Beautiful Girls

by Beth Ann Bauman

  “Have a heart, J.D. honey. They’re stuck, and they’re going to some kind of dinner party,” his mom said, looking delighted, the way she often looked, even now as she rooted through the refrigerator, opening lids and sniffing brown saucy things.

  J.D. wasn’t sure he ever looked delighted. In recent Christmas photos he noticed he looked glazed, not with boredom exactly, but with something dull and gloomy, and he wondered about his mother, radiating goodness and luck. He stuffed a Twinkie in his mouth and thought about objecting to the babysitting, but he liked the idea of getting out of the house.

  “It’s money in your pocket,” his mom said.

  “I’ll be loaded,” he said with his mouth full. “All right. I’ll do it,” he added, as if he had the final say.

  J.D. had occasionally babysat the girls, Annabel and Sophia, when the Allards lived next door. But last year they had left their three-bedroom ranch and moved across town to—according to nosy neighbors—a tiny two-bedroom on a lumpy piece of property, and J.D. hadn’t seen one of the downwardly mobile Allards since. J.D. was now a high school freshman with bad skin and a meager social life and no real Friday evening options; sometimes he’d go to one of his friends’ houses and they’d listen to music and toss a tennis ball against the wall, passing the time. Soccer was his thing, but it was January and the streets and tree branches glinted with ice.

  J.D. plopped in front of the TV and stared at an old black-and-white movie. The remote didn’t work and since he was too lazy to get up and change the channel, he watched a young woman with a hairdo in the shape of an ocean wave embrace a young man under a street lamp. “I would do anything for it not to be true,” the man said, pulling away from her and holding his hat over his heart. “But what we had here is over, dollface. We’re through.” J.D. watched their eyes glisten, he saw their sadness. He had his own little storage bin of strange, sad feelings he tried to keep under lock and key. He felt something like heartache when he thought about the mysterious girls, walking the hallways of his school. There were so many new faces since the graduated eighth graders from both the town’s junior highs and at least half of the Catholic school spilled together to make up the freshman class. His drama class was filled with many of these exotic girls. There was Susan Steen with her magical hair. He had watched her pull on one of her tight curls, pulling it past her shoulder to almost her elbow and when she let it go it sprung back up to half its length. There was Katie Taylor, who he heard danced ballet. Her spine was straight and her neck long, and even though she was a little chubby, when she walked nothing jiggled. There was Luann Morley, who still had a child’s body and a loud, high laugh. She could do a cartwheel on the balance beam. One day after school he walked by the gym and saw her strong arms stretched taut on the beam as her little legs parted in the air, and then as if her legs had eyes they landed to safety, one chalky foot after the other. She wobbled only the tiniest bit. He wondered about all these girls and what they were like to talk to. What did they think about? Would he ever know? Thinking like this was sometimes delicious, sometimes terrible.

  He hadn’t wanted drama class; he wanted shop, where they made tool racks and bar stools, but freshmen got leftovers and he was rerouted to the arts. “A thespian,” the old guidance counselor shouted in J.D.’s ear, handing him his schedule. It would have been intolerable if it weren’t for these girls who filled the seats in front of him. From his seat in the back of the room, he could stare, unseen, at the back of their fine heads and wonder about them.

  Two weeks ago, the drama teacher had asked the class to form groups, choose a play from the shelves, and present a scene. J.D. sat quietly, waiting for one of these girls to turn to him, which they were bound to do considering he was one of only three boys in the class; there were boy parts, he knew. But this didn’t seem to matter. He watched as desks were turned and groups sprung up. He watched and waited and found himself alone.

  Then Dawn Martinelli poked him in the arm. “I guess you’re stuck with me,” she said.

  “I am?” Dawn Martinelli was a big, beefy girl with bad skin, like his, although her pimples were red and mean and gathered in small clusters, while he had a couple of large, sluggish bumps. He knew Dawn Martinelli’s type, from her chicken soup smell to her huffy attitude. He had her pegged.

  “You’ll be Vladimir and I’ll be this Estragon,” she said, thrusting a copy of Waiting for Godot at him. “We’ll do this scene where they call each other names. ‘You abortion! You sewer rat!’”

  “You lobotomy,” he whispered.

  “You butthole,” she said. He inched his chair away from hers, looking at the gray sky. January was one of those months that went on forever.

  “We’ll be bums. It’ll be wicked. You’ll see,” she said.

  J.D.’s mom dropped him off at the Allards’ at seven o’clock. The house was small and bright with a yellow living room, a little yellow kitchen and a short yellow hallway, sprouting two bedrooms and a bathroom, which were probably yellow as well, J.D. thought. “John Dewey, how are you?” Mrs. Allard smiled. She was cheerful and dumpy, wearing pink lipstick.

  The kitchen table had been moved into the living room and a rickety card table was pushed up next to it. Both tables were covered with a paper tablecloth. Six assorted chairs were gathered around the tables, and each place was set with a bowl, a spoon, and a napkin. Mr. Allard in his coat and boots carefully placed a dish of melting butter to the right of the bread basket, then the left. “Where do you think, Johnny?” Mr. Allard asked, when he saw J.D. watching him. J.D. shrugged.

  “Girls, girls, John Dewey is here,” Mrs. Allard called.

  Shy at first, Annabel and Sophia clung together and whispered into each other’s hair. They wore flannel nightgowns and plaid slippers. Annabel was eight and could be a chatterbox. J.D. remembered her once standing on his shoes and holding his hands, discussing nimbostratus clouds; she and J.D. had dazzled each other with the weather report. Sophia was younger and quieter and had dark, dark eyes. Both girls had chin-length hair and mild cases of static electricity. A couple strands rose, almost elegantly, toward the ceiling.

  “We’re having a progressive dinner, J.D. We’ll come back here for stew.” The Allards grabbed their coats, kissed the girls and left. For the first half-hour, the girls colored quietly on the floor, looking up at him shyly, then looking away. “It’s been a long time since we saw you, John Dewey,” Annabel said after a while.

  “J.D.,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want a snack?” he asked.

  “We had our snack,” Annabel said.

  J.D. settled on the couch, opened Waiting for Godot and studied his lines. He’d finally agreed to it because he wanted the class to notice him, notice that he was breathing the same air as they were in the same overheated classroom; he hoped the scene would be funny, and he found he liked yelling insults at Dawn Martinelli. Earlier in the week, though, when they were supposed to be rehearsing their scene, Dawn Martinelli had stared out the window and wouldn’t cooperate.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  “I decided to stop talking so much. I’m trying to cultivate a sense of mystery.”

  “Well, you’ll still be weird and boring.”

  “I’m not boring,” she said mildly.

  “No,” he agreed. Boring wasn’t one of her flaws. “But this is required talking.”

  Dawn pointed to one of the groups. “They’re doing The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know a thing about art, do you?” she said, leaning her fat head close to him and scowling.

  “Get out of my face,” he said, inching his desk away.

  “You are so blah,” she said, lightly, almost musically. “There’s not one thing about you that’s memorable. You could disintegrate right now and not one person in this room would notice.”

  He felt himself get warm, could feel his face reddening. They s
eemed to instinctively know things about each other that he wished they didn’t know. “I take it back,” he said, as easily as he could. “You are boring.” But he could see they’d both gotten under one another’s skin, and for the rest of the week they spent third period drama class alternately rehearsing their lines and saying terrible things to each other.

  Now just looking at the lines made his heart sink. He didn’t know what to make of high school, where he walked the halls like a phantom. He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked over at the Allard girls, who were watching him expectantly. They smiled, looked down into their coloring books, and then looked up again.

  “Annie Fofannie, Sophster,” he said, suddenly, tossing aside the book. “Let’s have some fun.”

  The girls jumped to their feet. First they played Evil Baby Snatcher—an escaped jailbird who was as slippery as smoke, passing under doors and through cracks, tried to enter the Allard home and seize the girls. The girls had to spot Evil Baby Snatcher before it got a stranglehold on one of their little necks. Sophia would point to the shadowy, lurking snatcher while Annabel bugged out her eyes and let herself come close to death by asphyxiation. J.D.’s job was to wind up his pitching arm and send Evil Baby Snatcher sailing through the window and out onto the telephone pole, where they would listen closely and try to decipher its evil words and prepare themselves for the next attack. Next, they played Smokers, a game where they sucked on pretend cigarettes and hacked their brains out and talked in raspy voices.

  Then the girls dragged two boxes that were each marked $1 into the living room. “We got this junk at a rummage sale,” Annabel said. Inside one box were many pairs of dress shoes, now old and crunched and dusty. The other box held hats and purses and accessories. All of it smelled liked someone’s basement.

  Annabel flipped through the stuff and draped herself in a fox wrap—the old, sad, toothed head sat on one shoulder and its ratty tail hung off the other. She wore a beaded beret and pointy-toed satin slippers. J.D. found a beat-up motorbike helmet and goggles.

  “Miss Vanilla Bean,” he said, getting down on one knee. “I would do anything for it not to be true, but what we had here is over.”

  “Noooooooo,” Annabel said, throwing herself onto the recliner, writhing and moaning, her nightgown twisting around her pale legs. “You have to staaaaay…”

  “I’m sorry,” J.D. said. “We’re kaput.”

  She threw herself at J.D.’s feet, her mouth opening and searching for words. “But tomorrow it will be sunny, a warm front is moving in and we might make it to the low fifties.” He shook his head sorrowfully.

  In the meantime, Sophia had slipped a dirty pink boa around her neck. She wore a Peter Pan cap with a feather shooting off to the side and glittery pumps. In her hands she held an alligator purse.

  “Miss Horseradish, I wish it weren’t true,” J.D. said, holding the helmet over his heart. “But what we had here is over.”

  Sophia looked shy, standing on the carpet in her getup.

  “We’re all washed up,” J.D. urged.

  “Act!” Annabel yelled.

  Sophia looked stricken, and she just stood there clutching the alligator purse. They waited, and finally Sophia gave a dramatic turn of her head and teetered in her high heels over to the closet, opened the door, stepped inside among the fishing poles and overcoats and slammed herself in.

  “Well,” Annabel said. “That’s not really acting.”

  “It was pretty darn good.”

  “Really?” Annabel shouted.

  “Really,” J.D. said.

  They stared at the closet door, waiting for Sophia to reappear. Slowly, the door opened and Sophia, red as a beet, came stumbling out. J.D. applauded, and she smiled hugely, pulling on her Peter Pan cap and making the jaunty feather point skyward.

  Then the girls changed into new getups and paraded around the living room, walking the runway. “Work it, girls,” he said.

  At 8:30 when it was their bedtime, J.D. sent the girls to the bathroom to brush their teeth. He looked in their little bedroom, stuffed with dolls, board games and miniature kitchen appliances. They had bunk beds covered with brightly flowered blankets.

  “Let us stay up late. Come on, John Dewey,” Annabel said.

  “No, no.” He leaned in the bathroom doorway as the girls took turns spitting into the sink. “Goodnight, little ones, goodnight. Tonight the moon shines high and the lamp light glows, goodnight little ones, goodnight,” he said. This was something his grandmother had said to him when he was small. He could still imagine the watery potato smell of her kitchen, and for a second he was overcome with great love for her; she’d been gone for a long time. He backed into the hall, missing his grandmother and her house built on stilts with its ramps and staircases and the view of the sea. He swallowed hard. “Vamoose,” he said, pointing to their bedroom. “Kapeesh?”

  The girls climbed into their beds and pulled the covers up, looking at him standing in the doorway. “We had fun, didn’t we?” Annabel said.

  He nodded, then felt stupid and weird. He closed their door and returned to the couch, wondering if he was still that same boy who had run up the ramps and staircases of his grandmother’s house on stilts, or whether he had grown up. After he and Dawn Martinelli had insulted each other one day this week, he’d taken a hall pass and went to the bathroom, where he examined his face. He squeezed a pimple, making the skin raw. He ran his fingers under the cold water and thought about peeing, but he didn’t really have to. When he returned to class the room buzzed with unfamiliar voices. He heard Katie Taylor croon, “I’ve had many gentlemen callers.” Lynn Cooper whispered, “Oh Brick, sometimes I feel like a cat on a hot tin roof,” and Susan Steen yelled in a trembly voice, “STELLA…STELLA!” In the short time he’d been gone, everyone in the room had become someone else.

  J.D. heard a car crunch over the ice, and the headlights filled the living room for a second. Nine o’clock, he saw on the wall clock. Two hours, six bucks. He reached for his jacket, working his long arms into the sleeves.

  Mr. and Mrs. Allard dashed in with their coats flying open and waved at him before disappearing into the kitchen. Next, a large woman heaved herself through the door and headed for the card table, where she sat down and buttered herself a piece of bread, still wearing her coat. A man in a furry hat with earflaps and big glasses walked in soon after and asked J.D. directions to the bathroom, and he was followed by an elderly couple—the old man, tall and stooped, moved slowly into the room and folded his coat across the back of the couch while his birdlike wife stood on the welcome mat. “Let me help you with your galoshes, dear,” he said to her.

  “Why?” she asked. “I’m just going to have to put them back on.”

  J.D. stood in the middle of the room, waiting for one of the swift-moving Allards to pay him and drive him home. It smelled good in the kitchen, and he felt his stomach growl. The large, bread-eating woman patted crumbs from her lips with a napkin and wandered into the kitchen.

  “What are we eating?” Birdy asked, still standing on the welcome mat.

  “Stew, I believe,” the old man said, lowering himself into a folding chair.

  “We had soup at that Phipps fellow’s,” she said, gesturing toward the bathroom.

  “What can I say?” the old man said quietly.

  “How many bowls of soup do they think I can eat?”

  “Shush, dear.”

  Mrs. Allard entered the living room with a bottle of red wine and stopped short, seeing J.D. in his jacket. “Oh, J.D., we’re not taking you home yet. Didn’t we tell you? This is a progressive dinner. You see, we had coconut soup at Mr. Phipps’s,” she said, referring to the bathroom man who had just returned to the living room. “And cheese puffs and pigs-in-a-blanket at Mrs. Martinelli’s. We’ll have beef stew here and then we’re off to the Waverlys’ for cheesecake and a lemon-lime sherbet roll.” Mrs. Waverly, the birdlike woman, offered half a smile and held up her wineglass for Mrs. Allard to fill.
“Everyone, this is J.D., the babysitter,” Mrs. Allard said, and the room turned to him.

  J.D. lifted his hand stiffly in more of a stop signal than a greeting. Mrs. Martinelli, he thought queasily. He searched her face for hints of Dawn and sure enough he found them in her high, flat forehead, her large frame, the way she moved her mouth. J.D. backed up a few paces, still standing in his jacket while the dinner guests moved around him. They expected him to sit on the couch while they ate their beef stew. What did they think he should do with himself while they ate their beef stew? And what if it somehow got back to Dawn that he was a babysitter, a Friday night babysitter? He grew warm and anxious, standing on the yellow carpeting. There wasn’t anywhere for him to sit other than the couch, so he sat on the farthest end and unzipped his jacket. He took his book out of his pocket and nervously turned the pages.

  “Hey, Johnny boy, do you mind if I flip the light for some atmosphere?” Mr. Allard asked, though he didn’t wait for a response. Mr. Allard was red-faced and chatty from the wine. He turned off the lamp, and the little room was filled with soft candlelight.

  Mr. and Mrs. Allard scooped stew into bowls and poured more wine, after which the bathroom man said a short prayer. J.D. sat in the dimness, pretending to read. A progressive dinner party was one of the dumbest ideas he’d ever heard. Coconut soup over here and cheese puffs over there while babysitters were made to sit on the couch, eavesdropping. And just how was the dinner “progressive,” just what was the point? Where did they think they would arrive? A lemon-lime sherbet log was hardly a prize, hardly something to work up to.

  J.D. half-listened as the dinner guests discussed a sermon from the previous Sunday, Saturday morning traffic jams on Main Street, and each of their paperboys, who were of the same ilk, haphazardly tossing the day’s news into the snow. J.D. stifled a yawn and listened to his stomach grumble. He almost wished he’d been offered a bowl of stew. He stole glances at the guests, then looked away. He slid out of his jacket and shifted uncomfortably.