Life After Coffee (14 page)

Peter suddenly stands up. It’s instantly clear that he’s not going to sit on it. In any sense.

“You know what?” he says. I mentally cower under the chair. “You’re a
complete
asshole.” Matt turns to face Peter. I can tell he’s shocked. Peter has obviously not hit this level of insubordination before. Peter’s face is pale. “You won’t listen to anyone else’s ideas. This isn’t a writing room, it’s a dictatorship. I don’t know why you even employ us. Why do you need us at all? Just write the whole thing yourself—that’s what you obviously want to do.” He throws his writing pad across the table toward Matt. Perhaps that was supposed to accentuate his point. “You ask my wife’s opinion and then call her
abnormal
because she doesn’t agree with you and your ideals of what a woman should be.” He picks up one of the pens and scribbles “ASSHOLE” on the board and underlines it three times. “That’s you. There.” He bangs the pen on the board. “An
asshole
.”

“We’re done here. Get out.”

“I
am
out.” Peter gives the whiteboard a shove, and it skids across the room and bashes into the wall. If that didn’t leave a divot, I know it at least left a massive mark. Peter barrels out of the room like he can’t leave fast enough. I mouth, “Nice to meet you,” to Kimberly so she doesn’t think that I’m as insane as my spouse and then follow him out the door.

I can’t help but glance at Matt as I leave, but he’s not looking at me, he’s looking at Kimberly. Maybe I’m reading way too much into the look a man is giving his wife, but I think seeing Kimberly and me in side-by-side action just then sort of sped up the inevitable. He just realized he married the wrong one.

CHAPTER 17

And so Peter blew it for us again. He managed to rack up a grand total of one paycheck. One. The first since our children have been born, and now he is unemployed once more. Just sitting at home all day in the garage, cranking more unsellable screenplays out of his laptop. We are doomed.

Now that we are back in the poorhouse, in a valiant attempt to recoup my wasted six hundred Sylvia’s Angels dollars, I decided to visit my “territory” today and try to sell something. And did I manage to sell one lousy lipstick? Nothing. Not. One. Sale. And, of course, I had to take Violet with me.

Violet’s pretty quiet on the drive home and as soon as I pull up to the front door, switch off the engine, and turn around to see if she’s asleep, I see why. She’s covered in makeup. My makeup kit is lying open next to her, and she seems to have daubed on every available color to every single part of her face. She looks like she’s been dunked in a murky rainbow.

“Violet!” I have to get this stuff off her skin before anyone sees her. I open the glove compartment and pull out a pack of baby wipes. They’re completely dried out. If Miss Havisham had owned a packet of baby wipes, these would have been them. If I crunched the top one, I’m sure it would crumble in my palm and blow away in the wind like apocalyptic wipe dust.

“Hey, Amy!” comes a muffled voice through the window. Oh, of course. It’s Lizzie. It’s like she’s got some kind of “crappy mommy” radar. The second I approach any kind of parental fail, her sensor starts a-beepin’ and she’s over here as fast as her Bikram-toned legs can transport her. She looks super annoyed. I wonder what the drama is this time. I fleetingly remember that I haven’t cleaned off the boogers I caught Billy wiping on her mailbox last week. But still—she couldn’t
know
those were his? She hasn’t got a booger DNA lab in her basement. And then I remember her video surveillance app . . . I lower the window.

“Hey, Lizzie.”

“They’re waiting!”

“Who?”

“All my friends. In my living room. Right now. They’ve already gone through all the Chardonnay and now they’ve started on the Pinot!”

I stare at her. She stares back. It seems like she really wants me to do something.

“You’re extremely late!” She more or less squeals, going pinker by the nanosecond.

“For what?”

“Your party!”

Oh no. Now I remember. Earlier this week I practically forced my way through Lizzie’s front door under the guise of “catching up.” Nine minutes in, I changed tack and somehow talked her into hosting a Sylvia’s Angels party. I played the “hoping to be able to make this a success so I can stay at home with my kids” card, so how could she refuse? And now there’s a horde of Pasadena princesses in her living room, their children deposited with their nannies, waiting to be sold a bunch of toxin-laden makeup from a fifty-year-old brand that has never been popular. Not even in the eighties, when everything was popular. I wonder how on earth Lizzie got them to come.

“I’m so sorry, Lizzie. I’ve had a bit of a weird morning and I totally forgot. I’ll just take Violet inside and wash her face, and we’ll be by in a minute.”

“Just come now. Everyone’s waiting,” she says, already helping Violet out of her car seat. “Good Lord. You look like a psychedelic Oompa-Loompa.” She grimaces and puts Violet on her hip, starting out for her house, knowing that I’ll have to follow along. I’ve always been extremely jealous of women who can carry kids on their hip and walk at the same time. I’m so lacking in hip that whenever I try it, the poor child has to cling to the side of my body like an abandoned monkey and eventually ends up just falling to the floor. There’s a
ding
from my phone. It’s a text from Matt.
Call me.
Not going to happen. If he’s so desperate to chat, he can make the call, not text me a directive to do it.

As soon as we walk into Lizzie’s living room, I realize this is a mistake. A big mistake. The room is filled with some of the most beautifully and artfully manicured women I’ve ever seen. There’s not a thing I could say about makeup or the application of it that they don’t already know. There’s not a single item in my fourth-rate makeup inventory that they would want to buy. These women probably pay at least seventy-five dollars for a lipstick. And buy four at a time.

“Oh, look. You put the makeup on your baby,” says one particularly perfect blonde. Three instant reasons to dislike this woman: she’s practically perfect in every way possible, she thinks I’d purposefully splodge makeup on my child, and she’s calling my three-year-old a
baby
. Last week, in another failed attempt to be a normal mother, I took Billy and Violet to the park. While they were off scampering around, some woman on the bench started desperately searching through her bag.

“Damn it! I’ve forgotten the milk for the baby,” she said.

“Oh no,” said I, wondering how she bore the pressure of being the only nonbreastfeeder at the park. And then I noticed her “baby” was absent. “Wait! Where is your baby?” Had the baby been snatched while she was searching for milk?

“There,” she said. “On the swings. And she is going to be pissed.” And stomach-down on the swing was one long-legged four-year-old wearing knee-high boots and spinning with her legs stuck out as far as possible in an attempt to hit the kid standing behind her waiting for a turn. Baby? Babies stop being babies the minute they can walk and talk, let alone don heeled boots and try to dominate the swing set. Violet hasn’t been a baby for a long time. In fact, I don’t think I have any actual memories of her being a baby. There was just the birth, and then now. The in-between is kind of just not there. It’s documented by a series of photos taken by the snap-happy Peter. But that’s the only real evidence it ever happened. For me, anyway.

“Actually, she put it on when I wasn’t looking,” I say to Perfect. “If you all can bear to wait just a couple more minutes, I’m going to quickly wash it off.”

“It’s hard to watch them every moment,” says Perfect with a smile. She’s looking at us like she’s the Duchess of Cambridge and Violet and I don’t own any shoes. And what does she know about “watching them every moment”? I expect she’s got two nannies on alternating twelve-hour shifts for every perfect child she’s ever popped out of her perfect vagina.

Before Lizzie can put Violet back up on her hip again, I grab my daughter’s hand and make for the bathroom. The first one’s almost out of soap—and I’m going to need a lot—so we end up in a room at the back of the kitchen. It’s filled with laundry, various soaps, and two huge sinks. It seems to be a room created purely for the washing of things. Perfect. I fill a sink with tepid water and get to work.

Just as I’m starting to make some progress, I hear a clitter-clatter of heels as someone enters the kitchen. Seriously. Who wears heels during the day? Unless you work in an office or host a daytime television show, there’s really no call for six-inch heels before the sun goes down.

“Did you look inside that terrifying box? It’s like the Twinkies of makeup in there,” says a voice that’s vaguely familiar.

“Stop it,” says Lizzie, not sounding like she wants her to stop it at all. I hear another bottle of wine being opened. These women are going to be plastered by the time they leave. Maybe I’ll just call 911 on the way out with a list of license plates. Perhaps they’ll all lose their licenses, and their husbands will make them choose between a driver
or
a nanny and
then
they’ll start to see exactly how “hard” it is to watch the children every moment. I put my finger over my lips to signal to Violet to be quiet. That sign has never worked up till now, but there’s always hope. Maybe she’ll see the look of terrified embarrassment in my eyes and decide to comply.

“Why on earth did you get us all over here? The whole thing is ludicrous.”

“I feel bad for her, okay?” says Lizzie. “Just buy something for goodness’ sake. You don’t have to use it.”

“You’re right I won’t use it.”

“Think of it as a fund-raiser if that makes it any easier. Your nonprofit venture for the week,” says Lizzie.

“Mommy,” says Violet, as loud and insistent as a car horn, “what’s a nonprofit venture?”

Busted. From the other side of the wall I hear a delighted yet stifled gasp, a suppressed snort of laughter, and then they’re gone. Should I just sneak out the side door now and escape the whole thing? If Lizzie weren’t my next-door neighbor, or if we could afford to move, that would totally be my plan. But seeing as I’m stuck with this woman in my life, at least until we have to move to Riverside, I’d better go out there and put on the dog-and-pony show she’s after. Maybe I’ll send Violet around at the end of the demo with an emptied-out makeup bag for them to toss pennies into. That’s obviously the kind of thing they’re after here.

I step into the room to face a pack of red-faced late-thirty-year-olds. Red-faced because they’ve been mixing Chardonnay and Pinot or because they’ve been delighting in the news that I overheard someone bitching in the kitchen—I’ll never know which.

The most face-saving thing would just be to request that they all take a good long look at themselves and then leave the premises. But, as Lizzie mentioned, this is supposed to be something of a fund-raiser. I may as well make some cash out of this hellacious situation.

“First of all, thank you so much to Lizzie for opening up her home to host this party today,” I start. This settles some of them down a bit. “I know this brand of makeup probably isn’t a natural choice for any of you, so I also appreciate the generosity you’ve all shown by choosing to be here today, to support my new
venture
.” Okay. That shut the last of the snickerers up. I’ve set the tone. We all know what’s going on here, so let’s just get to it and pull the checkbooks out, shall we?

“I need a volunteer.” Silence. I’m not surprised. Why would any of them want to remove their beautifully applied luxury-brand makeup to expose their skin to this cheap crap? I’m considering whether I might have to use Violet as a model, when from the back of the crowd comes a voice I recognize from my moment of exquisite humiliation in the laundry room.

“I’ll do it,” she says. I see a lavishly long arm raise itself into the air like a giraffe going for a leaf at the top of the tree. And then its owner stands up and I see her, surrounded by a haystack of endless red hair: it’s Jasmine. Why the frick did Lizzie invite her? She witnessed the throwdown at Time for Twos. Was she hoping for a rematch? Of course, what Lizzie doesn’t know is that Jasmine also just cost me my one and only likely opportunity to be gainfully employed in the foreseeable future.

Jasmine unfolds the rest of her body and pulls herself up to her full height. She’s exactly double the length of Lizzie, who’s standing right next to her. It’s like looking at a small, puffy white rabbit positioned next to the tallest, leanest giraffe on the horizon of the African savanna.

“I came straight from the gym so I’ve got no face on,” she says by way of explaining her act of martyrdom. In contrast to the rest of the group, Jasmine’s decked out in designer yoga gear. Her T-shirt says “Bodhi Beautiful.” I suddenly recall a news clip I saw once where one of the directors of the company blamed some alleged pilling on the seams of the pants on the women who were wearing them, saying they had thighs that rubbed together where they shouldn’t. I imagine Jasmine’s pant seams are absolutely pill-free. Her thigh gap is so large the whole Bodhi Beautiful board of directors could hold a meeting in the space there and be quite comfortable.

My face has set to a thin, hard brittle. I don’t like to be a hater, but it must be said that I intensely dislike this woman.

“Jasmine. What a surprise to see you again,” I say, without the enthusiasm necessary to convince anyone that the surprise is a happy one. The red-faced gigglers have started up again. Everyone knows I overheard Jasmine in the kitchen. I’d rather be anywhere on earth than here right now. Even in the depths of Africa covered in mosquito bites and ankle-deep in organic fertilizer. The truth is, I’d love to be in Africa right now grading people’s coffee-pulp-and-chicken-shit fertilizer—but I’m not. I’m here, trying to flog the “Twinkies of makeup” and whose fault is that? Jasmine the Giraffe’s.

After a moment of shuffling, a suitable seat is procured and Jasmine is faceup, ready for me to inflict my worst. I decide to start with the lips. I can’t remember the order this stuff goes in, but the mouth is surely as good a place to start as any.

“Now if your lips are a little on the skinny side like Jasmine’s”—death glares abound. What? She’s got skinny thighs, so it’s only biologically fair that she got the skinny lips too. I’m merely pointing out what we can all see—“you can use this beautiful lip plumper right under your lipstick.” This time last month I had no idea that society had made a place for a product to plumpen the lips. I pull the spongy brush out of the bottle. It’s covered in something that looks vaguely like semen. And on it goes. “Doesn’t that feel great?” I ask Jasmine.

“Actually, no,” she replies. What was I expecting? A sugarcoated, glowing review? “It feels like my lips are burning.”