Girls of a Certain Age Read online

  Even though I didn’t really like Tiger, I was also worried that he’d die, which was what made him worse than the sea monkeys. I’d rush home from school to look into his cage. He was usually sleeping, curled up like a giant, dirty cotton ball on top of his own poop. He was so fluffy you couldn’t tell if he was breathing, so just to make sure he was alive, I’d tilt the cage up, and Tiger would wake up in a panic and scramble down the ramp to the side that was still on the floor, and I’d feel bad for waking him even though all he ever did was sleep.

  One day, I tipped the cage and Tiger didn’t scramble. He just rolled all the way down the wood chips covered in his poop and hit the other end of the cage with a thud. I was mad but also relieved because now I could stop wondering if he was dead.

  Since we didn’t have a yard, Ma and I walked to the park with Tiger in a Key Food bag. Ma was beautiful with some meat on her bones and a little darkness under her eyes like a rainy day and a chin that was pointed always a little toward the sky despite everything. She often wore these little blue dangly earrings that matched her Rite Aid vest, and she was wearing them as we walked through the park to the edge of the woods, and they twinkled in the sun like they were expensive. We rolled Tiger up in a big, green maple leaf and Ma said, “Would you like to say a few words?” She put her hand on my shoulder as I held Tiger like a burrito.

  “Tiger,” I said, “you weren’t that fun and you were expensive, but I’m sorry that you’re dead.” I was sorry, but it seemed like if a thing had to leave, it was better if it died—then you didn’t have to wonder if it might come back. Otherwise, you’re left feeling like you do when you have to return a chapter book to the library before you’ve finished reading it.

  “Amen,” said Ma. And we agreed that she would do the honors of pitching him into the woods because she had a great arm.

  When Willa heard about this, she clutched her puffy hair and screamed, “You did what?” We were at her house and hadn’t even gotten to the cookies yet.

  “He was eating me out of house and home,” I said.

  “Did you kill him?” she said, her eyes welling up with tears so they glittered like her stupid sparkly shirt. “Did you do it on purpose?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “I did everything for that bastard, and how does he thank me?”

  Willa stared at me hard because Tiger was dead and I’d said a swear word—which, get over it—and then Willa’s dad, Mr. Tim, came in the door, whistling and carrying a big bag of dog food in his arms. “Everything all right in here?” he asked.

  Willa didn’t even look at him. “Seriously, Dad,” she said, like it was none of his beeswax. When he left she whispered, “You’re so irresponsible, you can’t even keep a rodent alive. Then when he’s dead, you can’t even bury him right.”

  “What’d you want me to do, bury it in a flowerpot?” I asked.

  “It!” Willa screamed. “It!!!!”

  Then she stopped talking to me, and I went home without a cookie or a chance to play with her basement toys.

  A few weeks later, Ma got off the phone and said, “Why don’t you join the 4-H club with Willa? Ms. Mary said she’ll drive you.” Ma was wearing her blue earrings, but the sun wasn’t out so they just looked like blue squares that I could’ve made out of Play-Doh.

  “I hate Willa,” I said.

  “That’s not true,” said Ma.

  I was pretty sure it was true, but Ma said she could use a break and it was very nice of Ms. Mary to offer, so I didn’t have a choice.

  Willa and I sat in the back seat in silence with our arms crossed, but first she aimed both of the AC vents in the back directly at her face, because it was her car. She was wearing new denim overalls with smiley faces bleached into them and she had a triangle of red handkerchief in her hair, like she was some sort of farm child. “What’s going on, girls?” Ms. Mary kept saying, looking back into the rearview with this big concerned crease in the middle of her forehead. “Willa, why don’t you tell Ashley what 4-H is like?” She had this high-pitched voice like a cartoon bird. Sometimes she sounded so friendly I wanted to smack her.

  Willa didn’t say anything. She just casually slipped this little egg-shaped plastic thing out of her pocket, all cool, like it was just a stick of gum or something, but I knew that it was a Tamagotchi because on the six o’clock news they’d talked about it and said it was going to be a fad. It cost twenty bucks and had this little screen where a pet lived, and you could press buttons to play with it and feed it so it would have full happiness and wouldn’t die. I’d never seen one in real life, but I pretended not to be interested because I didn’t want to give Willa the satisfaction. I looked out the window instead.

  It was practically forever until we rolled up to this long dusty driveway, and at the end of it there was this giant white house with a porch on every side, and a big building out back like every farmhouse you ever saw in a book, bright red with white Xs on giant doors. Instead of putting the Tamagotchi back in her pocket, Willa hooked it on to a belt loop of her overalls so it just hung at her side, and I couldn’t help but look at it. On the screen, there was this little outline of a creature with giant lips, and he was bouncing around with happiness.

  As soon as Ms. Mary turned the car engine off, Willa made a big show of jumping out of her seat and flinging open the car door and running over to the fence where these pigs and chickens and ducks were wandering all over the place. “So addorrabble!” she said, patting some crazy-eyed bleating goat on the head. “So cuuuttte!” I followed Willa slowly, kicking my feet in the dirt.

  “Who pays to feed all these things?” I asked.

  “Everything’s about money with you, isn’t it?” Willa said. Ms. Mary told Willa to hush and I threw Willa a look like, Even your ma doesn’t like you. There was this black, wiry-haired potbellied pig named Suzie Cakes and Ms. Mary got on one knee next to me and showed me how to feed it Cheerios, speaking very slowly to me in her high-pitched voice like I was an idiot.

  Suzie Cakes started eating right out of my hand, her wet snout tickling my palm. “You know,” said Ms. Mary, “you could train this piggy, and then you could show it at the fair. Remember Willa did that last year and she got a blue ribbon? She had a lot of fun.”

  “Is there prize money?” I asked, hoping Willa would hear, but she didn’t even turn to look at me. She was pressing the buttons on her Tamagotchi again while this big fat potbellied pig named Fifi pranced around next to her, wagging its tiny tail. Fifi was a Grand Champion and could do stuff like sit and roll over and fetch things.

  Ms. Mary went inside and Suzie Cakes snorted around in my hand for a while eating Cheerios, her little tail wagging around, and then I thought I should give her a nice hug, but when I reached out she made a run for it, slipping right out from under me and jetting off through the grass. For something so fat, Suzie Cakes was a really fast sprinter, and even though I was right on her tail, I couldn’t quite catch up, and then she darted under the porch, and I couldn’t fit in there unless I slithered on my stomach, which I was not going to do. I stood next to the porch for a minute, trying to catch my breath and compose myself, because there was an angry feeling in me, and I was thinking about how dumb it was that the things you were supposed to love were always running away or dying.

  The space under the porch had a crisscross front like the top of a pie, but there was an opening at the side where I could sit on my haunches and peek through. Suzie Cakes was huddled at the back near the cement wall, basking in the shade. She didn’t seem to care that I was outside in the hot sun saying nice things like, “You’re very pretty, Suzie Cakes. Come on out!” I got a handful of Cheerios from the ziplock bag and shook it in her direction. “Come on, now,” I said very nicely, but she just kept her head down on the ground and blinked lazily, like she didn’t care about anything.

  “Quit messing around under there!” I shouted. I threw the Cheerios toward her, but she just ate them off the ground wherever she could reach her snout with
out getting up.

  I looked around. Ms. Mary was inside having iced tea with the lady who owned the farm, but Willa was nearby on the grass. She was standing still as a statue with her skinny arm stretched above her head, her fingers in an okay sign, her Tamagotchi hanging perfectly still at her waist.

  At first I didn’t understand what Willa was doing, but then I saw Fifi on her haunches at Willa’s feet, staring up at Willa’s hand, and I knew she was holding a Cheerio. Fifi’s back legs were twitching like she could hardly contain herself, and her tail was clicking back and forth like one of those piano timers.

  Fifi was so excited that she started vibrating and her snout started moving in and out like an accordion and her nostrils were getting bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller, and still Willa didn’t drop it. I felt embarrassed for Fifi, for how much she wanted a stupid tiny thing.

  Fifi’s head started jerking up and down, like maybe she thought Willa’s hand was moving even though it was stone-still, and I kept thinking Fifi was going to jump up on her back legs and try to get the Cheerio, even though it was impossible for her to jump that high. I was sure that Willa would drop the Cheerio now, but she just stood there, the single O held high in the air.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Not yet,” said Willa, and my chest started burning, worse than before.

  I hated Willa—I was sure of it now. I hated her stupid sparkly shirts and the dumb handkerchief in her hair and the crazy barrettes she always wore, one of them with this Noah’s ark scene with all the animals going two by two. I hated her craft supplies, like glitter stickers in the shapes of letters so she always got A pluses on poster board projects even though I drew all my letters by hand in this cool 3D style. I hated her mom for driving her to the bus stop, and I hated her dad for buying the dog food, and I hated her pink calculator watch and her dumb basement toys and her stupid Tamagotchi that she got the second it was invented.

  I didn’t even think about what I did next. I just did it. I plunged my hand into my bag of Cheerios and started throwing handfuls at Willa, just shoving my hand in and out like a machine and throwing while walking toward her, and Fifi jumped up from sitting and snorted around in the grass with glee like it was a party, and Willa’s stretched-out arm came down to cover her face, and the egg-shaped Tamagotchi swung at her waist.

  “Stop it!” Willa squealed as I chucked Cheerios at her. It was like a pebble had been tossed into me, and the angry feeling was moving out in ripples through my whole body, and I really felt wild, so when I ran out of Cheerios, I started pulling up clumps of grass with the roots and damp dirt falling off and pegging them at her while she shrieked.

  And for some reason, while Willa was yelling “Stop!” and rolling up into a ball in the grass and I was trying to jimmy a mass of wet dirt into her face and Ms. Mary was running out the back door of the big white house saying “What’s going on?” in her high-pitched bird voice, I had this picture in my head of my dad, a picture of what he looked like one night before he left, his face moonlit, his hand smoothing my covers, his mouth saying, “People are gonna tell you that you can always make a good choice, but those are the kinds of people who have choices.” And I was pretty sure which kind of person Willa was and which kind of person I was.

  I had Willa down with my forearm across her chest when we caught each other’s eyes for a split second. Hers were shiny with tears and they were looking at me like she didn’t know who I was.

  And I guess I was kind of confused too because I know you’re supposed to feel bad when you do something mean like throw things at people and smash dirt in their faces, but I didn’t feel bad, I felt this dark kind of happiness rising inside me, like how TV villains must feel when they cackle, and I thought maybe Willa was right about one thing, maybe I was callous after all.

  Middlemen

  Grace is moving in with me because my lease is being renewed and my rent has increased and she is trying to wean herself off her parents’ money. Also, the windows in my apartment let in a lot of light, unlike in Grace’s long, thin apartment, which has the ambiance of a tunnel.

  Darren, my ex-boyfriend and Grace’s coworker, is helping us make the cross-borough trek from Brooklyn to Queens. Darren and I had the sort of amicable breakup only possible when gender is the primary issue. It’s not that I dislike men; it’s not even that I won’t date them. It’s just that I more often prefer the softness of women.

  I stand in the dark, empty kitchen, which smells like Lysol, and shove the three mugs we’ve been using into the last brown box without washing them. Grace’s mug is rimmed in pink lipstick, over and over in a pattern, as if it’s part of the design.

  I can see down the dark hall where Darren is leaning one shoulder against the wall. His hand is almost over his mouth, his fingers squeezing his bottom lip, like he is both thinking and trying to prevent himself from speaking. He is watching Grace, who is in the bathroom pressing down the plastic spout of a bottle of body lotion in order to lock it closed. A dollop of lotion spurts into her hand, and she rubs it onto her pink ankles and up her thin calves. She moves slowly and purposefully—she knows she is being watched.

  A glint of sun coming through the bathroom window, one of the two windows in the apartment, hits her shiny legs in just such a way that light seems to be coming out of them rather than shining onto them.

  Darren smiles.

  I watch all of this quietly from the kitchen, off to the side, like a stagehand.

  After several trips back and forth from Brooklyn to Queens, Grace and I carry the final boxes upstairs to my apartment while Darren parks the car. On the way up, we run into my downstairs neighbor, Vinny. He’s unshaven, red-eyed, dressed in plaid pajama pants and a black terry cloth bathrobe covered in cat hair, getting yesterday’s mail. He looks us up and down. “Now I’ve got two single ladies on top of me!” he says, and he laughs and laughs, his yellow teeth gleaming like kernels on a corncob. Grace beams back at him, as if he’s just said something pleasant.

  I am relieved when all of Grace’s boxes are piled high in the spare room, now Grace’s room. I have a strong urge to push Darren out the door and lock it. Grace and I would never have to leave. We could live forever off egg rolls and pizza delivery.

  The stacked boxes look like buildings in a neglected city, Grace Godzilla-size among them. “Let’s hang pictures,” she says brightly. She bends over a fat box, sticking her butt out, flipping through frames.

  “What about your bed?” asks Darren. The mattress, which was a pain in the ass to move, leans against the wall in a gentle arch, pink sheets still sagging from it, disassembled slats of dark cherry bed frame resting behind it.

  “It just drives me crazy when pictures are crooked,” she says, ignoring him, pulling out a square canvas featuring some abstract version of Grace herself, painted by an ex-boyfriend.

  “Here?” Grace asks, looking back at Darren and me, who are leaning side by side against the opposite wall. It is impossible, comical, to determine where a picture should hang in a room full of packed boxes. The picture is so far above her head that she has to stand on tiptoes to hold it. Her body, bronzed by the afternoon light, looks like a Degas dancer all grown up. The short bob of her blond hair is curled behind her ears and pointing, mimicking the shape of her sharp, determined chin.

  “It’s not straight,” says Darren, indicating an adjustment with his hands.

  Grace moves the picture, sloping too far now in the other direction. “Good?” she asks.

  Grace and I settle into a routine. Since I work on Long Island and Grace in Manhattan, I always get home first, and since I have spent all day at work printing recipes off the internet, by the time Grace gets home, the sweet smell of onion and garlic fills our little kitchen and I am bent over the stove with the seriousness of a sentry in Grace’s pink cupcake apron.

  When Grace gets home from work, she immediately changes, not into pajamas but into a white V-neck tee and navy sweatpants rolled at the waist. We allo
w ourselves the locker-room ease of dressing and undressing wherever and whenever we feel like it. We unhook our bras at the kitchen table, slipping them out through sleeves and hanging them over our chairs; we stand over the sink in our underwear, brushing our teeth; we run on our tiptoes, dripping wet, looking for lost towels. We watch each other from the corners of our eyes and pretend we are not watching each other from the corners of our eyes.

  As I cook—chicken chili with beer biscuits, lemongrass coconut curry soup, spinach-artichoke mac and cheese—Grace sits at the green two-person table, which we found together at a yard sale in Flushing, picking green paint off with her fingernails, knees to her chest, bra dangling from the post of the chair, trying to work through the mystery of her failed relationships. “In this city resides an entire city unto itself of my ex-boyfriends,” she laments. “You’d think they’d call once in a while.” She speaks of her ex-boyfriends as if they have gone into hiding together, refugees from the terrifying land of their relationship.

  We do not talk about my exes; there are very few to speak of. Even Darren we treat like an old college friend rather than my ex. When he calls, we trick him by picking up each other’s cell phones—no one can tell our voices apart. “Guess!” we shout into the phone. “Guess which one I am!”

  Our first night in the apartment together, Grace slipped into my double bed braless in a white tank top and bright bikini underwear. “I’ll put the bed together soon,” she said, curling into the blankets like a kitten and falling instantly asleep.

  But even after Grace finishes distributing her things—brown boxes splayed flat, dishes piled to capacity in the cabinets, pillows taking over the couch, pictures hammered into the walls and perfectly aligned, extra furniture spilling out of her room and into the living area, which now looks like a thrift shop that sells mostly chairs—her bed still leans against the wall as if it’s some aesthetic decision, just part of the decor.