilda, who is now a dean of humanities in a far west university, but I can’t imagine it would be received well, if she even recalled the incident. Other people in the narrative of my life have moved on, I’ve been astonished to find. I so wish I could recall why we were subjected to this!

Anyway, yes, we were going to stay in a motel. I assumed that Gerry would buy two rooms for us. I mean, how could all three of us, and me an adult male with a penis, stay in the same room?

Yet that was what Gerry was proposing. In those days, oh hell, this very second, I had and have no poker face at all, so she clearly noted my confusion and despair.

“Would you like to get your own room?” she asked me, her voice truly solicitous, her artificial eyebrows raised dramatically.

I shrugged; I was an instructor in an English department. In budgeting for this trip, I hadn’t accounted for a motel room; that’s how close my finances were in those days. An assistant professor, Greg Stephens and I, agreed that after expenses, we had $10 or $20 left at the end of each month. In those days, that would buy at least some basketball sneakers, so, OK.

So I didn’t have the money for a room. I’ve never been one to put expenses on a credit card that I couldn’t pay off, even in this circumstance. Maybe I thought my calling Gerry’s bluff would work: Alvin was a big deal, they lived in a mansion in coastal Connecticut. Again, I was an adult male. I might be boning her daughter. Surely the old lady would spring for an extra room. But no.

What did she have in mind?

My memory is unaccountably quiet on these next moments. Maybe I’ve been trying to block it out. All I can recall is that nothing untoward occurred during our ministrations for sleep.

Apparently we all used the one bathroom without incident, and certainly no one exposed any private parts in the process. I do recall that Gerry had some piece of paper wrapped around her head at the forehead mark and her dyed-blonde hair exploded above. There must have been robes, though none supplied by the local motel.

I took my place in my double bed, and they in theirs. Lights were turned off. I know I lay there, wondering what was going to happen. It was awfully quiet for a room with three adults trying to sleep. In any event, there was no tortured tossing and turning by females desiring sex in the other bed. Were they waiting for me to start masturbating? And how would they react? My male reproductive organ clearly didn't want to find out.

Well, they were Danes and perhaps preternaturally calm.

Eventually, I suppose, I must have fallen asleep, and probably I wasn’t snoring so horribly in those days as I was without sleep apnea then. I don’t know what happened with them.

Oh no, now that we’re at this point in my shameful narrative, this is the very definition of the shaggy dog story. Hilda didn’t and wouldn’t ever have sneaked to get into bed with me. Gerry didn’t pull a Mrs. Robinson. Nothing happened. I have no memory of waking the next morning, but it had to be awkward as hell. No memory of breakfast. I wonder if I paid for my own.

So why would Gerry have manufactured such an event? What was she thinking? She certainly wasn’t miserly in other areas of her life. Was she simply muddled? Did she find it titillating being in a bed next to her daughter’s lover? Which, I can’t even.

Once long before, Hilda overheard her telling a neighbor, “I don’t know what’s going on with Hilda. I don’t even know if she’s sleeping with George.”

Precisely. Hilda said she never confided in her mother because whatever Hilda told her was immediately conveyed to the neighbors’ ears.

I was so shaken by the event that I actually asked my mother what was going on. Her response: “Some women are interested in sex.”

Which women? What…?

Dear readers, I have no idea. I suspect that this is simply going to be one of those mysteries, never to be solved. However, if anyone with a fetish for weird sexy stuff in which nothing happens, please let me know.

PS: My website host says that this is my 100th blog post. Thanks so much for reading. I hope you're enjoying this. If you think this should be my last, please tell me: gjarecke@comcast.net.