Joannie Cientela leans over and gives Linda Franks an air kiss, then grips Lizzie’s upper arm with a tight fist. “It sounds like Lizzie is just fighting them off,” she says. “Aren’t you, Lizzie.”
Lizzie stands stock-still, petrified, as Mrs. Cientela’s wedding ring digs into her shoulder blade. “Um, fighting? Not really,” she mumbles.
But Joannie Cientela isn’t listening. “Just look at her!” She pushes Lizzie a few inches forward. “Cute as a button. You finally grew into your own, sweetie, and you’re such a darling thing, it’s no wonder all the boys have crushes on you. Your mother must be so proud. Where is your mother, sweetie? So good of her to have the party—keeping up her spirits despite everything. It’s
nice
to see. Anyway, let’s not talk about that. How is school? I hear you’re doing well?” She turns to the Franks. “Brian told me Lizzie was tutoring him after school a few weeks ago—his Spanish is terrible, and this one here”—she jiggles Lizzie’s shoulder—“has apparently been helping him out after school. Lizzie, you know you left a barrette in the bathroom? I should have thought to bring it.”
Linda Franks turns to Lizzie. “You tutor! Your mother never told me. Johnny needs Spanish help too.”
Lizzie’s vocal cords have frozen, so she nods instead. In fact, she is getting a C in Spanish, but she decides this probably shouldn’t be mentioned. She sees Justin Bellstrom’s mother, Cecile, walking their way. Oh God. She hates herself! These parents, they are all so nice and trusting and they have no idea that they are talking to the
school slut.
What if her mother found out? Would she throw Lizzie out of the house? How could Lizzie have been
so stupid
? She thought they
liked
her when all they liked was her…Lizzie thinks of a vile word and then erases it from her mind. She tenses up into a hard little knot of muscle and thinks that if she lets her muscles relax she might just melt into a puddle, like the Wicked Witch of the West. Her nether regions tingle from the need to pee.
The doorbell rings again and Lizzie sees her opportunity to escape. “Gottagetdoor,” she mumbles, slipping out from under Mrs. Cientela’s grasp.
As she pushes her way through the living room, Noreen Gossett appears in Lizzie’s path. Her patrician nostrils flare like a rearing horse’s and she purses her peach-lacquered lips with displeasure. “Where is your sister,” Mrs. Gossett says, articulating every syllable. Is. Yer. Sis. Ter. “Your sister, Margaret. I need to speak with her. I am
very
upset.” Lizzie shakes her head. Noreen Gossett cranes her neck to survey the room and spies Margaret by the sideboard, guzzling a glass of wine with her eyes rolled back in her head while Mr. Bellstrom, on her left side, pontificates at the empty air. Margaret lowers her glass and makes eye contact just as Noreen Gossett locks in on her target.
“Excuse me,” says Mrs. Gossett, sweeping past Lizzie. Margaret drains the wine in one gulp, drops her glass on the sideboard, and makes a beeline for the kitchen, Noreen Gossett in pursuit.
The doorbell rings again—
BA bum BA bum ba bum be ba bum
—and Lizzie flees to the foyer. She squeezes her eyes shut as she pulls on the handle to the front door, not sure who else might arrive on the doorstep but convinced that there must be still more punishment waiting for her. The Liverbachs, maybe? When it swings open, she sees James, the pool boy, standing on the front step. He is not dressed in party attire, at least not unless he considers party attire to be a wife-beater tank top paired with shorts held up by a belt of brown yarn.
James hooks a thumb over his shoulder and gestures at the cars. “Are you having a party or something?” he asks.
“What are you doing here?” she says. “I thought you already came today?”
“Special delivery for your mom. Where is she?”
“She’s upstairs,” says Lizzie. “But she’s sick. She isn’t seeing anybody.”
“Oh, don’t worry. She definitely wants to see me.” He steps through the doorway and heads straight up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. Lizzie follows him to the bottom of the staircase and watches him vanish in the upstairs hallway. His presence baffles her. Maybe her mother forgot to pay him?
She lingers for a minute with her hand on the balustrade, listening to the din in the living room and wondering if anyone would notice if she just slipped out the front door and left. Would Margaret be mad? Maybe Lizzie could go back down to the Fountain and get a hamburger and fries and by the time she returned everyone would be gone. She turns around, preparing to bolt, and runs smack into Barbara Bint, who has materialized behind her in the foyer.
Barbara plants her pump on the first stair. “I just thought I’d chat with your mother while she gets ready. See how she’s doing. Catch up.”
“Catch up about what?” says Lizzie, thinking of her mother wrapped around the toilet, and stalling.
“There are
lots
of things to talk about,” she says. There is a slithery quality to this statement, something decidedly ominous—and pointed? From her elevated position on the step, Barbara gazes down her nose at Lizzie, her face cast in shadows by the overhead chandelier. Lizzie panics.
“You shouldn’t go up there,” she says. She lurches forward and, as Barbara climbs up the stairs, grabs Barbara’s fuchsia dress by the hem. In the process, she accidentally gets a glimpse of control-top panty hose stretched tight over Barbara Bint’s thighs. “She’s really sick.”
“Sick?” says Mrs. Bint. She reaches down and gently unpeels Lizzie’s hand from its grip on her dress, then smooths the skirt back over her thighs. “How awful. Why didn’t she cancel the party? If I’d known I would have brought a pot of soup. I’ll go see what she needs.”
“No, that’s a really bad idea. She has bac…bad…” She can’t remember the phrase, though, and struggles to retrieve another medical-sounding illness. “Melanoma. It’s really contagious.”
“Melanoma?” Mrs. Bint says. “She has skin cancer?”
“Um, I mean. Food poisoning?”
Mrs. Bint looks at her suspiciously. “Are you being honest, young lady?” Lizzie tries to smile but fails and can feel her face flush pink. “You know, Jesus pities a liar. That’s the Ninth Commandment! ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’”
Lizzie feels the weight of yet another screwup piling up on her and slumps under the added burden. “Is it?”
“Lizzie! Everyone should know the commandments.”
A figure appears at the top of the stairs, and both Lizzie and Barbara look up. It is James, who hurtles down and past them. He pauses at the front door, winks, and vanishes, slamming the door closed behind him. Barbara watches him go with a cocked head.
“Who is that?” she asks.
“James,” says Lizzie, relieved that her failings are no longer the topic of conversation. “The pool boy.”
“Oh,” says Barbara, sounding puzzled. But then her hand jets forward to clutch Lizzie’s forearm. “To finish what I was saying…. Maybe—and I’m just saying this because I feel a lot of compassion for you—maybe you should consider going to church more often, Elizabeth. I have heard things from my son Zeke, things that he’s heard about your behavior—very disturbing things that I don’t plan on repeating right now, but I think you know what I’m talking about. And I know you haven’t had a whole lot of good role models lately, what with your father’s behavior. And I know your mother is having a terrible time of it—the poor thing—but that doesn’t give you license to do…the things you’re doing. Your body is a sacred temple, Lizzie. It belongs to Jesus Christ! Didn’t you know that?”
Lizzie is definitely going to pee her pants. She squeezes her legs together until they burn. Barbara stares at her, and Lizzie realizes that she is waiting for an answer. She can’t remember the question. “Yes?” she says tentatively.
“Well, then you should know better than to desecrate that temple, Lizzie! Lizzie, listen to me.” She leans in closer, using Lizzie’s forearm as leverage. She whispers, “Jesus forgives all sinners. His love is boundless, and if you come to Him and pledge your devotion He will show you the path to eternal grace. He will bless you with happiness.”
“He will?” Lizzie whispers back. She senses that she is being told a profound secret and lets herself be pulled in close. Barbara Bint is warm, practically steaming, and in the hot nimbus of this holy righteousness Lizzie is helpless. She feels herself being sucked into a dizzying vortex.
“Yes, Lizzie. And you should experience the joy of taking the Lord into your heart and being cleansed of sin. God loves you, Lizzie! Loves you! You should come with us to River of Life Church. Thursday nights are introductory nights for new members. We can give you a ride—it’s en route anyway. I’ll pick you up next Thursday at seven and Zeke can introduce you around.”
The vortex pulls her in and tosses her gently about. Jesus loves her. Really? She isn’t quite sure what this means, but it compels her. There seems to be no alternative but to go to church and see for herself. Lizzie closes her eyes and succumbs. She unclenches every muscle in her body and is relieved to realize that she isn’t actually going to pee on herself after all.
“Okay,” she says, still in a whisper.
Barbara steps back. “I’ll be praying for you,” she says. She looks up past Lizzie’s head, and her face, already glowing from the effort of her religious prostrations, brightens further. Lizzie turns to see Janice standing at the top of the stairs, her face freshly washed and her hair yanked back into a bun. She has traded in the bathrobe for a simple black dress. She has even put on panty hose. She looks pale, but she exudes a nervous buzz, as if every little pore on her body is pulsing with pent-up energy.
Janice bounds down the stairs, her manicured nails reinforcing each step with a tap on the balustrade, and stops to air-kiss Barbara at the bottom step. “I am so
sorry
to be so late to my own party,” Janice says to Barbara. “I hope my daughters entertained everyone while I got dressed.”
“Lizzie said you were very sick.”
“Sick?” Janice looks amused at the very idea. Lizzie is confused. How could she have recovered so fast? Wasn’t she just puking a few minutes ago? “No. Nothing serious. Just a little upset stomach. I hope you weren’t too concerned.”
“Well, I figured it couldn’t be all that bad, because you had a visitor up there—who was that young man?” Barbara’s face twitches, as if she’s battling her own curiosity and losing. “What a strange-looking boy. He could use a real belt, couldn’t he.”
Janice doesn’t blink. “Just the pool boy, Barbara. I owed him his salary.”
“Well, don’t you worry yourself about being late,” says Barbara. “I’ve just been catching up with Lizzie. We’ve had a good chat, haven’t we Lizzie?” She winks at Lizzie. Lizzie blanches.
“Good good good!” cheers Janice. She steers Barbara back toward the living room. Lizzie follows behind, unsure if the vast sense of relief she feels has to do with her mother’s rapid recovery or with the bargain she senses she has just made with Barbara Bint. Janice comes to a halt just before the door to the living room, reaches up and smooths an invisible strand of misplaced hair, then wades right into the party as if she was never missing in the first place.
Heads turns. Hands are thrown up in mock-surprise pleasure. Faces register their delight. Her mother is swallowed up in the melee. Lizzie watches Janice, in the middle of the room, the Groupers on one side and Luella Anderton on the other; she talks animatedly, refilling drained wineglasses with one hand, grasping welcoming handshakes and peppering the air with kisses. Lizzie is struck by her mother’s efficiency, not for the first time. Only her mother could be a vomiting wreck one minute and a gracious hostess the next. Watching Janice, Lizzie believes in her heart that she will never be that capable. She has already messed up everything in her own life in a way that feels so ghastly and permanent that she knows she will never be anything like that pretty, perfect woman in the center of the room. Even if Jesus does forgive her.
Lizzie backs out of the living room very slowly, so that no one will notice her retreat. She goes upstairs to her room and lies down on her bed. She stares at the ceiling without blinking until her eyeballs burn with pain, and then she closes them and slips off into oblivion, lulled to sleep by the rising and falling of the tides of conversation downstairs.
james doesn’t return until his regular tuesday, a full four days after the cocktail party. He hasn’t responded to the six messages Janice left on his cell phone, begging him to come sooner. When Janice hears his truck rattle to a stop in the driveway, in the early afternoon, she springs from the bed, where she has been lying all morning in a black funk—hair greasy, calves stubbly, face unwashed—and bolts for the door on legs that wobble like a newborn calf’s.
She trips down the stairs at double speed, trying to ignore what her eagerness suggests. Even after two-and-a-half weeks of using the white powder in the little plastic baggie, she still reasons that her behavior is no different from that of any person taking a prescription drug. After all, a few years back she had voted to legalize marijuana as medication for the terminally ill—after reading the scientific research, of course, and deciding it was cruel to deny pain relief to suffering cancer patients—and really, what is so different about It? Just like pot or Vicodin or Valium, It is a simple chemical that serves a utilitarian purpose: to help her feel better in a difficult time. A time that will, she tells herself, eventually pass, at which point she will no longer need pharmaceutical aid.
And there are
so many
beneficial side effects to It. There’s the weight loss, of course (James was right about that), but also the productivity! She has filled the refrigerator with casseroles, put up twenty jars of fresh lemon curd, and distilled five batches of veal stock for the freezer. She’s hand-embroidered a set of kitchen towels and designed a cunning series of origami boxes to hold her paper clips and rubber bands. She can clean for hours and only much later feel the satisfying ache in her fingers from scrubbing away the ancient black stain at the bottom of her roasting pan, the cramp in her shoulders from reaching up to wax the curtain rods in the living room. With It in her veins, no task feels too menial, as if by scrubbing a little bit harder, stirring the pot that much faster, she will be granted a glimpse of nirvana.