Outside Beauty (6 page)

Then Maddie slipped into the bed with me, and I held her like a teddy bear. She wet the bed in the middle of the night, so I got up to change the sheets.
She didn't even wake up fully. But once I'd changed the sheets, I just stared at the dark ceiling. Somehow I knew it was true that my mother had called Larry to tell him she would marry him. So I cried that night too, but unlike Lakey, I cried quietly.

Anyway, that was the end of my mother and Larry.

As for the other fathers, they were there and not there. I wrote my own father now and then, and every so often I received a brief reply. He, too, had gotten married once a while back, but he divorced eight months later. Whether or not he was married mattered not a twit to my mother.

Marilyn's father lived in a suburb of Chicago. Sometimes she didn't see Mack for weeks, and sometimes he stopped by every day. He wrote her letters all the time. Some of his letters were so long, Marilyn would never finish them. Marilyn said he wrote those letters when he was drunk. He spoke wistfully of the times we ate dinner out together, and he called us “the best family unit” he ever had. It seemed to me that it would take more than some dinners to create a family unit, but what did I know? As for Maddie's father, we didn't know for sure what was going on, so one night when our mother went out, we got to talking about it.

We were playing Crazy Eights when Marilyn said, “Do you think Mr. Bronson has sued Mom for custody or threatened to or what?”

“The only way to find out is to find those papers the guy gave her at Larry's,” I said. “I'll bet they're in her filing cabinet.”

“But it's locked!” Lakey said.

Maddie leaned forward and whispered, “I know where the key is.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Finally, Marilyn said, “How do you know?”

“I saw her hiding something, and then later when she was in the bathroom, I checked what she was hiding.”

“You mean you could unlock the cabinet, like, right now?” I asked.

Marilyn said, “There must be interesting stuff in there, or she wouldn't lock it.”

That was a good point. But I brought up another good point. “It wouldn't be nice to look in it,” I said.

“She wouldn't know,” Marilyn retorted.

That was a good point too, I had to admit. As a matter of fact, I thought it was an excellent point. “Why would she even lock it unless it had interesting stuff in there?” I said.

So Maddie showed us where the key was—underneath a section of torn cloth in one of Mom's jewelry boxes. Marilyn unlocked the cabinet in the small room next to our mom's bedroom, and opened the top drawer. “Letters from men alphabetized,” she said. She leafed through several files before pulling one out. “Look at this! Here's a letter from Larry saying he wants to say good-bye nicely. He says he doesn't want to end with their phone conversation because that was so negative. He tells her she's beautiful.” She opened the second drawer and turned to us. “The whole drawer is filled with pictures of her with men.”

The rest of us leaned over Marilyn and began rifling through the pictures. The odd thing was that while it seemed to me that she knew hundreds of men, there didn't seem to be that many in the photographs. All the pictures were the same, with both my mother and the men smiling brightly. Mostly, she and the man stood with arms around each other. She even had a picture of my father. She looked so different—younger—in the picture with him. For the first time I could see how my mother was getting older. And there was a picture of Mr. Bronson as well. At first I didn't recognize him
because he was smiling broadly; he looked almost silly. And he was wearing blue jeans, which I'd never seen him in. His eyes actually seemed to be twinkling, and he was looking directly into the camera. He was happy, ridiculously happy.

Marilyn put the pictures away and opened the third drawer. I looked over her shoulder. It was all legal papers. One folder was labeled
HARVEY BRONSON
. I pointed. “Check that one.”

Marilyn gingerly pulled out the file, and we fell on it like vultures. He
was
trying to get custody of Maddie. In his custody suit he claimed our mother was unfit.

“That's why she needs money so badly now,” Marilyn said. “To pay for the lawyer. Look at this attorney bill.”

Maddie was scowling. “What's custody?” she asked.

“If he gets custody, he'll take you to live with him.”

“What?” Maddie said. “What do you mean? Tell me!” She pulled on my sleeve. “Shelby, tell me.”

“Custody means who's in charge of you,” I said. “Sort of. And if he has custody, he gets to make all the decisions about you.”

“But I don't like him,” she said. “He's yucky.” She pulled on my sleeve again. “Is anyone listening?”

“You're not going anywhere,” I assured her. Then we heard a noise from the living room.

“Someone's at the door!” Lakey cried out. We sprang up as one, and Marilyn ran to put the key away while I pressed the filing cabinet lock gently into place. We rushed into the living room. My heart pounded.

Someone knocked insistently. Marilyn looked through the peephole. She whispered in my ear, “Pierre.” I whispered the information in Maddie's ear, and Maddie whispered in Lakey's ear.

I tiptoed to peer out the peephole. Pierre was in a suit and holding flowers. He leaned toward the peephole, and I moved my eye quickly away. We stood gathered around the door, waiting for the pounding to start. But Pierre was calmer than last time we'd seen him. We didn't hear anything for a long time, and when I peered out again, he had gone.

Our mother still hadn't come home by the time I fell asleep later that night.

Lately, she was milking her men like cows. Her coffers grew quickly. She found a man younger than her and richer than anyone she'd ever met. He had inherited a great deal of money because his father owned eight pajama factories, and he also worked at one of the top advertising firms in Chicago. Several
times that spring he came over to watch TV with us. We'd turn down the volume during the shows and turn up the volume during the commercials. He would tell us who had made what commercial and what people in the industry thought of each one. When his own commercials came on, he watched enraptured. Some of them were quite funny, actually.

Our mother delighted in showing us her baubles from him. She never showed us anything until she'd had it appraised. Diamonds were the mainstay of her collection, but she favored emeralds, and that's what her new boyfriend got her. She bought a book on gemology and gave us lessons on cut, color, and clarity. She said her collection was now “worth a hundred and fifty.”

My mother and her new boyfriend drank a lot and often fought when they drank. Inevitably, when my mother and a man fought a lot, he used criticism as his main weapon. This new man began screaming at her one night while we girls were in the bedroom. “You look like a clown in that getup!” he said. “You might as well join the circus.” I remembered how my mother once pointed at a picture of Marilyn Monroe late in her career. “She looks like an overweight clown,” my mother had said, a hint of cruelty in her voice.

“Get out of my house,” our mother now said firmly.

We sat behind our door and listened.

“I won't leave until I get what I paid for.” Now I heard cruelty in this man's voice.

“Get out.” Silence. Silence, silence, and more silence. My heart sank a bit, until I heard the door slam, and my heart rose. I did not want my mother letting anyone talk to her that way.

For a few weeks after that, there was no man in her life. I couldn't remember another time like this before.

Then one night in the summer, she went out with Marilyn's father. We stayed at home with a babysitter Mack knew. We didn't usually need a sitter, but some admirers of Marilyn's had tried to storm the apartment the previous day.

Mack was a minor hoodlum who owned a steak house frequented by other minor hoodlums as well as some low-level major hoodlums. At least, that's how my mother described him. We'd never been allowed to go to his restaurant. He was, as Marilyn often said, an emotional man. His favorite word was “idiot.” In fact, he could barely have a conversation without calling somebody or something an idiot.

We made our babysitter play Spades at the coffee table. He was a big man who could hardly get his legs under the table. He looked mean, and something bulged under his jacket. He studied his hand as if there were money at stake. A cigarette hung from his mouth. He kept looking at us all suspiciously. Lakey—future lawyer—grilled him.

“Is that bulge a gun?” she asked excitedly. “Did you ever kill anyone?” We all leaned forward for his answer.

“Do you know what M-Y-O-B means?” he asked.

I saw Maddie thoughtfully mouth the word:
Myob . . . myob
.

“I don't think you've ever babysat before,” Lakey said accusingly.

“I babysit all the time, kiddo. It's my second profession.”

I set down a card.

“That ain't right, what's-yer-name, Shelly, right?”

“Shelby. What ain't right?” I asked.

“It ain't your turn.'”

“I won the last trick,” I said.

He studied me suspiciously and took a drag from his cigarette and rubbed his nose. “Oh, yeah?” he said, still suspicious.

“Yeah.” My sisters all glared at him.

He glanced self-consciously at Lakey. She nodded her head.

“Right,” he said. “I knew that.” He took another drag from his cigarette. “I never killed anyone.” He spoke modestly. “But if you ever
need
anyone killed, I know someone who can take care of that.”

After just two rounds he got bored and abandoned the game, claiming he needed to rest. “Babysittin's givin' me a headache.”

He snored on the couch as we eagerly rifled through his pockets. Marilyn triumphantly snatched something out of a pocket. It was a hundred-dollar bill. She held it up to the lamp.

“Wowwww,” we said. Our savings were all in small bills.

We heard a noise and saw several boys from Marilyn's class trying to scale the wall to see her. We roused the babysitter and ran back to the window. The sitter took a gun from a holster under his jacket, causing the four of us to scream and the boys to go slipping crazily back down. We heard one of them shout, “My ankle!” as he hobbled off down the sidewalk. Then he turned to look back at our window. “Marilyn Antonio!” he shouted. “You may think
you're special because you're pretty, but you don't have a boob to your name!”

Marilyn looked a little shocked before raising her chin haughtily. “It's all in the face,” she said to me. For a second she became just like my mother, and then she pulled her gum out of her mouth and stuffed it back in, just like Marilyn. My sister.

WE WENT TO SLEEP WITHOUT powwowing that night because there was nothing pressing we needed to discuss. I woke up when I heard the phone ringing. What time was it? It was still dark out. No one else seemed to be getting up to answer the phone, so I bounded into the kitchen.

“Hello?” I said.

“It's Mack.”

“Hi, Mack. What time is it?”

“A drunken idiot ran a red light.”

“Oh,” I said.

And before I could get my brain to focus, he added, “No, she's not okay, so don't ask questions. You girls need to get to the hospital now. It's Cook
County Memorial. Take a taxi. Don't wake up Jerry—he doesn't have a valid license.”

“What? You mean Mom was in an accident?”

“Yeah, get over here.
Now
.” The phone clicked off.

I ran back to my bedroom. “Mom's been in an accident. We have to go!” I shouted. Nobody woke up. I felt a little like I was watching myself stand in the middle of the bedroom. For a moment I doubted I'd heard Mack right. Everything seemed so peaceful. Marilyn was snoring in short snorts. I turned on the light and shouted, “Get up!”

Lakey leaped out of bed as if she'd practiced this a million times. Maddie just stared. Marilyn, who never woke up quickly, said, “Huh?”

“Mack called. He said Mom's been in an accident.”

That woke Marilyn up. “Now? He said now?”

“Yes, now.”

She jumped out of bed. “Is she hurt?” Marilyn said, pulling on jeans.

“He hung up on me. He said we should take a taxi to the hospital immediately.”

We all dressed in a flash and ran through the living room, where our babysitter lay on the couch. We girls had a cash stash that we'd gathered in a variety of ways. Mostly, it was money our mother's boyfriends
had given us over the years to buy ourselves toys and clothes. We'd saved most of the money. We had a few thousand, with more coming all the time. Maddie thought we were practically millionaires.

Marilyn told me to grab some money while she called a taxi. We had taxi numbers on the refrigerator because our mother preferred taxis to driving in the city. When I got to the phone with the money, Marilyn asked crisply, “What hospital?”

“Cook County Memorial.”

She looked up the number in the yellow pages and dialed. “Hello,” she said, almost flirtatiously, into the phone. “I was wondering if you could give me information on the status of a patient . . . Yes . . . Helen Kimura, K-I-M-U-R-A. I'm her daughter, and we just got a phone call from my father . . . Thank you . . . Uh-huh, okay. Thank you.” She listened for what seemed like a long time. Finally, she hung up. “She's in surgery. Let's go.”

We ran downstairs in our group uniform: tank tops and too-tight jeans, with sweaters tied around our waists and our backs loaded with packs containing a change of clothes in case we had to spend a while at the hospital. The taxi was already approaching. We rode through the quiet streets.

“Did the hospital tell you how bad it is?” I said.