Pretty Things Don't Break

by Lauren Jayne

  “We need your energy, beautiful people. And when you sell that Fresh Sheet, sell it like you’re selling yourselves,” sounding like he was performing at the Paramount.

  Just then I heard my name called over the PA system that played the same crazy Italian dialog way too loud whenever the restaurant was open; some days I thought it would drive me completely insane.

  “Lauren, you have a call at the front desk.”

  “Hello?”

  “Lauren,” Carmen was sobbing, “I’m going to King County.” She was barely understandable.

  “What? No, I just dropped you off.”

  “I didn’t know they were going to drug test me, Lor; they didn’t tell me. I smoked some of Jerry’s (Cantrell) pot and maybe did a few lines last night at work, and they didn’t tell me they were going to drug test me. They’re taking me over there in ten minutes for a week.” She was barely able to cough up the words.

  “Carmen, no, they can’t do that; don’t you get some kind of an attorney? Can’t Jon help you?” I said.

  “You were my one call, and no, it’s mandatory now. I’m doing a week. Come get my stuff – I don’t want these MOTHER FUCKERS going through my bags!” She was sobbing, except when she said “Mother Fuckers” she screamed so loud I had to move the phone from my ear.

  Walking back to the sea of college-faced girls and artsy guys, I wanted to bawl thinking about Carmen – my beautiful, sweet, Carmen – being locked up where my dad had been so many years ago.

  Tears welled up in my eyes as Michelle, a nursing student at the UW with a blonde bob and pinch-pink cheeks said, “Everything OK?”

  Knowing I would never tell any of them about my life, I just gave her a half smile and tried to pretend I was listening to Thoma.

  *

  When I walked into Tamera’s apartment to study for French, she said, “We’re so excited that you and Mark will be at the wedding! When will it be your turn?”

  Tamera and Terry were meant to be together, like milk and cookies. Mark and I had been together for almost a year and a half, and I was just waiting for the right time to break up with him.

  Feeling like Tamera’s loyalties lay with me over Mark, I said, “Tamera, after almost a year and a half, do you know what Mark knows about me?”

  She just looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

  “My eye color, my measurements, and my religion,” I said, never before really boiling it down, but being mad to realize this was the truth.

  “I’m sure that’s not true. He loves you; he talks about you all the time to Terry and the guys, and I know his family loves you.”

  “He’s never told me he loves me,” I said.

  “What! Never?”

  “Nope, he says he’s never said it to a girl, so, I don’t know.”

  When Terry came home at midnight, he got on the couch with Tamera and me and told us all about the skanky girls at Sugar’s and the lap dances that the guys had bought him. We sat, the three of us snuggled on the couch, and I thought, this is how people talk; this is how a couple talks. I had thought that the fact that Ben and I were friends for so long before dating was why we always talked about everything and were always best friends. But seeing Terry and Tamera together, I thought, “I can’t do it anymore, not one more second. I’d rather die alone than spend one more minute with someone I can’t speak to without editing, can’t laugh with, or feel myself with.”

  “Thanks Tamera, you saved me. Merci!” I said, and headed to Mark’s.

  “How was tonight? Have fun?” I asked, trying to give him one last chance to be real with me.

  “Yea, Terry’s dad was there. We had dinner. Guy stuff.”

  “Anything else?” I said.

  “There’s a guys’ code, you know,” Mark said.

  “I’m going to go. You are free to do whatever you’d like. Forever.”

  That was all I needed, the nail in the coffin. Like I care about some stupid stripper, I thought. That’s what boys do before they get married. I want to laugh about it like friends who know and trust each other. Instead, you’re a stranger who thinks I’m something I’m not, and I’m done, I thought, as I drove to Mrs. Miller’s, glad my heart was free. I swore right then and there that I’d never be with anyone again who didn’t want to know every part of me; the good, the bad, and the ugly. I was just a girl to him, not a soul or a mind. He didn’t know one thought in my head. He’d never known more of me than my shell, and I wanted to scream as I drove down East Lake Union, back to Mrs. Miller’s. I felt lighter than air as I cranked my music, lit a cigarette that I’d pulled from my glove box, ripped my hair down from my ponytail, and flew across the lake singing at the top of my lungs with Kurt to Come As You Are.

  Chapter 30

  Freedom

  Hearing a car pull up, I peeked out my bedroom window into the navy sky and saw Carmen’s little blue car parked under the streetlight. I grabbed a piece of gum off of my desk, tucked my lip gloss into the elastic of my boxers, and ran down the stairs to tell her I was finally free. I’d finally done what she’d been begging me to do for months.

  She’d always say, “Fuck him. If he doesn’t worship the ground you walk on, if he doesn’t realize he has been living with an angel, not like an angel, but with an actual fucking angel, then fuck him. Please be done already.”

  “I did it!” I said as I turned the corner.

  “Hi! Did what? What’s going on, you okay?”

  “I broke up with Mark. We are done. I’m such a black and white girl, and I was stuck in the black too long, being loyal to – what? Why? I feel nothing, almost like he never existed. I just feel so fucking free and happy, like a twelve thousand pound elephant has been lifted off of my body. I’ll never do it again. Never, ever, ever. If, and I mean if, I ever date another guy again, he’s going to know all of me, not just what he sees on the outside.”

  Carmen was just staring at me, listening intently. Then she jumped up, hugged me and said, “Let’s go out and celebrate!”

  We headed down First Ave and when we passed Cherry Street, we both stuck up our middle fingers at the jail. Turning down under the viaduct to park, we walked past the line of screaming, barfing club-goers. Carmen kissed the bouncer, and we were in the jam-packed J&M Café in Pioneer Square, where it seemed Carmen knew everyone.

  Carmen downed a shot of tequila, pulled her mouth to my ear, pushed my hair back and said, “I love having my girl back. You’re my angel. You know that, right? I love you.”

  Three stops later we headed back over the bridge. Just like the carriage turning into a pumpkin at midnight, Burger Master switched off their big sign when they closed. So sad to zip by and see that the lights were off, we headed to Mrs. Miller’s.

  Lying on the beach the next day, I got a page from a number I didn’t recognize and ignored it. While Carmen was showering before heading into work that night, the number came through again, followed by 911, which meant call ASAP. I picked up her phone from the couch and dialed. I instantly recognized the voice.

  “Kurt! Hi! How’d you get my pager number?”

  “Ben gave it to me.”

  “Sorry, I’ve been kind of out of commission since I got back from Maui. I was trying to get my life together and met Mark, and he wasn’t a big fan of me being friends with you.”

  “Well, I’m not a big fan of Mark’s,” he said, and we both laughed.

  “You’ll be my friend forever, and I’ll never let a stupid boyfriend dictate who my friends are again.”

  “So it’s true, you finally broke up with him?”

  “Yep.”

  “Come over Saturday night; I’m having a party, everyone’ll be there.”

  “I can’t, I’m supposed to go out with Carmen and it’s a big deal that she took Saturday off from her job at some new place called Belltown Billiards,” I said, curling the cord around my finger.

  “Bring Carmen! But you’re coming. I’ll see you Saturday, okay?”

  “Okay, we’ll
be there, promise,” I said, not realizing how much I missed Kurt until I heard his voice.

  The entire week Carmen and I rolled down to Seattle, seeing a different show every night. Tuesday was the Showbox and the Frontier Room, and Wednesday was the Off Ramp and the Moore. Thursday we ordered pizza, laid in bed and buried our pagers under Carmen’s pillows, falling asleep before ten. Friday we had dinner at her work. The new chef came out, the dim lights hanging over the swanky bar, and dropped off plate after plate of gourmet pizzas and pasta with artichoke hearts and bottles of wine.

  “Spending my week off with you in town has been better than any vacation I’ve ever taken,” she said, wiping her mouth with her cloth napkin and then wiping mine.

  “Me too; it couldn’t have been a better week, and we couldn’t have crammed more in if we were writers for Rolling Stone.”

  “We own this town, you and me,” she said as we clinked our glasses and ate.

  “So tomorrow before we go to Kurt’s, I have to go to a party at Cassie’s for a bit, but I’ll be home early.”

  Carmen’s face dropped.

  “Why?”

  “She lives right by Mark on Eastlake – I think she lives in Fremont – anyway, like three days in a row when I was leaving Mark’s, she pulled up behind me in her red Wrangler. The last time she jumped out when the light turned red.

  “Every time I see you, you say you’ll call and you never call. I’m having a housewarming party on Saturday night, and you have to come.”

  “Blow it off. You have to,” Carmen said as she lit a smoke and blew it up to the ceiling.

  “If Cassie’s mom didn’t basically take me in and let me live with them in junior high, I would, but she’s been so good to me. I’ll stop by, and we’ll be at Kurt’s by nine. We can’t show up before then anyway.”

  “True,” she said.

  Getting ready to go to Cassie’s, I wanted to blow it off, when Mrs. Miller came in to check on me, asking, “How are you doing, honey?”

  “I really don’t want to go to this party. I’m finally free. I just want to run down and get ready with Carmen and go see my real friends, that’s all.”

  “Did you tell your friend you’d go?” she asked, her coffee cup in her hand as she leaned on the door jam.

  “Yea.”

  “Well sweetie, just go and bring her a plant, stay for fifteen minutes and come back. Just go. You’ll be glad you did.” Then she walked over to me as I stood in my bra and kissed my head.

  Walking into Cassie’s party, I saw that the back door was open and headed through it and out the back. Her parents, aunts, and uncles were all sitting around a big table with a hanging basket draped with fuchsias over their heads.

  Jeri jumped up. “Lauren, how are you! We’ve missed you; come and sit.”

  Being surrounded by Cassie’s amazing family, who were telling stories about me and laughing until they cried, made me hope Cassie knew how lucky she was.

  “Remember when we took Lauren with us to Sun Valley, the new skis her mom had just bought her on the roof of the car with her name engraved into the tips under K2?”

  That alone was enough to make everyone at that table laugh until they couldn’t breathe.

  “You guys are hysterical. I may have overreacted a little, but I don’t know,” I said.

  Cassie started telling the story to her boyfriend, Eric. “We were going on a family trip, and Lauren was basically living with us. The look on her face while we were running around the house packing was too much for my mom to take. Okay, flash forward three days. We are all skiing, and up to this point, Lauren has been skiing with the parents.”

  I chimed in, “What? I like to glide down the hill so I can take everything in, not race like you guys.”

  “So, we tell her to come with us, and we take lift after lift to the top of the mountain.”

  “I assumed I could go green all the way down, but I was wrong,” I said.

  “When we get to the top, a crazy bank of fog rolls in and it’s hard to see. The mountain that was soft powder is now a plate of ice. We tell Lauren we have to go before dark, and she sends us on our way. She told us she’d come down in her own time. Three hours later, as we are all pacing at the bottom of the mountain, she comes down in a toboggan being pulled by the hottest ski patrol in a red coat I’d ever seen. When he dropped her off, he said in a thick Australian accent, ‘Anything else I can do for you, love?’ This is the best part,” Cassie said. “She took the brand new skis and poles her mom had just given her, made an ‘x’ in the snow, and said, ‘Will you give these to someone who’ll use them?’ And she walked into the lodge.”

  This story never got old for some reason. I got up to check out the house and noticed a guy by the punch bowl with short black hair, a goatee, brown eyes and a deep tan. He was holding the ladle and a cup and staring at me. I smiled at him and continued to walk through the house with Cassie.

  As I was heading out the back door to sit by the fire pit, the guy by the punch bowl asked, “Do you need a drink?”

  I held up my full drink and smiled.

  “You look kind of cold, hold on a sec.”

  Right before my eyes he walked over to a beautiful blonde girl, took the sweater from her shoulders and came back.

  Shaking it out he said, “Do you want this?”

  “Are you seriously trying to give me the sweater you just ripped off of that girl’s shoulders?” I asked as she was giving me a look to kill. “No, I don’t want your gross, hot sweater.” I was laughing, but dead serious.

  He laughed and said, “Come and sit with me.”

  “There’re no more chairs. I’m okay, and I have to leave soon.”

  He walked away, and I went over to say a quick goodbye to Cassie.

  With two folding chairs in his hands and his plastic cup in his teeth, he put the chairs down and said, “Just sit with me for a minute.”

  I just laughed at him as he patted the chair.

  Cassie came over. “This is Ted. He’s one of Eric’s best friends, but be careful. He’s pretty much slept with everyone in the Cove and his last two girlfriends looked like super models. He goes to UW law school and is a bartender at Dukes. I’m surprised you guys don’t know each other.”

  We talked about how weird it was that I worked at Cucina upstairs and he worked at Dukes downstairs for two years, and we’d never met. Everything that came to my mind rolled off my tongue.

  Ted said, “I want to take you out for dinner.”

  “I told you, I’m Jewish.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, you went to Blanchet, so that makes you, what? Catholic?”

  “I did go to Blanchet, but every time they said something fucked up like there was a devil with a pitchfork I just kind of tuned out. I have my own religion; it’s my own relationship with God. So no, I’m not Catholic,” he said in a downplayed matter-of-fact kind of way.

  Trying to hide how impressed I was with his answer, I threw out another bomb.

  “You said you grew up on Queen Anne with your mom. What happened to your dad?”

  “He was a dick, and I liked it when it was just the two of us. My mom worked her ass off to send me to private school. I was skating to the metro stop down Queen Anne when I was nine. How cool is that, that she let me skate down Queen Anne and take the metro to school?” he said, unfazed by any of my rude and brash comments. “But then she married my stepdad and…” he added, as he coolly sipped his beer.

  “And what? Is your stepdad a dick that beat the life out of you?”

  I had a theory about that, too. If some guy was either beat up or watched his mom get beaten, then he would pretty much for sure do the same to me or my kids, and since I would kill someone if they laid a hand on my unborn kids, I had to know. I figured asking in a nonchalant way, when he had no reason to lie, was the only way to get a real answer.

  “No, I was the dick. When he’d come to my room, I’d turn the dial on my stereo up as high as it would go,
almost blowing my speakers, and slam my door in his face.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He made my mom sign us up for family therapy.”

  Noticing that the blazing sun was gone, and the moon was high, I stood up and said, “Oh my god, I have to go.”

  “You can’t leave without giving me your number,” he said.

  “I told you, I could never date you. You’re not Jewish, and your parents are divorced, which probably means you’ll get divorced, and I broke up with my boyfriend like twenty minutes ago, and…no. I have to go.”

  Ted leaned over, pulled my hair back, tucked his nose right next to my neck and took a deep breath.

  When he pulled his head back, he said, “I couldn’t let you leave without smelling you. You smell amazing; I knew you would.”

  “Are you serious? You can’t just smell someone,” I said, laughing.

  After two hours of the easiest, most unedited conversation I’d had with a guy since forever, I was completely at ease around Ted, like I’d known him forever.

  *

  “My stomach feels weird, like butterflies,” I said to Carmen.

  “Are you nervous about seeing Ben?”

  “Nope, not even a little. I’m so weird. I loved him for so long, but the day I found out he cheated on me, it was like he died to me. It takes so much for me to let anyone into my heart, guy or girl. When I do, my love has no limits. But, the minute I feel my trust has been betrayed, it’s over. Even if I don’t want it to be, it is. It’s like a switch goes off. Anyway, not Ben, but butterflies are filling my body.”

  “I’m here with you, and if you aren’t comfortable, we’ll leave. You have never looked better than you do right now. Something about your fuck off attitude with boys makes you look really hot,” she said.

  “You’re saying that because you love me.”

  “I do, more than anything, but you look hot, trust me,” she said and smiled.

  Cars lined the Kirkland street. We parked and walked up to the big house with a view of the lake in the distance. When we walked up, a handful of the boys who were playing basketball caught the ball mid-dribble and came over to give us hugs. It was so good to be with our own boys again. These guys had known us since we were sixteen. They were like brothers to us. Walking up the stairs to the house, I saw Ben sitting on the couch. He put down the bong and got up to give Carmen and me a hug and we ran into the bathroom.