Beautiful Girls

by Beth Ann Bauman

  The woman makes a small, understanding noise as Georgeann rushes to the rear corner of the store, where a light shines. A stockboy mops the floor by the dairy case, his large flashlight illuminating a milky puddle. “The bathroom,” Georgeann says. “Where is it?”

  “The bathroom isn’t for customers, lady,” he says, turning from her and going over her wet footprints with the mop.

  “I have to go!” She clutches his arm; it is a skinny boy’s arm.

  He makes a sour, huffy noise that says, just who do you think you are? I haven’t a clue, kiddo, she thinks. He leads the way through a set of metal doors and into the meat locker where hunks of beef hang from hooks. “You should have gone before you came here.”

  “Hurry,” she says, pulling him along faster. She’s not sure she will make it.

  He shines his light into the dirty little bathroom so she gets an idea where the toilet is, before he gives her a small push and shuts her in.

  Georgeann unbuckles her jeans. Constipation is more her style, but now she has to take an urgent shit in the blackness of Safeway. The air is cold and creepy on her naked skin as she squats over the toilet until she must sit. Feeling along the wall she finds the roll of toilet paper.

  There must be a mirror above the sink, and she reaches out and touches the smooth, chilly surface, but in the darkness there is no reassurance of her face. She is just a woman alone in a dank bathroom, a woman who wishes she’d lived a little better. At this moment she’s certain a touch of rot has taken root inside her heart, where instead there might have been expansion. She also knows she still might live better if she knew how not to be afraid. Her heart pounds loudly, letting her know she is still very much alive, as she gropes with the faucet and feels for the soap dispenser. When she flushes she hopes it all goes down.

  There is no stockboy with a flashlight waiting for her when she opens the door. The overhead lights begin to flicker as she makes her way past the slabs of bloody meat. It is a hard life, there’s no doubt. She gives the side of a cow a fairly good punch. It is a cold and dignified piece of beast. Large and stupid and ugly, but it is what it is.

  On the other side of the double doors, the lights continue to flicker in spurts, and Georgeann moves quickly to the front of the store, ready to leave. By the checkout line she eyes a shopping cart wedged against the magazine rack holding a T-bone steak and a five-pound bag of potatoes. “Is this anybody’s?” Georgeann asks.

  The checkout girl shrugs under the sputtering lights. Georgeann lifts the food onto the conveyer belt and digs for her wallet, discovering the avocado, ripe and warm, buried in her purse. After she pays the girl she carries her bag to the car, squinting into the brightness. The sunset is a swirl of red and purple melting together and hanging low over the Tucson Mountains.

  When Georgeann returns home she peers under the living room curtains at Sam Bailey’s salmon-colored adobe, listening to the whir of his swamp cooler, watching the billow of his ratty T-shirts on the clothesline. “You,” she says; the word sounds almost accusatory.

  She takes a cool bath. The rye bread is stale without any nibbles in it and there is no sign of the lizard—hopefully it found its way out to the yard, she thinks, biting into the hard bread and feeling the pressure between her teeth. She changes into her nightgown and moves to the living room, feeling deeply unsatisfied, and sits in different chairs, finally falling to sleep on the couch.

  At dawn, sunlight fills the room and she wanders into the bathroom, where she discovers the lizard clinging to the side of the bathtub. “Oh!” she yells, kneeling in front of it. “You’re going to die on me, aren’t you?” The lizard is completely still and she notes the translucent front legs, as elegant as a dancer’s, and the dainty tip of its tail. “Lovely,” she whispers. She gently touches it with one finger. “Please,” she whispers, her voice faint and airy. “I won’t hurt you.” The lizard turns its neck and looks into her eyes with its own black, unreadable ones. It is weak, she can see. Its body has probably started in on the business of dying. “Let me take you outside,” she whispers. She brushes it into her hand and feels the little body there in her palm, trusting her, and she wonders at the mystery of this.

  Warmth rises from the earth, this desert valley, beneath her bare feet as she moves slowly past the cholla and rose bushes. Cupping her hands, she talks to the lizard in a low, soothing voice and sets it down next to the Joshua tree. “Be well,” she says as the lizard moves uncertainly across her fingers to the ground.

  As she stands, she sees Sam Bailey sitting on his back stoop, working his feet into a pair of socks. One of his beagles stretches out next to him. Faint music is playing on a transistor radio. Sam sees her then, half-hidden by the Joshua tree, standing in her nightgown. A warm breeze, like a breath emptying from the lungs, blows through her yard into his as she moves toward him.

  WILDLIFE OF AMERICA

  MY SISTER FRANKIE’S EVENING-OF-BEAUTY COUPON was good only on Fridays, so she’d made an appointment for this coming one and when she’d spend the evening swaddled in seaweed and dipped in Middle Eastern mud, and since my brother-in-law Chuck had his impotence support group, after which he and the guys would usually go for a beer, could I please babysit?

  I had left my life in New York City and for the past month had been rehabilitating in New Jersey in the half-finished apartment over Frankie’s garage. Our deal was that I’d babysit my niece and nephew on occasion, though it hadn’t quite worked out yet. Frankie stood at the bottom of the stairs to the apartment, balancing a load of laundry on her hip, waiting for my answer. We had the same mass of dark curly hair and we were both slightly pear-shaped with pitted cheeks from long-ago acne.

  “Sorry, Frankie,” I said. “But I have a date.”

  Slowly, she made a face at me. “Shit on a stick! I’m going to get stuck with Constance Poblanski. Fiona, how much do you want to bet I’m going to get stuck with Constance Poblanski?”

  “You’re going to get stuck with Constance Poblanski,” I said.

  Frankie sighed.

  “Shit on a stick,” I said, sympathetically.

  “Well, I hope you get laid,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  Yesterday, after the stickup at Wawa where I met Derek Head, Frankie and I had sat at her kitchen table, eating fat-free cream cheese on rice cakes, as I described in great detail Derek Head’s looks, exactly what words passed between us, how I felt talking with him, how I thought he felt, what I thought could happen between us, what I thought the children we would never have might look like, with his hypnotic avocado eyes and all.

  “I’m doing darks, got any?” Frankie said, putting down the laundry basket.

  I went for a pair of jeans and some shirts, and as I came back to the top of the stairs, she was reaching under her T-shirt and unhooking her bra. She slid one strap off one arm, then the other, and with a fast pull—like a magician—whipped free a zebra-striped padded push-up number and dropped it into the basket. She had a Frederick’s of Hollywood charge account and loved ultra-fancy and lewd underwear—bras that pushed them up and hauled them out or bras that left nothing to the imagination—but over this stuff she wore the jeans, T-shirts and cardigan sweaters of every other good suburban citizen. Frankie wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. I loved her more than anyone at the moment. Her sadness was so terrible and tender.

  I aimed for the basket and my clothes hit the top of the heap. “Next time I will absolutely babysit,” I told her.

  “I look forward to it,” she said, picking up the load. “’Cause,” she said, shaking a finger at me, “I’m going to get stuck with Constance Poblanski.”

  Chuck was making spaghetti with garlic, olive oil, and red pepper, and the smell wafted over the garage, drawing me out of my apartment even though I had just taken a long bath and was still shriveled. With wet hair dripping down my shirt, I entered the kitchen where Frankie was on the phone, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “So, we’ll see you at six on Friday. Don�
�t be late.” Frankie forced a laughed and hung up. “Guess who we got?” she said in a low, injured voice.

  Chuck had just come home from his shift and still wore his police uniform, though he had unbuttoned the shirt. He was muscular and Italian and on the short side, and he stood over the sizzling frying pan. “Don’t get all worked up, Frank,” he said.

  “I enjoy getting worked up,” she said, hotly.

  “I enjoy watching you enjoy getting worked up,” I said and smiled. I took Chuck’s spoon and had a little taste.

  “Two cuckoo birds,” Chuck said, flashing us a smile.

  My sister could only ever get the lackluster Constance Poblanski to babysit when she wanted the sweet Laura Rossi. Frankie would always call Laura first, but Laura, without fail, would already be booked with the Andersons. Both girls lived in the neighborhood and were headed to Rutgers in the fall, and they seemed to be great friends, which was incomprehensible to Frankie. Laura Rossi was sweet and radiant while Constance Poblanski burned at a lower wattage, raising her plucked brows and flaring those elegant nostrils in a vague scorn. Laura was a nailbiter, her only beauty aids a dab of lip gloss and a plastic barrette. She had, we all agreed, an astonishing smile. God had been equally kind to Constance, though Constance fooled with Mother Nature, yanking and spraying that mass of hair to unnatural heights and streaking it an orangey-blonde. But Constance wasn’t the issue here. The issue was the Andersons—Lord and Lady Anderson, as Frankie called them—who were able to get the good babysitter. Frankie saw the whole situation as the inequitable universe dispensing the fair and virtuous Laura to the fair and virtuous Andersons, while she got stuck with Constance.

  Frankie had had this petty but debilitating obsession with the Andersons for as long as they’d been her neighbors. It seemed to Frankie that the Lord and Lady were everything she and Chuck weren’t. The Andersons had money, but more importantly they acted as though they had the secret knowledge that abundance would always be their lot. Their rhododendron had grown to the size of an African elephant and bloomed flowers the size of your head. They had an interior designer who dabbled in feng shui and made sure that any bad energy that got dumped in their living room would be swept right out the front door and wouldn’t spill into their hallways and soak into their walls. They had their house professionally painted an enticing mix of beiges and browns that made me think of cake mix and icing. Frankie and Chuck had gotten on ladders and slopped their own house a color resembling French’s mustard. Well, it didn’t look that way in the can. They couldn’t quite afford the neighborhood but Frankie had insisted they try. Chuck was not infected with Anderson obsession. He was a shy, easygoing cop who loved his wife and wanted to please her. Their house was big and old and weather-beaten. With its sagging gutters it wore a frown similar to Frankie’s.

  Lord Anderson was a young, stocky rheumatologist with close-clipped hair, resembling his manicured lawn. He had a kindly, long face with a full-bodied nose and a habit of standing with his hands on his hips. In the warm months he liked to pull out the garden hose and wash and wax his Infiniti. Lady Anderson had girlishly shiny hair and freckled skin. She didn’t wear makeup and her teeth were a bit jumbled, but she had glamorous bones. They often strolled the block hand in hand, their daughter Dana, the heiress, trailing them on her bike, pink and white streamers dangling from the handlebars.

  As luck would have it, the heiress and my niece Melody were in the same class in the same private school, which my sister and brother-in-law couldn’t really afford. During Dental Awareness week, Melody had been cast as a cavity in a skit on personal hygiene while the Heiress Anderson got to charge in with a large paper toothbrush saving the day. “Why does that kid get to be the savior while mine gets to rot?” Frankie later yelled. It didn’t matter to Frankie that Melody was a perfect cavity. I knew this because I sat with Frankie in the audience, watching the impish and wiry Melody do her decay dance. “Some people just seem to live charmed lives,” Frankie said, shaking her head. I had to say, now that I was living with Frankie and Chuck, I enjoyed the Anderson obsession. I liked hearing tale after tale about the Lord and Lady. This preoccupation kept me from my own thoughts.

  We sat down to eat, and Chuck herded the kids to the table and tied a dishtowel around Marcus’s neck. “You guys like Constance Poblanski?” Chuck asked.

  “She lets us watch naked butts,” Marcus said, forking up one strand of spaghetti.

  “Not real live naked butts,” Melody said. “Baboon butts. The Discovery Channel.”

  “Still,” Marcus said, cocking his head to the side.

  “A naked butt’s a naked butt,” Chuck said, winking. Frankie smiled. She and Chuck had been together for almost eighteen years. They met in a human sexuality class at the community college, where as an icebreaker on the first day the teacher asked the students to come up with slang terms for genitalia. When they were doing female genitals the guy Frankie had been dating volunteered, “bearded clam.” Romantically, it was over for her after that. Chuck squirmed and blushed when he was called on and finally whispered, “pussy.” Frankie, too, could barely get out “wang.”

  My boyfriend Dean and I had been going out for two years, and I wasn’t sure where we were headed, but the relationship was as comfortable as slippers. I lived on Cherry Lane in Greenwich Village, Dean lived in Tribeca. We spent lots of time together with our friends, drinking beer and eating hamburgers at the Ear Inn like all of us were twenty-four instead of thirty-four. I knew I probably should have been thinking of the future. Was this relationship moving forward or had we stalled out? Did I want to get married? I thought I did. Then last fall when the leaves started to turn beautiful and crisp, Dean and my good friend Patty came over to my place, pale and somber, and told me they had something very difficult to say. I’d been defrosting my freezer, which was like the Arctic. I had bowls of hot water in there to speed up the job. I was wearing sweats and socks when they told me they’d fallen in love. They were quick to point out that they hadn’t acted on it, that they’d only spoken about deciding what was to be done, that at this point their relationship just involved words and feelings. My stomach did a flip, and I lowered myself right to the floor. I wanted to yell but found I had no voice. “Why didn’t you just screw each other and shut the hell up,” I whispered. “You think it’s easier on me that you love each other minus the screwing?”

  “We were thinking of you, Fiona.”

  “We love you, Fiona.”

  “If you think this isn’t hard on us, Fiona, you’re mistaken.”

  I couldn’t remember who said what; they seemed to be interlinked, two bodies sharing the same mind. I had an out-of-body experience. I felt myself calmly leave the premises of my body and rise to the ceiling and remain stuck there against the paint chips. We and us, they said; Fiona, they said over and over. I was no longer part of the equation. In the kitchen, chunks of ice splintered and crashed in the freezer. I thought I’d crack in two.

  I either slept twelve to fourteen hours a night or couldn’t keep still. I couldn’t bear to be in my apartment on Cherry Lane. I couldn’t bear to sleep in my bed. I wrestled with the ancient two-ton sofa bed in my living room and finally managed to open it, but it had a powerful defective spring and sprang shut like a venus flytrap, capturing me in the mattress. I shimmied out, but every muscle in my body hurt for days. I called in sick to work and bought stacks of magazines. I limped to Washington Square Park, furiously flipping pages but unable to concentrate. A pigeon flew up into my face, and I swatted it in the head with a copy of The Economist. I railed at Patty and Dean late at night, alone in my apartment. I handled the whole thing terribly; of course, terrible was my only option. Initially, I had our friends’ sympathy but after a while I lost their company. Around the holidays a few friends told me I was a drag to be around. They told me I had to get over it already. “Easy for you to say,” I spewed, feeling my words roil with something rank and foamy. “No one’s saying it’s easy,” they’d counter. Co
uldn’t they see I’d been thrown to the ground and didn’t know how to get up? And through it all Dean and Patty remained together, sharing their words and feelings, and presumably screwing, too.

  By March I was teeming with vile thoughts and rage, probably trailing a slime residue. My boss, the remarkable Mr. Snodgrass, had called me into his office and shut the door. “Look, Fiona,” he said. “I’m gonna finagle disability for you. I’ll send you to a doctor friend of mine and you’ll take some time off, work this through.” I didn’t want free time on my hands, even though I’d come to loathe my job in member services at Wildlife of America. I once loved the work, but these past few months I’d lost my zest and found myself getting snarly with the members. “I’m going to report you,” said a Doris Pitts, a twenty-year member, when I told her I didn’t care if she was a twenty-minute member. “Wait your turn, Laverne,” was how I put it.

  It had all gone down so easily. I saw the doctor, the paperwork was filled out; I sublet my place on Cherry Lane, packed up some boxes, and within a week moved to Frankie and Chuck’s in Little Silver, New Jersey. When I’d called Frankie I wept so hard I could barely speak. “Those bastards, those double-crossers, those fuckers,” she said. At first I thought she meant Dean and Patty, but then realized she was lumping together all the bastards, double-crossers and fuckers we’d ever known. She sighed and said, “You just don’t know who you’ll fall in love with.” This made me cry harder. “You come here,” she said. “Live in the apartment.” “I love you,” she yelled over my tears. “I love you back,” I yelled. We yelled about many things, especially all the things we cherished and despised, working ourselves up until we were both ecstatic and exhausted.

  Coming to New Jersey was like taking a bath. At least I felt clean. I rode a bike every day and did crosswords. I drank tea at the Local Drip and met a few local drips. Little Silver, I discovered, actually had a five-and-dime called Five & Dime. I loved to cruise the dusty aisles, examining the junk crammed on the shelves in wobbly heaps. I’d buy my nephew and niece some tchotchkes: yo-yos, some glitter and glue. I’d buy myself glow-in-the-dark stars, a plastic cigarette holder, plastic daisy flip-flops, a Magilla Gorilla wall clock, conch shells, magenta nail polish, seahorse erasers, corn-on-the-cob refrigerator magnets. I borrowed the Babcocks’ mutt and walked the beach, wearing a windbreaker and the daisy flip-flops. I liked lifting my face to the sun. Every week I cashed my disability check and carried around hundreds of dollars; I didn’t have many places to spend it since Frankie and Chuck wouldn’t take any money from me. I’d flip through Frankie’s recipe books and make menu decisions and then bike over to the Grand Union and buy egg noodles and butter and cream and various cuts of beef and chicken, and I’d make us beef stroganoff and meatloaf and mashed potatoes, honey mustard chicken and roasted potatoes. I played Barbershop Play-Doh with my niece and nephew. I’d send the blue dough spouting through the holes on the plastic figures’ heads and then I’d give them chic haircuts with the plastic scissors. When Chuck worked nights, Frankie pulled out moldy-smelling games she’d saved from when we were teenagers. We drank Bloody Marys and ate tortilla chips and I’d wear my Five & Dime tiara as we played Mystery Date, hoping not to open the door on Poindexter.