Christina Drill
The Tenderfoot
Sandra had plans to attend the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve satellite concert in the Meadowlands. Her ticket was already printed out and folded in the inside pocket of her purse. But earlier that evening she’d been struck by a sharp bolt of loneliness while making pernil in a pot too big for one person and decided to invite Lyle over for dinner. They worked together at Slooterdam Middle, and he was good company. Now they sat on opposite ends of the couch recalling the best Bobby LaFrange moments of 2003. On TV, Dick Clark announced there were ninety minutes left in the year.
“There was the first incident,” Lyle said. “Where he called Baccara phat, and she cried.”
They lost it, remembering the way their poor music teacher’s face froze in embarrassment after learning that phat with a “ph” meant cool.
“Or when he knifed a bean bag, and got PVC pellets all over my room?” Sandra doubled over in hysterics with a tissue pressed against her eyes. She tried not to spill her wine. Lyle made her feel young, like she was in her twenties again, like all she had to do to look glowy and beautiful was drink a glass of water.
She would turn forty-one this winter. He was twenty-five. He taught Geography at Slooterdam and she taught Spanish, and he liked to joke that he was Geographic because Sandra was Spanish (she was Dominican). He claimed to have a girlfriend, a delivery nurse named Alonna who lived on a farm out in Warren, but Sandra hadn’t met her. Which was fine because Lyle had never met her husband Eduardo, a successful long-haul trucker who’d died on the turnpike two years ago next month. The hole E had left in Sandra’s heart was almost as big as Bomba, his wet-red semi she was storing at the airport in long-term parking. Sandra missed E with fervor, but this friendship had bloomed wildly and unexpectedly this fall and made that pain feel highway light and far away. She watched Lyle take a long drink from E’s old “Loungin’ Lizard” mug, noticing how he closed his lips over his teeth like he was catching a fly.
Sandra was slightly embarrassed to be enamored with someone so . . . obvious. Lyle was sandy and handsome, and the only person she had ever met from California. He was young enough to see beyond Slooterdam, could still imagine a future that took him away from the classroom and onto the maps. He’d already been to every state and longed to sail around the Americas, the Panama Canal be damned. His love for Geography was essential to his being like how writers and artists are, before anything else, these things first. Like how E’s life had been determined by the irresistibility of the open road.
At eleven, Lyle stood up and announced he was leaving. She’d hoped he’d stay past midnight, as if that were a possible reality, as if Alonna didn’t exist.
“No big,” she lied. “I’m headed to the Meadowlands anyway.” She was glad she could still end her year surrounded by people, and not alone.
“You had KISS tickets? San, you should have gone!” he seemed guilty and flattered at once.
“I am going,” she said. She’d get there fast and park behind the band’s tour buses, then leave before anyone noticed. Thanks to E, she still had every tristate parking privilege known to man. The Times Square broadcast showed a sign hanging from inside an office building that said “HAPPY NEW YEAR!! DICK!!!” to which Dick responded, “Hello!” Sandra aimed the clicker at his forehead and zoom, a calm black void took his place.
“Drive safely, there’s ice.”
“I’ll head out with you,” she said.
Sandra merged onto Route 80 and skidded immediately. On NPR a saxophone played a totally nuts, unsyncopated solo. Traffic was abysmal, but in her head she and Lyle were speeding toward Guadalajara in new clothes and a red coupe. She’d gotten great at this game after E died; it was almost enough for her. The sax punctuated the sound of the wind with birdlike shrieks and staccato tata-tas. She turned her head toward the empty seat and imagined Lyle in boyish profile picking his fingernails. She luxuriated in her fantasy until traffic came to a halt and she was forced to brake.
She never made the light at Bergen. It was deliberately long, meant to minimize tunnel traffic up ahead, and Sandra often found herself spending those seven minutes staring at the sign for the Tenderfoot Motel. It was an artifact of another time: a neon cowboy boot with an oversized spur stepping onto a red carpet, its star jutting nearly into the street. It all seemed to promise a little amuse-bouche of Big Apple glamor. And under the boot was a vacancy notice. In red letters it read: SANDRA AND LYLE FOREVER! Sandra blinked—no, it didn’t. It said: REDUCED RATES! NOW TIL 21st CENT! and it had said that since 1999. She pulled into the Tenderfoot’s parking lot, assuming she’d find some coffee inside.
The wind was no joke. She walked through the motel’s doors and into a brown lobby with wood paneling. A piano cover of a popular Christmas song played low from a boombox and thirsty poinsettias lined an unmanned desk. The emptiness felt both eerie and comforting as she followed the smell of coffee down the hall until she found the carafe she was looking for.
“I’m sorry!” A young girl with an accent emerged from a back room. “The coffee is for guests. Are you a guest of here?”
“Hi,” Sandra said, making her way back to the desk. “No, I’m not.” “No worries. It’s easy to become one. We’re having a promotion.”
“Oh, really?” Sandra asked, though she already knew this—REDUCED RATES! NOW TIL 21st CENT!
“I can’t just pay you for the coffee?”
The girl shook her head sympathetically. She was so young and fresh, with long lacquered nails and eyelashes.
“I’m on my way somewhere,” Sandra explained.
But there was no way she would make it to the Meadowlands in time. So, armed with a worm of an idea, she gave the concierge her credit card. In exchange, she was given an oversized pink mug.
“This mug has a magnet and doubles as your key. You hold it near the handle to unlock your door.”
“Oh, that’s fun,” Sandra said.
The girl shrugged. “It’s kinda dumb. It’s just a Tender thing.”
“A tender thing,” Sandra repeated. She filled her mug with hot coffee. After a satisfying first slurp, she turned the mug around to find her room number, 108, and wandered down the hallway in search of her match.
Room 108 was neither Broadway nor western themed, unless you counted a faded print of Elvis in rhinestones above the bed, which was neither here nor there. The mattress was a waterbed though. She threw her purse on the nightstand and sipped her coffee carefully on the undulating queen. The room smelled pleasantly of a pretty teenager who chain-smoked cloves. The alarm clock said twenty to midnight, so she turned on the New Year’s broadcast for company. The band 3 Doors Down had just finished performing; she would have missed the KISS set, anyway. Once she felt bold enough from the caffeine, she picked up the telephone in the room and dialed Lyle’s cell. It went to voicemail.
“Hey, it’s San,” she could hear herself saying, her mind to the left of her body. “It’s urgent. Call me back at two oh one . . . uhh . . . ” and read off the number taped to the receiver. She hung up fast, then shut herself in the bathroom.
Sandra stared at her reflection. She still glowed, but in a haunted way. She decided to take a shower, where she found herself trying to imagine what would happen if Lyle called her back. She had trouble conjuring the details— the look of his dick, or where he would put his hands while they kissed passionately—but it didn’t matter. Her desire for him, theoretical and childish and absolute, created the condition between her legs. She turned the water valve as hot as it could go, then as cold as it could, then twisted it back to scalding. Her desire was a rotten tooth that must be pulled.
She re-dressed to resume her waiting on the bed. She laid there, staring at the pockmarked ceiling, and listened as the countdown boomed, “Three, Two, One . . . ”
Kazoos! Inflatables! A new year was here. Sandra sat up to watch the people on the screen kiss and carouse in the wind and snow. The footage cut to fireworks in Washington, DC, then to a giant tinsel flip-flop dropping somewhere on a beach in the Carolinas. The broadcast stretched time like taffy, showing footage of earlier London celebrations, then Cape Town, then Shanghai, then Vienna, the crowd gearing up in Los Angeles, and Lyle still had not called. Sandra allowed herself hope for five more minutes before she grabbed a pillow, pressed it over her face, and screamed. How sad, to find so much comfort in her flimsy imagination! For three months her mind had been a maze of tunnels to alternate dimensions where she and Lyle were one. Had she really thought stopping here for coffee would somehow lead to—for the first time, she was really picturing it—fucking Lyle?
She lifted the heavy red curtain off the window to find snow fast accumulating on the balcony. Things looked bad, but she could make it home. She talked to E in silence and sent him her love. She imagined him distracted by an especially scenic skyway, unbeholden to her stupid mortal self. She pulled her car keys out of her purse and was nearly out the door when, at an extremely loud volume, the phone in the room rang.
It was him. The connection was staticky, like even a galaxy could not keep them apart.
“Hi. It’s Sandra.” She sounded beautiful, she knew, just beaming with joy. She told him where she was. He said he’d be there in fifteen. She closed the window curtain and stared at her slip-on shoes, her outgrown acrylics. He did not show up in fifteen minutes, but in ten.
There was no couch so they shared the waterbed, where every tiny movement was logged. He had spun out on 17 and was waiting for a tow truck when he saw her call. So he’d been close, just a half mile away. A half mile apart, he said. “I was happy to hear from you, I’ll say that. Happy New Year.” He placed his head in the nook between her ear and shoulder.
“Can I ask you a private question?” Sandra said quietly.
He paused. “Depends?” He laughed nervously. They never asked each other private questions. It took her a minute to get it out.
“Where’s Alonna?”
“Oh. That’s private?” he turned to face Sandra, smiling. “I thought you were going to ask me something serious.”
“Well, she’s not dead.”
“I know.” He grabbed her hand and changed the subject. “And you always wear your wedding ring.”
She saw her two-carat solitaire and the eternity band above it in a new light as Lyle spread his fingers through hers, then squeezed.
“San, you’re so rad,” he said, letting go of her to grab a pillow. “And you’re a real good teacher. I’d worry about Bobby LaFrange a lot more otherwise. He’s lucky to have you.”
Sandra found herself on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry. I need a moment.” “I’ll be here,” he said, and closed his eyes.
She slid through the sticky balcony door. Snow piled in the parking lot as the wind carried in sirens from miles away. There was an ashtray on the balcony that looked like it had never been emptied. Ew, Sandra thought, and then, a cig would be nice. Feeling like a woman who gets what she wants, she picked the least disgusting butt out of the ashtray and placed it between her lips. Where had she been last New Year’s Eve? Ah yes. The art teacher’s dinner party, where she’d had a miserable time. The year before that, she was with E in Puerto Rico. Sandra sucked on the unlit butt until she thought she felt a nicotine buzz. Gross, she thought, and then, Who cares? She made the sign of the cross like she’d just taken communion and returned the butt to its rightful cemetery. When she slid back into the room, Lyle was asleep. His head lolled off one side of the bed, and he was snoring. Sharply Sandra yelled, “Wake up!” She mounted him and leaned gently over to meet his eyes, which opened to reveal no more than they ever had; she’d always known he found her attractive. She cupped his left cheek with her right hand, his jaw like a hunter’s bow in her palm. He placed his right hand on her left breast. This one kiss was serious, deep, and unbridled by time. Beneath them the bed swooshed and swelled but eventually stilled, like a spot of sea returning to calm after something heavy, bobbing above it, finally sinks.