Beautiful Girls Read online

  “Dad, you can kiss mine.”

  “Go,” he writes. “I’ll sleep.”

  Libby is suddenly so tired, so very tired. She stiffly lowers herself into a chair. Does he really think she can just leave? Each time this happens, she is frightened to think that he might believe she really will leave, that her leaving would be all right with him. She wonders what kind of a life he imagines she has in the city while he is here. “Won’t you be lonely without me?” she asks.

  “Boring?” he writes. “Hanging out with the old man?”

  It’s true, dying is boring and tedious among all the other terrible things ascribed to it.

  “Boyfriends?” he writes.

  “Not at the moment,” she says.

  “None in this joint,” he writes. She frowns. He shrugs with a small smile.

  “Pain in the ass,” he scribbles on his pad, pointing to himself. She nods. He points to the same words, and then points to Libby. She half-smiles. He writes the word “Talking,” circles it, and then draws a diagonal line through it. In solidarity, she zippers her lip.

  On TV, Fred Astaire dances across the screen. “Fred again,” he mouths. Every time they turn on the TV Fred seems to be swinging around a pole or dipping Ginger. Such poise, such dexterity, such sheer joy. Fred exhausts them. Her dad reaches for her hand and closes his eyes. As he falls asleep, he slides down the pillows and rests lump-like in the middle of the bed. The ventilator keeps a steady, dull rhythm. Something livelier, like a salsa, would better encourage health and healing, she thinks. As he sleeps, his fingers fly up to the ventilator and he wakes. It’s been weeks, but he still hasn’t gotten used to the tube protruding from his neck. Often he makes like Frankenstein’s monster, jutting his arms out in front of him, widening his eyes and letting his mouth go slack. “Your kind of poison,” he once scribbled on a pad.

  “Not anymore,” she’d snapped.

  Before her no-job job, and before law school, Libby worked on the production crew of low-budget horror/sci-fi movies that went straight to video. The actors were snarly and unprofessional, the pay was crap and the hours spilled into each other, leaving her with no time for a life. They often shot several movies at once, and in holding at any given time there might have been a group of corpses playing poker, assorted fanged creatures complaining about the air-conditioning, and gross-out, flesh-eating lumps chowing down on meatball heroes. Libby raced from set to set, where several times a day she’d get chewed out for not doing something she hadn’t known she was supposed to do in the first place. There were some compensations: Libby, who was never good with clothes, had Jane, her best friend in wardrobe, help her dress when she was dating the cute though underachieving cyclops, Peter. Jane would flip through racks and come up with something chic yet understated, maybe slutty footwear; there was always plenty of this stuff on hand for the hapless heroine whose job was to traipse unwittingly through the cool, serene world before meeting early doom.

  One day when none of the bloody corpses was cooperating—one even had the nerve to snap gum while lying on a stone slab under a fake moon—and the director endlessly futzed with the lighting, Libby parked herself behind a tombstone and filled out law school applications.

  “But you like the ghoulies,” her dad had said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, all right.”

  “I’m going to be a lawyer. It’s great news, dad.”

  “I’ll say. You can write my will. You get everything. Make sure none of my girlfriends get anything.” Ironically, he is generous to a fault. He bought Geri a barbecue, Sue an aquarium, and Mary a front-end loader, even when she had moved to ex-girlfriend status. He didn’t expect much in return and rarely phoned the girlfriends. He claimed to hate the phone, referring to it as the “squawk box,” and yet he called Libby every Saturday without fail.

  Early the next morning, Libby puts on a coat over her bra and underwear and heads to the laundromat, but Hugh can’t find her laundry bag. “It’s huge,” Libby says, cornering him by the fabric softener. “Where could it have gone?” She tries to remember what was in there—shirts, jeans, fuzzy slippers.

  “Man,” Hugh says, dejectedly. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Find it!” she says, giving him her address. “Apartment 2G. Two.” She holds up two fingers. “G as in goddamn it.”

  At home, she pulls out her horror clothes, a speckled mess of paint- and fake-blood-splattered T-shirts and holey jeans. So comfy, she’d forgotten.

  A handsome young kid who reminds Libby of Neil Lubin, who was supposed to ask her to the prom but never did, pushes a wire cart down the east wing as she sits at Imelda’s desk. “Filing?” he asks. Libby gives him her letter to Gautreaux’s tailor, requesting another pair of the size 42 herringbone trousers with a little more room in the seat, please. The handsome kid puts it in his empty cart and winks at her before speeding the single sheet down the hall to the filing room.

  The women’s bathroom in the east wing is always empty, with Imelda gone and Miss Perry not seeming to have the need, but today someone pees in unison with Libby. They exit the stalls at the same time, and Libby stands face-to-face with Miss Perry, who eyes Libby’s outfit with concern. As Libby washes her hands, staring into her raw and crusty eyes in the mirror, she suddenly confides to Miss Perry about her dad.

  “Dear, you must go to him now. Give me your work,” Miss Perry says, kindness and duty shining in her eyes.

  “But I don’t have any.”

  Miss Perry looks at her incredulously. “Well, then you must go now.” She ushers Libby to the east wing coat closet, and by this time Libby is crying, crying because why hadn’t she gone to the prom? So when Miss Perry accidentally grabs Bilox’s coat—long and black, woven with a touch of cashmere—Libby is mildly aware it isn’t hers, but what difference does it make at a time like this? Little Bilox, tidy and delicate as an egg in a nest, is just her size, and she grabs her token and flees to the subway.

  When Bilox comes in the next day wearing her coat, at first Libby thinks he’s just being polite by not mentioning the mix-up. But when he leaves for an early appointment, he slips into her velvet-collared wool coat and waves at the room before departing.

  It’s not that surprising when the sepsis comes. Her dad’s body has been invaded at too many points and the armies of antibodies wave a white flag. A ridiculous fever shakes his entire body, a smoldering heat rises from his limbs, and the back of his head, which has been pressed against a pillow for weeks, reveals a strange and snarled hairdo.

  Sepsis isn’t a bad way to go, the Dumpy Downer tells her. The toxic shock brings on delirium and then coma, after which her dad would float away to a better place, leaving behind his soggy body. Her dad wears a finger cap to monitor his oxygenation, which isn’t good, and in his furor he pulls it off and the machine begins a steady ding. Libby places the cap on her own finger and the room is quiet again. Why didn’t she fight with that Gestapo nurse yesterday—let him have the damned milkshake! Really, what are they doing here? She doesn’t know if she’s done right by her father, and she’s not sure he’s done right by her. He’s abandoning ship, and she blames him a little.

  Libby walks the twenty blocks from Penn Station to her apartment just to feel the cold breath of air on her face. On the way, she stops in a Korean market and buys a beer and drinks it out of a paper bag. It’s late, but when she gets to her door she finds Hugh sitting on the stoop, holding a bag of laundry as if it is a small child. “Maybe you’d like this,” he says.

  “You can’t give me someone else’s laundry,” she says, peering into the bag.

  “It’s been in the lost and found for a year, man.” He looks at her kindly. “You could probably use some underwear, right?”

  “Well, you’re sure this is nobody’s?” Maybe there are some towels inside. She needs a clean towel. Bingo. Inside are four towels, several aprons, knee socks, a large shapeless sweatshirt with many zippered pockets, and a daisy-printed muumuu.<
br />
  And so this becomes her routine: in the mornings, Libby pulls on her soft and comfy horror clothes and puts Bilox’s coat over the colorful, shabby mess. Then she dashes to the office, sits at Imelda’s desk chewing a nail, waits for Marianne Switzer and her wire cart, runs the forms in to Bilox, then Gautreaux, then Sodder, adds her own initials in four minutes flat, phones Marianne Switzer for a pickup, dashes down the hall at the sound of the breakfast cart, shovels a doughnut into her mouth, tosses Miss Perry a buttered sesame bagel, snatches Bilox’s coat from the east wing coat closet, runs for the elevators, thinks bad thoughts all the way to the lobby, flies through the double doors, takes the shuttle across town, hops on the 2 or 3 to Penn Station, scrambles for a ticket, steps onto the Jersey-bound train and falls into a wicked hot sleep.

  Libby’s mother calls late one night from Chicago, where she’s married to a placid radiologist. “Tell me how I can help,” she says.

  “Do you want to see Dad?”

  “Well, no, not that,” she says. “I’ll come visit you!”

  “But I’m never here.”

  Today Libby’s cab sits in a traffic jam en route to the hospital. She pays the driver and gets out and walks, her feet crunching over autumn leaves. Directly across from the hospital is a mini-mall with a deli, a clothes shop and a laundromat. Above the stores are apartments with tiny curtained windows. I should move here, she thinks, digging her hands in Bilox’s pockets, which are filled with crumpled bills, sticks of gum, train tickets, ATM receipts.

  Her dad’s pulled through the sepsis, and he’s looking good. In fact, as he becomes sicker he’s more alert and the color has returned to his cheeks. Maybe this is some kind of crazy antibiotic flush, a crazy antibiotic buzz.

  A boisterous nurse with a smock that pulls across her stomach announces it’s time for cognitive tests. “Mr. Meyers, who’s the president of the United States?” she asks, checking his intravenous bags. As his body grows waterlogged and inert, they need to check and see that he’s still home.

  Her dad makes little effort to hide his irritation, but he is more of a charmer than a crab, even in sickness, and finally he smiles wearily. “George Washington,” he mouths.

  “All right, wise guy,” she says. “Let’s try movies and entertainment for $500.”

  He scribbles on his pad, “Frankly my dear I don’t give a flying,” and then for modesty’s sake he’s drawn a line.

  “Oh!” she hollers. “Mr. Meyers is getting fresh.” He offers a half-smile and a silent laugh. He’s always been handsome and easy in a reluctant way. Sometimes while he sleeps, the nurses will confide to Libby, “I like your father.”

  Now as they joke, Libby sees he’s already folding in on himself. “Are you in pain?” she whispers. For a moment he’s quiet, then shakes his head. He can’t name it. They don’t have a language for any of this. Libby pats his hand, and his fingers wriggle against the sheet as if movement might carry him somewhere else.

  As Libby walks down Eighth Avenue, shivering and drinking a beer out of a paper bag, she bumps into Hugh from the laundromat, who tells her he will personally do her laundry this time. Funny, she asks, but isn’t it his personal job to do all the incoming laundry? He tells her he will protect her garments as if her jeans and underwear are the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses. She considers letting him wash her horror clothes, but she doesn’t trust him. Instead she asks him if he wants to sleep with her. He arrives a bit later, shyly slurping on a chocolate drink, and she greets him at the door wearing the daisy-printed muumuu.

  Her law school friends start taking her out for dinners when she arrives back at Penn Station late in the evenings. They eye her speckled clothes, the same mess of a wardrobe she wore through law school, and her headbanded friend Marcy suddenly offers to take her shopping at Loehmann’s. “Maybe it’s time we found your softer side,” she whispers. Libby, tired and drunk, says, “Maybe it’s time for one of my friends to do my frigging laundry.” But the laundromat can do it for her, Marcy insists. Libby just smiles. They have better jobs than hers, and they insist on tiramisu and picking up the checks. Hang in there, they say nicely.

  Her horror friends bring over Chinese food late at night when she’s already under the covers in a bathing suit and knee socks, and they spread out all over the floor, eating lo mein with their fingers and discussing tracheotomies, incontinence and hemorrhaging. Sleep, they tell her, we’ll lock up when we leave.

  Late one evening, Peter the cyclops calls. He’s heard about her dad and wants to know if there’s anything he can do.

  Libby, though wound up and hungry, feels touched. “Come over and do my laundry for me one day.”

  “No, really?”

  “Really.”

  He hedges and then suggests she take it to the laundromat, where they’ll wash, dry and even fold it. Imagine that. “One, two, three,” he says.

  “I did that and they lost my freaking laundry,” she tells him. “It’s gone. Vanished!”

  “Really?”

  “What do you want, Peter?” He’s quiet, and it’s clear he has nothing to offer. But never mind him; what can she expect from a cyclops? Libby discovers deep in the recesses of her dresser drawer many wearable things—old tank tops and lacy bras with the tags still on. She’s running out of clothes again, but there’s still something for the morning.

  She stuffs her laundry into a backpack, all of it, including the bathing suits and the muumuu, and she takes it to the office, where she packs it up in one of Gautreaux’s Seagram’s boxes. She addresses the overnight packing slip to the hospital, calls the mailroom for a pickup, and ten minutes later a young man with a wire cart carries the box away.

  There is some problem with the elevators. Flashing lights, a bleating noise. Misbuttoning Bilox’s coat, Libby weakly considers the stairs, but then she spots the handsome kid who looks like Neil Lubin, who didn’t take her to the prom, as he rolls his empty wire cart down the hall. “Is there another way out?” she asks.

  “There’s always a way out,” he says slyly. “Freight elevator.”

  “Show me,” Libby says, hanging onto his sleeve. She’s bone-tired and wants a helping hand. Without thinking, she hoists herself onto Imelda’s desk and lowers herself into his wire cart. “I have a freaking headache,” she explains. He is as kind as he is good-looking. He finds her an aspirin and gives her a paper towel to blow her nose and deposits her outside the service entrance at 44th and Lexington, where a light rain mists their heads.

  The next day, the doctors make another attempt to wean her dad from the ventilator, but he struggles for breaths and his eyes dart wildly around the room. Libby stares anxiously at the monitor, which measures his vital signs, as if this will make his lungs work better. He starts mouthing words, and she stands there dumbly, trying to understand until finally she runs into the hall yelling, “He can’t do it! He can’t!”

  Now, exhausted, he sleeps. Libby sits beside him, patting his hand. She wears a cocktail dress, argyle knee socks and the large, shapeless sweatshirt with many zippered pockets. On her dad’s nightstand she notices a trick-or-treat bag decorated with goblins and witches. There’s a note attached that reads, “Libby, provisions for the long haul. How you doing?” Inside are a combination of sweets and health foods and multivitamins. Libby’s eyes tear up, and she is overwhelmed with love for the girlfriends and finds herself wishing they were her friends, wishing her dad could have another chance with one of them if he wanted it.

  A friendly nurse brings in the Seagram’s box and says, “Do you know what this is?” Before Libby can get out of the chair, the nurse tears off the cover of the box, and together they stare down at the dirty, faintly smelly laundry.

  “Mine,” Libby says.

  Libby grabs quarters from her purse and then shifts through the trick-or-treat bag, stuffing one of her zippered pockets with a V-8 juice, another with homemade chocolate chip cookies and another with a bottle of multivitamins. The Seagram’s box is large an
d cumbersome, and she weaves unsteadily down the hall until she finds an abandoned wheelchair to place it on. Outside, she rolls the wheelchair across the street to the mini-mall and into the laundromat, past the long line of washers, all of which are in use. The attendant, an elderly man who jingles with coins, looks at her strangely and tells her to come back later. She leaves the Seagram’s box and wheels the chair back to the hospital.

  Later, when she returns, the air has changed. The darkening sky is a swirl of winter grays, like an old bruise. The same attendant pushes a mop and tells her he’s closing in five minutes. She sits on the folding table, as if her unmovable presence will make him soften. The cocktail dress rides up her thighs, exposing the bare skin above her argyle socks. She touches the stubbly hairs.

  The attendant sweeps lint into a pile and eyeballs her sitting on the folding table. “I can lock you in, if that’s what you want. Do you want me to lock you in?”

  “All right.” You can never be locked in, only locked out, she reasons. “I’ll be very neat,” she tells him.

  The man finishes sweeping and ties up several garbage bags, turning to her every so often to see if she is still there. Libby tries to smile, but can’t quite pull one off. Her body feels leaden and she’s struck with the terrible feeling that maybe she, too, is dying. She pats her ears and then feels her neck for enlarged lymph nodes. Reaching into one of the zippered pockets, she pulls out the vitamins and dumps a couple on her tongue. She unzips another pocket and washes them down with a V-8, then unzips another pocket and nibbles on a cookie. She slides her hand under the sweatshirt and does a discreet mini breast exam.

  As soon as the man leaves, she separates the whites and darks, gathers her quarters and gets three loads going. She stretches out on the folding table, looks over at the sloshing, soapy water and feels a kind of hope. Please God, she thinks. She doesn’t wish for anything in particular, just that things remain as they are a while longer; she simply needs to be suspended in the moment. Time, she believes, is a kind of hope.