Box Girl

by Lilibet Snellings

  I don’t know when it was decided that thirty was the year. Maybe over a caboodle of Barbies on Kimberly Baker’s living room rug. After cramming Ken in the driver’s seat of the pink Corvette (in which the bulky, albeit penis-less Ken never seemed to fit) and placing his golf clubs in the backseat, we’d wave Barbie’s rubbery arm from beneath the pink, plastic portico of their mansion. Being a good wife, Barbie would always wave until Ken was down the road and out of sight. Meaning, behind the couch. Then we’d scurry her through the front door; she had to change out of her apron and into something sportier because Skipper was coming over to help her pick out her outfit for the ball that night. (Basically all our Barbies ever did was say goodbye to their husbands and try on outfits for whatever nighttime activity was planned for their return.) In our minds, Barbie had it all: the mansion, the convertible, the closet (though now I realize she actually didn’t have a closet, just a pile of clothes that was half the height of the house), the endless social engagements, and a best pal named Skipper who never seemed to have plans of her own but was always more than willing to help Barbie primp for hers. We’d sit there sipping Citrus Cooler Capri Suns, our Gumby-like knees bent out to the side in a position that would be entirely impossible to get into (or out of) now, and plan our lives.

  “When we’re thirty,” we’d say, because it was always thirty, “we’ll move in next door to each other, and our kids will play in the cul-de-sac, and our husbands will play golf, and we’ll try on clothes.” It was the all-American dream, pre-packaged for us by Mattel.

  Years later, in adolescence, it was still thirty. “If we don’t find anyone else to marry by the time we’re thirty,” I’d say, to my best guy friend, “Then we’ll marry each other.”

  And even at twenty, it was still thirty. One night while dancing on the bar at a saloon in South Georgia, I reached for Melissa’s wrist to hoist her up. “Come on!” I shouted over Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” my swollen, beer-fat body stuffed into a sundress, my shoulders magenta because this was also before I wore sunscreen. “We can’t do stuff like this when we’re thirty!” Since that night, I have been made fun of for this line way more than thirty times.

  One night, not long ago, the foursome from that first house in Santa Monica reunited for dinner in LA. It was a rare treat to have us all in the same city—by that point, we were strewn all over the country. Heather had moved to New York for an even better producer position, Melissa was in New York for law school, Rachel was enjoying a successful career designing children’s clothing San Francisco (yay, painting degree!), and I was still in LA. During dinner, we talked about my impending “big” birthday. It seemed like I was supposed to be upset about it—thirty, the big 3-0, the end of the line, the party’s over—but all I could think was, Thank god. If anything, I was relieved to be getting out of my twenties. How many lives had I lived during this interminable decade anyway? Five? Fifteen?

  Like me, they weren’t particularly upset about thirty either. We’d always prided ourselves on being “fiercely independent” women, and quite frankly, we were tired of being “fierce” and “independent.” While at one point the thought of living anywhere but New York, LA, or San Francisco sounded simply pedestrian, we found ourselves at thirty talking romantically about cities somewhere in between. Longing for lives more pastoral, slower paced. The phrase “a farm in Wisconsin” was said, as well as “the burbs of Chicago.” Even “Kansas City,” for chrissake. After nine lives worth of tiny apartments, failed relationships, too little money, and too little sleep, these places started sounding idyllic, a suburban Valhalla. Just give me a good coffee maker, a laptop, a Tahoe, and a carpool route, I thought. And as soon as I thought that, I was haunted by one of my many former selves: Isn’t that exactly what I was running away from when I moved to California? But that was then. And if it weren’t for all that living in between, I would have resented it, rejected it. Freaked out.

  What was it then? Were we feeling maternal? For being so independent—make them chase us, don’t call back, don’t text first—at thirty, did we really just want a husband, a house, and a couple of kids? In an attempt to be less of a mess, I now occasionally record snapshots from my day in Word documents and save them in a folder on my desktop titled “Notes.” The documents have titles like: “Notes on Technology,” “Notes on LA,” “Notes on Dad.”

  One of them is “Notes On Nightmares About Babies”:

  Losing my babies under beach towels at the pool.

  My nephew’s head keeps falling off when I hold him.

  Does this mean I’m not ready to have children?

  Is this normal?

  Needless to say, this desire for a downshift was not necessarily maternal. It is interesting though, that when my mom was twenty-nine, she already had one child and one was on the way, yet she still felt way behind the curve. That was the early ’80s in Augusta, Georgia, though. My mom didn’t marry until she was twenty-four and, at that age, was considered an old maid. This must have had something to do with the fact that every Christmas after college, she had to be “re-presented” to society at something called The Spinsters Ball.

  “The Spinsters Ball?” I repeated, on the phone. “The name alone.”

  The Spinsters Ball was a black-tie gala at the country club, my mom explained, with the sole purpose of announcing to the whole town which women were still single. “About halfway through the night,” she said, “they got the crowd’s attention, and everyone gathered around the ballroom floor. The master of ceremonies called out our names, and we all stood in a sort of semicircle, and everyone applauded.”

  My mouth was agape.

  “So that was sort of embarrassing,” she added. She told me they sent an engraved invitation every year, inviting her to participate.

  “Well could you turn it down?” I asked.

  “Oh no you didn’t turn it down,” she said. “It was considered an honor to be invited.”

  The Spinsters Club was the sister society to The Bachelors Club, but, as my mom told me, “All they did was throw one heck of a costume ball. They were just out to have a good time.” As bachelors typically are. (Again, the name alone.) My mom was twenty-three when she made her final appearance at The Spinsters Ball. “I said, ‘If I am not engaged by this time next year, I am not doing this again.’” Fortunately, my dad proposed that spring. I sort of wish he hadn’t, though. I would have loved to know if she would have kept that promise.

  Because a twenty-three-year old never keeps the promises she makes. She’s never the same person she was a year before. As I approach thirty, I feel lighter, shedding all those selves. I survived my twenties—the ecstatic highs and pathetic lows, the forty-pound weight gain while studying abroad, the over-tweezed eyebrows and the tanning-bed tans, George W. Bush (and the insisting we’d move to France if he was reelected, but, of course, the never moving). I survived the mistakes, the regrets, the firsts, the lasts, the baby tees and flare-leg jeans. I made it through the hippie phase, the preppy phase, the hipster phase, and even the asymmetrical mullet.

  At dinner that night, we sat around an outdoor table drinking wine, laughing about some of the dumber things our younger selves did during the last decade. We talked about how the only time Melissa had ever gone commando in her life was also the time her wraparound skirt busted open at the top of a staircase during a party. We talked about the time Rachel nearly burned down her apartment after preheating the oven to make a midnight snack, then fell asleep and forgot she was also using her oven as a storage space for a Costco-sized barrel of pretzels. We talked about the time Heather’s car was stolen while she was throwing up red wine in the bathroom at Chez Jay in Santa Monica. And then, of course about the time I lit my face on fire, along with a large section of a tablecloth, at the Nobu in Las Vegas—while attempting to take their signature flaming sambuca shot, the hairs on my upper lip charred into a John Waters mustache.

  And who knows? I thought as the night continued. Maybe ten years
from now, we’ll be circled around another table littered with wine glasses, longing for our twenties. Those wild and unbridled days before daycare and diapers, mortgages and divorces.

  Our service at the restaurant that night was terrible. Our server might as well have just gone out the back door and never come back because we would have gotten more attention that way. Someone else would have come over and asked if we’d like something else, which we did—much, much more wine. But, because they thought we were in good hands, no one ever came over. We sat at the table surrounded by empty wine glasses, and because we are women who hadn’t seen each other in a long time, we kept talking and talking, but—let’s be honest—we would have much preferred if our glasses were full, not empty. What can I say? We’re optimists.

  After an hour of no one asking if we’d like more wine, more water, a dessert, anything, our server reemerged and causally tossed off a, “Can I get you anything else?” I placed my hands on the table, flipped them palms up, and motioned toward the four empty wine glasses stained the color of old, dried blood. Then I replied, in my most scolding tone, “Well, we would have liked something else but at this point”—I raised my hands even higher to indicate I give up—“You should probably just bring us the check.” Our server’s eyes popped out of her head like a scared little frog that was about to get stepped on, and said she’d be right back with our check. She scurried out of sight to get our bill and to no doubt talk about what a bitch that girl on table ten had been.

  Oh god, I thought, oh god oh god oh god, did I really just act like that? Have I become one of those women who I used to hate waiting on? I looked around the table. We were all drinking wine; two of us had also ordered cups of herbal tea. One of us was wearing a leopard print top. (Sure, animal print was sort of “in,” but still.) We had spent the majority of the night talking about men and aging. We were definitely those women.

  When our server returned with our check, I thought to myself, I know this girl. She is young, in her early twenties, just embarking on this exhausting adventure. She’s not a good waitress, no, but good for her. She has other ambitions. She has a whole decade of mistakes and false starts, several lifetimes to figure it all out.

  We threw four credit cards on the table, then discussed how many dollars below twenty percent we should leave her:

  “I don’t think she deserves more than ten percent.”

  “We could have walked up the street to Whole Foods and gotten wine faster.”

  “We could have stomped and fermented our own wine faster.”

  “I think I’m going to become a member of Yelp just so I can complain about her service.”

  While exchanging goodbyes by the front door, I said I left my phone on the table. Making sure no one saw me, I pulled a twenty from my wallet and left it on top of the credit card slips.

  When I look at old pictures of us from our early twenties, with the ashy matte makeup and the bad, blunt haircuts, I don’t think we look good. Yet when I look at the pictures from that night, I think, We’re glowing. Maybe this is because we finally discovered good moisturizers and learned to consume more water than just the club soda in our vodka drinks. But more than that, in those old photos, we just look tired. It’s the same thing when I look at old pictures of me sitting in the box. I don’t think, wow, I look young. I think, wow, I look exhausted. I was living so many lives then. Standing at the threshold to thirty, I was looking forward to only living one.

  Soon after that dinner, a group of men struck up a conversation with some friends and me at a restaurant bar in Palm Desert. The men were older, gray-haired, married. One worked in LA and knew the box at The Standard well. When he found out I was occasionally a Box Girl, he said, “Aren’t you a little too old to be in the box?”

  This would have sent me into a tailspin a few years before. Oh god. Do I look old? Am I getting old? The younger me would have shot back something surly about his gray hair and how he should talk. But my near-thirty self just raised my glass, laughed, and said, “Probably.”

  And maybe I finally am.

  The Concierge Desk

  Two men are working at the front desk tonight. Their backs are toward me. They’re wearing white button-down shirts with subtle silver pinstripes, white pants, and white, rubber-soled shoes, which look geriatric. On the desk are two computers, two phones, two credit card machines, two printers, a cup holding pens, and an industrial-sized container of wet wipes. I can see everything on the concierges’ computer screens. They must realize this. Maybe not? They used to spend hours looking at MySpace. Now, Facebook. I sometimes wonder what they did before MySpace. Did they talk to each other?

  Right now, the one directly in front of me isn’t even standing up straight. He’s hunched over, his left elbow next to the keyboard, his right hand on the mouse, just scrolling down pages, clicking through Facebook pictures. Over and over again. When the phone rings he answers, “Hello, Standard!” still scrolling and trolling.

  To the left of the front desk is the deejay booth. Tonight the deejay is a tiny, Tinkerbell-like girl with close-cropped pixie hair. She is adorable. She looks like she could live inside someone’s pocket. She dances a dainty little dance while she deejays, subtly shifting her shoulders from side to side while her right hand rests on the turntable. But it’s not a turntable. There are no records. There are two record-like circles with a Macbook in between. On the laptop’s screen, neon green lines pulse up and down like the machine at the hospital that beeps and blips and tells you whether someone’s dead or alive.

  It is late and no one has come into the lobby for a while. Toward the end of the night, other staff members gather around the front desk. The valet guy comes in and asks the concierge how Vegas was. The tiny deejay takes off her headphones and turns toward the front desk to chat. I am not a part of this conversation. I am behind this conversation. I am as much a part of the background as the ambient music the deejay is playing. They are ignoring me as much as I am ignoring them. Except I’m not ignoring them.

  Deejay Girl excuses herself and tells the concierge to watch the turntables. He says he’s going to put on Celine Dion. He seems to be a bit of a jokester. She twirls back toward him, giggles, and says, “You do that, I’ll kill you,” and slips into another part of the hotel.

  Jokester Concierge starts singing Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” while he wraps an iPhone cord around his hand. He is a very bad singer and he finds this very funny.

  Deejay Girl returns with something that looks like a bowl of soup. It might not be soup. It’s hard to tell if she’s using a fork or a spoon.

  Jokester Concierge, who is a bit hefty, announces he wants some dessert.

  Deejay Girl turns back toward him and says, “My sister was just in town, with my niece who’s two. She’s at that age where she says anything that you tell her.” She blows on the bowl. (It’s soup.) “And she just says words really funny. Like when you tell her to say, ‘vacuum,’ it sounds like, ‘fuck you.’” Jokester Concierge erupts in laughter. I can’t tell if he actually thinks it was that funny, or if he’d just like to make out with her.

  I go back to reading until a boisterous group of guys stumble through the sliding glass doors and into the lobby. They seem very excited about the box. A flash bursts. Jokester Concierge shouts, “No pictures, no pictures, no pictures!” The one taking the pictures puts his phone in his back pocket. He is wearing a black button-down shirt with a dragon stitched on the shoulders. He says, “Sorry, man,” and asks where the nearest liquor store is.

  The group leaves for the liquor store and the lobby is empty again. Deejay Girl leans on the front desk with her chin propped on her right hand and says, “Okay, it’s time to tell each other bad jokes.” She starts. I can’t hear the joke. Maybe it’s dirty or racist, because she tells it very quietly. The concierge then tells some joke about a priest. The pocket-sized deejay laughs politely.

  I go back to my magazine until I hear the word “heroin.” Deejay Girl says sh
e’s from Baltimore originally, “But I had to get out of there, because everyone around me started doing heroin.”

  Jokester Concierge looks up from his computer and lets out a concerned-sounding, “Dude.” I don’t think he runs in those circles.

  “I’ve never used it,” she says. “I’ve just seen people massively messed up on it. And that’s why I decided to leave.”

  “Gnarly.”

  At eleven o’clock, Jokester Concierge is relieved by the grumpy older one who has been working here as long as I have. The fun stops. Deejay Girl returns to her tables and to looking at her iPhone.

  I have never seen the grumpy concierge smile or speak unless directly addressed by a guest. He always seems very put out when I ask him to validate my valet ticket at the end of the night. He wears frameless glasses and is, at the moment, involved in a Google search for Bose noise-canceling headphones.

  I’ve Got the Over on Fifteen Minutes

  It’s a bit bizarre to think that strangers have watched me sleep. Right now, a group of guys is placing bets on what time I will doze off. One of them points a Peroni at me.

  “I’ve got the over on fifteen minutes,” he says. “If she falls asleep before then, you’re buying the next round.”

  Beer bottles clink. “Deal.”

  Tired

  The lighting in the box is dim tonight, which is always nice (flattering for the thighs, good for sleeping). On the glass, the words, THE RAINBOW PROJECT are written in large, black-outlined letters, each one filled with a different color of the rainbow. There’s a black-and-white barcode sketched after the letter T. Behind me, a rainbow is projected in a swirling pattern.