Mr. Jones

                                                Mr. Jones

It didn't seem right, no matter how he looked at it.  His name was Jones, and he could see it clearly engraved on the wooden plaque hanging from his mailbox.  The word, written in cursive script, seemed to denote plurality.  But he was just one.   

Colleen, his wife, was dead.  His wife was dead.  Colleen was ... gone.   

He took his mail out of the black metal mailbox, and carefully checking for traffic on his rural road, he took heavy steps back toward the house.  No family to speak of.  He had two stepchildren, but they didn't come to see him.  Rick and Laura were Colleen's kids, and by the time he had married her, when he had been thirty-two and his new bride was thirty-six, her children had been on their way out of the house into college then marriage and adulthood.  His mother had passed away, seven years before and except for an aunt somewhere he would hardly recognize, he was alone.   

He made his way up the sloping hill toward his ranch house, painted white with a brick foundation, past the lilac bush his wife had planted and the ivy-covered arbor he had hauled here in an old pickup years ago. He made it to the steps leading to his house, and sighed.  He didn't know what to go in for, but he didn't know what to stay outside for either. The sunshine was making his head hurt, so he made his way laboriously into the dim house, shutting the door carefully behind him to ward off the rising sun. 

It was later that day, when he was putting away his laundry, methodically stacking socks into the drawer, that he found her clothes.  Not that he hadn't known that they were there before; he just hadn't bothered to look. He took the drawers on the left in the chest of drawers and the ones on the right were Colleen's. But while kneeling on the floor, on knees that were getting too old to want to kneel comfortably, he opened the drawer on the right.  Her shiny polyester undergarments were stacked inside.  Nylon things in shades of white and the palest pinks.  He took a slip from the drawer, and held in up in the dim light illuminating from the tightly shaded window.  It had scallops of lace at the hem and the top.  He held it to his face, hoping to catch some scent of his wife, maybe of vanilla or roses from her garden, but smelt only fabric softener.  He liked the feel of it all the same, and held it under his face as he laid his head on his bed and cried.   

The next morning, he woke and decided to make breakfast.  He turned on the kitchen light, and stared at the kitchen.  Colleen had always made bacon and eggs, and he wanted the taste of it--the feel of a busy morning.  He avoided the cereal bowls and reached for the frying pan out of the bottom cabinet.  He took eggs and bacon out of the fridge, and laid the bacon carefully out over the pan.  He snapped on the burner, on the knob over the stove, and then he started his coffee in the coffee maker.  He must have turned on the burner too high; the bacon was sticking to the pan, when he tried to turn it.  A strong smoke started to rise from the pan, and when he reached to turn off the burner one drop of grease splattered up and seared into his arm.  "Damn!" he screeched.  He flipped off the burner, and felt the rising red welt in his arm.  He stood motionless for a moment, and stared vacantly as the waning smoke.  His limbs felt heavy, his mind felt dead.  He felt dead, and worse yet, helpless.  He went back to bed.   

When he lay on his (left) side of the bed, he found the slip he had cried over the day before, still scrunched up.  He took it in his fingers and tried to remember what his wife had looked like wearing it.  She had been a heavy woman, and had crinkly hair that had been red but later had faded into an orangey gray.  Her face had been square and solid but her movements lithe and swift.  She had known how to cook a good breakfast, to plant a good rose bush, to live a good life.  He took the slip, and taking off his own clothes, he put it over his head.  It slid down his body with a delicious coolness.  He felt better already.   

He went out to scrub the pan and to make a new breakfast.  With the slip on and his old leather slippers, his movements were swift and sure at the stove, and he was eating within 15 minutes--the good breakfast he had yearned for. 

It didn't seem odd to him, from that day on, that Colleen would help him out, if only he wore her clothes.  They had been such a part of her, and she had spent hours, at the stores on sales days, carefully adding up discounts from credit card offers and Early Bird sales to get the right garments.  If he wore the slips, the brassieres, and sometimes the nylon panties, she would help him adapt the sure swift motions she had possessed to get through the day.  He could cook, he could clean, and he could even bear to raise the shades.  He even felt he could dial the numbers to call his stepchildren and wish them the proper "Happy Birthday," or "Just thought I would make sure you guys are getting along all right."   

It was his neighbor, a short round woman with a yippy black dog and a tired face that showed him that people might not understand.  He was wearing a red dress, with his leather slippers that day when he bounded out to get the mail.  "Good morning!" he bellowed when he spotted his neighbor, who was pushing a lawn mower around in front of her house.  She just stared, for one moment, for two, her eyes widening with alarm. The buzz of the mower ceased, leaving a silence that was deafening.   

"Hello," she finally answered. "Are you doing... okay?"   

"Just fine, " he fairly yelled across the distance of 15 feet or so between them. "Just fine." He took giant steps back into his house quickly before he lost his movements to the slow dread languidness he felt returning.   

He had put in a garden that year, and after harvesting up plum tomatoes and cucumbers with hardly any brown spots on them, he laid them carefully out on Colleen's kitchen table.  There were so many.  He took dozens and stuffed them into the crisper in the refrigerator, but after that was done there were still mounds of them left on the table.  He stacked some in paper bag and went over to his neighbor's house.  She came to the door as he laid the bag carefully against her porch stoop.  "Thought you might have a use for these. I grew too many, I think."   

She said with a forcible tightness to her voice. "Thank you. You shouldn't have...but thank you."  Her eyes trailed away from his face and onto the pale silk blouse he was wearing.  It had pearl buttons and was the color of the faintest blush.  It was then that he knew.  Regular people would never understand.  He would have to look for understanding. 

He forced himself back into his ironed gray slacks, even if he slid them over a pair of ivory panties.  He put on a polo shirt and grabbed his car keys.  When he got to the library he had to ask the librarian how to run the computer, and after she did, he tentatively typed in women's garments into the search line.  Dozens of names of stores popped up onto the screen, Spiegel’s, Newport, and others.  That wasn't right.  He tried channeling/clothes, but that pulled up nothing.  Finally, he typed in cross-dressing, and dozens of web sites started slanting across the screen. "Are you looking for that special someone?” one asked. That's how he met Billy. 

Billy as it turned out, was 25.  He had the finest blond hair, and a face that was smooth enough to warrant boyhood.  His picture he sent online showed a frail chest against a backdrop of sky and blue sea.  His eyes were large and round.  He didn't mind Roger's age, 62.  He just wanted a friend, the same as Roger.  Roger found his delicateness admirable, something that would never hurt. They decided over many emails and chats online to meet at a park.   

The day was full of sunshine, but the cooler kind that showed the leaves in the trees in their shades of brown and burgundy at the park. When Roger got out of his gray Oldsmobile and went to sit under the red roofed shelter, he took his can of diet Pepsi with him. 

Billy's face was kind, when Roger first saw it.  He hesitantly sat down beside Roger as if getting too close might hurt, but after a few fervent words of, "I've waited so long", and "Do you have a place?"  They drifted back to Roger's Oldsmobile.  Roger drove in silence toward his white ranch house, located just beyond the edge of town, but built before town's edge was out that way.  Billy stared out the window, at the lonesome utility poles that spanned the streets.  When they got to Roger's house, they went in and sat in the dimly lit living room.  It was there that Billy tried to kiss him. 

Roger let him, feeling the soft lips against his flesh, but Roger understood by his shaking hands that this was all wrong.  Billy clued in too. 

"What's wrong, am I not...?" 

"I don't know," Roger stated, and to his horror, he realized that tears were running down his cheeks. He wiped them off with his shaking hands, and felt as if the sprightliness that had been given to his limbs of late was draining out of him, into the rough brown weave of his couch. "I can't do this, I'm not..." 

Billy stopped and dropped his head. "You're just a dirty old man, " he said.  "Nobody will want you." Billy's lips looked thin and sharp when he said the words. Roger felt that Billy might be right.   

When Roger drove him back to his Chevy, still at the park under a weeping willow tree, Billy took one last look at him.  "You're just an old fart.  I was doing you a favor, you know, nobody else around here would." 


Roger had nothing to say.  He slowly backed the car out of the lot, and the drive home seemed to take forever.   

The next day, he packed all his wives clothes neatly into cardboard boxes.  He wrote "Goodwill" carefully on the side and stacked them beside the front door.  He didn't bother cooking breakfast, or going out for the mail.  He watched soap operas and stared at the dust swirling about in the light from the window.   

Two days later he took heavy steps outside, to get the papers that had stacked up on the sidewalk.  His neighbor was getting the mail.  He sighed heavily and turned to face her.  "I'm sorry if I've been causing you any...discomfort.  When Colleen died, I got a little messed up.  It won't happen again." His words sounded strange to him, slow and laborious, and he wondered if she could understand them.   

Her face brightened.  "I understand," she said, as if on cue.  I know it must be hard," She lifted a hand as if to caress his hand even though distance spanned between them. "If you need anything, let us know.  Really," she added meaningfully, while gripping the collar of her dog to quell his yips.     

While he was pouring milk over his special K one afternoon some days later that the bright light emulated from the kitchen window, even though the shade was tightly drawn.  He could feel the light warm up his face, and time pulled out to a languid thread.  He didn't know how he ended up on the kitchen floor, but he barely heard the clamor of the porcelain bowl against the spoon as they rolled on the linoleum a few inches from his face.  Now the light was even brighter, and he could feel it warming his hands, his chest, the gray flannel of his pants.  He looked up, trying to discern where it came from. 

"Colleen?" he uttered, and sure enough he could see her, her body square and sturdy. She just stood there in her red dress, as if she were waiting for him to get up, to do something. From where he was down on the floor, he could see the pale pink slip underneath the dress, and in the light it seemed to shine.