When she gets to the door of the boys’ locker room, she pauses. Her heart pumps rapidly in her chest at the thought of getting caught in this off-limits territory. But she gathers her nerve and pushes the swinging door open with one hand, standing back so that she won’t accidentally see in, just in case someone is in there.
“Hello?” she whispers hoarsely, just to double-check, prepared to run away as fast as she can if she gets a response. Her voice echoes off white tile and bounces back to her.
The boys’ locker room, to her astonishment, is identical in every way to the girls’, except that the bathroom area has urinals as well as toilet stalls. It even smells the same: like bleach and pink granulated hand soap. It is disappointingly, benignly unmasculine.
The graffiti is scribbled on the tiles on the wall just beside the sinks. It is her name, written in black Sharpie. “I did Lizzie Miller,” it says, in handwriting that slants up the wall. Underneath that there is a list of names, written in different hands, with a date beside each one. “Justin Bellstrom 3/22,” “Max Grouper 4/17,” “Johnny Franks 6/9 & 6/18,” “Brian Cientela 5/24.” There are ten names in all, and she stares at them, horrified: Six names she recognizes with a stab of embarrassment (Did she? Yes. Yes. Yes) and four infuriate her, because they are liars. Mark Weatherlove is in the latter group. What a faker! And she didn’t have sex with Martin Simms, either.
“Shit,” she says out loud, and the swear word reverberates off the tiles and fills the room, a dozen curses echoing back to rebuke her. She is not an object of desire to the boys of Fillmore High after all, she sees with a sudden sickening clarity. (How could she have missed this before? Did she know but somehow not know?) She is hardly a real girl at all, just a score. No different than a touchdown in a football game.
As she stands there in the boys’ bathroom, the Lizzie she thought she had become vanishes like a soap bubble in a stiff breeze—gone just like
that
—leaving her with only the hideous feeling that the last three months, the months she thought had been the best of her entire life, were a horrible mirage.
She tears a handful of paper towels from the dispenser, pumps a cupful of granulated soap on top, and rubs at the graffiti. Brian Cientela’s name, written in ballpoint pen, smears a little, but they aren’t joking when they call Sharpies permanent. She moistens the towels in the sink and rubs harder, but the paper just deteriorates into pink mush in her hand. Still, she scrubs as hard as she can, until her palm is raw and soapy water runs down the wall and her arm feels like it will fall off from the effort.
when she arrives home, in the early evening, she goes straight to her room and slams the door. She grabs a lace-trimmed pillow off her bed and throws it at the mirror. It falls to the ground with an unsatisfying wheeze. She kicks it and it punts forward only about three feet. She kicks it once more, hoping to tear a hole in its side, and it bounces off the wall. She stands there in the room, looking down at the pillow, which now has a black smear in its center, trying very hard to breathe.
At her desk, she pulls out a piece of pink stationery with “Elizabeth Miller” embossed across the top. The stationery was a Christmas present from her grandmother in Connecticut four years ago. Her mother had cooed over it and proclaimed it a “very thoughtful gift.” After writing a thank-you note to Grandma on one sheet of the stiff pink paper, she still has 499 sheets left.
Lizzie grabs her favorite pen, the one with the fuzzy blue troll glued to the top, and composes a letter to Mark Weatherlove.
“Dear Mark,” she writes, in her best cursive. “You are such a liar. How DARE you write that bullshit in the boys’ locker room. I wouldn’t touch you if you were the last person on earth, and you know it. And your mother is a total slut. Don’t ever talk to me again. NOT yours truly, Lizzie Miller.”
She seals it and, feeling much better, heads back down the stairs and out the front door. At the end of the driveway she looks both ways to see if anyone is watching—there is no one around—and thrusts the pink envelope into the mailbox.
When she returns to the house, she hears rustling in the living room and peeks around the door frame. Margaret is splayed out on the couch, legs propped up on a tower of decorative pillows. She is surrounded by computer printouts. Lizzie walks into the room and picks one up. It’s from the
Legal Affairs
Web site, entitled “Postnuptial Asset Allocation.” Another one reads, “Unitary Appreciation of Nonbinding Marital Property.” A third page is something torn out of
Ladies’ Home Journal:
“When Divorces Get Ugly: Eleven Women Talk About the Hell They Survived!”
“Where’s Mom? What’s she cleaning now?” Lizzie asks, flopping down on the couch.
“Nothing, actually,” says Margaret. “She went upstairs for a nap a few hours ago and asked to be left alone for a while. Honestly, she looked pretty rough. Maybe it’s all the fumes from the Lysol. That stuff is toxic. She should really be buying eco-friendly cleaning supplies, considering how much she uses the stuff. What happened to the cleaning lady?”
“She fired her,” Lizzie says. She chooses not to mention the fact that Guadalupe had been blamed for the vanishing booze that she herself had, in fact, been stealing from the liquor cabinet. Oops.
Lizzie picks up the
Ladies’ Home Journal
article and skims the first paragraph: “When Jenny’s husband fled for the Bahamas with his 23-year-old secretary, emptying their bank account and even taking their pet Chihuahua, Jenny thought things couldn’t get any worse. Then she showed up in divorce court and discovered that her husband—an investment banker—was suing her—an unemployed housewife—for $8,000 a month in alimony. Jenny tried committing suicide, slitting her wrists in a bathtub, before she finally got smart and…”
Lizzie looks up. “Do you think Mom is going to commit suicide?”
Margaret wrinkles her nose. “I doubt it. It would make a mess of the white rugs. Unless she chose something neat, like a bottle of sleeping pills.”
Lizzie, alarmed, tries to recall the insides of her mother’s medicine cabinet. “Could Vicodin be a sleeping pill? Mom had some of that.”
“Why does Mom have Vicodin?”
“She hurt herself playing tennis in the spring. She walked around with her arm all bandaged up for two weeks.”
“Right,” says Margaret. “Well, don’t worry, Vicodin is harmless. You can’t kill yourself with it. Not really.”
“Oh,” says Lizzie, but she’s not convinced.
Margaret notices the look on her face and reaches over to rub Lizzie’s back. “Hey, I was only joking, Lizzie. Mom would never kill herself. She’s just not the suicidal type. Besides, she’s too much of a control freak to let us run amok in her house without her around to make sure we don’t make a mess of things. Right?”
Lizzie puts down the papers. “Why are you reading
Ladies’ Home Journal
?”
“I saw it at the supermarket, thought it sounded relevant.”
“What are you doing?”
“Research. For Mom.”
“They’re getting divorced, right?” Lizzie asks reluctantly.
Margaret nods and flips to a new page, her eyes still focused on the tiny text. “If Dad has his way.”
“Will he?” Lizzie’s eyes are stinging, and she realizes that she’s holding back tears. For a moment she hangs on to the hope that Margaret will say that her father won’t, in fact, have his way; that their mom will convince him that he was wrong and he’ll leave Beverly and come home and everything will return to normal.
“Yes,” she says, dropping the sheaf of papers to her lap. “In all probability.”
Lizzie blinks twice and frowns. “Oh,” she says. “So are you going to help Mom?”
“Yes,” Margaret says, in a loud, firm voice, and Lizzie is warmed momentarily by the assertion. Margaret always seems to have it together; if there is something good to be redeemed from the situation, Margaret will find it. She closes her eyes and feels safe in her sister’s presence; if Margaret were home all the time, she thinks, it would be like having a best friend living right in the house with her. “I think I’m going to go make myself a sundae,” Lizzie announces. “Do you want one?”
Margaret shakes her head and stacks the papers on the table. She aligns them with three quick raps. “Not hungry. Thanks, though.”
Lizzie pauses at the doorway. “Margaret? How old were you when you lost your virginity?”
Margaret raises an eyebrow. “Wait, Lizzie. Wait until you’re much, much older.”
Lizzie feels her face flush and is frightened that her sister might be able to see right through her pink cheeks to the ugly truth inside. She’s just a little annoyed that Margaret always seems to think that she’s too young to discuss anything of importance. “C’mon, Margaret. I’m not, like, a child.”
“You’re only fourteen.”
“Fifteen in October!” She grips the doorway.
“Seriously. Wait. For three reasons. A: Men suck, and all you have to do is look at what’s going on with Mom and Dad to see this in action. B: Teenage boys, especially, suck. C: Teenage boys suck especially in bed. You won’t enjoy it; they don’t know the clitoris from the clavicle.” She gives Lizzie a Very Serious look, the one with accordion eyebrows and flared nostrils that says Margaret Means Business. “More importantly, though, Lizzie, is that it’s risky, both physically and emotionally. As long as you can postpone the kind of grief that comes with sex, you should. I know life sometimes seems hard now, but it gets even harder later, once you start factoring love and sex into the equation. If you really want to explore sex, let’s talk about vibrators.”
Lizzie, taking this in, feels sick. It’s too late, she thinks, as she sees this miserable future spreading out before her. Surely, she thinks, Margaret must have some hope for her? “But it’s not like that with Bart, right?”
Margaret barks a small little laugh and wrinkles her nose. “No. Bart is an angel.”
Lizzie smiles bravely. “I’m sure he is,” she says. “You’re so lucky.”
The kitchen is sparkling and smells like bleach. Janice has left a casserole on the countertop that’s labeled with a stickie note: “Dinner. 350 degrees for 30 minutes.” Lizzie peels back the aluminum foil and probes it with her finger, breaking through a filo dough crust to a layer of spinach: spanakopita. Lizzie hates spinach. Just once, she wishes her mother would make something like mac-n-cheese from a box. Maybe she can convince Margaret to go out to dinner.
She finds the freezer well stocked with ice cream and mango sorbet—the latter probably intended for her, but she makes herself a mocha toffee almond fudge sundae anyway, sneaking a few big bites before she goes back to the other room so that Margaret won’t see what a pig she’s being.
The ice cream is hard and icy, and Lizzie eats it slowly, putting a spoonful at a time in her mouth and letting it melt on her tongue as long as she can bear it, before her teeth freeze and she has to swallow. Margaret watches her and sighs; a long, hot puff of air. “I really need a cigarette,” Margaret says, but she doesn’t move from the couch. Lizzie looks at the rose arrangement on the sideboard, the neatly stacked pile of coffee-table books—
Golf Courses of the World, Mediterranean Castles,
and
The Gardens of Manet
—and her mother’s weird French magazines that no one reads and the collection of antique boxes on the display shelves. She thinks, again, of the writing on the wall in the boys’ locker room—of her whole secret life exposed for everyone in school to see, of all the boys who pretended to like her when it turned out they didn’t care at all, of the boys who scribbled their names on the wall even though she never touched them, the liars. (Mark! Mark Weatherlove! What a creep!) She wants to sweep everything to the floor, to crunch the porcelain under her heels, tear the books in half, make a mess of the house. She has the crawling sensation that she is being watched and that there is some impending doom before her. She puts the sundae down and sinks back into the beige velvet cushions, letting the voluminous couch cocoon her. Maybe she’ll slip into the cracks between the cushions and disappear forever.
Out in the front yard, the gravel crunches and Lizzie hears the whir of an engine idling to a stop. A car has pulled into the driveway. Margaret looks at Lizzie, looks at the living room window, and jumps up to pull the curtains aside.
“Who is that?” Margaret asks, as she peers out.
Lizzie follows her and peers out too. A woman in a fuchsia drop-waist cocktail dress is climbing out of the driver’s seat of a Mercedes station wagon, carefully placing one black heel before the other as she navigates the gravel of the driveway. She carries a woven basket filled with silver tissue paper in one hand and uses the other to tug her panty hose into place in the back. She looks up at the house, glances down at her watch, and then begins to walk resolutely toward the front door.
“That’s Barbara Bint,” says Lizzie. “She’s a friend of Mom’s, from the club.”
“Why is she here?” Margaret asks.
Lizzie shrugs. “No idea.”
The sisters stand transfixed in the window, watching Barbara pick her way through the gravel and then vanish out of their view. The doorbell rings.
Margaret heads for the front door. Lizzie stays frozen at the living room window, watching the evening light sparkle in the gravel, catching on bits of mica trapped in the rocks. She can hear the murmur of Margaret talking to Barbara Bint in the foyer. She wills time to stop, so that she is forever standing in this window, watching the setting sun, staving off whatever danger or embarrassment lies behind the closed doors of this reassuringly beige room.
Mrs. Bint bursts into the living room just as Lizzie turns around.
“Am I the first person here? I’m always the first person,” Barbara Bint wails. “Such a terrible habit I have, but don’t you think that promptness has just gone the way of etiquette and good manners these days? I really think it should be revived. If an invitation says seven o’clock, then I say, be there at seven o’clock. I can’t stand it when I throw a party myself and everyone is late and the canapés get dried out in the oven while you wait! Give this to your mother, Lizzie? Home-baked carrot muffins!” She flourishes the basket, sweeps over to Lizzie, and leans in to kiss her on the cheek. She smells like baby powder and jasmine, and up close, Lizzie can see the droplets of dried hairspray that shellac her hair into perfectly symmetrical wings.