Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

I aimed for the basket and my clothes hit the top of the heap. “Next time I will absolutely babysit,” I told her.

“I look forward to it,” she said, picking up the load. “’Cause,” she said, shaking a finger at me, “I’m going to get stuck with Constance Poblanski.”

Chuck was making spaghetti with garlic, olive oil, and red pepper, and the smell wafted over the garage, drawing me out of my apartment even though I had just taken a long bath and was still shriveled. With wet hair dripping down my shirt, I entered the kitchen where Frankie was on the phone, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “So, we’ll see you at six on Friday. Don’t be late.” Frankie forced a laughed and hung up. “Guess who we got?” she said in a low, injured voice.

Chuck had just come home from his shift and still wore his police uniform, though he had unbuttoned the shirt. He was muscular and Italian and on the short side, and he stood over the sizzling frying pan. “Don’t get all worked up, Frank,” he said.

“I enjoy getting worked up,” she said, hotly.

“I enjoy watching you enjoy getting worked up,” I said and smiled. I took Chuck’s spoon and had a little taste.

“Two cuckoo birds,” Chuck said, flashing us a smile.

My sister could only ever get the lackluster Constance Poblanski to babysit when she wanted the sweet Laura Rossi. Frankie would always call Laura first, but Laura, without fail, would already be booked with the Andersons. Both girls lived in the neighborhood and were headed to Rutgers in the fall, and they seemed to be great friends, which was incomprehensible to Frankie. Laura Rossi was sweet and radiant while Constance Poblanski burned at a lower wattage, raising her plucked brows and flaring those elegant nostrils in a vague scorn. Laura was a nailbiter, her only beauty aids a dab of lip gloss and a plastic barrette. She had, we all agreed, an astonishing smile. God had been equally kind to Constance, though Constance fooled with Mother Nature, yanking and spraying that mass of hair to unnatural heights and streaking it an orangey-blonde. But Constance wasn’t the issue here. The issue was the Andersons—Lord and Lady Anderson, as Frankie called them—who were able to get the good babysitter. Frankie saw the whole situation as the inequitable universe dispensing the fair and virtuous Laura to the fair and virtuous Andersons, while she got stuck with Constance.

Frankie had had this petty but debilitating obsession with the Andersons for as long as they’d been her neighbors. It seemed to Frankie that the Lord and Lady were everything she and Chuck weren’t. The Andersons had money, but more importantly they acted as though they had the secret knowledge that abundance would always be their lot. Their rhododendron had grown to the size of an African elephant and bloomed flowers the size of your head. They had an interior designer who dabbled in feng shui and made sure that any bad energy that got dumped in their living room would be swept right out the front door and wouldn’t spill into their hallways and soak into their walls. They had their house professionally painted an enticing mix of beiges and browns that made me think of cake mix and icing. Frankie and Chuck had gotten on ladders and slopped their own house a color resembling French’s mustard. Well, it didn’t look that way in the can . They couldn’t quite afford the neighborhood but Frankie had insisted they try. Chuck was not infected with Anderson obsession. He was a shy, easygoing cop who loved his wife and wanted to please her. Their house was big and old and weather-beaten. With its sagging gutters it wore a frown similar to Frankie’s.

Lord Anderson was a young, stocky rheumatologist with close-clipped hair, resembling his manicured lawn. He had a kindly, long face with a full-bodied nose and a habit of standing with his hands on his hips. In the warm months he liked to pull out the garden hose and wash and wax his Infiniti. Lady Anderson had girlishly shiny hair and freckled skin. She didn’t wear makeup and her teeth were a bit jumbled, but she had glamorous bones. They often strolled the block hand in hand, their daughter Dana, the heiress, trailing them on her bike, pink and white streamers dangling from the handlebars.

As luck would have it, the heiress and my niece Melody were in the same class in the same private school, which my sister and brother-in-law couldn’t really afford. During Dental Awareness week, Melody had been cast as a cavity in a skit on personal hygiene while the Heiress Anderson got to charge in with a large paper toothbrush saving the day. “Why does that kid get to be the savior while mine gets to rot?” Frankie later yelled. It didn’t matter to Frankie that Melody was a perfect cavity. I knew this because I sat with Frankie in the audience, watching the impish and wiry Melody do her decay dance. “Some people just seem to live charmed lives,” Frankie said, shaking her head. I had to say, now that I was living with Frankie and Chuck, I enjoyed the Anderson obsession. I liked hearing tale after tale about the Lord and Lady. This preoccupation kept me from my own thoughts.

We sat down to eat, and Chuck herded the kids to the table and tied a dishtowel around Marcus’s neck. “You guys like Constance Poblanski?” Chuck asked.

“She lets us watch naked butts,” Marcus said, forking up one strand of spaghetti.

“Not real live naked butts,” Melody said. “Baboon butts. The Discovery Channel.”

“Still,” Marcus said, cocking his head to the side.

“A naked butt’s a naked butt,” Chuck said, winking. Frankie smiled. She and Chuck had been together for almost eighteen years. They met in a human sexuality class at the community college, where as an icebreaker on the first day the teacher asked the students to come up with slang terms for genitalia. When they were doing female genitals the guy Frankie had been dating volunteered, “bearded clam.” Romantically, it was over for her after that. Chuck squirmed and blushed when he was called on and finally whispered, “pussy.” Frankie, too, could barely get out “wang.”

My boyfriend Dean and I had been going out for two years, and I wasn’t sure where we were headed, but the relationship was as comfortable as slippers. I lived on Cherry Lane in Greenwich Village, Dean lived in Tribeca. We spent lots of time together with our friends, drinking beer and eating hamburgers at the Ear Inn like all of us were twenty-four instead of thirty-four. I knew I probably should have been thinking of the future. Was this relationship moving forward or had we stalled out? Did I want to get married? I thought I did. Then last fall when the leaves started to turn beautiful and crisp, Dean and my good friend Patty came over to my place, pale and somber, and told me they had something very difficult to say. I’d been defrosting my freezer, which was like the Arctic. I had bowls of hot water in there to speed up the job. I was wearing sweats and socks when they told me they’d fallen in love. They were quick to point out that they hadn’t acted on it, that they’d only spoken about deciding what was to be done, that at this point their relationship just involved words and feelings. My stomach did a flip, and I lowered myself right to the floor. I wanted to yell but found I had no voice. “Why didn’t you just screw each other and shut the hell up,” I whispered. “You think it’s easier on me that you love each other minus the screwing?”

“We were thinking of you, Fiona.”

“We love you, Fiona.”

“If you think this isn’t hard on us, Fiona, you’re mistaken.”

I couldn’t remember who said what; they seemed to be interlinked, two bodies sharing the same mind. I had an out-of-body experience. I felt myself calmly leave the premises of my body and rise to the ceiling and remain stuck there against the paint chips. We and us , they said; Fiona , they said over and over. I was no longer part of the equation. In the kitchen, chunks of ice splintered and crashed in the freezer. I thought I’d crack in two.