by Laura Ruby
“We don’t like Egyptians anymore,” says Roxie, flipping open a menu with a flourish. “What do you guys want to eat? Do they have any breadsticks?” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Ryan crumpling up straw wrappers and flicking them at his dad, his sister, Liv. “I always like to get breadsticks first.”
“They have a nice cheese fondue,” Tate says. “It’s served with bread cubes. You dunk them.”
Roxie is scouring the menu for some food item that doesn’t involve blue flames and boiling oil when Ashleigh eyes Liv with the marrow-deep hostility known only to teenage girls. “Get her a dozen hamburgers and a cheese milkshake,” she says. “Please.”
Liv stretches, all cat, scrutinizes Ashleigh’s bountiful chest. “Nice tits,” she says. “How much did they cost?”
Roxie opens her mouth to add something or squash something when Ryan crosses his cuckoo-bunny eyes and dumps his Shirley Temple right into Roxie’s lap.
Driving home with the drink still seeping between her thighs, Roxie thinks that Ryan’s animosity, while marked, doesn’t seem personal. And no one set the table on fire or had their eyes put out with a wandering—or menacing—fondue fork. She guesses she should be grateful for these things. It is amazing how much she wants to be grateful.
Roxie sets up for the third yard sale she’s had in a year. There isn’t much left to sell. Some random clocks and phones, a set of stacking tray tables, the rest of Liv’s baby things, a rack of women’s clothes, a couple of kitchen chairs—they need only the two—a box of rabbit’s feet she found under Liv’s bed. Roxie’s record collection, which was spared the ax twice before, is featured prominently on the center table.
“Roxie!”
Roxie turns to see a woman standing on the sidewalk, her hand tented over her eyes to shield them from the sun. “Hi, Moira!”
“I thought that was you!” Moira marches up the driveway. This is a woman Roxie met at a bunko party, the one who set her up with Tate, the ADD doctor. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m just trying to get rid of some junk. What are you doing?”
“God, exercising,” Moira says, her lip curling up. She gestures to the orange red tracksuit she’s wearing. “Isn’t it awful? Ben bought it for me for inspiration. Do I look inspirational to you?”
Moira is thin but has the kind of sallow skin that results from spending too much time indoors, skin that looks green against the red of the suit. She reminds Roxie a little of the Grinch dressed as Santa Claus, except without the potbelly. “You look great!” says Roxie.
“Liar.” Moira tucks a clump of hair behind her ear. “So, can I help you bring out the rest of the stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“Stuff you’re going to sell, what do you think?”
Roxie shrugs. “This is it.”
“Oh,” says Moira. “Okay.” She unzips her suit jacket. “I hear you met my kids.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. When you were out with Tate.”
Roxie can feel her eyebrows fly up into her bangs. “What? Wait a minute. You mean . . .”
“Yup,” Moira says. “Tate’s my ex.”
“Those were your kids? Ashleigh and Ryan?”
“I hope they behaved themselves.”
Roxie unconsciously rubs the fronts of her thighs where Ryan dumped the Shirley Temple. “But . . . but you set us up!”
“Sure. You said that you were looking for a date, remember? Tate’s single, you’re single.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Roxie trails off. She can’t imagine setting up Alan with anyone she knew. It was like some sort of incest. Practically obscene.
“Tate’s a tad rusty in the dad department, but no rustier than most,” Moira is saying. “And anyway, one woman’s trash is another woman’s boyfriend. Oh, hey. That was a joke.”
“A joke,” says Roxie.
“What I mean is, just because he ignored me doesn’t mean that he’ll ignore you. We didn’t click, that’s all. Sometimes that’s all divorce is. A fatal case of not clicking.”
Roxie is about to disagree, to say: No, it’s not about clicking, it’s about purpose, it’s about gratitude, it’s about believing you’re better than pyramid schemes and the husbands who are sucked in by them. But before she can speak, Moira picks up a set of plastic picnic cups. “How much for these?”
Later, Roxie’s sitting in one of the chairs, watching people pick through her things, and trying not to think about their dirty hands handling, their paws pawing, when she sees Alan ambling into her yard. He inspects the items on the tables—an ashtray, some measuring spoons—then sits in the chair next to her.
“What’s the deal?” he says.
“You’re the salesman,” Roxie says. “You tell me.”
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars for these spoons.”
“Do I look stupid? Do I look crazy? Two thousand, and not a penny less.”
“Seriously,” he says.
“I am serious. These are very important spoons. I was going to bring them to the Antiques Roadshow, but they’re in Nashville this week.”
Alan leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Does Liv know you’re selling her baby stuff?”
“Yes,” says Roxie. “Does Beatrix know you’re here?”
“Yes,” says Alan. “Well, sort of. I was on my way to deliver a letter to Ward. She likes me to deliver them personally.”
“She wants you to deliver letters to her ex? What kind of letters?”
Alan tips his head, looking as if he’s not sure she’s the right person to whom this information should be revealed. “That’s the weird thing. They’re about regular stuff. Alimony, visitation, vacation plans. But I don’t think they’re for Ward at all. I think they’re for Lu.”
Roxie frowns. “Ward’s wife?”
“Yeah. I think Beatrix writes these letters to drive Lu crazy. And then she wants me to drive them over to their house and hand them to her.” He rubs his cheeks. “The plan seems to be working, too. Once, Lu answered the door with two cigarettes clamped in her mouth, one on either side, like tusks.”
“How does it make you feel? Delivering these letters?”
Alan takes out a handkerchief and blots. “I hate it when you try that therapy crap on me.”
“Therapy crap.”
“All right. It makes me feel like an idiot. A useless idiot, if you really want to know.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He stuffs the handkerchief back into his pocket. “So I quit the vitamin business. And I’m quitting this mailboy business. I have some interviews next week. For real jobs.”
“Reality,” she says, and snorts, though she likes the sound of it, the lilt of it. “I’ll give you five records for two hundred bucks. That’s my final offer.”
Alan stays till the end of the sale and helps her clean up. She knows he does this because he is angry with his wife, but Roxie has lived apart from him long enough to find his games amusing. She offers him some leftover chicken chunks from Café Fondue as a reward.
“Why are all the cabinets open?” he says, eating the chicken standing up at the counter, scooping the chunks from the plastic bag with his fingers.
“Liv,” says Roxie. “You can always tell where she’s been because she won’t close anything—drawers, cabinets, refrigerators, doors. She’s an open book, that girl.”
He tosses the plastic bag into the garbage. “When’s she due home from dance?”
“A half hour. Why?”
“Let’s play a joke on her.”
“A joke? On Liv?”
“Come on.” He proceeds to open every door and drawer in the place: the toaster oven, the microwave, the basement, the bathroom medicine cabinet, the drawers in Liv’s bureaus. They crouch behind the island in the kitchen.
“This is ridiculous,” says Roxie.
“Shhh!”
Liv flings open the back door and drops her dance bag on the floor, takes in the openings everywhere. S
he circles the kitchen slowly, walks around the island to see her parents crumpled there like a couple of kids. She puts her hands on her hips and squints, hard. “You guys aren’t, like, sleeping together or something, are you?”
“We’re not sleeping together,” Alan and Roxie say in unison.
“I just don’t want to know, okay?” says Liv. “I don’t want to know about any of it.”
Alan springs to his feet. “Let’s play a game. All three of us.”
Roxie looks up at him and sees that he’s not perspiring at all. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”
It takes some convincing, but Liv agrees to play a game that Alan digs up from the basement, a game in which someone picks a letter, then everyone has to come up with names of certain items—furniture, sports teams, foods—that begin with that letter. You get points when you think of names that no one else has thought of, but the others can vote on whether your answer is too creative.
The buzzer rings.
“Time!” shouts Alan.
“We can all hear the buzzer, Dad,” Liv mutters.
“What do you guys have for ‘desserts’?” he says. “I have ‘nuts.’”
“That’s not a dessert!” says Liv.
“Of course it is,” Alan says. “Why else would people put a big bowl of nuts on the table after dinner?”
Liv shakes her head. “You are so cheating,” she says. “But, whatever. I have ‘Newtons.’ As in Fig.”
Roxie is about to blurt: But that’s not the real name of the cookies, you can’t split it up like that. But she keeps her mouth shut, afraid that she will ruin this fragile moment. Right now, Alan’s bizarre, real-job energy is the only thing that keeps Liv sitting cross-legged on the floor, hunched over her list like a dragon around its gold. One false move from Roxie, and Liv slips back into her favorite persona: Olivia the Teenage Bitch.
“What do you have, Mom?”
Roxie purses her lips. “I wrote ‘nothing’ because I’m on a diet and I’m supposed to have nothing for dessert. Kind of creative, right?”
Liv shrugs, and Roxie silently gives herself a point.
“What about ‘names from the Bible’?” says Liv.
“That was easy,” says Alan. “‘Noah.’”
“I have ‘nun,’” Roxie says.
“Cute, Rox,” says Alan. “Nothing, none.”
“No! N-u-n. Nun. As in sister.”
“Doesn’t count,” says Liv.
“Come on!” Roxie says, unable to keep from protesting. “I gave you Newton. You mean to tell me that there’s no nuns in the Bible anywhere? There’s got to be a nun!” She is sure there’s a nun.
“It’s not a real name. It’s just a noun,” says Liv, just as sure, even more sure.
“What do you have?” Alan asks her.
“‘Nebuchadnezzar,’” says Liv.
Roxie drops her pencil. “Who?”
“‘Nebuchadnezzar,’” says Liv. “The king in the book of Daniel who dreams about the statue with the feet of clay.”
“Feet of clay,” says Roxie. Alan is nodding like a horse, and she wants to kick him to make him stop it. He was the one who had insisted on the parochial schools when they still lived in the city.
“Explain it to your mother,” says Alan, and Roxie does kick him. Lightly, though, just a nudge. So he’s getting a real job again, so what?
Liv flips her list over and draws a picture of a statue. “This king dreams of a statue. It had a gold head, silver chest, brass legs, and feet of clay. Since the clay’s weaker than the rest of the statue, the feet break apart, so the whole thing falls down. Daniel says the dream means that the head of gold was Nebuchadnezzar, that he was king of kings, but the kingdoms after him would get worse and worse and eventually everything would suck.”
“Such a nice story,” says Roxie. “Okay, what do you guys have for ‘condiment’?”
But Liv isn’t finished. “It’s true, though, isn’t it?” She points to the head on her drawing. “This is, like, say, everyone from the beginning of the world to World War One.” She moves down the body, pointing to the chest. “This is people from the Depression. Here are some baby boomers. And here’s you guys,” she says, pointing at the feet. “Right here.”
Roxie’s latest book gets right to the point: Chocolate Is My Weakness. The main character is a lonely woman who asks all her co-workers and potential lovers a series of questions: Would they rather stay on a Ferris wheel for two years straight or have a thumb twenty-one inches long for the rest of their lives? Would they rather have the ability to be invisible or fly? (Of course, everyone wants to be able to fly.) She marries the one guy who answers “thumb” and “invisible.” At the wedding, they both fly away. At least, that’s what everyone else believes.
Roxie closes the book. Here she is, a woman who has willingly dug a financial and emotional pit for herself and now reads these arch and quippy stories, these butterscotch dreamscapes, to climb out of it. What kinds of women were reading these books? More important, what kinds of women weren’t reading these books? Moira, who looks to Roxie like the type of person who’d carry a knife in a little sheath at her ankle. No sweetie-pie magical realism for her. Or for Beatrix, Alan’s wife, a great doughy goddess of a woman, all breasts and butt and temper barely restrained by her suits, the buttons threatening to spray like bullets. Even Lu, Beatrix’s ex’s new wife who skulks around on parent-teacher nights, Lu would open up one of the books just to crush her lipstick-stained cigarette between the pages.
Roxie reaches into her bag for the apple she’s tucked there, a little depressed to have fallen back into the personal habits she’s tried so hard to get free of: the endless lists, the didactic instructions, the spare piece of fruit tucked in the purse for emergencies. She has been staying later and later at the hot line, taking inventory, counting the pencils over and over and over, each time getting a different number. How is it that you learn you aren’t going to be a dancer or an actress or a star? How does that slow and silent knowledge sneak up behind you and then break open over your head like some great, spoiled egg? You won’t make great cookies or sew your own curtains or take a good photograph. You aren’t going to beat those odds and stay married for a thousand years. What do you do when you take stock and find out that even pencils are beyond you?
Roxie takes a clean sheet of paper and one of the pencils, writes, “THINGS I AM GRATEFUL FOR,” at the top of the page, then crosses it out. To hell with it, she thinks, she’ll write her own damn book. It will have chapters such as “Stupid, Humiliating Affairs with Supervisors and Foreign Men,” “The Pod People Who Have Replaced the Children,” and “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: When the New Husband Makes You Long for the Old One.”
“You were right,” the man says.
“Excuse me?” says Roxie. She is wearing a little paper hat, which she whips off her head before she remembers the callers can’t actually see her.
“About the Marlboro Man? You were right.”
“I was?” she says, recognizing the voice. “Oh! I was.”
“Yeah,” says the man. “She was down in Colorado for three weeks and said that the whole outdoors thing got old. The bugs were awful and everything was damp, she said. Who would have expected bugs in Colorado? And the guy was a total jerk. She wants to come back, and I guess I want her to, but I may make her wait a little.”
“Well, I’m very glad for you,” Roxie says. “I guess.” She flattens the little paper hat. It’s actually a letter from Sears, telling her that if she doesn’t pay the bill, well, they may have to come over and do something intrusive and inconvenient. “Good for you,” she says.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” the man says. And then he adds, “Hope things are okay on your end.”
“They’re fine,” she says. “Actually, I think Sears is going to repossess my washing machine. But, hey, other than that . . .” She trails off.
“It’s always something, isn’t it?”
He has learned something, too. “I know what you mean.”
Liv has been holed up in the basement for weeks, putting the final touches on her number for the school talent show. She is doing a clown theme, she says, tragic and pathetic and weird all at once. Roxie wants to weep at her choice. “Honey,” she says gently, “people hate clowns. In horror movies, the clowns are always evil, okay? And even if they aren’t evil, they aren’t ever funny.”
“Who says I’m trying to be funny? I’m a clown from another world. I’m a freak clown.”
“Those are the worst kind.”
“Duh. Why do you think I’m doing it?”
At the school on the evening of the talent show, parents are milling around wearing the blank expressions of farm animals, butting into the walls and one another. Roxie sees Alan and Beatrix in the hallway. Beatrix is dressed in winter white, though it’s spring. Roxie absorbs the wide, schmoozy smile, imagines Beatrix dropping fishhooks into an envelope. At the sinks in the ladies’ room, Roxie gets an overbright and cheerful greeting from Lu, who then dashes off without even drying her hands.
The parents are herded into the auditorium seats, and the show begins. After a few numbers, Roxie sees that, at Liv’s high school, “talent” is defined as singing off-key in body glitter or wearing as little as legally possible while shaking your thang to loud, monotonous music. Roxie slides down in her seat in horror while Tate not so secretly plays games on his cell phone.
Liv is the seventeenth act. She walks out onto the stage in her silvery blue unitard and fluffy white blond wig: Smurfette gone bad. Her expression is her usual, one of intense constipation, but beneath it her neck is long and elegant, her limbs belted with tight ropes of muscle. She begins to dance, and Roxie feels her own muscles tighten first in sympathy, then in surprise, then in wonderment. All she’s ever seen Liv dance were the pretty things, the sweet things, La Bayadere, The Nutcracker. This is rough ballet, broken ballet—it is the Tragedy of the Fallen Arches, the Ballad of the Barbie Feet—but the pain in Liv’s desperate gyrations, in her powerful leaps and contortions, is real and terrible and beautiful, raw and bitter as a mouthful of Baker’s chocolate.