Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

I either slept twelve to fourteen hours a night or couldn’t keep still. I couldn’t bear to be in my apartment on Cherry Lane. I couldn’t bear to sleep in my bed. I wrestled with the ancient two-ton sofa bed in my living room and finally managed to open it, but it had a powerful defective spring and sprang shut like a venus flytrap, capturing me in the mattress. I shimmied out, but every muscle in my body hurt for days. I called in sick to work and bought stacks of magazines. I limped to Washington Square Park, furiously flipping pages but unable to concentrate. A pigeon flew up into my face, and I swatted it in the head with a copy of The Economist . I railed at Patty and Dean late at night, alone in my apartment. I handled the whole thing terribly; of course, terrible was my only option. Initially, I had our friends’ sympathy but after a while I lost their company. Around the holidays a few friends told me I was a drag to be around. They told me I had to get over it already. “Easy for you to say,” I spewed, feeling my words roil with something rank and foamy. “No one’s saying it’s easy,” they’d counter. Couldn’t they see I’d been thrown to the ground and didn’t know how to get up? And through it all Dean and Patty remained together, sharing their words and feelings , and presumably screwing, too.

By March I was teeming with vile thoughts and rage, probably trailing a slime residue. My boss, the remarkable Mr. Snodgrass, had called me into his office and shut the door. “Look, Fiona,” he said. “I’m gonna finagle disability for you. I’ll send you to a doctor friend of mine and you’ll take some time off, work this through.” I didn’t want free time on my hands, even though I’d come to loathe my job in member services at Wildlife of America. I once loved the work, but these past few months I’d lost my zest and found myself getting snarly with the members. “I’m going to report you,” said a Doris Pitts, a twenty-year member, when I told her I didn’t care if she was a twenty-minute member. “Wait your turn, Laverne,” was how I put it.

It had all gone down so easily. I saw the doctor, the paperwork was filled out; I sublet my place on Cherry Lane, packed up some boxes, and within a week moved to Frankie and Chuck’s in Little Silver, New Jersey. When I’d called Frankie I wept so hard I could barely speak. “Those bastards, those double-crossers, those fuckers,” she said. At first I thought she meant Dean and Patty, but then realized she was lumping together all the bastards, double-crossers and fuckers we’d ever known. She sighed and said, “You just don’t know who you’ll fall in love with.” This made me cry harder. “You come here,” she said. “Live in the apartment.” “I love you,” she yelled over my tears. “I love you back,” I yelled. We yelled about many things, especially all the things we cherished and despised, working ourselves up until we were both ecstatic and exhausted.

Coming to New Jersey was like taking a bath. At least I felt clean. I rode a bike every day and did crosswords. I drank tea at the Local Drip and met a few local drips. Little Silver, I discovered, actually had a five-and-dime called Five & Dime. I loved to cruise the dusty aisles, examining the junk crammed on the shelves in wobbly heaps. I’d buy my nephew and niece some tchotchkes: yo-yos, some glitter and glue. I’d buy myself glow-in-the-dark stars, a plastic cigarette holder, plastic daisy flip-flops, a Magilla Gorilla wall clock, conch shells, magenta nail polish, seahorse erasers, corn-on-the-cob refrigerator magnets. I borrowed the Babcocks’ mutt and walked the beach, wearing a windbreaker and the daisy flip-flops. I liked lifting my face to the sun. Every week I cashed my disability check and carried around hundreds of dollars; I didn’t have many places to spend it since Frankie and Chuck wouldn’t take any money from me. I’d flip through Frankie’s recipe books and make menu decisions and then bike over to the Grand Union and buy egg noodles and butter and cream and various cuts of beef and chicken, and I’d make us beef stroganoff and meatloaf and mashed potatoes, honey mustard chicken and roasted potatoes. I played Barbershop Play-Doh with my niece and nephew. I’d send the blue dough spouting through the holes on the plastic figures’ heads and then I’d give them chic haircuts with the plastic scissors. When Chuck worked nights, Frankie pulled out moldy-smelling games she’d saved from when we were teenagers. We drank Bloody Marys and ate tortilla chips and I’d wear my Five & Dime tiara as we played Mystery Date, hoping not to open the door on Poindexter.

The next night I made stuffed cabbage, and after dinner Chuck washed the dishes and the kids dried them. Frankie was still in her white X-ray technician uniform and white clogs as she peered out from behind the living room curtain. Lord Anderson stood on his lawn, one hand on his hip, the other holding a cell phone to his ear as he made a wide circle on the grass. The sun was setting and gave the neighborhood a warm glow.

“Just look at him,” Frankie said.

“And?” I said.

“I bet he can get it up,” she whispered to me. “I bet he does the Lady just fine.”

The Lord bobbed his head in elaborate nods, as in: Of course, just fine, sure buddy, you bet . “Yes, yes, yes,” Frankie said. “The magic word at the palace.”

“Frankie, he’s kind of an ordinary guy, if you ask me.”

She snickered. “He’s gonna get grass stains,” she said, referring to his socks. Then, as if on cue, Lady Anderson appeared on the steps holding his sneakers. “See, she intuits his every need,” Frankie said. The Lord turned and gave his wife a wave and continued nodding his ordinary head. Lady Anderson threw one of his sneakers and it landed next to him, and as she tossed the other he moved in her direction and got clocked on the ear.

“Huh!” I said, elbowing Frankie, who almost looked disappointed.

Frankie was convinced that the Andersons always did the right thing. Once when the town had wanted to open the dead end at the end of their development to make an alternate route for traffic, the Andersons held a block meeting in their creamy home and served wine and brie while they outlined a plan of action against the proposal. Frankie believed because their lives were blessed they could afford such generosity. My sister had once held a block meeting herself. She stood on her crumbling stoop handing out flyers while snow fell from the clouds. I remembered this; I took the train from New York to spend the day with her, and I wound up watching her through the window from my seat on the couch as she yelled about zoning ordinances, her teeth chattering. “Why didn’t you invite them in?” I later asked. “The house’s a mess.” But her house was always a mess, and at least people would have been warm. “ Who would invite the whole block in?” she asked. Well, a year later the Andersons would, and it was just another blow to my sister, proving that she would never have membership in that elite league to which the Andersons belonged.

A couple days before I had stopped in Wawa for an ice pop. I was standing over the freezer, debating between orange and piña colada when this flirty guy swooped in next to me and reached for a toasted almond bar. As we both stood in line at the counter, the guy in front of me pulled out a gun and aimed it at the young slack-jawed clerk. “Keep it quiet. Open the drawer. Empty the bills,” he said.

The clerk did just that, handing a short stack of bills to the thief, who thrust them into his pocket. “Everybody,” the thief said as he reached the door, “Hands where I can see them, hands where I can see them.” I held my ice pop in the air and so did the guy behind me. “Count to sixty,” he instructed us as he darted through the door and into the sunshine.