by Anne Wagener
For now, I scoot my chair closer to Lin’s. Because I know deep down there’ll be fewer moments like this from here on out—fewer moments with just us. I lean my head on his shoulder as the fireflies dance and dance.
Twenty-Four
Alex pushes her nonprescription glasses down her nose. “You have to do it.”
When her face appears in my cube the next morning, we don’t get much past “Good morning” before I’ve told her everything. Our coffees sit unsipped as I sum up. “I’ve been hired de jure as a bridesmaid but de facto as a wedding Terminator.” (Can I put that on a business card? Professional Life Ruiner?)
I pick up one of Billy’s binders and flip through it without looking at any of the contents. “I don’t know if I can sit around making favors for Charlie’s nuptials, covert as the intention may be. Anyway, what if I do find out she’s manipulating him or cheating on him or lying to him? I don’t know if I could break that to him.”
Truth is, in the ragged Wednesday-morning light, I’m mildly horrified at what I’ve agreed to. Getting dressed this morning, I caught a reflected glimpse of myself, halfway clothed in my teal cardigan and dragonfly undies. I imagined superimposing a pair of aviators on my face and talking into my wrist, then laughed out loud. Is someone who has laughing fits in her underwear cut out for espionage? Doubtful.
The thought of spying on Charlie’s fiancée makes my stomach do a monkey backflip. On the other hand, I started writing again because of Charlie. If he marries Holly, will his own writing days be over? It feels as if he’s sitting on a dunk-tank platform and Holly’s aiming her next throw right at the bull’s-eye. But if he doesn’t have enough self-respect to rescue himself, what is it I’m supposed to do?
Alex snaps her fingers in front of my face. “You’re thinking too much. You know what I think? You don’t take risks because you’re scared of the unknown. You take crappy jobs even though you hate them, because they’re predictable. You take those jobs so you don’t have to challenge yourself, because you’re scared you’ll come up short.”
My lips part. It feels like a well-deserved hit to the solar plexus.
She softens, perching on the desk and squeezing my shoulder. “Thing is, you’re worthy of a good challenge. And so is Charlie.”
I take a long drink of coffee. The lukewarm liquid settles in my gut along with her words.
“Oh, just do it.” She snatches the binder from me. “You know you want to. Oh my God—can I help you? I’ll help you.”
“All I have to do at this moment is color-code fifty-seven of Billy’s binder dividers.”
“Fuck these with a disco stick. I have a plan to get us both out of here.”
As if he can smell mutiny with his electronically trimmed nose hairs, BILLY! pops his head around the cube wall.
Alex instantly turns her concentrating-friend face into a seductive pursed-lips face, Kabuki-like. “The man of the hour. I was looking for you to tell you I’ve pulled Piper onto a new project, just for today. You don’t mind, I trust?”
Billy beams at her—I’ve never seen him beam! “You always take exactly what you want, don’t you?” He steps closer to her but stumbles on an errant binder. He grabs the edge of my desk to steady himself, clearing his throat to cover the blunder.
Alex doesn’t miss a beat. The glasses are back down the bridge of her nose, the better to seductionize him with. “Could be.”
“Well, then. Who am I to stand in your way?” He looks like he’s thinking, God, woman, take me RIGHT HERE AND NOW. Before slipping away, he glares at me, his manscaped eyebrows communicating a very specific message: Even though you’re currently working for God’s most succulent creation, you’re still a waggling piece of shit sticking to the bottom of my designer shoe.
Alex holds up the binder for me. “See this?”
I nod.
She tosses it into the metal can under my desk. “Put it in your mental trash bin.”
I take a deep breath. I think about the humanoid kiss at Alfred Angelo. How a certain quiet desperation lurked in Charlie’s eyes. How my gut suddenly felt like it was the burrow hole of a particularly rotund land beaver. And not because of Lin’s and my late-night Mexican food binge.
Alex shakes her head. “Hellooo! Let’s get this done in real time, not geologic time. When’s the wedding?”
“Three weeks.”
“Right. Off your ass, Brody.”
“Where are we going?”
“To get some mojo.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m standing under unflattering fluorescent light at Alex’s gym. As a first-time visitor, I’ve received a promotional pair of hot pants and a T-shirt depicting Rosie the Riveter wielding a pink barbell. The back reads, “We can pump it! GirlPower Gym, Fairfax, VA.” Alex wears a pink sports bra and black hot pants. Both of our hot pants are made of the clingy material that wicks moisture away from you while showcasing perky asscheeks. My ass is nowhere near Alex’s on the perk-o-meter; I’ve always had a pancake ass. I feel like a bad infomercial. Is your ass flat and uninviting? Do your hot pants look like they’ve deflated?
“Alex,” I hiss as we approach the mirror-lined classroom where she’s convinced I’m going to have a conversion experience. “What are we doing?”
She puts her hands on my shoulders. “This is the first place I came after Greg broke up with me. You have to trust me on this. Maddie will sort you right out.” She nods to the instructor, a five-foot-tall woman with a high ponytail, a scrunchie the size of a fist, and calves that could crush whole stacks of binders.
“If you survive this class,” Alex continues, giving me a pointed look, “you can do anything. You can break up a wedding.”
When I hesitate at the door, Alex pushes me through as the stereo starts playing Sir Mix-a-Lot—some pimped-out techno mix, anyway. We squeeze into a middle row on the left, and Alex sets a step platform in front of me, stacking two rungs underneath. One rung—nay, zero rungs—would be dandy, but there’s no arguing. Under her own platform, she deftly stacks four.
“Basic!” Maddie yells from the front, bobbing up and down on her platform. Her curly ponytail bounces away, swinging back and forth as if conducting an ensemble of rapidly toning buttcheeks. Just when I think I’ve got the rhythm, she begins galloping across the platform, shouting, “Mambo!” And then “High step!” The entire class proceeds to do jumping jacks on their platforms. Broken clavicle waiting to happen.
After many moments of physical dyslexia, I begin catching on. Maddie must sense this, because she starts a new routine. “Let’s transition to some kickboxing, ladies. Basic with punch!”
Step with right, punch with left. Step with left, punch with right. I can do this. This is easy! I punch right and almost teeter off the platform. I have visions of knocking over the entire class, domino-style. One hawkeyed glance from Alex sends me skittering back in synch.
If the pain of my quads and hams could be distilled into an audible sound, it would be a screech high-pitched enough to spontaneously combust any hearing aids in the vicinity. Each step feels like I’m fetching my feet out of drying cement.
Must. Survive. Shit just got primal: I’m out of my head and into my body.
If I tone my gut, maybe I’ll be better equipped to receive the messages it’s transmitting. Maybe that’s why I’ve ended up in so many horrible job situations and relationships. My gut’s signals got lodged in the stripe of squishy across my midsection. I imagine working out so hard the fat melts away, releasing fossilized transmissions from ages past. Scott’s a doofus! Don’t trust Sal! Keep writing! I wonder what it’ll tell me about Charlie—and his wedding.
“Kick hard, ladies!” Maddie shouts from the front. She tucks right, punches left. It takes me a few moves, but then I’m into it, and when I punch left, I envision punching away all the stress from the past twenty-four hours—or the past year. As Alex’s f
ist pops into my peripheral vision, I’m aware of the entire room moving in tandem: a badass woman army.
“HIT! HIT! HIT! C’mon, girls! You got this!” Maddie shouts from the front. I catch Alex’s eye, and for a split second, we beam at each other before following Maddie’s directive to jab left, then hook right. It’s as if we’re the inner workings of a prolific typewriter, an invisible hand instructing us to issue one exclamation point after another.
HIT! HIT! Typewriters—I’ve got to make some progress on the article. This latest assignment would really be the icing on the fondant. Or the fondant on the cake. Whatever! My words will leap off the page and knock those City Paper staffers with a right hook.
HIT! HIT! I can do this. I’m going to get to the bottom of this Holly/Charlie scenario.
“Squats!” Maddie shouts, changing gears. We drop our glutes to the floor, holding our interlocked fingers at chest level in a karate bow. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I look ridiculous, trying to drop my pancake butt like it’s hot. Alex and I lock eyes via our reflections. She offers me a proud smile, reminding me, If you survive this, you can do anything.
The next time we HIT! HIT!, I picture Sal’s face, then BILLY’s. I picture Holly dangling a piñata of devious secrets in front of me, then demolish the piñata with my fist.
As the entire class moves like one feisty organism, I suddenly feel invincible, like I’m punching a question-mark block to reveal a star power-up. Bowser, beware! I am part of a woman army, dedicated to truth! To justice! To asscheeks that crush binders!
HIT!
Twenty-Five
Arriving at Senator Collinsworth’s mansion for the first time on Saturday afternoon, I hear voices in my head. Specifically, the voice of my mother, critiquing everything in sight. Not that it’s not immaculate—quite the opposite. But my mother believes the best homes are the most welcoming, and nothing about the senator’s mansion is welcoming. Everything seems to be indicating that one should pick up and run at a good clip in the opposite direction.
On the front step, stone lions with bared teeth stand guard. I press a fingertip-sized doorbell encased in an elaborate gold molding the length of my forearm. Moments later, a member of the household staff opens the door, raising an eyebrow in lieu of a greeting. Her bleached-blond hair is pulled into a taut bun, and she looks exhausted. As she pulls the door all the way open, a robotic voice announces, “Front. Door. Open!” I’m bumfuzzled until I realize it’s the security system.
“You must be the bridesmaid,” she says in a thick Eastern European–sounding accent.
I nod. “Guilty as charged.”
“I’m Anna. Come on in,” she says, and I follow her blond bun into the massive foyer. As she shuts the door behind me, the robotic voice confirms, “Front. Door. Closed,” which sends an inexplicable zap of panic through my central nervous system. It’s as if the closing door has confirmed my commitment to this Wedding Terminator scheme. My body protests. It’s Saturday and my body craves a Titanic-length nap preceded by a carb-and-bacon binge. It is not amused at this attempt at productivity.
Anna sees my alarmed expression and smirks to herself. “You will have your little hands full,” she says, laughing a deep smoker’s laugh. “Come on, come on.”
She motions for me to follow her. As she leads me deeper into the house, I can’t help thinking it looks like a model home. Reclining of any sort seems to be strictly prohibited. You might get away with something akin to lounging on the hard-backed colorless chaises, but after about a half hour, you’d probably need a deep-tissue butt massage.
The mansion does seem fitting for a businesswoman/politician. Susan reminded me that Lena is the executive vice something at a major consulting company: Hence the funding for her endless campaigns. I remember the last campaign clearly—every other television spot was an attack ad. I didn’t vote for her. God, I hope she can’t smell that on me.
We walk through an elaborate hallway of statues (petrified nonvoters?) into a kitchen approximately the size of a football field. At a table by a bay window, a stack of unopened RSVP envelopes is accompanied by boxes of unassembled favors, spools of ribbon, and towers of votive candles. A laptop perches on one side of the table. On its screen is a massive RSVP spreadsheet. The only thing missing is Holly.
“So Holly’s not here?” I ask Anna.
Anna shrugs. “I think she is at the spa.” She goes on to explain that Holly left a task list for me. I take a peek: It’s outlined down to the lowercase number. Item 1, 1a, 1a.i., et cetera. Probably at the bottom of the list is a request that I spin straw into gold, with failure punishable by death, or at least several hours on one of the unforgiving chaises.
Figures. What did I think—that we were going to sit side-by-side, opening RSVPs and talking about our periods? I thank Anna, and I’m promptly left alone at my chore table in the capacious kitchen with its blinking ogre-sized appliances. A few minutes later, a vacuum comes on in another room. Out the bay window, the surface of a large pond flutters and sighs with the summer breeze.
On my dual quest for evidence and article material, I’m failing. I don’t know exactly what I was planning, though it involved asking some subtle but leading questions about Holly’s past with Charlie. It involved some great feats of investigative journalism, as practice for my would-be job at the paper.
It did not involve solitary confinement.
After four hours of opening RSVPs and putting together favors, my fingers begin to rebel. They don’t want the intricate labor of twelve-step favor creation. They itch to browse, to scroll, to double-click.
Unable to resist these urges any longer, I minimize the RSVP spreadsheets on the laptop and double-click the pink hard-drive icon. I was eyeing said icon during the opening of 226 RSVP envelopes, as if it were a virtual carrot being dangled in front of me. At last, I take a nibble. My appetite duly whetted, I nom-nom-nom the whole damn thing.
Against my better judgment and the thought that my mother would most certainly identify my behavior as “not Christian,” I start to search Holly’s computer for evidence of illicit activity. I have probable cause, right? But after looking through her entire iPhoto album, I feel less investigative journalist than sniveling paparazzi.
Most of her pictures show her and Charlie as undergrads at UCLA. For several minutes, I stare at a picture of them on the beach, both in swimsuits, tanned and happy. He has his arm around her waist; her hair blows across his eyes, temporarily veiling them. I think of Susan’s words at the Shoddy Wheelbarrow: It wasn’t all bad times. She was his first love. In another picture, he perches his chin on her shoulder.
Unfortunately for my purposes, the only man who features prominently in her pictures is Charlie. I feel a strange mixture of disappointment and relief. Disappointment because I’ve failed in my mission so far, and relief because part of me doesn’t want to find evidence of her betraying him.
I find not one juicy tidbit. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Even Zuckerberg has nothing for me—she’s left her Facebook account open. Status: So excited to be marrying my high school sweetheart in three weeks! This is why Facebook makes me hate my life. No one ever posts pictures of a significant other leaving dirty socks on the kitchen counter or children making poo handprints on the walls.
Nothing else in Holly’s files seems suspicious in any way. At one point I think I’ve found a sonogram in her “Misc” folder—OMG.jpg—but on closer examination, I realize it’s a photo of Crater Lake. For that one moment, my stomach folded up like an accordion—ohmygodohmygodshe’shavinghisbabyomg—then whooshed out as the bellows released with a hopeful C-major chord. No baby.
My only other bread crumb is another file in her “Misc” folder, Untitled.txt. I double-click to find a few lines of uncapitalized text: two different street addresses in Blacksburg, each underscored by a line of question marks. Southern Virginia—her dad or his family, maybe? I Google both add
resses but don’t find any affiliated names. Just a couple of apartment complexes in run-down parts of town.
I finally return to my favor-making after restoring her computer to the way it was prior to my snooping session, issuing a silent apology to my mother, whose voice is without fail broadcasted over my internal loudspeaker whenever I find myself in the midst of remotely illicit activity.
Speaking of mothers, as soon as I’ve returned to my one-woman favor assembly line, I hear a door slam elsewhere in the mansion. A raised voice alternates with Anna’s in the adjacent breakfast room (eat lunch there and ye may also be petrified). I tiptoe closer to the doorway to catch a snippet of conversation. My heart thrums. The words are hard to parse, but Anna’s accent sounds suspiciously thicker than before. Lena is incensed about something; Anna is backpedaling by feigning ignorance. I tiptoe back to my table so I can look like I’m hard at work before Lena emerges. When I risk a glance to check for her, she’s right there in the kitchen doorway, giving me the hairy eyeball.
I literally jump; I’m caught so off guard to look up and find her scrutinizing me that I let out a combination of “fuck” and “yip” and inexplicably toss a candle and a bit of ribbon into the air. The ribbon drifts to the ground between us, the frayed end pointing accusingly at me. She doesn’t blink.
Though I’ve seen her picture on any number of glossy mailers, seeing her in the flesh is something different altogether. She’s elegantly dressed, tall, and has the same airbrushed look as Holly. Not a hair out of place.