Free Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle Page B

wrapping around her throat. A really fat ass. I am about to comment about how they all must have left nose prints on the glass of her cage when I walk over and stand next to Bill just in time to hear Ethan deliver his punch line about how to screw a fat girl: “Roll her in flour and look for the wet spots.”
    â€œWhat a hoot!” I slap him on the back as hard as I can. “Aren’t you
funny?”
I avoid looking at Joyce, who I have known for a very long time. She was in my wedding. Bill is the godfather of their son. She drinks a little bit more, I notice, at each gathering.
    â€œI’ve got one for you,” I say. “Where do men go after they go to Hooter’s?”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œThe Hootel. And why don’t women date Wood
peckers?
” I emphasize the last two syllables.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œAlways boring.” The women like that one. “And why does a dog lick his balls?”
    â€œWait, I know this one,” Ron says. “Because he can.”
    â€œAnd did you hear about what happened when the woman showed her size 36C breasts? No? None of you guys have heard this one?”
    They all shake their heads, Bill included, as they wait for the punch.
    â€œGod, this is an old one. I hear it at least once a week. And I can follow it with the one about the 36B and the 32A and the 48DD.”
    â€œSo tell us already,” Dennis says. He and Ethan are standing there nudging each other like prepubescent boys.
    â€œWell, they all had cancer. They all had to have their breasts surgically removed.” The women look down at my rug, the lovely intricate pattern of color. I’m sure there’s at least one bad Pap smear in this room. One lump that has caused fear and worry. “Like your mother, Dennis.”
    They are all quiet now. The women are moving toward the warm yellow glow of my kitchen, where I have promised them a comfortable seat and a glass of good wine while I finish preparing the meal. “Maybe this is the reason the women go to the kitchen,” Ron’s wife, a relatively new wife, says quietly. “I wish we had done it sooner.”
    Now you can hear a pin drop. Now you can hear the cars passing on the highway, a rise and fall like ocean waves, and my mind is there by the highway with those women walking around inside Cafe Risqué. And wouldn’t any one of them give everything she owned to be standing in this very room, in this privileged life where people actually have hobbies and children fuss about the full plate of good food you put before them and men take for granted the women they married, the bodies they like to roll on top of in the middle of the night, the breasts they pinch and knead like dough.
    â€œHoney,” Bill says and calls me back to the doorway. “Let it drop, okay? This is a party, not some New Age awareness group.”
    Tears spring to my eyes and I have to look away. I look out the window into our backyard at the array of Little Tikes apparatus that no longer gets used. He looks over at all of his buddies, especially Dennis, and laughs as if to apologize for the interruption. I can tell he wants to whisper all of thechoice words—
hormones, premenstrual, girl things
—but to me he says, “I’m sorry. It was all a joke.” He grips my hands in his. “Truce?”
    T HE MEN ARE talking in low cautious voices. They are talking about birdies and bogeys and woods and irons, which in many ways is the same conversation with different nouns. The women have sprung to action and have begun setting my dining table with crystal and silver and Wedgwood china, all wedding presents eighteen years ago. They are laughing now about things their children have said and done. They are talking about their perennial beds, knowing that soon enough I will have to join in. The peonies are just on the verge of bursting into full bloom and Joyce knows that next to the first breath of autumn this