Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

She had stretched out next to Sam, and he pressed his lips to her neck. She fingered his ear, its delicate smallness, knowing how love might get thrown into the mix and how much hurt it could bring. Later at his place they curled together like shrimp, and she held his hand close to her thumping heart. At dawn, she slipped from his bed and fled to the desert, where she sat on a large sun-washed rock and stared out at the cholla. Under the hot Tucson sun her skin heated up until the smell of Sam rose off her and enveloped her. She sat for hours, baking, feeling warm and lush, until finally she returned home.

Georgeann holds English muffins and nine-grain, giving each bag a squeeze but unable to choose. Clutching both bags, she searches for her cart. In front of the Crackerjack display sits a cart holding Muenster cheese, cherries, and bubble bath. Bubbles, she thinks longingly. The cart has the look of abandonment, and Georgeann wheels off with it. There will be many other days for vegetables, she decides.

Up ahead a small boy sits in a cart, singing a song about a boy and a girl in a canoe while his mother bends near a low shelf. Georgeann stares at the child and listens. His voice is high and tuneless. She can’t see the boy’s eyes, just the darkness of his sockets. As Georgeann comes up next to the child he doesn’t stop singing, only hesitates for a second, and then continues while Georgeann runs her hand over his downy head. He tips his face up toward her. He’s silky-headed and earnest, his hair so fine between her fingers she would like to lean down and sniff him.

Georgeann had a husband for many years and together they’d made a baby, who has probably turned to dust in the cemetery up in the foothills by now. The baby had been perfect but blue and he wouldn’t breathe. Her baby with his perfect head, heavy with skull and brains, lay curled and lifeless in her arms. The doctors only let her and Ross visit with the little boy for a few moments. Even chimpanzees are more civilized; they carry around their dead for days.

The death of their baby unlinked Georgeann and Ross from each other. They turned their backs, lowered their eyes and erased their faces, but they went on folding the towels, unclogging the bathroom drain, watering the fish pond, ordering Chinese, playing Rummy.

Then when they adopted Aaron and he came to them at two years old with a bad haircut and a clear, steady gaze they were linked together again by the urgency to show him things. They took trips by car and trips by plane to the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, the meteor crater, the petrified forest. Georgeann taught him how to do the twist and make a potato chip sandwich. Ross taught him how to care for a goldfish and stand on his hands. Lit with glee, they lived like Spaniards, eating charred pork chops at eleven p.m., tired and flushed, with sleepy Aaron munching, his lids half-closed, his body ready to topple over. “Get the chop out of your ear, sweetie,” Georgeann had said. She and Ross were deliriously in love with him, but his arrival didn’t do a damn thing about the hollow pit opened up in her by the dead baby. The center of her pain had been scooped out, but the air left there was dry and brittle.

Georgeann quickly drops her hand from the boy’s head and pushes her cart along as the mother moves toward her son. Up ahead a small woman leans against the frozen foods, holding a lit candle. “I picked this up in housewares,” she says.

“Good thinking.”

“My boyfriend’s got the flashlight in the potato chip aisle. I snuck away.” She runs her fingers through the air. Her shopping cart holds cereal and yams.

Georgeann clicks off her flashlight and leans over the freezer, expecting frosty air but the air is still and watery. She holds a package of asparagus to her forehead and sighs, feeling the coolness.

“I could kill him,” the woman murmurs.

“Who?”

“My boyfriend.”

“What did he do?” Georgeann whispers.

“He’s got some side action going on,” the woman whispers back.

“Your boyfriend?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Dump him,” Georgeann says.

“I should, shouldn’t I?”

Georgeann can tell that the woman probably won’t, that she’ll hold on to him for longer than she should, and Georgeann has the urge to slap her. “Really, you should,” she says instead, touching the woman’s thin arm.

“I know!” the woman says. “I know!”

Georgeann nods.

A gangly man moves along the meat counter, rustling through a bag and crunching.

“That’s him,” the woman says.

The man’s crunch suddenly infuriates Georgeann. How dare this cheater crunch so delicately, so innocuously! Georgeann reaches for a yam from the woman’s cart and hurls it through the air, striking the cruncher on the back of the head. Oh, the hearty smack! “Shit!” he yells, quickly moving away. Georgeann throws another yam and so does the woman, but they miss and hit the meat counter instead. They gather up more yams, hugging them to their chests, and run after the strange man. They throw yams in his direction until he outruns them, disappearing down the household cleaner aisle.

“I’m not sure that was him,” the woman says.

“That must have been him!”

Just last week Georgeann ran into Ross outside of Target. I spent twenty-three years with you, Georgeann thought, looking at his head of sparse hair, which had gone crinkly like dried seaweed and turned the color of ash. In his arms he held his daughter, a tiny blonde girl with flyaway hair. Ross married the woman he’d been running around with the last couple years of their marriage, a younger woman with long gauze skirts and cool blue eyes, who left a whiff of patchouli in her wake.

Outside Target, as his tiny daughter twisted and jumped in his arms, wanting to ride the fifty-cent Dumbo, Georgeann waved to him. Three years later she was able to do that. He lifted his arm, smiled widely and walked toward her, but she moved swiftly through the double doors without a backward glance.

Georgeann had known in her heart before she knew in her head that Ross was cheating on her. When she’d found him throwing pennies in the garbage, sweeping them off his dresser into the trash bag, she asked herself, just who is he—this careless, careless man? Then without conscious effort her love began to untangle its hold and dissolve.

“Listen to me,” Georgeann now says to the woman, grabbing her arm. “Listen…” But she doesn’t know what to say to her; Georgeann’s own experiences have left deep impressions, but where, she wonders, is the grace of wisdom? “Come,” she says instead, following the scent of chocolate and butter as she steers the woman to the bakery counter at the back of the store. The candle casts a warm, inviting glow on the trays of round butter cookies sparkling with sugar, little buttery men filled with chocolate and raspberry, cupcakes dipped in rainbow sprinkles, a small cake decorated with a chocolate ribbon. “Here,” she says, pulling the woman behind the counter.

The sweets are gleaming and beautiful, and at this moment everything feels possible to Georgeann—the world feels vast and comforting. Clarity pushes in on her amid the scent of luscious chocolate. Move it, it tells her; move, move . They kneel in front of the goodies. “Eat!” Georgeann cries, sliding open the glass case. “Eat something.”

Slowly they reach into the case and eat one cookie at a time. Soon they start exchanging treats, passing the fanciest and the gooiest ones to each other. Georgeann wants to eat everything. She grabs an éclair, licks the icing and then stuffs it in her mouth. The woman’s hand hovers over a tray, unable to decide. Her hand creeps back to her side and thrusts forward, snatching a cupcake and stuffing it, paper and all, into her mouth. Georgeann eats a cannoli, feeling crumbs fall from her lips onto her lap.