by Sarah Bird
Stretch-waist pants? Why not simply wear a giant sign that reads I HAVE GIVEN UP?
I remind myself to keep a cyanide pellet handy for the moment I ever find myself in Chico’s or any store that sells clothes in sizes 1, 2, and 3. Only Cokes and condoms should come in just three sizes. The human body requires a bit more calibration. And shoes? Not just clogs, Birkenstock clogs. All the color, shape, and style of pinto beans. I’m glad I wore the Zac Posen and my Louboutins.
The major issue, though, has to be diet. What parallel universe do these women inhabit where there is no South Beach, Zone, WW, Pritikin? Low carb, high carb. Pick one, ladies, any one. I am not saying that everyone has to be a twig like Nancy Reagan, but even our own hometown dumpling Laura Bush will do. We don’t all have to go for Eleanor Roosevelt, do we?
And speaking of sanctimonious overachievers, my old nemesis, Dr. Dr. Robin, from my thwarted Pap smear, is here. Thankfully, Robin is making a point of ignoring me, which I infinitely prefer to the good doctor bringing me up on identity theft charges.
I recognize a few familiar faces. High school reunion in hell, if that is not too redundant. I am trying to avoid eye contact when a stocky Asian woman thrusts herself upon me.
“Blighta Yoong!”
“Oh, my God! Byung Chao Soo, is that you?”
“Thas my name, don wear it out. But now I am Bunny.”
“Bunny. That’s the perfect name for you.” It is. BCS never walked when she could bounce and her sunny disposition was one of the bright spots in a house dominated by women whose lives revolved around scathing critiques of the social order and erratic menstrual cycles. “You were in computer science, right? No, no, violin. Weren’t you studying the violin?”
“Piano. But I am so ober that. Too Korean, know what I’m saying?”
“Your English has gotten really good.”
“Roger that. Habba to hab the good English when you a please dish splasher.”
There are one, two, three seconds of dead air as I puzzle out what a “please dish splasher” might be. Then, click. “You’re a police dispatcher!”
“Better fit for me with my pea poles kills.”
One, two, three.
“Yes! Yes, people skills, you always had great people skills.”
“Whuz you gum?”
“Well, my game is event coordination. But I’m currently…currently, I’m working on a documentary about housing co-ops. University housing cooperatives. Like this one. In fact, I’m actually living here at the moment. For research purposes.”
“You! You!” Bunny grins and stabs me with her index finger. “You got it going on! You all that and a bag of chips!”
“Blythe? Blythe Young, is that you?”
“Jen! Alli! Wow, you guys look great!” I greet the house’s resident dueling dykes, infamous for all-night dissections of their tumultuous relationship. A toddler tugs on Jen’s hand, which sports a goliath diamond engagement ring and wedding band. I have a vision of a “commitment ceremony” with both parties in tuxes and then the turkey baster.
“Is this your”—boy? girl? I can’t make out the sex of the toddler hanging on to Jen’s hand and discard “hermaphrodite” as a guess not likely to warm the hearts of many parents—“child?”
“He’s Jen’s,” Alli answers. “I’m just Aunt Al. Right, slugger?” Alli scoops the child up and begins tissuing away some of the leakage pouring from every available duct and orifice.
“So, you two?” I seesaw a questioning hand back and forth between them, praying they will leap in and fill in the blanks.
“Not together anymore. Not as lovers anyway,” Jen answers in the forthright, too-much-information way that is the curse of the therapized.
Her attention still on mopping up toddler effluvia, Alli adds cheerily, “Yep, Jen got her LUG and moved on.”
Jen leans in to provide unsought clarification. “Lesbian Until Graduation.” Jen and Alli laugh self-consciously frank, open laughs.
Still there is a bit of a tone when Alli adds, “Yeah, Jen’s just a giant het now.” She sticks the gooey Kleenex in the pocket of her formless jacket.
Jen’s son starts tugging ferociously at her and grunting, “Pup-pup! Pup-pup!” He points to Big Lou the cat eating from a bowl on the side porch.
“Yes, Simba,” Jen tells her son, pretending that her patience is strained even as she glows with mom pride. “We’ll go see the pup-pup. But Mom is going to have to hold you because that can be a very dangerous pup-pup.”
They leave and Alli says, “He calls anything with fur a pup-pup. How cute is that?”
“His name is Simba?”
“That’s just what Jen calls him, Simba, the Elephant Boy. She says she feels like an elephant hauling this tiny creature around all day. That he’s like the mahout who whacks her on the trunk to pick him up and take him where he wants to go.”
Alli watches Jen and her son with such obvious longing and adoration that I have to ask, “So there’s no…”
“Bitterness? Hard feelings? Homicidal rage? At first, yeah, I was demented. Once she went skipping off back to boys—a total has-bian!—I was making wax dolls and sticking pins in them. I keyed her car. Can’t believe I did that. Actually, it was Millie who got us speaking again. Got me to start coming to these meetings. I didn’t even know that Jen had named her son after me.”
“She named him Allison?”
“Well, Alex. They call him Al.” Her voice grows wistful. “That’s what she used to call me when we were…Okay, I promised my therapist that I would maintain a forward, outward focus. What are you doing now?”
I unspool the whole documentary fantasy for Alli, adding that the Bass brothers are funding me, but that has to be kept a secret, explaining, “It hasn’t been announced yet. What about you?”
“I’m program coordinator for the Platinum Longhorns.”
“Really? You?” That last question mark could have been considered insulting, but Alli and UT alums who’ve given in excess of fifty thousand dollars to the alma mater are a highly unlikely pair. The plushiest of the plush Pee Heights princesses were always talking about trips they’d taken with the Plat Longs. Jaunts to Tuscany for a plein air sketching holiday. Excursions to Bali to study temple art. Private cooking lessons in London with Nigella Lawson. The Platinum Longhorns’ trips were, mostly, a pretext to allow Kippie Lee and her coven to hang out and gossip about one another while pretending to study art and culture in deluxe, five-star settings where there was guaranteed to be great shopping and purified ice in the drinks.
“I know.” Alli shakes her head at the absurdity of her career. “Strange that I should end up spending my days with Republicans.” She takes in my jacket and shoes and adds quickly, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, seriously, if you are, Republican, that is, that’s fine. At least we’re all here doing penance for our sins, right? Helping Millie to buy off our guilt for not doing more ourselves. I guess that’s part of your reason for coming back. That and the, uh, documentary.”
She turns toward the porch where little Al is trying to eat out of Big Lou’s bowl. “Oh, that is too cute!” She pulls a digital camera hardly bigger than a credit card out of her pocket. “Auntie Al has got to get a picture of that.”
“‘Penance for our sins’? What does that mean?” I ask, but Alli is already rushing away.
“God’s eyes! As I live and breathe, it’s our own Blythe Young.”
Ariadne grabs me. She doesn’t seem to have aged a day since I first met her, probably because when I first met Ariadne she both looked middle-aged and existed in the Middle Ages. As a mead-making, heraldry-designing, wench-in-glasses member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, she delights in all things medieval.
“Ariadne, hey. You’re looking well. How are things in the society? Still making mead and doing your heraldry stuff?”
“By the rood, no. I’ve moved on to something far more arcane than that.” She leans in, her eyes twinkling, and whi
spers, “The law. I’m an attorney, but don’t tell anyone.” She lowers her voice for even more pretend secrecy. “My mother thinks I play piano in a house of ill repute.”
I feel sorry for the poor saps who end up with Lady Guinevere representing them in court.
Ting! Ting! Ting!
At the front of the room, Robin taps on a glass with a fork. Conversations trail off and the group begins to coagulate into meeting mode. I search for an escape route and notice a knot of vegan residents at the refreshment table shoving mini ham quiches and spicy chicken wings into their mouths with both hands.
Dr. Dr. Robin waits until everyone is quiet before she sweeps a hand in Millie’s direction. “I give you our very own Mother Teresa, our conscience, our touchstone…”
While Robin goes on with the introduction, Sanjeev appears at the back of the crowd. His eyes are riveted on Millie. Emotions play across his face: admiration, yearning, hope, desire. In one clouded instant, however, they are all washed away and replaced by despair. The same hopelessness flashes across Millie’s face as she glances at him. Then she slaps a fake grin on and bounds to the front of the room. For some reason, she is wearing a derby hat. “Oh my gosh, Robin,” Millie says. “Was that an introduction or a eulogy? I’m not dead yet.”
The house phone rings and Sanjeev answers. He catches my eye and waves me over. I reel the anvil of a phone out onto the front porch.
“So, Younghole, where are you taking me for our date next time I’m in Austin? And don’t think I’m gonna put out for some cheap-ass dinner at Olive Garden either. No action unless I see fabric on the tabletop.”
“I don’t know, Escovedo, I may need some references here. Referrals from satisfied customers.”
“Hey, I’ll do better than that. I’ll come over there right now and give you a free sample. Money-back guarantee.”
It is so juvenile. Kidding, teasing like a couple of high school boys in gym class, but that is our language and we are speaking it again. I barely notice the meeting taking place on the other side of the glass front door while I talk to Danny. My divided attention is why it takes me a few minutes to figure out what is happening when Millie takes the derby hat off her head and the Old Girls start chunking in bills and checks while Robin runs credit cards in the corner.
Even as Danny and I banter back and forth I process this new information: The Old Girls are supporting Millie.
What You Love on This Earth
SO, are you completely lacking in a life too?” Nikki asks me as we watch Millie trying to talk to Jaguar.
Millie and Jaguar squat on the sidewalk beside the Baptist church. Millie is having a hard time making contact as the tattooed boy’s attention seems to be focused on some imaginary howler monkey or parrot squawking in his mental jungle. The other street kids bound after passersby, shaking plastic cups, begging for spare change. When anyone well dressed passes by without tossing something in the cups, the kids pretend to cough and hack, “Die, yuppie scum!” into their hands.
Nikki dangles a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor in a brown paper bag off her jutted hip just below a motorcycle-chain belt. She brings the bottle to her lips and tilts her head up for a big chug. Sunlight catches on the rings above her brow and glints off a tiny diamond in her left nostril. “I take silence to be consent.” Nikki tugs again on the bottle and holds it out to me.
It is nine o’clock in the morning and a runaway teen, already drunk, panhandling on the Drag has concluded that I am completely lacking in a life. Not much point in trotting out the documentary story for this audience. In fact, I have no reason to work Nikki at all; there is nothing she can do for me or to me. That knowledge makes me feel unencumbered, weightless. I take the bottle and answer, “Pretty much, yeah.”
The sweet Kool Aid–flavored liquor leaves me woozy, nauseated, and deeply nostalgic for Code Warrior.
Nikki nods approvingly. “All right. Millie would be all, ‘Drinking’s bad for you. Get an education.’ For a fucktard dee bag, you’re pretty cool.”
This is the funniest thing I have ever heard.
“Me? Cool? I am not cool. I’m a gigantic washout freeloading off of a friend I dumped years ago so I could claw my way up to becoming a fucktard dee bag by using, sucking up to, or cheating everyone who crossed my path.”
This admission makes me feel so giddily light that I try a few more. “The IRS is hunting me. Probably DEA; Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and the INS as well. I defaulted on my college loans, so someone will be coming after me for that, too. I’m thirty-three years old and I’ve got a roommate. I’m sharing a bathroom with six college kids, three of whom have very bad aim. Yeah, I’m cool.”
“Could be worse.”
We both drink to that. The malt liquor buzz lets me see past Nikki’s piercings and tattoos and hostility long enough to ask, “What do you want to do?”
Nikki hefts the bottle. “Besides finish this and get another one?”
“Yeah. Besides that.”
“What? Are you going to be all, ‘Get an education’?”
“Right, like mine really helped me. Where I ended up, I would have been better off working at Burger King. Any kind of cost-effective mass-feeding outfit.”
“Maybe in the olden days you didn’t need an education to work there, but you do now.”
“That’s probably true.”
“Oh, it is. Trust me. Burger King won’t even let you near the Fryolator without one.”
“I doubt that.”
Nikki shoots me a sideways glance out of slitted eyes and asks warily, “Not that I give a shit, but what do you think I ought to do?”
“You’d have to be a whole lot worse off than you are to take career advice from me.”
“Duh, I know that.”
“What do you think you ought to do?”
Nikki rolls her eyes.
“No, seriously. What does Nikki want to do with her life?”
She shrugs.
“What do you love on this earth? What are you good at?”
“Me? Like what was my favorite subject in school?”
“No. Forget that bullshit. What are you good at? What’s the thing that when you do it, you forget about time the way you used to when you were a kid and really got into something?”
Nikki takes a big swallow and holds the bottle up high. “Getting fucked up.”
After years spent intuiting, then exploiting the desires of rich women, tapping into the dreams of the well-to-do and making myself into whoever could deliver them, Nikki is an easy read. Her hair is magenta today and done in haphazardly artful arcs and swirls. Her makeup is a self-portrait, a fantasy painted on skin. “You’re living on the street. How do you keep your hair and makeup looking so good?”
“Young pussy. I can always get inside, use a bathroom, when I need to.”
“So you ‘need to’ do your hair and makeup.”
“No. I just like to, that’s all.”
“Nikki, you’re an artist. You are a cosmetic artist. You are a colorist and a hair designer. You need to go to beauty school and get the bullshit piece of paper that says you can practice the art you were put on earth to create.”
Nikki doesn’t shrug or roll her eyes. “Yeah, like that’ll ever happen.”
“Why not? What’s stopping you?”
“Uh, look around. You see a car? You see a beauty school I can walk to even if one would let me in the door?” She snorts at the ridiculousness of the whole idea.
It suddenly becomes desperately important to me to solve this one problem, to convince this girl to do what I want her to do. “I can get you in the door. I can get anyone in the door anywhere. That is not a problem. And here…” I fish out the keys to the minivan and hand them to Nikki. “Transportation problem solved. Skip a few lattes and you can put gas in the thing. It’s the piece of crap parked behind Seneca House.”
“You’re letting me use your car?”
“Minivan. Sorry. But, consider this, you can sleep in
it. You and Kat. Seats come out. All the soccer mom features. I’ll try to figure something out about tuition for beauty school.”
Nikki holds the keys away as if they were oozing slime. “Why?”
“Gift horse. Don’t look it in the mouth.”
I am trying to figure out why I feel so bizarrely elated because I’ve made someone take my only source of transportation when Millie drags a highly agitated Jaguar over to us. “Blythe, look!” She holds out the scrawny cat boy’s arm. Above the inside of his wrist is a new patch of tattooed jaguar spots beneath a quilt of raw scabs. A streak of red crawls up the pale, undyed part of his inner arm.
“He’s got a massive infection. I can’t let go of him or he’ll run away. We’ve got to get him to the People’s Clinic up in north Austin. Go get your van.”
“Millie, it’s empty. Out of gas.”
“Okay, we’ll have to take a cab.” Maintaining her hold on a struggling Jaguar, Millie tosses me a giant Taco Bell cup and orders, “Panhandle.”
“What? Me? Panhandle? Isn’t this what the Old Girls give you money for?”
Millie is shocked at the suggestion. “Not for this. Those donations are specifically earmarked for eggs, tortillas, condiments, and my living expenses. There is no line item for cab rides in my budget.”
Hissing more like an alley than a jungle cat, Jaguar pulls away from Millie. His speed is reduced considerably by an insistence upon quadrupedal locomotion. Down on all fours, Jaguar doesn’t cover much ground. Millie runs after him.
Nikki holds up her own cup. “Well? Shall we?”
“I’m not going to beg.”
“Here.” Nikki plunks a quarter and three pennies into my cup, then shakes hers. “Get that whole alms vibe going. A female who has most of her teeth doesn’t need to do much more than shake the cup. Go. Get him.” She shoves me in the direction of an older man, probably an English professor, judging from his fleeciness—fleecy beard, fleecy hair, fleecy corduroy pants.
I catch a glimpse of Millie wrangling Jaguar. He shrieks in real human pain when Millie accidentally grabs his infected arm. I clink the coins in my cup and tell the professor, “It’s for my friend.” I point to Jaguar. “He has an infected tattoo.”