“Shoot,” she says. She pokes at the browned eggy mess. “I didn’t turn it in time. It’s ruined. I’ll make you another.”
“That’s okay,” says Lizzie. “Can I have bacon instead?”
Janice looks at her strangely. “What about your diet?”
“I’m quitting my diet, too,” says Lizzie, emboldened by her victory. And it is to Janice’s credit that she opens her mouth but pauses, and says nothing, before she shuts it again and yanks open the freezer door to retrieve a slab of bacon.
there isn’t all that much more to do at home than there is at the library. Up in her room, Lizzie sits on the lavender pile rug with a pair of tweezers and plucks the hairs, one by one, out of her legs. Today she is focusing on a patch just below her knee, one where the hair has begun to grow back in after its last plucking. She tugs at the baby-fine brown hairs, eyes watering slightly at the pain. A good one is one that comes out with the root still encased in a gooey rim of flesh.
Until last year, this was her favorite pastime, though she dropped the habit once she took up swim team. Now that she has endless hours to fill, it seems a good enough way to kill the day. She knows that this self-abusive hobby would cause assorted school psychiatrists no end of alarm, but she has always found it meditative. Here, with the door closed and her stereo cranked to top volume (“You told me you loved me…. How could I break your pretty little heart?” croons Bobby Masterston, her favorite singer), she can empty her head of the abstract dramas that have no tangible resolution—the fact that her period has yet to arrive, the graffiti that’s still on the wall of the boys’ locker room, the increasingly manic mother in a domestic frenzy downstairs, and the father who seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. The fine point of loneliness that needles at the center of her chest. Each hair extracted is a step toward a finite accomplishment: total denudation. And then it will grow back, so she can do it all over again.
Her bedroom is purple, a half dozen shades of it, from the deep purple velvet curtains over the windows to the purple striped bedspread to the artfully coordinated floral pillows printed with lavender blooms. Lizzie hates purple. Unfortunately, she did not hate purple when she was seven and requested this as the color of her bedroom in their new house. Her mother obliged, and now Lizzie’s
House & Garden
bedroom thwarts her every attempt to assert her personality upon it. She cannot tape her Brad Pitt posters on the walls, because this might make marks on the purple floral wallpaper. Pushpins are strictly forbidden. Books and CDs are artfully arranged on the bookcases—any errant tomes are reordered every time her mother comes in to clean—and nestle next to the bowl of dried lavender blooms and the unopened SAT prep booklets (just in case her mother checks).
Lizzie is torpid in the grapy maw, so listless that she can’t muster the energy to do anything but pluck the hair from her body. She feels, for the first time in months, fat and lazy—the combination of quitting the team and her secret Snickers habit seems to already have had an effect on the size of her stomach, which is once again creeping over the waistband of her shorts. At least, she hopes that’s why she’s getting fat. The thought that pregnant women also put on weight flickers across her brain. She sucks in her stomach, making the roll of flesh vanish, then tugs a particularly thick black hair out of her knee and examines it. She scrapes at the bits of flesh still attached to the root, then wipes it off on the bedspread. The skin on her knee is pink and raw-looking.
She thinks of Mark Weatherlove. Should she call him? She wants to call him. But why? What would she say? What did that mean anyway—“I think you’re really cute?” Does he mean it in an “I’d like to date you” kind of way or was it more of a polite, friendly kind of thing? More to the point: Does
she
think
he’s
cute? She has never really thought about it. He has never really seemed to be the kind of guy to think about. She has known Mark Weatherlove since they were both at Mrs. Kraus’s nursery school together, but they have never been friends. He was always part of the game geek squad, those scrawny boys who sit on the lawn at lunchtime and read video-game magazines and brag about how they’ve jacked the video cards on their desktop setups in order to increase their respawn rates in Half-Life 2. At the obligatory neighborhood barbecues, Mark would usually just sit inside and fiddle with his Game Boy, no matter how much his mother nagged him to come out and play. Once, Lizzie recalls, he tried to show her how to play Super Mario 4, but she was more interested in the contents of the buffet table than in saving a digital princess from a bunch of gorillas.
She used to think that Mark Weatherlove was an antisocial dork; now she wonders if perhaps he was just shy. She thinks again of the way he turned bright pink when he told her she was cute. She’s never made a boy blush before. She didn’t even know boys
could
blush. Maybe she will call him, to apologize for calling his mom a bitch.
Lizzie puts down the tweezers and picks up
Us Weekly.
She devours the glossy photographs of the “Stars Are
Just
Like You!” pages—her favorite section, which shows teen starlets with pimply skin pumping their own gas and buying Dr. Scholl’s foot powder—and lands on the gossip section. Halfway down the page, she stops abruptly. She examines the photo, reads the caption, and then examines the photo again. It shows Lizzie’s favorite star, Ysabelle van Lumis, exiting a white Bentley outside a Hollywood restaurant. In one hand she is clutching a gold Fendi purse; her other hand reaches behind her to grasp the hand of a gruff-looking man, cigarette hanging from his teeth, who peers out from the depths of the Bentley’s back seat. The picture is blurry, but Lizzie recognizes him instantly: It’s Bart.
“Ysabelle van Lumis has a hot new man,” the story reads,
in Brit Bartholomew Johnson, former
Fahrenheit 88
hunk and her costar in the new action thriller
Thruster.
Our Hollywood spies have seen the happy couple canoodling at My Pilates Body and buying nonfat green tea Blended Freezies at the Coffee Explosion…. Word is that Johnson has even moved into Yzzie’s six-bedroom mansion in Malibu! Is the new 5-carat pink diamond on her right hand a gift from her new love? “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s an engagement ring,” says an insider. “It’s a whirlwind romance!”
Lizzie is outraged. Poor Margaret—here she is, home taking care of her family in a time of crisis, and Bart is cheating on her. The jerk.
She hesitates for only a minute before deciding that Margaret needs to know—
this second
—exactly what’s going on behind her back. Margaret will show Bart a thing or two. Maybe she’ll get on a plane and go kick his ass. Lizzie envisions her sister driving to Malibu with a righteous fury, screeching to a halt in front of Ysabelle van Lumis’s Greek Revival mansion, and storming up the steps. And then she’ll walk in on Bart and Ysabelle drinking Cristal half naked in bed, and she’ll throw a bucket of ice water over the both of them, and stalk out. Ysabelle’s hair will get soggy and she’ll scream like a baby. And then Bart will realize that Margaret is such a badass that he never should have fooled around on her and he’ll race after her. There will be a high-speed chase through the hills of Malibu until Margaret comes screeching to a halt—maybe because there are sheep in the road?—giving Bart a chance to catch up. And then he’ll fall to his knees and apologize and they’ll kiss under the setting sun and then Margaret will bring Bart up to Santa Rita to see her family and they’ll all go out to dinner at the Fountain. And everyone in town will marvel.
As Lizzie bounds down the hall to Margaret’s room, the
Us Weekly
rolled tightly in her fist, she admits to herself that she thinks it’s pretty cool that her sister’s boyfriend would cheat on her with a huge Hollywood star. It makes Margaret seem even cooler. Someday, Lizzie thinks, she’d like to date someone who also dates huge celebrities.
She throws open the door to her sister’s room to find Margaret dead asleep on her bed in the middle of the day. An open book—it appears to be Lizzie’s freshman English copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
—lies on the bed beside her. Lizzie sighs. Margaret has spent the better part of the last week sleeping and drinking beer. She barely leaves her room at all except to eat, and even then she never has dinner with Janice or Lizzie anymore. She just eats in the living room by herself, in front of the TV. Lizzie wonders if Margaret is sad—maybe she has already heard the gossip?—and, for a minute, considers whether this is such a good idea.
No. Margaret needs to know. And Lizzie will be there to console her. She slams the bedroom door shut, waking Margaret up. Her sister jolts upright in bed.
“Wha?” she says. “Lizzie, I was sleeping.”
“I have some bad news,” Lizzie says, as gravely as she can. She throws the open
Us Weekly
onto the bed, letting her hand linger in the air for dramatic flair. “Look.”
Margaret grinds bits of sleep from the corners of her eye with the edge of her thumb. “Jennifer Lopez is pregnant?” she asks.
“No,” says Lizzie impatiently. “Below that.”
Margaret stares at the page in silence. She slumps in her wrinkled sundress. “Oh,” she says. “Right.”
“That’s your Bart!” points out Lizzie.
“I know,” says Margaret. “He’s dating Ysabelle van Lumis.” She tosses the magazine down on the floor and falls back into the pillows. She yawns.
Lizzie is appalled by her sister’s lack of vindictive fury. Isn’t Margaret supposed to be jumping from the bed, screaming and yelling and wailing in rage? “He’s cheating on you, Margaret,” Lizzie points out gently, just in case Margaret doesn’t get it.
“He’s not cheating on me,” says Margaret. “We broke up months ago.”
“Oh,” says Lizzie. She looks down at the page again and watches her romantic revenge movie fade to black. No credits, not even a blooper reel. “Why did you pretend you hadn’t?”
Margaret sighs and screws up her shoulders. “Oh, you know. I didn’t want everyone to make a big deal about it. Our mother, in particular, would have gloated.”
“But you could trust me, Margaret! You could tell me anything! Maybe I could have helped you work things out with him!”
“That’s sweet, Lizzie. But you’re fourteen. I’m not sure you would have had a whole lot of context on the situation.”
Lizzie stares at Margaret uncomprehendingly, wondering who on earth this cynical stranger sleeping in her sister’s bed might be. What has she even been
doing
here for the last month, anyway? She views her sister in a completely new light, as if someone has just flipped the world upside down: Her sister is not enviable, living a fast-paced glamorous life in a city far away; she is not the savior who is going to help fix their family; she is not even that good of a friend. She is actually (Lizzie sees now) a seemingly underemployed, secretive know-it-all who never includes Lizzie in anything. It feels like the air in the room is hissing out, leaving Lizzie deflated and flat. She looks down at the pink raw skin on her legs. “I’m not a
child,
Margaret. You don’t need to act so
superior.
”
“Aw, Lizzie,” says Margaret. She reaches out from the bed and pats Lizzie on the shoulder. “It wasn’t anything to do with you. I just didn’t feel like talking about it. I needed to go through my own internal grieving process first, you know?”
“No, you lied,” says Lizzie, and yanks her arm away from her sister’s patronizing touch, finding herself unexpectedly quite angry. “You know what you are? You’re a total faker, Margaret. And you know what? I don’t even like your magazine.”
“Oh, Christ,” says Margaret, flopping back down on the bed. The
Us Weekly
riffles in the breeze from the open window. She talks to the ceiling: “I can’t believe that even my little sister hates me now. It’s just all too hilarious.” But she doesn’t sound amused at all.
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Lizzie says, already feeling guilty about having been so mean to her sister, despite how pissy Margaret is being. She thinks of M&M’s pouring from the ceiling into outstretched palms—that’s what she wants. “You should pray to God. That might make you feel better. Or I could lend you my Bible.”
Margaret stares at Lizzie in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? Your Bible?” She opens her mouth to say something, then stops. “You know what, I don’t even have the energy to ask.”
Lizzie watches her sister lying on the bed for a long while, feeling decidedly queasy. She thinks of Pastor Dylan and the way he stood there, so confident, at the front of the room, dispensing grace and mercy and love to his gathered masses. She squinches her eyes tight and focuses very hard, trying to feel the God light in her belly. There. There it is. A hot little spot beneath her belly button. When she opens her eyes again, she is dizzy. The room seems to spin slowly around her and her sister, who still lies there on the bed as motionless as a corpse; it’s as if the entire universe is rotating around just the two of them.
“I’ll pray for your soul,” Lizzie says. “Even though you totally suck.”
the invitation for the annual summer silent auction at the golf club arrives on a sticky August morning, only four days before the actual event. Janice stands in her spotless hallway fingering the embossed envelope, feeling strangely jolted by this message from beyond her walls. She hasn’t been to the club in almost six weeks. Ensconsed as she’s been in the house, she has forgotten all about the party, usually the highlight of her summer. So it is only now that she realizes that she wasn’t asked to be the auction host, for the first time in six years, and feels it like a slap to the face.
Une gifle en pleine figure.
Perhaps it was just an assumption on the part of the club’s social committee, a delicate maneuver around her perceived grief, but Janice can’t help suspicion from settling in. Is she being publicly ostracized? Did Noreen’s rumor about James spread even further?
She will not let it deter her; Janice feels invincible. Just a quick visit to the ladies’ room is all it takes to conquer another six hours (actually, more recently, four; sometimes three). She’s even started to run out of household projects—having already given the wedding silver a really thorough polish, organized the books in the study by color and genre, ironed every napkin in the linen closet—and now, sometimes, she itches to do something beyond the boundaries of her home. The boundaries of Santa Rita, even. The other night, she looked up airline prices to Morocco after reading a story in
Departures,
although she didn’t go so far as to purchase a ticket. It was enough just to know that she had considered it.