Turnabout
by Jala Pfaff

Katherine and Sally, arm in arm and laughing about a joke Sally had just told, strode leisurely to the proprietor's apartment to check into the B&B. Katherine was also laughing out of pride and, truth be told, a little embarrassment and shyness at the thought that Richard might recognize her and wonder what was going on. She knew Richard was far too discreet to say anything even if he remembered her, but at the thought of his potentially raised eyebrows, his subtle inquisitive expression, Katherine kept lapsing into more giggles—perhaps unseemly at her age, she thought.
    Katherine had told Sally about this place, Posada Scarlatti, how when she'd been here before with Leroy, they'd been shocked (and, later, Katherine was quite amused) to discover it was a gay B&B. This included all the other guests as well as the proprietors themselves, a long-term couple, Richard and Louis (though they only ever saw Richard, as he served, in a spotless white apron, perfect waffles, banana bread he'd made himself, fresh-brewed local coffee, and elegantly sliced papaya for breakfast, and constantly inquired whether his guests were comfortable or needed anything); delicately and formally it was explained that unfortunately Louis, currently bedridden with AIDS, would be unable to offer them his hospitality during their stay. Katherine, upon hearing this, had asked Richard to please send Louis their best wishes; elegant Richard, with a small smile, nodded and gave her a simple thank you.
    For his part, Richard had seemed surprised for only a moment when he first saw Katherine and Leroy standing together at his check-in desk, and recovered perfectly; thereafter, he was as gracious to her and Leroy as he was to all his other guests. Katherine had laughed uproariously when she entered the spotless hotel bathroom to discover Martha Stewart towel sets. "Now where else in Costa Rica are you going to find Martha Stewart—and check it out, it's even all matching—washcloths, hand towels, everything? I guess our so-called excellent guidebook neglected to mention just one little important fact about this B&B, huh?!" Leroy hadn't understand why she found it all so funny, and, in fact, was visibly uncomfortable the entire three days they'd stayed, especially while in the dining area. She'd had to tell him to chill out.
    As Katherine now once again entered the lovely, clean bathroom in their room (Richard tactfully assigning them a different room than the one she and Leroy had stayed in), Sally lay down to rest on one of the comfortable, perfectly-made beds covered with handmade quilts. Katherine was reminded of the contrast with the bathrooms in the cheap lodgings she and Leroy had mostly stayed in. And indeed, she had spent a surprising amount of time in them, rampant mildew, insects, and all; they had had to serve as a sort of refuge for her.
    For Leroy had developed the habit of slowly, lazily masturbating or simply absentmindedly playing with himself the minute they got into their hotel room—while Katherine was busy unpacking, doing much-needed laundry in the sink, or brushing her teeth. What might have, once, been a sexy, turn-on gesture for her had instead gradually begun to seem disgusting, dirty—even an act of aggression toward her—to the point where, as she watched him laconically twirling his dusky foreskin or rolling his scrotum between his fingers, almost belligerently, she thought, as if she were not present—she had to wonder when the feeling of disgust had begun. Katherine had ended up escaping to the spider-filled, claustrophobic bathrooms during this ritual.
    As for the exact color of his foreskin, she'd spent hours thinking exactly how to define it. She'd hit upon it by chance, finally, one day, when she'd gotten some cooking oil stains on her best pair of pants, and had gone looking for clothing dye at the local hardware store to investigate the possibility of salvaging them by dyeing them a darker color. There in front of her on the shelf was a color called Black Plum. That was it, precisely. She never did purchase any dye—she hadn't been prepared for the complexity of the instructions—but the color of the box and its name was indelibly inscribed in her mind.
    After dinner, she and Sally brought a bottle of rum back to their room and sat out on the private deck, hoping to spot toucans (which she'd heard, during her first visit here, always traveled in pairs) flying past in the dusk. But if there were any, they were too far away to be able to discern a riotous beak. As the two women became more inebriated, the easy talk and happy exclamations about the beauty of the site began to morph into something darker, more bitter.
    "So, like, whenever I started doing my laundry? He'd suddenly jump up with a handful of his dirty clothes—his basket was always overflowing—and go, 'Room for a few things?'" said Sally, taking another swig of the expensive rum. "Mmm, this is really good stuff," she added, staring wide-eyed at the bottle's label.
    "Well, mine.... It was that sense of entitlement, of presumptuousness—that arrogance—that I think got to me the most. Like, he'd be out somewhere and I'd be cooking myself some little thing, some portion that obviously was only enough for one, and, coming home and apprising the situation, he'd go, 'I'll take some of that.' You know?"
    "Yeah...you know how the showers here are so hard to get just right? How you constantly have to suffer through, like, one minute of scalding, then one minute of icy cold?" asked Sally.
    "Sure do."
    "Well, instead of sympathizing, he would spend his energy calculating precisely how many milliseconds of comfortable temperature I was actually getting, during the transition periods from hot to cold and back again, to try to prove to me that it wasn't so bad. He seemed really thrilled doing that."
    "Asshole. Mine shed like a dog, I swear. His side of the bed, the shower after he'd used it—disgusting," spit Katherine.
    "Yeah, same here." They laughed, though it was an unamused sound. "And mine would always refuse to wash the cutting board and our only good chef's knife—especially after cutting onions. He'd just leave that onion detritus and smell everywhere, even though he knew I hate onions."
    "Bastard. Well, mine touted himself as an accomplished artist and therefore—by definition, wouldn't you say?—an expert in visual perspective, but he pleaded impossibility when it came to learning to make his own bed. I couldn't believe it. I actually had to show him how—had to visually demonstrate to him the resultant smoothness, the aesthetic effect that one was attempting to achieve."
    "No way," said Sally, staring at Katherine in disbelief.
    "Yes way. Plus, speaking of beds, he'd sit on his like he was some kind of little pasha, just sit himself down on it and refuse to move, to get up for anything. He'd call for things like...I don't know, what's that old nursery rhyme, you know the one? 'He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl, and he called for his fiddlers three.' That was totally him. It was like his mattress was a life raft surrounded by sharks and he didn't dare step foot off it." Katherine gulped down another mouthful of rum. "And get this: he'd always be playing with himself and if I wasn't interested—and most of the time I wasn't; that was such a turnoff—he'd always go through the same routine—sigh really dramatically, then ask me to go get him four Kleenexes, so he could lay there and whack off!"
    "Oh god," said Sally sympathetically. "You poor baby."
    Karen laughed in agreement, but somehow it came out strangled, sounding more like a sob. Sally took another sip of alcohol—the bottle nearing empty now—and, with a slight slur, offered: "It took me almost a year before I caught him—you're not going to believe this—using my nicest face towel to wipe off his penis after he peed. Of course I confronted him in a rage, and he 'defended himself' by saying Yeah but, at least I already washed the tip off with a little water under the faucet. I screamed, 'Why the hell don't you use your own fucking towel for that, you pig?' and he just shrugged. Then he tried to smile charmingly at me and said he supposed it was because my towels were always so nice and soft and clean. Then he got pissed off because I was pissed off and yelled, Why did I mind so much anyway? So I screamed at him, 'Well, maybe I don't want to wipe my face with my own fucking towel smelling of dirty dick!"
    "Oh my god, the jackass!" shrieked Katherine. "Good thing you dumped that dickhead!"
    "'Dickhead!' That's exactly the point!" Sally convulsed with laughter. "No more dick heads! Fuck men!"
    "Yeah, fuck them!" Katherine swallowed the last mouthful of rum but suddenly began to giggle, which made her cough and choke. Sally started to bang on her back, and for some reason this drunken gesture made Katherine's chuckles turn to tears.
    "Oh, Katherine," said Sally tenderly, opening her arms and offering Katherine a soft place to lay her head. Katherine, snot-nosed and all, accepted the haven. A few gentle, comforting strokes on Katherine's back soon became more sensual caresses. This, too, Katherine was grateful to accept.
    Sally had been the only other guest at one of the first inns Katherine stayed at during this, her second trip to Costa Rica. Each evening they'd shared the dinner table—a picnic bench, actually—which looked out on a large grassy area and a sort of large perch with a shelf, some twenty feet away, a structure built to leave fruit on so that guests could watch the tremendous quantities of wild birds coming for their daily treat. One larger dark-colored bird had even lifted off with nearly a whole banana for itself. Katherine and Sally spent those four evenings chatting amiably; Katherine felt truly fortunate. She knew she'd found a new friend. Sally announced the first night, with no shame or embarrassment, that she'd been a lesbian—"and loving every minute of it"—since dumping her last, no-good boyfriend six years ago. She'd been "bumming around" Costa Rica for four months already—Imagine! Sally chortled—at my age! Like a goddamned teenager! Sally was really only middle-aged, like Katherine, but if it pleased her to think of herself getting away with something, flaunting convention, then that was fine with Katherine.
    The next night, they stayed talking so long at dinner that moths began dive-bombing their candles and they'd had to extinguish them and sit in the ever-darkening tropical night. The darkness made it easy for Katherine to confide that she had come back to Costa Rica "to try to have a better time this time," without Leroy, with whom she'd just broken up. And even to ask, on the third evening, what it was like to prefer women. When Sally had touched her hand and looked long into her eyes, asking her if she'd like to find out, Katherine had giggled, assuming it was a joke. But it wasn't. And by the fourth night, Katherine's last booked at that place, it felt natural and completely right that they should travel on together.
    On her previous trip to this country, Katherine had begged and cajoled Leroy to stop at the occasional roadside sign advertising, though always in Spanish, Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, and always shakily hand-painted on battered plywood. He'd adamantly refused, just as he'd always refused to go to zoos, citing his political correctness to not see any animals behind bars. She'd agreed about zoos to some extent, although they'd had an argument about whether it was better for endangered animals to go extinct or live out their species' remaining days, years, or centuries in captivity. But in any case they were in agreement about not wanting to visit any zoos in foreign countries, not wishing to witness any horrors, any exploitative or likely terribly depressing conditions.
    "But these rehabilitation centers are probably different," Katherine had tried to convince him. "They're at least trying to get the animals back into the wild, and our money to visit them probably helps pay for their care. I mean, that is the theory, right? And in the meantime, we actually get to see some animals!" She'd been tremendously excited at the thought of it, desperately wanted to see a margay or an ocelot—any of the cats, especially, in any setting other than a zoo.
    But he'd continued staunchly refusing to stop the car, ignoring her pleas, then later, her silent anger, and finally even her tears. And so they saw very little of the much-advertised wildlife of Costa Rica—some birds, a few lizards, one iguana, some hummingbirds, a bunch of butterflies. Even the butterflies and hummingbirds rankled Leroy; in the special nature centers where they went to view them they weren't truly "in the wild," but rather were being presented to humans for money. They argued over that too—at least the creatures were alive and happy; wasn't that good enough? The fact that the butterflies, flitting about in their own enormous net enclosure, knew no predators this way and in fact, only enjoyed a lifespan of a couple of weeks anyway...these were factors Katherine thought he couldn't argue with. But he did.
    Now, on this trip, she and Sally were masters of their own destinies—and itineraries. They pulled over not only for every necessary pee break, but for every possible sloth sighting (hundreds per day, all of which turned out to be just clumps of epiphytes or dead branches, or, a few memorable times, monkeys), every roadside tree hung with ripe guavas, every cute café emitting the siren call of hand-picked, locally-cultivated roasted beans, and most definitely, every wildlife rehabilitation center. It was at these that they came face-to-face with the aggressiveness and unearthly beauty of the ocelot, but also the comical pizote, the stately spectacled owl, the Poas squirrel, armadillo, and agouti, even a jaguarundi ...and at last Katharine felt she was experiencing all that Costa Rica had to offer.
    After making love—and how different that was with a woman!, Katherine kept marveling: the gentleness, the unhurried pace, the incredible sweetness, the lack of constant worry about birth control—they took turns stumbling into the bathroom to brush and floss, and to wash the sweat off their faces. As they lay curled next to one another against the cool mountain air, their two bodies amazingly able to fit on a single bed, Katherine mused on all the other things that made traveling with a woman so much more enjoyable.
    There was the tacit understanding that it took a certain amount of time to get ready in the morning, and there was no man standing around impatiently, packing up her things before she'd even had a chance to use them, looking at his watch and insisting that they "get a move on." There was the agreement, implicit, that they would check out the water pressure and cleanliness of the shower before agreeing to rent a room. Time was allowed for doing laundry and at least two large towels each were always requested from the proprietors—of course, one to use as a turban for the head and one to wrap around the body—plus additional washcloths. There was no male sighing at a woman's "ridiculous" needs to have a rest-and-recoup in the middle of the day, to change and wash her face and brush her hair before going out for dinner, to hang up her clothes when she got to a new hotel to get some of the wrinkles out, to have packed at least three pairs of shoes, to want time to sit around in hammocks and read, to actually search out the nicest place for lunch—not just run-run-run from dawn to the time they collapsed famished in bed late at night, sightseeing as fast as possible. She and Sally both made sure to place snacks, maps, and full water bottles within easy reach in the back seat of Katherine's rental car, instead of hearing a deep voice suddenly demand what mile marker they were at on the map, when the map was lost god-knows-where amidst all the crap and she was expected to instantly produce it, to pull the rabbit out of the hat. There was time to take artsy photos, and to make amateur sketches and write in a journal, in order to feel the day's experiences more fully. There was the foresight to plan ahead to actually book hotel reservations instead of just arriving in a town and hoping there'd be something available. They stopped at gas stations and exchanged money before they ran out of either. They understood that sometimes an orgasm required an hour of quiet patience. And mostly, there was talk that was easy and never strained. They were both women; they had the same needs, fears, desires, ways of enjoying a trip.
    One week into traveling with Sally, Katherine realized that her entire lifetime of being with men had been a huge mistake. But at least she saw that now; like a dazed new cult member, Katherine knew she'd never go back.
    After the second week traveling with Sally, certain small things had begun to get on Katherine's nerves: the way Sally expected to be cuddled for hours every night, even nights when Katherine felt too tired to cooperate. The way Sally insisted on taking two, sometimes even three, showers a day—which sometimes meant they didn't really have time to go out and do anything at all. The way Sally stroked Katherine's face, arms, shoulders, almost constantly. Even the fact that Sally talked too much, wanting to process every experience, every thought, every emotion known to humankind. It felt almost cloying.
    As the plane began its descent into Philadelphia, Katherine was thinking the unthinkable. She missed that particular guy smell, so like the piles of exotic burnt-orange, brown, and aged red spices she and Leroy had once been coerced into admiring down every little alleyway in Marrakech. She missed a little of that male energy that shouted, Outta the way, I'm here to get things done! She missed someone who wasn't afraid to remove the cockroaches and centipedes from the shower stall every morning.
    And mostly, she thought, giggling to herself as she dialed Leroy's cell number at the first pay phone she found, before even retrieving her luggage, what she missed perhaps more than anything was a good hard fuck.
    "Hello?" he answered.
    "Leroy, how I've missed you," said Katherine, and laughed.



About the author:
Jala Pfaff has published short fiction, essays, and poetry in Rose & Thorn, Slow Trains, The Hiss Quarterly, and Stone Table Review. Her first novel is Seducing the Rabbi. Visit her at www.jalapfaff.com.


© 2009 Jala Pfaff