Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

There is another whole page on “Cleanup and Sanitation.”

  I look around at the faces of my classmates. The fluorescent lights illuminate everyone’s most damning qualities: lines and blackheads and brassy bleached hair and greasy skin and heavy features. We’re none of us very pretty in this light. Maybe Vera almost makes the grade, but not even Vera looks all that hot in here. Pretty requires a more forgiving context.

  There’s this thing I do when I’m anxious or bored. Like now, for instance, when I’m near catatonic. I don’t know why it goes like this or how it started even. I’ve always done it, since I was a little girl. I did it even before I joined Zion. Like a mantra or a counting game or something, except I use Jesus. I don’t talk about it too much because I know it sounds religious and most people I meet around Los Angeles at least think that religious means creepy. Anyway, it’s not religious. It’s just a list of what I see around me.

  Jesus is under my fingernails. Jesus is in the soap bubbles. Jesus is in the chalk dust.

  Miss Mary-Jo always switches her words around and says the opposite of what she really means.

  She says, “It is very important that you contaminate your instruments after the using. Everything on the sanitary maintenance area must be contaminated or exposed of or you will translay the fungus.”

  The mention of fungus elicits a somber nod all around. We’ve all been subjected to the photos of the yellowed, grossly twisted toenails going black around the edges and digging into the bright red, tortured toes beneath them. The word itself seems to carry infection in its wake. Mention it and I want to take a bath in Barbicide.

  “We have now a quiz from the yesterday lesson. What are the five nail shape?”

  As a group we easily get the first four: round, oval, pointed, and square. Then the rest of the class is stumped, but I remember.

  “Squoval,” I say.

  Jesus is square. Jesus is pointed. Jesus is squoval.

  “Yes! Squoval! It is the trick question! Good work, Bebe. Now everyone go and get your instruments and begin oil manicure with the partner.”

  Violet is my manicure partner, and she wants to mope about Jimmy the whole time. Javier sits next to us, partnered with Shrek and cheery as usual. I listen in as he chats with her about a recipe for a string bean salad with a touch of orange zest and about the wonders of Accutane. I forget my cuticles are soaking in oil and absentmindedly run a slimy hand through my hair. Now I am greasy on top of being eyeball-aching tired.

  Valley Blonde #1 breezes by our table and nearly upends my oil tray with a sweep of her denim-encased hip.

  “Oops, sorry,” she says and reaches to steady the tray at the same time I do. She sees my hand and startles, her neon blue eyes (lined in neon blue eyeliner) widening with horror.

  “Oh, my God! I think you got a fungus.”

  “Honey, are you high?” Javier asks Blonde #1. “You’ve been sitting in class with Bebe all year and you don’t know yet that she has a few teensy scars on her hands?”

  “Oh, my God, I forgot. I’m sorry. It just scared me.”

  “Well, at least it’s good for something,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind,” says Javi. “On your way now.”

  When people express horror at my mummy hands it hardly even bothers me anymore. Months ago I gave up on trying to incorporate gloves as a fashion statement. But the interaction with the Valley Blonde makes me think of Jake and our lunch date today. Jake is a lousy boyfriend for a lot of reasons, but he’s a freak who thinks my hands are beautiful and that makes up for a lot.

  At the end of the morning we bring our cards to Miss Mary-Jo, who sits at the front of the room like St. Peter at heaven’s gates. She holds a felt-tip pen and signs out everyone’s points. Violet and I hold out our poorly manicured, shiny-skinned hands for her to judge. One point each, practical manicuring. Three points’ credit for manicure/pedicure theory. Pedicures come later in the week, the high torture of vocational school purgatory.

  Miss Mary-Jo looks at my hands and adds an extra point to my card. Then she rubs my hands between hers.

  “Your hands,” she says. “There will be the healing.”

  This is what Miss Mary-Jo knows: beauty school is a doorway. It’s not a school so much as a test. I envision a real job, or a career even, at the end of these sixteen hundred hours. And, more important, I imagine a life. One where I have a skill people pay me for and I wake up in the morning in my own little apartment and make coffee in a sunlit kitchen and maybe I have a cat or something. A sunlit kitchen in San Francisco. I don’t know if there is that much forgiveness in the world, but that’s the truth of why I’m here, in spite of nasty pedicures and regulation smocks and words like “squoval.” If you want to know.

  1532 hours down. 68 hours left to go.

  Four

  Jake comes to meet me for lunch. He picks me up in the Ghetto Racer, which is the shittiest car you’ve ever seen in your life. No, really. When he pulls up to the curb a general giggle erupts all up and down the sidewalk. People actually turn and point. Jake has to carry a book of vehicle codes around with him on the floor of the passenger side because he gets pulled over by the cops at least once a week and has to prove the car isn’t in violation of anything but taste.

  The Ghetto Racer is missing its front bumper. In the rear windows float demented doll and stuffed animal heads that stare out at you. The stick shift is a doll arm, tattooed with a Sharpie. Stickers for bands with names like Maggot Pus and Alien Sex Fiend cover much of the body of the car. The few parts of the paint you can see are badly rusted. Once it was a black hatchback Honda.

  Jake looks as nuts as his car, if a whole lot more handsome. A wave cap with a grandpa hat over it covers his head. A still-pink, angry scar travels diagonally down the left side of his cheek from underneath his eye to his jaw. He has as many stories about how he got the scar as there are people who ask him about it, but I’m pretty sure I know the truth. I’m pretty sure he did it himself in order to let the poison out from beneath the spot where he was convinced he was kissed by Judas. That was during the psychotic episode that got him slapped into the detox where we met.

  Today, he wears a filthy white T-shirt, covered with car grease and paint, and his jeans are stained green and brown from dirt and grass. There are multicolor brush marks all over everything, from his shoes to the ceiling of the car. He’s wild-eyed and muscular and he moves like a spooked animal. He’s the same age as me, but in the bright afternoon sunlight he could be forty. His twenty-five years on this planet have been long ones.

  It’s important with Jake to make the distinction between when he’s going crazy, like clinically, and when he’s just being Jake, which means eccentric in the impale-a-doll-arm-on-your-stick-shift way but not crazy as in you can literally see the fiber optics in the air that connect you to God. It’s important to know the difference, but it can be hard, even for me, who might know him best. Even at his sanest, Jake still shines with an otherworldly quality. Talk to him for long enough and you may start to believe that he really is periodically privy to the conversations of angels and not just a victim of some faulty wiring in his brain.

  “Hello and much worship, Divine Angel,” Jake says as I get in the car. He takes both of my hands in his and kisses them. “To where do we travel?”

  Jake’s smile kills me, wide and sweet, with a chip in his front tooth. Like a little boy who went over the handlebars on his bike.

  “We travel to the California Pizza Kitchen three blocks down on the left, unless you have a better idea.”

  I never meant things to get where they are with him because he’s an obvious impossibility and also because I am not looking for love. I have no place left in me for love. But here we are.

  Jake is the wild card in my mundane existence. He reminds me that things used to be more colorful than the ten-minute drive between Moda and Serenity, sliding by on barely enough gas in my tank. There has to be something in between that grayness and life
in the Ghetto Racer, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

  I’m still kind of pissed off about last night but I can tell he doesn’t even know he stood me up. I don’t mention it. I’m too proud to admit that I was forgotten, even to the guy who did the forgetting.

  California Pizza Kitchen is hideous, of course, but all the spots around here are like that. Everyone is on their lunch hour from the surrounding office buildings. Men with sunburned faces and too much gel in their hair lunch in their shirtsleeves. Women who wear nude hose and navy skirts like flight attendants pick at salads. I feature the ever-present, ever-humiliating school uniform. The purpose of uniforms, I figure, is to keep you from feeling confident. If you always feel like shit, you are more malleable. Or maybe that’s only true for certain uniforms, because military uniforms seem like they would make you feel sharp. I’ve seen pictures of Jake in his dress blues and it’s enough to make even me want to wave a flag.

  After he was discharged, Jake made his way to New York, where he started doing these mega guerrilla public art projects. He erected statues overnight in corporate sculpture gardens and painted over commercial billboards with sci-fi worlds of zombies dressed in high fashion, incredibly crafted, criminal explosions of color. He paints like a deranged angel, so you can imagine that those New York socialites couldn’t get enough of him—his rare talent, his genuine insanity, his incongruous military bearing. You know, very real-life. He spent his summers at swanky beach pads in the Hamptons and his winters in Central Park penthouses or chic SoHo lofts. He beat the husbands at chess, graffitied the bathroom walls, and fucked the rich wives. He stole the prescriptions out of their medicine chests and the jewelry out of their drawers and they ate it up. Where is there to go from there? That kind of success can ruin you. Lots of things can, I guess.

  People stare at us when we walk into the restaurant, but not directly. Rather, they stare out the corners of their eyes, then quickly avert their gaze the minute I look back at them. Jake looks like what he is: a guy who took too many psychedelics and periodically thinks he is Jesus. He has J-e-s-u-s in Cholo script tattooed on the top of his hand, wrapped in a snarl of vines that travels up his forearm. He got it when he was shooting acid intravenously. I didn’t even know it was possible to shoot acid, but it is. Not recommended, but possible. He once told me he had gotten the tattoo when being God still felt good.

  I order a salad, trying to make up for the milk shake binge last night. Life is a constant series of cleaning up the last mess.

  “How is your day going in the palace of beauty?” Jake asks.

  “You mean the pit of boredom? It’s swell.”

  “It is a box inside a box for you, Angel. You’re a princess in a tower guarded by zombie gorillas. But you’ll prevail.”

  This is how Jake talks. You get used to it, kind of.

  “Only sixty-eight hours left. Tomorrow we start the joys of pedicures. After your friend’s gotten way too intimate with your feet, you get to put your closed-toe shoes back on your freshly painted nails.”

  “Surely the princess has some stockings or lovely lace ankle socks or, better yet, knee-highs with stripes she could wear to remedy the tragic problem of smudged toenails.”

  “You’re a pervert,” I say. Jake is something of a sock fetishist, obsessed with striped knee-highs. I have seen him stare at sock displays in shop windows for long, transfixed moments. At least it makes him easy to please. It also makes him the perfect boyfriend for a girl with lacerated legs.

  I redirect. “How’s the job going?”

  “Me and money are not friends. I’ve decided I can’t do it. I can’t work for the monster boss people. I can’t concentrate with real people concentration. I said it would take me five days to paint these rooms and now it’s been eleven. One color, one color. If you break it down by the hour, I haven’t made minimum wage. I’m practically paying them to paint their fucking house.”

  He looks around, distracted. I have brought his good mood crashing down. I can tell it disappoints him that I’m so boring, you know, asking about things like jobs when he wants to talk about zombie gorillas.

  “Maybe it’ll get better once you do it a few times.”

  This is my best attempt to sound supportive. Truthfully, Jake’s noncooperation policy annoys me. I know he could do it, he just doesn’t want to. He makes everything so difficult. I call it his civil disobedience act. The world shows up and he goes limp. I don’t know how we’re supposed to get anywhere if we’re not willing to even try.

  “Or maybe I’ll reenlist. There’s a war on now. They’re not calling it a war, but it is and they could use me. I have skills,” he says with sudden renewed interest.

  “Good idea.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? All you talk about is how much you hate this president. How stupid the war is. It’s, like, your number one diatribe.”

  Sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s serious or talking in metaphors or just joking.

  “Politics means nothing. Politics is totally extraneous, beside the point.”

  “Whatever. They won’t let you hold a gun. Sorry, soldier. Looks like you’re stuck having to get a job.”

  “Politics means nothing,” Jake patiently repeats, as if I haven’t even said the word “job.” “We laughed at the government. There were communists and fascists and fucking whatever in my platoon. We talked about it when we got drunk and we made fun of each other but it meant nothing. Politics means shit compared to the sense of self you get out there. I’m telling you that the weight of a hundred-pound rucksack, a thirty-pound machine gun, is nothing compared to the fucking weight of having to pay the fucking rent in the city of Lost fucking Angels.”

  He leans forward, his hands planted wide on the table, his gray eyes lit with clarity. It is a man thing, I think. I stare at the breadbasket and contemplate an olive roll. I put the breadbasket on the table next to us so I won’t have to look at it. Jake takes it back, puts it in his lap, and bites off large hunks of a baguette, talking with his mouth full. Gooey dough balls stick to his teeth.

  “Don’t think it’s about America. You think that’s why guys go over there? It’s not for George fucking Bush. I’ll tell you that much. Anyway, what should I stay here for? Tell me that.”

  “For your art,” I say, but it sounds thin. It’s not the answer he wants. “For whatever’s coming next,” I continue. “What if it’s something amazing? It could be. It has been before.”

  The truth is, I don’t have anything near his brains or his conviction, with my Mr. Rogers aphorisms and my twelve-step meetings and my self-help books and my nothing real I believe in. One thing Jake has that I don’t anymore is faith. He has the capacity to believe he’s Jesus. To believe in joining the Marines. I can barely believe in the next hairdo.

  “That is what you come up with, Princess? For my fucking art? For something amazing? You can’t even ask me to stay here for you? And anyway, what are you staying for? I’m serious. Maybe not about the Marines, but let’s go volunteer for the Peace Corps. Or I’ll teach English in Bangladesh and you can volunteer, like, teaching prostitutes to give pedicures or something. You’re not born for this drudgery.”

  “What are you talking about? This drudgery is actually exactly what I’m born for. I come from a long line of drudgery.”

  “I’m talking about purpose,” he says. “I’m talking about daring to fucking exist. I’m talking about commitment. If you had ever had any, you’d know what I mean.”

  “Change the subject,” I say, chastened. It’s rare to get through an hour with him without either a catastrophe or a revelation. He’s that kind of a dice roll. I feel like I got kicked in the solar plexus, but I try to remember to hold my head up, pull my shoulders back. Milady’s Standard Textbook of Practical Cosmetology has a whole chapter on posture.

  “You’re right. You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to add stones to the princess’s prison w
alls. I came here to save you, even if it means painting all of Los Angeles one color, one color. I’m not enlisting in anything. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just talking. I’m just an asshole.”

  He kisses me in the CPK and a bored temp looks up from her Chinese chicken salad, her former judgment turning into a little stomach twinge of envy.

  He’s impossible. I’d bet my cosmetology license that he’ll leave his job half-finished and will never even pick up the check. Me, I’ve always been good at showing up for work. That’s the kind of girl I am. But I can’t look Jake in the face and tell him that it’s gotten me much further than not showing up for work has gotten him. Here we both are.

  Jake drops me back at school and drives off in the opposite direction to stare at the unpainted walls of his unsuccessful attempt at a job. I’d say that I have the worst luck with men but when you make a choice like Jake you can hardly call it luck anymore, can you? Still, he saves me from the sameness of my days.

  Jesus is in the polish on my nails. Jesus is in the stucco walls. Jesus is in the sun on my face.

  Five

  Before I clock in, the phone buzzes as soon as I slip it into my smock pocket. I take it out and look at the screen and the area code isn’t Jake’s as I’d hoped. It’s Toledo.

  I take a breath like how they teach us in group. They teach us to breathe. I decide to pick it up, hiding by the lockers in the back hallway to talk. Partly because I have nothing better to do and partly because I’ve got to talk to her sometime, don’t I?

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, honey.” My mom tries to sound upbeat, to banish the sticky eternal glaze of need from her voice. The attempt makes her sound like one of those fascist Disney chipmunks.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m doing pretty good, Mom. Not bad. Could be worse.” How many ways can I say the same nothing? “A little tired from school but all right. How are you doing?”

  It’s hard to explain why this is so agonizing. How can there be so much bullshit in just a “hello, how are you?” that it makes me want to stick my head in the oven? She is listening to see if I’m drunk; I’m listening to see if she’s drunk. And both of us are broke and depressed and alone and hanging on to our respective life rafts by a pinkie nail. So you can see that the truthful conversation is not the one you want to have, either.