Beautiful Girls (7 page)

“Places, girls,” a fat man from the Chamber of
Commerce said to us, and I slowly climbed down and took my place on the right rear corner of the float. Next to me were Styrofoam stars attached to broom handles.

We crept along to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” as people on the sidewalks waved to us. Inggy’s parents, the very tall and brightly blond Oberlanders, snapped pictures and galloped alongside us for a block. “Inggy! Dani!” they called. “Over here, love. Big, big smile.” Inggy sat on the folding chair, flushed yet pleased, beaming her big, big smile down on her mom and dad.

Mom and Franz had decided to call it quits, and she’d taken to wearing dark glasses as if someone had died. She demanded super quiet. Even walking around in our socks and opening the refrigerator door would make her scream and send us scattering to far corners of the house. This morning I’d left her on the couch with her diet soda, Motrin, box of tissues, can of mixed nuts, and the
TV Guide
, and I knew she’d still be on the couch when I got home, that she might be there for a long time. I hoped she’d find a new boyfriend, I hoped she’d soon put on her three-inch heels again and leave us in peace. But why couldn’t she have dragged her butt off the couch and brought the Instamatic and been here today? Even if it was me up there on the folding chair with the crown on my head, I knew she’d still be horizontal
under the afghan in her dark glasses.

There was nothing to do but wave my arm. My sisters were boycotting the parade, at least that was what they said for the hundredth time when I left them this morning, slurping up Fruit Loops and glued to cartoons. The week before when they found out I hadn’t won they both cried, but it was Daffodil who sobbed, huge tears running down her blotchy face, her whole body heaving. Maybe she had wanted me to pave the way for her. “You like Inggy, right?” I’d said, holding her hand.

“Not anymore.”

“But I get to ride on the float, too.”

“So what?” she sobbed.

I hoped they’d change their minds, and I kept a lookout for their pompomed hats as we rolled along. There was so much noise—“Deck the Halls,” the clapping and cheering, Santa and his ho ho ho’s. Kevin McSweeney leapt out of the crowd and ran alongside us, gaping up at Inggy. I looked for Ben but didn’t see him until we passed the hardware store, where he and a couple of his friends were sitting on bags of fertilizer. We both waved, but I couldn’t tell if we were waving to each other. “Ben,” I heard myself whisper. “Ben.” What if he’d been meant for me and me for him?

Up ahead on the sidewalk Connie waved to Pamela Zlotkin, who stood on the front of our float,
and I wondered if they liked each other. I wondered if Pamela had sat in Connie’s warm kitchen on the chair with the blue polka-dotted cushion next to the radiator, the chair I always sat in. Connie saw me and blew a kiss. I blew one back and turned and stared in her direction long after we passed.

Then I saw my sisters, hiding behind a mailbox in front of the savings and loan and watching for me. As the float glided toward them, they pushed their way into the street and stood there wide-eyed while I waved like mad. “That’s my sister!” Daffodil shouted, pointing at me. Both Dorrie and Daffodil looked as if they were waiting for something to happen, and I too almost expected something to happen then, but the float coasted on indifferently like a cloud through the sky, and I lost them in the crowd.

The air was still and calm and cold. I’d heard it would snow later tonight, the first snow of the year. It was only supposed to be a light dusting, but I hoped it would be enough to cover the town in a clean sheet of white.

All of a sudden we stopped short. I stumbled, nearly stepping on Inggy’s tiara, which landed by my feet. It was hard to see what was happening so I climbed up the little staircase to Inggy, carrying her crown, and saw that up ahead a car had rear-ended a police cruiser at the intersection of Maple and Main, causing everything to come to a stop. Inggy inched
over and I shared the folding chair with her. “You’re not crying, Dani, are you?” she said.

“I’m not crying,” I said. She slung an arm over my shoulder and pulled the bag of corn chips from under her cape. That’s all I wanted then, to sit beside Inggy, eating corn chips and watching the standstill up ahead.

In front of us, the ladies’ auxiliary put down their banner and lit cigarettes. Pamela Zlotkin still stood on her corner of the float, waving to a crowd that wasn’t paying attention while the two other girls hunched together in their billowy white velvet capes and seemed to be reading each other’s palms. I wondered what they saw there.

L
ET’S CALL OUR COUPLE
A
DAM AND
E
VE SINCE THEY’LL
be visiting paradise. Both Adam and Eve are accompanying their mothers on a cruise from Africa to India and the islands in between. Four hundred passengers board the ship in Kenya. Adam and Eve haven’t met yet, and they don’t notice each other as they roll their suitcases along the Marina Deck in search of the elevators to their respective cabins, which they’ll share with their respective mothers. Soon—not today—they’ll meet. They’ll learn they both live on the East Coast; that they both have high metabolisms; that they’re both easily exasperated by their mothers; that they’re both flirty yet wary.

Adam is a hippie who teaches junior high and has two children by two different women and lives in the
Pine Barrens of New Jersey, where he has an outhouse and fruit trees. He’s a vegetarian. He’s also boyish and compact and a tad persnickety.

Eve is a dark-eyed, woolly-haired carnivore who likes to chomp on the turkey leg on Thanksgiving. She’s a dreamy, occasionally crabby person. She’s a clothes buyer for Lord & Taylor and lives in New York City and has been on many bad blind dates this year.

On day two of the trip Adam and Eve unofficially meet in Zanzibar. It’s sunrise and they’re the only two on the deck as the ship heads for the lush palm tree-covered island. Wooden dhows dip and sway in the pulse of the water. There’s a heavy scent of cloves. Adam and Eve sniff the air and give each other the once-over.

They officially meet on the island of Mayotte, where they swim with turtles and drip dry under the ylang-ylang trees. Adam plucks a flower, crushes it, and puts his fragrant fingers beneath Eve’s nose. “Smell this,” he says. It’s the most gorgeous scent that’s ever filled her nose, and she almost drops to her knees in the sand. She takes this as a sign from God—a sign of what she isn’t quite sure.

It isn’t long before Adam and Eve are sneaking around the ship in the wee hours. She sticks her tongue in his ear in the library; he feels her up in the engine room; they get half-naked on the Lido Deck
after midnight, where the warm wind makes them shiver. Adam has dark, wet eyes and a tidy ponytail. He has a way of tilting his head and gazing at her full strength as if he can see her down to her bones. “Your hair,” he murmurs, “is crazy fantastic.” And it is! In New York her hair is all wrong, her curls often a fuzzy, startled nest. But here on the Indian Ocean she has loose, snaky tendrils—a voluptuous seaweed head.

Eve gallops along the deck at sunset, past all the retirees out for a stroll. The sky is scorched with color. Love, love, love, she whispers out to sea. Oh,
love
, she thinks mistily—I can’t wait to get to know this Adam guy.

But she knows this isn’t love, only her desire to love and be loved in return. The trouble is she’s gone too long without feeling special. She’s gone too long without gazing into the eyes of someone dear. She’s been out with one too many drips. She’s had a major drought and is ready for a little drizzle.

During their days at sea Adam and Eve loll in the saltwater pool, mute as driftwood. The sun beats down on Eve’s head, and she realizes she hasn’t been thinking complete thoughts. She looks south and thinks there’s only water between us and Antarctica. There: a complete thought. Everything on this journey is about pleasure. The pleasure of sunshine, powdery white sand, the blue-green sea; the pleasure of hands and hair and bellies. Just last week she was
plowing through Midtown, jaywalking, dodging taxis and buses—tense as a skyscraper, a 5’2” nerve ending. Here her limbs are splayed and bare, idle as a jellyfish.

There is the problem of ditching their moms. Adam and Eve gobble through their respective dinners and then sit with their mothers in the Diamond Lady Lounge for the tango show or an evening with the Sea Dynasty singers and dancers. Later when their moms have gone to bed, they meet up at the Water Hole or the Tip Top Bar for cigars under the stars. Adam hugs Eve tightly, cigar smoke twisting above their heads. She swoons. “Adam,” she whispers.

“Eve,” he whispers back.

Not that it’s perfect, though it almost is. He rubs her back and pulls the label out of her tank top. “What is this? Acrylic?” he asks.

“It’s microfiber. Like it?”

“I like natural fibers,” he says.

When the sky begins to lighten they sneak back to their respective cabins, waking their respective moms, who eye their respective clocks.

Adam phones Eve at eight-thirty one morning. “Come quick,” he says. His mom is going to the beauty salon in the bowels of the ship. “How long does a pedicure take?” he asks. Eve throws on a bikini and shorts and grabs her key.

“I thought we were going to the champagne
breakfast,” her mom says, squeezing into a girdle. She squats, hoists, wriggles it up. “You’d rather run all over God’s creation with that hippie than spend time with me.”

Of course I would, Eve thinks.
Oh, Mom
. Eve wants to be loved deeply, tragically, completely. It shames her, but after all these years she still hopes for the fairy tale. She wants to believe there’s a prince of a guy, tucked into her future, who will one day unfurl like a robust, exotic bloom in the weedy patch of her life. That’s the way it is with Eve—the way it has been since she can remember. “Oh Mom,” she says. “I’ll meet you there. Save me a chocolate croissant.”

Eve flies down two flights to the Laguna Deck and down the skinny corridor to where Adam is putting the “Do Not Disturb” sign on his door. They tumble onto his little twin bed, yanking off clothes and pulling each other close, quick and naughty as if they’re teenagers. “Alone at last,” Eve cries. And just when they are naked and tangled the key turns in the lock.

“I forgot to take my multivitamin!” Adam’s mother cries, as Adam and Eve grab the covers. Adam’s mom snatches the bottle off the dresser and shakes one out. “Really Adam, if you want me to shoo, just tell me to shoo. I’m only paying for this trip.” After she leaves they huddle under the covers, ashamed, quietly playing footsie. Next to the bed is a pair of Adam’s mom’s felt slippers with little button
eyes, watching them.

All Eve wants is to have sex in private. She wants to lie down between sheets next to Adam. She wants to rest her head on his chest, pretending he is hers, even though he is not and she doesn’t know him well enough to know if she would want him to be. But still…She wants to see how it might feel, how it might be. This fling has the whiff of something delirious—Vick’s VapoRub, gasoline.

They do what they can. On Nosy Komba, Madagascar, she gives him a hand job on a tree-topped hill while golden-eyed lemurs swing from the branches above them. On Nosy Be, they hump behind a mud hut.

In the Seychelles they attempt underwater intercourse. They swim away from the watchful eyes of the other passengers, toward the reef where they pull off their bathing suits and tread water. But they slide off each other and sink, and Eve’s bikini bottom almost floats away. The trouble is Adam’s too soft, the watery angles are wrong, and they get nosefuls of the salty sea. Finally, they give up. Beneath them the water is clear as light, and there’s a tremulous city of slippery neon fish, downy rocks, and fallopian plant life. They stare down at their reedy, naked legs—pale sea anemones—pumping in the current. Their pubic hair is pulsing and alive. What perfect sea creatures they’ve become!

At $1.75 per minute, Eve e-mails her friends back home. In the subject section she writes,
I think I’ve found the one!
She tells her friends all about Adam, his lovely yin-yang tattoo. She complains about the lack of privacy, the lack of sexual opportunity, their mothers.

Her mystically inclined friend Miranda e-mails back. “Hip hip hooray! And New Jersey! He’s practically right around the corner. But, honey, how long have you known this guy? A week? Some Native Americans believe the first time with a new partner should take place in the woman’s bed, otherwise little pieces of her spirit are lost, and as far I know they’re not recoverable. This is the way it is with women, unfortunately. I’m only mentioning this because you’re so far from home. Do you really want to lose a piece of yourself on the Indian Ocean? If he’s as delicious as you say, wait. Save intercourse for America—on the Upper West Side in your Murphy bed.”

Eve spends the next five minutes in a gloomy funk because Miranda—wise, dear Miranda—is often right about many things. This could be a potentially irksome quality, but Miranda is a radiant being, charming and self-deprecating, and she pulls off righteousness without too many snags.

Eve hasn’t always had first-time sex in her own bed and wonders if she’s had some soul leakage in the San Fernando Valley, the East Village, Weehawken.
She also wonders if soul leakage could be related to the melancholy that sometimes swells inside her like music.

She shoots back an e-mail. “Thanks for the spirit tip. I’ll try to wait, but I’m in paradise…”

She presses Send, and exits the cave-like e-mail center and hangs over the deck’s rail, peering down into the foamy sea. Perhaps her spirit is intact. She breathes deeply and closes her eyes, aware of her galloping pulse, her grumbling stomach, her whirling thoughts. She believes her spirit is of one piece, reasonably whole, quietly yearning, ethereal and unknowable, hanging inside her and flapping against her heart.

They’re headed to the Maldives, south of India, to a tiny uninhabited island that apparently can be circled on foot in ten minutes’ time. The crew needs to foam-wash the carpets and encourages all passengers to go ashore or assemble in the Diamond Lady Lounge for a day of Bingo. Eve packs a small bag with her bikini bottoms and two condoms. She wears a bikini top and a fluttery wrap that swishes against her ankles and feels silky against her naked ass. It’ll be all right. How she wants Adam with his dark, expressive eyes, like a deer trapped in headlights.