Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

The woman and Georgeann have chocolate rings around their mouths. Georgeann wipes her own mouth, feeling queasy with sticky sweetness, but she’s tempted by a thick brownie. It’s heavy and slick with icing, and she swallows it down in gobs. Gooey chocolate coats the roof of her mouth. As she stuffs in the rest of the brownie she feels her bowels turn. “I have to find a bathroom,” she says, standing and bumping into the cookie case.

The woman makes a small, understanding noise as Georgeann rushes to the rear corner of the store, where a light shines. A stockboy mops the floor by the dairy case, his large flashlight illuminating a milky puddle. “The bathroom,” Georgeann says. “Where is it?”

“The bathroom isn’t for customers, lady,” he says, turning from her and going over her wet footprints with the mop.

“I have to go!” She clutches his arm; it is a skinny boy’s arm.

He makes a sour, huffy noise that says, just who do you think you are? I haven’t a clue, kiddo, she thinks. He leads the way through a set of metal doors and into the meat locker where hunks of beef hang from hooks. “You should have gone before you came here.”

“Hurry,” she says, pulling him along faster. She’s not sure she will make it.

He shines his light into the dirty little bathroom so she gets an idea where the toilet is, before he gives her a small push and shuts her in.

Georgeann unbuckles her jeans. Constipation is more her style, but now she has to take an urgent shit in the blackness of Safeway. The air is cold and creepy on her naked skin as she squats over the toilet until she must sit. Feeling along the wall she finds the roll of toilet paper.

There must be a mirror above the sink, and she reaches out and touches the smooth, chilly surface, but in the darkness there is no reassurance of her face. She is just a woman alone in a dank bathroom, a woman who wishes she’d lived a little better. At this moment she’s certain a touch of rot has taken root inside her heart, where instead there might have been expansion. She also knows she still might live better if she knew how not to be afraid. Her heart pounds loudly, letting her know she is still very much alive, as she gropes with the faucet and feels for the soap dispenser. When she flushes she hopes it all goes down.

There is no stockboy with a flashlight waiting for her when she opens the door. The overhead lights begin to flicker as she makes her way past the slabs of bloody meat. It is a hard life, there’s no doubt. She gives the side of a cow a fairly good punch. It is a cold and dignified piece of beast. Large and stupid and ugly, but it is what it is.

On the other side of the double doors, the lights continue to flicker in spurts, and Georgeann moves quickly to the front of the store, ready to leave. By the checkout line she eyes a shopping cart wedged against the magazine rack holding a T-bone steak and a five-pound bag of potatoes. “Is this anybody’s?” Georgeann asks.

The checkout girl shrugs under the sputtering lights. Georgeann lifts the food onto the conveyer belt and digs for her wallet, discovering the avocado, ripe and warm, buried in her purse. After she pays the girl she carries her bag to the car, squinting into the brightness. The sunset is a swirl of red and purple melting together and hanging low over the Tucson Mountains.

When Georgeann returns home she peers under the living room curtains at Sam Bailey’s salmon-colored adobe, listening to the whir of his swamp cooler, watching the billow of his ratty T-shirts on the clothesline. “You,” she says; the word sounds almost accusatory.

She takes a cool bath. The rye bread is stale without any nibbles in it and there is no sign of the lizard—hopefully it found its way out to the yard, she thinks, biting into the hard bread and feeling the pressure between her teeth. She changes into her nightgown and moves to the living room, feeling deeply unsatisfied, and sits in different chairs, finally falling to sleep on the couch.

At dawn, sunlight fills the room and she wanders into the bathroom, where she discovers the lizard clinging to the side of the bathtub. “Oh!” she yells, kneeling in front of it. “You’re going to die on me, aren’t you?” The lizard is completely still and she notes the translucent front legs, as elegant as a dancer’s, and the dainty tip of its tail. “Lovely,” she whispers. She gently touches it with one finger. “Please,” she whispers, her voice faint and airy. “I won’t hurt you.” The lizard turns its neck and looks into her eyes with its own black, unreadable ones. It is weak, she can see. Its body has probably started in on the business of dying. “Let me take you outside,” she whispers. She brushes it into her hand and feels the little body there in her palm, trusting her, and she wonders at the mystery of this.

Warmth rises from the earth, this desert valley, beneath her bare feet as she moves slowly past the cholla and rose bushes. Cupping her hands, she talks to the lizard in a low, soothing voice and sets it down next to the Joshua tree. “Be well,” she says as the lizard moves uncertainly across her fingers to the ground.

As she stands, she sees Sam Bailey sitting on his back stoop, working his feet into a pair of socks. One of his beagles stretches out next to him. Faint music is playing on a transistor radio. Sam sees her then, half-hidden by the Joshua tree, standing in her nightgown. A warm breeze, like a breath emptying from the lungs, blows through her yard into his as she moves toward him.

MY SISTER FRANKIE’S EVENING-OF-BEAUTY COUPON was good only on Fridays, so she’d made an appointment for this coming one and when she’d spend the evening swaddled in seaweed and dipped in Middle Eastern mud, and since my brother-in-law Chuck had his impotence support group, after which he and the guys would usually go for a beer, could I please babysit?

I had left my life in New York City and for the past month had been rehabilitating in New Jersey in the half-finished apartment over Frankie’s garage. Our deal was that I’d babysit my niece and nephew on occasion, though it hadn’t quite worked out yet. Frankie stood at the bottom of the stairs to the apartment, balancing a load of laundry on her hip, waiting for my answer. We had the same mass of dark curly hair and we were both slightly pear-shaped with pitted cheeks from long-ago acne.

“Sorry, Frankie,” I said. “But I have a date.”

Slowly, she made a face at me. “Shit on a stick! I’m going to get stuck with Constance Poblanski. Fiona, how much do you want to bet I’m going to get stuck with Constance Poblanski?”

“You’re going to get stuck with Constance Poblanski,” I said.

Frankie sighed.

“Shit on a stick,” I said, sympathetically.

“Well, I hope you get laid,” she said.

“Thank you.”

Yesterday, after the stickup at Wawa where I met Derek Head, Frankie and I had sat at her kitchen table, eating fat-free cream cheese on rice cakes, as I described in great detail Derek Head’s looks, exactly what words passed between us, how I felt talking with him, how I thought he felt, what I thought could happen between us, what I thought the children we would never have might look like, with his hypnotic avocado eyes and all.

“I’m doing darks, got any?” Frankie said, putting down the laundry basket.

I went for a pair of jeans and some shirts, and as I came back to the top of the stairs, she was reaching under her T-shirt and unhooking her bra. She slid one strap off one arm, then the other, and with a fast pull—like a magician—whipped free a zebra-striped padded push-up number and dropped it into the basket. She had a Frederick’s of Hollywood charge account and loved ultra-fancy and lewd underwear—bras that pushed them up and hauled them out or bras that left nothing to the imagination—but over this stuff she wore the jeans, T-shirts and cardigan sweaters of every other good suburban citizen. Frankie wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. I loved her more than anyone at the moment. Her sadness was so terrible and tender.