The Pretty Ones (5 page)

No response. He didn't even bother to lift his arm from across his face. A prince, vexed by the world.

“Did you get any writing done?”

Barrett slid his forearm away from his eyes and gave his sister a tortured look.

“Well,
my
day was nice.” At least partly. It had been terrible before it had turned terrific. “I made a friend.” The statement left her in a rush of excitement.

Nothing.

Nell tossed her purse aside, studied the stained sleeve of her sweater before shrugging it off her shoulders. She kicked her penniless loafers off beside the door.

“Her name is Linnie Carter, and she's the kindest, most wonderful person I've ever met.”

Barrett's ailing gaze settled on Nell's ruined clothes. After Linnie had left the restroom, Nell had done little to remove the coffee stain, too wound up to care about a bit of destroyed fabric. But now, with Barrett staring at the ugly blotch the way a boy would gape at a swath of menstrual blood, a pang of insecurity shot through her. She peered down at the stain, covered it as best she could with her hands.

He sat up on the couch, pushed Robert Louis Stevenson aside. Scribbled a message:
I'll bet
.

“Oh.” She shrugged a little, as if dismissing the stain as no big deal. “I just . . . it was an accident. You know me, all thumbs. I spent half the day covered in coffee. But I'm glad, because that's how I met Linnie. I mean, I already
knew
her, though she never had a reason to stop and talk to me. But she came into the break room just as they had . . .” She paused, corrected herself. “Just as I had my spill, and she was so sweet, Barrett. She was on me in a flash, asking if I was okay, if I needed help. She even went across the street for seltzer water, if you can believe it. Her mother . . .”

The muscles in Barrett's face tensed.

“. . . she knows how to remove stains, see? She worked at a dry cleaning shop, and she swears by seltzer water and lemon juice. The place across from R & B didn't have any lemon juice, so we . . .” Her near-manic soliloquy faded to nothing.

Barrett's expression was blank, as though his soul had escaped his body. Another quip:
Yeah, she knows how to remove stains ­REALLY well.

“Well, I
know
there's still a stain,” she told him. “I'm not blind. It's just that Linnie had to get back to work, and I didn't know what I was doing, really. It's my fault the stain didn't come out, not hers. I could have done a better job, but I wasn't going to spend the entire day cleaning off a cheap shirt, you know.”

Barrett rose from the couch, his brown eyes level on her face.

Sometimes she hated him for his silence, but she knew it wasn't his fault. She had tried to convince herself that maybe it was a choice, but it had been so long—long enough for her to completely forget the sound of his voice. Long enough to simply accept the way things were: quiet. Choice or not, she doubted Barrett would ever speak again.

“It was on sale.” She shoved her hair behind her ears and shrugged at him. “Just a cheap shirt,” she murmured. “I can get another one.”

He held up his notepad.
I thought we were on a budget.

“We
are,
but what am I supposed to do, go to the office in my pajamas?” A laugh. “Maybe I'll buy myself a nicer shirt,” she mused, eyeing the blouse that struck her as more frumpy than usual. “Something that Mary Ann could feast her eyes on, something that'll show her I'm not such a square after all. What a shock
that
would be, right?” A snort. “I can just imagine her face, the surprise; look at fat old Nell Sullivan in her pretty new blouse, and maybe even a new skirt and new shoes too.” That would certainly set the snobby priss straight. “Maybe I'll get my hair cut, give myself a whole new image.” Just what Harriet Lamont would have suggested.

A new image for a new life.

A better life.

One that Nell deserved.

Barrett's attention remained on her face. Nell caught his eyes and flushed. He looked aggravated. Glaring down at his notepad, he began to write in a rush.

Oh God,
Nell thought.
Here it comes.
Another one of his freak-outs. Slowed by his lack of vocalization, these arguments could last hours. They were exhausting. Silent and vampiric, zapping all of her energy.

“You don't know how it is, Barrett. Those girls . . .” She tried to stall him, to make him stop writing with her memory of what Linnie had said. “They're bullies. Nobody should act the way they do. They think they're so special, so
perfect.
” She frowned, then looked down to her bare feet. There was a line of road grit across their tops, the dirt a reminder of Faye Sullivan's favorite saying:
You can't shine a turd
.

You're kidding yourself. You think everyone is nice right up until they throw dirt in your face. Those chicks aren't friendly. They aren't special. They'd be just as happy if you were dead.

But Mary Ann and her friends
were
special. They were the privileged ones. The gorgeous ones. The ones that even Linnie Carter couldn't compete with. So where did Linnie get off suggesting that they weren't as amazing as they seemed? Sure, Mary Ann Thomas was less than kind. That girl could be a real
bitch
. But Nell supposed that came with the territory. Everyone wanted to be Mary Ann's friend. Surely, that sort of attention must be exhausting. Nell was only adding to the noise, to the pressure, to the suggestion that Mary Ann
had
to be perfect. Maybe Mary Ann was responding the only way she knew how: with hostility.

“Anyway.” Nell gave her brother a weary smile, choosing to ignore his glare, to forget the harsh words he'd scribbled onto his small pad of canary-colored paper. “I'm going to invite Linnie over for tea.”

The muscles in Barrett's jaw went rigid.
No you're fucking not.

Nell raised her hands at him, shook her head. “I know you hate company, but it's rude not to do it. She helped me, and I have to show my appreciation.” He started writing again, but she turned away, refusing to read whatever aggravated disallowance he was preparing to throw at her next. Her fingers brushed across the fronds of a small fern poised in the kitchen window. Its waxy leaves glowed with the late afternoon sunlight. The entire kitchenette seemed to resonate with a newfound sense of hope.

“Tea,” Nell said to herself. “And a layer cake, frosted with the prettiest pink buttercream.” Pink like Linnie's lipstick. “And real sugar cubes in a tiny porcelain bowl sitting next to tiny silver spoons. And I'll need a proper tablecloth, something white, maybe lace.”

She spun around, gave Barrett a look. “You'll be nice, won't you?” Her tone edged on pleading. Barrett showed her his back. If she was going to ignore him, he'd return the favor. An eye for an eye. In games like these, Barrett always held the upper hand. She could disregard him all she wanted, but it was Nell who was sensitive to being shut out. Barrett couldn't have cared less.

“Barrett,
please
!”

Every time she brought up the idea of a friend outside of their two-person circle, he had a fit. He didn't trust anyone, especially not women who were too fancy for their own good. To him, Plain Jane was perfect. Those ostentatious girls were little more than sinners stuffed into expensive shoes. They reminded him of their mother. A woman who couldn't have a drink without swallowing the whole bottle. Who couldn't disagree without screaming at the top of her lungs, without shoving and clawing and turning into a lunatic.

It was the very way Faye had handled Barrett's accident in the backyard.

Nell and Barrett had been sitting in a kiddie pool among the weeds and dirt clods of their New Jersey backyard. Their mother and father fought inside, the screaming nothing new. Mom and Dad always argued. Once, Nell had seen their mom try to hit him with a frying pan. Another time, Leigh had shoved Faye against a wall and held her there by her neck while she kicked and screamed to be let go. This particular afternoon, though, four-year-old Nell and six-year-old Barrett sat in their pool and listened to tiny, glittering explosions of breaking glass. There were faint sounds of fists pounding flesh, of palms hitting skin. The argument's end was punctuated by the slap of the screen door against the jamb. Dad remained inside while Mom stumbled onto the patchy lawn. She struggled to light a crooked cigarette. Her hands were unsteady, her entire body rocking as though she was standing on the deck of a boat.

Nell crawled out of the pool and ran across the yard to go inside and pee. The one time she had let loose in the pool, Barrett had screamed at her that it was the grossest thing in the whole wide world. She had taken a beating from her mother for it.
Dirty, disgusting child.
Nell was exiled to the closet, and while she had screamed and wept and beat her fists against the door, Barrett was allowed to watch
Gumby
and eat Trix cereal out of his favorite bowl. Had it been Barrett who had peed, they would have both spent the afternoon sleeping among their mom's scuffed-up pumps.

When Nell returned from the bathroom to the sun-dappled yard a few minutes later, struggling to pull her little green peplum bathing suit up onto her shoulders, the screaming match between her parents had found a second wind. Her father was outside now, a limp Barrett in his arms. Their mother was wailing. Her hands shook as though each of her fingers contained the seed of a tiny earthquake, her cigarette gone. Nell couldn't put it together. Had Barrett stood up and slipped as he stepped out of the pool? She'd nearly fallen on her face a few times herself, so maybe he'd lost his footing and hit his head? Or maybe he had gone under and swallowed water? The scenarios were muddled, confused by a sudden burst of motion. Her dad rushed Barrett inside while her mom followed them both, pummeling Leigh with her fists. Neither one of them stopped to regard Nell on their way into the house.

Nell blinked at her mother's extinguished cigarette. It bobbed up and down in the pool, marooned in a tiny ocean. Her mom's screams echoed from inside the house. Amid the sepia-colored tones of Nell's memory, she couldn't recall the screaming ever stopping that day. That was the day Barrett lost his voice. Whether it had been trauma, stress response syndrome, or a mental break, the doctors couldn't tell. But Barrett was all right later. He never spoke again, but he was okay.

It was their crazed, alcoholic mother who made Barrett hate women. And after their father died, Faye Sullivan only went from bad to worse. She'd doll herself up with lipstick and hair spray, then shove Nell and Barrett in her closet. She'd lock it from the outside and run off for the night. Barrett said that she was probably going to nightclubs, or maybe spending time in the backseat of a strange man's car. At first, Nell refuted her brother's assumptions. But it wasn't long before Faye Sullivan started bringing those strange men home.

They would listen to unfamiliar voices through the crack of the closet door. Neither of them made a sound as their mother gasped and moaned, begging for the headboard to hit the wall faster, harder, louder. Nell wasn't sure, but she was pretty confident any harder would have made the entire house shake loose.

It was only after their mom's man-friends left that Nell and Barrett were allowed to come out of hiding. Sometimes those men would spend the night. “You keep your mouth shut,” Faye would tell them. “If you make a peep in here, I'll beat you within an inch.” During those evenings, they were left to sleep among their mother's nicotine-scented clothes. They tried to stay quiet despite contorting their faces in anguish, their bladders threatening to burst. Faye Sullivan didn't want anyone to know she had kids, and the way Barrett recalled it, in a sense, she didn't. It took more than having children to be a mother.

Eventually, the men would leave and Faye would unlock the closet door. She'd look down upon them, her hair a wild bird's nest atop her head, her satin nightgown hanging off a single shoulder, a perpetual cigarette clinging to the swell of a rouged bottom lip. And instead of crouching in the doorway and telling them she was sorry and she loved them—
It's just pretend, my babies; it's just a game—
she'd hiss, “Go to your room.”

Barrett's hate was all-encompassing. So large that it spilled out beyond their mother and soaked into the skirt hems of every woman who reminded him of her. It was why he didn't want Nell going out with her coworkers. He was afraid of Nell turning into their mom. Into a witch. Into a monster.

Standing in the kitchen, Nell studied her brother's scowling face. “I know you don't like this idea,” she told him. “But you need to trust me. Everything will be fine.”

Barrett said nothing, his muteness a result of whatever had happened out in the backyard that summer afternoon. His stillness was a perfect illustration of his ever-present stubbornness. Whatever had transpired out at that pool had rendered him perpetually speechless, as though the water he'd swallowed had been laced with a fairy-tale curse. Like Snow White's apple, or the beer and cigar that turned Pinocchio into a donkey boy.

“She's nice,” Nell promised. “She's nothing like Mom.”

Mom.

Barrett flinched, stung by the word itself. His fingers tensed against the yellow paper of his notepad.

It hurt Nell to see her sibling so vulnerable, but she stood her ground. Turning to the fridge, she pulled open the door, allowing Barrett to sulk back to the couch while she searched for dinner possibilities. Though she knew Barrett wouldn't eat a bite of what she made while she was there. He always ate his dinner when she wasn't around, as if to spite her.

.   .   .

The following morning, a Thursday, Nell readied herself bright and early despite having the day off. She was out the apartment door long before Barrett woke, but another one of his notes greeted her from the kitchen table.