Dan by Joanna Ruocco Page B

asked Don Pond. “By removing you from the bakery, I sacrificed my only defining characteristic and my only hope of compelling respect from other people. Not that being the first customer was a skill I developed on my own,” Don Pond added, modestly, in a manner that recalled his former self. “As you pointed out, I owed it to Leslie Duck, who rented me this property. But I like to think I went above and beyond the bare minimum required of a first customer.”
    “You did,” Melba agreed. “The garlic …”
    Don Pond leaned across the armrest. It was longer than Don Pond’s torso and so he ended up splayed across it on his belly in a seal-like posture.
    “You noticed!” he said. “You cared.”
    Melba fumbled for some way of expressing what Don Pond had meant to her. “First customer” didn’t seem adequate, but how else could she describe the role he played in her life? She slid away from him toward the other end of the couch, chewing the collar of her shirt.
    “Your head,” she said, releasing the collar, using her fingertips to press the damp wrinkles against her neck. “You probably think I’m indifferent to it, but you’re wrong. I feel tense and distracted. It’s as if your head were a hard ball balanced on a seal’s nose and the seal might toss it to me, but Don, what if I miss?”
    Don Pond groaned. The couch seemed to get longer by the second and Don Pond’s groan came from far off.
    “Melba, you wouldn’t miss,” he groaned. “Not if you didn’t want to. You know you can just hold up the ends of your apron and catch anything. But it’s no good trying to convince you. You aren’t compassionate. You lorded it over everyone when you worked at the bakery. Now that that’s over, I wonder what you’ll do? In a way, you’ve lost more than I have.”
    Melba did not know how to respond. It was too new, leaving her position at the bakery, the bakery closing for business, the day stretching out before her without activities or tasks. Curled in the corner of the couch, she contemplated the black vinyl expanse. The couch was really a showpiece, one of a kind, grimly magnificent, the house merely a shanty built over the couch to protect it from the elements. The cold, claylike cushions cased in the thin, vaguely tacky membrane—they did give one the sensation of snuggling dead flesh. Even the faint chemical odor of the couch seemed preservative in nature. Melba rubbed her hand on the vinyl and examined the pad of her thumb—no darker, but waxier.
    Summoning all her strength, Melba crawled from the couch corner toward what she hoped was the cushion’s edge, a matte black horizon line where the gleaming vinyl graded into the dim and porous air. The vista dizzied her. She swung her arm, using the momentum to propel herself backwards away from the edge. She bumped against her abandoned mug and the tea sloshed but did not spill. She fumbled for it, grasping the mug in both hands and gulping without hesitation. The taste was not good. The texture, however, reminded Melba pleasantly of silt.
    Like any female in a male’s house, she thought, I am being struck with ways to make improvements. She smiled, relieved to find that she had surrendered her contested singularity and merged herself with the anonymous multitude of women in general.
    For instance, thought Melba, improvingly, enjoying her newfound freedom as representative of a group, how nice it would be to serve such a tea in a small dish, just the slightest bit concave! The silty tea would spread out wide and warm and shallow, and the guest could drink it with eyes fixed on the brown surface, as though peeping through rushes at the squidgy rim of a eutrophic lake. Having seen her improving idea to the finish, Melba sighed, her mind returning to its lonely track.
    She heard rummaging and clinking and wondered briefly if animals had emerged from wallows beneath the couch before she glimpsed Don Pond setting a platter on the coffee table. The platter