Clementine

The day hasn’t been a shade over grey in the sky, on the ground, in this house which gives way to an obnoxious assortment of colors. The grey is coming from a heated disagreement at the dining room table between Kenny and his girlfriend, Caroline over the length of a denim skirt. Kenny, with his blood orange tan and hair, soft features, and pale overalls, feels the length is too short while Caroline, whose skin and hair are as mahogany as her eyes in a plain off-white t-shirt that drapes to her knees, believes the length meets socially acceptable regulation. And even if it didn’t, she doesn’t care because there isn’t much she cares about. The heat of the disagreement doesn’t rise above a calm tone which makes calling it an argument unnecessary and may even disarm any sort of possible “heat” that could be displayed in their words.

The skirt sits right above my knees, Kenny, she sighs, her pendulum eyes growing more and more distant while her arm props her head up to prevent nodding off. He narrows his eyes and stands at the table, measuring his height in his head and wondering how much he can assert dominance before he is dismissed as misogynistic or patronizing at the least. But it shows your knees and guys can go gaga over some knees, he hisses almost inaudibly but not enough for Caroline to miss the words or pass them over.  Who in the hell drools over knees but then again, maybe Kenny is aware of or considers himself a part of some circle of men who worship some good knees. 

Caroline shifts back and forth in her chair until she stands because the wicker grows uncomfortable but of course, not as uncomfortable as she feels debating the length of a denim skirt. It’s not a grass skirt or something sheer and it’s not exposing her ass from the hem but if Kenny isn’t wearing it, it must be inappropriate. Kenny glosses over the grey outside and then the empty look on Caroline’s face before retiring to the faux bay window in their living room. Quit being sullen, Caroline. The answer’s no and he sticks a firm pin in that statement, possibly hoping it would convince her to wave a white flag but instead, she poses with the skirt in a full body mirror pressed against a corner of the living room. 

Kenny literally blows hot air at the sight of Caroline posing as if she’s going to wear the denim skirt and he imagines, either out of spite or out of genuine independence, she’s leaving the house in it shortly. There isn’t much he can do to dissuade her and there isn’t much she can do to convince him and therein lies a medium that isn’t happy or unhappy. He doesn’t hate the skirt but feels it reveals too much and she doesn’t hate his opinion but she feels it’s misguided or misinformed. There isn’t so much as a breath that leaves the thin line Kenny’s lips make as Caroline disappears upstairs and reappears downstairs in an off-white graphic tee, minimal makeup, combat boots, and the denim skirt he uneasily watches approach the door. 

I’m meeting up with Clementine, she states pointedly without turning towards him because it’s pointless to forgive when she isn’t ready if her boyfriend might feel he’s done anything that warrants asking for or receiving forgiveness. She exits the house without his rebuttal and when the blinds open, his eyes drop to a cushion in the faux bay window; his blood orange tan appearing to suddenly match the overcast sky. Caroline swings open her maroon sedan, turns back to Kenny who hasn’t lifted his eyes or closed the blinds and starts the engine. She adjusts her rearview mirrors and occasionally looks skyward because the weather seems as though it’s calling for rain and to be on the safe side, she rolls up her windows and swerves out of the driveway before slowing to a reasonable crawl. 

The world is catching up with Caroline in her 1991 car and its 1891 pace, not as if she’s watching the tortoise lovers wave at her or imitate one when she slides by. She’s been more focused on trying not to picture Kenny in the passenger seat tugging or attempting to tug on her skirt as if it would extend the hem or something. She passes the tanning salon where he turned blood orange and she remembers the denim skirt adorned with nylon flowers she wore there. He didn’t tug on it before he sat in the tanning bed and after he emerged an Oompa-Loompa, he didn’t tug on it. Much as she doesn’t care about the salon, the laughable tan or the people who expressed how laughable it was, she admittedly cared that Kenny didn’t tug on her skirt the way he did with every other skirt she wore which is why she made it her mission not to care. 

Her best friend Clementine doesn’t care about the length of her clothes and never did. They met in a coffee shop five years ago with equally deep purple hair, a punk/preppy contrast in clothing, and several hours worth of university homework to burn through between them. Clementine maintains the belief that she made the first move from her seat closer to the register to a stool adjacent to Caroline but the way Caroline remembers it is that the two of them, sitting parallel to one another, said nothing for the first fifteen minutes before they asked the other’s opinion of the shop at the same time. Clementine expressed how quaint the place is as a slice of heaven/hole-in-the-wall away from the franchises and Caroline regarded the shop as an escape from the perils of overpriced university coffee and not once in branching off into other conversations did the length of Caroline’s skirt come up. 

Caroline mentioned how she was bound to a boy who emigrated from London to California in search of that ideal American girl and the reason why she didn’t leave him was that he gave her more attention than anyone else did. Clementine gritted her teeth over a relationship of a lower caliber with a boyfriend from Denmark who started as a witty guy with the knowledge of when to be insightful and when to be goofy only for him to taper off into some one-note hodgepodge of seriousness she already received from her classes. I would take the London boy any day of the week, she noted in a smirk as if pinning an asterisk to her sentence, waiting to follow up Caroline’s response with a “but”.  Take the London boy, he sees the pub more than he sees me, she giggled and Clementine rewards the answer with a dry So much for a free trip to Europe. 

Clementine nearly disregarded her work over the thought of her in the arms of Caroline’s Romeo and that is when she rifled through her bag for six pages of psychology homework. Caroline’s grin widened as if it was a hot serve from a tennis racket and smacked seven pages of calculus homework on her table as they slid the two tables together, wondering if the Denmark boy could give her more attention since he was boring. They guffawed in short bursts, all of the laughter muffled by their hands over the mouth as they witnessed the short mountain of paper they have amassed from school. They got started with their work in ballpoint pen and conversation about the first thing to come to mind- sex. Clementine didn’t have any sexual anecdotes about her one-dimensional man except for the one time when they did attempt to have sex and she fell asleep in the middle of his stroke while Caroline had a goldmine to share. 

There’s this guy I’ve been seeing while Liam, that’s my boyfriend’s name, is out getting hammered at the pub, she started almost as a cautionary tale but loosened up because she didn’t care. Kenny is the guy I see and he tans way too much but he’s cute and funny and knows what he’s doing in bed. Clementine attempted to contain her excitement and the closest she got to that was biting her bottom lip and crossing her legs around the table stand but of course, she at least appeared to intermittently focus on her work. I plan on breaking up with Liam because he seems to want more of a relationship with the pub than me, Caroline declared half-sad, half-excited to push forward from her unresponsive, beer-loving man, as she realized the true reason why she held on was for that free trip to Europe when he decided to visit family. 

Clementine anticipated more sex stories at first and Caroline was prepared to part with them but between the two of them, they were content with the brief story about Kenny that had vague details but more depth than Clementine’s miserable time in bed. She wanted to advise her to dump Liam and move things along with Kenny but she had the feeling that was on the itinerary and once she announced it, she sighed with relief. With two hours remaining in the coffee shop, they attended to their respective work in silence until they finished and left for their cars. They exchanged numbers and went their separate ways as Caroline knitted her brows together on the way to her dorm, worried about breaking the news to Liam until she pictured her experience with Kenny in comparison. 

Caroline called Liam over the weekend to come over to talk when she heard the voice of an older woman in the background calling for him to “come back to bed.” She yelled that it was over, hung up the phone, and wept into her pillow before she called Clementine and continued to weep. Caroline never saw Liam again once they graduated but she saw Clementine who would transition from the preppy phase to something more easygoing and she saw Kenny who would transition from her sideman to her boyfriend. Kenny liked Clementine but not in the way where he would leave or consider leaving Caroline and the feeling was mutual. Clementine stayed single on purpose for a while and watching Kenny gradually tug at Caroline’s skirts convinced her that she didn’t need to be in a relationship any time soon, not that she fell in love anyway as she wasn’t in love with the boring Denmark boy during or following her university days.  

Caroline loved Kenny because he remembered her birthday, their anniversary, and their song, right down to how she eats roasted vegetables from the left side forward. She loved him because he wasn’t afraid to be emotionally transparent whether he felt compelled to or not. She loved him because he postponed some times with his friends to spend some quality hours with her curled up watching a silent or black and white film. She loved him because he let her chop his flowing hair down to a buzzcut when they knew she wasn’t handy with scissors or a razor. She drew the line at his judgment of her skirt length which happened often and while it never devolved into something uncivilized between them, it was an argument and a potent enough argument to ruin their week. 

Clementine never wedged herself between what she called their “serene spats” in real-time since their voices were barely raised above a whisper but never bothered to reach a shout or the mere concept of one. She did address them individually to have their side of the story and their response was similar only Kenny’s was blunt but careful while Caroline’s was sweet yet direct. She sensed a tension that she didn’t attempt to defuse and neither Kenny nor Caroline attempted to coerce her in choosing sides. They calmly expressed their opinions to her and made up in the subsequent week by burying the disagreement under dinner and an apple pie which is something they’ve done at least fifteen times throughout their five-year relationship. 

All the flashback is gone as are all the tortoise fanatics berating Caroline’s car and possibly her for its speed. The train station is as empty as the look in her driver’s side rearview mirror as she undoes her watch from her wrist and wraps it around the steering wheel, melting into the leather interior. The rain didn’t come for any of them and it doesn’t come now either and maybe meteorologists or the people who write their scripts are the liars. She wanted to be a meteorologist when she attended high school but changed her mind when she remembered her dad, who divorced from her mother when she was three, was the chief meteorologist in the county. 

The world grows dark as Caroline’s eyes close for a minute since she successfully dispelled Kenny’s myth about skirts attracting thirsty men to knees in her mind. She has a vision of Clementine alone at the station calling her and when her phone buzzes, she believes it has to be part of the dream which leads her to turn over rather than answer her phone. Her phone continues to ring until she shakes the sleep from her eyes and answers it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes and you better not be fighting with Kenny, Clementine warns in a maternal tone and Caroline allows dead air to take the reins for a minute before releasing a nervous laugh.