Beautiful Girls (13 page)

Sam was her second lover. In the foothills under a quarter moon Georgeann had sat with him on an air mattress in the back of his pickup, sipping beer and scooping his fiery chili from a thermos. “See the Little Dipper?” he asked, leaning close and pointing into the night sky. His hand brushed her leg, and she stirred. The sky was alive with scattered stars, but she couldn’t see the Little Dipper. Sam kneeled behind her and lifted her arm. “Close your left eye,” he said. With her right eye Georgeann watched him trace the small, appealing ladle with their fingertips. She licked her spicy lips, figuring him to be mid-forties, maybe a little younger than she. A coyote bolted into the road and she thought, if it turns and looks my way,
I’ll sleep with him. The coyote, quickly changing direction, turned its head and regarded them with bright, translucent eyes before crouching low and slinking away into the hills.

She had stretched out next to Sam, and he pressed his lips to her neck. She fingered his ear, its delicate smallness, knowing how love might get thrown into the mix and how much hurt it could bring. Later at his place they curled together like shrimp, and she held his hand close to her thumping heart. At dawn, she slipped from his bed and fled to the desert, where she sat on a large sun-washed rock and stared out at the cholla. Under the hot Tucson sun her skin heated up until the smell of Sam rose off her and enveloped her. She sat for hours, baking, feeling warm and lush, until finally she returned home.

Georgeann holds English muffins and nine-grain, giving each bag a squeeze but unable to choose. Clutching both bags, she searches for her cart. In front of the Crackerjack display sits a cart holding Muenster cheese, cherries, and bubble bath. Bubbles, she thinks longingly. The cart has the look of abandonment, and Georgeann wheels off with it. There will be many other days for vegetables, she decides.

Up ahead a small boy sits in a cart, singing a song about a boy and a girl in a canoe while his mother bends near a low shelf. Georgeann stares at the child and listens. His voice is high and tuneless. She can’t
see the boy’s eyes, just the darkness of his sockets. As Georgeann comes up next to the child he doesn’t stop singing, only hesitates for a second, and then continues while Georgeann runs her hand over his downy head. He tips his face up toward her. He’s silky-headed and earnest, his hair so fine between her fingers she would like to lean down and sniff him.

Georgeann had a husband for many years and together they’d made a baby, who has probably turned to dust in the cemetery up in the foothills by now. The baby had been perfect but blue and he wouldn’t breathe. Her baby with his perfect head, heavy with skull and brains, lay curled and lifeless in her arms. The doctors only let her and Ross visit with the little boy for a few moments. Even chimpanzees are more civilized; they carry around their dead for days.

The death of their baby unlinked Georgeann and Ross from each other. They turned their backs, lowered their eyes and erased their faces, but they went on folding the towels, unclogging the bathroom drain, watering the fish pond, ordering Chinese, playing Rummy.

Then when they adopted Aaron and he came to them at two years old with a bad haircut and a clear, steady gaze they were linked together again by the urgency to show him things. They took trips by car and trips by plane to the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, the meteor crater, the petrified forest. Georgeann
taught him how to do the twist and make a potato chip sandwich. Ross taught him how to care for a goldfish and stand on his hands. Lit with glee, they lived like Spaniards, eating charred pork chops at eleven p.m., tired and flushed, with sleepy Aaron munching, his lids half-closed, his body ready to topple over. “Get the chop out of your ear, sweetie,” Georgeann had said. She and Ross were deliriously in love with him, but his arrival didn’t do a damn thing about the hollow pit opened up in her by the dead baby. The center of her pain had been scooped out, but the air left there was dry and brittle.

Georgeann quickly drops her hand from the boy’s head and pushes her cart along as the mother moves toward her son. Up ahead a small woman leans against the frozen foods, holding a lit candle. “I picked this up in housewares,” she says.

“Good thinking.”

“My boyfriend’s got the flashlight in the potato chip aisle. I snuck away.” She runs her fingers through the air. Her shopping cart holds cereal and yams.

Georgeann clicks off her flashlight and leans over the freezer, expecting frosty air but the air is still and watery. She holds a package of asparagus to her forehead and sighs, feeling the coolness.

“I could kill him,” the woman murmurs.

“Who?”

“My boyfriend.”

“What did he do?” Georgeann whispers.

“He’s got some side action going on,” the woman whispers back.

“Your boyfriend?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Dump him,” Georgeann says.

“I should, shouldn’t I?”

Georgeann can tell that the woman probably won’t, that she’ll hold on to him for longer than she should, and Georgeann has the urge to slap her. “Really, you should,” she says instead, touching the woman’s thin arm.

“I know!” the woman says. “I know!”

Georgeann nods.

A gangly man moves along the meat counter, rustling through a bag and crunching.

“That’s him,” the woman says.

The man’s crunch suddenly infuriates Georgeann. How dare this cheater crunch so delicately, so innocuously! Georgeann reaches for a yam from the woman’s cart and hurls it through the air, striking the cruncher on the back of the head. Oh, the hearty smack! “Shit!” he yells, quickly moving away. Georgeann throws another yam and so does the woman, but they miss and hit the meat counter instead. They gather up more yams, hugging them to their chests, and run after the strange man. They
throw yams in his direction until he outruns them, disappearing down the household cleaner aisle.

“I’m not sure that was him,” the woman says.

“That must have been him!”

Just last week Georgeann ran into Ross outside of Target. I spent twenty-three years with you, Georgeann thought, looking at his head of sparse hair, which had gone crinkly like dried seaweed and turned the color of ash. In his arms he held his daughter, a tiny blonde girl with flyaway hair. Ross married the woman he’d been running around with the last couple years of their marriage, a younger woman with long gauze skirts and cool blue eyes, who left a whiff of patchouli in her wake.

Outside Target, as his tiny daughter twisted and jumped in his arms, wanting to ride the fifty-cent Dumbo, Georgeann waved to him. Three years later she was able to do that. He lifted his arm, smiled widely and walked toward her, but she moved swiftly through the double doors without a backward glance.

Georgeann had known in her heart before she knew in her head that Ross was cheating on her. When she’d found him throwing pennies in the garbage, sweeping them off his dresser into the trash bag, she asked herself, just who is he—this careless, careless man? Then without conscious effort her love began to untangle its hold and dissolve.

“Listen to me,” Georgeann now says to the woman, grabbing her arm. “Listen…” But she doesn’t know what to say to her; Georgeann’s own experiences have left deep impressions, but where, she wonders, is the grace of wisdom? “Come,” she says instead, following the scent of chocolate and butter as she steers the woman to the bakery counter at the back of the store. The candle casts a warm, inviting glow on the trays of round butter cookies sparkling with sugar, little buttery men filled with chocolate and raspberry, cupcakes dipped in rainbow sprinkles, a small cake decorated with a chocolate ribbon. “Here,” she says, pulling the woman behind the counter.

The sweets are gleaming and beautiful, and at this moment everything feels possible to Georgeann—the world feels vast and comforting. Clarity pushes in on her amid the scent of luscious chocolate. Move it, it tells her;
move, move
. They kneel in front of the goodies. “Eat!” Georgeann cries, sliding open the glass case. “Eat something.”

Slowly they reach into the case and eat one cookie at a time. Soon they start exchanging treats, passing the fanciest and the gooiest ones to each other. Georgeann wants to eat everything. She grabs an éclair, licks the icing and then stuffs it in her mouth. The woman’s hand hovers over a tray, unable to decide. Her hand creeps back to her side and thrusts
forward, snatching a cupcake and stuffing it, paper and all, into her mouth. Georgeann eats a cannoli, feeling crumbs fall from her lips onto her lap.

The woman and Georgeann have chocolate rings around their mouths. Georgeann wipes her own mouth, feeling queasy with sticky sweetness, but she’s tempted by a thick brownie. It’s heavy and slick with icing, and she swallows it down in gobs. Gooey chocolate coats the roof of her mouth. As she stuffs in the rest of the brownie she feels her bowels turn. “I have to find a bathroom,” she says, standing and bumping into the cookie case.

The woman makes a small, understanding noise as Georgeann rushes to the rear corner of the store, where a light shines. A stockboy mops the floor by the dairy case, his large flashlight illuminating a milky puddle. “The bathroom,” Georgeann says. “Where is it?”

“The bathroom isn’t for customers, lady,” he says, turning from her and going over her wet footprints with the mop.

“I have to go!” She clutches his arm; it is a skinny boy’s arm.

He makes a sour, huffy noise that says, just who do you think you are? I haven’t a clue, kiddo, she thinks. He leads the way through a set of metal doors and into the meat locker where hunks of beef hang from hooks. “You should have gone before you came here.”

“Hurry,” she says, pulling him along faster. She’s not sure she will make it.

He shines his light into the dirty little bathroom so she gets an idea where the toilet is, before he gives her a small push and shuts her in.

Georgeann unbuckles her jeans. Constipation is more her style, but now she has to take an urgent shit in the blackness of Safeway. The air is cold and creepy on her naked skin as she squats over the toilet until she must sit. Feeling along the wall she finds the roll of toilet paper.

There must be a mirror above the sink, and she reaches out and touches the smooth, chilly surface, but in the darkness there is no reassurance of her face. She is just a woman alone in a dank bathroom, a woman who wishes she’d lived a little better. At this moment she’s certain a touch of rot has taken root inside her heart, where instead there might have been expansion. She also knows she still might live better if she knew how not to be afraid. Her heart pounds loudly, letting her know she is still very much alive, as she gropes with the faucet and feels for the soap dispenser. When she flushes she hopes it all goes down.

There is no stockboy with a flashlight waiting for her when she opens the door. The overhead lights begin to flicker as she makes her way past the slabs of bloody meat. It is a hard life, there’s no doubt. She gives the side of a cow a fairly good punch. It is a cold
and dignified piece of beast. Large and stupid and ugly, but it is what it is.

On the other side of the double doors, the lights continue to flicker in spurts, and Georgeann moves quickly to the front of the store, ready to leave. By the checkout line she eyes a shopping cart wedged against the magazine rack holding a T-bone steak and a five-pound bag of potatoes. “Is this anybody’s?” Georgeann asks.

The checkout girl shrugs under the sputtering lights. Georgeann lifts the food onto the conveyer belt and digs for her wallet, discovering the avocado, ripe and warm, buried in her purse. After she pays the girl she carries her bag to the car, squinting into the brightness. The sunset is a swirl of red and purple melting together and hanging low over the Tucson Mountains.

When Georgeann returns home she peers under the living room curtains at Sam Bailey’s salmon-colored adobe, listening to the whir of his swamp cooler, watching the billow of his ratty T-shirts on the clothesline. “You,” she says; the word sounds almost accusatory.

She takes a cool bath. The rye bread is stale without any nibbles in it and there is no sign of the lizard—hopefully it found its way out to the yard, she thinks, biting into the hard bread and feeling the
pressure between her teeth. She changes into her nightgown and moves to the living room, feeling deeply unsatisfied, and sits in different chairs, finally falling to sleep on the couch.

At dawn, sunlight fills the room and she wanders into the bathroom, where she discovers the lizard clinging to the side of the bathtub. “Oh!” she yells, kneeling in front of it. “You’re going to die on me, aren’t you?” The lizard is completely still and she notes the translucent front legs, as elegant as a dancer’s, and the dainty tip of its tail. “Lovely,” she whispers. She gently touches it with one finger. “Please,” she whispers, her voice faint and airy. “I won’t hurt you.” The lizard turns its neck and looks into her eyes with its own black, unreadable ones. It is weak, she can see. Its body has probably started in on the business of dying. “Let me take you outside,” she whispers. She brushes it into her hand and feels the little body there in her palm, trusting her, and she wonders at the mystery of this.

Warmth rises from the earth, this desert valley, beneath her bare feet as she moves slowly past the cholla and rose bushes. Cupping her hands, she talks to the lizard in a low, soothing voice and sets it down next to the Joshua tree. “Be well,” she says as the lizard moves uncertainly across her fingers to the ground.

As she stands, she sees Sam Bailey sitting on his
back stoop, working his feet into a pair of socks. One of his beagles stretches out next to him. Faint music is playing on a transistor radio. Sam sees her then, half-hidden by the Joshua tree, standing in her nightgown. A warm breeze, like a breath emptying from the lungs, blows through her yard into his as she moves toward him.

M
Y SISTER
F
RANKIE’S EVENING-OF-BEAUTY COUPON
was good only on Fridays, so she’d made an appointment for this coming one and when she’d spend the evening swaddled in seaweed and dipped in Middle Eastern mud, and since my brother-in-law Chuck had his impotence support group, after which he and the guys would usually go for a beer, could I please babysit?