Waking Beauty (2 page)

The handle was sticking up and out of the mad tangle of dishes. It reminded me of Picasso’s
Guernica
.

“Maybe Allison would like some eggs,” said Virginie with a smirk.

“No, thanks.” There was no way in hell I was going to scour out their refried-bean remnants again.

“You should eat breakfast,” she said coolly, lighting a cigarette, miffed that I’d refused to do her bidding. “It gets the metabolism going.”

The kettle started to scream. I switched off the burner and poured the water.

“We’ll go out after coffee,” said Fraser.

“Goody,” said Virginie. “I’m ravishing!”

Fraser laughed. “You mean you’re
ravaged
, dum-dum.” He kissed the top of her head and dropped his cig into a beer bottle on the table. She grabbed him by the kimono belt, pulled him close, and nuzzled her face into his belly. Then she tilted her face upward and presented him with a big mock pout. He leaned in and they started to neck.

“Ravenous,”
said my mouth as I pressed down on the Bodum plunger.

“Quoi?”
said Virginie, peeking around from behind Fraser. She took a puff of her cigarette and blew the smoke toward me.

“Nothing.” I poured my coffee and retreated to my room. As I closed the door, a burst of suppressed laughter erupted in the kitchen.

I got back into bed
, drank java, and waited for the lovebirds to clear out. For the zillionth time, I fantasized about kicking Virginie’s ass out of the apartment—opting for the highly illegal, immensely satisfying change-the-locks-and-toss-the-heap-of-belongings-on-the-front-yard method. Better yet, I would move myself into an airy one-bedroom apartment with hardwood floors, a wood-burning fireplace, a claw-foot tub, and a private perennial garden. Yeah, right. I couldn’t begin to afford the former scenario and the latter was absurdly pie-in-the-sky.

I stared at the peeling ceiling paint and cursed my lack of judgment for allowing her to move in in the first place. But then, as I always did when I ran through this particular loop in my mind, I remembered that I had no choice. My first roommate, Elda, had lit out with virtually no notice to shack up with her new boyfriend. “My first real boyfriend,” she told me with tears in her eyes as she stuffed her bedding into garbage bags. I was happy for her—Elda was a fat girl, too, much fatter than I—but I was pissed that she was leaving me in the lurch. Still, I understood. The boyfriend had lost a roommate and wanted her to hustle in right away. She wasn’t going to risk love for friendship. Who would? And besides, we weren’t really friends. We had cohabitated peacefully for several years, maintaining a chummy facade, but we never really connected. Elda was a ditz. A hairstylist. A club chick. She drank raspberry coolers and listened to A.M. radio. She read
Cosmo
and
Fitness
and
Shape
magazines. She shopped incessantly and was always on an outlandish diet—low-fat, or no carbs, or nothing but bananas and yarn. She was constantly tweezing her eyebrows or waxing her gams, painting her toenails or fiddling with her hair—cutting, perming, dyeing it different colors (including blue). In the early days, when she was still in hairdressing school, I allowed her to experiment on my lank locks. She sharpened her two-hundred-dollar scissors and went to work. With a snip-snip here and a snip-snip there and a snip-snip through the cartilage
of my left ear.
Just an inch off the top, thanks
. Four hours in emergency and eleven hideous stitches to sew the thing back in place. But the most gruesome element was the haircut. For six months I looked like Moe Howard from
The Three Stooges
.

In truth, the only things Elda and I had in common were excess flab and vigorous PMS cravings. Once in a blue moon we would slip into the same menstrual cycle and be PMSed Up at the same time. Then we’d rent
Terms of Endearment
or some other cathartic tear-yanker, and hunker down on the sofa in our elastic-waist pants with a party-sized pizza, a couple bags of rosemary and olive oil potato chips, some M&Ms and Doritos, and several single-serving liters of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. We’d get a good salty-sweet-salty-sweet rhythm going. Elda had an enormous shelf of a chest, and by the end of the evening a sprinkling of chip crumbs and assorted food remnants would have fallen from her mouth and collected there. She’d call it “dessert,” and would make a show of cleaning it off when all the other munchies were gone. One time she took a straw and vacuumed it directly into her gape. It was sort of amusing.

Unfortunately, as soon as Elda started bleeding, she’d be back on some draconian diet, sticking pictures of
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit models on the fridge door, ordering toilet-seat-like fat-free grilling devices from the Shopping Network, and toting around tomes with exclamatory titles such as
Eat, Cheat, and Melt the Fat Away!
But Elda could never remain in the Zone for very long. Binge, Purge, and Flush the Flab Away! was more like it.

Personally, I had sloughed that bilge a long time ago. No more juice fasts or Thighmasters or diet pills for me. I ate what I wanted when I wanted. But Elda persisted. Elda persisted because Elda was pretty. She had glossy hair and smooth skin and a fabulous smile with big Chiclet teeth. Yes, Elda was one of those fat girls with a pretty face. The kind who could proudly model plus-sized lingerie on daytime TV talk shows. The kind of whom it is said or thought every time someone
clamps eyes on her:
Such a pretty face. If only she could lose sixty pounds
. Nobody thought that of me. If I’d lost sixty pounds, I would have been a hideously ugly thin person. My dead-mouse hair would still have laid limp, my golf ball skin would have continued to ooze boils, my pellet eyes and potato nose would have remained, as would my broad back, hunched shoulders, and flat ass. My teeth would still have sat snaggled and mossy in my thin-lipped mouth, my legs would have remained too short for my torso, and my beige-nipple tits would have gone on dangling, lopsided and slack. That brown birthmark would still have sprawled like an obscene diarrhea stain over my left shin, and those three black hairs would have continued to sprout from the mole above my upper lip. I was one of those rare individuals who possessed nary a good feature. I didn’t have nice eyes or a winning smile or a creamy complexion. There was no single feature in which I could take comfort. I was a physical disaster. I always had been (since the age of two, anyway). No wonder that Elda had allowed me to move in with her—in contrast, she looked like a supermodel. And no wonder that nobody wanted to take her place when she bugged out. At least half a dozen prospective roommates had trooped through the freshly scrubbed, centrally located, and reasonably priced flat, but there were no takers. They had all found my presence too disturbing. Too depressing. I could tell. I have a sixth sense, a radarlike detection device that can pick up the faintest frequency of compassion. Ultimately, only Virginie jumped at the chance to shack up with the ghoul next door (at a slightly reduced rent—she had a sixth sense for weakness and desperation).

I heard the front door slam. Virginie and Fraser had finally gone for breakfast. I went to the kitchen to see if there was any coffee left. There wasn’t. Not in the pot. There were two barely sipped mugs sitting, cold and greasy, on the kitchen table. I thought about brewing up a fresh batch, but decided to shower and skedaddle before the sweethearts
returned. I didn’t even blow-dry my hair. I just pinned it into a bun, dressed quickly, and left.

The day was lovely. Yellow and shiny and warm. Bees were back in the city. Grass, too, all moist and fresh. And everywhere outside, people dizzy with spring and hungry for sun were taking it in: Mrs. Silva planting annuals around her cement shrine to the Virgin Mary, Nuno Benitah lovingly soaping up the spoiler on his red Camaro, Debbie and Sergio Big-Wheeling down the sidewalk, and as usual, as always, my neighbor and coworker Isadora on her front stoop, hosing down her paved front lawn. Twice each day in spring/summer/fall Isadora would carefully unravel a perfectly coiled garden hose and proceed to blast the interlocking patio stones with about a thousand pounds of water pressure—as if it were a rioting crowd that needed to be controlled, as if the Ebola virus had flopped down in her yard and shouted:
Hi, honey, I’m home
. Needless to say, not even the most roguish dandelion seed would be bold or crazy enough to settle upon this pristine surface. Yet there she was, every morning and every afternoon, washing away the phantom dirt. Not only would I cheerfully eat a meal off of the DeSouzas’ front lawn, I would confidently stretch out and undergo major surgery without fear of bacterial infection.

Isadora waved as I passed by. “Off to your mom’s?” she said, smiling sympathetically.

“Yup.” I knew better than to stop and chat while she was purifying pavement. “Talk to you later.”

“Later.”

I was surprised when I discovered that Isadora was only a few years older than I. She was just twenty-five, but there was something patently middle-aged about her, something low to the ground and matronly. Maybe it was the childbearing that did it—she already had two rug rats. Maybe it was the facial hair—she sported a bit of a Fu Manchu mustache. She was always smiling sympathetically. “How was your weekend?”
she’d ask, smiling sympathetically. “My cousin Paulo is getting married,” she’d say, smiling sympathetically. When I first moved onto the street, the sympathy smile annoyed me. I got it every time I walked by her. But soon she started throwing in a “Hot enough for you?” or “Have a nice evening,” and then one afternoon she was at my door with a plastic bag fat with zucchinis from her family’s vegetable garden. Nice. The following day, I countered with a bouquet of snapdragons scrounged from a neglected planter at the side of the 7-Eleven. The day after that, Isadora responded with an armload of dazzling, homegrown tomatoes. I lobbed back a bundle of fresh rosemary, purchased, then passed off as something I’d cultivated and had more than enough of. Isadora one-upped me with a plate of sardines that had been barbecued in a brick structure at the back of her yard. A day later, as I scanned my apartment for some sort of reciprocal goody, I had a disquieting vision of neighborly escalation, and saw myself in a week’s time dragging my sofa or television set down to the DeSouzas’.

A friendship of sorts had begun. One that was given shape and purpose when Virginie, on her way to the subway, casually flicked a cigarette butt onto the damp, freshly sanitized DeSouza lawn as Isadora stood watching/rewinding her hose. Thereafter, Isadora was hungry for stories of my roommate’s treachery, and I was happy to oblige.
The enemies of my enemies are my friends
. Suddenly we had something to talk about. One thing in common.

Isadora wasn’t very bright, but she was extremely cordial. She lived with her extended family in a semi-detached house at the end of the street next to the alley. Back in Lisbon, Isadora’s father was a well-paid hydro technician. Here he was a janitor. Even though he spoke nothing but Portuguese, he managed to secure a contract to clean a small office building downtown. Every weekday at six-thirty, the DeSouza clan piled into a van and headed to 505 Richmond Street to fight grime and restore order. And for ten months I went with
them—after Isadora’s sister got laid up with multiple sclerosis. The DeSouzas needed an extra body, and since my unemployment insurance was about to run out, I needed some semblance of an income. It would take at least twelve years before Isadora’s children were of broom-wielding age, so Mr. DeSouza reluctantly agreed to hire a non-relation (after concerted campaigning by Isadora on my behalf). I was grateful for the job and I did my best to keep up, but the DeSouzas were the most energetic and thoroughly clean family I had ever encountered. What the Wallendas were to flying, the DeSouzas were to scouring. And while I found them inspiring on a certain level, it was often difficult to marshal adequate enthusiasm for my eight-dollar-an-hour scrub gig. Mind you, I found it difficult to get up for just about anything back then.

By the time I got to the subway
, I was sticky with sweat. After a leisurely seven-minute waddle to the corner, my freshly laundered blouse was damp and clinging, and my crotch was broiling in my blue jeans. It was a relief to go underground and get into an air-conditioned car. I fanned myself with both hands and tried not to gawk at all the people in their summer clothes—tank tops, shorts, tiny sundresses with spaghetti straps. This was the part of spring that I detested: the doffing of the duds. The Annual Molt. All that exposed flesh, all those beautiful bodies on display. How I envied women who could wear sleeveless tops. How impossibly breezy and fine would it feel to be out in public, wearing a top without sleeves? I just couldn’t imagine it. With my arms, even T-shirts were out of the question. So I went with long-sleeved blouses rolled to the elbow, and either full-length jeans—the shit smear on my shin precluding the cooler Capri pant option—or a skirt that went down to the ankles. Spring was tolerable. Summer was a five-alarm hellfire.