The Almost Archer Sisters (8 page)

I wasn’t supposed to see that note, but a TA had accidentally slid the assessment in my mail slot at school. It was an odd feeling to read about myself, to picture myself doing those things, however wrong. But as with the artistic pursuits of my special ed charges, my intentions for Beth and her love life had always been good ones. My advice was always meant to help Beth; it was how I attempted to wrap my hand around hers so she could begin to spell out happier endings. But what she and her friends had hatched went way beyond casual interference or heavy-handed advice. It was near-criminal in its brilliance, and for the first time ever, I had been included.

W
EEKS BEFORE
B
ETH’S
last disastrous trip home, I had returned from grocery shopping to find Beau splayed out on the couch, the top of his pants undone. His furtive masturbation had woken me twice that month. I didn’t get angry because I wasn’t doing anything to offset the need. He was welcome to play with himself all he wanted; I just didn’t want the boys to catch him.

“Why not?” teased Beau.

“It would traumatize them. That’s why.”

“How?”

“They’re just boys. And they don’t need to know they’ve surpassed their father in every way. It would mess up their ability to admire you.”

“There’s a message from Beth. She’s in fricken Thailand somewhere. I saved it,” Beau mumbled, tugging himself out of the tail end of his nap. “She’s crying again. I swear, you spend more time with her than me.”

Beth’s crew was on a two-week buying trip to find cheap batik and men’s Hawaii shirts for a special episode on leisure wear. It was that aspect of her job that I had always found bafflingly enviable. She did these things, went to these places, and worse, she had a way of making the trips seem as important as G-8 summits.

I dumped the grocery bags on the kitchen counter.

“What time is it where she is?”

“I don’t know, but she and her friends are pretty drunk. It kills me. She calls, you drop everything. I want something from you, you tell me later.
Wait. Not now. No. Quiet. Leave me alone
.”

“Don’t be like this, Beau.”

“It’s true, man. I did the math. Fucking seven hours on the phone last month. That’s more than you spend talking to me. Or anyone else.”

“Where are the boys?”

I yanked a can of beer off its collar and threw it at Beau the way you’d pacify a caged lion with a lamb shank. I wanted to say that if I didn’t have Beth, I’d have let the hair on my toes grow black and long like they want to. I’d be fat(ter). I’d have cut my hair into that spiky middle-aged, manageable lady mullet, one you and the boys would be sporting a variation of, too. Worse, all proudly. Without the computer Beth gave us, we wouldn’t have found that not-too-bad-looking, unobtrusive helmet that Sam can wear when we’re not around, or when he knows he’ll be negotiating hard surfaces.
And forget about that red halter dress, the French perfume, the playful lingerie, the tasteful porn. Forget about those recipes you love so much you once said that you wanted to spread my eggplant parmesan all over your chest in front of the guys at the shop, like a monster,
It’s that good
. Without my biweekly Beth dose, we never would have heard of
The Usual Suspects
, Lucinda Williams, or braised rapini, all your favorites now.

You have no fucking idea, Beau
, I wanted to say.

“So. Where are the boys?”

“I butchered Jake and stuck his body in the freezer. Sam’s out back choking on his vomit,” he said, punctuated by a loud burp.

“Ass. Hole.” I slapped him not lightly on the back of the head. “Don’t joke about that.”

“Relax, they’re with Lou. He took them to the fair in Wheatley. He’s gonna feed them lunch there.”

“Lou take extra pants?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Jesus. I told you, that’s part of watching Sam, for chrisakes. Did you give him your cell?”

“No. I forgot.”

“Man …” I took my anger out on the answering machine button, smashing down
PLAY
.

“Paging Dr. Peachy,” Beau screeched through a
TV Guide
bullhorn. “Waa, it’s Beth. Nobody loves me. Call me.
Waaa!
”

Heavy Duty Peachy.

I used to ignore that laptop when Beth first gave it to us.
Then I started researching Sam’s illness, a terrifically addictive and terrifying habit that I was trying hard to break. Her email was titled “I Want to Die.” The body of the email contained two Web links, the first one taking me to a New York newspaper’s daily gossip section.

The second link in the email took me to a dating Web site, specifically to an ad featuring a “Newly Single Lawyer,” presumably Marcus. My heart actually leapt at seeing his handsome, happy face again, chin resting in his hand, making him seem professorial and wise. He looked exactly like a well-balanced, evolved, curious, committed, kind human man—no one like Beth had ever dated, including Beau. Plus, he ticked off an income category which exceeded that of everyone I knew or was related to, combined.

I finished reading, checked the time in Thailand, and phoned Beth’s cell.

“Congratulations!” I said when she picked up.

“Fuck, Peach. You gotta be kidding.”

“Whoa. Didn’t you say you always wanted to make the gossip pages?”

“Not as Tara Fucking Reid!” she yelled over a loud crowd
behind her. I could hear a man’s voice say, “She was great in
The Big Lebowski
!”

“Fuck off, Jeb,” Beth yelled, trying to muffle the receiver.

She told me they were in the hotel bar after a long shoot involving cauldrons of dye on the beach. It was almost midnight there, just after lunch for us. I looked at the back of Beau’s skull, the alert part of his head facing NASCAR on that stupid flat screen we bought with the satellite dish after 9/11.

“Beau, turn that thing down, okay?” He raised the remote over the top of the couch and ratcheted down the sound.

“Peachy, did you see his fucking
ad
? We
just
broke up, and he had the balls to send the link to Kate, in case she had any friends who were single. I mean, he doesn’t even like Kate. No offense, Kate,” Beth said, presumably to Kate. I could hear people laughing in the background, but I could also tell Beth was on the cusp of some real pain for the first time in a long time. I whipped out my old voice, my soothing social worker voice, the one I had hoped to take out of its imaginary, velvet-lined box upon graduation.

“Okay, calm down, Beth. What happened? Walk me through it slowly. Start from the start. What sticks out? And go somewhere quiet, would you? I’ll head out back too.”

I grabbed a Coke in the fridge before letting the back door slam behind me. On my way out Beau muttered, “No, no, I’m good, Peach, I’ll just stay right here, playing with myself.”

“So tell me what happened, Beth.”

“You wanna know what happened? You wanna know what he said? He said: ‘Well, Beth, I wasn’t sure I could fall in love with you before. But after that Page Six stupidity, it’s doubtful I ever will.’ He’s looking to join a private firm. Make partner, or whatever law people do. Seems I’m not law-partner-wife material. But dammit, Peachy, that bouncer was a fucking tool.”

Marcus told her he thought that they should take a long break,
as though Beth was an arduous hike and lucky him coming upon a bench. I understood that urge, but sometimes that’s all it took. A brief break, feet up, phone off for a spell, and then I’d muster up the business of missing Beth again.

“I want to know what’s wrong with me, Peachy. Why I can’t get a guy to love me?”

“I wish I knew too, lovey,” I said. “Maybe your picker’s broken and you should retract it for repairs. You know?”

Beau was right, I did spend more time on the phone trying to fix Beth’s life than I did making sense of ours. I know now we had just begun the mysterious process of growing apart, something that used to baffle me about other couples. I used to wonder how, after seven, eight years together do you possibly “grow apart”? And please can you show me how to do it? I used to worry Beau and I had grown way too close, not in the cute way of finishing each other’s sentences, but in the bad way, like a pot holding too many plants, the roots eventually strangling each other. After almost a decade of marriage, my body, my life, was becoming indiscernible from my husband’s, a man who ate off my plate, used my toothbrush, and talked to me while sitting on the toilet, scouring his molars—worse, I understood every word he mumbled through the suds, standing there at the vanity wearing his tossed-off T-shirt and rubbing his medicinal hand cream into my heels. Even if I hadn’t had sex with him, hugged or touched him, by the end of the day, I would smell like Beau. Once, after my hernia operation, I was about to scold him for clipping his toenails in the living room. But when he was finished with his toenails, he started on mine as though my feet were simply an extension of his own, a backup set, perhaps, and I loved him so much in that moment.

“Beth. Listen to me. Have you spoken to him?”

“Marcus won’t talk to me. Won’t answer my emails. Won’t tell me why he can’t love me. Then he goes and posts that ad and he
makes sure
I know about it. It’s so cruel. I hate him, but I love him
so much. Oh, Peachy, I’m going crazy. And now the Internet’s down at this fucking hellhole hotel, and I’m fucking here for another week of fucking stupid models and fat Germans trolling the beach for kids. I hate it here.”

I let her cry while craning my neck to watch Beau stretch off the couch, channel-surf, then fall back down after finding something else to watch. Like bobby pins under a high beehive hairdo, or the spider web of arthritic knots tied behind a delicate piece of embroidery, men have no idea how relationships are held together, the girdles and duct tape, the emotional scaffolding that hold two people together.

“Forget him, Beth,” I said. “You have to just forget him. And no more emails, okay? He’ll think you’re desperate.”

“It’s just that I don’t want this to keep happening to me. You studied social work. What’s wrong with my social life?”

“Well, I flunked out so I’m just an antisocial nonworker. Maybe you pushed things too soon, too far?”

Beth had a knack for sending what I called “emotional canaries” into the hearts of the men she liked or loved. They took the form of anxious questions: Where do you see this going? When are you back in town? What should we do about dinner? How do you feel about meeting my people? My meeting yours? Where do you see yourself in five years, ten, twenty? When she wasn’t using these questions to peck at her boyfriends, the questions would turn on her, stalk her, turn an otherwise successful TV personality into an urban Tippi Hedren, running in a panic to escape them. Because of this, I’ve never envied my prettier, smarter, funnier, skinnier, richer sister. Her uncertainty drained even me.

“Did you read his personal ad, Peachy? Doesn’t he sound like a dream come true? Wouldn’t you just want to meet him and love him?”

“Yeah, maybe someone’s dream come true, but not yours. That’s kind of dicky what he did, sending it to Kate.”

“Well, he’s trying to make a point. That it’s over. Which I get.”

“If it’s any consolation, Beth, it actually looks like Marcus is looking for someone kind of like you,” I said.

“Yeah, almost me, only
not
me.”

“That’s a good way to put it.”

“Yeah. And so I feel like putting up a fake profile. A really hot one. Like the perfect woman.” There was a pause, a rather long one, then she quietly added, “How hilarious would that be? Wouldn’t that be funny?”

“Actually, ‘funny’ isn’t really the word I’d use. ‘Insane’ comes to mind.”

“Peachy?”

“What?”

“That funny thing I did?”

“Yeah.”

“That
we
did.”

“Yeah. What? What did you do?”

“It’s funny more than anything. Jeb and Kate think it’s funny too.”

“Jesus Christ, tell me. This call is costing a fortune.”

“Well, a couple of nights ago we were fucking around on my laptop and we were a little drunk, and … what if I told you that Marcus might be in love again. With someone we both know!”

“What are you talking about? Who do
we
know?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, he’s in loooove with you.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

She told me it was Kate’s idea. Partly Jeb’s. But mostly it wasn’t her idea. Not mostly. Partly. Okay, all three of them thought it up. See, what they did was, well, they got to talking about how shitty it was for Marcus to send Kate the profile, so they thought it
would be funny to contact Marcus with a fake profile of the perfect woman, someone who didn’t exist, but they needed a picture so they filled out a form and topped it off with a real photo of me, my face at least, looking farm-fresh and windblown, culled from a recent crop of pictures Beth had taken during our unseasonably warm Christmas, which she had stored on her laptop, and wasn’t that hilarious? Totally hilarious, right?

After a long moment, I said, “Wow. You are a piece of work. Even thousands of miles away you’re dangerous to me and mine.”

“I know, but listen I gotta run so remember this information. The password for the profile is Scoots. Don’t ask. It just came to mind. And the user name is Almost Me. I haven’t finished filling out the questions yet—Internet troubles here. But Peachy, please, please can you? Pleeeeease? It’ll be fun!”