From “10 Quick and Easy Salads”
I’m a nice girl and there are things nice girls don’t do. My mother was quite clear on that point, but my mother did not live downstairs from Jaycee Sofino.
Walking from my car to my apartment as I did most evenings, tired from the bland office work that paid the bills, I’d seen Jaycee lounging on her balcony while smoke curled from the small grill near her feet. The aroma of something sizzling in teriyaki made me faint with hunger. The sight of her bare back and the armband tattoo on her right bicep woke up many other kinds of hungers.
Nice girls—my mother’s authority again—did not go for boys who wore tattoos. Jaycee Sofino was no boy, as her habit of going shirtless while she made her dinner had amply demonstrated. She also wasn’t straight, as the moans and screams from her bedroom a couple of times a month had more than proven. Since I’d moved in downstairs six months ago, there had been at least a dozen Sundays when my search for my newspaper had brought me face-to-face with a departing blonde or redhead or brunette.
They had all looked tired, and in a really good way.
I took care of one hunger by devouring the burger I’d bought on the way home from work. I’m all thumbs in the kitchen, much to my mother’s despair, and cooking is something I’ve never aspired to master. The long parade of boxes and buckets made Jaycee’s aromatic dinner all the harder to ignore. I tried to sublimate the other hungers with some chocolate and a movie, but in the end, like many other nights, the only thing that helped was my well-practiced left hand.
A nice girl, I thought several evenings later, would wear a shirt if she was barbecuing on her balcony right above where a single, frustrated lesbian lived. My chicken bits tasted like dust and the yogurt I found in my nearly empty refrigerator was expired. It didn’t sport any growth, so I ate it anyway.
I paid for that decision around two a.m. After I cleaned up the bathroom I quietly opened the sliding glass door to let in fresh air. The summer night was cool to my cheeks. It cleared my head and settled my stomach.
I was about to slide the door closed again when I heard voices above me. I wasn’t sure at first what the low whispers might mean.
“Out here?”
“Yes, out here. It’s too hot inside.”
Jaycee and some girl, I realized.
