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Chapter One
Beth Norton wasn't ugly. She was a nice enough girl. Just rather
ordinary.
A nose and eyes that were too small on a long pinched face.
Straight hair that fell in a drab curtain that could neither be called blonde nor brown but was a rather ambivalent shade
in between. Not fashionably thin but a little too angular in places, a little too awkward.
Beth worked as an accounts payable clerk for a very large,
very busy cryogenics lab. The pay was ok, the hours were decent, and the people were somewhat friendly--almost to a fault.
They were the usual girlish office types, chattering about their boyfriends or husbands around the break room table while
Beth glumly chewed on her tuna sandwich. Every one in a while one of them would wield a painted talon in Beth's direction
and say, "My cousin (or my uncle, my hairdresser, my exterminator) has got a friend who's single. Sure he's a little fat (or
a little old, a little neurotic, a little divorced) but he's a really great guy. You'd like him."
Inevitably, she would find herself at dinner with these
alleged "great guys." Bald and wooly. Elfin and colossal. Scrawny and gluttonous. One discussed the girl who had unceremoniously
dumped him the week before. Another picked his teeth with the edge of a matchbook, sucking out bits of spinach with ignorant
delight. And there was the mulleted Romeo who asked, "Are you a lesbian?" when his charming description of his anatomy failed
to inspire a spark of lust in Beth. She simply responded by not responding.
Despite the pathetic parade before here, Beth would stare
blankly at her plate, waiting for the right words to appear magically on her plate of kung pao chicken that would make the
loser across the table think she was captivating and tremendously witty. Instead she calculated the minutes until she could
get home to her small (but cute) apartment, climb into her pajamas (the flannel ones with cows on them), plop herself in front
of the TV to watch her favorite show "Misty Harbor" with a huge bowl of ice cream (preferably mint chocolate chip), her grey
cat
Maggie pawing at the spoon for a taste.
Each date would end with a fumbled handshake, a cool peck
on the cheek, with the false promise of "I'll call you sometime." And Beth would find herself at work the next day with the
matchmaker sidling up to her as she dumped too much sugar in her coffee.
"So--how'd it go?" the matchmaker always sing-songed.
"Oh fine. He's nice. He said he'll call," Beth would mumble.
"See I told you so," the matchmaker would reply with a look
of glee and satisfaction. She would then disappear down the hall, ready to share the news about Beth, the poor girl in accounting.
Beth would retreat to her cubicle, stir her coffee some
more, and look out the window at the army of suited men filing into the building for the day. One guy. Just one guy was all
she wanted.
The reality of her 30th birthday looming in less than a
month smacked her square in the face. She decided to address the thought that she had been obsessed with ever since sixth
grade: she was going to die a virgin.
Chapter Two
Lucy, the lab's receptionist, was getting married two weeks before Beth's
birthday, and all of the girls were invited to her bachelorette party--an expensive affair at the Meow Meow Club. (Lucy was
fortunate enough to come from
money because she certainly wasn't marrying into it.) Lucy's sister had rented one of the
Meow Meow's private rooms and had it stocked with an assortment of lover mechas from the Black Tie Agency (reputed to be one
of the best), ready to do anything the ladies wanted. Anything.
Beth immediately tried to invent an excuse but her fellow accounts
payable clerk Jenny practically begged her to go. Jenny reasoned, "Hey, I'm married so I'm just going to have a few drinks
and watch Lucy make an ass out of herself."
Beth winced and said, "No, I need to..."
"... Oh c'mon--go! We'll stick together, it'll be fun!" Jenny flung
her flabby arm reeking of "Eau de Amour" around Beth's shoulders.
Beth grudgingly agreed. Better to go and be miserable than not go and
be gossiped about.
Mechas. Beth had always cast a wary eye on them. When she was five,
her father lost his welder's job at an auto parts factory to a mecha. His already fragile ego was absolutely crushed and since
then hadn't quite been the same--working a series of dead-end jobs that he could never hang onto, drinking as much as possible
to get through the day, his resentment of mechas becoming an obsession. Once when Beth was six, crouched down and listening
at the top of the stairs, she overheard her parents arguing (not an uncommon occurrence). Her father wanted to spend his usual
evening ritual imbibing in one of Haddonfleld's sleazier bars and for some reason this night wanted his wife along with him--for
once. Afraid to pass up this golden opportunity to be with her husband,
Beth's mother picked up the phone and began to dial, ready to hire
a nanny mecha for just one night.
Her father stormed over, grabbed the phone from her hands and slammed
it down. "What the hell's the matter with you? A mecha--here? You wanna come home and find we've been cleaned out? No fucking
way! Forget it, you're staying home," Beth's mother stood shocked as he thundered out the door.
Beth tentatively made her way down the stairs. Her mother glared at
her and collapsed onto the couch with a lifeless thud, her arms folded across her chest.
"I'm sorry Mommy," Beth whispered and padded her fuzzy-slippered feet
across the floor, ready to climb into her mother's lap. Her mother wordlessly turned over, oblivious to her daughter's open
arms, and began to cry silently into the arm of the couch. Soon she too, found solace in a glass.
This is my fault, Beth thought.
As his rage grew, her father became an ad hoc one-man citizen patrol
reporting unlicensed mechas. He combed the streets night after night and even stood poised, peeking through closed blinds
with phone and homemade scanner in hand, ready to expose an errant garbage collector or construction worker. Beth in her room,
hearing the sirens and builhorns, would run to the window and watch terrified and fascinated as the serene mechas were shoved
into the backs of trucks, the doors being forced shut and caught limbs spilling onto the asphalt as the truck screamed away.
Later, as the anti-mecha movement began to slowly and silently mushroom,
her father found allies in other orgas who only helped fuel his anger. For "the cause" he spent hours at the computer, feverishly
producing propagandaat home expounding on the "dangers" of mechas, their "deviant" ways, their plots for "world domination
and the extinction of the orga race" while Beth struggled with her math homework. If Beth pleaded for his attention, he'd
threaten to sell her to a mecha, so then she'd "really have something to cry about."
As a result Beth had always felt a sense of fear wracked by a morbid curiosity about mechas--these creations of metal
and plastic that raised such ire in her once stable father. It had affected her more than 20 years later. Even if she had
piles of work that needed to be done by 9:00 a.m. the next morning, she would try to leave before the mecha cleaning crew
arrived at precisely 5:30 p.m. The mechas moved silently, deliberately, and always with a slight smile on their faces. Pushing
their vacuum cleaners, emptying the trash--she found their smooth, assured movements unnerving in contrast to her tepid bumbling.
She had seen lover mechas out on the more dingy streets of Haddonfield as she drove home from work. The slippery
black-clad men and women strode proudly across the cracked pavement calling to one another and potential customers. Beth always
kept her eyes forward, hands never leaving the wheel. She was impressed, jealous, and fearful of their confidence. She had
even heard the girls at work talking about them, how wonderful they were, how they really knew what women wanted, and how
they could do things that no man would--or could--do in bed. Beth would lightly tap her keyboard while rabidly inhaling the
details of the previous weekend's escapades drifting over her cubicle wall. She felt a yearning to join their world and yet,
much like the cleaning crew mechas themselves, moved quietly in the shadows.
Yes, she knew about lover mechas but had never actually seen one close-up, in the "flesh" before. Until that night.
To Be Continued....
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