Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

There was nothing to do but wave my arm. My sisters were boycotting the parade, at least that was what they said for the hundredth time when I left them this morning, slurping up Fruit Loops and glued to cartoons. The week before when they found out I hadn’t won they both cried, but it was Daffodil who sobbed, huge tears running down her blotchy face, her whole body heaving. Maybe she had wanted me to pave the way for her. “You like Inggy, right?” I’d said, holding her hand.

“Not anymore.”

“But I get to ride on the float, too.”

“So what?” she sobbed.

I hoped they’d change their minds, and I kept a lookout for their pompomed hats as we rolled along. There was so much noise—“Deck the Halls,” the clapping and cheering, Santa and his ho ho ho’s. Kevin McSweeney leapt out of the crowd and ran alongside us, gaping up at Inggy. I looked for Ben but didn’t see him until we passed the hardware store, where he and a couple of his friends were sitting on bags of fertilizer. We both waved, but I couldn’t tell if we were waving to each other. “Ben,” I heard myself whisper. “Ben.” What if he’d been meant for me and me for him?

Up ahead on the sidewalk Connie waved to Pamela Zlotkin, who stood on the front of our float, and I wondered if they liked each other. I wondered if Pamela had sat in Connie’s warm kitchen on the chair with the blue polka-dotted cushion next to the radiator, the chair I always sat in. Connie saw me and blew a kiss. I blew one back and turned and stared in her direction long after we passed.

Then I saw my sisters, hiding behind a mailbox in front of the savings and loan and watching for me. As the float glided toward them, they pushed their way into the street and stood there wide-eyed while I waved like mad. “That’s my sister!” Daffodil shouted, pointing at me. Both Dorrie and Daffodil looked as if they were waiting for something to happen, and I too almost expected something to happen then, but the float coasted on indifferently like a cloud through the sky, and I lost them in the crowd.

The air was still and calm and cold. I’d heard it would snow later tonight, the first snow of the year. It was only supposed to be a light dusting, but I hoped it would be enough to cover the town in a clean sheet of white.

All of a sudden we stopped short. I stumbled, nearly stepping on Inggy’s tiara, which landed by my feet. It was hard to see what was happening so I climbed up the little staircase to Inggy, carrying her crown, and saw that up ahead a car had rear-ended a police cruiser at the intersection of Maple and Main, causing everything to come to a stop. Inggy inched over and I shared the folding chair with her. “You’re not crying, Dani, are you?” she said.

“I’m not crying,” I said. She slung an arm over my shoulder and pulled the bag of corn chips from under her cape. That’s all I wanted then, to sit beside Inggy, eating corn chips and watching the standstill up ahead.

In front of us, the ladies’ auxiliary put down their banner and lit cigarettes. Pamela Zlotkin still stood on her corner of the float, waving to a crowd that wasn’t paying attention while the two other girls hunched together in their billowy white velvet capes and seemed to be reading each other’s palms. I wondered what they saw there.

LET’S CALL OUR COUPLE ADAM AND EVE SINCE THEY’LL be visiting paradise. Both Adam and Eve are accompanying their mothers on a cruise from Africa to India and the islands in between. Four hundred passengers board the ship in Kenya. Adam and Eve haven’t met yet, and they don’t notice each other as they roll their suitcases along the Marina Deck in search of the elevators to their respective cabins, which they’ll share with their respective mothers. Soon—not today—they’ll meet. They’ll learn they both live on the East Coast; that they both have high metabolisms; that they’re both easily exasperated by their mothers; that they’re both flirty yet wary.

Adam is a hippie who teaches junior high and has two children by two different women and lives in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, where he has an outhouse and fruit trees. He’s a vegetarian. He’s also boyish and compact and a tad persnickety.

Eve is a dark-eyed, woolly-haired carnivore who likes to chomp on the turkey leg on Thanksgiving. She’s a dreamy, occasionally crabby person. She’s a clothes buyer for Lord & Taylor and lives in New York City and has been on many bad blind dates this year.

On day two of the trip Adam and Eve unofficially meet in Zanzibar. It’s sunrise and they’re the only two on the deck as the ship heads for the lush palm tree-covered island. Wooden dhows dip and sway in the pulse of the water. There’s a heavy scent of cloves. Adam and Eve sniff the air and give each other the once-over.

They officially meet on the island of Mayotte, where they swim with turtles and drip dry under the ylang-ylang trees. Adam plucks a flower, crushes it, and puts his fragrant fingers beneath Eve’s nose. “Smell this,” he says. It’s the most gorgeous scent that’s ever filled her nose, and she almost drops to her knees in the sand. She takes this as a sign from God—a sign of what she isn’t quite sure.

It isn’t long before Adam and Eve are sneaking around the ship in the wee hours. She sticks her tongue in his ear in the library; he feels her up in the engine room; they get half-naked on the Lido Deck after midnight, where the warm wind makes them shiver. Adam has dark, wet eyes and a tidy ponytail. He has a way of tilting his head and gazing at her full strength as if he can see her down to her bones. “Your hair,” he murmurs, “is crazy fantastic.” And it is! In New York her hair is all wrong, her curls often a fuzzy, startled nest. But here on the Indian Ocean she has loose, snaky tendrils—a voluptuous seaweed head.

Eve gallops along the deck at sunset, past all the retirees out for a stroll. The sky is scorched with color. Love, love, love, she whispers out to sea. Oh, love , she thinks mistily—I can’t wait to get to know this Adam guy.

But she knows this isn’t love, only her desire to love and be loved in return. The trouble is she’s gone too long without feeling special. She’s gone too long without gazing into the eyes of someone dear. She’s been out with one too many drips. She’s had a major drought and is ready for a little drizzle.

During their days at sea Adam and Eve loll in the saltwater pool, mute as driftwood. The sun beats down on Eve’s head, and she realizes she hasn’t been thinking complete thoughts. She looks south and thinks there’s only water between us and Antarctica. There: a complete thought. Everything on this journey is about pleasure. The pleasure of sunshine, powdery white sand, the blue-green sea; the pleasure of hands and hair and bellies. Just last week she was plowing through Midtown, jaywalking, dodging taxis and buses—tense as a skyscraper, a 5’2” nerve ending. Here her limbs are splayed and bare, idle as a jellyfish.

There is the problem of ditching their moms. Adam and Eve gobble through their respective dinners and then sit with their mothers in the Diamond Lady Lounge for the tango show or an evening with the Sea Dynasty singers and dancers. Later when their moms have gone to bed, they meet up at the Water Hole or the Tip Top Bar for cigars under the stars. Adam hugs Eve tightly, cigar smoke twisting above their heads. She swoons. “Adam,” she whispers.

“Eve,” he whispers back.

Not that it’s perfect, though it almost is. He rubs her back and pulls the label out of her tank top. “What is this? Acrylic?” he asks.

“It’s microfiber. Like it?”

“I like natural fibers,” he says.

When the sky begins to lighten they sneak back to their respective cabins, waking their respective moms, who eye their respective clocks.