Beautiful Girls (3 page)

Milling in the hall is the useless-though-energetic-and-good-looking oncologist, who won’t be treating the tumor clinging to her dad’s lung. This tumor, which isn’t the worst kind, she’s been informed, probably has some relatives that have taken up residence in his spine or liver. No one knows for sure since there’s nothing to be done. His heart, sorry to say, simply isn’t tough enough. Standing with the oncologist is her dad’s primary physician, a squat, morose man who delivers all news in the same monotone.
Dumpy Downer—Libby’s name for him—is looking to wean her father from the ventilator, maybe send him home for a short while, bring in hospice.

Libby eyes a small bag on the nightstand marked “Libby” and realizes it’s from one of her dad’s girlfriends. Inside is a jelly doughnut, and as she takes a big bite jelly oozes out the side and a glob lands on her suit. She wipes it off, but a dark, glossy stain remains. Something smells funky and she sniffs the air, wondering if it could be her; she can’t remember when she last cleaned her five suits.

Libby stands on the platform waiting for the 8:18 to take her back to the city. Tonight her dad asked her to tell his girlfriends, who are actually all ex-girlfriends, not to visit anymore. They talk too much, was how he put it. She told him no. The girlfriends arrive in the mornings, often carpooling together, and stay for hours. They are excellent lip readers, excellent mind readers and excellent at charades. They’ve acquired the good grace that comes with age. They are a flurry of laughter and perfume. There must be people around him, she reasons to herself. She can’t imagine he’ll up and die in the face of all this activity. She boards the train and it moves swiftly through suburbia, cutting past trees and highways and people walking their dogs under a pale shine of moon. Libby’s head lolls against the dirty window as she fights sleep.

Back in her apartment, she sniffs every suit she owns and dumps them into a pile by the door. Four are food-stained and a fifth has a jagged tear from a barb that pierced through the plastic couch in the CCU waiting room and stabbed her in the thigh. “Dry cleaners,” she says aloud. She walks around her apartment in a bra and underwear, watering the brown plants, eating a ham sandwich, and holding counsel with herself. “I want the morphine given every two hours, regardless of whether he asks for it. He’s not going to ask until it’s too late.” She nearly trips over a body bag of laundry in the middle of the floor. “Laundry,” she shouts. She’s almost out of clean clothes, but there’s no time to wash them. How can she be so weary and buzzed at the same time? “How am I coping?” she asks, cupping her face. She tosses herself onto the bed, finishes eating her sandwich and then curls up under the covers, blowing crumbs toward the wall.

In the morning, she’s forced to put on the least sour and wrinkled of the suits, and unfortunately it’s the one with the tear in the butt. She stumbles down the stairs with the bag of dirty laundry, the suits piled on top, and lurches up Eighth Avenue to the laundromat. The suit on the top of the heap is the color of lime juice. Libby heads for the nearest trash can and dumps it, and she also dumps the purple one with the gold buttons because it too, she realizes for
the first time, is butt ugly. Without thinking, she stuffs the remaining suits in with her dirty clothes. At the laundromat Hugh the laundry attendant tosses the bag into a giant bin and tells her it will be ready “pronto tonto.”

Libby works at the end of a long wing in the semi-vacant legal department of a large corporation, where the air smells of whiskey and cigars and she has very little to do. Gautreaux, Bilox and Sodder, senior attorneys, arrive late each morning, take three-hour alcoholic lunches and return midafternoon, crocked. Each man weaves toward his office, shuts his door and falls asleep on his respective couch. Gautreaux, the most long-winded of the three, sometimes tells her boring stories after these lunches, always ending with a parable or lesson. “You see, girlie,” he’ll say, “you see where this is going?” Often he forgets Libby, too, is a lawyer and asks her to water his plants, as he lies helpless and drunken and gurgling on his couch. Once he asked her to call his tailor in Hong Kong and order him another pair of “those natty herringbone trousers.”

There are two actual workers, who tirelessly seem to do the work of the whole department: Mr. Muskon and his trusted assistant Miss Perry. Apparently, there once was a departmental secretary, known as Imelda because she was always sneaking off to buy shoes,
who disappeared and can’t be accounted for.

Acquisition forms arrive midmorning each day in a wire cart pushed by Marianne Switzer. First Bilox, the one with the bowtie, initials the stack, then Libby, Gautreaux, and Sodder. Afterwards, Libby rings Marianne Switzer, who arrives twelve minutes later with her wire cart to whisk the forms to the third floor for further processing. In a nutshell, this is Libby’s job. When she asked Gautreaux about more work, he’d said, “All in good time, Pearl.” Who was Pearl? She’d started to look for something else, but then her dad got sick, and now she’s stuck in her no-job job.

Growing up, Libby’s dad had been a good father from a distance. His attention never landed directly on her, but good energy radiated off him in all directions and she felt it as a kind of love.

When Libby was small, her mother’s cousin’s kid Wilhelmina from New York City spent several summers with them. Wilhelmina was a sour girl, tough as a spike, whose favorite game was Choir Girl, a sadistic version of church in which Wilhelmina would play the plastic organ, and Libby, draped in a sheet and Amish bonnet, would solemnly descend the staircase and make her way behind her father’s recliner, which was the pew. When Libby got the speed of her descent right, which wasn’t often, they would take
communion with the watery scotch left in the bottom of her father’s glass. Or if Wilhelmina was feeling chipper, the host might be a gumball, although chewing wasn’t allowed. Most times they didn’t get to communion because Libby didn’t descend the staircase slowly enough, and Wilhelmina would pinch Libby hard, hissing,
“You’re not doing it right.”

Once during these church services, Libby’s dad reclined in his chair with a copy of the
Tribune
held out in front of him as his bonneted and glum daughter worked her way to and from the pew. Perhaps because Wilhelmina was no relation of his, he caught Libby’s eye, pointed to the organ-playing girl, and twirled his finger next to his ear. At this, Libby dove onto his lap while he continued, humming a happy tune, to read the paper. Wilhelmina, sensing a conspiracy, lifted her bony fingers off the keys and glared at them.

Libby’s parents divorced when she was twelve, and she divided her time between them, traveling from one end of town to the other with her ratty blue suitcase. Her mother sighed a lot during Libby’s teenage years while her dad threw himself into goodwill and charity. Each year he planted an enormous garden and went door-to-door distributing his eggplants and zucchinis, and it was in this way that he met his girlfriends.

All the equipment in the hospital room gives off
a smothering heat that leaves Libby and her dad sticky and soft-brained. A portable fan, precariously balanced atop a garbage can, makes a low, jumbly noise while Libby feeds him ice chips. She’s not doling them out fast enough and he snatches the cup, shoveling in three or four chips with his good hand before she grabs it back. “It’s gonna go right into your lung and you’ll turn blue,” she tells him.

“Kiss my ass,” he mouths.

“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.