The Starter Wife

by Grazer, Gigi Levangie

  “One forty-six: double lot, one and a half story, bread-mold green [Gracie didn’t know any other way to put it] exterior—”

  Lavender was looking at her over her black-rimmed glasses, her chin on her chest, her mouth open; she appeared to be having a Whoopi Goldberg white-people-are-plumb-crazy moment.

  “Mercedes 250SL in the driveway, no other cars present except from nine to four, presumably a housekeeper—”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Lavender said.

  “You know everything that goes on around here. I’m just trying to narrow down the field,” Gracie said. “I have to attack this like a scientist.”

  Lavender shook her head. “I could get fired.”

  “For telling me if there’s a single male living on the premises?” Gracie asked.

  “They’d fire me for less,” Lavender said.

  Gracie shut her notebook. “Okay, fine, here’s what we’re going to do.” She was determined not to let her hard work go to waste. “I’ll call out a number, you give me a two-word assessment. Then I’ll let you get back to your book.”

  Lavender leaned back and crossed her arms over her ample chest. She had recently dyed her hair a strawberry color; Gracie admired her courage.

  She cleared her throat. “So, as I was saying, number 146?”

  “Married,” Lavender said.

  “That’s only one word, but an important one.” Gracie scratched that number off the list. “Number 148? White clapboard with blue trim. Funny mailbox.”

  “Cute. Female,” Lavender said, looking at her closely. Smirking.

  “Scratch that, we’ll come back to that one in a few years.” Gracie looked down her list. “Number 172? Gray stone building. One car, as far as I can tell—”

  “Old man.”

  “How old?”

  “Old, like wheelchair-and-portable-oxygen-tank old. That’s his nurse’s car.”

  Gracie crossed Wheelchair/Oxygen Tank Man off her list. “Ah, 176?”

  “Models.”

  “178?”

  “Have you actually seen him?”

  “186.”

  “Happily married movie star.”

  “218?”

  “Hookers. Drugs.”

  Gracie shook her head. “I’m running out of houses here.”

  Lavender looked at her. “152.” Then she turned her back to Gracie and started reading again.

  “One fifty-two?” Gracie asked. “Who is 152?”

  “Moved in two days ago. Summer rental. Now, I got work to do here,” Lavender replied, her nose fixed in her book.

  11

  WORKING FOR THE MAN

  LAVENDER JACKSON lived in a neat one-bedroom apartment on South La Cienega in Inglewood, a mile and a half from the Forum, where the Lakers once played. The area, all black when she was growing up, had become mostly Latino. She was fine with that, except for the music thing on the weekends. But then she mostly worked on the weekends. If she happened to be home at night on a Saturday, she could count on her downstairs neighbors, the Abuelas, to be celebrating something—a birthday, a graduation, a haircut. These people celebrated at the drop of a sombrero, Lavender joked, though she knew she was envious.

  Lavender was alone, no family since her grandmother passed away over five years ago. Her grandmother, Lady Eva, raised her from a baby. Lavender knew her mother when she’d come by for her disability checks—disabled from what, she did not know. Her grandmother only would hand over the checks and tell her daughter, Tamia-Mama (Lavender used to call her), that she would pray for her in church, like she always did. Her mother would run over to Lavender, almost knocking the child over, smother her with sloppy kisses and heavy cologne. Lavender didn’t know the name of the cologne, but she’d smelled it in a red bottle at Thrifty’s. When Tamia-Mama disappeared from her life completely, Lavender paced the perfume aisle at that drugstore in the basketball shoes Lady Eva forbade her to wear inside the house, unwrapping the bottles, spraying her wrist with the samples.

  The red bottle. All she had left was a scent; she had long since forgotten the name. Lavender had taken a couple of psych courses at Dominguez Hills—she had something that the textbooks called repression. She’d repressed that name.

  Lavender remembered the day Tamia-Mama stopped coming. She remembered the checks piling up—the gray-green welfare checks, the light pink disability ones. Lady Eva never spent a dime of her daughter’s money. The checks withered in her kitchen drawer before Lady Eva finally accepted what she could not prove and sat down to call the authorities to tell them her daughter would no longer be needing those checks.

  Lavender did not stand out at her local elementary school. Lots of kids were being raised by their grandparents; it was a sign of the times, as Granny E used to say, long before Prince said the words.

  “Sign of the times,” her grandmother would say when an eleven-year-old boy got mowed down at the corner on his bicycle. Just another drive-by. “Why,” Lavender asked Lady Eva, “do they always get the ones who looked to be on the way out?”

  “Sign of the times,” her grandmother said during the riots. Granny E had lived through the first round, the Watts riots. She’d seen the bodies, dead from policemen’s bullets. Nothing surprised her. Not anger, not hate, not despair. During the Rodney King riots, she prayed for the white truck driver that got his head bashed in not far from their apartment house.

  Lavender learned quickly. She learned to keep a low profile. She was a generally shy child, so this was not particularly hard for her to do. Keep to yourself, don’t engage, don’t get involved in other people’s business.

  As Lavender got older, though, she released herself from fear of her neighbors, from expectations of her grandmother, from repression of her sexuality. And her laugh, the one her grandmother said she was born with but seldom laid claim to after her mother left, the laugh that was a vessel for her soul, made a return.

  She was in her twenties then. She had been a virgin until she was twenty-three. What a ridiculous waste of time, Lavender thought.

  Still in her early twenties, she’d signed up with a security company and found herself a night job manning the Malibu Colony guard station. The work suited her. She liked her coworkers; there was camaraderie. They all got shit pay for shit work, nobody was aching to get ahead, no one was climbing over the next guy for more hours, easier shifts. There was a silent agreement between the guards that in the scheme of things, they had it pretty good. Except on Fourth of July weekend, when all hell would break loose. She’d been there almost ten years.

  A car drove up as Lavender was halfway through chapter 3. Number 152.

  “Hello there,” he said, this older man with the small kid in the backseat. Lavender hadn’t noticed the kid before. She wondered if he was married and not wearing a ring, or maybe just separated. She wondered what assessment Gracie, the Amateur Sociologist,would have of this man.

  “Hello,” Lavender said, as she wheeled her chair back from the desk and took two steps toward him.

  “You have a package for 152? Manahan?” he said. The kid in the backseat started blowing raspberries.

  Lavender turned to look through the stack of FedEx and UPS packages that had come in that morning.

  “Nothing here, sorry,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” Manahan replied. “Saves me the trouble of opening it.”

  Lavender waved back to him as he drove off, his arm sticking out the side of his brand-new Jaguar. He seemed like a nice man, she thought, a decent man, the kind of man who would make sure to hire valet parking if he had a party on July Fourth.

  WIFE NUMBER FIVE

  Walked into her famous TV action star husband’s Las Vegas hotel room years ago wearing little more than high heels; he had ordered a voluptuous redhead.

  They’ll be celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary this November.

  12

  A HAIRY ENCOUNTER

  ON THE FATEFUL MORNING that Gracie swore that this wou
ld be the day she would meet 152, her future husband, or at least future stalking victim, she saw hair on her face. She did not notice the six o’clock sun angling menacingly toward her as she splashed water on her face, humming, ignorant of the ensuing horror. Then she had the audacity to glance into her bathroom mirror. Nature’s cruelty was never more apparent: Gracie was growing a beard. She had found fine blond hairs not only in their usual nesting place over the shallow vertical lines dividing her mouth into a hundred sections. These she had grown accustomed to. But this was different. Tiny dark hairs had taken root under her chin. When had this happened? All she could think about were ancient women in babushkas sprouting wild hairs out of their chins, women she had known in her very own family when she was a child. Women who had names like Bushka and Malnif. This would not do for a modern widow, er, divorcée, living on the most expensive real estate in the nation—even if it wasn’t her real estate—even if she couldn’t get inside the gate with what she had in her checking account (what savings account?). All plans were scratched for the pareo she had purchased at a price usually reserved for elective surgery; foiled were her hopes for the pink flip-flops that showed off her new pedicure in a color named after Sarah Jessica Parker. She could not walk down the beach with fur on her face; she’d have to bikini-wax her whole body, furry forehead to hirsute toe.

  Why did God make women more hairy as they aged? Gracie wondered. Did He/She know that there was no one at home to keep us warm so we needed to manufacture our own coats?

  Kenny’s words came back to her at the oddest times, mostly when her self-esteem could be found near the bottom of the ocean, along with all the old paint cans.

  “You just don’t seem to fit in,” Kenny had said to Gracie years ago, when they’d come back from a dinner party populated by fabulous people with a penchant for mixing narcotics with French Bordeaux. “I don’t think you make enough of an effort,” he’d said. On the way home, Gracie had been making fun of the women at the party; she could not judge the men, as they didn’t talk to her as much as look through her.

  The women—with their sleek blond locks, courtesy of Fekkai; taller-than-thou height, courtesy of genetics and Manolos; great big white teeth, courtesy of cosmetic dentistry; cheekbones courtesy of Lasky Clinic—seemed to be speaking in a foreign language. They knew the home number of the “lady” at Hermès New York, they had tubs of the London brand of perfume that was all the rage, they had the dates of the trunk shows at Neiman Marcus on their PalmPilots, they knew what day to get what purse at Louis Vuitton and how to skip the wait list, they knew what shade of pink to wear during what season on their toes. Gracie grew up knowing she wasn’t cool, but she had no idea there was an actual language barrier.

  And she was squatting up against the wrong side of the style barricade.

  The women were nice enough, so nice that Gracie felt kind of bad making fun of them—kind of bad, but not bad enough. She could no longer get Kenny on her side, though. They were supposed to be a team, she and her husband, but it turned out he was running offense for the other side. Kenny had changed. He admired these women; they looked good, they fit in.

  Gracie, who had avoided all manner of sorority in college, would have to join Kappa Alpha Wife Of.

  Gracie took what Kenny had said seriously. She attended dinner parties and studied the bearing, habits, and rituals of the Wives Of in attendance. She literally took notes. Several times a night she’d sneak into a bathroom and scribble observations: “Patchett: salesgirl at Barneys,” “Dr.Vogel: Botox/collagen—no bruises,” “Playpen: Toes, Outdoor Sex: Hands.”

  And Gracie, the cynical student, learned. She began changing herself, one body part at a time, starting with her head. She started dying her hair. She added extensions. Then the Turkish lady tortured—er, rather, blow-dried—her curly, frizzy hair into submission twice a week (complaining the whole time about how hard Gracie’s hair was to blow-dry compared to, say, the locks originating from Mrs. John Travolta’s scalp). Gracie likened the experience to being one of the extras in Midnight Express. She moved on to her eyebrows: Gracie arrived fifteen minutes early for the Eyebrow Queen and was shocked to see a line around the block; the Eyebrow Queen had not only double-booked like a fire-marshal-infuriating premiere, she’d quadrillion-booked.

  Gracie visited the Beverly Hills dermatologist reportedly behind Madonna’s preternaturally youthful appearance and Demi’s sudden metamorphosis into a forty-year-old teenager, but then fainted at the sight of a needle coming toward her forehead. Sedated on Valium, Gracie finally took shots of collagen in her upper lip (nothing like going to a plastic surgeon to find out how many, many things are wrong with your appearance), which proved to be more painful than cutting one’s finger off with a rubber knife and not nearly as festive. But she was not to be deterred. At the urging of a doctor who hadn’t met a face he didn’t want to change, Gracie was on the verge of getting cheekbone implants when she happened on an article about the Wildenstein woman in New York and realized the very same phenomenon was happening all around her—the town was becoming Wildensteined.

  The body came next. Gracie went on a Kenny-sponsored mission to lose those stubborn eight to ten pounds around her hips and thighs. She went to the Diet Guru—again, in Beverly Hills, so at least she could say the architects of her transformation would be geographically desirable. The Diet Guru, a woman who wore either black and vertical stripes or both, recommended that Gracie drink her “exclusive” name-brand tea and eat only pink grapefruit for a one-week cleanse. Gracie was cleansed all right; the only thing that didn’t make it out of her body was a Burger King Whopper she had eaten in 1982. After one particularly onerous bout on the master toilet, Gracie was fearful she had lost a major organ. She wondered if it were possible to have disgorged a liver.

  Still Gracie was not deterred. She tried the Zone, Atkins, South Beach—any diet, in fact, that was sponsored by someone who once had a medical degree but hadn’t practiced medicine in twenty years.

  Gracie started working out; to augment the slow rate of weight loss, she chose to exercise. She joined a gym that was more like a bar—Sports Club, Los Angeles. She got a writer-director-trainer. She tried the treadmill, she tried the elliptical (why?), she tried the exercise bike, she tried the StairMaster, she tried the one with the giant steps, she tried the rowing thing. There were 368 different ways to sweat in this gym, but the most surefire method was to walk into the women’s locker room, where Gracie would be surrounded by women halfway out of their knickers, standing around like Victoria’s Secret models on a coke break.

  Gracie had emerged, like a butterfly from a cocoon, with a new face, a new body. And the same old personality.

  All she had left of her painful, hard-won transformation was her character.

  And a few errant hairs on her chin.

  SAM KNIGHT hadn’t been able to get to the water right away that morning. Mrs. Kennicot, who lived in #191, had tripped over a warped plank of wood in her old floor when she got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night. Sam had been on his hands and knees early, sanding the warped spot down to a smooth finish. Mrs. Kennicot hired him for various odd jobs—moving furniture, building a chest of drawers, snaking a plugged toilet. Before they met, he used to watch her, eighty years old and still swimming in the lagoon every morning, oblivious to the chill or the pollution. She inspired him, and later they became friendly; unusual for strangers, more unusual for an old lady and a homeless man. She was the first to hire him in the Colony. He felt beholden to her in more ways than he could articulate; she’d fed him when he was hungry, she paid him for a job well done, and even though she’d been widowed, even though she’d watched her husband sink into the morass of Alzheimer’s, she made Sam believe that while life was not just, it was pretty good. Better than the alternative. And so he did his best to keep her safe—sanding down warped planks was just part of it.

  The Kennicots’ house was on the “street side” of the Colony, next to their faded t
ennis court with the deeply cracked surface, where no one had played since their grown sons had moved away. Behind the house, there was an overgrown trail, hidden from view. Sam became aware of the trail when he grew tired of sleeping in the open, on the beach. He had been comforted by the sound of the ocean at night, but he could feel the eyes on him. Not just of the residents of the Colony, but the unseen, those who slept in the bushes along the pathway leading to Surfrider Beach.

  He discovered the trail on a hot day, searching for a cool spot to eat a sandwich he’d found tossed in a garbage pail festooned with the numbers of a local radio station. To him, the trail was serene; in reality, it was moderately untraversed. He set up shop there for his first night, and from his vantage point he could see the lights of the houses along the street side of the Colony. He could watch a family eat dinner, enjoying their interactions without imposing. From here, sitting on his rolled-up sleeping bag, he had watched Mrs. Kennicot wheel Mr. Kennicot to the table, wiping his mouth between bites. Discussing that which was no longer understood. Holding a hand and laughing, alone, at a memory. The trail became his home. All who passed there, whether or not they saw the navy blue blanket folded neatly under the bush, the long pieces of cardboard ripped every other week from refrigerator boxes, the Tupperware bowl tucked away for washing, knew that they were walking through someone’s home.

  Occasionally Sam was forced to defend his prime territory, much as a man in one of the fancier living quarters in the parallel world, both literally and figuratively, would defend entrance to his home. Sam didn’t consider himself a violent man, a consideration that would have been laughed at by both his compatriots and his superiors. He had given up his Purple Heart; the Silver Star had been stolen long ago. He wasn’t sad to see it go, though it had been his only possession of worth; its only value to him was that he could have sold it for a sandwich at John’s Garden, a cup of coffee, clean socks for the winter months. Despite his protests that he was a peace-loving man, he would not tolerate an incursion into his space.