Three Single Women


Arnie loved women. He loved them from afar in the secret places within his own mind, the hidden places where Arnie was a hero, a strong shining light, scatterer of bright pleasures.
Arnie liked women. This should have given him an advantage over the machos, and yet somehow it did not. His gentle light was never bright enough to outshine their bolder glare. Born gentle, quiet and shy he walked unnoticed through life. Age brought maturity, but shyness remained tapping at his shoulder reminding him to hold back, not push himself forward. Within his own mind love could be glorious and golden, out in the world he met only confrontation and rejection which clashed and rattled against his world, while pity chased after him calling names.
Arnie knew all about love. He had fallen as often as the rest of them, but fall en silently, without words, without tears, so nobody heard the crashing of his breaking heart. When the time came to speak about his love, Arnie could never hold on to a look or a word. It was a race he did not know how to enter, and so, left behind from the start, he had never even caught sight of the goal where love waited to welcome him home.
Now at the age of 40 he still limped and lingered while the bold, the vicious and the uncaring had wooed and won and gone on to woo and win many times over.
Arnie was pitied by women. The well meaning and motherly gathered him in, petted him, fussed over him and sent him back into the world as they would a small son late for school. Arnie was used by women who allowed him to mend their broken vacuum cleaners or their splintered lives, then dismissed him with dispassion as they would any tradesman whose job was done.
Yet still Arnie loved women. He longed to be gathered in to that scented world where women shared their soft secrets and wove their feminine magic. Arnie knew about this world, and he knew it was set apart from the world of men.
There were plenty of women to be found in the kingdom of masculinity. He knew, because as a young man this was the first place he had looked for them. Here he had found decorative women who could be bought by the hour or by the lifetime and displayed as symbols of male achievement. He found nurturing women who could be safely directed towards the kitchen and nursery and left to skilfully manage the necessities of perpetuating society. He found clever women, and beautiful women, and independent women and ambitious women, all mounted like trophies around the walls of this club which was the world of men.
But Arnie had learnt a secret. He knew that when the men turned their backs, or went out to play with other toys, the women slipped silently from their posts and escaped into another world. Here they gathered into a sister hood of intuitive liberation, slipping and sliding out of the firm masculine grip into the freedom beyond. It was here that Arnie longed to be. But his male ness excluded him.
Then one day Arnie met Briony, Alice and Maggie - three single women who seemed prepared to open the doors and invite him inside their alien world. For Arnie it was an initiation, a wondrous infiltration into forbidden lands. His gentleness, his sympathy, his shyness, all the things that had held him back from being one of the men, magically opened those coveted doors for him.
He played with their children, the same games he had played in his own childhood but this time relished in the richness of family life - Arnie had been abandoned to an orphanage at the age of three.
He opened their bottles of wine which they bought at the supermarket with the fish fingers and chocolate biscuits. He sat with them around the kitchen table when they met together on a Saturday evening to drink wine, cook food and talk, talk, talk - all their thoughts, their plans, their fears were taken out, shaken, folded and packed tidily away again within the security of sisterly bonding.
Three single women, they said, laughing, heads together, and Arnie laughed too and bowed his head into the circle.

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