Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

“See ya,” Eve says.

“Later,” Adam says.

Facing each other, they creep backwards until Eve wonders who will turn away first. It will be her, she’s ready to turn. Seconds pass, but she doesn’t turn. She becomes very still. If she turns away now she might miss what’s supposed to happen next.

It’s Adam who turns with a quick wave of his hand. Eve watches him grow smaller as he jogs away.

Adam has beaten her back to the other end of the island. He’s brought reading material and lounges under a palm tree. Eve sits with her mom, who’s baking under the sun, and they watch Adam slap at the insect circling his head.

“I thought hippies had gone out of vogue,” her mother murmurs.

“Hippies are timeless,” Eve says and sighs.

“They don’t make a lot of money.”

“Oh Jesus, Mom.”

“I want a grandchild,” her mother says. “I just think you’re barking up the wrong tree with that one. He probably doesn’t have much of a pot to piss in.”

“How romantic!”

“ Romance ?” her mother says. “You’re almost thirty years old. You need a husband.”

“I’m having some fun here!” Eve yells.

“You don’t look like you’re having fun,” her mom says.

Adam is still swatting the air. He flutters both hands before spinning away in a tizzy. Eve marches over to him and slaps the torturous mosquito against his forehead, leaving a bloody smudge.

“Fuck!” Adam says.

She realizes then how pissed off she is, not specifically, but generally; she’s a very pissed-off person. She flicks the mosquito away.

At dusk the crew builds a bonfire and the passengers form a single-file line and bunny-hop around the flames. The sky is pink and soft, beckoning. Eve gazes into it, transfixed by its perfect beauty and indifference, until she is forced to join the bunny-hopping line, holding onto the fleshy middle of the old man in front of her as they hop across the sand. There they are—fools and bunny-hoppers—hooting and hollering under a glorious sky.

Adam and Eve take the last tender back to the ship. They smile too widely at each other, and for the first time since she’s met him, which seems a long time ago, she can’t think of anything to say. As they climb onto the floating dock to board the ship, Eve’s aware of her naked ass beneath her wrap. Looking back at the tiny island, she realizes she’s left her bikini bottom behind.

Later when Adam and Eve meet up in the Water Hole, he is morose and fiddles with the olive in his martini. He hunkers down in his seat and complains about his depreciating Oppenheimer account and one of his exes, who is a ratfink. He gazes too long at the beautiful Asian waitress who brings them fresh drinks. As Eve gets buzzed on fuzzy navels, Adam begins to look strange to her. His head seems perfectly round and he wears the loose-lipped look of a moron. How has she not seen this until now? Adam is a stupid bore. He drones on and on until she screams into his ear, “We’re on the Arabian Sea, for Christ’s sake. The Arabian Sea! ”

He looks at her, alarmed. “Chill,” he says.

She lets the anger rattle around inside her for a minute, realizing that the air and the sea and the light have seduced them, conspired with them, pushed them toward this moment, toward nothing at all.

What’s clear is that Adam is a mostly nice guy who’s got some issues and is ultimately not the one; what’s also clear is that she’s not yet ready to know. So she clings, literally, to his arm, pawing him, while they get sloshed in the Water Hole beneath the stars.

Why has love eluded me? she wonders. Love is such a natural thing, after all. Is she too ridiculous, too cranky, too old, too set in her ways, too lusty, small-minded, immature? Other ridiculous people have found love, like her co-worker Lucy with the sleepy mascara-crusted eyes, who’s addicted to “Drama in Real Life!” stories in Reader’s Digest . Slurping her drink, Eve gazes up at the night sky—so high above her head—and thinks, when will it be my turn? Mine .

They dock in India, in the port of Goa, and Eve ditches everybody. She ditches her mom, who’s visiting Portuguese cathedrals, and Adam, who’s visiting Hindu temples, and Adam’s mom, who’s going shopping in Panjim. Instead, Eve hires a taxi and goes to the beach, where cows lie on the red sand looking soulfully at the waves.

Eve hasn’t lost anything. It’s not her own spirit that concerns her, it’s Adam’s which has attached itself to hers. His ghostly residue is as useless and cumbersome as an extra foot. He’s living inside her, infecting her dreams, her thoughts, her every second. That’s the way it is with Eve. It’s an ancient story. How she wishes she could knock him out with the heel of her hand, like water from her ear.

So she does what she can. She spends the day swimming in the Arabian Sea, bobbing in the waves. She walks along the shoreline and catches glimpses of shells as the tide rolls out. Digging, she discovers finger-long snail shells—purple and gold—slender tornadoes. Some are broken, most are perfect. Such treasures. As the light begins to change, she lies on the sand near the cows while her taxi driver sits on the hood of the car, reading the newspaper.

Later she asks him to drive, to just drive. They ride through twisty tree-lined lanes. She stares out at houses the colors of Easter eggs, where chickens, dogs and cows wander through yards. Sparkly clothes hang on clotheslines and catch the last of the light. The taxi zooms with the windows wide open, and the flotsam of Adam embedded in her crocodile brain begins to shed itself like dandelion fluff until she imagines she might be free and clear.

MRS. ALLARD CALLED J.D.’S MOTHER EARLIER IN THE day and asked if he could babysit since their regular girl had the flu. His mom said, of course.

“Ah, Ma,” he groaned, when he came through the back door and she told him the news.

“Have a heart, J.D. honey. They’re stuck, and they’re going to some kind of dinner party,” his mom said, looking delighted, the way she often looked, even now as she rooted through the refrigerator, opening lids and sniffing brown saucy things.

J.D. wasn’t sure he ever looked delighted. In recent Christmas photos he noticed he looked glazed, not with boredom exactly, but with something dull and gloomy, and he wondered about his mother, radiating goodness and luck. He stuffed a Twinkie in his mouth and thought about objecting to the babysitting, but he liked the idea of getting out of the house.

“It’s money in your pocket,” his mom said.

“I’ll be loaded,” he said with his mouth full. “All right. I’ll do it,” he added, as if he had the final say.

J.D. had occasionally babysat the girls, Annabel and Sophia, when the Allards lived next door. But last year they had left their three-bedroom ranch and moved across town to—according to nosy neighbors—a tiny two-bedroom on a lumpy piece of property, and J.D. hadn’t seen one of the downwardly mobile Allards since. J.D. was now a high school freshman with bad skin and a meager social life and no real Friday evening options; sometimes he’d go to one of his friends’ houses and they’d listen to music and toss a tennis ball against the wall, passing the time. Soccer was his thing, but it was January and the streets and tree branches glinted with ice.

J.D. plopped in front of the TV and stared at an old black-and-white movie. The remote didn’t work and since he was too lazy to get up and change the channel, he watched a young woman with a hairdo in the shape of an ocean wave embrace a young man under a street lamp. “I would do anything for it not to be true,” the man said, pulling away from her and holding his hat over his heart. “But what we had here is over, dollface. We’re through.” J.D. watched their eyes glisten, he saw their sadness. He had his own little storage bin of strange, sad feelings he tried to keep under lock and key. He felt something like heartache when he thought about the mysterious girls, walking the hallways of his school. There were so many new faces since the graduated eighth graders from both the town’s junior highs and at least half of the Catholic school spilled together to make up the freshman class. His drama class was filled with many of these exotic girls. There was Susan Steen with her magical hair. He had watched her pull on one of her tight curls, pulling it past her shoulder to almost her elbow and when she let it go it sprung back up to half its length. There was Katie Taylor, who he heard danced ballet. Her spine was straight and her neck long, and even though she was a little chubby, when she walked nothing jiggled. There was Luann Morley, who still had a child’s body and a loud, high laugh. She could do a cartwheel on the balance beam. One day after school he walked by the gym and saw her strong arms stretched taut on the beam as her little legs parted in the air, and then as if her legs had eyes they landed to safety, one chalky foot after the other. She wobbled only the tiniest bit. He wondered about all these girls and what they were like to talk to. What did they think about? Would he ever know? Thinking like this was sometimes delicious, sometimes terrible.