Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“I don’t see why we’re sitting around waiting to be invited to a party at the last minute,” Mary said. “Big deal anyway — the Fourth of July.”

“What?” Angela said. “You’re liberated or something?” Angela was dotting on lavender eye shadow with a Q-tip. “I told you: Marcy told me that Lloyd was just being cool, and she saw that he was going to ask me to the party. The phone rang twice yesterday, and the person hung up. He’s just afraid to ask. So I’m going to sit here and assume he will.” Angela widened her eyes the way her father did when he punched words. Angela’s father was always telling them, “Get some inflection in your voice. When you talk, you’ll bore people if you don’t emphasize anything.”

“I don’t believe that he had a list drawn up of who he was inviting to this party,” Mary said. “That’s like what my mother would do. She writes notes to herself: Take trash down front.’ Jesus.”

Angela looked at her watch. It was a silver watch with single diamonds at the top and bottom of the face — another gift from her grandmother. She was waiting exactly half an hour, as she always did after dinner, for the food to settle in her stomach, but not be digested. Then she would turn up the volume on the stereo and go into the bathroom and stick her finger down her throat to vomit so she would stay thin. By the time her father shouted for the music to be turned down she would already have thrown up and flushed the toilet — she gagged a few times before she turned up the volume, then ran into the bathroom to finish the job. The lipstick she had just stroked on wasn’t the color she was going to wear to the party anyway, so that didn’t matter. And she had gotten used to the routine: She could vomit without her eyes even watering anymore. Mary was the only one she let in on her secret. Mary refused to do it with her, though. Mary hadn’t even believed her until she watched. “Models do it,” Angela said. “Lots of people do it.” “You’re a pervert,” Mary had said. But Mary thought everybody was a pervert: her brother, because he was fat; Henri, the poodle who had gone to live with Mary’s father and grandmother, because he sniffed crotches; Lloyd Bergman. Mary thought that giving hickeys was perverted. Angela had tried to find out, earlier in the day, whether Mary had ever French-kissed somebody. She knew that if she asked, Mary would tell her that she was a pervert for asking, so she had done it subtly, talking about another girl they knew. Mary didn’t say “yuck,” so Angela decided to assume that she had done it. Then her curiosity overwhelmed her, and she said, “I’m surprised you don’t think Frenching is yucky,” and Mary had said, “Not really.” Of course, that didn’t mean that Mary had done it. If she hadn’t, Angela wanted her to do it at the party. Everybody did that at Lloyd Bergman’s parties.

“We could go see Moonraker ,” Mary said. “I don’t want to sit around here all night. Why would you believe his ten-year-old sister anyway?”

Angela looked in the mirror and stuck her index finger down her throat.

“Turn the music up,” Angela said. “Be helpful.”

“You are so disgusting,” Mary said.

“I don’t care,” Angela said.

“You ought to save it in a bag for Lost in the Forest.”

“That’s gross,” Angela said.

“Stop it,” Mary said. “You’re really gross.”

Angela stuck her finger down her throat again, crossing the room to turn the music louder. The record was Parallel Lines . The song was “Heart of Glass.”

Mary decided to ignore Angela; she sat on the velvet-covered piano stool and looked at the tubes and pots and cakes of eye-shadow. She decided to brush some of the gold-colored shadow over her eyes. Angela was vomiting in the bathroom.

“I can count on having to ask every night for an end to the noise, can’t I?” Angela’s father shouted from the foot of the stairs. Angela was still retching in the bathroom. Mary put down the gold-flecked brush nervously.

“Angela!” her father hollered. “Turn that down!”

Mary got up and turned it down. She was relieved that Angela, in the bathroom, had stopped gagging. Angela came out, looking fine, holding Vogue open to a page of a doberman snarling by a model’s ankle. “This magazine is really neat,” Angela said. “Your eyes look gross. That’s the worst color. Put on something nice for the party.”

“If we were going to the party, he would have called.”

“He’ll call,” Angela said.

Mary looked at Vogue . She envied Angela for having subscriptions to every fashion magazine available. They were so much more interesting than She Stoops to Conquer and Pride and Prejudice . That was all just a lot of crap, and didn’t have anything to do with the way people lived, or how they could look better.

“What do you think my worst feature is?” Mary said.

“Your eyebrows,” Angela said. “But they wouldn’t be if you’d just pluck them.”

“My mother’d kill me.”

“She wouldn’t care. She’d like it when she saw how much better you looked. You look like Talia Shire. You can pluck them, you know. The thing is right there.”

Mary picked up the tweezers. They were old and ornate: They had belonged to Angela’s grandmother’s mother. Mary knew the history of everything on Angela’s dressing table.

“I don’t know,” Mary said.

“You’re hopeless,” Angela said.

“You pull out the ones underneath, right?”

“I can’t believe you’ve never plucked one hair out of your eyebrows.”

“Big deal,” Mary said. “You criticize a lot, Angela.”

“Because I’m your friend. Nobody has naturally pretty eyebrows. If you’d tweeze them, your eyes would look bigger. Your eyes are your best feature.”

“Okay,” Mary said.

“It helps if you put an ice cube on them first,” Angela said. “Wait a minute.”

She had a small refrigerator in her room. She took an ice cube out of the tray, shaking her hands to get the flecks of ice off, putting the tray on the rug.

“Don’t drip it in my lipgloss,” Angela said, pushing one of the little pots to the back of the vanity. “You don’t have to freeze your skin pink, either. Just hold it there about ten seconds. Give it to me,” Angela said. Angela took it back to the tray and put the tray in the refrigerator.

“Just do one at a time,” she said. “Pluck mostly in the middle.”

“Now I’ll always have to pluck my eyebrows.”

“So?” Angela said. “You want to, anyway.”

“Shit,” Mary said.

“You didn’t freeze it enough,” Angela said.

“That ice felt gross. Forget it.”

“There it is,” Angela said. “I told you.”

Angela’s mother called up the stairs to Angela. Angela walked across the room and picked up the phone on her night table. “Hi,” she said. “Who’s this?… I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Blondie,” Angela said. “Do you want me to bring it?”

“I’ll think about it,” Angela said. “If I do come, do you want me to bring Blondie?”

“Maybe,” Angela said. “What time are people getting there?”

“Mary might come with me,” Angela said. “If we come.”

When she hung up, she gave Mary a smug smile. Tears were pouring down Mary’s cheeks — mostly the pain of pulling hairs, but also a sudden flash of embarrassment that she was always tagging along with Angela, and Angela was so much prettier; she was the one the boys wanted at their parties. She went on plucking because she thought she should look good for Angela — Angela would stop bringing her along to the parties if she started thinking she was hopeless.