by Anne Wagener
She pops a few bar nuts in her mouth, chews thoughtfully, and swallows. “Here’s my disclaimer about everything I’m going to tell you—it’s part neighborly observation, part sisterly intuition, part reports from Charlie and my parents, part Freudian speculation.” She points to herself. “Psych minor. So take it all with a lick of salt and a squeeze of lime, but here’s what I know.”
She taps the Crown Royal bottle with her index and middle fingers. “Meet Madam Senator Lena Collinsworth, aka Empress of All She Surveys. You’ll have the pleasure of meeting her soon. This lady runs a tight ship professionally and personally. She’s a state senator. She’s been in the position for years, working her way up to senior leadership. President pro tempore, I think it’s called. Never to be sated, now she’s set her sights on the lieutenant governorship. The election’s this November.”
She wraps a hand around the tangerine vodka bottle. “Envision for a moment what life was like for Skinnygirl Tangerine. She grew up being taught that image is everything, and that in order to be loved, she must be squeaky-clean perfect.” She wraps her other hand around the grapefruit vodka as if she’s about to double-fist. “Her sister is only a year ahead in school, so they’re constantly pitted against each other to see who can be the most popular, the most perfect.”
She turns the bottles so the mascots of Skinnygirl Grapefruit and Skinnygirl Tangerine hoist silhouetted martinis toward each other like weapons.
“On one level, Holly is deeply insecure because she hasn’t been given the kind of parental love a kid deserves. Crown Royal only cares about herself, and Bud is so busy trying to please Crown—or dodge her wrath—that he hasn’t been there for his grapefruits. Er, kids. At times, Grapefruit and Tangerine were used as political props. Oh my God, you have to see this—” She fumbles with her smartphone, tapping and sliding her finger across the screen until she produces a YouTube clip. “Watch.”
On the miniature screen is a montage of a tiny version of Holly at her mother’s office: answering the phone, licking envelopes, shaking hands with constituents. Then she’s accompanying her mother to the state senate chamber and saying something into the microphone. The chamber bursts into raucous applause. A “Collinsworth for VA Senate” logo spreads across the screen. The logo remains while an animated stamp featuring the words “Real Family Values” is superimposed on top.
“What did she say?” I ask, unable to hear the audio above our bar neighbors’ “your mom” jokes.
“It was this promo Lena did for Take Your Daughter to Work Day. What Holly says into the microphone is ‘When I grow up, I want to fight for hardworking Virginians just like Mommy,’ or some sort of political mumbo-jumbo. And then it ends up being featured in a campaign ad.”
On the screen, the video fades to black, then cuts back to its starting image of a pigtailed Holly sporting a smile sans front teeth.
“So that was Holly’s childhood,” Susan is saying. “Growing up as a political prop is the kind of thing that leads a person to go a bit bonkers. But I still blame her for each and every one of her wrongs.”
This tiny pigtailed girl—I want to hug her. I grab a handful of bar nuts and munch as I contemplate Holly’s past. I mean, my parents weren’t perfect; whose are? But they let me be a kid. I grew up feeling safe and loved. The year I grew ta-tas and Timmy Robbins called me “fat boobykins” and made me cry, my mother was so outraged that she showed up at Timmy’s house and gave them an earful about how their child’s behavior was “not Christian.” At the time, I was mortified. Later, I was profoundly grateful. I make a mental note to envision Mom giving Billy an earful the next time he’s rude. About his whole image, she’d say: “I don’t get these metrosexuals” (pronounced: met-rah-SEX-shuls).
We look up to find Chops lurking between the Skinnygirl Tangerine and the Bud. He points to the Bud. “Wha’ about him?”
“Right around the time we move into the neighborhood, Holly’s father, Mark, starts behaving badly, then just up and disappears. You hear all kinds of speculations volleyed back and forth at the neighborhood block parties: addict, nervous breakdown. Some thought she only married him to get blue-collar cred. His family’s from southern Virginia, and they do skilled trade work—welding, maybe?”
I wince. “It’s like her family members are pawns. Selected and maneuvered for maximum political advantage.”
“Yup.”
“Did you ever meet him—Bud?”
“Once or twice. Really nice guy. Who knows how Lena sucked him in.”
“An’ her?” Chops points to Skinnygirl Grapefruit with a thick freckled finger.
“Oh, Rachel. Standoffish, hung up on herself. Went off to college and never came back.” Susan pushes away the Bud and the grapefruit, pulling the Sierra Nevada toward us. “Enter Charlie, who right away saw in Holly that sweet toothless girl underneath the high school queen bee. Charlie’s like that: He sees the diamond in the rough. No matter how rough. When Holly’s dad leaves the family, her mom goes on publicly like nothing’s different, but who knows what it was like at home.
“So Holly works even harder at creating her own social caucus at school, and Charlie works even harder at getting her to go out with him. After Charlie reads an original poem in English class to ask Holly to the prom—”
“Fuck, that’s sweet,” Chops says.
“Ay, barkeep!” someone shouts from farther down the bar. Chops snaps the plaid towel in the hassler’s general direction and turns back to us.
“Totally sweet,” Susan agrees. “They start dating, and Charlie’s on cloud nine. It was this whole star-crossed lovers thing, artsy hipster woos popular chick. I think, secretly, he reminded her of her dad, the way he’s naturally laid-back and kind. And Holly probably reminded him of our mom—remind me to tell you about her later, Lord, she’s a piece of work—but again, that’s the stuff of my Freudian speculation. At any rate, trying to solve mommy-and-daddy issues in an adolescent relationship is not a good plan. Add a heaping spoonful of hormones and stir vigorously, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
“So. Turns out the image of perfection that Holly presents is riddled with secret, torrid acts of batshit crazy. They break up, then she turns on the Charm Hoover and sucks him back in. Super-toxic dynamic.”
Chops pulls his hat closer around his ears. “What kind of ba’shit crazy?”
Susan sighs. “The kind of crazy that cropped up when something good was about to happen in Charlie’s life. Have you heard of the Interlochen Center for the Arts?”
Chops and I shake our heads in tandem.
“It’s an awesome program—they do prestigious art camps for kids. Junior year, Charlie got accepted to a camp where he was going to spend the summer working with experienced screenwriters to produce a short script.”
“Cool!”
“Yeah, very cool. But the night before he was supposed to leave, Holly completely freaks out. Like, shows up at his door, sobbing. Says she’ll stop eating if he goes away and leaves her.”
I tip my head forward into my hands. “And he stays?”
“You got it.”
Chops starts moving down the bar to distribute drinks but turns back to say, “Tha’s messed up.”
“Why?” I ask, rubbing my forehead. “Why did he—”
Susan’s voice softens. “It wasn’t all bad times. She was his first love. I’d do anything to change that, but the past is what it is.” She pushes the craft beer and the Skinnygirl Tangerine close together. “So. They go away to school together in L.A., saying they’re going to start fresh. Away from her mom, she can change, she says. Surprise, surprise—same shit continues. She hurts him, then makes him feel needed, which he can’t resist. They graduate and decide to stay in the L.A. area. Not too long before my wedding, she tells him she wants to move in with him. But he calls it off. For good—or so I thought.”
Susan folds a couple o
f bar napkins into paper graduation caps. “I think he must have been in therapy or something, or maybe it was the shock of being in the real world for a while that made him see things differently. He finally decided to give his screenwriting dream a real shot and acknowledge that he deserved to be happy. Meanwhile, Holly’s in grad school for economics so she can rule the world or crash the stock market. A field oddly fitting for her volatile nature.” She pushes the Skinnygirl away from the Sierra Nevada. “It seemed they were finally going their separate ways. I was so happy for him, so relieved.”
Two more Paddy shots appear between Skinnygirl and Sierra Nevada, emphasizing the distance between them. Susan pauses and we drink. The room is beginning to spin, and I cling to the bar for support. I think Susan’s feeling it, too, because she starts creating a lot of compound words.
“Charlie starts really blossomingartistically. He’s writing more, he’s making new friends—he’s the happy guy I always knew he could be. He calls me and tells me he’s sorry he never listened to me all those years; that he’s finally beginning to see what the relationship with Holly didtohim. I mean, for years, this girl had him under her thumb”—here she lifts up her thumb and we gaze at it as if it’s sculpture—“and at her beck and call. She actually forbade him to come to my first professional concert because she was in the batshitcrazy zone. Anyway, after they split up, he was back to himself. Creating, enjoying life, being young.
“Inexplicably, a month later, I find out he and Holly are moving back east and getting hitched.” She pushes the Skinnygirl and Sierra Nevada back together, sending the empty shot glasses tumbling.
Chops appears again, clearing the glasses, wiping the counter with his plaid towel, and narrowing his eyes at Skinnygirl and Sierra Nevada.
“This girl.” Susan points at the girl on the vodka label. “Thisgirl in her pencil skirt, she’s a destroyer of hearts.” She runs her finger across the label. “Ah! She’s fucking LOW CARB. See! This is all wrong. Allwrong. I know she’s probably hurting deep inside, but I can’t let Charlie get sucked into that cycle again, not after he’s escaped. I dunno, this is all so fast, it’s like she has to be manipulating him again. I just don’t know how.” She picks up the craft beer. “Charlie needs the space to explore his . . .” She squints at the bottle. “Hoppy flavor with unique piney aromas.”
I close my eyes. The room seems to have tilted on its axis. I think about Charlie being manipulated, hurt. I think about his creative energy, like light traveling through the universe. Beautiful, dazzling light that’s being violently sucked into a black hole of batshit crazy.
Susan hiccups, then grabs my cheeks in her hands. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to pay verycloseattention to Skinnygirl. You will look for lying, cheating, stealing, or manipulation of any kind. I want to know exactly what she’s up to and if there’s anything we can do to make Charlie see reason. I will pay you one million dollars. Wait, no. No, that’s the booze talking. I will pay you—” She whistles at Chops, who appears instantaneously. “What’s a reasonable fee for having someone potentially break up a wedding?”
He strokes his left chop in thought. “How abou’ a thousand quid?”
Susan nods. “A thousand it is. Do you accept?”
I nod, my head feeling like a bowling ball about to be released at full speed. Once I start on this trajectory, it might not end until I’ve knocked down the entire ten-pin wedding party.
“Ineed a verbal,” Susan says, my cheeks still squished between her hands.
We take a long look at each other. I try to consider her offer rationally, given that the room is spinning and I’m feeling a sudden urge to “Do the Hustle!,” which has come on over the speakers. This is how my life is going to be. Confusing, all mixed up, and encouraging me to go both right and left in quick succession. But what do I have to lose? She hasn’t asked me to de-pants anyone or start any forest fires. Just be observant. I can do that, right?
Susan’s eyes are boring into mine.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll do it.”
Chops raises a glass to us. “Godspeed. I wish you well.”
“And I wish you happiness and many chocolate biscuits!” Susan says before collapsing in a fit of giggles.
Lin—it feels like ages since I’ve seen Lin. When I get home, I find him under an enormous afghan, watching Some Like It Hot. My heart wants to explode. This is why everything has felt so wrong: I haven’t had any BFF time.
Hi, he mouths. I frown. He’s gone mute? But he points to an extra lump under the afghan: a Steve-shaped lump, with a crop of blond curls emerging from one end of the blanket and a pair of tanned feet sticking out the other.
I smile because Lin looks so happy. Inwardly, the night janitor sweeps pieces of my now-exploded heart.
I blow Lin a kiss and make my way into my room. I forgot how messy I’d left it. A few discarded outfit options lie on the bed, like former versions of me, deflated. Handwritten loose-leaf brainstorming maps for my article cover the dresser. Cheer Bear presides over all from his perch atop my computer desk. Moonlight slips between the blinds and stripes the carpet. Walking across the light bars, I look like I’ve been jailed by moonbeams.
I watch the occasional car go by, the noise crescendoing and decrescendoing as the periphery of each set of headlights sweeps the lawn behind our complex. I open the window to let the cicadas’ whirring into my room—a shiatsu massage for the eardrums. Fireflies create their own flea-circus traffic as they whirl by. In a documentary Lin and I watched weeks ago, we learned that fireflies in Thailand coordinate their light blips to make stunning displays, a natural Times Square luminance. In North America, each firefly flashes to the beat of its own drum.
On an impulse, I pick up Cheer Bear and squeeze him. His fur still smells like my parents’ house—lavender air freshener—and for a second, I swear I smell homemade angel biscuits baking.
Lin walks in while my nose is still pressed into Cheer Bear’s fur. He shoves his hands in his pockets, looking adorably ruffled from snuggling. The outer edge of one eyebrow lifts when he sees me doing my own bit of snuggling with an inanimate object. He says simply, “Honey.”
“Hey. Where’s Steve?”
“He sleeps like the dead. He’s still under the afghan.” Lin makes a face. “He makes this weird lip-smacking noise while he sleeps. Which, at this point in the relationship, is still a-fucking-dorable, thank God.”
I smile. “Ever the chef. Wonder if he’s dreaming of dancing soufflés?”
“If dreaming is nature’s way of preparing us to face life’s challenges, maybe I’m the one who should be dreaming of soufflés. I couldn’t make one if you shoved it up my ass and asked me to toot it back out.”
“That’s . . . graphic.”
He puts his hands on his hips. “Back to you. What’s all this about?” He motions to Cheer Bear. “You’re regressing?”
I sigh. “It’s been a weird day. Actually, ‘weird’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“Far be it from me to keep you from making a couch soufflé,” I say, waving him back toward the den. “Go get your man snuggle on.”
“I lied. The lip smacking does annoy me. Let’s have some balcony time.”
And so we slip outside, where fireflies light up the balcony railing like miniature string lights. Lin extends his hand across the arm of his camp chair, and I take it. We sit in silence for several minutes. It’s like sitting on the side of the pool, wanting to get nice and hot before diving in. I want to tell him everything, but the silence is warm and comforting.
Then I belly-flop in and share the whole story.
He listens, making the occasional sympathetic noise or gasp. When I finish, bringing him up to the minute, he squeezes my hand. “How’s your sanity level? You don’t have to do this. We can find you another gig.”
I squeeze his hand back. “I think I need to do this.”
Lin looks worried.
The fireflies make Morse-code signals at us. Their disjointed blips spur a thought. “You know, I think since graduation—and maybe even before—I’ve been paralyzed. Because I don’t know what path is right, what job is right, what guy is right. I feel like it’s time for me to start taking chances on things, on people. Maybe this is a crazy idea, but something is telling me to see where it goes.” I give him the reasons I laid out for myself at Alfred Angelo and later, at the pub, albeit in a boozy haze. How Susan’s revelations about Charlie’s past dissolved the bulk of my anger into confusion and concern. “And I need rent money. Plus, I’ll be paying for Wulfie’s new transmission for at least the rest of the year.”
“But this isn’t just another job. These are people’s lives.”
“I know.”
“And you believe Susan?”
I nod, thinking of the exasperated way Charlie looked at Holly. How their kiss seemed familiar but also—staged. “There’s something off.”
He sighs, a smile passing across his face. “It’s completely and utterly crazy. But that’s what I told you at the beginning of this whole bridesmaid rental shebang, and you’ve surprised me at every turn. Made some new friends, seen some strangers’ gazongas. An-y-way, if you’re going with your gut, I’ll go with your gut, too.”
“And I’ll go with yours. You and Steve seem really happy.”
Lin closes his eyes. “Oh, Pipes—I think—” He grips my hand tighter. “I think I’m falling in love.”
I guess I could have surmised this; the clues have been everywhere: the coffee grinds he hasn’t been cleaning up in the kitchen, the early-morning sleepy smiles the two of them exchange, the under-the-table texts at dinner.
Speaking of being in love, if I had to put a caption on Charlie and Holly’s kiss earlier today, it wouldn’t be “Nearlyweds Charlie Bell and Holly Garbo share an impulsive, passionate kiss.” It would be “Early-model humanoid robots imitate human emotion; scientists determine more tests, upgraded models needed.” Or “Bears in human suits create contrived portrayals of humanity.” My mental wheels try to spin, but I push the thoughts away, copy and paste them into tomorrow’s schedule.