Beautiful Girls

by Beth Ann Bauman

  SAFEWAY

  GEORGEANN STANDS ON THE RIM OF THE BATHTUB and peers through the little window, getting both a front and rear view of Sam Bailey’s house. His dusty pickup sits next to a barrel cactus in his yard the way it always does in the late afternoon. All’s quiet next door; his house is still, almost patient. “Don’t be,” she whispers.

  As she steps down from the tub the lizard catches her eye, the same lizard she discovered a couple days ago, right after her night with Sam. While she’d brushed her teeth a movement had caught her eye and made her bend around the toilet to see the stricken lizard clinging to the bowl. “Damn,” she’d said with a foamy mouth, spitting into the sink. The lizards in the kitchen crawled under the stove or refrigerator and that was the last of them, but this bathroom lizard would have to be dealt with.

  And yesterday as she stepped from the shower it had darted from behind the wastebasket. “Lizard,” she’d said, crouching down naked, determined to move it outside to the rocks and sun. “Go out the way you came.” Two whole days in her bathroom, she thought.

  Now it gazes up at her from the tiled floor. It seems paler. “What can I do?” she says. In the kitchen she spins the lazy susan and opens all the cabinets before finally grabbing a piece of rye bread and a paper bag. Back in the bathroom she waves the bread at the lizard, saying, “In the bag you go,” and she places the bread in the bag with the opening facing the lizard. It hesitates with one shy foot poised in the air. “Please,” Georgeann says. Three days without food or sunlight. “Eat some rye bread,” she instructs the lizard, “and when I come back I’ll take you outside to the yard. All right?” The little lizard arches its slender neck and then dashes behind the toilet bowl. Georgeann shakes her head and sighs.

  She hurries to the car and before the air conditioner has a chance to kick in she pulls out of the driveway, watching Sam’s front door as if he might suddenly appear. Yesterday, as she hung the wash, he stood in his yard cooking hot dogs while his two beagles waited by the grill, wagging their tails and looking up at Sam with a mixture of restraint and zeal. Georgeann said hello and stood with her back to him, feeling like a teenager as she emptied the washer and contemplated her underwear and bras and the grayed, stretched-out T-shirts. She rolled the wet pieces into a ball and then proceeded to hang the better-looking laundry when Sam, holding a paper plate, climbed the small fence and presented her with a hot dog in a bun, a handful of potato chips and a carrot stick.

  “Oh, no thank you,” she said.

  “Think about it.” He smiled and rested the plate on her washer.

  “Really, no thanks.” A fly buzzed near the hot dog and she shooed it away. “I just ate,” she lied.

  He shrugged and turned. “I like you,” she said, intending to infer a “but,” though the sentence ended cleanly, simply.

  “Good.” Sam climbed the fence into his yard. “I’m over here,” he said, looking back at her.

  Safeway is only two miles away, but Georgeann speeds along River Road with the windows wide open, and when she pulls into the parking lot she’s sweaty and windblown. It takes her a moment to realize something is wrong with Safeway. The grocery store is completely dark. The automatic doors are propped open with shopping carts, and behind the darkened storefront the cashiers use flashlights to ring up customers, who lurch through the open doors and stare down into their bags, checking out their purchases. Yes, they seem to be thinking, I did get the Salisbury steak dinner and these oranges aren’t half-bad. The deli woman, a chunky woman with a Safeway smock and a bright beehive hairdo, stands on the curb smoking a cigarette. Georgeann drives up and lowers the passenger window.

  “Transformer blew, hon,” the deli woman says.

  “Can I shop?”

  “Got a flashlight?”

  “I think so.”

  The beehive shrugs and places her hands on her wide hips. “Just be careful back by dairy. The floor is kind of wet and you could slip and land on your ass.”

  Georgeann nods and swings the car into a parking space. In the trunk she finds a rusted, working flashlight. She then joins the deli woman on the curb and peers into the store, catching a glimpse of herself in the chrome of the doors; she sees her Levi’s and a sleeveless denim shirt, and her silvery shoulder-length hair tucked behind her ears. Flushed and dreamy-looking, she looks like a person who possesses a secret.

  “Weird, huh?” beehive says, lighting another cigarette and offering the pack to Georgeann. It has been nearly thirty years since Georgeann has had a cigarette, but on impulse she accepts and gets lightheaded from the first drag. She takes another drag and feels the churn and sink of her bowels.

  “Go on, it’ll be an adventure.” The beehive touches her arm; for such a stout woman her touch is delicate. The store looks inviting, cavernous. Georgeann nods and unhooks a shopping cart from the line-up.

  Inside the store it is hushed and calm, except for the chug of a generator next to a checkstand. The air heavy on Georgeann’s skin, and it no longer feels like a late afternoon. The cash registers make small dings and trills. Georgeann slowly pushes past the manager’s specials, her flashlight illuminating piñatas—a big-mouthed fish, a mariachi, a shaggy sun and the Swiss Miss girl, who winks at Georgeann. Georgeann flashes her light in the doll’s face, and the happy, braided head stares blandly back at her. She stands still and lets her eyes adjust to the low light.

  In produce, water drips from the sprinklers onto the heads of lettuce and sprigs of parsley. The vegetables still look alert, almost hopeful under the beam of light. A skinny female shopper sticks a pineapple into her backpack, and Georgeann hears the zip of a zipper as the woman hurries past her with wide eyes. Georgeann, too, feels inspired to loot a little something, and she drops a ripe avocado into her purse.

  “Tomatoes, corn-on-the-cob, honeydew,” she says, thinking about what she needs. She is now alone among the fruits and vegetables. The arrangements seem just right under her yellow light, tomatoes next to assorted lettuces next to cucumbers next to peppers, all cousins together. She holds an eggplant, feeling its hollow bulk and wondering if she has ever really considered an eggplant—its purpleness, its prehistoric shape. She clicks off her light and stands holding the eggplant, feeling pleasantly immobile. I love, she thinks slowly, the words filling her head with the heaviness of sand…but what?

  Georgeann tosses everything into her cart, loose and free—the perfect honeydew, several ears of corn, three rugged Idaho potatoes and a snarly turnip. She gazes into the cart, realizing this is all too much, but she can’t resist tossing in two tomatoes, a peach, a plum, a nectarine, half a watermelon. The romaine smells green, a deep earthy green. She bites into an expensive yellow bell pepper, spitting a seed from the side of her mouth. The pepper tastes sweet and cool. Here in the dark she allows herself to wonder what Sam is doing. Sam’s skin is bronzed and lined like the dry stream beds. He’s a cabinetmaker and one-quarter Cherokee. When his dinky clothesline is full he hangs his wet laundry in the pomegranate tree. Something slithers across the loose carrots. Lizards everywhere, she thinks.

  When her son Aaron was home for spring break, he and Georgeann had sat on the front stoop one night drinking margaritas. Aaron, newly in love with a freshman from Tennessee, had whispered, “Go for it, Mom,” as Sam Bailey and his two beagles climbed into the pickup. Sam was tall and broad with dirty blond hair hanging into one eye. He had moved into the adobe next to hers eight weeks before, around the time the prickly pear and ocotillo went into bloom. Since then Georgeann had watched him come and go so often she had decided things about him—that he was easy to be with and spirited in a low-key way, that he was a man of his word though sulky when hurt.

  Slightly tipsy, Georgeann lifted her chin as she stared at her neighbor, pretending to have noticed him for the first time. “Hell, I don’t need my life turned upside down.”

  “Yeah?” Aaron said. “And what’s so cool about right-side up?” Georgeann smiled and cupped Aaron’s knee, such a large kn
ee. He’d become a good man, she knew. Sam Bailey waved to them as he backed into the street, his beagles looking expectantly over the dash.

  Georgeann moves slowly out of produce, and the pleasing stillness of fruits and vegetables, to Aisle 10: cake mixes, puddings and crusts. Not now, she thinks, leaving her cart and rounding the bend to the bread aisle.

  The store has an unusual hum today, a hum like a pulse that matches her own slow, curious heartbeat. She seems to be the only human among the bread. For a moment she feels woozy, and she squeezes a loaf of sourdough, feeling the give of soft bread. She buries her nose in the bag and sniffs the comfort of dough.

  Alone in the dark with her rusted flashlight and surrounded by assorted loaves, Georgeann becomes aware of her body—its age and how long she has lived in it, the feel of blood moving through veins and the steady pump of the heart. She knows that she’s going to die one day, just give out, no longer breathe and think thoughts, no longer see through these myopic eyes. She’s lived in this body for nearly half a century; it is hers and hers alone. It is what she possesses.

  Sam was her second lover. In the foothills under a quarter moon Georgeann had sat with him on an air mattress in the back of his pickup, sipping beer and scooping his fiery chili from a thermos. “See the Little Dipper?” he asked, leaning close and pointing into the night sky. His hand brushed her leg, and she stirred. The sky was alive with scattered stars, but she couldn’t see the Little Dipper. Sam kneeled behind her and lifted her arm. “Close your left eye,” he said. With her right eye Georgeann watched him trace the small, appealing ladle with their fingertips. She licked her spicy lips, figuring him to be mid-forties, maybe a little younger than she. A coyote bolted into the road and she thought, if it turns and looks my way, I’ll sleep with him. The coyote, quickly changing direction, turned its head and regarded them with bright, translucent eyes before crouching low and slinking away into the hills.

  She had stretched out next to Sam, and he pressed his lips to her neck. She fingered his ear, its delicate smallness, knowing how love might get thrown into the mix and how much hurt it could bring. Later at his place they curled together like shrimp, and she held his hand close to her thumping heart. At dawn, she slipped from his bed and fled to the desert, where she sat on a large sun-washed rock and stared out at the cholla. Under the hot Tucson sun her skin heated up until the smell of Sam rose off her and enveloped her. She sat for hours, baking, feeling warm and lush, until finally she returned home.

  Georgeann holds English muffins and nine-grain, giving each bag a squeeze but unable to choose. Clutching both bags, she searches for her cart. In front of the Crackerjack display sits a cart holding Muenster cheese, cherries, and bubble bath. Bubbles, she thinks longingly. The cart has the look of abandonment, and Georgeann wheels off with it. There will be many other days for vegetables, she decides.

  Up ahead a small boy sits in a cart, singing a song about a boy and a girl in a canoe while his mother bends near a low shelf. Georgeann stares at the child and listens. His voice is high and tuneless. She can’t see the boy’s eyes, just the darkness of his sockets. As Georgeann comes up next to the child he doesn’t stop singing, only hesitates for a second, and then continues while Georgeann runs her hand over his downy head. He tips his face up toward her. He’s silky-headed and earnest, his hair so fine between her fingers she would like to lean down and sniff him.

  Georgeann had a husband for many years and together they’d made a baby, who has probably turned to dust in the cemetery up in the foothills by now. The baby had been perfect but blue and he wouldn’t breathe. Her baby with his perfect head, heavy with skull and brains, lay curled and lifeless in her arms. The doctors only let her and Ross visit with the little boy for a few moments. Even chimpanzees are more civilized; they carry around their dead for days.

  The death of their baby unlinked Georgeann and Ross from each other. They turned their backs, lowered their eyes and erased their faces, but they went on folding the towels, unclogging the bathroom drain, watering the fish pond, ordering Chinese, playing Rummy.

  Then when they adopted Aaron and he came to them at two years old with a bad haircut and a clear, steady gaze they were linked together again by the urgency to show him things. They took trips by car and trips by plane to the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, the meteor crater, the petrified forest. Georgeann taught him how to do the twist and make a potato chip sandwich. Ross taught him how to care for a goldfish and stand on his hands. Lit with glee, they lived like Spaniards, eating charred pork chops at eleven p.m., tired and flushed, with sleepy Aaron munching, his lids half-closed, his body ready to topple over. “Get the chop out of your ear, sweetie,” Georgeann had said. She and Ross were deliriously in love with him, but his arrival didn’t do a damn thing about the hollow pit opened up in her by the dead baby. The center of her pain had been scooped out, but the air left there was dry and brittle.

  Georgeann quickly drops her hand from the boy’s head and pushes her cart along as the mother moves toward her son. Up ahead a small woman leans against the frozen foods, holding a lit candle. “I picked this up in housewares,” she says.

  “Good thinking.”

  “My boyfriend’s got the flashlight in the potato chip aisle. I snuck away.” She runs her fingers through the air. Her shopping cart holds cereal and yams.

  Georgeann clicks off her flashlight and leans over the freezer, expecting frosty air but the air is still and watery. She holds a package of asparagus to her forehead and sighs, feeling the coolness.

  “I could kill him,” the woman murmurs.

  “Who?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “What did he do?” Georgeann whispers.

  “He’s got some side action going on,” the woman whispers back.

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Dump him,” Georgeann says.

  “I should, shouldn’t I?”

  Georgeann can tell that the woman probably won’t, that she’ll hold on to him for longer than she should, and Georgeann has the urge to slap her. “Really, you should,” she says instead, touching the woman’s thin arm.

  “I know!” the woman says. “I know!”

  Georgeann nods.

  A gangly man moves along the meat counter, rustling through a bag and crunching.

  “That’s him,” the woman says.

  The man’s crunch suddenly infuriates Georgeann. How dare this cheater crunch so delicately, so innocuously! Georgeann reaches for a yam from the woman’s cart and hurls it through the air, striking the cruncher on the back of the head. Oh, the hearty smack! “Shit!” he yells, quickly moving away. Georgeann throws another yam and so does the woman, but they miss and hit the meat counter instead. They gather up more yams, hugging them to their chests, and run after the strange man. They throw yams in his direction until he outruns them, disappearing down the household cleaner aisle.

  “I’m not sure that was him,” the woman says.

  “That must have been him!”

  Just last week Georgeann ran into Ross outside of Target. I spent twenty-three years with you, Georgeann thought, looking at his head of sparse hair, which had gone crinkly like dried seaweed and turned the color of ash. In his arms he held his daughter, a tiny blonde girl with flyaway hair. Ross married the woman he’d been running around with the last couple years of their marriage, a younger woman with long gauze skirts and cool blue eyes, who left a whiff of patchouli in her wake.

  Outside Target, as his tiny daughter twisted and jumped in his arms, wanting to ride the fifty-cent Dumbo, Georgeann waved to him. Three years later she was able to do that. He lifted his arm, smiled widely and walked toward her, but she moved swiftly through the double doors without a backward glance.

  Georgeann had known in her heart before she knew in her head that Ross was cheating on her. When she’d found him throwing pennies in the garbage, sweeping them off his dresser into the trash bag, she asked herself, just who is he—th
is careless, careless man? Then without conscious effort her love began to untangle its hold and dissolve.

  “Listen to me,” Georgeann now says to the woman, grabbing her arm. “Listen…” But she doesn’t know what to say to her; Georgeann’s own experiences have left deep impressions, but where, she wonders, is the grace of wisdom? “Come,” she says instead, following the scent of chocolate and butter as she steers the woman to the bakery counter at the back of the store. The candle casts a warm, inviting glow on the trays of round butter cookies sparkling with sugar, little buttery men filled with chocolate and raspberry, cupcakes dipped in rainbow sprinkles, a small cake decorated with a chocolate ribbon. “Here,” she says, pulling the woman behind the counter.

  The sweets are gleaming and beautiful, and at this moment everything feels possible to Georgeann—the world feels vast and comforting. Clarity pushes in on her amid the scent of luscious chocolate. Move it, it tells her; move, move. They kneel in front of the goodies. “Eat!” Georgeann cries, sliding open the glass case. “Eat something.”

  Slowly they reach into the case and eat one cookie at a time. Soon they start exchanging treats, passing the fanciest and the gooiest ones to each other. Georgeann wants to eat everything. She grabs an éclair, licks the icing and then stuffs it in her mouth. The woman’s hand hovers over a tray, unable to decide. Her hand creeps back to her side and thrusts forward, snatching a cupcake and stuffing it, paper and all, into her mouth. Georgeann eats a cannoli, feeling crumbs fall from her lips onto her lap.

  The woman and Georgeann have chocolate rings around their mouths. Georgeann wipes her own mouth, feeling queasy with sticky sweetness, but she’s tempted by a thick brownie. It’s heavy and slick with icing, and she swallows it down in gobs. Gooey chocolate coats the roof of her mouth. As she stuffs in the rest of the brownie she feels her bowels turn. “I have to find a bathroom,” she says, standing and bumping into the cookie case.