Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

He’s laughing without sound. On his pad he’s written, “Would you want to go to ventilator wing? What kind of characters are up there?” He’s drawn a picture of a skinny little figure covered in a cobweb. She shakes her head. Why make decisions? She wants to hang out. She’s got this crazy routine down.

But then he does the unthinkable. He reaches for her hand, tells her how much he loves her, how everything will be okay. He’s reaching for movement, to move beyond this moment; his decision’s been made. How dare this hospital rush them, how dare they. She simply isn’t ready. She heads for the door, throws it open and yells into the quiet, pale hallway, “DO NOT RUSH US!”

The nurses’ station is unoccupied, but on a wheelchair by the door is the Seagram’s box filled with clean, folded laundry. She touches it, and it’s still warm.

FOR DAYS NOW SOMETHING HAD REEKED IN THE basement. None of us went down there, no laundry had been done and our mother had to hand-wash her stuff in the sink. She now stood in the kitchen in her pantyhose and mink, cursing, as she waved the blow drier over her fancy black bra while Franz waited for her in the living room.

“Find that stink!” she yelled suddenly, chasing my little sisters around the dining room table. “Or I’ll throw all of you out.”

“Good!” Daffodil yelled. She was nine. “I’ll go live at Shoshanna’s. They don’t have to eat roast beef every single night!”

“Shoshanna’s, my ass. Here, you want some variety? How about an eyeround?” Mom opened the refrigerator and tossed a package of beef that landed next to Daffodil’s foot.

Feeling hungry, I picked up the piece of meat. “Hey Mom, 300 degrees for an hour?” I asked.

“350. 45 minutes.”

“We should hire someone to go down the cellar and find the stink,” Dorrie shrieked. “Like the boy who cleaned the rain gutters.” Dorrie was eleven and geeky with long, jagged teeth that didn’t fit right in her mouth. She wasn’t pretty like me or Daffodil. She looked more like our mother, big-toothed and sulky. Both my sisters, though, looked Italian while I looked more French, I thought. “We could hire someone,” Dorrie said again.

“Do you think I’m made of money, Miss Priss?”

“Then send Franz,” I offered.

Mom’s faced flushed and her hands flew up to her hair. “We are not asking Franz because you three will take your little behinds down there, find the stink and get rid of it. Do you hear me, Dani?” She wasn’t fooling me; she believed Franz was too good for our stink.

Mom had met Franz through the freezer plan. Once a month he would come with his list and Mom would check off what we needed—two packets of pork chops, a crown roast, a London broil—and the frozen hunks of meat would arrive in individual frosty plastic pouches, which my sisters and I would unload into the gigantic freezer in the basement. Now with the stink, we unloaded right into the refrigerator.

As Mom glared at us, a skinny, sagging breast slipped out of her mink coat and gazed at us.

“Your tit, Mom,” I said. Luckily, I hadn’t inherited that gene; mine were full and firm, perfect handfuls. But I was seventeen.

Inggy stared into the mud, smiling, and I felt drunk all over, even my fingers felt stupid. The crème de menthe and Quaalude sloshed in my stomach as the band played the theme song to “Hawaii Five-O,” and we spun on the sidelines with our shakers high in the air. The noise swelled in my bones and Inggy’s bones and everyone’s bones—as if all bones were connected; I could tell Inggy felt it too. She closed her eyes and looked to the sky as if she were praying.

Ingrid Oberlander, my best friend, was the color of milk with shiny blonde hair hanging down to her butt. At 5’11”, she was the boniest and most beautiful person I knew. She wanted to be a psychoanalyst and carried around a bent-up copy of The Portable Jung and gave me personality tests. We found out that I was ENFP, meaning I was lively, deeply psychic, prone to ulcers, a bit wishy-washy and a softy at heart.

Inggy swooped down and hugged me tightly. “My friend,” she said.

“No, my friend,” I said.

When the music stopped, Lauralynn Figuero, captain of our lame squad, shouted “Hey! You!” and we got into a line for attitude time.

“Hey you,” we sang, pointing our fingers at the school across the field and shaking our hips.

“Hey you, sitting over there

you’d better get your ass right out of that chair,

because I’m telling you once

and you better beware

we’re gonna fuck you right on up,

WE’RE-GONNA-FUCK-YOU-RIGHT-ON-UP,

we’regonnafuckyourightonup.”

We danced, lifting our skirts and shaking our asses at the band as we shouted the chorus once again. No one paid attention to us, and we started knocking into each other, moving in cranky, drunken circles. The sky looked like it was ready to break open.

Ben sat on the bench with ice on his leg, scanning the crowd as he chewed on a pretzel. He was a middle linebacker and one of my favorite people. Once he was my boyfriend for ten days until all the fun went out of it. Pamela Zlotkin, who stood in the bleachers with the drill team, waved to him and mouthed his name. Rumor was her parents spent a thousand dollars to send her to modeling school. She was no better-looking now; she was still an attractive girl in a horsey kind of way, and like a caribou she migrated in a herd to the water fountain, cafeteria line, wall mirror outside of the gym. She wasn’t a friend of mine but she was all right, I supposed.

The rain started lightly. I felt it on the top of my head and the rim of my ears. Some kids in the band opened umbrellas. My muscles were tight and cold, and I kicked my leg up alongside my body to stretch it out. I did a sloppy back handspring and muddied my hands. I was restless and numb at the same time, and I let the rain soak me. From where I stood I counted three guys in the bleachers I’d slept with, another leaning on the fence. Then I counted Ben sitting on the sidelines and even Kipper Coleman, the waterboy, because he was kind of cute in a goofy way. I moved in half a circle and counted two more guys on the field and the assistant to the assistant coach, who didn’t really count because I only gave him a blow job. Then I lost count. I rubbed on cherry lip gloss, blinking into the rain. I’d never been in love. I wondered about love and was there a right love and a wrong love—was getting naked with a cute boy and watching his eyes soften and feeling my heart pound high in my chest—was that a little like the real thing?

Yesterday, with one hand, Ben had swept his bed clean of socks and sweats and CDs. I stood naked beside him looking down at my breasts, feeling good. The small of his back was pimply; I touched him there as I had many times, and then we snuggled on the same warm and funky-smelling pillow, smoking what was left of a joint. It didn’t make me high, but it made me laugh inside my head for about thirty seconds. Ben’s mom, Connie, was coming home soon, and together the three of us would eat spaghetti and meatballs. The Stones sang in the background.

I placed my palm over Ben’s heart and felt it beating there, strong and quick, rising up to meet my hand. A boy’s heart, I thought. The dark blue light of dusk filled the room. I kissed his collarbone, running my fingers over his chest until he leaned down and took my face between his hands. He looked at me hard, not like he thought I was pretty, but as if he were memorizing me. I let him look at me like that until I started to feel ugly. “Hey,” I said, squirming.

He blinked, smiled, then kissed my forehead, my nose, my cheeks, my lips. “I like you, Dani,” he whispered.