"I want you to wear a skirt," he said.

Not This Guy -5-
by Suzan Donamas

Rollie had been through Jacksonville a few hundred times and had feelings about it.

"City'll eat you alive if you stop in the middle of it," he said. "We go through and stop on the other side. Then when we want to leave, we ain't in traffic trying to get away."

So we went through. Jacksonville in the early evening was loud and new and sprawling — construction cranes and fresh concrete and half-built things that would be something by next year — and I watched it all go past from the height of Gypsy's cab, looking down into the cars alongside us, feeling tall in a way I hadn't since yesterday morning when I'd been a different person and six feet one inch and selling earthmovers for a living. A woman in a station wagon glanced up at me, and I looked back at her and thought, you have no idea.

The city thinned on the north side, construction giving way to scrub pine and sandy soil, and Rollie took an exit with a Howard Johnson's and a strip of stores and a Sears sign visible from the highway.

"There's your Penneys," he said.

"That's a Sears," I said.

"Close enough," he said, and pulled Gypsy into the far end of the lot where there was room to breathe.

He came around and lifted me down from the cab. I liked the feel of his hands on my waist and made a noise to let him know that, and he grinned and set me on the asphalt.

"I want you to wear a skirt," he said as we walked toward the store.

I looked at him. "Why?"

"Because taking them pants off in the sleeper was like to kill me. You poked me in the eye with your elbow and your knee."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "That was your fault."

"I was exactly where I was supposed to be," he said. "It's the pants that were the problem."

I looked down at Guy Wendell's trousers, rolled at the cuffs, belted to within an inch of their life. They were not, I had to admit, a practical garment for the situation under discussion.

"A skirt," I said.

He made a vague gesture that somehow communicated something that moves out of the way without requiring surgery.

The heat went through me again and I looked at the Sears sign to collect myself.

"You're buying dinner," I said, and walked toward the entrance.

"I was always buying dinner," he said, and followed me in.

*

A saleswoman materialized with the professional radar of someone who had seen everything come through a Florida Sears on a Friday evening. She looked at me. She looked at Rollie. She looked at the knotted shirttails, which were doing what they did, and she made a decision about us that showed in her face for just a moment before she put it away.

"Can I help you find something?"

"Skirts," said Rollie. "And blouses. And whatever else she needs." He thought for a moment. "Underpants," he added helpfully.

The saleswoman looked at me with an expression that said honey without saying it out loud. "Right this way," she said.

I found underpants first. There was a rack of frilly ones in pastel colors — pink and yellow and a pale blue — and I held a pair up and felt completely goofy and then put them in the basket anyway. Then a package of plain white ones, more sensible, for the days when I was presumably going to be a sensible person.

The saleswoman, who said her name was Patsy and had the manner of someone who had fitted complicated women into difficult garments for twenty years and was not going to be surprised by anything, measured my waist and my hips without comment and brought me two denim skirts, one straight cut and one with a little flare at the hem.

"Both," said Rollie, from the chair where he'd settled in to supervise.

"I don't need both," I said.

"You need both," he said.

I got both.

For blouses, Patsy understood immediately — she picked five of them from three different racks, all with shirttails long enough to tie, all light enough for Florida and for whatever came after Florida. She did not comment on the knotted shirttail situation already in progress. I liked Patsy.

"Do you want to look at brassieres?" she asked.

I opened my mouth, and Rollie said, "Nope."

Patsy looked at Rollie. She looked at me. Something moved across her face that might have been a suppressed smile. "Shoes are over there," she said, and pointed, and that was that.

*

The shoe department had a young clerk with a cowlick who looked at my feet and asked my size. I had no idea. Guy Wendell had worn an eleven. These were not elevens.

"Measure them," said Rollie, installing himself in the adjacent chair as if he had season tickets.

Seven and a half. I said it out loud, just to hear it. Seven and a half. It seemed both surprising and completely right, like a lot of things about the last twenty-four hours.

"Now," said Rollie to the cowlick, "show her something with a chunky heel. Not too tall. Something she can walk in on a truck stop floor without killing herself."

The clerk looked at me.

"He's helping," I said.

The boots were thirty dollars, which was the most expensive item and worth it. Dark brown leather, a heel that was substantial without being precarious, and when I stood up in them I was tall enough to look Rollie nearly in the mouth, which produced a reaction in him that I noted for future reference.

I wore them out of the shoe department, and the chunky heels went click click click on the linoleum, and the denim skirt moved the way a denim skirt moves, and I did not look down at myself because the situation was already complicated enough.

Rollie bought the purse without consulting me. Pink leather, soft as anything, with a long strap for my shoulder. I looked at it.

"Pink," I said.

"Matches your everything," he said.

I put it on my shoulder. Patsy appeared from nowhere with a compact mirror, the professional instinct apparently overcoming all prior reservations. I looked at myself in the little circle of glass. Cowgirl hat. Knotted shirttails. Pink purse. The boots I could hear but couldn't see.

"Lord," I said quietly.

"Mm-hm," said Patsy, and took the compact back, and watched us head for the register.

*

The drugstore next door provided toothbrushes and a comb and the other things you need when you've left your whole life in a motel parking lot in Silver Springs. Rollie asked if I wanted makeup.

"You're pretty enough without it," he said. "You know that."

"Let's skip it," I said. "I wouldn't know how."

He nodded. "But we oughta get your hair seen to. That D.A. — someone who knows what they're doing could make it look more —" He moved his hand.

"Girly," I said.

"I was gonna say intentional."

I put my hand up to the duck-butt automatically. It had been there through everything — the spring, the motel, the Waffle Barn, the shoulder of a Florida highway, the back of Gypsy twice. It was the one thing that hadn't changed, which made it either a comfort or a problem, and possibly both.

"I'm keeping the cap," I said.

"Wouldn't have it any other way," he said.

The Braves cap went in the pink purse, the brim sticking out at an angle. It barely fit. That was fine. It was mine.

*

The beauty shop was three doors down and still open, because ladies get their hair done before they go out on a Friday night. The woman who did my hair was named Doris and she had the same quality Patsy had — she took in the situation, made her assessment, and got to work.

"You want to keep the shape?" she said, in the tone of someone who might have opinions.

"Yes," I said.

She kept the shape. She softened it, worked the front differently, did something with the sides that I couldn't follow in the mirror but felt. When she was done, the duck-butt was still there, more or less, but it had become a choice instead of a habit. The face under it looked like a woman who wore her hair this way because she wanted to, because it suited her, because she had decided.

I sat in the chair and looked at myself and thought: Gwen Telford. Twenty-three. Springfield, Illinois.

It fit better than anything I'd tried on at Sears.

I tipped Doris a dollar fifty and put the cowgirl hat on over the result and went back out to find Rollie leaning against the building with his arms crossed, watching the parking lot, and when he saw me he straightened up and looked for a moment with the specific attention of a man revising his already favorable opinion.

"Well," he said.

"Dinner," I said. "You promised me dinner."

*

We found a steakhouse a quarter mile up the road — white tablecloths, candles in glasses, a menu that had langostino on it, which I had never tried. We ordered steaks and langostino and all the trimmings, because neither of us had eaten a real meal since the Waffle Barn at four in the morning, and the food, when it came, was serious and good.

We ate for a while without talking much, the way you eat when you're hungry enough that conversation is a secondary concern. The langostino was extraordinary. I made a note to have opinions about langostino going forward. Gwen Telford, who liked langostino. Sure.

We were slowing down, nearly full, the plates mostly cleared, Rollie with his coffee and me with mine, when he said, without looking up: "Those four men in the corner booth have been watching you."

I knew. I had known since we sat down, the specific weight of it at my back. I looked at Rollie instead of at the corner booth.

"Do they like what they see?" I asked.

"I'd say so," Rollie said. "You can feel their eyes on you. Right on your skin."

A tingle went through me that had no business being there, or every business being there, I wasn't sure which. I set my fork down.

"Stop it," I said.

"I'm not doing anything," he said. "I'm just pointing out what's already there." He looked at me steadily across the candle. "You felt it before I said anything."

This was true. I picked my fork up and put it down again.

"Four of them," I said.

"Mm-hm."

"And you're not bothered."

He thought about that with the patience of a man who has already worked it through. "You came out of that spring for me," he said. "That's the important part."

I looked at him for a long time. The blue eyes, the candlelight, his hand on the tablecloth near mine.

Then he reached across and covered my hand with his, and held it. Not loosely.

"Being watched is exciting to you," he said. It wasn't a question. "You like knowing they want you." He paused. "And you like knowing you belong to me."

My heart was going hard enough that I could feel it in my throat. Everything he'd said was true, all of it, and the rightness of it moved through me like the spring water had — all at once and everywhere at once.

"I belong to you," I said, just to hear it out loud.

It sounded like something that had always been going to be true.

"Yes, you do," Rollie said simply, and signaled for the check.

*

He lifted me up into the cab, and I unzipped the boots and tucked them behind the seat, and we went over into the bunk together without much discussion and without any elbows in anyone's eye. The skirt turned out to be everything Rollie had claimed on its behalf. He worked efficiently, and I contributed enthusiastically, and afterward I lay with my cheek on his chest and listened to his heart slow down.

How many times in the last twenty-four hours, I started to think, and then his hands moved on my back and the thought dissolved before it finished.