Even Strippers Get Days Off

Now that I have fully recovered from the month of May I feel that it is time to share a story.

I fell in love with a woman other than my wonderful girlfriend two months ago and I need to lay the truth on the line. I have been living a shameful lie for far too long and can’t catch my breath at night because of it. I jolt awake in our shared bed, saturated in a cold sweat and spend hours trying to rock myself back into a dreaming state. A lump rises in my throat at the mere mention of this lunacy as my panic begins to mount.

If I don’t come clean now my conscience will eat me like a party sub in a break room full of depressed, underpaid soccer moms. This blatant deceit is not a fact that I am proud of and not something that I have shared with a lot of people. My girlfriend knows the truth, and together, we are wading through the pain and distrust that I have caused within our relationship.

Even though it’s wrong, and I know I shouldn’t stick to the overplayed story that I couldn’t help myself but…well…there you have it. The feelings that conquered me weren’t guided by my consciousness but by something else entirely. It simply couldn’t be helped. 

I first noticed the mystery woman when I walked into my girlfriend’s apartment one afternoon. Laughing and muttering to herself in the kitchen, she was methodically opening and closing cupboard doors in all of her silver-haired glory. She seemed to be surveying the situation that was my girlfriend’s tidy kitchen and noting a mental checklist. My infatuation with her sealed itself instantly. She was tall, pretty, hilarious, had a great laugh and bright eyes, was 78 years old and…

Yeah, you read right. She was 78, my girlfriend’s grandmother and a near duplicate of my late grandma Katie. My grandmother, who was my entire life and heart, died in the summer of 2002. Today is her birthday and I plan to honor her by celebrating her life and her beauty.

Here’s to you Gram! Happy 78^th! I won’t eat cake because you were Diabetic and that seems wrong but I will spend the day telling your stories and possibly plaguing my co-workers with pictures. What the hell, you cheated with sweets all of the time. I am going to have some damned cake!

Upon meeting my girlfriend’s grandmother I was shocked to recognize so many of her comical quirks and qualities to be the same as my grandmother. In her presence I felt a sense of calm that I haven’t experienced since my before my grandmother left.

This fortunate meeting came about in May when my girlfriend’s family flew in from California. I had the opportunity to meet them for the first time and was edgy as hell to make a striking impression. I was worried but knew that if I couldn’t win them over with my personality, good looks or list of meticulously prepared jokes, I could fall back on gaining their respect with my superior dance moves.

Sweaty-palmed and stuttering like a jerk, I clasped the hands of her mother and stepfather and tried to act as respectfully serene as possible. Fingers crossed I did my best to not vomit on their shoes and go cross-eyed when I looked at them. Note: I am not generally cross-eyed but I was, however, worried that this inopportune condition would spontaneously develop in the presence of my high anxiety.

The introduction process with her grandmother was easier -much easier. She grinned at me, pounded me on the back and asked where we were taking her to dinner. She was positively starving. On our trudge to the restaurant bound car she managed to make four friends out of neighbors we had never seen before, pointed out three rabbits, complained about the sticky Arkansas heat and playfully grabbed a handful of my butt.

Uh-huh, that’s right. Her grandmother copped a feel within twenty minutes of meeting me. The woman moved even faster than her granddaughter. In her (seemingly innocent) weathered hand she managed to gather the majority of my left butt cheek and squeezed firmly. With my face burning red hot in mortification, I nearly had a seizure on the sidewalk.

Throughout the remainder of the visit, the comedy ensued. Her grandmother, whom I soon dubbed “G-mo”, kept me crimson-faced for the rest of her stay. My girlfriend’s parents, highly amused with my obvious discomfort, settled back on their haunches to enjoy the show. I was kept in a constant state of fluster and quickly schooled myself in either walking three strides behind G-mo or keeping my butt to the wall at all times. I had to protect the family trinkets and maintain dignity after all.

At the end of the long weekend, V’s parents cried their good-byes and boarded a plane back to California. G-mo was staying in Arkansas with us…for another month. I damned near had a coronary. You know the kind? When a 24 year old perfectly healthy female clutches her chest and sprawls to the floor in searing agony? Yeah, that was me.

G-mo stayed on and quickly became a part of our daily life. Everything was lovely, and we got along smashingly. I loved spending my after work hours devouring her colorful stories and being praised for my cooking. I loved seeing her curled on the chaise lounge with a newspaper each morning and padding around in her pajamas each night. Soon, V and I forgot what life was like without her in our home.

After a few days, she even got me highly (and very emotionally) involved in a Spanish soap opera. Every night at 6 p.m. the two of us would neglect all else to watch the dramatic adventure unfold. To tear our eyes from this television tragedy would’ve surely meant death. The much-loved hours from 6 p.m. until 10 p.m. became sacred. With G-mo by my side on the big red couch I laughed, I cried and I deeply felt the ache of the show’s key players.

Let’s be honest here. I am not bilingual and I had no freaking idea what was going on with our beloved characters. I was monkeying emotional cues straight from G-mo’s face and she knew it. With no real idea of what was going on with the show, I still leaned forward and shushed my bewildered girlfriend every time she tried to make conversation. It was an awesome sitcom –I think. Hell, I don’t know.

She took over our lives (in a good way) and hilariously changed our two-person dynamic. My friends and co-workers came to love my hundreds of G-mo stories and clambered to meet her on the weekends. The break room table became my stage where I would regale everyone with narratives from the night before.

The most favored stories were the stories in which G-mo made me think that I was going crazy. I would come home, begin to prepare dinner and notice that everything in the kitchen was in a different place then I remembered. Mystified, I would frantically paw through the cupboards trying to reestablish myself. Apprehensively peering into the refrigerator I would see that all of the leftovers from dinner that had been placed in Tupperware the night before had inexplicably found themselves in different storage containers. I would glance at G-mo perched on a nearby chair and question my sanity. Was the kitchen undergoing daily changes or did I need to consider being placed on medication? She would stare back at me, tilt her lips in a smile and go back to her reading.

One morning, while I was making sandwiches, I noticed that the bread bag was unusually short. It was early, weird and I was late so I shrugged the realization off. The next morning, the bag had shrunk even further and the puzzlement really began to set in. That night, when I cautiously questioned V, she giggled a little and explained that G-mo regularly trimmed the bread bags in the house.

Apparently this task cuts sandwich making time by 193 percent. Question answered! I had been wondering why I had been arriving to work three hours early each day.

Eventually G-mo began to get bored in diiiirty south Arkansas. You have no idea what insult is until you bore a 78 year old. She was homesick so my girlfriend gloomily booked her flight back to the sunny hills of California. We knew it would be strange in our house alone and hoped that we would remember how to fill the silence as a grandmother-less couple. It was time for her to go home.

As she flew off into the sunset, I grabbed my girlfriend’s arm and swiped at the tears streaking my face. Arkansas misses G-mo.  WE miss G-mo. If she comes back I promise not to walk so closely to the wall so she doesn’t have to work so hard for a handfull of booty.