Delilah rubbed the tip of the straw, lightly tapping the bed of her finger over it. The band had stopped playing already, it was Thursday. There was nothing left of her milkshake but a puddle of dry pink goop swaddled at the bottom of the cone glass, the perfectly circular, equally dry remnants of bubbles over the straw like leftover scars on a smallpox victim.
Tim finished off the last of his fries and wiped the grease from his fingers on the bed of paper that lay over the plastic bowl, firetruck red. Delilah looked at him without much of a thought. Nothing about him seemed to interest her too much aside from if the meal was good or if work was fine. His inner world remained his, and he liked it that way for the most part..
He was horrified and irritated by her feeble attempts at beauty and glamour, which aggravated his disdain for the true belief she held in her own beauty and glamour. The way she spinned her shoulders back and held her chin up like she had to balance an apple on her head. Ridiculous. She was a tramp, anyone could see that. Made him recoil. Her plump little earlobes were rarely ever not stained green from the cheap nickel jewelry, stray bits of glitter finding their way into her pores. That horrid darkness around her eyes, smudging black and blue down all over her eye sockets when she came back home from work, her mascara clumped and thick like the legs on a spider and her crimped white blonde hair, chocolate black at the roots which stretched down to her brows. She really thinks she’s Marilyn, he scoffed.
She bent over the booth table and picked up his leftover pickle with her long fingernails, smiling. The lace on her ultra-pink bra peeked over her coral orange tank, which squeezed her torso. She had this same top, spaghetti straps and down to her hips, in about eight different colors. Bright coral, neon aqua, black, hot red, hot pink, baby pink, ultraviolet. He was forgetting one. Maroon.
Same with her damned bra, each too small for her grotesque breasts and spilling her cleavage everywhere, a whole drawer of different lace patterns and colors and rhinestone straps for a special day out and a green and orange one for St. Patrick's day. Each with its matching pair of panties and some with a matching babydoll gown or strappy harness. Frivolous purchases, Tim thought. She was a big spender, half a big earner too, a while back. At this rate there would never be enough money for a new car. This was the more pressing matter, not a new get-up or new perfume from Walmart.
She loved those body spritzes from the expensive stores, the ones with shimmer, super thin glitter that was impossible to wash off clothes or bedsheets, let alone her sticky sweet skin, those nauseating sweet perfumes which she layered over each other, vanilla, peach cobbler, whatever else. Chocolate.
This one time, Delilah came home with a big bag of flavored makeup. Birthday cake flavored lipstick, creamsicle flavored skin mousse, a cotton candy flavored shimmer puff powder, whatever else. About two hundred dollars for the whole lot. Tim was fuming with rage. He threw it all away expecting her to key his car, but she resigned quietly. This made him feel strangely guilty, frustrated, but before he could scrounge up the courage to ask for forgiveness she was acting normal again, though they didn’t talk for about a week. He didn’t realize that she had bought herself a new set the day he threw his fit. He didn’t find out about it until her powder ran out and he found it in the trashcan.
He must’ve somehow assumed all lip balms tasted like butterscotch and all women had a hint of weird chemical cherry pie to their skin. He could be quite dense sometimes.
The drive back home was quiet, which got him thinking about when her mother died and she did nothing but lay motionless on the bed, too weak to speak. She couldn’t talk at all, only stared relentlessly at the fan. Eerily quiet for a woman such as her. She was a big crier, cried at roadkill and lifetime movies or love songs, but that all consuming terror of wails and weeps never got to her while they stayed in her childhood home for the funeral, or the motel before the final drive back home. She was glassy eyed with her lips quivering in the car for that, and it was probably the first time he ever saw her without makeup.
For a second it was relieving to see her in her natural state. Her dry animal body flat across the flashy neon bed and neon walls and neon beads and sparkles. Her sort of staggering decay, her spine limp rather than erect to push her chest out, her face was glossy from the tears and pale and bare, doughy, and it seemed stone gray in contrast to all her belongings. Like a mummy surrounded by gems and gold. It was almost comical.
After about a week of sulking, he got irritated and left her on her own while he crashed at a friend’s couch. When he returned after about two weeks he found her face bloated from the crying but no longer wet, more so dry from the tears and deflated over the mattress, ravaged and unmade, the bedding peeled from the edges and folded in all sorts of ways. For a second, he thought she might be dead. It smelled like hell, body odor and piss. She was alive. It took her two weeks to get back to work, about two months to get back to her old ways. By this time, they had changed her role from dancer to waitress to dancer for a week then hostess again. The pay was fine.
Seeing her so disarmed and simple that one time made it so that he could not stand the sight of her doing her makeup or putting her damaged platinum hair up into a big updo again. Not that he could ever stand it, he was just especially cruel about it now, could simply not bear it. Not that, not her crystal heels clicking or her thick nails tapping, about two inches long and curved.
He couldn’t remember how they even ended up together, or if he ever truly loved her, or where they even met. Delilah was a fact of life now, much like work on Monday or his own eventual death. She was there in the morning to wake him up, there at night to heat up some dinner. There to nag, to ask for his coat in the rain or the cold, to fuck.
He pictured her somewhere else, dead in a ditch, as a groupie, as a hooker. Her working the pole. That's how they met, he assumed. Good pay, at least. As stated, a tramp.
But that was long ago. For now, they stayed in a decently sized trailer. Neither he nor her seemed to really mind it, but he didn’t like the way she set up the place. The walls were turquoise and the bed was zebra print, hot fuchsia beaded curtains separating the bedroom and the kitchen. He pleaded for her to change it but she never listened. It was her trailer, after all.
If you hate it so much, then go stay at a motel she rang over him with her frilly southern voice, loud as a thundering sky. The big goddess of consumption and cheap glamour. He tried, but he couldn't make the money stretch. She was kind. She always bought him a box of his favorite cigarettes and candies when she went to the store, always happy to see him again after work even after a fight. He could try to be mean, she seemed too stupid to figure it out. But she did.
They got home, he grabbed himself a beer and upon finishing it they had sex. It was cold and utilitarian, but that's all he ever really wanted from it. Delilah laid there in protest after without a word, refusing to get up to wash and hoping for Tim to figure out she was upset, as was routine. He didn’t think of it, never noticed. They both lay quiet and he fell into his slumber as she waited for him to say something, ask what's wrong. It wasn't until he started snoring that Delilah obliged and rolled herself to her side, half upset and half relieved that they didn’t fight tonight. She fell asleep.
