Girl Talk

by Julianna Baggott

  And then Church unlocked the door, kicked it open with his boot, and carried Kitty Hawk over the threshold of my apartment, la-la-ing “Here Comes the Bride.” He plopped Kitty down on the sofa. A little champagne from a bottle she was holding spilled onto her dress. She threw out her hand to show me a diamond ring.

  “Nice rock,” she said. “Right?” She was all legs in a white minidress, her pillbox hat cockeyed on her head. She had a cheap little nosegay.

  Church said, “Well, we did it. We’re officially Church and Kitty Fiske.” The name conjured up an old golfing couple in matching shirts. Church was breathless. I wondered if he’d carried her up two flights of stairs. He wasn’t in tip-top shape, had never been much of an athlete despite all the tennis lessons. “What was the witness’s name?” he asked Kitty, a leading question that they both obviously knew the answer to.

  Kitty said, “Mr. Nixon! The president of the United State!”

  States, I said in my head, correcting her. And then aloud: “For God’s sake, United States.”

  “An inventive street person,” Church said, “a top-notch citizen.” He turned to me. “We’ve come to collect you,” he said. “You’ve been invited to the reception.”

  I was not impressed. “Where?” I asked dryly.

  “The Fruit, Cock, Tail, of course.”

  “Who else is invited?”

  “Giggy and his girlfriend, Elsbeth, and Matt, of course.”

  I’d never heard of Giggy and Elsbeth, but Matt was one of Church’s college buddies who lived with his parents on Long Island and sold Italian water ice seasonally. I’d heard stories of him. Once, visiting Piper at Harvard, he and Church had jumped off a bridge into the Charles.

  “Matt’s girlfriend might come, too, but they’re kind of on the rocks,” Church said. “She wanted to go halvsies on an ab roller and he’s not into that kind of commitment.”

  “I’m not dressed,” I said.

  “Look,” Church said, walking up to me, lowering his voice, “this is important to me.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, sighing loudly. The thought crossed my mind quickly, Mothers don’t go to strip clubs. See, I’m not a mother.

  Kitty squealed and tossed the little bouquet with too much force; she was used to throwing things into a deep audience of hungry men, but also I read the force as a little brewed anger. I ducked, and the bouquet landed in the kitchen sink.

  Shahid, the doorman at the Fruit, Cock, Tail Strip Club, had already heard the news. He had long black hair, slicked back over his ears into a ponytail, and huge biceps that stretched his T-shirt sleeves. He clapped Church on the shoulder in congratulations and shook him a bit, and then Shahid saw Kitty. He lifted her up off her feet and kissed her cheek.

  “Thanks, thanks,” Church said, laughing. “Okay, okay. That’s enough now. Enough of the whole touchy-feely. Okay, great.”

  Shahid raised his eyebrows at me. “Who’s the redhead?” he asked, and it was still strange to hear myself referred to as a redhead, the hair dye being pretty recent.

  “Lissy,” Church said, introducing us with little energy, “Shahid.” It was obvious he wasn’t a big Shahid fan. We shook hands and Church hustled us into the club.

  Kitty said, “You like Shahid, I can fix you up. He’s available. Not like Peter, but a real man. You know?” Her face was so close, she looked cross-eyed, staring at me so earnestly. It was meant as a goodwill insult.

  “No, thanks. That’s sweet, but no, really. Shahid’s not my type.”

  “Too bad no Churchie for you,” she said with a smile.

  “I had him,” I said. “Didn’t you know we lost our virginity together?”

  It made her pause, but only momentarily. “You got the boy. I got the man!”

  “I have trouble thinking of Church as anything more than a big boy,” I said.

  “Whatever!” Kitty said, cheerfully. It sounded like something I’d taught her.

  The Fruit, Cock, Tail was typical strip club, a steep cover for overpriced, watered-down drinks and tits galore. Shahid waived the cover, and the drinks were on Church. I was going to drink only lemonade anyway. I’d been there before with Peter when Kitty and I had been friends and she had wanted me to see what she did for a living. It was a dark, hot place with little tables and lots of seats. Peter and I sat right next to the stage because Kitty wanted us to have good seats. And she danced in front of us, in front of Peter mostly. I told him to give her a twenty, because I didn’t want to insult her. And so he awkwardly tucked it into her G-string. I was thankful she was off tonight.

  Giggy and Elsbeth were obvious in the Fruit, Cock, Tail Strip Club. I didn’t need to have them pointed out. They sat rigidly in the corner, as far from the greased poles on stage as possible. Giggy sat with his legs crossed, staring at his loafers, while Elsbeth watched the women writhing on stage, her back straight, keenly observant, unmoved. Giggy and Elsbeth were both still tan, their hair sun-streaked. Elsbeth wore a V-neck sweater, a small scarf knotted around her long neck, and a slim skirt, and Giggy wore a linen shirt and unpleated khakis. Matt showed up just as Kitty, Church, and I got to the table. He was slouchy, tucking in a baggy shirt. He’d been in the bathroom—his eyes red, lids puffed—where I figured he’d gotten stoned.

  “Giggy, Elsbeth, Matt,” Church said. “This is Lissy.” I nodded. “And this, this is Kitty Fiske, my wife.”

  I moved to the side, and Kitty appeared in her white minidress, her boobs pushed up, jiggling, on the verge of popping out. She did a little turn, spinning around. She curtsied, and then held out her hand to show everyone the fat ring.

  Matt congratulated Church with claps on the shoulder and winks and whatnot. Giggy and Elsbeth applauded lightly from their seats, and we settled down at the table.

  “We need to drink,” Elsbeth said. “Heavily.” She spoke like a newscaster, but I liked her sentiments, even though I’d be having lemonade.

  Church got our beverages and we all started talking at once, the group straining to keep one fluid train of thought. Elsbeth asked Kitty about the details of the wedding, but there were so few details, aside from Nixon, that Matt ended up picking up the slack, filling in with chatter about hashish he planned to score out of Miami and lamenting the loss of his girlfriend, Sue—evidently the ab roller had in fact proved a final straw. Kitty got bored quickly and went backstage to talk to her girlfriends, to show off her new ring, no doubt. Giggy and Church were in serious debate, as far as I could hear, about marrying Kitty, the absurdity of it.

  “Are you really sure about this one?” I heard Giggy ask. “Is this for some sort of effect?”

  “Don’t be a dick about it, Giggy.”

  But Giggy persisted. Elsbeth let it slip that Giggy’s father had been the Fiskes’ accountant for years, and Giggy, an accountant now, too, was planning on taking over the account. “He’s being selfish,” the monotone Elsbeth told me. “He doesn’t want her to take half of everything. He’s come to think of the Fiskes’ money as his own.” I understood. Even though I hadn’t actually laid eyes on Church in fifteen years, I still thought of him as my own. I had, after all, mistaken him, once upon a time at the Fiskes’ house in Cape Cod, for a father figure and for my own Anthony Pantuliano. And even though he proved to be neither of these, I’d claimed him in a way that I couldn’t undo.

  Finally tired of Giggy’s nagging, Church stood up and said, “Dead people. That’s the topic. What did they last eat?” It became silent.

  At last, Giggy gave in. “Jimi Hendrix?” he asked weakly.

  “Tuna fish and wine,” Church answered. “Buddy Holly?”

  “A hot dog,” Giggy replied.

  “It’s a game of theirs,” Elsbeth said. “Church and Giggy, at one time, were going to write a morbid cookbook.”

  “Church is always on the verge of doing something.”

  “Well, he’s done something this time,” Elsbeth said, nodding toward where Kitty had been. “This is all so fucked up. Don’t you think?”<
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  “It won’t last,” I said.

  “Oh, God, it could go on forever.”

  “The marriage?” I said. “You think so?”

  “Oh, I thought you meant the night! The marriage is a joke.”

  “Yes! Someone who agrees with me,” I said loudly. “Jesus!”

  Church, hearing only the last word, thought I was playing the game of famous dead people. “The Last Supper, unleavened shit,” Church shouted. “C’mon, that’s common knowledge. Give me something a little more challenging!”

  Everyone drank until they were all quite drunk, except for me. Alliances turned. Matt and Elsbeth ended up in a sour discussion about relationships.

  “She’s a bitch, really, pushing an ultimatum on me,” Matt said. “I’m in no position to move into that kind of relationship. Italian water ice is only seasonal.”

  “She was holding you hostage emotionally,” Elsbeth said. Church told me later that she was a counselor of some sort. “She had you by the balls. Sometimes it’s all you’ve got.”

  Kitty had wandered back to the table and had turned to Giggy for attention. She was now sitting on his lap. Elsbeth seemed vaguely aware. She rolled her eyes and went on counseling Matt. Kitty was listening to Giggy talk about his favorite childhood nanny. It looked to me like a recipe for disaster. Kitty fawning, trying on Giggy’s glasses and then rearranging them on his face, at the tip of his nose and then higher and higher.

  Church was now leaning up against me, still shouting out dead people’s last meals. “Cleopatra? Anyone? Anyone? Figs! Asp-wrapped figs. Karen Carpenter? Anyone? Anyone? Trick question! How about James Dean? Anyone?” He was bombed, the words slurring off his tongue. I was exhausted, ready to go home, eat some toast, and go to sleep for days.

  The crowd had started to get a little rowdy and it was harder and harder to hear above the throbbing bass line and hooting men. Giggy started to bounce Kitty on his knees, and I could barely hear him mimic his nanny in a Cockney accent. “This is the way the lady rides: trit, trot, trit, trot. This is the way the gentleman rides: trit, trot, trit, trot. This is the way the farmer rides: galopy gee, galopy gee, galopy gee and down in the ditch.” With this, Giggy tipped Kitty backward, sending both tits popping out of her dress. She landed on the floor, laughing.

  But no one else was laughing. Elsbeth was fuming, Giggy fumbling, Matt and Church dumbfounded, but not any more dumbfounded than they’d looked moments before.

  “I’m okay. Okay,” Kitty said, as if we’d been concerned that she’d hurt herself in the fall. She looked around the table. She was embarrassed, I could tell, confused by the scene, why everyone was gawking at her. Everything had turned so quickly. She looked at me, too, and Church leaning on my shoulder. I thought she might cry. She shoved her boobs back into her dress and walked quickly away. I felt bad for her, actually. I nudged Church. “Are you going to go after her?”

  “After who?” he asked. He was blind drunk. He couldn’t have gone after her if he’d tried. But it was further indication to me that although he might love Kitty on some level, for some reason, he didn’t love her as a wife, not in that deep way.

  Elsbeth stood up. “Give me the keys, you fucking stupid asshole.”

  Giggy straightened, indignant. “I didn’t grab her tits, you know.” He gave her the keys and she gave him the finger, the longest, most elegant, and well-manicured finger I’d ever seen.

  Matt looked at Church, whose eyes were sagging, chin dropped. Matt said, “Now, see, I just have to find the right girl and then I’ll settle down, like Church here.”

  Church piped up. “I could kick your ass, Matt—you, too, Giggy.” His head fell into my lap. He said, “James Dean had an apple and Coca-cola. Isn’t that a beautiful thing? Isn’t it? So beautifully American.”

  I patted his hair. “You’d make a good pope of the Church of the American Middle Class, Church, really. I could think of no one better.” A terrible husband, most likely, I thought, probably a lousy father, but irrepressible, lovable, and that must be worth something.

  He smiled and closed his eyes.

  7

  Just outside of Bayonne, we pulled up to a Gino’s drive-through. The hot wind had been beating on us for five hours. I’d fallen asleep, and when I awoke, it seemed everything had changed. We were no longer surrounded by the pristine landscape of Cape Cod but by buildings, cement, tar. The air was hotter and thicker. My legs were stuck to the vinyl seat. I’d never been to New York City—I would not visit even during this trip, although I’d gotten so close—but I could sense its pulse, its tension. And even though we were obviously in a bad part of Bayonne, I liked it, the grimy city feel. In the parking lot, a couple of boys my age were pulling bottles from a 7-Eleven Dumpster in clear view and breaking them on the street. My mother looked a little bloated and pale. We ordered hamburgers and orange sodas, nothing diet.

  My mother said that she didn’t know where else to go. “If you’re going to hear the whole story, you might as well hear it right where it all happened,” she said. “And this is where it all happened.” She spread her arms wide in mock grandeur.

  We ate our food in the car parked in the lot. I had to pee. My mother sighed heavily, handed me a Wetnap package, and said, “Hover, for God’s sake; don’t sit.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m fifteen, you know.”

  The bathroom was filthy, both toilets clogged. I peed anyway on top of the heavy paper, unwrapped the tightly folded Wetnap and wiped with it. I didn’t attempt to flush.

  My mother drove down the road to an orange-roofed Howard Johnson and parked at the front door under the tacky orange awning. “Does it have a pool?” I asked. I wasn’t much of a swimmer, having mastered only my mother’s gliding frog kick, but it was stinking hot and I was dying to cool off.

  “We’re staying here only if we have to. I still have connections, I think.” She was wearing a yellow Izod shirt, stained a darker yellow under the arms, and as she got out of the car, I could see the stain across her shirt’s wrinkled back. I hung out the window and watched her flip through the pages of a phone book at the front desk in the lobby. The receptionist pointed her to a pay phone, and I watched her chat, chat, chat, pull a napkin from the endless supply in her pocketbook, and jot down directions; I couldn’t imagine where to. She hung up and half jogged to the car.

  “Did you ask if it has a pool?”

  “We’re staying with friends.” She did a U-turn into a parking space and started rummaging in her suitcase in the backseat. She pulled out a teal dress and shimmied into it, lying down in the back seat.

  “With who?” I asked, impatiently.

  She was applying a fresh coat of makeup, rubbing the lipstick from her teeth. “We’re going to Dino Pantuliano’s. The old bastard’s still alive.”

  On the way to Dino Pantuliano’s house, we hit traffic and my mother gave me the first installment of her love affair with Anthony. She told most of the story while yanking the wheel this way and that, weaving in and out of slow lanes. The story went something like this: At sixteen, Anthony Pantuliano had a Nikon camera, and he would wander the streets of Bayonne taking pictures of the gray steepled sky, the bulk of hard labor in people’s arms, the deeply lined faces with that expression of new freedom, of coming up in the world, immigrants with that we-aren’t-dirty–New Yorkers kind of pride, as he gazed through the lens with his one good eye. One afternoon in February of 1965, he took a picture of a crowd roped off from a fire on Avenue C. It was a small fire confined to one apartment above Verbitski’s Fish Shop. He snapped a few shots hurriedly before a policeman grabbed him by one of his short arms and pushed him back behind the ropes. When he developed the pictures in the basement of the apartment building on Avenue E where he lived with his Uncle Dino and had converted a corner into a darkroom, the blurred image of my mother at sixteen appeared at the edge of the rope—her dark eyebrows raised, her face wet with tears, her mouth open, sobbing, releasing a white ghost of hot breath into the cold air
. Her face grew clearer and clearer as if he were creating her, as if she hadn’t existed until he’d taken this picture. He fell in love with her. He cropped the picture and kept it in his wallet.

  Three months later when he saw my mother on the Avenue C bus in downtown Bayonne, he walked up to her, smelling of the Bayonne Rendering Plant where he worked. He walked up to her as if they were already lovers separated by something like war. He said, “God, it’s you.”

  My mother snatched her purse in close to her body as he reached into his back pocket for his wallet. He showed her the cut-out picture. He placed his wide hand on his chest. “I am Anthony Pantuliano.”

  She recognized the picture immediately and glanced around the bus. “My mother didn’t start that fire,” she said. “It almost killed her.”

  Of course, my mother was lying to Anthony Pantuliano. My grandmother hadn’t technically started that fire, but she was responsible, and my mother would end up telling him so that first day, because she trusted him, because she was already in love with him.

  I have to admit, though, before I go on that all of the stories that would come from my mother in bits and pieces during the summer my father disappeared with the redheaded bank teller have also passed through me; my mind has turned these stories over and over, rubbed them so clean, a hat to the bare band, that I’m not sure what came from her and what comes from my imagination. When I think of my fifteenth summer and, therefore, my mother’s youthful romance, I remember it as if I am still fifteen.