Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  After two weeks of fear, frustration, and tears, she finally turned in her corduroy project, only to have Mrs. Hobbins hold it up in class and ridicule it in front of our peers.

  To be fair, her project was truly a disaster, a jumpsuit with twisted seams and one leg shorter than the other—as Hobbins pointed out, an outfit suitable only for a polio victim. But Julie hated Old Hobnail after that. The next class, before Hobnail got there, Julie discreetly poured water in the hollow of her wooden chair—just a little, so that she might not feel it through her bomb-grade corsetry, but enough that she’d look like she wet herself when she got up.

  This is precisely what happened. When Hobnail turned to the blackboard and displayed her wet ass to the class, the loud laughter of the girls tipped her off that something was up. Strangely, though, she didn’t accuse Julie. She accused me, and though I denied it, she kept me after class.

  The next year, we were put in separate sewing classes, the theory being that separately we were inert substances, volatile only when mixed.

  “Is this Julie worth all this trouble?” Claire asked.

  “To me she is. Because of her, I moved to New York. And because of her, I became semipopular in high school, and redeemed my cooties somewhat.”

  “I can’t wait to meet her,” Claire said.

  12

  WE HAD TO PICK UP TAMAYO, so we went up to East 25th Street, just off Madison Square Park, site of the Rocking Chair Riots of 1901. When I first heard about those riots, I imagined a bunch of old people beating on cops with their rocking chairs. But actually the riots were started by a young guy who sat in a public rocking chair in Madison Square and refused to pay the nickel rental fee that the city charged.

  The party was in a huge duplex with pillars holding up the ceiling and very little furniture. “Young, nasty hipsters,” as Claire put it, and Wannabeats jammed the place, most standing but others sitting on everything, hanging off the steel-mesh staircase in the back, lounging on top of amps. The crowd was young, twentyish, likely single. Most were moshing, kind of bobbing up and down, because there wasn’t enough room to dance. You could hardly breathe, and when you did you took in a lungful of cigarette and pot smoke.

  (As I looked for Tamayo, I caught a whiff of cigarettes and strawberry perfume, mingled, and I had a midlife moment. For a second there, I was transported back to a dark rec room, necking with a boy whose bubble gum had formed a thin sugar crust on his lips, and suddenly in my head I heard Cher singing “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.”)

  Two mummies holding hands passed by, and I remembered that I had to make a decision about Mike or Eric. If it was going to be Eric, I should call Mike and just tell him to can the weekend and I’d see him in two weeks, when I had to go to Vegas for an affiliates meeting. Or maybe I should be responsible, and not see either of them, stay in and do work instead, since I had reports due Monday, etc. It wasn’t like I was doing some huge favor for Eric or Mike by seeing them. Eric was reeaallly good-looking, and funny too, a good guy, and he could scare up companionship pretty easily. Mike wasn’t such a hound, and if we couldn’t get together when he was in town, he’d hang out with his daughter Samantha.…

  Oh, hell, I thought. I’ll worry about it later.

  It was too noisy to have a conversation here; music from early-1960s spy shows was blasting away. The idea seemed to be to just bump randomly into other bodies all night until you bumped into one you liked and then leave with it. When I was younger, I loved scenes like this, but unless you’re energetic and in full mating mode, what’s the point of standing around in a noisy, smoky room for even five minutes?

  It took more than five minutes to track down Tamayo, who was out on the fire escape talking about her UFO movie to a comic-book illustrator, not in costume, and a guy dressed like a Klingon.

  “But if the two black holes are connected by a tunnel, or what is known as a wormhole, and the mouths of the black holes meet, as they would eventually, then the people on this planet would travel back to their own pasts,” the Klingon said. “Maybe to their own futures.”

  “And how would that affect their weight?” Tamayo asked. “Would it fluctuate wildly?”

  “I’m not sure they would weigh more in the first place. I don’t know. I’m confused,” the Klingon said.

  I admired how Tamayo could get a man trying to hit on her into a conversation about quantum physics.

  “Know how Klingons flirt?” Tamayo asked, when we finally dragged her out. “The Klingon word for ‘love’ is bang, and the word for ‘yes’ is HISlaH. Bang? HISlaH. That’s an entire romantic interaction.”

  “Did that Klingon use that on you?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That explains why there are so few Klingons in the world,” I said.

  “Where are we going?” Tamayo asked.

  “Park and 62nd, to find Kathy and Julie. There have been a few wrinkles since I lost you in the parade.”

  Claire filled Tamayo in on the key things, and also mentioned Solange’s new book.

  “So what do you care what Solange says? Remember what you told me when I started doing stand-up full-time? If you’re going to swim with the sharks, don’t wear a raw-beef bathing suit. Good advice.”

  Claire said, “It’s not what she thinks, it is what other people will …”

  “The swells will know she’s full of shit. There isn’t anything you can do about the squares except win them over through your work. Otherwise ignore them. Did Robin tell you how I offended Solange with an armpit fart at one of those Womedia things?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “Why don’t you tell her?”

  Tamayo had the world broken down into swells and squares. Swells, presumably, include those people who laugh at quality fart jokes. Solange was not in this number, as we discovered at a Womedia fund-raiser organized by Solange and featuring a dance piece choreographed by a guy Solange wanted to boink. I took Tamayo so I could introduce her to some of my sweller Womedia sisters who might be able to help her career. Solange did not appreciate Tamayo’s making fart noises, or, as Solange put it, “vulgar noises,” with her armpit during “sensitive parts of the performance.”

  That sounds crude, I know, fart noises, but it was Tamayo’s timing that made that work. See, the female dancer had her back to the male lead, and he was holding on to her, slowly sliding down her back to his knees, and when his face got to her butt, Tamayo did the fart thing. Childish, yes. Nobody but those people immediately around us heard the fart, but Solange heard it—and was not amused. Stifling hysterics, we had to leave.

  Perhaps we shouldn’t have had those preshow Rob Roys at Hojo’s.

  Not that we’re completely uncultured boors—not all the time. But it was a shitty dance piece, called X/Y, tedious and pretentious, a couple in spandex essentially doing what we used to call dry-humping back at Hummer High School in Ferrous, Minnesota. I hasten to add that the New York Times dance critic also panned the piece, although she expressed herself somewhat more eloquently than Tamayo. In any event, some of my more serious Womedia sisters felt the armpit fart was inappropriate, and I could see their point of view too, you know.

  Tamayo’s retelling of this had Claire laughing her ass off, and Claire was suddenly fine again. They talked about people I didn’t even know, nights they’d gone out together to interesting-sounding places, like Mugsy’s Chow Chow and the Bubble Lounge, and exchanged information about all the new trendy places. They poked fun at each other and did that home-girl, hands-on-hips, side-to-side head-bob thing, which Tamayo, mimic extraordinaire, had taught to Claire. The circle of their intimacy drew a little tighter, and seemed to have a little less room for me.

  It bothered me a little, I admit, how my friends and former producers Tamayo and Claire had become such good friends when I wasn’t there. At first, I couldn’t figure out what they had in common, but it turned out the mixed-race business gave them a lot of common ground. They were both former special-report producers, roughly the s
ame age, late twenties, and closer in age to each other than to me. They both had, under normal conditions, an excess of self-confidence.

  On the dissonant side, Claire was a vegetarian, whereas Tamayo was a carnivore and had eaten whale once, which she found a tad oily. She even had an Eat More Whale bumper sticker from an Eat More Whale campaign in Japan a few years back, though as a joke, not because she was for eating whales. Claire is very tolerant of people who eat meat, though she never gives up her campaign to get other people to give it up, but she was pretty rabid about some things, like saving the whales, and didn’t have a good sense of humor about it. Still, despite this difference, she and Tamayo had bonded, leading me to wonder how I fit into this Benetton tableau vivant.

  Tamayo read my mind. “Hey, look at us, we’re like ‘Charlie’s Angels’ for the nineties. A black chick, a Jap chick, and the token dead redhead. I forgot to tell you, Robin, we have a new security trick for you,” Tamayo said. “It’s an Elayne Boosler trick. You get six locks, and you lock three of them, so if a burglar tries to pick your locks he’ll always be locking three and unlocking three.”

  “Isn’t that a great idea?” Claire said. “When she told us …”

  “She told you this?”

  “Last night, at this party we went to. Boosler was there and Tamayo introduced me to her. We would have invited you along, but you were in L.A.”

  “I always miss these parties for some reason.” I admit I am a tad starstruck and get a kick out of meeting celebrities. I’d love the chance to say something stupid to Matt Dillon sometime. I guess that’s the small-town girl in me.

  “I was in L.A. having dinner with my ex-husband and his divine new fiancée,” I said. As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I planned not to mention this, because I thought it might upset Claire, especially since Burke’s fiancée was packing it up in L.A. and moving to Washington for him, and this was well known.

  It did upset her.

  “What will I do when that moment comes, when I have to meet Jess and his new fiancée?” Claire said. “Oh God, I’m hyperventilating.”

  “Take your head off,” Tamayo said. “Breathe deep. Sometimes people are only meant to take each other partway in life.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

  “From your super,” Tamayo said. “Phil. I had tea with him and Helen after my tarot reading. Claire, you should call Sally. Have a tarot with her, and then have tea with Phil. Pick you right up.”

  “Don’t call Sally,” I said, exasperated.

  Sally would give Claire the usual rap about following her instincts. We all have good and bad instincts, so you can’t follow all of them, though Sally certainly tried. Her instincts led her to Dirk, a writer in his second year of writer’s block who kicked her naked out of his apartment one night and refused to let her back in to get her clothes and books, despite Sally’s screaming and banging on his door.

  When she finally got her stuff back, it had all been mutilated by Dirk. Big chunks were cut out of clothes, the CDs were cracked and scratched, and pages were missing from her books. Sally spent a month trying to piece together what was on those missing pages, thinking it was some coded message from Dirk and if she figured it out she won some kind of big prize, like the return of his affection. She didn’t give up this quest until she met a new True Love, the one who took off with her life savings.

  “You know how Sally makes decisions,” I said. “When the tarot and the horoscope don’t provide the answer, she tells herself: If I see a red car before a blue car, I’ll do A. If I see a blue car before a red car, I’ll do B. It’s hardly a rational process you can invest faith in.”

  “You don’t get it,” Tamayo said.

  We got a cab, and as we rode uptown Claire snapped herself out of her angst by resuming her questioning about Julie. How come Julie had waited so long to contact me?

  “We had a falling-out, a long time ago. You know how it is when you’re young. You harbor grudges over dumb stuff. Then you grow up and get nostalgic and you let go of the shit and reconnect. You’ll know what I mean in about ten years.”

  Claire rolled her eyes. She hates it when I play the age and experience cards, but I had about a decade of experience on her, things I’d learned the hard way, like, a little religion can come in handy sometimes, a cat is a woman’s best friend, and if you attend an airborne ash-scattering keep your mouth shut and beware the updraft, among other things.

  “What did you fall out over?”

  “A dress I borrowed and returned in less-than-ideal shape.”

  “Pretty dumb thing to nurse a grudge over.”

  “Hey, people are killed for less,” Tamayo said. “Right, Robin? Tell her about the chicken and the egg.”

  Buried somewhere in my closet is a box of scrapbooks full of stories about people who killed each other for less, entitled “The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back,” e.g., the man who killed his wife in an argument over where to put the mustard on the dinner table. People have been killed ostensibly because they served eggs for breakfast every single day, because they hid the milk behind the vegetables in the refrigerator, in arguments over toast and marmalade, etc. In the Philippines, two brothers fought to the death in an argument over who was prettier, Imelda Marcos or Princess Diana. The Imelda man won.

  “Remember the woman who killed her husband with a skillet because he ‘forgot’ to mow the lawn for the third day in a row?” Tamayo said.

  “I’m sure there was more to it than the lawn,” Claire said, and she was right. The woman who hit her husband in the head fifty-some times with a skillet, hammering him like a nail, didn’t do it because of the lawn. She did it because she suddenly decided she’d like him a whole lot better a foot shorter and dead. That Filipino brother didn’t die over the debatable charms of Princess Diana. Same with the woman killed over mustard placement on the dinner table. The real issues weren’t condiments or Imelda Marcos, because what goddamned difference does it make? Those are the cover arguments for the real issues.

  “Isn’t it funny how people would rather kill each other than be honest and work things out?” I said.

  “It’s fucking hilarious,” Claire said. “But there’s got to be more to it than just a stained dress. I hope we’re not wasting an evening because of her.”

  “Yeah, there better be a payoff,” Tamayo said. “There better be major fun waiting for us.”

  My first inclination was to keep mum, maybe pout a bit, think to myself that it would be good to see a real friend, like Julie, who understood me.

  But I had to admit there was resentment between us.

  “There was probably a lot of stuff going on that I didn’t understand at the time,” I said. “I think some of it had to do with Doug Gribetz, this boy we were both in love with when we were growing up. Between me and Julie, it became untenable, our both having a crush on the same boy, so we solved the problem by betting on him in a game of Trouble. That was Julie’s idea.”

  “Oh, my older sister had that game. With the Pop-o-Matic, right?” Claire said.

  “Pop-o-what?” Tamayo said.

  “Dice in a plastic bubble. You popped the bubble to roll the dice,” I explained.

  “That’s the kind of thing I wanted!” Tamayo said. “I love my Grandma Scheinman, but she never got the girl stuff right. I’d ask for American toys for Hanukkah or my birthday and she’d send me porcelain dolls and Parcheesi games.”

  “Poor Tamayo,” Claire said. She turned to me. “You bet this boy in a game of Trouble?”

  “Yeah, the winner got to be in love with Doug Gribetz, the loser got to be in love with Bobby Sherman. And we adored Bobby Sherman, especially Julie.…”

  “Bobby Sherman?” Tamayo said.

  “He sang the song, ‘Julie Do You Love Me,’” Claire said.

  “Julie loved that Julie song. That should give you some idea how wonderful Doug Gribetz was, that the winner got to be in love with him over Bobby Sherman. Anyway, I lost. I kno
w that sounds hilarious, but it was a big issue between us for years. At least for me.”

  Doug Gribetz. Even now that name made my heart beat faster. He was the standard by which I judged all other men, and all other men fell short. It was completely understandable that I was in love with him. Every girl was in love with Doug Gribetz. Hard not to be. It wasn’t just that he was nice-looking and smart. In a lot of ways, he was the most mature boy I’d ever known. Popular with everyone because he was kind to everyone, even me, and everyone respected him. He had a good heart. We rarely spoke in all the years we shared a classroom, but one time, in third grade, when I was being pushed roughly around a circle of girls, he came up and said, “What are you doing?” in a voice that made all the girls stop and hang their heads a little. He walked me home, and we talked about stuff the whole way. I was on cloud nine. We parted shyly, and never spoke extensively again. After that, I was never tortured by the popular girls while he was present. Did that ever deepen my infatuation.

  “Julie ended up dating Doug for a while in eleventh grade. That really burned my butt,” I said.

  “What other resentments did you have?” Claire asked.

  “Oh gee. Let me think. I resented that she was prettier than me, or at least always acted like she was, and she resented that I got better grades in school even though she thought she was smarter than me, especially in math and stuff like that. That was all a long time ago. It seems so silly now. What we shared was so much greater than the things that tore us apart,” I said.

  There was more to our resentment than I was willing to admit to Claire and Tamayo.

  “I think she’s trying to show you how rich she is and how smart she is, that she can get you going this way,” Tamayo said as we pulled up to a nondescript building with an awning on Park Avenue.

  Way to go, Julie, I thought. You managed to get that Park Avenue address, one way or another.