What I Should Have Said Was
What I should have said was: I’m feeling a little queasy.
Darna lay on her side on my couch. She tickled my back with her feet. She said in a breathy voice, “Hey there mister,” which was strange because she wasn’t introducing herself. We had met a week ago at the Schenectady curling club. She was the other young person there among adult curlers who acted all serious as if curling were life or death. Darna made a giggle noise. I sat on the edge so my butt was almost off the couch. I had inherited it from my older brother when he moved in with his fiancé. She told him it smelled like dog feet, so there ya’ go, and I was given the thing.
“You should lie down,” she told me. Not my brother’s fiancé, but the girl, Darna. She lay there all squeezed into the cushions, a little drunk. She was squat, but cute, sort of like a puppy, a pug, something you’d like to toss around and throw things to and all but certainly not, you know, do anything more with.
Darna swept her red, mop-like hair out of her face and patted the cushion in front of her with her little hand. I wanted my other friends to magically return to the party. Maybe they forgot something, I thought, like a cell phone, or maybe they had a pressing question they felt I should address at 3:17 in the morning.
But Darna was the only one remaining, forgotten by her mostly pug-ish cluster of friends, like the little kid who inevitably gets left at the rest stop and then eats ice cream—compliments of the up-and-coming TCBY manager—for two hours until her parents bust in all red-faced screaming “WHERE IS OUR DAUGHTER?” As if it’s someone else’s fault.
Darna flicked at the cushion with her hand, maybe brushing crumbs away. I imagined her thinking: if the couch is clean, he will lie down; it’s the couch that he is afraid of.
I shifted my position to look at her. After falling on my ass at the curling club for the umpteenth time she had come over in this big purple sweatshirt and helped me up, walked me inside. I told her I knew nothing of the sport, that I was there with people from work, and that I was kind of scared of ice—not in drinks but as a surface. Darna listened intently and then got all into it, having me pretend to launch a curling stone down a long carpeted hallway.
“Just like life,” she kept saying, “it’s not about force; it’s about touch.”
I told her about the party for Terrance, my friend. “Terrance likes people,” I said. “Come by. Bring some friends.”
“Oh yeah,” she said holding out the sound on the last word.
I didn’t mean it like that.
On the couch, she propped her head on her right hand, and her right elbow sunk way down into the cushion, so she had to strain to look at me. “Yeah, I’m feeling pretty relaxed,” she said. “Real good.” She held the last word again and then let it trail off. I said, “Looks like it.” It looked as if she’d go right on sinking into the thing, and maybe disappear. Stiffly, I lay down next to her. I was breathing hard when she saddled up to me, put her left arm across my chest, rubbed my bony side. She dropped her left leg over me, strapping me in. She started singing something quietly into my ear. As she nuzzled her face into my neck I watched the ceiling as if for an answer. The ceiling shifted. Maybe the ceiling will cave in, I thought. Maybe the world will end.
“Do you smell dog feet?” I asked.
“What are you thinking?” she said in a low, breathy voice.
“Well,” I said turning to look at her. And then I felt it. What I should have said was: I’m thinking I’m going to throw up in your hair.
So I washed Darna’s hair. She took the whole thing pretty well. Probably too well. She saw me scrubbing at her hair as being intimate—the touching, the rubbing, twice with the shampoo, once with conditioner, although conditioner was probably unnecessary.
“Mmm,” she said. “The shampoo smells heavenly.”
“It’s Prell,” I said, trying not to crush my pelvis into her butt.
She was quiet for a moment. “Mmm,” she moaned.
I glanced up at the mirror. I looked scared, tired, younger than I remembered.
Darna ended up on my bed. And I swear that I didn’t invite her. The couch was a mess so she couldn’t sleep there, and while I swabbed up the water in the bathroom Darna scurried away, towel dropped behind her.
“Your bed feels real nice,” she said. “Real comfortable,” she said, moving to one side of it, yawning.
I stood there swaying like an old flag pole. What I should have said was: Thank you for being nice to me at the rink; what I should have said was: I have fears bigger than you can imagine; what I should have said was: I’m sorry.
In this time of contemplation and inaction Darna fell asleep snoring loudly. She doesn’t need me, I thought. She’s already forgotten me. I wanted suddenly to grab her hand, to present her with a sense of excitement and urgency, to coax her from my room and, using the long, slick hall in my apartment, to go hallway curling, with or without objects.
“Show me!” I’d say.
“It’s not about force!” she’d say, flailing her arm.
“It’s about touch!” I’d say, following through.
But instead I didn’t do anything and sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor, on the weave rug that my mother had given me. I watched Darna on my bed, curled in a little ball, and I thought about those words even though I had no understanding of them at the time.
Casey Wiley, 2009 Emerging Writer Fellow at Penn State Altoona, is a 2009 Creative Nonfiction MFA graduate of George Mason University. His nonfiction and fiction has been published, or is forthcoming, in Pindledyboz, Emerson Review, Word Riot, Fringe, and he was selected for a Finalist for Glimmertrain’s Short Story Award for New Writers.