More Muffia (The Muffia Book 2) (3 page)

I realize it irritates non-English speakers when Americans do this, but I really believe it can help them understand better; so I forge ahead.

“And as you can see—” I point to my eyes—“there’s no place to put it.” I point to the overhead bin and shrug.

“Do you think we could find out who owns all this stuff?” I draw a question mark in the air and indicate all the passengers. “Because I’m pretty sure I few people on this plane have exceeded their baggage limit.”

I wag my finger to indicate somebody has been very, very bad. “So if we were to do that, then we could put all their excess stuff under the plane.” I end my demonstration with a flourish, swinging a pretend suitcase in one hand, sliding it under the other—simulating the underbelly of the plane—and slamming the non-existent door before finally, brushing my palms together with a smile.

“Sorry,” Kitty says, reaching for my Tumi and not the least bit sorry about it. “You late. Take seat and adjust seat belt low cross lap; we taking off soon.”

“But—” I protest, holding onto the bag. “I only have one bag!”

She won’t let go. “Put under plane.”

“No!” I say, realizing I shouldn’t be having this fight with Kitty. “I mean
—
” I try a softer tone. “What are rules if nobody enforces them? Let’s get a few people with more than one carry-on to put their unfiltered sake under their seats.”

Where was Maddie, the mediating Muff, when I needed her? Oh, right, asleep in L.A., unsympathetic to my plight, unsympathetic to her own plight!

“Sit—down!” Kitty says, trying to take my Tumi. For such a tiny figure, she’s surprisingly strong.

“Let me...have my...
ugh
—” I use all my weight to snatch the Tumi from Kitty’s clutches. “Bag!” My ankle is really killing me.

We stare at each other for a few seconds, while I’m quite sure she is considering telling somebody in the cockpit there is a terrorist on board.

I compose myself. Inhale:
Yes, yes, yes, yes;
exhale:
thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
“I’ll just put it under the seat in front of me and have leg cramps and back trouble from your airline’s flawed policies and this twenty-hour flight. Thank you for your help.”

Once I’m back on the other aisle of the Jumbo Jet, I continue to limp into the bowels of the plane until I finally reach my row—forty-five—and stare at the spot that is my seat. It’s a bit of red and purple upholstery, barely visible between a sumo wrestler and a woman in the shape of a tent who met my gaze with an expression that dared me to even try squeezing between them.

Casually, I glance over my shoulder, desperate for another place to put my ass for the duration of the flight, but it’s quite clear that every seat is taken. Not only that, it seems like most of the people occupying the seats are huge—even the Japanese passengers.

When did that happen? Japanese people, other than sumo wrestlers, of course, are usually thin. Could childhood obesity be wreaking havoc in Japan, too? With human cargo this size, we might not get off the ground.

Oh, why was there no empty seat next to Viggo?
If we’re going to crash, it might actually be all right if I could just be near him. If I were to perish in a plane crash, at least I’d be spared further grief from my mother about how I missed out on having kids and how terrible Hollywood is. More importantly, I’d be spared any further thought about how she might be right.
Breathe—I am destined for great things!

Resigned to the situation, I sigh and fish out my e-reader, on which
The Glass Castle
, the Muffia Book Club’s current read, awaited me. There was nowhere to go, and no one was going to help me better my situation. But at least Kitty hadn’t gotten me kicked off the plane.
So make the best of it, Quinn. This too will pass.

I take another deep breath, pick up the Tumi, and squeeze past tent lady into my sliver of a seat, wedging my bag under the seat in front of me. It’s going to be a very long flight, but I’m heading home. And though my seatmates’ combined mass is four times mine, should either of them attempt to monopolize an armrest, they do so at their own peril. I may have very little control over anything in my life, but my elbows are very sharp.

Having sexual intercourse with a very large man has never been something I longed for, though I’ve often wondered what it might be like; not necessarily a sumo wrestler, but someone of that size and stature who exists on a grand scale and takes up a lot of space—a Pavarotti type of man. My curiosity stems from the concern that even if this large man’s penis is perfectly normal in size, as penises go, it’s going to look small, buried as it must be—particularly in its non-erect state—in mounds of flesh. It’s the visual that I find both amusing and disturbing; amusing, for obvious reasons, and disturbing for less obvious ones having to do with finding the penis—providing, of course, that I was inclined to look.

And how did sex even work with a big man? Did the flesh get in the way? And if the belly protruded substantially beyond the groin, as indeed it usually did with men of generous girth, how was a woman to position herself so as to achieve full penetration without adipose obstruction?

These were the questions that consumed me now, pressed into my seat as I was, essentially trapped by Sumo, a Mount Fuji of a man, and far stronger than I. My first reaction, however, was one of hope—hope that his penis was, in fact, trapped by mounds of flesh, unable to press beyond its rolls; the sumo wrestler’s body, in essence, was a buffer against rape.

Where had the tent woman gone? Not that she would have done anything about what was happening in seat 45B. And hadn’t I been reading a book? Yes,
The Glass Castle
, on my Kobo e-reader. I needed to find it. Book club was coming up, and this time I was determined to finish the assigned book. This time I would wow the Muffs with my erudite commentary.

I pushed into Sumo’s mountainous middle with my fingers. His fleshy folds could certainly house a book, or possibly, such was his vastness, even a toaster oven. It was simply—or perhaps not so simply—a matter of finding which fold he hid things in. Not so simple because it seemed like the inside crease of each fold was some five or six inches closer to the vital organs than the outer rolls. In order to reach that inner lining, I needed to contort my body so as to pry apart the rolls and squiggle my fingers inside. Pressing deeper, I found the crease and kept wiggling my fingers. How
does
one clean in there? The interminable folds were reminiscent of a bulldog’s jowls or a sharpei’s facial wrinkles, only deeper and wider, like the Shenandoah foothills. I made one last attempt to extend my hand deeper, a little farther and—
kersplatz
.

Jolted awake, I found myself lying on the floor of my apartment. There I was, fully clothed and surrounded by what appeared to be every pillow I owned, which, no doubt, had contributed to the disturbing vision of Jelly Belly copping a feel.

But had it only been a vision?
I had the distinct sense that my subconscious was recalling Sumo’s porcine presence hovering over me during the flight when I’d nodded off for a few minutes while tent woman was in the rest room. Or had she been there, complicit in his febrile explorations.

With the two warm, fleshy forms rhythmically rising and falling on either side of me, it’s no wonder I’d fallen asleep on the plane. Though initially feeling trapped, it turned out that my rowmates’ deep, relaxing inhalations and exhalations had lulled me into a state of torpor, during which time Sumo must have pushed himself on me. Now, it was too late to confront him.

Other than the nagging suspicion I’d been violated, however, being able to sleep for a couple of hours during the flight had been bliss, as had the hours I’d spent awake reading
The Glass Castle
. It’s rare I finish any book in time for book club, but with Jeannette Walls’s memoir—the story of a girl raised by insane people who happened to be her parents—I felt connected to the author in a very real way. We shared a similar past that made reading the book feel like a memory. Not that my father—God rest his bleepin’ soul—ever pimped me. No, it was more the tone and the way she reflected back on her childhood with a certain generosity of spirit that made me keep reading until I’d finished.

After learning about all the things poor Jeannette endured on her way to adulthood, I also had a sort of revelation. I say, “sort of,” because I’ve had the thought before, making the word
revelatory
an expression of hyperbole. Still—whatever grounds a person in reality is worth mentioning. What I realized is I felt guilty about all the snarky complaining I’d been doing lately; all that angry white woman stuff.

When I thought about it, I was grateful for so many things. Not the married guy so much, but my friends and even my silly job getting commercials for celebrities. Seriously, I should be ashamed of myself whining about the petty inconveniences of international jet travel—
it was international jet travel!
Some people never get to go anywhere.

Sure, I could be agenting talent on big movies instead of in foreign ads, but at least I still get to hang out with Viggo and Benedict and Brad, occasionally rubbing up against them—even if it’s by mistake, and even if they’re stinkier and dirtier than you’d ever imagine they’d be.
Uh—there I go again; be grateful, Quinn. Yes, yes, yes, yes; thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! Who cares if they haven’t bathed?
Some people would kill to get a whiff of Mr. Cumberbatch, no matter what he smelled like. I smiled and closed my eyes.
MMMmmmm
....I
knew
what he smelled like.

My cellphone was ringing and probably had been ringing for awhile, only I was too sleepy to realize it. Somewhere, lost in all the pillows, was my mobile playing its jazz-era ring tone.
I really needed to change that
. “I Ain’t Got Nobody” had turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but when I chose it, I’d just come off “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and that hadn’t borne any fruit, either. I was trying reverse psychology.

Kicking away a pillow that said “Keep Calm and Wear Spiked Heels,” I once again felt the pain in my damaged ankle while my ring tone continued: “...my baby don’t care for me.”

Spotting the phone, at last I picked it up, fumbling and almost dropping it as I brought it to my ear without checking caller I.D.

“I
knew
it!” said the female voice, further shaking me from my jetlagged state.

“Who is this?” I mumbled, finally getting the damned thing secure.

“What do you mean, who is this? It’s Jelicka. Maddie told me you called her from Tokyo, and I just want to be on record as saying, ‘I
told
you he wasn’t dead.’”

Eeeeerrrrrkkkk—!

Cue SFX of screeching tires. Insert the visual of a car skidding out and coming to rest at the edge of a steep precipice. This is the part of the movie where we might go to a flashback, show the audience how the character ended up in a car skidding to a stop at the edge of a steep precipice; or, maybe we’d start to hear a voice over—perhaps a woman reflecting on the moment everything in her life changed. I don’t know about all that; I just want to go back and either refresh your memory, or fill you in on some things before we proceed with the story.

If you’re not already onboard with what’s happened with The Muffia up to this point, or for some reason, you don’t accept my definition of the term,
The Muffia
, let me start by saying there’s no hidden meaning. The Muffia is a book club, and that’s pretty much it. We are nine women living in the greater Los Angeles area of California, USA, and we’ve been reading books together for over twelve years. That’s it.

We’re friends too, of course, some of us enjoying the company of one or more Muffs over and above the others, but that’s only to be expected when you put nine women together. We bond, detach, and re-bond all the time. But through all the shifts, what is of greatest importance remains: we all like each other and respect each other’s opinions—particularly about books—that is, when we’ve read them, which we don’t always get around to, given the demands of life. This, too, we accept in each other.

We are not, in any way, associated with the group of militant English mothers who call themselves
The Muffia
, whose members criticize bad mothering wherever they see it; nor are we connected to a lesbian porn collective using the name, though we have been known to discuss pornography at great length during book club meetings. In fact, I can recall a particularly heated discussion we had once when we should have been talking about Adrian LeBlanc’s
Random Family
. Instead of discussing what might be done regarding the problem of inner city youth and poverty in New York City—hell,
any
major city—we became immersed in a conversation about vajazzling and the pros and cons of vaginal rejuvenation surgery, which after careful review, most Muffs—Jelicka excluded—decided wasn’t worth the pain or expense. Deciding on
that
was way easier than figuring out how to eradicate the cycle of poverty.

The Muffia Book Club has been around since 2001 and, as far as we’re concerned, even though the other claimants to the name have female power in their mission statements, we feel they’ve taken their muffs in the wrong direction. And to forestall any additional confusion, let me re-introduce the members of the real and true Muffia Book Club:

You’ve no doubt deduced, by this point, that my name is
Quinn
, and I’ve probably told you more than enough about me for now. Maddie, who prefers to be called
Madelyn
, is a divorced mom and mediator who had the wild affair with the guy I saw at the Narita Airport who is supposed to be dead. Maddie wrote about The Muffia in a book called—rather obviously, IMHO—
The Muffia
, which perhaps you’ve read. Now it’s my turn to write about us, and I’m calling my story
More Muff
, which granted isn’t all that original either, but my excuse is I
represent
talent—I don’t have any of my own. Despite my parents’ contention that I was destined for great things, their sanity was later questioned when I was the only child of five who didn’t have an arrest record by age eighteen. “Great,” after all, is relative. But I thank them anyway because even though I turned out far more ordinary than they’d have you believe, their conviction gave me the confidence to succeed, and it did, after all, get me out of Fresno. Not that there’s anything wrong with Fresno. It’s close to Yosemite. The truth is, I probably would have wanted to get out of wherever I grew up. Even though I have no plans to return, Fresno now seems like a refuge from all the insanity in Los Angeles.
Oops—didn’t mean to start talking about me again.