Pretty (6 page)

“You're a pervert,” I say. Jake is something of a sock fetishist, obsessed with striped knee-highs. I have seen him stare at sock displays in shop windows for long, transfixed moments. At least it makes him easy to please. It also makes him the perfect boyfriend for a girl with lacerated legs.

I redirect. “How's the job going?”

“Me and money are not friends. I've decided I can't do it. I can't work for the monster boss people. I can't concentrate with real people concentration. I said it would take me five days to paint these rooms and now it's been eleven. One color, one color. If you break it down by the hour, I haven't made minimum wage. I'm practically paying them to paint their fucking house.”

He looks around, distracted. I have brought his good mood crashing down. I can tell it disappoints him that I'm so boring, you know, asking about things like jobs when he wants to talk about zombie gorillas.

“Maybe it'll get better once you do it a few times.”

This is my best attempt to sound supportive. Truthfully, Jake's noncooperation policy annoys me. I know he could do it, he just doesn't want to. He makes everything so difficult. I call it his civil disobedience act. The world shows up and he goes limp. I don't know how we're supposed to get anywhere if we're not willing to even try.

“Or maybe I'll reenlist. There's a war on now. They're not calling it a war, but it is and they could use me. I have skills,” he says with sudden renewed interest.

“Good idea.”

“I'm serious.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? All you talk about is how much you hate this president. How stupid the war is. It's, like, your number one diatribe.”

Sometimes it's hard to tell if he's serious or talking in metaphors or just joking.

“Politics means nothing. Politics is totally extraneous, beside the point.”

“Whatever. They won't let you hold a gun. Sorry, soldier. Looks like you're stuck having to get a job.”

“Politics means nothing,” Jake patiently repeats, as if I haven't even said the word “job.” “We laughed at the government. There were communists and fascists and fucking whatever in my platoon. We talked about it when we got drunk and we made fun of each other but it meant nothing. Politics means shit compared to the sense of self you get out there. I'm telling you that the weight of a hundred-pound rucksack, a thirty-pound machine gun, is nothing compared to the fucking weight of having to pay the fucking rent in the city of Lost fucking Angels.”

He leans forward, his hands planted wide on the table, his gray eyes lit with clarity. It is a man thing, I think. I stare at the breadbasket and contemplate an olive roll. I put the breadbasket on the table next to us so I won't have to look at it. Jake takes it back, puts it in his lap, and bites off large hunks of a baguette, talking with his mouth full. Gooey dough balls stick to his teeth.

“Don't think it's about America. You think that's why guys go over there? It's not for George fucking Bush. I'll tell you that much. Anyway, what should I stay here for? Tell me that.”

“For your art,” I say, but it sounds thin. It's not the answer he wants. “For whatever's coming next,” I continue. “What if it's something amazing? It could be. It has been before.”

The truth is, I don't have anything near his brains or his conviction, with my Mr. Rogers aphorisms and my twelve-step meetings and my self-help books and my nothing real I believe in. One thing Jake has that I don't anymore is faith. He has the capacity to believe he's Jesus. To believe in joining the Marines. I can barely believe in the next hairdo.

“That is what you come up with, Princess? For my fucking art? For something amazing? You can't even ask me to stay here for you? And anyway, what are you staying for? I'm serious. Maybe not about the Marines, but let's go volunteer for the Peace Corps. Or I'll teach English in Bangladesh and you can volunteer, like, teaching prostitutes to give pedicures or something. You're not born for this drudgery.”

“What are you talking about? This drudgery is actually exactly what I'm born for. I come from a long line of drudgery.”

“I'm talking about purpose,” he says. “I'm talking about daring to fucking exist. I'm talking about commitment. If you had ever had any, you'd know what I mean.”

“Change the subject,” I say, chastened. It's rare to get through an hour with him without either a catastrophe or a revelation. He's that kind of a dice roll. I feel like I got kicked in the solar plexus, but I try to remember to hold my head up, pull my shoulders back.
Milady's Standard Textbook of Practical Cosmetology
has a whole chapter on posture.

“You're right. You're right,” he says. “I'm sorry. I didn't come here to add stones to the princess's prison walls. I came here to save you, even if it means painting all of Los Angeles one color, one color. I'm not enlisting in anything. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just talking. I'm just an asshole.”

He kisses me in the CPK and a bored temp looks up from her Chinese chicken salad, her former judgment turning into a little stomach twinge of envy.

He's impossible. I'd bet my cosmetology license that he'll leave his job half-finished and will never even pick up the check. Me, I've always been good at showing up for work. That's the kind of girl I am. But I can't look Jake in the face and tell him that it's gotten me much further than not showing up for work has gotten him. Here we both are.

Jake drops me back at school and drives off in the opposite direction to stare at the unpainted walls of his unsuccessful attempt at a job. I'd say that I have the worst luck with men but when you make a choice like Jake you can hardly call it luck anymore, can you? Still, he saves me from the sameness of my days.

B
efore I clock in,
the phone buzzes as soon as I slip it into my smock pocket. I take it out and look at the screen and the area code isn't Jake's as I'd hoped. It's Toledo.

I take a breath like how they teach us in group. They teach us to breathe. I decide to pick it up, hiding by the lockers in the back hallway to talk. Partly because I have nothing better to do and partly because I've got to talk to her sometime, don't I?

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, honey.” My mom tries to sound upbeat, to banish the sticky eternal glaze of need from her voice. The attempt makes her sound like one of those fascist Disney chipmunks.

“How are you?”

“I'm doing pretty good, Mom. Not bad. Could be worse.” How many ways can I say the same nothing? “A little tired from school but all right. How are you doing?”

It's hard to explain why this is so agonizing. How can there be so much bullshit in just a “hello, how are you?” that it makes me want to stick my head in the oven? She is listening to see if I'm drunk; I'm listening to see if she's drunk. And both of us are broke and depressed and alone and hanging on to our respective life rafts by a pinkie nail. So you can see that the truthful conversation is not the one you want to have, either.

“Good, honey. Real good. It's getting ready to snow here. Can you believe it? You can smell it in the air. It's real nippy outside today.”

“Huh.”

“Still getting snow so late this year. The frost killed my early flowers already two days ago. Bet there's no snow out by you, though, huh?”

“Not exactly. How's work?”

“Oh, the same. The same. Pam took me to Red Lobster last night and I thought that was real nice of her. Those shrimp are just sweet as candy. Do you have Red Lobsters out where you are?”

“What's the occasion?”

“For what?”

“The Red Lobster?”

“It was her birthday.”

“She took you to Red Lobster for her birthday.”

“So?”

Someone closed a locker on her windbreaker. Someone dropped her box of wig pins and didn't bother to pick them up. Someone spilled something liquid on the floor of the hall. There's a Three Stooges moment in the making. I imagine Mrs. Montano walking down the hallway, slipping on the liquid, and trying to grab for the corner of the jacket. It slips through her fingers and she lands right on her ass on the wig pins.

I forget what we were talking about.

“Um. Yeah,” I say.

Or I could just go ahead and stick a wig pin in my eye.

“Yeah. Well. How's your beauty school? Are you beautiful yet?”

“Ask another question.”

Mom has been working as a receptionist at a doctor's office for about ten years now, which gives her perks like health benefits and free pens from pharmaceutical companies and unlimited stolen prescription pads. When we talk on the phone I hear the telltale fading in and out, the lazy consonants. She calls a lot less than she used to. She started drinking again when my stepfather, Rick, left her for some slut who had just graduated from junior college and was studying for her real estate license. At the time, I was bitter and dismissive. Said it was a good thing, that she was better off without him. That hasn't turned out to be true.

“Another question?”

“I'm almost done here. The pin curls are challenging but I think I've got a real aptitude for blow-dries. I'll have a big career any day.”

“You can do my hair next time you come to visit.”

“Sure, Mom.” I never visit. I haven't visited once in four years.

“Eyes on the prize, honey.”

“Eyes on the prize” is pure Rick. She still talks like him all these years later. He's still in her. In our family, it was always him with the “chin up” and the “early bird gets the worm” kind of shit. I remember Rick at my soccer matches: “Eyes on the prize, Bebe. Eyes on the prize, sweetheart.”

I had asked my mother to tell him not to call me that and, while he was at it, not to come to my games at all, but my mother pointed out that it was his car and I should be grateful we had one at all. She said I should be thankful he took an interest in me and wanted to marry a widow with a six-year-old daughter.

Rick sold hot tubs. A luxury profession in a luxury-starved town.

“You shouldn't be able to sell hot tubs in Toledo,” he said. “Not now. Used to be a different kind of place. Where there were plenty of men doing ordinary jobs for fine money and plenty also getting rich off them. Not anymore. But I'm a can-do guy, Bebe. And there are always people with money and if there aren't people with money there are people with credit and if there are people with credit than I can sell 'em something.”

Mom met Rick at an AA meeting and they bonded over the fact that his son, Hunter, was the same age as I was. It was a valiant save. How Rick swooped in just before the house was gone and the car blew its last whatever it is cars blow. I remember Mom sitting up rod straight on the padded chair at the head of the polished oak dining room table that used to be Grandma's. She called me over and pulled me into her lap and then she told me about Rick. How we were leaving the house and moving in with him on the north side. They had only been dating a few months.

I felt panic. We couldn't leave. We lived in the only house with a hill in the whole town practically. A hill to roll down. A hill to lie across and look at the sky. Dad would have dismissed Rick with a snort. Dad would have called Rick a square.

“I don't want to go. I want to stay. Rick is a square.”

Mom laughed at that. She pushed my bangs off my forehead to kiss it. I guess she once was the kind of mom who smoothed my hair.

“I know, sweetie. But Rick is an okay guy. And he can take care of you and Mommy.”

My mom was a pretty lady. Prettier before she cut her hair off short and started wearing sweater vests, but pretty still. Why did she have to give up so fast? Our old chandelier threw little rainbow splashes onto the gray walls. There were no rainbows in Rick's house—no rainbows, no hills, no dad I wanted anything to do with. I held her hand, her nails always polished coral and filed to a tight oval. Then I put her index finger into my mouth and bit down, crunching the bony joint. She yanked her hand away and shoved me roughly off her lap. Her hand hovered in the air somewhere between suspended in surprise and wanting to give me a good whack. She never did whack me, though. I can say that for my mom.

“I swear, Beth Baker. I don't know what is wrong with you sometimes. What kind of animal are you?” She stalked off into her bedroom and I stood outside the door and heard her crying and was glad.

The last day of August we moved into Rick's house with the stone fence and the broken gate and the orange carpeting woven through with yellow dog hair. Rick lounged in his undershirt on the recliner in the living room that first night, with the cable box resting on his round belly, and showed me how to make the channel change, the fat, white buttons making a nice thunk sound when you pushed them in. I guessed Rick was okay, but I didn't like him to call me sweetheart.

Every night in that new house my mother lay next to me and sang when she put me to sleep, holding my hand in hers, her sweater smelling like perfume and dinner. My wallpaper was green and white with a fern leaf design that crawled and shifted in the dim light. She and Rick took me to pick it out myself. A seashell night-light glowed peach in the corner. We sang Joni Mitchell songs, “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Little Green.” We sang the Beatles' “Yellow Submarine” and I sang “sumbarine” instead. When I want to hang up on her, want to put down the phone and never pick it up again, I try to remember that. When I hear her voice and it seems it belongs to no one I've ever met, I remember how we sang the song about the sumbarine.