Beautiful Girls (2 page)

“I don’t need a martini,” her mother said, sadly. “Not now, not ever.”

“You do! You do! We all do.”

Shaking her head, Allie’s mother took off a shoe, stood on the bench, and tapped the top of the diving bell with it.

Huddled together, they were pulled lopsided to the pier. They later learned one of the cables had broken. The local news was there with a camera when the three of them climbed out of the bell, but her parents yanked Allie to the car, and silently they drove home.

Allie bounds down the stairs. Tonight the front and back doors are open, and the house is like a wind tunnel. Her hair blows crazily across her face. It’s almost two a.m. She climbs up onto the kitchen counter, but she doesn’t see her father in the yard. Then she spots him next door in the Allens’ yard, sleeping on a chaise longue. The phone rings.

“Hello.”

“Hello, you,” the woman says. “Do you feel like blabbing? How would you like to hear about one of the greatest love stories in history? Should I tell you? Let me ask the eight ball.” Allie hears a soft glug.
“Should I tell the kid my stories? ‘It is decidedly so.’ All right.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m your father’s flame. Your father’s a very attractive man but you might not know it by looking at him. We have the kind of love affair where we can’t keep our mitts off each other.”

“You don’t really know my father,” Allie says.

“Look, kid—”

“What’s your name?” Allie asks.

“Why?” the woman asks. “What’s yours?”

Allie stares at her reflection in the oven window. She looks afraid and this frightens her.

“Tell me something. Who do you look like, your mother or father?”

Allie regards her colorless reflection. “I have brown hair, long hair.” She inspects her crooked teeth. “I’m in my nightgown. What do you look like?”

“Tell me what you think I look like.”

“Ugly.”

“Don’t get saucy with me, béarnaise.” The woman hangs up.

Allie wanders outside. Her nightgown fills with air, making it balloon. The ground is moist beneath her feet. Barefoot, she crosses the street and walks into the Beckers’ backyard and touches the roses, which are all in rows by color. The petals are velvety and moist. She picks up a pair of hedge clippers and
clips flowers off three of the tallest stems. They fall to her feet.

On a table by the Beckers’ pool is a stack of books. One is called
Correct Behavior for All Occasions
. She likes the cover; it pictures a large house filled with silhouettes of delighted-looking people, all with good hairdos, all of them leaning close to one another in cozy, gold-lit rooms.

She wants the book. She wonders if Mrs. Becker will fall to her knees and scream when she sees her beheaded roses. Will Mrs. Becker miss her book?

The sky is filled with bright stars. The wind is crisp. It swishes under Allie’s hair onto her bare scalp, filling her with a vibrancy that makes her feel disconnected from the earth, disconnected from the life around her. Crossing the street, Allie hugs the book to her chest.

The next afternoon her father searches for his tooth beneath the recliner—his face is bright red with the strain of bending. Allie reaches her own small hand onto the carpet beneath the chair as she feels for the tooth. Did he have it when he went to sleep last night, she wants to know. He sits back on his heels, cocks his head and smiles sadly at her. “I believe I had a full set then,” he says. The dark gap where his front tooth should be makes him look like a stranger to her.

Allie is annoyed and scared that a tooth could just
disappear. It’s one thing when you send two socks down the laundry chute and only one comes back, but something very different when you go to bed with a full set of teeth and wake up one short. “Dad!” she shouts.

Her father sticks his finger into the gap, as if the tooth might be there after all, as if it is hiding. “It was a cheap plastic cap,” he says. “I should have had it replaced. I’ve had it since the age of the dinosaurs.” He carelessly sweeps his hand over the carpet. “Well, maybe I swallowed it.”

“Really?” Allie asks.

“Who knows.” He shrugs.

Allie feels like crying. A panic starts thumping through her. What is going on here, she thinks. Today a tooth, tomorrow an ear or a finger.

“Where is it?” she yells.

Her father is looking at her now, but he doesn’t seem to see her. Behind her the drapes billow in the breeze—it is a warm summer evening, an ordinary evening. There’s the smell of a barbecue not far away.

“Your mother will come back to us, you know. It’s like she’s on a vacation, honey.” He rubs his eyes. “Come sit with me, Allie.”

Allie sways from leg to leg. She does not want to sit; she will trace his tracks and find that tooth. “Tell me everywhere you went last night.”

On the back porch the world seems much bigger and harder to weed through than it had looked from the living room. Allie will not search for the tooth. How do you find something fingernail-sized out there—where do you start?

Besides, she’s lazy during the day. She rests on the sofa, falling in and out of dreamless sleep. Her bones seem to have curved and shifted. She feels like a smaller girl.

She now slumps on the steps, eating potato chips and quietly reciting curses. She waits for the night, when her vision will sharpen, when her energy is up and her spirit yawns and stretches, standing up straight and taking her creaky bones with it.

At midnight it is calm and starry. There is no wind as Allie sits on the front steps blowing bubbles through the wand. The yard is filled with translucent blue bubbles and the low hum of crickets. The phone rings.

“I know it’s you,” Allie says, picking it up.

“You’re a mind reader. How are you, sweets?”

“Good.”

“How come I always do all the talking? Lemme ask the eight ball something. Should the kid talk for a change? ‘Signs point to yes.’ Okay. Act alive; say something.”

Allie crunches the phone cord in her hand, thinking fast. “If you had to have a pet snake, a pet rat, or
a pet tarantula, which would you have?”

“None! My god! Why would I want one of those things?” The woman is silent for a second. Then she says, “Your problem, kid, is that you take too much crap. You gotta learn to say ‘fuck off’ once in a while. Don’t let anyone push you around. Say it. Say ‘fuck off.’ For practice.”

“Fuck off,” Allie says.

“Like you’re mad, say it like you’re mad.”

Allie says it again, louder.

“Try ‘go piss up a rope.’ Say it with an attitude.”

“I like the middle of the night. Do you?”

“What are you interrupting me for? You show a lack of concentration, kid. Your problem—”

Allie hangs up the phone and thinks this is the last straw. She doesn’t know what that means, but when she looks at her reflection in the oven window she looks like a person whose feelings have been hurt.

Outside a few fireflies glimmer near the azalea bush. The moon is a toenail clipping, and a breeze blows back her hair.

Allie wanders through the patch of woods behind her house and into the next development. The houses there are dark and quiet. She roams through the backyards like a spirit in a nightgown. On the back stoop of one house a long-necked watering can catches her eye and she waters her feet, leaving wet footprints on the concrete. The back door of the house is
open, and Allie peers through the screen down the hallway to where a light shines. She steps inside, imagining a sleeping family there, a mother and father and a few children tucked in their beds. She walks down the hall as though she is invisible.

In the darkened living room a man sits on a couch with a long-haired woman curled up next to him. Soft voices come from a small TV, which gives the room a bluish glow. Both the man and the woman look up at her standing in the doorway.

“Who are you?” the man asks.

“Is that a kid, Marshall?” The woman sneezes three times in a row. “God, I feel like shit,” she whispers in a raspy voice. “Am I hallucinating or is that a kid?”

“It’s a kid.”

The man gently pushes the woman off his lap. Standing, he runs his fingers through his hair as he looks from the woman on the couch to Allie. “This is kind of fucked up,” he says.

The woman sneezes again and lets her head fall to the couch. “I must have a fever. Am I a hypochondriac, Marshall?”

“You’re allowed,” he says. “Where are your parents?” he asks Allie.

Allie leans against the wall. Something smells good in the kitchen, and she looks toward the smell.

“Come here,” the man says. He’s very tall and slouchy in his body. He’s wearing faded jeans and
flip-flops.

Allie follows him into the kitchen, where soup boils on the stove. The can says “Chicken & Stars.” He stirs it.

“I’m going to walk you home after she eats.”

“Oh, I know the way.”

“It wasn’t a question, it’s a statement.”

Allie nervously pulls her hair. “Well, goodbye,” she says, losing her nerve. As she turns, he grabs her by the back of the nightgown.

“It’s two o’clock in the morning. Just hold your horses.” He directs her to the stove, where he pours the soup into a bowl. It is steaming hot. He leans over and blows on it. This man smells like grass. “Can you pour that ginger ale into a glass?” he asks.

Allie does. “You want some?” he says. She does not. But as if in a dream she remembers the book with the silhouette people,
Correct Behavior for All Occasions
. In the chapter on food it says to always accept a small offering of food or drink, it’s the polite thing to do. Allie takes a glass off the drainboard and pours herself some.

The man takes a box of Saltines down from the cupboard. “Carry the drinks,” he says. Together they join the sick woman on the couch.

“Oh, Marshall,” the woman says, in a high, pained voice. “I’m all clogged up.”

The man sets up the food on a TV tray and puts
his arm around the woman. Her hair is matted, and her face is shiny with sweat. In her feverish daze, she takes delicate sips of the soup.

Allie sips her ginger ale with similar grace.

“Give me something to wrap around my neck. My throat’s so sore,” she says to Marshall. He puts a sweatshirt over her and wraps the sleeves around her neck.

“That’s much better, Marshall. Much better.” She eats steadily, daintily. Looking up at Marshall she says, “You’re all right, you know that.” Marshall kisses her lightly on the forehead.

“What’s the kid doing here?” the woman says.

Marshall studies Allie with kind, searching eyes. “What’s the deal with you?” he asks.

Allie doesn’t know what to say, or what she might say if she could say something. Nothing feels certain to her.

“Do you love each other very much?” Allie asks in a sleepy voice. She asks because she knows what the answer is and wants it confirmed, to know that she’s right.

Marshall nods.

Suddenly Allie needs to get home, to check and see that everything is all right there. She’s out the back door and into the woods before she realizes no one is following her. She is alone, it is the middle of the night, and her house is not far away.

Her house is dark, even the attic. In the silence
she can tell her father is inside, maybe in the den. Allie stands in the hallway, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light. The house is very still, there is no movement, no wind, no creaking floors, no life it seems except for her pounding heart, which is too loud to be hers alone and must really be three pounding hearts, the one in the den and the one in the attic and hers here in the hallway.

H
ER FATHER IS SPELLING WITH HIS FINGER
. M-O-N and then the rest is gibberish. “Slow down,” Libby tells him. He slaps the bed sheets and mimics choking her. Without language he’s been reduced to bad acting: smirks, eye rolling, mugging. There’s no subtlety; even his eyes are luminous and bald. Some days, like today, he’s just too tired to move a pen across paper. He blinks up at her and tries again, slicing his angry finger through the air. “Okay, M-O-N.” Her mind is as dull and heavy as a butter knife. “Monkey, monsoon, money.”

For a second he looks truly helpless and closes his eyes on her, on everything. From the pillow he offers up a bored, calm face; is this the face he’ll wear when he’s dead? “Do it again. I’m sorry, Dad.” Libby tries
a laugh. “Pretty please with sugar on top.” She’s become a moron.

He continues to ignore her, and in their silence the room is kept alive with sound—the bleep of the heart monitor and the earnest, steady wheeze of the ventilator, poking out of his neck and pushing air into his lungs. Her dad then snaps open his eyes and slowly, as if she is brain-damaged, spells M-O-N-T-H.

“Month, for godsakes,” Libby says. He rolls his eyes to the ceiling in exaggerated, delicious contempt. Bad moods now swoop down on him in an instant and leave him puzzled and disheveled, hair poking out, gown slipping off a thin shoulder. But as quick as they come, they leave.

He looks at the slice of sky through the narrow window and patiently starts to mouth something, gesturing with his good hand, the one that isn’t large and soft as an inflatable paddle.

“October,” Libby says. “It’s the middle of October.” He raises his eyebrows, surprised. They both stare at the little slice of blue sky—they could be looking into a chlorinated pool. Where has the time gone? Libby wonders. Where has her life gone?

Libby’s dad has been in the hospital for weeks. Before then, he had a terrible cough that sounded as if he’d hack up a lung, and even though he spent hours in his garden the sun wouldn’t tan him. She remembers visiting one Saturday and watching him
move unsteadily across the yard, his fingers reaching for the side of the house as the late-day sun cast his long and crooked shadow. After Labor Day he reluctantly went to the doctor and wound up here in the CCU. Each afternoon Libby takes the train from Manhattan, where she lives, to this small tree-lined town in New Jersey, the same town where she grew up, although it’s no longer familiar.

While her dad sleeps, Libby rests her head against the chair back and instantly she dreams—dreams that are filled with unpleasant smells and involve public transportation. The infectious disease doctor, who runs, doesn’t walk, now flies into the room, waking her. He makes some preliminary pokes and prods before pressing his ear to her dad’s chest, as if using the stethoscope would take too long. Before a question forms in her mind, and she has many questions, he’s gone, out the door.