Beautiful Girls Page 4

  The police escort her back to the nurses’ station, where the nurses gather around her. There’s whispering. The elderly laundry attendant confides, not quietly, that “she looked like a crazy to me.” Dumpy Downer impatiently eyes the small crowd and moves toward Libby, touching her elbow.

  “I need to speak with you and your father,” he says.

  “What about my laundry?” Libby asks, looking at the cops, then the nurses and then the mean-spirited laundry attendant. Everyone talks at once, and the cop’s radio sputters at noisy intervals. “We know her. It’s fine,” the friendly nurse says. “There’s no need to make a fuss,” the boisterous nurse says. Dumpy Downer is now yanking on her arm. Finally, the cops and nurses wind up flirting with each other as Libby is pulled into her dad’s room, and the door is closed behind them.

  The bottom line, begins Dumpy Downer, is that her dad can’t live without a ventilator. His lungs can’t do it. They’ve made every effort. Sad to say, but there’s no justification for keeping him in the CCU. He’ll have to go upstairs to the ventilator wing. The doctor frowns. He’s been through so much. There is another option. They can put him on a morphine drip, make him as comfortable as possible, turn off the ventilator and leave it in God’s hands. Libby reels, feeling static travel up her neck and gather in her head. She slumps into a chair. God, she thinks; what does He have to do with it, the slacker. Staring at Dumpy Downer’s round, freckled head, she can tell he’s not a believer. He believes in medicine, and medicine’s failed here. Well, off to the ventilator wing.

  “Let’s turn off this goddamn thing,” her dad writes on his pad. He’s sitting up, a picture of health. You flip the switch on invalids; her dad looks as if he could be going to the grocery store. Really, if anyone were to ask, she would have thought that a dying person would be half-gone, unrecognizable, yet her dad is here, terribly present, cocking his head to the side when he hears something dumb. When a vein quivers beneath his eye, he reaches up to touch it.

  “Think good and hard,” the doctor says, with a finger raised for emphasis. “Good luck, sir.”

  The doctor shuts the door behind him, and Libby and her dad are left staring at each other. “What an asshole,” her dad mouths. She sobs, lowering her head to the bed, and she feels his fingers dance across her hair, light and graceful as Fred Astaire. They are quiet for some time. Finally, she closes her eyes and almost reaches sleep, but at the last second she rushes back from it and lifts her head.

  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.

  BEAUTIFUL GIRLS

  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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  “I know,” I said.

  After the football game, Inggy and I walked the few blocks to my house, where we napped in my twin bed, sleeping head to feet. Later as we woke, untwisting ourselves from the sheets, we were crabby and raccoon-eyed with heads of tangled hair. I poked at mine with a comb, and Inggy tied hers back with a sock while Daffodil whined at my door to please let her in. She was extra-in-love with the two of us ever since the senior class had chosen Inggy and me as two of five nominees for the Miss Merry Christmas Contest. “Don’t be too impressed, Daff, we’re still the same cruddy girls,” Inggy said through the door.

  “It’s hardly the big time,” I added.

  Inggy kept a stash of clothes in one of my drawers, since she could never go home high or drunk and would sleep over at my place instead. We both changed into jeans, debating our evening options. Outside, it was dark and chilly, and my mom and Franz were out on the town.

  In the kitchen, Dorrie and Daffodil burned popcorn while they waited for George, their dad, to pick them up. He showed up pretty regularly and took them bowling, or to the batting cage or an arcade on the Jersey shore. He often asked if I wanted to come along. But I didn’t like him. “You’re a pretty thing,” he’d once said, letting his eyes wander all over me. Number one, I didn’t need him telling me I was pretty; number two, he was about forty years old; and numbers three, four and five, Dorrie and Daffodil were my sisters, he was their father, and he’d lived with us when I was a little kid.

  My own father had pulled a Houdini a long time ago. I only knew him by the check that was supposed to come at the beginning of each month but didn’t always. He had just erased me, I guessed, pretended I hadn’t happened. But still, did he ever wonder how I was turning out? It was clear to me how he’d turned out.

  Inggy and I grabbed handfuls of burnt popcorn for the road, said goodbye to my sisters, and set out for a keg party.

  As the beer ran out and the party broke up, most everyone headed for the front lawn. A few bodies were strewn throughout the hallway and draped across assorted chairs. Our host—this kid John—whose parents, I’d heard, were in Atlantic City for the weekend, was asleep on the recliner. I sat at the kitchen table and peered into the living room at Inggy and Kevin McSweeney, who sat on a big lumpy couch, quietly holding hands.

  Moments later, Inggy joined me, flush-faced and nervously fingering the buttons of her sweater. “I’m sure Kevin’s an INFJ.”

  “How do you know so much? Telepathy?”

  “We talked, nosey.”

  I sucked up beer through a straw, watching as Pamela Zlotkin stood on the curb and loudly offered rides home in her Nissan. “Aren’t you starving?” I asked.

  “Completely and absolutely.” In this John kid’s refrigerator, his parents had left him—we counted—twenty hamburger patties. We didn’t think he’d mind, so I fried us up a couple of his hamburgers while Inggy explained to me how two similar personality types are naturally drawn to each other while the idea of opposites, who supposedly attract, is highly questionable and overrated. “Jung got it wrong,” she says. “Don’t you think?”

  I nodded. My opposite would be a quiet, territorial, practical, logical, facts-first decision-maker. I didn’t know boys like that and hoped I never would. But the way I thought about the boys I liked best was different; I thought about their contradictions—how they were soft yet fierce, happy but all chewed up on the inside.

  “Do you think Kevin’s cute, Dani?” Inggy asked, biting into her burger.

  “Kind of.” She gazed at me mildly. Kevin had a long hangdog face and wide eyes that drooped in their sockets, and while he played a mean game of basketball, he had a bad slouch off the court.

  “I do,” she said.

  I reached across the table and rubbed her hand, feeling the delicate bones and the small swell of blue veins and wondered what it meant to be Inggy inside that long stretch of white skin. As pretty as she was she’d only been kissed once in her seventeen years. “He’s got a certain something,” I said. From the window, I watched Ben climb into the front seat of Pamela Zlotkin’s Nissan.

  When my sisters and I ran out of clean underwear, Dorrie had to resume laundry duty despite the stink. She’d hold her nose, run down the cellar stairs, get a load going and run back up, looking like she might blow chunks. No one but Dorrie had set foot down there. Mom fought with us daily, yelling, yanking on our skinny arms, but no one was budging.

  Mom, who was now all dressed up, wearing her mink and Chanel No. 5, gathered us in the den one night while Franz waited for her in the living room. A full moon shone through the window behind her. “Cook up a steak and potatoes for supper, ladies,” she told us, and then lowering her voice added, “And when I come home, I want the stink gone. I want it out of our lives.”

  “We’re beautiful girls!” Daffodil said, linking arms with me. “You can’t expect us to go down there!”

  This kind of talk really ticked Mom off, and she tilted her head to the side and gave Daffodil a cockeyed smile. “God is punishing us with the stink because you’re conceited and stuck-up.”

  “I am stuck-up,” Daffodil agreed, and a tiny sigh escaped through her lips.

  “It’s very rude,” Mom snapped.

  “She is rude,” I agreed.

  “You’re stuck-up, too,” Mom said.

  “I’m really not,” I said.

  “I guess I am, too,” Dorrie said.

  “You are not stuck-up,” Mom said, but she regarded Dorrie with the same disappointment.

  “Ask Franz to find the stink,” Daffodil said finally. “That’s what boyfriends are for.”

  Mom lifted her hand. “I’m leaving. Do what I asked.” And she turned on her three-inch heels and left us for the evening.

  “I’m starvin’ Marvin,” Daffodil said. I popped the steak in the broiler while the girls set the table. Then Dorrie and I took turns standing on the stepstool and mashing the potatoes while Daffodil roused us with a Pop Warner cheer,
ending with a crash to the linoleum in a split. The meat was rare the way we liked it, and I cut thick slabs. My sisters sat in their seats, forks poised in the air, ketchup globs dainty and jewel-like on their plates.

  I got thrown out of Anthropology because I’d accidentally dropped my bracelet onto the second-story ledge outside the window. In the girls’ room, I climbed out on the ledge and walked past Humanities and U.S. History and made my way back to Pickett’s class where my bracelet lay. Pickett, who must have been eighty, opened the window and when I tried to tell her I was fine, she reached for me with her age-spotted hands and hauled me in. As I sat in the principal’s office, I checked my biology homework and read a chapter of Daisy Miller.

  I got to Advanced Biology late but I still had my pick of a frog or a clam. I wasn’t in the mood for an invertebrate so I took the frog, went back to my station and sliced it open, correctly labeling the digestive and reproductive systems. I saw a fly in the stomach, small and perfect, not yet digested, its wings close to its body as if at rest.

  After school, Inggy and Kevin lingered in front of her locker, talking. She seemed to be on the brink of love, wavering there, unsteady. I waved goodbye, feeling sort of itchy and jealous and not knowing what to do with myself. I thought about stopping by the Exxon station and visiting Colin who I fooled around with now and then.

  Ben’s sweatshirt was spotted with big raindrops and his workboots were untied as he plodded up to me. He gave me a slow smile as he leaned against a locker. “Stoner,” I said, looking into his bloodshot eyes.

  “Slob,” he said, looking into my locker at the mess of books, crumpled papers, candy wrappers and medicated acne pads.

  “Want to go to your house?” I brushed the knots out of my hair.

  He shook his head. “You toy with me.”

  “Ha!” I yelled, but when I turned to him he looked disgusted and far away. You toy with me. The words were strange and flat in the air above us. “That’s a rotten thing to say,” I finally said. “Are you mad at me?”