Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  “You spoke with her?” I felt a thread of alarm. “What did you do, pretend to be her friend?”

  “Anyone can go to a yoga class,” Amanda said lightly. “It’s not like I lied to her. Most people are so eager to talk about themselves, they’ll tell you what you need to know before you ask. Especially someone as lonely as Brenna Branchik.” She smiled. “Her blog has eleven followers so far.”

  “And you’re one of them.” It made me deeply uneasy. I read what Amanda was typing under the photos, username Homewrecker: Ur hubby showed me his so I showed him mine. “A little on the nose, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t worry, I use a dummy IP,” she said blithely. “Anyway, I’m sure Brenna knows all about Doug’s little habit. She’s gone deep with the herbal supplements and healing gemstones. Self-medicating.”

  “If she already knows about him, then why are we—going nuclear?” I waved at the screen. And more to the point, why hadn’t Amanda told me this part of the plan?

  “Brenna’s very concerned about her baby’s future.” She finished typing with a flourish. “That’s where we’re going to be able to apply the most pressure.”

  “Pressure? We’re not going to hurt her, are we?”

  “No, Dana.” She sighed impatiently and turned away from the screen toward me for the first time. “There wouldn’t be any point. Men are like dogs—they misbehave, you roll up a newspaper and bop their noses. It’s all they understand, all they respond to. But women learn to live with violence early on. They spend their whole lives learning how not to respond. You of all people should know that.” I flinched. “So getting at a woman like Brenna isn’t as simple as a tap on the nose. You have to find something she cares about.”

  “But—she didn’t do anything!”

  “Exactly.” She raised her hands in the air, exasperated. “She doesn’t do anything. She knows her husband is out there harassing women. You look at her face, you know she knows. But she doesn’t care whose life he ruins. She doesn’t divorce him, she doesn’t expose him. She just goes to the spa and gets an extra hour of vaginal-rejuvenation therapy.” She saw my face and rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay, calm down. Yes, we’re going to use her to get to her husband. But we won’t hurt a hair on her blowout, I promise. Much less her fetus.”

  “How are we going to use her?”

  “Well, the first thing is to make sure she freaks out, good and hard,” Amanda explained, pushing a scraggly lock of hair out of her face. “She’ll be getting out of spin class right around now, and she’ll want to blog about it. When she sees this, she’ll flip out and start texting him ultimatums. He’ll check the IP address, which I set up with a pretty easy-to-spot dummy that redirects to a second dummy—one that’ll point straight to St. Catherine’s.”

  I just looked at her.

  “St. Catherine’s, aka the Exeter of Westlake, aka the most exclusive K-through-twelve private school in Austin?” She smiled gleefully. “Brenna Branchik already has her unborn sweetheart on the waiting list. The dummy IP belongs to the girls’ dormitory. Where the boarders live. All of whom are underage.”

  I was catching her drift. And starting to smile, despite myself.

  “So now Branchik’s got a real live Catholic schoolgirl sending kiddie porn to his wife from inside the sacred walls where his own daughter is expected to matriculate. And if Brenna finds that out”—she smirked—“let’s just say he’ll do anything to make this go away. Promise her the moon and stars. We’ll be doing her a favor, in a way.”

  “Surely he would know if he was sexting teens.”

  “How could he be sure? Guys like him cast a wide net on Tinder and Snapchat. How about if one of his swipe-rights just happened to be a sweet seventeen-year-old—or, better yet, a fourteen-year-old—and she’s eager to reciprocate?”

  “I do not look fourteen,” I said indignantly, my concern for Brenna Branchik already fading.

  She shrugged. “Kids grow up fast these days.”

  One thing still bothered me. “If all that matters is the IP address, why couldn’t we just send her the dick pics you already have?”

  “I’m pretty sure he’d recognize those, since they were the subject of a formal complaint.” She gestured toward the screen. “Anyway, this is so much better, don’t you think? The wedding picture! This is definitive proof you were in his apartment. Recently. He’ll have to figure out something to say about that.”

  So would I, if anyone found out. But the exhilaration of being in Branchik’s apartment, crossing the line—the thrill of the sultry, faceless pictures—and even the pleasant terror of nearly getting caught hadn’t worn off completely.

  Amanda continued to crow. “Plus, he knows you can get in any time you want. You got him once. You can get him again. I’m not naive enough to think he’s going to stop sending dick pics altogether. But I want him to be very, very scared every time he does it. I want him to fear his own desires.”

  8

  The week leading up to the finals night of the Funniest Person in Austin contest was relatively calm. I’d been too wrapped up in the Branchik strike to pay much attention to the rest of the semis but was happy to see that Kim had made it. Fash had too, unsurprisingly.

  I knew I should be stressed-out, if only because I was going to deliver the same set for the third time in the competition. Plenty of comics did it, but there was something discouraging about parading the same five minutes’ worth of material past the judges—especially when one of them was Cynthia Omari. The Bestie Cast had five hundred thousand Twitter followers and regularly featured interviews with comics who would otherwise have been stuck playing bit parts with incomprehensible accents in second-rate Hollywood comedies; the podcast had even launched some of their careers. I wished I could show Omari something more exciting than my usual set. But I was still blocked for new material, and there was no point in trying to sharpen up jokes for the finals that I hadn’t even thought were good enough for the preliminaries.

  Yet I felt surprisingly mellow, and I knew it had to be because of the Branchik strike. Once the roller coaster of adrenaline and exhaustion had run its course, I’d woken up feeling refreshed, as if I had gone to the gym and then eaten a huge but healthy meal.

  At first I’d waited excitedly for blowback, though Amanda had deleted my Runnr account instantly, scrubbing the metadata so that no trace of me remained. She’d also convinced me that there was no way Branchik could see into her apartment from his, a fact I’d confirmed for myself when I was there but that did little to ease the feeling of exposure when we sat outside on the balcony drinking glasses of wine.

  But within a few days, Branchik had vacated the apartment entirely, piling some boxes into a U-Haul and driving away.

  “Looks like someone’s going to live in the hills where wifey can keep an eye on him,” Amanda said with satisfaction. “I think we can rest assured she’ll put a damper on his photography habits for a while.”

  It did feel good to see him go—and not just because it made the balcony a more comfortable place to hang out. As when Neely had gone back to L.A., there was a palpable sense of having driven someone off our turf. I liked the feeling of taking up space. I wondered once again whether Amanda had deliberately found an apartment close to Branchik, but even if she had, it didn’t seem as outlandish a move as it had before. After all, why should he be able to go where he pleased while she had to work at avoiding him? She had come to Austin and staked her claim, and the fact that he was already there didn’t make a difference. That was living, not just surviving.

  I’d felt the thrill myself when I donned the Betty wig, infiltrated Branchik’s apartment, and rubbed my scent all over it like a bitch in heat, claiming it for my own. I remembered what Ruby had said about the wigs changing her personality, the “mean” wig she wouldn’t wear anymore. I’d thought it was just Ruby being Ruby, but wasn’t that just what the Betty wig had done for me—changed me into a different person? Or at least given me permission to let out a sid
e of my personality I’d never acknowledged before?

  One evening that week, after I came home from Amanda’s place a little drunk, I tried on the Betty wig before I went to bed, just to see what she looked like in the mirror. When she wasn’t naked, Betty was an ordinary girl with platinum-blond hair—petite and tan and not exactly dripping with class, but laid-back. She looked uncomplicated, fun, and none too intelligent. Nonthreatening. A girl who didn’t have to work extra hard to smile, who never had to worry about people thinking she was prickly if she was quiet, aggressive if she was loud. She could look at her phone in the line at Starbucks and the barista would assume she was checking Instagram, not being rude. She could yell as much as she wanted on game day, even get drunk and throw a beer can in the street, and people would just think a white girl had had too much to drink, and wasn’t that kind of cute? The type of bouncy, fluffy girl that men treated like a pet, picked up and carried around over their shoulders for a joke, egged on when she was drunk with the words Go get ’em, tiger.

  I reminded myself to put the wig in my purse so I’d remember to take it to work on my next shift. I’d promised Ruby I would return it to her, but for some reason I kept forgetting. The thought of losing the wig made me ever so slightly depressed, as if I were giving back some of the space I had won. I began to wonder whether there would be a next time for Amanda and me. Her list was long, she’d said. Mine was too.

  “Go get ’em, tiger,” I told Betty.

  The night of the finals, I stood in the Bat City bar watching Kim on the monitor.

  “Destroy everything in your path,” I’d told her with a quick hug before she walked out, and she was doing a bang-up job, her sleepy drawl more animated than usual. The audience was following her down every nook and cranny of her decidedly blue set and went wild during her deadpan imitation of a male orgasm.

  I smelled stale cigarette smoke and turned to see Fash, who was up next, standing beside me. He, too, was watching the monitor.

  “Take a good look,” I said. “That’s who you have to beat tonight.”

  “More like beat off to,” Fash said with a deliberate leer.

  I made a gagging noise. “You think you could save that thought for private time?”

  “Sorry, didn’t see you there.” He grinned under his mustache and turned toward me. “You’re so short.”

  “And you’re so full of shit,” I said. “But unfortunately I can still hear you.”

  “Feisty!” he said, and I rolled my eyes. “Jealous? Don’t worry, I can beat both of you at once.” He sucked his teeth. “I promise you’ll like it.”

  But now the audience was clapping and Kim was exiting the stage, which meant Fash was up. I noticed a greenish tint to his face under the red bar lights and smiled widely at him. “As long as we’re having fun up there, that’s all that matters, right?” As he started down the hall toward the stage, Kim came out through the swinging door on the other side. I high-fived her, but we watched Fash on the monitor with a certain grimness. He was on tonight, undeniably. And I was up next.

  Feeling a little green myself, I ducked into the women’s bathroom to touch up my makeup. Under the fluorescent lights, I caught a gleam of blond peeking out from my purse, like the telltale lock of hair sticking out of a trash can on an episode of Law and Order: SVU. I’d managed to lug the wig to work and back several times now without giving it to Ruby, and here it was, throwing little tendrils over the side of my bag like an octopus trying to escape a tank.

  I fished out my makeup bag and reached for the zipper pull to close my purse. But I couldn’t do it. I had the absurd thought that the wig was alive and needed to breathe. I pulled it from my bag and shook it out. The blond shimmered in front of the mirror. I smoothed it against my chest, then reached for the bobby pins that were collected in the inner pocket of my purse. I pinned the elastic cap in place and shook the plastic hair down over my shoulders the way I’d done in the mirror at home. In natural lighting, it looked even more fake, but then, it didn’t need to look real; onstage, everything is fake, whether it’s real or not.

  I emerged from the bathroom in the Betty wig, and Kim didn’t even turn her head when I passed; I was evidently unrecognizable. Betty’s bouncy strut propelled me down the hallway, where I nodded at the photos of past winners on the wall, and toward the banquet room, whose back half had been unroped for the finals. The swinging door gave, and I threaded my way through a packed house toward the stage as the emcee reeled off my introduction. Stepping onstage, I faced the largest crowd I’d ever seen.

  My hand flew up to the wig. What on earth was I doing? I couldn’t do my Amarillo opening with this blond opossum stuck to my head, but I had prepared nothing else. I cleared my throat and opened my mouth.

  “I’m Betty,” I said in a girlish soprano. “I’m so excited to be here.” I breathed slowly and loudly into the mic, my eyes stretched wide and wild. “I have to tell you about this great guy I just punched in the face.”

  There was a confused pause and then one sharp laugh from the audience.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Every time Betty punches a new guy, she always thinks he’s the One. But what can I say?” I paused and drew my breath in through my teeth slowly, making a liquid sucking sound into the microphone. “There was a real connection.”

  The audience had fallen silent, understanding at last that something strange and uncomfortable was happening onstage. Ordinarily this type of reaction would have prompted me to amplify my voice, exaggerate my gestures to fill space, and perhaps cut the rest of the jokes in the bit. But this wasn’t a bit. This was a story. And I knew I wasn’t going to cut anything. Once Betty opened her mouth, she wouldn’t close it until she had said every word she wanted to say. The audience knew it too. I heard the shifting of weight in chairs, felt the strain of people wanting to get up and leave, but it only made me want to draw things out more. I kept my eyes wide and let the silence gather into a large, empty pool. The oxygen felt thin, but I let it continue, saucer-eyed. Slowly, keeping my gaze fixed on the audience, I turned my head to the right and held the pose for ten long, silent seconds.

  A man in the front row let out an explosive laugh. I stayed rigid, my eyeballs bulging with the strain of looking as far left as I could while my head lolled to the right. Another man chuckled, then a few women. The mood broke. I relaxed my eyes without blinking them, flickered my eyelids slightly, just enough to telegraph my control over the situation. A wave of relief swept the crowd. A few people even clapped.

  “Do you want to hear about it?” I said, keeping my face as motionless as possible.

  Cheers and applause were my answer.

  What followed wasn’t really standup, at least not in any way I’d ever performed it. It was some kind of performance art. It wasn’t coming from me; it was happening to me. My face felt like a mask, and I had no idea what I was going to say next. The words that came out of the mask, accompanied by grotesque contortions, didn’t require effort or forethought. Betty was unsettling and weird, and I was as transfixed by her as the audience was. Blond and pretty and ugly, all at the same time, she was pure, terrifying id, amoral and animalistic, a stunted half human in a state of nature. She made earrings out of real ears. She drank out of the toilet. She thought a manicure was a cure for men, and a pedicure was an abortion. She was alternately petulant and brash, vulgar and cute, Baby Jane and the Bad Seed rolled into one.

  When the blue light came on to signal one more minute in the set, I pulled her story back around to the part about punching the guy, and it felt like tugging a large, mean dog to heel. As long as she had an audience, Betty would want to keep talking and talking. It took all the discipline I’d acquired as a performer to keep the last minute building in a direction, but finally, she came to a line I recognized immediately as her catch phrase, delivered with a bit of what they call in improv “space work”; holding an invisible kitchen knife in one hand, I mimed grabbing something at crotch level with the other. “So I too
k matters into my own hands!”

  The audience burst into shouts and applause, and I pulled the wig off my head, said, “Thank you,” into the mic, and walked offstage, relieved to be me again.

  I’d always hated nastiness for the sake of nastiness. Dirtbag characters, insult comics, and even excessive brutality toward hecklers made me itch. I would have hated Betty’s material on paper. But it didn’t really matter. When you kill, you kill. And Betty killed.

  “Second runner-up goes to . . . Kim Rinski!”

  To my left, Kim gave a yelp and jumped up and down. I squeezed her hand and whacked her on the back as she stepped out of the line of comics and clopped up the steps in her chunky heels to accept her medal and five-hundred-dollar check.

  I held my breath. I was definitely making the top three. And now I knew I wasn’t third.

  Behind the emcee, a woman in heels and a short sequined dress, probably some put-upon Bat City employee hoping for her own break in comedy, held the winner’s red robe and crown aloft. From where I stood at the base of the stage, huddled shoulder to shoulder in the line of twelve comics who’d performed that night, I could see one of her high heels stepping on the hem of the robe. I realized I was feeling guilty in advance for what would happen when the winner was announced, as if it would be my fault if she pulled the robe out from under her own feet and gave the audience an eye-level peek into her gynecological mysteries.

  “Stay onstage, Kim, right there,” the emcee said, gesturing her to one side. “Next up is the second-funniest person in Austin, our first runner-up, and I think you’ll agree with me that it’s well deserved this year . . . Dana Diaz!”

  I launched myself up the steps to the stage in a daze, made my way to the microphone, and let the emcee hang the medal around my neck, where it immediately slithered into my cleavage. Digging it out, I almost forgot to accept the check that went with it and had to be gestured back toward the emcee.