Reinventing Mona by Jennifer Coburn Read Free Book Online

ocean. Every day, I pass the North Island Naval Station and see the same uniformed guys out front, waving in their comrades. For the first two years I lived here, I never understood how the navy guys knew who was military. I assumed that they just had great memories and recognized the faces of all North Island personnel. Grammy laughed when I told her this. “You little goose! They have stickers on their windows. See?” She pointed at the car ahead of us, and sure enough, there was a small navy decal on the corner of the windshield. I never actually wanted to go onto the naval base. If I had, it would have been easy enough to arrange through Grammy. What I longed for was the guy in uniform giving me the official wave. “Come on in, Mona. You’re welcome at our private little club. Please, come in. We want you here.”
    In fact, my fondest sexual fantasies take place behind the walls of the naval base. It wasn’t the guys in uniform. I know some women go for that, but I’d just as easily fall for a guy in a suit and tie, which I suppose is a uniform, too. But I could very easily be attracted to a man in a soft black sweater and khaki pants. It wasn’t even so much the location. It was, I suppose, getting behind those walls. Some nights, the fantasy would start with the guy at the gate waving in my car; other nights I’d imagine scaling the walls and jumping over the fence until I landed on the other side with scraped knees and twigs in my hair.
    When I arrived home with my new magazines, I poured a glass of iced tea and carried it out to the backyard. Our yard is spacious by any standard, but humongous by Southern California’s measure. Every year without fail, a housing developer wants to purchase three quarters of my yard to build another home. He always assures me that I’ll still have plenty of yard left, tells me how “classy” his projects are, and then leaves me with the tired old line about oceanfront property — “they ain’t making any more of it.”
    Grammy always said that when a developer tells you that he builds elegant homes, it’s because he almost always throws together half-baked cookie cutter models of what twenty-five-year-old trophy brides deem tasteful. “Always consider it a tremendous service when a person tells you how honest he is,” she also said. “It’s a warning round. When they start talking about how honest they are, run. If you’re honest, you don’t need to talk about it. When you build elegant homes, you most certainly do not need to tout their elegance. If someone makes a point of telling you who he is, rather than showing you with his actions, you can bank on the truth being quite the opposite.” Whenever we shopped together, we spoke a secret language of facial expressions. At the Mercedes dealership, the owner carried on about how he created a “second home” for his employees and how they all loved working there. Grammy gave me a look, which I knew meant, “Where is this coming from? Did we inquire about the job satisfaction level of his staff?” We left that day without a car, but instead with Grammy’s pregnancy-like craving for information about this dealership. After a half hour of pounding away at the computer keyboard, Grammy shouted “I knew it!” from her office. “Get in here, Mona. Are my instincts keen, or are they keen?”
    “Well,” I stretched the word to tease. “If they’re so keen, why do you need to talk about them?”
    “Oh pish posh, get your rump over here and see what I’ve found on the Internet.” When I arrived, she continued, “Sexual harassment charges. Hmpf! He sees two women walk into the dealership and immediately starts talking about the big happy family, the low turnover, and how happy, happy, happy everyone is there. Silly fool might have had my money in his pocket today if he would have simply focused on the car. I don’t care about what kind of place he’s ‘created’ for his second family of car