Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

MRS. BILLINGSLEY ASKS Rachel’s mother, not Rachel, if Rachel would like to accompany them to the beach for two weeks. “There’s no television, no AC. It’s almost embarrassingly primitive, but Rachel is just so entertaining. Such a delight. I know she’d make my girls happy.”

This is how Mrs. Billingsley puts it to Rachel’s mother over the phone, one evening after Rachel has been particularly engaging at tennis, and Rachel’s mother, in her outdated kitchen, still humiliated by her divorce, her hatchback, her teeth, replies: “Yes! Yes! Absolutely!” without even asking Rachel if going to the beach for two weeks with the Billingsleys is something she wants to do.

If Rachel’s mother’s own life is unsalvageable, her daughter still has a shot. She pictures what Rachel can look like in five years if she goes to the beach and puts on a good show for these folks, meets the people they know. If Rachel is willing to do her little song-and-dance thing at night while the Billingsleys drink gin, tell some of those Helen Keller jokes she picked up at summer camp while the Billingsleys scrape crab claws with silver forks, teach the talentless Billingsley girls how to macramé, lip-sync, hula hoop; Rachel, if she’s lucky, might end up as decadently bored and unafraid as they are.

Of course, Rachel will have to learn how to starve herself, how to volley, how to operate aging dick, but these are small prices to pay. Rachel’s mother can at least teach her something about the not-eating. Think of your hunger as a wheelchair , she’ll tell Rachel before she leaves for the trip. Something you can never get out of, but something that will get you where you want to go, even if it’s uncomfortable .

“I don’t want to go,” Rachel says, when she learns of the plans.

“Too late now,” her mother answers.

Rachel feels like hired help, a jester for the elite. Rachel’s mother feels something akin to hope, like the hand of God is touching her for the first time in a decade.

The Billingsleys fly to the beach in a private King Air twin-turboprop. The girls, Devlin, fifteen, and Davenport, seventeen, straddle Rachel agewise and know her only through the tennis clinic that Rachel’s mother paid for, like her summer camp, on a low-interest Discover card. They buckle themselves loosely in adjacent leather seats across from Rachel and their mother and exhale in unison.

“Was there not a Lear?” Devlin says.

“Or a Citation?” Davenport adds. Their voices pout but their mouths do not, as if their faces are afflicted by a practiced palsy.

“The girls are used to jets,” Mrs. Billingsley explains. “But this is what we get when the men have first dibs.”

“Fuck men,” Devlin says.

“No thanks,” Davenport answers. “I’m going to be a lesbo.”

Rachel stares at the sisters and they stare back in such a way and for such a time that Rachel begins to wonder if this is her cue to begin entertaining everyone. To start diffusing things, as she always does, with her nonthreatening plumpness, her simple face, her clever puns. It’s why she was invited, after all: to do what she does at tennis. Introduce the joyless to the concept of joy—if not in a way they can experience, at least in a way they can witness.

“You know any lesbos?” Davenport asks. “You went to camp. Camps are crawling with lesbos.”

Rachel waits for Mrs. Billingsley to chime in, to say something like, “Davenport, please,” or “Knock it off, girls.” But instead, Mrs. Billingsley tilts her head back for a nap even though the plane has yet to depart. “Lesbos,” she snorts with her eyes closed. “What goes where?”

Rachel’s mother works in the basement of a bank counting checks with the eraser end of a pencil. She hears three things, eight hours a day, five days a week: the thipthipthip of the erasers, the asylum hum of the fluorescents, the cheery, insufferable banter of her co-workers: all women, all obese, all over sixty. All of them inexplicably—infuriatingly—content with their lives.

“One of them told me a recipe for layered pudding today,” Rachel’s mother tells Rachel the night before her trip. “You should have heard her. You would have thought she was explaining how to deliver a baby. ‘First there’s a layer of vanilla pudding. Then there’s a layer of strawberries. Then there’s a layer of nondairy whipped topping.’” Rachel’s mother groans. “It’s called Cool Whip, you idiot. It doesn’t make you sound smart to call it something else. It makes you sound like someone who’s worked in the basement of a bank her whole, pathetic life who thinks calling Cool Whip nondairy whipped topping puts a stamp in her passport. Please. Like she even has a passport.”

Rachel’s mother looks hard at Rachel. “This is what it’s come to, Rachel. Pudding people. For a while there, your father and I had a chance to make something of ourselves. We were on the verge of a country club. But now? The city park.”

Rachel remembers the first time she walked in on her father. He was standing in front of the bedroom mirror, using a can of hair-spray for a microphone. “Who here’s happily married?” he asked the mirror. “Can I get a show of hands?” Her father squinted his eyes, as if he were looking out past stage lights and into an audience. “What’s that? Five? Six? Well, there you have it, people. Proof of aliens.”

Rachel’s mother puts both of her hands on Rachel’s shoulders. “This is not a trip to the beach, Rachel. It’s a trip to school. Study these people like you’re going to be tested. Someday, you could spend a third of your year in a beach chair. You just have to work at it hard enough and then—abracadabra!—you won’t have to work at all.”

Rachel’s mother smiles. She sees Rachel living like someone in a soap opera: lethargic with wealth. Her tan arm, now thin, stacked with bracelets to the elbow. A silver-haired man in linen shorts at her side. Rachel’s mother sees Rachel with a husband so taken by her full lips and visible hipbones that he rewards her yearly with a new Lexus. Rachel, on the other hand, sees nothing but a container of Cool Whip. She’s eating out of it with a ladle. Or rather: her hands.

In the air, somewhere between Delaware and the beach the sisters insist on calling “Ass Island,” Davenport gestures loosely at the plane’s amenities: a narrow drawer lined with packs of spearmint gum. A first aid cabinet equipped not for engine failure but hangovers, stocked with envelopes of Goody’s Headache Powder. A breadbasket filled with boxes of animal crackers and buckled into a spare seat, like a neighbor’s child the Billingsleys have agreed to transport but are set on ignoring.

“Animal crackers,” scoffs Devlin. “You see any babies up here?”

“In your vagina,” Davenport says.

Devlin and Davenport lean across the narrow aisle to punch one another in the upper arms for a time, back and forth like papier-mâché marionettes, until their arms are red and welted from shoulder to elbow. It’s as if both have been grabbed and shaken by a middle-aged lover who’s discovered he’s been jilted for a pool boy.

“Trucey trucey?” Devlin asks.

“Vodka juicy,” Davenport answers.

At this, the sisters set about making cocktails, and Rachel watches, spellbound. The girls are a study in contradiction, equal parts crude and classy, mundane and mesmerizing. Their hair is eternally slept on, piled on their heads like Caucasian turbans. Their silk dresses are shapeless but clingy, their expensive loafers intentionally mashed into slides. Their bodies, fed only candy, seem to consist of neither muscle nor fat. They can slump in the corner of a tennis court biting Skittles in half; they can scuff across a tarmac with unwieldy handbags concealing liquor; they can slouch in leather seats, knees agape to show a pearly slice of panties and still, somehow, exude regality. Their only accessible flaws, Devlin’s fingernails and Davenport’s bottom lip, both of which have been habitually and vigorously chewed, only serve, in Rachel’s opinion, to humanize them, to mark them as either inwardly anxious or outwardly bored.