Sapphic Images

While I sat in the lobby of a local breakfast restaurant awaiting my tenth-grade high school English teacher, a woman who failed to surface for reasons unknown, I flashed to twenty-four hours earlier, to another local breakfast restaurant where my friend Naomi and I had eaten misshapen, unphotogenic ham, egg, and cheese sandwiches that looked like they’d been made by hidden camera pranksters.

I complimented our waitress’s Todd Rundgren tee shirt, joked about the “Klan rally energy” of the all-white eaters surrounding us, and wondered about the locale of the unseen bathroom, hinting that the diner who’d just entered the back room would likely piss on the loaves of bread in view. It was shaping up to be a day no different than my Saturday adventures with Sue, now capably replaced by her childhood best friend, a fellow amateur sociologist fond of blue humor, cussing, and the freewheeling conversation I’m constantly poised to indulge.

Naomi and I had gone out to lunch and to visit area thrift stores the previous summer, so I’d suggested a sequel with three shops Sue and I had patronized, bookending the day with breakfast and dinner stops. Roy, Naomi’s husband, told her that although I’m a “lesbian,” she still couldn’t sleep with me, friendly antagonism I welcomed, now in a phase of life where my unwanted bachelorhood finally granted me access to become “one of the girls.”

“Are you noticing how many people shuffle their feet in here?” I said when we arrived at the first store.

“No, but I will now!” Naomi said, adding her ungrateful thanks. “How do you do this place?” she asked about my route.

“Loop around the perimeter then do the inside. I’ll see ya!”

Of course, as two sarcastic assholes keen to share our judgments with receptive and reactive ears, we kept returning to one another, like when I found a booth containing two items: MAGA hats and brightly colored rubber accessories.

“This guy’s theme is, ‘I want to be in a cult, but I also love keychains!’” I said loud enough for nearby shoppers to hear, not getting any bites. “You see that woman just walk by with the exact thing you wanted?”

“I know!” Naomi said. “I thought, ‘There goes that bitch with my bench!’”

Naomi had been on the hunt for a bench to sit on when taking off shoes at her home along with a towel holder (no clue either), vintage board games, old toys (“the kind with lead in them”), and a Tesla album; I’d hoped to find watercolors of eggplants and/or bread to complete a living room food-based wall theme, settling for a record, incense, and freeze-dried candy instead.

“This is like the grocery store,” I said. “You keep running into the same people.”

“The worst.”

“Nice of them to not have the heat on. You should ‘borrow’ one of these coats and wear it until we get to the register.”

“My vest was the wrong choice today,” she said, wearing a long sleeve black top with an open knit pattern I complimented, but not for its functionality.

“We’re gonna leave here with frostbite.”

“What do you put in here?” Naomi asked about plastic ice cream cones with removable tops. “My friend Jannette loves ice cream, but what the fuck’s she gonna do with this?”

“Store it by her bedside and fill it with phlegm and pus. By the way, I don’t trust any grown man in a tight sweater,” I said about a nearby browser.

As we cashed out, I commented on the large screen displaying security camera feeds, realizing there were forty-eight of them.

“You guys ever get lost staring at one?” I asked the two women working.

“Not really.”

“Where’s the secret one with the bathroom feed?”

“We don’t have one of those.”

“Yeah, right. With all those signs about throwing away sanitary napkins in the separate trash, I know you’re watching. Dying inside when you see another woman flush a used pad.”

“We don’t do that!”

“They’re watching your menstrual cycle in the bathroom here!” I loudly joked, again failing to get the reaction I wanted aside from employee laughter.

“Can you hold this?” Naomi asked on our walk to my car, which I’d almost absentmindedly left running when we headed inside.

“Did you buy some used cum?” I said upon noticing clear liquid in her hand.

“I took a squirt of sanitizer,” she said.

“Gonna tell Roy you thrifted for jizz?”

At our second stop, I spotted those damn Christmas dolls, the type with open mouths that look like they’re permanently ready to perform fellatio, imitating them for Naomi’s amusement.

“Sue hated these things!”

“They are fuckin’ weird. I kept hearing a foot shuffler behind me and thought you were fucking with me until I turned around. They’re everywhere.”

“Told you! Found a two-dollar cookbook showing how to make desserts with almost any fruit. Look at how ugly food pictures were forty years ago.”

“I should buy it for Sarah,” Naomi said about her daughter. “I made a roast the other night. Sarah claims to not like pork, so I told her I was making a beef roast, but then once I cooked it and tried a bite to be sure, I realized it was pork. Still served it to her and she was too stupid to notice. I’m not telling her.”

“If she can’t taste the difference, that’s her problem. Nothing here for you?”

“No. I hate how so much stuff is behind glass. And how are these tiny pieces of glass three hundred bucks?”

“Saw similar stuff with Julie last fall for the same price,” I said about one of Sue’s other friends, now referred to by a fake name due to a falling out generated by an essay I wrote.

“You think you’ll ever hear from her?”

“Not anytime soon, but maybe someday.”

“I don’t think I told you this, but when you let me pick out some pieces of Sue’s jewelry, I purposefully picked one ring with a missing stone. I wanted it to be imperfect.”

A fitting tribute to a friendship ended too soon, although Naomi revealed how she sent Sue a card upon learning that Sue’s sister died in 2007. Sue called to thank her, the last time they spoke to one another. It had become a round robin relationship: Naomi and Sue, Sue and me, and now Naomi and me. The missing stone would’ve been symbolically perfect if it was a diamond, Sue’s birthstone, but she didn’t believe in purchasing expensive rings, the metaphor ultimately flawed like the ring itself.

“I hate this font,” I said about wooden signs surely tempting any middle-aged woman with terrible taste in a room at our third stop. “Always with some bullshit saying on them too.”

“Those are the fuckin’ worst!”

“The only exceptions I make are for ones about how housework can kill you. Unrelated, but what’s up with these cute young girls who wear glasses normally worn by seventy-year-old Jewish men?”

“It’s a thing. That’s how they get your attention by not wanting your attention.”

“I’m gonna walk up to one and say, ‘L’chaim!’”

Disappointed that our third stop had nothing for either of us, I recommended a fourth store as a way to eat dinner at a nearby place we both love. Naomi disclosed how she hadn’t gotten a job she applied for recently, indicating that part of the reason she wanted it was to quit working for her current supervisor, a woman lacking people skills who she had a difficult time respecting. I commended her ability to sacrifice the politically incorrect elements of her personality I loved prior to her detailing how she offered small pieces of her non-corporate self to select co-workers, earning their admiration in turn.

“You can’t treat adults like children and expect them to not act like children,” she said.

“Being real is the easiest way to earn the respect of strangers,” I said. “I give you a ton of credit for working in corporate America for…how long?”

“Thirty-eight years,” a tenure that included when her employer removed the male genitalia from their mascot, something the distaff surely preferred to earning pay equivalent to their still un-castrated co-workers.

“I’m gonna run in the back and get some stuff done,” one cashier said to another at our final stop.

“She’s going to do drugs,” I told the other girl.

“Oh, stop,” the lady said with a smile. “That’s the last thing I’d be doing.”

“That’s what drug users always say!” Naomi and I said in tandem.

I did my usual do-si-do with the remaining cashier, goading her to pick on me for walking in a circle while I waited for her to scan each album I’d plucked then write its title on a college-lined notebook ledger, Naomi later giving the gal credit for hanging with me throughout the verbal sparring, the give and take as much of a turn-on as the brunette’s inexplicably endearing lisp caused by her borderline invisible braces.

“I forgot to ask for a single barrel shotgun for the table,” I told our waitress at a two-hundred-year-old pub with ample firearm décor. “Would you believe these wings are good?”

“Yeah, they’re okay,” she said while smirking.

“The water is good too,” Naomi joked.

“The finest in all the county,” I added.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you this,” Naomi said, “cuz Sarah asked me, ‘Do you think Adam has the hots for me?’”

“What’d you say?” I felt more alive than I had all day.

“I told her, ‘Adam would never be interested no matter what because you have a kid.’”

“You can tell her I think she’s cute, but the age gap’s another deterrent. She posted a video on Instagram this morning that she was on the George Washington Bridge, so I wrote back saying it was really the John Adams Tunnel. She then called me a loser for paying attention in Geography class, so I wrote back that I’d made the name up and asked ‘Who’s the loser now?’”

A petite blonde girl with a nose ring, one of Sarah’s friends conveniently eating nearby, stopped at our table with her toddler to say hello as I wiped sauce off my hands and offered to take photos of the three of them together. After she left, I confirmed that she was the woman Naomi had mentioned was trying to convince her husband to have a second child. When I checked my messages during a bathroom break, Sarah had inquired, “You two dykes scissor each other yet?” but I chose to respond later.

One final bit of spontaneity arose as we diverged to a diner for dessert, the same place I’d visited a week prior and complimented a tan Asian hostess’s braids and fingernails, my friend Sam saying, “You do have a type!”

The same adorable girl seated us as Naomi said, “Yeah, that girl’s seventeen.”

As we chatted and kept waiting for our server, I told Naomi how she both acted and looked younger than her age, same as Sue, and then discussed how my fondness for people, especially one on one, led to other friends telling me how it caused me to consistently ignore how stupid people truly are. We also chatted about an elderly lady in stained sweatpants, segueing to the disadvantages of being a woman after Naomi said she couldn’t leave the house without doing her hair, putting on makeup, or changing out of her pajamas, needing to do one of the three to feel comfortable about presenting herself to the world, an issue never challenging me(n).

“We’ve been looking for you,” I said upon greeting our server, her apologizing that the busy Saturday night crowd delayed our order. Later, I complimented her heart-decorated fingernails when she resurfaced.

“I grew up an only child with a single mother,” I said, not that Naomi required a defense for my feminine instincts.

“I miss Sue, and I know how much you miss Sue, but I’m glad we get to do this.”

“It’s very similar to my days with her,” I said. “The four of us would’ve had a blast together had you reconnected with her, but so it goes.”

First, one of my best friends had accused me of dressing like a lesbian skateboarder, and now I was enjoying the company of one of my numerous platonic female friends assuming her husband imagined us in matching Thelma & Louise get-ups. (Having ties to my favorite person didn’t hurt either.) Opting not to grab a nutrition-themed paperback from Sue’s bookshelf, I insisted Naomi at least try a freeze-dried Skittle in the driveway prior to heading home.

“Ooh, these are good!” she said, exhibiting a fondness for weird sweets comparable to her old buddy.

“Thanks again,” I said while we hugged. “I’ll see you soon in the group chat.”

Before I did, I opened my message history with her daughter and wrote back: “We ran into Alyssa at dinner. I convinced her and her husband to have the second kid, but the baby must be conceived during some vigorous anal before he ‘accidentally’ slips into her birth canal while cumming. Heartwarming family fun.”

Would Sarah read between the sodomy-stained lines? Would Naomi report back, as I requested, with my reaction to Sarah’s inquiry? Naomi had mentioned that Sarah said I was cute, the same thing I’d heard from middle-aged women since I was a kid. Sue had given me her childhood best friend, and now her childhood best friend teased giving me her daughter. Infanticide would certainly be as forbidden as the lesbian sex Roy prohibited, but perhaps Sarah would find another new way to enjoy pork. Not mine, at least in the wake of my new yonic phase, but we could work out the details later. The only notch needed in my belt was another new gal pal with whom I could gossip and share our innate feminine intuition. But you better believe that the first time I caught her flushing sanitary products on video I’d secretly recorded, I’d post it in the group chat so Naomi and I could comically backstab her, no strings attached when we got to scissoring.