DON'T LET THE DOLEDRUMS FOOL YOU
Tempting Goodness for Outdoor Meals, boasted the advertisement. Vera studied the package for margarine with big gray eyes. It gave her ideas, but then she remembered that time in April. She had prepared Jell-o topped with whipped cream in a bowl and had waited for Jim to come to his bed. Once he appeared, coming out from his study just down the hallway, she had begged him to sample one of the ten delicious flavors over her vagina. He became furious with her.
"Vera! What's gotten into you?"
He had done it again, had made her feel ashamed. He had called her "perverse".
"You've got some nerve calling me names, Jim Woodward, as if pussy for dessert wasn't the very thing men dream of!"
"A w-what?!" Jim had reproached in stutters, until she promised to wash her pretty mouth out with soap.
She came out of the bathroom a half-hour later in her blue cotton bath robe and a yellow towel wrapped around the russet-brown locks cascading upward into a thick funnel reminiscent of an African Queen.
Going back to blow-dry her hair, Vera could see Jim eying her in the mirror and Jim's boner was poking out of his red and gold checkered pajamas that he had changed into. He was anxiously sitting on his bed in privileged confidence.
_That ungrateful beast of mine,_ she had thought. _What happened to the man I married? What happened to the boy who used to feel me up during our movie dates?_
Vera had grown tired of those missionary style thrusts and the glazed eyes that looked right through her. She had slid into bed and austerely refused his advances. Jim reached from his separate mattress and pulled her to his arch in anger. Vera threatened to kick him and he let go with a sigh and punched his pillow. After a few seconds of additional protest, Jim gave up and went to sleep.
Jim had always been a charmer to look at, such as this evening in his new charcoal suit with the red and gold tie that she had bought him for his birthday the previous November, but he was a frigid lover.
Even now, into their fifth year of marriage, he was a rack of nerves in bed. If she rubbed his hard bony manhood before coital penetration, he would get excited and ejaculate all over her unloved pussy. Her sepia-cloistered flower of evil would sit like a cuttlefish until God-fearing Jim rolled over and fell asleep.
She had begun to enjoy doing it herself. Her fingers had become her only joy in marriage, save for big half-peeled cucumbers and the spin cycle on their washing machine.
Jim was a missionary-style hack. When he came home drunk after weekend men's night poker games he was a stinking bore and would probe her pink silk-panty-covered ass uninvited with his flaccid little meat slab until passing out into a dull roar.
Sometimes during those alcoholic nights he would get rough with her and bruise the soft creamy lip of her pink clitoris with his poorly aimed thrusts. If not for the pain and discomfort, it would be a welcomed change to their stud-bitch bedside manner, in which she often felt like a robot-sex-doll enslaved to their little suburban home in the middle of Flint, Michigan.
Vera could not get pregnant. This had added to her depression of late and in consequence their doctor had recommended lithium. She had been on it ever since, going on three months now, but the stuff wasn't working. She had seen Dr. Von Franz for a second opinion.
Everyone in town was afraid of Dr. Von Franz because he prescribed alternative medicine based on his research in the Amazon Rainforest of South America. Everyone was afraid except her Aunt Clara and the Hippolyta Group, a society of women of which her aunt was a member. Jim's side of the family was strongly opposed to such "pagan blasphemy and hooliganism", and Jim forbade Vera from having anything to do with Aunt Clara or Dr. Von Franz.
The recollection deflated her as she prepared the evening meal. They were having Tom and Liz over for a dinner party. Tom was Jim's friend from work and Liz was Tom's wife. Tom and Jim were engineers at General Motors.
It was a June Saturday in the year 1956. Jim had allowed her to return a few books at the public library and now she was skimming the color pages of a National Geographic.
Advertisements had taken over her women's magazines, attempting to control her through male-dominant subliminal messages. They wanted to keep her tractable and tame. They wanted her to tell Jim to buy things so that in turn she felt indebted.
Vera, like Liz, was a stay-at-home wife. Vera's mother had been a Rosie the Riveter during the war making tanks and ammunition shells and Vera had practically spent her childhood at the factory. She had dreamed of becoming a scientist like Marie Curie but had married right out of high school.
A few years her senior, Jim Woodward had been captain of the baseball team. Some slugger he was now. He and Tom went golfing some weekends, which was the only time that either of them stroked their wood, Vera gathered—they were both raised Catholic. Liz was a Presbyterian. Vera was Methodist.
But Vera _had_ visited her eccentric aunt, who had introduced her to the even more eccentric Dr. Von Franz. A man approximately in his early forties, Von Franz wore small round glasses and had receded, short, curly white-blond hair.
His office was filled with oddities: shrunken heads, creepy-crawlies in jars of formaldehyde, long, hand-carved pipes and blow guns, and exciting black-and-white photographs of Amazonian witch doctors and similarly unimaginable things beyond the scope of Vera's 1950s America.
After a strange examination involving pungent, oddly scented pipe smoke and exotic pan flute music playing in the background, Doctor Von Franz prescribed her something called ayahuasca, which she was to administer orally from a beaker only during a full moon.
"Only joking, of course," he had said, "unless you're into Awajún witchcraft. But don't overdo it! This stuff is potent!"
Today, the Saturday of June 28th, the moon was full in the daylight, although barely noticeable within the bleu celeste, and despite Vera's fear of acting strangely during their dinner party, she had anxiously taken her first dose. It was a leap year, after all, and anything was possible. Maybe tonight was the night.
THE PARTY'S IN THE KITCHEN
"Honey! Tom and Liz are here! Could you come out here for a second, dear?"
"Be right there!" Vera shouted casually as she placed the knife on the cutting board. She went out to greet their guests. "Hello Liz, Tom! Glad you could make it!"
Liz was wearing her blue plaid dress, which made Vera think of Scottish Highlanders, to fit her scrawny body like a package and Tom was handsome in his charcoal gray suit and red checkered tie (boringly similar to Jim's casual ensemble). Liz was a blonde beauty with squinting blue eyes. Tom was stocky and athletic and slightly shorter than Jim, at five foot eight. He had dark brown hair, cut short into a crew and beginning to recede. "You look lovely, Vera," said Tom, kissing her on the cheek. Yet Tom was keenly aware that something was amiss with Vera—she could see it in his troubled green eyes.
She and Liz went to the kitchen while Jim and Tom vanished into the study.
"Here, what can I help you with?" Liz said. She had placed the brownies on the counter while Vera was setting the white wine inside the fat little Frigidaire.
"Almost got it," assured Vera. "The roast is in the oven. I just need to finish preparing the salads and..." She looked at Liz from across the island. "You have such lovely hair."
"Thank you," said Liz, blushing. A beautiful smile lifted her face. "I can't seem to do very much with it, so I just let it hang. Yours is so flexible. I'm jealous."
