Lauren Holmes: Barbara the Slut and Other People

A month after Beth said she was coming to see me and then didn’t, she called. She said she felt bad about the birthday not-surprise and about the salsa dancing, and she was going to visit me for real. I told her I wasn’t going to hold my breath in case she couldn’t find a parking spot on my street and just kept driving until she got to Canada. She said very funny. She was coming Saturday.

On Saturday morning I made omelets for me and Kelly. Kelly fed half of hers to Muscle. Muscle was a Pomeranian. Kelly shaved him in the summer and it actually did look like he had muscles. But now he had long hair and Kelly called him Pammy because she said he didn’t have a penis in the winter. I preferred to call him Pammy year-round because Muscle was a stupid name for a dog. He was very cute and I loved him. He wasn’t mean like small dogs are mean. He would just sit and keep you company while you were watching TV or eating dinner or taking a crap or whatever. At night he liked to sleep between Kelly’s side and her arm, with his head on her shoulder. When Kelly was out he slept between my side and my arm. He loved to be under the covers except for his head. A tiny, very hairy, yellow person.

• • •

Beth called to say that she would be there at one. She got there at twelve forty. Beth had a lead foot. She drove sixty miles an hour in towns, and ninety on the highways. She drove with her left leg up on the dashboard, her left hand holding a cigarette and resting on the steering wheel. It always seemed likely that I was going to die when I drove with her. One time in particular she was driving seventy through town, on a road full of potholes, and the car sounded like it was losing big pieces. I was absolutely certain I was going to die. She called me a pussy for holding on to the door.

I let Beth in and she gave me a big hug and said, “I love those slippers more and more every day.” My mom gave me these shearling slippers when Tiffany broke up with me and I was spending a lot of time in my dorm room. Now they were full of holes. It felt good to see Beth.

Since I hadn’t known if she was going to show up, I hadn’t made any plans. Now I was thinking we could take a long walk with Pammy. Talk about life and internet dating. Get sandwiches and eat in the park. Watch a game and cook something healthy, something that Beth could learn from without me explicitly teaching her. I tried to do that when we lived together, to indeterminate effect. When I moved out I thought I’d be glad not to have to take care of her. Now I kind of missed it. At least she showed some appreciation. My sister showed none.

“What should we do?” I asked Beth, thinking she would say, “Whatever you want.”

“Shopping!” she said. I had never known Beth to want to go shopping before. Fine, I could do shopping. Beth said she wanted jeans and stuff for yoga and a perfume sample for a girl she worked with. Kelly said she couldn’t come because she had work to do, but she made a list of stores for us to go to in SoHo. When we left she was taking turns putting coats of paint on her nails and her dog’s nails.

“I think nail polish is toxic for dogs,” said Beth.

“This is dog nail polish,” said Kelly. It was yellow and Pammy was licking it.

“What do you two want to do for dinner?” I said.

“Something free,” said Kelly.

“What, I buy you dinner?” I said.

“Oh would you?” She smiled.

“Let’s cook here,” I said.

“Sure,” said Beth.

“You know what I feel like? Diner-style grilled cheese and french fries and root beer,” said Kelly. So much for teaching Beth how to make something healthy.

“Fine with me,” I said. “Beth?”

“Sure.”

• • •

On the way to the subway Beth and I went into a store with crafts and stuff. I tried to wait outside but Beth wanted to try on all the jewelry and have me tell her how it looked. I thought all the jewelry looked the same. The crafts looked like stuff that Kelly’s friends made, maybe worse.

Beth bought a ring. We looked in a junk shop next to the subway station and then got on the train. We sat down next to a deaf couple who were signing to each other and laughing hysterically.

“What’s been going on?” said Beth.

“Not much,” I said. “Work, bad dates, work.”

“Bad dates,” she said. “There’s no way your dates are as bad as my dates.” She told me about this guy who was a regular at the restaurant. He turned out to be married with kids but took his wedding ring off when he went there to eat lunch. She said she didn’t like being the other woman but she couldn’t stop. Before that there was another guy. Her age, but a socially conservative Republican. They couldn’t talk to each other about anything but they also didn’t need to. They were always having sex. Then it turned out that he was not actually her age. He was still in college. He was the head of the campus conservatives, a group that we had not taken seriously when we went there.

Back when we lived together I would have given her a lecture about both of these guys. Now I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like the lectures had worked. All of Beth’s lovers were basically the same. Good in bed but deeply morally flawed. In college she had been less discriminating, but she had developed this particular taste in the last four years. It seemed like she thought good men and good sex were mutually exclusive. They probably had been back in college. Good guys didn’t know what they were doing, and bad guys did. I didn’t do an anthropological study on this or anything. But I know that I thought I knew what I was doing and I definitely didn’t. The one nice thing that Tiffany did for me was to tell me that I didn’t know what I was doing, although I have never been more ashamed in my life. And obviously I didn’t improve quickly enough to not get cheated on. But Tiffany taught me that you have to assume you know nothing. I do think that makes me better in bed. At least less arrogant. Basically this is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever thought about.

I didn’t want to talk to Beth about sex, but I did want to tell her about the girls I had been meeting on the internet. I wanted to ask her if she thought I had tried hard enough and could give up. I had been on eleven first dates and two second dates. I had sex with two of the first-date girls. The first girl I wouldn’t have slept with, except her grandma died between when we were e-mailing and when we got together. When she halfheartedly suggested we go back to her place, I felt like I should take her up on it. I pretended I was really into it. There wasn’t anything wrong with her. But nothing made me feel drawn to her, other than how cheerful she was trying to be despite obviously being so sad. It ended up being very high energy, very good sex. But we both understood that that was that. The second girl I had higher hopes for. The sex was good in a more routine way, but I think she dated a lot. My friends might have called her a slut, but I didn’t have any friends. And when I was in high school my mom sat me down to talk about the word “slut” and to give me a general lecture about how to make her proud despite my being a man.

That girl never called me back. But before I could talk to Beth about any of this, we got to SoHo.

Beth wanted to go to the jeans store first. She tried on about a hundred pairs. She didn’t like the way any of them looked because she was still a little bit fat.

“This brand does not fit well at all,” she said. “Maybe they fit Kelly but she’s a lot shorter than me.”

Because Beth was thin and then fat and now almost thin again, it was like she didn’t remember being fat. She didn’t even act fat when she was fat. When we were living together she found out she had high cholesterol and said, “But I thought that was for fat people.”