Tahiti
by Hth

	When the radio kicked on at 7:15, the first thing Elaine heard was "winter
weather advisory," and it pretty much went downhill from there. Ice, snow, low
visibility, wind chill factor of twenty below zero. February in Chicago. The
pep-talk chatter of the morning disc jockeys didn't make her feel even the
slightest bit better, backlit by the rattle of her bedroom windows holding out
the wind. Hiding under four layers of flannel sheets and thermal blankets
*did* make her feel better, but it was, at best, a temporary fix.
	She sat up, thinking of French vanilla coffee, the slippers she'd left
downstairs by the television set, shoveling the driveway, and afternoon naps. 
Snow days in elementary school, sunshine and backyard barbeques, the gym, the
five minutes it took for the shower to start putting out hot instead of cold
water. Maybe she'd just shower at the gym. Vacations. They'd been making a
little noise about taking time off in the spring to go to Vermont, skiing and
staying in country inns. Nothing sounded like a worse idea at the moment. 
Cancun. Andalusia. Rio de Janeiro. Tahiti. Better.  Someplace a thousand miles away, 
with sand and the pressing need for a higher SPF.
	Francesca's hand was freezing cold as it burrowed under Elaine's Red Cross
t-shirt and up her back; Elaine stiffened uncomfortably, but she didn't say anything 
except, "Time to get up."
	"Mmmmm." Francesca made the sound cover at least four or five distinct notes,
each more expressive of her displeasure than the last. "Isn't this your day off?"
	A day off. What an exotic idea. "I guess so. But I have a lot of things to
do."
	"Still. You could sleep in."
	Blankets, and the room filling with soft white steam from the bathroom, the
smell of coffee and the windows shaking in their frames while the furnace
hummed away defensively. Elaine sighed and pulled the scrunchy out of her
hair, shaking it out. "The roads are really icy. I want to drive you to work."
	"You don't have to."
	"I know." And the fact that Fran wasn't nervous at all about driving in these
conditions was exactly why Elaine was pretty sure she shouldn't be allowed to
do it.
	She stood up. Her neck was sore, and she was annoyed with herself for leaving
those slippers downstairs where they wouldn't do her any good. She wanted to
make waffles, but Francesca was on this ridiculous anti-carbohydrate diet, and
while the idea of seducing her away from this silly fad with Belgian waffles
was appealing on some level, it also tread perilously close to really picking a
fight about it, and usually picking a fight was the best way to prolong things
with Francesca. Leave her alone, and things were bound to blow over sooner
rather than later. Argue, and everything became a matter of principle.
	"You're beautiful," Francesca murmured contentedly. From here, Elaine could
see herself in the bathroom mirror, the free blood-donor t-shirt and the
threadbare sweatpants, dark circles under her eyes and snarls in her hair that
were an omnipresent fact of mornings, scrunchy or no scrunchy.
	"The drive is going to take forever," she predicted gloomily. "The sooner we
can leave the house, the better."
	Even inside her own home, Elaine felt like she was walking against the wind,
moving twice as slowly as she normally did. She switched the t-shirt for a bra
and a cotton turtleneck, and her Keds weren't as warm as the quilted slippers,
but they were here. Downstairs, it took her almost as long to get the coffee
running and open a new can of food for the cat as it did for Francesca to take
her shower; when the water overhead switched off, Elaine was just starting
breakfast. Ridiculous. Fran had *never* had to wait on her before.  What was
wrong with her this morning?
	February in Chicago. The noise of the wind, the noise of the bacon sizzling,
the noise of Francesca's hair-dryer upstairs. It was depressing, knowing how
her skin would sting and her ears would ache once she set foot outside, seeing
it coming and not being able to do one single thing about it. She thought of
nights when she her sisters would jump rope in the brightly-lit parking lot of
the Baptist church around the corner from their house, stopping when they were
breathless and sticky with sweat to sit down on the curb and drink Kool-Aid
from a thermos. She thought of the hot tub at Fran's mother's house, the
lightbulb that was burned out in the downstairs bathroom, a vacation, the
Neighborhood Watch meeting last week that she'd had to lie and tell Franny that
she'd forgotten to mention, because otherwise Fran would just go across the
street and pick a fight with Mrs. Schuster for not inviting them. As though
Elaine would've wanted to go anyway, sitting around having punch and cookies
with that Bible-thumping Martha Stewart cultist and her sheet-wearing husband
and talking about how the police didn't care about the working-class neighborhoods. 
But it would hurt Francesca's feelings, not being invited. And Francesca would be 
mad at the whole neighborhood and probably start some kind of feud, and she might 
cry, and Elaine would lose sleep, feeling like it was her fault, like if it hadn't 
been for her, Fran would have a nice white husband and nice white babies by now, and 
they'd invite her to meetings and fawn all over her because she worked as an aide 
to major crimes and probably trade pot roast recipes with the other women. Francesca's 
hypothetical husband would probably own a bodyshop or install satellite dishes, or 
maybe he'd be an orthodontist or sell insurance, but at any rate he'd be a good 
provider, and he'd sleep in on freezing days off, and Fran would stay in her 
bathrobe all day and play Candyland with the kids and watch Zoog Disney.
	Meanwhile, the scrambled eggs were starting to burn, and Elaine was just
standing around in a fog. She muttered a curse and moved the skillet onto a
different burner. The stairs were rumbling like an earthquake as Francesca
raced down them. "Ow, ow, ow," she said, sounding more affronted than in pain.
	"I *knew* four weeks wasn't long enough to leave the studs in these new
piercings. I shoulda gone six, and I *knew* better, but Brenda said four, so,
stupid me! Like I have to start listening to Brenda Joslyn just because she
has a beauty school diploma now? Right!" She finished fussing with the
earring back and kissed Elaine's cheek as she picked a strip of bacon off the
paper towel that was soaking off the extra grease. "Whatcha thinking about?"
	"I don't want to go to Vermont anymore."
	"I know what you mean. How do you feel about...Palm Beach?"
	"We'll see."
	The cat rubbed up against Elaine's legs, desperate to prove his love in
exchange for bacon grease, and Elaine kicked him lightly away. He tried the
generally more profitable approach of making nice with Francesca, and she must
have been in a particularly good mood, because she let him up on her lap while
she was eating and put him back on the floor with the greasy plate when she was
done. She counted six different pills of varying colors and sizes out of the
sugar bowl on the table -- calcium, zinc, C, iron, an assorted mineral pill,
and a large pink one that was supposed to be for pre-natal care but that
Francesca swore was good for her hair. Elaine poured the rest of the grease
from the skillet over the cat's food, but she still shoved him away when he
tried to curl around her foot in gratitude.
	Francesca slipped on the front steps the second she was outside the door,
either because of the stacked heels on her boots or because she was paying more
attention to adjusting the hood of her parka so it did minimum damage to her
hair than she was to the ice on the ground. Elaine caught her, one hand on
Fran's elbow and the other on her waist. "Watch out."
	"Sorry."
	The wind was blowing the snow right at them, so that Elaine had to get to the
car, still guiding Francesca with a hand on the small of her back, while her
eyes were only barely slitted open, involuntary muscle reactions trying
desperately to protect her eyeballs from the sharp whips of snowfall. "Hand me
the scraper," she said as Francesca lowered stiffly into the passenger seat of
the Nissan, hampered by multiple layers of leggings and leather pants and thick
parka. Francesca found it on the floor, and then tried to stand up again.  "Stay in 
the car; it's cold out here."
	"Wow. Did you figure that out, or did you hear it on the radio?" 
	Elaine grabbed the plastic scraper out of Francesca's hand. "Stay in the car."
	"You don't have to do *everything,* you know."
	"Maybe if you didn't keep losing your gloves."
	"So I'll wear yours!"
	"*Stay in the car.*" Elaine very deliberately did not slam the door as she
closed it.
	The first few chips at the sheet of ice covering the windshield convinced
Elaine that this was not going to be a best-case scenario. Even with Francesca
starting the engine and the defroster inside the car, she was going to have to
chop through the ice and pry it up, not just scrape it off. She thought of the
gym, and how she seemed to be making no progress at all with her upper-body
program, and she struck at the ice with the sharp corner of the scraper,
useless frustration and directionless grief.
	Across the street, Mr. Schuster was scraping his own windshield. He noticed
Elaine looking at him and waved; Elaine's fingers tightened painfully around
the plastic in her hand, and she smiled at him, wishing she were a little more
like Francesca sometimes, a little more able to go over there and pick a fight.
She remembered being at Terri Norris' Christmas party, standing in the kitchen
and hearing Schuster in the next room with his friends, saying *After all,
we're white -- we actually have to *pay* our taxes.* She remembered walking
very slowly back out to bring Francesca her punch, and Franny frowning right
away, asking the question with her bright, expressive eyes, remembered shaking
her head, producing a smile, and saying, "Nothing. Nothing's wrong."
	The sound of the car door startled her, and Elaine went back to scraping
without looking up. "Let me do it," Francesca said, reaching out her hand, palm up 
in front of Elaine. Elaine shook her head shortly. "Look, you're getting up early 
to take me to work. Let me do *something.*"
	"It's not that big a deal, Fran."
	"Then why won't you--"
	She took another vicious crack at the windshield, trying to pierce through, 
to get a chink in the deep ice. "I don't know. Maybe because I just gave you
fifty dollars so Brenda could do your nails and there's no point in you breaking them 
now." Francesca got back in the car.
	In spite of wool overcoats and knit caps and gloves and layers, Elaine was
shivering, and it was hard to keep good, steady pressure on the scraper; it
seemed to sheer up and off the ice as she pressed, so that the edge of the
windshield was being whittled down, but just a few faint white scratches marred
the ice in the center. Elaine tried to concentrate on the ice, and when that
didn't work, she tried to think of warm things to calm her impatience to get
out of the cold.
	She thought of Honolulu and double-dutch in early September in Memphis. She
thought of the steam from the shower and the thermal blankets in the moment
before you had to push them aside, warmed from the accumulating heat of your
body all night long. She thought of Belgian waffles and the sno-cone cart
outside Adler Planetarium, at the top of the grassy hill that led down to the
beach. She thought of coffee and slippers and the ceiling fan in the bullpen
of the 2-7 that never cooled anybody down in the summer, and she thought of
Palm Beach and Tahiti and lying on the couch in her old apartment, the one
they'd gotten rid of because it didn't match the carpet of the apartment she'd
gone to after that, with Koko Taylor on the stereo and Franny on top of her,
her throat warm when Elaine put her face against it, her mouth even warmer over
Elaine's.
	Elaine opened the passenger door and tossed the scraper back on the
floorboard. "What? What?" Francesca kept saying, but Elaine ignored her,
reaching across to shut off the engine and pull the keys out of the ignition. 
Francesca quit repeating herself when Elaine pulled back enough to kiss her
cheek, then her lips, then her neck, but after a moment, nature reasserted
itself, and she said again, a little more softly, "What?"
	"It's too cold. The roads aren't safe. Call and tell them you need a
personal day -- a sick day -- tell them you're not coming."
	"I have to--"
	"No, you don't. This is exactly why you have a benefits package.  Tell them
you can't get there."
	"Are you all right?"
	She was slipping a little on the sloped driveway, bending down this way, and
so Elaine got down on her knees, leaning her cheek against Francesca's leg. 
"Do you remember that spring when we went to New York, and it probably didn't
get up to forty the whole week?"
	"Sure."
	"And the first day, we took a ferry to Ellis Island, and you wore those red
open-toed shoes, and you complained the whole time about your feet being cold."
	"I remember."
	"And I told you that it was stupid to wear those shoes. I meant to tell you
-- after -- I meant to apologize. I shouldn't have said that. I was just...mad, because 
you looked so cold and miserable. I always get mad when you're miserable, and I don't 
know why I took it out on you. I made it worse."
	Her long fingers with their new, long acrylic nails stroked Elaine's cap, the
side of her face, the spillover of long, uncombed curls. "Do you remember that
night, when we went back to the hotel? I wanted to run a bath, but you sat me
down, took off my shoes, and sucked on my toes until I wasn't numb anymore."
	"They were like ice."
	"It was the nicest thing anyone ever did for me."
	"It was...nothing," Elaine said, honestly meaning it. She did a million small
things like that, and it always felt like too little, practically nothing at
all. Inconvenience rolled right off of Elaine; hard work was comfortable, a
known quantity, nothing much in Elaine's mind, and most of what she did for
Francesca wasn't even hard work. Her emotions ran so low and silent that
Elaine could barely imagine anything short of death or bankruptcy stirring up
as much inside her as a ruined fingernail did for Francesca. It was so easy to
act in constant response to Francesca's desires; Elaine understood them so much
more clearly than she did her own desires most of the time. Most of the time,
they seemed so much more important.
	"It *was* my fault. It was stupid to wear those shoes when it was cold
outside."
	"No, that--"
	"It *was* stupid. But you know, who cares? You never made me feel like I
should be smarter or more careful, or like you'd like me better if I was. 
	Whatever I did, it was always enough for you. Don't you know that's why I
can't live without you?"
	"Come inside," Elaine pleaded, tasting the leather against her tongue as she
spoke. "We'll order pizza for lunch -- you can strip off the toppings, and
I'll eat the crust, if you still aren't eating bread. We'll watch the Travel
Channel all day and pick out someplace warm to go to next time."
	And Bill Schuster was still scraping the ice off his windshield as Elaine took
her lover by the arm and helped her up the slick driveway and back inside