Jeffery’s Toast

The dingy white tile that surrounded Jeffrey in the subway station made him feel somehow nostalgic. Not a feeling of reminiscence about his own childhood. Jeffrey had grown up in an almost rural suburb and had never been in a subway until he had gotten his current job and moved to the city at the age of twenty-four. But the tile seemed to Jeffery to be something that could be nostalgic to someone else, if only just to a character in a sitcom, and that made him feel somehow nostalgic. Jeffery seemed to feel nostalgic about everything sometimes, which bothered him immensely as he had hated his childhood and had always resented having been raised in the suburbs. So what did he have to be nostalgic about?

Perhaps it was a lack of real nostalgic items in his life that caused him to reminisce over objects that had nothing to do with his past. Maybe he had some kind of tumor pressing on some part of his brain. He was no phrenologist, but Jeffery felt this nostalgia problem coupled with his uncanny inability to properly execute the toasting of bread suggested something more sinister than quirky. It was on this morning as Jeffery sat on the subway bench with a piece of buttered white bread in one hand and his Starbucks in the other, struggling with nostalgia and a curiously strong stress headache, that he met Julya.

She was a stunningly beautiful young woman, so much so that Jeffery took her for a figment of his possibly tumor-driven headache before even considering the seemingly remote chance that she actually existed. After all, she had looked directly at him as she exited the train, and attractive women rarely did that to Jeffery. She had long brown hair and bright brown eyes, not an uncommon combination for a Caucasian female, yet Jeffery found these features combined with the busty curvature of her red vinyl jacket to be very attractive.

“That’s an interesting breakfast for a businessman.” She said, with a flaccid finger pointed at his bread and butter.

Jeffery managed to curl his thick, almost feminine lips into an awkward smile, nodded, and added, “I was in a hurry this morning.” It was an excuse he had become accustomed to giving since many people had trouble appreciating, or even comprehending the problems he had with toast. He seemed to be the only person on the planet that couldn’t toast a piece of bread, which he considered further evidence of a brain tumor. He imagined a blackish-gray mass at the center of his brain, soft to the touch, but with a dense core, pressing against different areas of gray matter and interrupting synaptic pathways.  

 Jeffery had tried for many years to explain to friends and strangers alike that it was impossible for him to make a piece of toast. He would regale his listener with stories of bread coming out of his toaster just as it had gone in, whether set to light, medium, or dark. He would spin long-winded yarns about scraping burnt pieces of toast over his sink until they crumbled apart in his hand. He would list the seemingly endless brands and models of toasters he had owned, which had lead him to the conclusion that the problem was simply him. No one was able to sympathize, and so he had thought up a handful of feasible excuses, written them down, studied them, practiced them in his bathroom mirror, and then tucked them away in the back of his mind for occasions such as this.

“That makes sense, I guess… my name is Julya.” She said with her right arm extended.

“I’m Jeffery.” He said taking her hand in his. She had a strong grip for such a lithe woman. Jeffery thought that she must play tennis, or the guitar.

Julya sat down on the subway bench, almost uncomfortably close to Jeffery, crossed her shapely stockinged legs, and stared at Jeffery with her impossibly large, mascara fringed, eyes. Jeffery took another bite of his buttered bread. 

“I guess you must be a big fan of Starbucks then.” Julya said.

Jeffery shrugged, “No more so than the next guy, why do you say that?”

“Well, I was just thinking that if you had time to stand in a long line at Starbucks during the morning rush, then you certainly had time to toast a piece of bread. Therefore, you must have sacrificed your toast for time in a Starbucks line. Am I right?”

“Makes perfect sense to me.” Jeffery said. His mind raced around the inside of his skull, collecting lies with which he could plug the holes Julya had gouged in his logic.

“Yeah, except you don’t seem like the kind of guy that would sacrifice his morning toast for a Starbucks fix. Not with that tie and those glasses.” Julya was referencing his green paisley tie and his safely rebellious horn-rim frames with the keyhole bridge. “So what’s the real story here?”

Jeffery was not sure what to say here. Nobody had ever pressed him beyond his feeble, previously prepared answers. Most people didn’t seem to really care. He had thought that he could live a toastless life built on white bread lies, but this woman wasn’t going to let it go. Wasn’t it bad enough to not be able to make toast, be plagued with inexplicable nostalgia, and struggle with the possibility of a brain tumor? Now the lies he had to tell to keep his life simpler were under attack.

Julya stared at him with lips pursed in expectation. Jeff had nothing. His feeling of stress over the question of toast was almost nostalgic. His head was throbbing with tumorous pangs.

Julya looked at her watch with a frown. Then pulled a card out of the breast pocket of her red vinyl jacket.

“There’s something strange about you, Mr. Jeffery.  Why don’t you think about telling me all about it tonight,” she said as she handed Jeffery the card, which read Julya M. Richards: Amateur Phrenologist followed by an address, “Pick me up around eight o’clock?”

“Sure.” Jeffery said with eyebrows raised in suspicion.

*  *  *

At five o’clock Jeffery logged off of his computer, went home, spent about an hour and a half agonizing over what to wear to dinner (after several outfits he finally came to settle on his original concept: khaki slacks, a brown belt, and a blue collared shirt with the top two buttons undone), and finally, holding a red carnation in his right hand, rang Julya’s doorbell at exactly five minutes to eight.

Although dressed in exactly what she had been wearing that morning, Julya looked somehow even more attractive smiling in the doorway of her brownstone. Jeffery thought that it was either due to some strange effect from the evening twilight on her face backlit by the incandescent light from inside, or just the change of setting.

“Isn’t that sweet,” Julya said, as she took the carnation Jeffery had nervously and unceremoniously thrust at her with an awkward smile, “why don’t you come in while I put this in some water?”

Jeffery wove the fingers of his left hand in and out of the fingers of his right hand anxiously as he waited on the red vinyl loveseat in Julya’s living room. The room was modestly decorated with a few Georgia O’Keefe prints on the wall and a tall oak bookshelf filled with various titles he had never heard of, Phrenology texts no doubt. A matching oak coffee table was home to a large ceramic Phrenology head and a smooth stone paperweight with the word “Discovery” imprinted on it.  She had no television.

“Did you find the place okay?” Julya voice lilted from a room somewhere down the hallway. It occurred to Jeffery that he had no idea. He remembered leaving his apartment, hearing the deadbolt clank, and walking up the steps to her brownstone. Surely there were other steps on his trip there, but he couldn’t remember a single one. Perhaps he was having a psychotic episode.

“Just fine,” Jeffery lied as he ran his hands down the crease in his slacks. He wanted to believe that if he stared at his pants long enough things would begin to make sense.

“Good,” Julya’s voice almost whispered in his ear. Jeffery looked up from his slacks to find Julya standing on the other side of the coffee table, completely naked. He couldn’t tell if he was more surprised by this, or the shocking similarity between her genitalia and the flower in Georgia O’Keefe print hanging from the wall behind her. He wondered if that is what had caused her to buy the print in the first place.

Julya gave a sympathetic smile as she walked around the coffee table towards Jeffery. Before he could get up, Julya had rested her hands on his shoulders and was now resting a well-manicured, equilateral triangle of pubic hair on his lap. A struggle between his mind and his member had rendered him paralytic. The sweet mixture of body and perfume wafted from the nape of Julya’s neck as her mouth drew closer to his ear.

“Just close your eyes and try not to think, I’m going to fix your toasting problem,” Julya whispered into his flushed ear. Jeffery stared wide-eyed at the Georgia O’Keefe print, imagining the flower nestling on his crotch. He couldn’t close his eyes if he had wanted to. With her middle and index fingers drew Jeffery’s eyes closed like blinds pulled down over windows and all was dark. He couldn’t move, he could barely breathe, but he knew somewhere in the center of his brain tumor that he had to trust this strange, naked woman.

Slowly the whole room seemed to rock back and forth as Jeffery felt Julya rub her warmth on his upper thigh. Fingers resting in his bangs, he could feel her soft palm pressing gently on his forehead. As the creaking and groaning of knees against vinyl increased in intensity, so did the pressure Jeffery felt on his forehead. It seemed as though Julya was putting all of her weight onto the front of his skull.

“Relax,” Julya cooed, and Jeffery found himself complying. He felt the muscles in his neck go limp and his head sink into the back of the loveseat. He felt his forehead go soft and Julya’s hand sink into his head like a knife into a pumpkin.

Julya’s hand slipped deep into his head, into the center of his brain. Jeffery could feel her hand come alive in his skull. She must have been elbow-deep. His hair stood on end as fingers wriggled their way through the folds in his grey matter. He could feel his mind squish between her fingers like Play-Doh.

Jeffery’s arms went limp and his legs shot up, knocking the coffee table over and shattering Julya’s Phrenology head on the hardwood floor. He realized that she had wrapped her fingers around something inside him, squeezing tightly as she pulled it from his skull. Jeffery could hear the slurping squish as Julya’s hand exited his skull like a mixer from a bowl of cookie dough.

Jeffery’s hands shot up to his forehead, searching for the hole, but aside from a smearing of pinkish goop, his head was normal. Julya still sat in his lap, her right arm covered with the same substance as was on his forehead. She was inspecting a black, ashen lump in the palm of her hand. Jeffery’s mouth was dry from being agape for so long.

“Thanks,” Jeffery said after a long silence, “how did you know?’

            “Oh, I could tell immediately by the shape of your head,” Julya grinned as she handed him the lump from his brain. It almost looked like a burnt piece of toast.