The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  “It’ll help,” I told her. “Nina Martin told me that cold could sober you up quicker than anything.”

  She gingerly sank into the water until she was covered up to the chin, and slowly, by degrees, she relaxed until her head was tilted against the curved edge of the tub. Her left hand, the one she would be offering to Tom tomorrow, was clenched into a fist and pressed against her heart. As she relaxed, tears started to flow down her face, slowly at first, and then more quickly.

  She went from looking like the funeral mask of some great queen to looking like a blotchy tomato as she sobbed, eyes screwed tight, and her closed fist striking her chest several times like a mourner from ancient Greece.

  I grabbed her fist to stop her from doing herself harm and spoiling her décolletage for the gown she was wearing tomorrow. She gave up easily, and I realized that she had had the letter clenched in her fist. I pulled it away from her trembling fingers, opening it up, but it tore at once, the ink all run together into an unreadable mess. The ink was of a particularly cheap kind, I noted, and when it ran, instead of a deep blue black, it went a kind of scabby reddish brown.

  I chucked the ruined letter into the wastebasket close by. No use keeping that or trying to iron it out. Instead, I sat on the edge of the tub and poured cup after cup of cold water over Daisy’s head. She looked calmer with every moment that passed, even if her eyes were swollen almost shut. I folded a cloth soaked with cold water and she pressed it to her eyes, murmuring at the relief, but when she finally stepped out of the tub, steady, and almost blue with cold, we both knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Fifteen minutes,” hissed Mrs. Fay from beyond the door, and Daisy’s shoulders heaved twice.

  “I can’t, can I?” she muttered, her voice hoarse.

  Before I could answer, she was throwing up, just barely making it to the toilet in time. She was racked with the spasms of her body giving up the alcohol it wasn’t used to consuming, and when she looked up, I could see all the hollows of her face, how corpse-like she could look when the light inside her was flickering.

  “No, you really can’t,” I said, and when she was empty, I hauled her back to her own room, where she ended up on her knees by the bed, like a child in prayer.

  “Jordan, Jordan, fix this for me,” she implored. “Get me ready for my bridal dinner, I have to go, Jordan. The cousins have come from Columbus, and Tom will be ever so disappointed if I don’t.”

  “I’m going to go make your apologies,” I told her, though the last thing I wanted to do was to face Mrs. Fay, who already thought I rather ruined the other matched blond bridesmaids.

  “No, no, wait, here…”

  She tipped over a basket from under the bed, covering the floor with the detritus of several years. I could see cards from her graduation, hagstones strung on bits of ribbon, tangles of crochet thread, packets of needles, and more, and then she withdrew a pair of large steel shears, slapping them into my hand.

  I bit my lip, but Daisy was already moving again, going to her nightstand and breaking a fragile frame that had a picture of her from high school. In it, her face seemed much rounder and the artificial color tinted on the apples of her cheeks and her lips gave her a fevered glow.

  “Here, use this,” she said. “I know you can.”

  I didn’t know. Ever since the night we had met, I hadn’t even wanted to cut out valentines. It seemed like too much to add to everything I already had going on, and at night, sometimes I dreamed of paper dolls coming alive to push me shouting towards a great pair of snapping scissors.

  “Daisy…”

  She clasped her photo to my hand. Her eyes sat in cavernous hollows, and there were unhealthy lavender smudges to her skin that made me pull back a little. She didn’t let me go, however, her hands on my wrists.

  “Of course you can,” she said, and even without her beauty and charm, I nodded jerkily and took a firmer grip on the photograph and the shears. Daisy was beautiful, and Daisy was charming, but her beauty and charm were cheap, offered to everyone who came near, from the maid to President Wilson the time he came to Louisville on the campaign trail. This was a rare thing, and as far as I knew, she had only offered it to me.

  I started to cut, the sharp shears snicking through the thick dry paper like they were hungry.

  The judge once told me that there was a class at Yale called the Paper Cutter Cults of Indochina. It was taught by a leathery strip of a man who called his Cambodian maid his wife when he thought he could get away with it, and the only time the class was ever full was when he presented the section on paper wives of the Lac Dragon Kings. Depending on the lecture, paper cutting was effigy magic, ancestor worship, and another sign of the barbarity of the region, where paper was given the same accord as human life, given rights, given property.

  The judge did not tell me that paper-cutting had never been duplicated in the West, as of 1922, or it might have made me more nervous to try what we did next.

  I sat on the floor with Daisy draped over my back like a heavy mink, one finger rubbing nervously up and down my bare arm. It was too hot, too close, and it felt like she was going to wear a raw patch on my arm, but it didn’t matter. I was too intent on shearing increasingly small bits from the paper.

  Mrs. Fay rapped on the door, making Daisy flinch against my back.

  “Just another few minutes, I’m just trying to make myself beautiful!” Daisy trilled, and that won us a little more time.

  I didn’t actually trace around the Daisy in the picture. Instead, working free-handed, I snipped a figure that approximated Daisy’s own out of the card stock. With Daisy whispering encouragement in my ear, with my eyes half-closed and a kind of instinct guiding me that I usually preferred to ignore, I cut out her entire figure, her bob, her neat hands, her love of the water, and her quick clever dancing. I made sure to cut out her narrow hips, her full lips, the way Christmas lights sparkled in her eyes as soon as the first of December rolled around, and how summer left her nearly stunned with sweat and exhaustion.

  Daisy’s soft voice in my ear sent shivers down my spine. She told me how good and clever I was, how absolutely sweet it was that I was doing this for her. She had absolute faith in me, she knew I could do it, so of course I could do it. With Daisy’s certainty, there was no room for my own doubt, so I simply packed it into a box and left it by the door for some other unfortunate person to pick up.

  A few moments later, the scissors fell from my numb hands and I slouched back against her dresser. My fresh new bangs were plastered to my forehead with sweat, and I was grateful I had lost my thick braids for the occasion. My breath came hard, and at first, I could only stare at the violet-dyed slippers in front of me. They contained the feet of a whole new Daisy who hummed slightly, swinging her hips a little to see her hems swirl.

  “Oh no,” I murmured, because it was very much a high-school Daisy. There was something slightly unformed about her, rounded and a little pallid. It was a difference of two years, perhaps even three, and it was obvious to me that this Daisy was someone else.

  Daisy herself, however, only hummed with satisfaction as she circled the newcomer, reaching over to lift her chin and fluff her hair a little bit.

  “Oh well done, Jordan,” she said. “Except for the hand, of course.”

  I had gotten too hasty close to the end. With a single snip of the shears, I’d sliced away the three smallest fingers from her right hand. Daisy took her double’s hand in hers, inspecting the clean slice thoughtfully. Her double stood quiescent, smiling a little. I could smell something chemical about her, something that spoke of darkrooms and pigments that gave her cheeks their plumpness and their gleam. She had Daisy’s coloring at least, and not that of the silvery photograph, so that was fine.

  “Oh, here, I have it…”

  Daisy stuffed the fingers of a fine pair of white silk gloves with scraps of fringe torn off her bedspread. When the gloves were on, Daisy’s double looked all right, and Daisy stepped up to her, takin
g the pearls I had been holding in my pocket and threading them around her double’s thin neck.

  “All right, you,” she said. “You’re made for going out to dinner, for being utterly charming in the best possible way, for making sure that everyone loves you, and then for coming back here, all right? Have you got that?”

  To my discomfort, the paper double’s eyes flickered to me. I was sitting slumped on the floor, hot and sweaty and as done as I ever had been. I felt I had already done my part, and I did not want to be involved any further. I waved at her, nodding.

  “What she said.”

  Just then, Mrs. Fay knocked again, hard enough that it suggested that it was the last courtesy we were going to get. Daisy slid herself flat behind the door, opening it with her lip bitten hard between her pearl-like teeth.

  “There you are at last, Daisy,” her mother said. “Don’t think you can give yourself airs because you’ll be gone tomorrow…”

  Mrs. Fay’s lips trembled a little upon seeing Daisy’s frock. I had thought it was silly that Daisy might go out in something she probably gave away after high school, but Mrs. Fay nodded.

  “All right. You were always a sentimental little thing. Jordan?”

  I jumped.

  “Yes, Mrs. Fay?”

  “Of course we’ll have Wilfred see you home…”

  For the first time, the Daisy made of paper spoke.

  “Oh no, Mama, Jordan must stay! She’s taking care of securing some of my laces on my dress before tomorrow…”

  Wordlessly, because hearing the Daisy made of paper speak took my breath away, I held up the shears still in my hand. I don’t know what kind of strange little goblin-like creature I appeared to be, on the floor, drenched in sweat and working a pair of scissors, but it was good enough for Mrs. Fay, who threw her hands up in the air.

  “Fine, fine, you’ll be running your own household soon enough. Jordan, if you want something to eat, just go down to the kitchen. They’ll take care of you. Now come along, Daisy. You know that your aunt Opal has never been able to abide lateness…”

  The door shut behind them, and Daisy bent over, knees buckling, a knuckle between her teeth. We were both frozen until we heard the telltale squeak of heels on the carpeted grand stairs, and then she burst into panicked laughter.

  “Oh my God,” she said over and over again, and I crawled to where she lay still naked on the floor, legs out flat and her hands crossed over her breast as if she were prepared for burial. Kneeling by her side, I took her hands in mine, wincing at how cold they were, and how I could see a little crescent of blue at the base of each of her nails.

  “It’s all right, Daisy,” I said. “Come on, it’s all right. She’ll do fine, no one will be the wiser.”

  “I don’t care about that,” she said, shaking her head, and I nearly bit my tongue in half to keep myself from asking why on earth I had done it, then? The answer came to me while she was still sobbing: because there was something in me that wanted to do it, and I felt far too young and new to pursue that. I shoved it to the back of my mind and locked in the closet I kept for such things as Eliza Baker, vague memories of a slow river I had never seen, and how I felt after Janie Greenway broke my heart.

  She finally stilled, lying on the ground by the door like a corpse. The minutes ticked by on her ormolu clock, and slowly, her hands warmed in mine. Her face lost its vaguely blue tint, but her fingers kept it. She was bad at the cold; it was a miracle she had lasted in Chicago as long as she had.

  “Why won’t you ask me what the matter is?” she asked finally.

  “Because you’ll tell me in your own time, or you won’t,” I said. It would do no good to show her how afraid I was for her. Instead I smiled to take some of the sting out of my words, and she let go of my hands to touch my cheek. I flinched a little from her chilly fingers, but she pressed them to my face, cooing at how warm I was.

  “It’s from Jay,” she said. “From Camp Taylor. You remember.”

  I swallowed. I did. I remembered pale eyes. I remembered a hand that reached out to touch Daisy as if he barely believed he could be worthy of her. I remembered how the heat of that summer two years ago put a haze over both of them, as if I were seeing something strange and a little otherworldly, something I wasn’t meant to be seeing.

  “He’s back. He lives. He wants me.”

  My heart shivered at that. It was like all the stories we had been told in the movie palaces were trembling just outside the door. I saw a single packed bag, an arrival to some distant bus station where Daisy’s heels would clack against the concrete, slowly at first and then running to meet—

  She sat up slowly, moving from the tense muscles of her core, not using her hands to push herself along. There was something eerie about it, something unseeing in her eyes.

  “Come here, darling,” she murmured. “Hold me for a little while. I feel ever so chilled for June. It is June, isn’t it? It’s so strange. Why, it seems like just yesterday it was Christmas and Mother had those splendid little gold and silver ornaments out for the tree. I wonder if she would be angry if I asked her to send them to Chicago to me next year. Why, I’ll be a married lady then, won’t I, with my own house along the lake, oh maybe even a little bump to house a dear little baby for Tom and me…”

  She shaped her aimless hands over her flat stomach, and we both shivered a little.

  “Daisy…” I said, because perhaps part of me wasn’t ready to give up on the fantasy of her and Gatsby. “You said you changed your mind…”

  “And then I changed it back,” she said, her voice brutally practical. “After all, all of the relatives have descended, haven’t they? All the hotels are full, and the hyacinth are coming at the very crack of dawn. Can’t disappoint, darling, never can … and that is all that Jay Gatsby will do.”

  For a moment, just a moment there, she had sounded like Mrs. Fay, but then she burst into tears, so hard that I had to help her to the bathroom. She was sick again, but there was nothing to throw up anymore. She was just retching until the blue veins of her face stood out in vivid relief. Her face was a porcelain dish with cracks through it, showing the unglazed portion inside.

  I emptied the bath, and ran merely cool water in it this time, but this time instead of getting in when I told her to, she grabbed me by the hand.

  “Get in with me,” she urged. “I’ll be so lonely if you don’t. I’ll drown if you don’t.”

  After a moment of hesitation, I stripped and followed her into the water, yelping a little as the cool seeped into my skin and as we made the tub overflow. The water sloshed onto the blue tiles, and I leaned back into her arms, her legs on either side of mine, my head back on her shoulder.

  She played with me fitfully like she would a doll, her hands light and fretful, me holding my breath because this was too much. This was Daisy, the flower of Louisville. While my brain buzzed like a paper nest of hornets, she sang to me, her voice low and rolling out the words of “Loch Lomond” as if it were a dark blue ribbon pulled out of her hair.

  “Daisy,” I murmured, “what are you going to do?”

  My voice was small and childish in the echo of the bathroom. She was only two years older than me, but it felt as if somehow, she had sprinted far ahead. I thought that it must have been love that changed her, that gave her a faraway look in her eye, the soft and hollow tone to her voice. She felt almost unspeakably grown up then, nothing like the girl who had begged me to go into Fulbright’s for her. I wondered how she had done it, or if it had come down upon her all at once, like some kind of sacrament that I had forgotten to take.

  “Why, darling, I am going to get married tomorrow, of course,” she said, her voice slow and slurred. Her hand came over mine, closing tightly around my fingers. I was something she could touch, something she could hang on to. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  When the water grew unpleasantly tepid, we dried off and went looking for her mother’s demoniac, kept in a cut-crystal bottle no larger than her han
d. I was wary of the stuff, but Daisy took a sip and then a second one. When she caught her breath, she dabbed a few drops on her fingertips and spread them over her eyelids and under her eyes. Almost immediately, her color returned and her swollen eyes went back to normal. She winked at me, first one blue eye and then the other.

  “See? That’s a trick that Victoria Powell taught me. Can’t tell that I’ve been crying at all, can you?”

  “No, Daisy,” I said. I stuck with the Talisker whiskey her father preferred, getting myself warm and just a little numb, because I had an idea about what was coming next.

  The bridal party came back sometime past one, loud, boozy, and happy. They had to roll Mr. Fay to bed, but Mrs. Fay stayed up to get everyone settled, showing the Columbus relatives to their beds and making sure that everyone had the toothbrushes, pajamas, and pillows necessary to maintain a civilized sleep.

  “Well, Jordan, I’m sure we’ve kept you too long,” she said, giving me a sharp look. “It really was too bad of Daisy to keep you at the mending.”

  “Anything for Daisy,” I said with a slight smile. She could tell that I had been at her husband’s whiskey, but as I had said, anything for Daisy.

  I walked down the porch steps and down the sidewalk as if I were running along home, but then I doubled back and slipped into the overgrown yard where Daisy was waiting for me under the dogwoods. As I watched, she stripped off her dress, hanging it from a handy branch and turning to face me in her white silk slip.

  “All right,” she said, and I scooped up some pebbles in my hand.

  The small stones rattled against Daisy’s window, and a moment later, the lace curtains twitched aside. I got a glimpse of her round face, and her bright smile. Then the curtains closed, and a few moments later, she was tripping across the lawn towards me. I took her hand and led her deeper into the dogwoods.

  “How did it go?” I asked, my tongue and throat still slightly numb from the whiskey.

  “Good, oh so good!” she bubbled. “Everyone was ever so kind, and we all looked as if we had stepped out of the pages of some beautiful novel. Tom squired me around to speak to all of his people, and Cousin Sandy from Columbus was ever so charmed—”