Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

HER FATHER IS SPELLING WITH HIS FINGER. M-O-N and then the rest is gibberish. “Slow down,” Libby tells him. He slaps the bed sheets and mimics choking her. Without language he’s been reduced to bad acting: smirks, eye rolling, mugging. There’s no subtlety; even his eyes are luminous and bald. Some days, like today, he’s just too tired to move a pen across paper. He blinks up at her and tries again, slicing his angry finger through the air. “Okay, M-O-N.” Her mind is as dull and heavy as a butter knife. “Monkey, monsoon, money.”

For a second he looks truly helpless and closes his eyes on her, on everything. From the pillow he offers up a bored, calm face; is this the face he’ll wear when he’s dead? “Do it again. I’m sorry, Dad.” Libby tries a laugh. “Pretty please with sugar on top.” She’s become a moron.

He continues to ignore her, and in their silence the room is kept alive with sound—the bleep of the heart monitor and the earnest, steady wheeze of the ventilator, poking out of his neck and pushing air into his lungs. Her dad then snaps open his eyes and slowly, as if she is brain-damaged, spells M-O-N-T-H.

“Month, for godsakes,” Libby says. He rolls his eyes to the ceiling in exaggerated, delicious contempt. Bad moods now swoop down on him in an instant and leave him puzzled and disheveled, hair poking out, gown slipping off a thin shoulder. But as quick as they come, they leave.

He looks at the slice of sky through the narrow window and patiently starts to mouth something, gesturing with his good hand, the one that isn’t large and soft as an inflatable paddle.

“October,” Libby says. “It’s the middle of October.” He raises his eyebrows, surprised. They both stare at the little slice of blue sky—they could be looking into a chlorinated pool. Where has the time gone? Libby wonders. Where has her life gone?

Libby’s dad has been in the hospital for weeks. Before then, he had a terrible cough that sounded as if he’d hack up a lung, and even though he spent hours in his garden the sun wouldn’t tan him. She remembers visiting one Saturday and watching him move unsteadily across the yard, his fingers reaching for the side of the house as the late-day sun cast his long and crooked shadow. After Labor Day he reluctantly went to the doctor and wound up here in the CCU. Each afternoon Libby takes the train from Manhattan, where she lives, to this small tree-lined town in New Jersey, the same town where she grew up, although it’s no longer familiar.

While her dad sleeps, Libby rests her head against the chair back and instantly she dreams—dreams that are filled with unpleasant smells and involve public transportation. The infectious disease doctor, who runs, doesn’t walk, now flies into the room, waking her. He makes some preliminary pokes and prods before pressing his ear to her dad’s chest, as if using the stethoscope would take too long. Before a question forms in her mind, and she has many questions, he’s gone, out the door.

Milling in the hall is the useless-though-energetic-and-good-looking oncologist, who won’t be treating the tumor clinging to her dad’s lung. This tumor, which isn’t the worst kind, she’s been informed, probably has some relatives that have taken up residence in his spine or liver. No one knows for sure since there’s nothing to be done. His heart, sorry to say, simply isn’t tough enough. Standing with the oncologist is her dad’s primary physician, a squat, morose man who delivers all news in the same monotone. Dumpy Downer—Libby’s name for him—is looking to wean her father from the ventilator, maybe send him home for a short while, bring in hospice.

Libby eyes a small bag on the nightstand marked “Libby” and realizes it’s from one of her dad’s girlfriends. Inside is a jelly doughnut, and as she takes a big bite jelly oozes out the side and a glob lands on her suit. She wipes it off, but a dark, glossy stain remains. Something smells funky and she sniffs the air, wondering if it could be her; she can’t remember when she last cleaned her five suits.

Libby stands on the platform waiting for the 8:18 to take her back to the city. Tonight her dad asked her to tell his girlfriends, who are actually all ex-girlfriends, not to visit anymore. They talk too much, was how he put it. She told him no. The girlfriends arrive in the mornings, often carpooling together, and stay for hours. They are excellent lip readers, excellent mind readers and excellent at charades. They’ve acquired the good grace that comes with age. They are a flurry of laughter and perfume. There must be people around him, she reasons to herself. She can’t imagine he’ll up and die in the face of all this activity. She boards the train and it moves swiftly through suburbia, cutting past trees and highways and people walking their dogs under a pale shine of moon. Libby’s head lolls against the dirty window as she fights sleep.

Back in her apartment, she sniffs every suit she owns and dumps them into a pile by the door. Four are food-stained and a fifth has a jagged tear from a barb that pierced through the plastic couch in the CCU waiting room and stabbed her in the thigh. “Dry cleaners,” she says aloud. She walks around her apartment in a bra and underwear, watering the brown plants, eating a ham sandwich, and holding counsel with herself. “I want the morphine given every two hours, regardless of whether he asks for it. He’s not going to ask until it’s too late.” She nearly trips over a body bag of laundry in the middle of the floor. “Laundry,” she shouts. She’s almost out of clean clothes, but there’s no time to wash them. How can she be so weary and buzzed at the same time? “How am I coping?” she asks, cupping her face. She tosses herself onto the bed, finishes eating her sandwich and then curls up under the covers, blowing crumbs toward the wall.

In the morning, she’s forced to put on the least sour and wrinkled of the suits, and unfortunately it’s the one with the tear in the butt. She stumbles down the stairs with the bag of dirty laundry, the suits piled on top, and lurches up Eighth Avenue to the laundromat. The suit on the top of the heap is the color of lime juice. Libby heads for the nearest trash can and dumps it, and she also dumps the purple one with the gold buttons because it too, she realizes for the first time, is butt ugly. Without thinking, she stuffs the remaining suits in with her dirty clothes. At the laundromat Hugh the laundry attendant tosses the bag into a giant bin and tells her it will be ready “pronto tonto.”

Libby works at the end of a long wing in the semi-vacant legal department of a large corporation, where the air smells of whiskey and cigars and she has very little to do. Gautreaux, Bilox and Sodder, senior attorneys, arrive late each morning, take three-hour alcoholic lunches and return midafternoon, crocked. Each man weaves toward his office, shuts his door and falls asleep on his respective couch. Gautreaux, the most long-winded of the three, sometimes tells her boring stories after these lunches, always ending with a parable or lesson. “You see, girlie,” he’ll say, “you see where this is going?” Often he forgets Libby, too, is a lawyer and asks her to water his plants, as he lies helpless and drunken and gurgling on his couch. Once he asked her to call his tailor in Hong Kong and order him another pair of “those natty herringbone trousers.”

There are two actual workers, who tirelessly seem to do the work of the whole department: Mr. Muskon and his trusted assistant Miss Perry. Apparently, there once was a departmental secretary, known as Imelda because she was always sneaking off to buy shoes, who disappeared and can’t be accounted for.

Acquisition forms arrive midmorning each day in a wire cart pushed by Marianne Switzer. First Bilox, the one with the bowtie, initials the stack, then Libby, Gautreaux, and Sodder. Afterwards, Libby rings Marianne Switzer, who arrives twelve minutes later with her wire cart to whisk the forms to the third floor for further processing. In a nutshell, this is Libby’s job. When she asked Gautreaux about more work, he’d said, “All in good time, Pearl.” Who was Pearl? She’d started to look for something else, but then her dad got sick, and now she’s stuck in her no-job job.