Trophy Life

by Lea Geller

  “So you’re sure he’s coming back?” Grace had climbed into Beeks’s lap and was pulling at her coconut-flavored curls, jamming her fists into her mouth to taste them.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I mean, I don’t see him coming here, but at some point he’ll send for me, and then I’ll go home.” I shifted on my couch cushion. I was relieved that I hadn’t told Beeks that Jack had asked me to come here to try to get information for him. That was a whole line of questioning I wasn’t sure I could handle.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know. Until I hear otherwise, I’m going with that. End of story.” I hoped my firm tone would put her questions to bed.

  “And you’re not mad?” Beeks’s questions, or so it seemed, were insomniacs.

  “What do you mean?” I knew what she meant.

  Beeks paused. I could see her thinking before she spoke. I got nervous. As a rule, Beeks did not think before she spoke.

  “Listen, you can tell me you didn’t marry him for his money, but you can’t tell me it wasn’t part of the attraction. You’re telling me now that it’s all gone you’re not even a little bit angry?”

  I looked at Beeks because I could not think of anything to say to her that I hadn’t already. Turns out, Beeks didn’t need me to respond, because she kept talking. She leaned back into the couch and let Grace sit in her lap. “I dunno, Agnes. When a woman marries a guy partly for his money and the money vanishes, usually she’s a lot more pissed off.”

  I was breathing through Beeks’s words. I was breathing so loudly I could hear myself, but she just kept talking.

  “This guy promised to look after you, and he goes and steals some money, sends you here, goes AWOL, and you don’t seem to be angry. I just don’t get it. I get madder when I lose a parking spot.”

  I sat in silence, grateful that Grace could not yet understand us.

  “Of course I’m angry,” I said, looking down and plucking at the thread on the hem of my shirt. “At first I was a little angry, and with each day that I don’t hear from him, I just get angrier.” I forced myself to look at her. “I hate what he did, and I hate that I don’t really know what he did. There’s so much I hate about this, Beeks. But I don’t want to hate Jack. I just can’t.” I looked back down at my shirt, which began to unravel. “I have a job to do, and I have Grace, and if I start hating Jack, I’m gonna fall apart. I can’t fall apart, Beeks.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, both staring at anything but each other. I mumbled something about dinner and leftovers, but Beeks would have none of it.

  “Tonight,” she announced, standing up, “tonight, we dine out.”

  I hadn’t eaten in a single restaurant since I’d arrived here. With Jack, restaurants had been part of our everyday lives, part of our currency. He’d book restaurants weeks in advance, planning our vacations around our reservations. The idea of someone else making food and putting it in front of me, only to clear it all away at the end, nearly drove me to tears.

  “Brian has a pub up here he loves,” Beeks said. With her free hand, she pulled me off the couch, and the three of us walked out into the darkening autumn.

  The walk to the pub took us through the North Riverdale neighborhood surrounding St. Norbert’s. Like campus, the area was hilly. Until that evening, I had only ventured up and down the main street. I didn’t know there were houses so close by. The houses were small and boxy, most of them attached row houses like mine. It was hard to see the houses, though, because nearly all of them were plastered with Halloween decorations. When I was growing up, Halloween decorations had been a pumpkin, just one, and never carved. It was always a sad sort of affair, a last-minute, marked-down purchase.

  Halloween was the closest Santa Monica came to an official religion. People who believed nothing believed in the sanctity of hiring a decorator to turn their house into a gothic wonderland from October 1 to November 1. People who shunned organized, formalized worship of any kind whipped themselves into a dogmatic frenzy of outdoing their neighbors by transforming already impressive homes into movie sets. I am not exaggerating when I say I once saw a house with singing, mechanized butlers, all dressed like extras from an Addams Family movie.

  Never to be outdone, Jack hired a team of decorators to hang fake yet lifelike bats, gossamer cobwebs, and electric candles. But Jack had his Halloween limits. He refused to hang anything that suggested death or decay, or possibly even advanced age. My first year in the house, I thought it might be fun to hang skeletons or turn our porch into a graveyard, but Jack would not hear of it. No hollowed-out faces or RIP signs came near our home. Jack did order several pumpkins to arrive, precarved. Although the decorations were up for a full month, the pumpkins arrived on October 29 and promptly disappeared on November 1. Precarved pumpkins rot quickly, and rot screams decay.

  North Riverdale also embraced Halloween, although in a far more DIY manner than Santa Monica. Weather-beaten witches perched precariously on rooftops, presumably saving the spot for Santa, who would replace them in a few weeks’ time. Thick, gauzy, cottony cobwebs coated the bushes and hedges, and gravestones popped up in all the small, boxy front yards. The few trees in front of houses had ghosts, plastic skeletons, and bats hanging from thin, aggravated branches. It was getting dark, but I could have sworn I saw a grim reaper in a window and blood oozing down the side of one of the bigger houses. The decorations were fun, almost joyous in their creepiness, and I would have missed them completely if not for that walk with Beeks.

  I also would have missed this Irish pub. I’d never been in any kind of pub before. Pubs weren’t Jack’s thing, and frankly, I’d heard the pubs in Santa Monica were full of British expats (there were many of them) who wanted to eat their fish and chips, watch their soccer, and still be able to walk out into the sunshine, something they could not do “at home.” One of the baby-group moms was from London. She loved those pubs but never invited any of us to go. Those pubs didn’t do outreach. They were comfort for people far from home. I was far from home now. I wondered where I was supposed to find comfort.

  Beeks could see that I had drifted off into self-pity. She could see it right on my face and maybe read it in my slouch. She hooked her arm through mine. “Buck up,” she said. “Let’s go eat some greasy food together.”

  Greasy it was. She ordered a side of something called shepherd’s pie for Grace, which was, as far as I could tell, mashed potatoes on top of ground beef. Grace sucked down the entire plate in five minutes. The pub was dark, and there was music coming from somewhere. It didn’t sound live, but I wasn’t sure. Beeks ordered a beer. I’d never been much of a beer drinker, and I’d been dying for a glass of wine that was not from a dusty bottle with little pieces of floating cork. I ordered a glass of the house red and almost hugged the waiter who brought it to me. I nearly leaped out of my chair when he brought our food. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had brought me food. Beeks and I ate burgers. I didn’t even know if they still sold hamburger buns in LA anymore—all our burgers had been in wilting but defiant lettuce wraps.

  Over dinner, we talked about everything but Jack. We talked about school, and Beeks filled me in on her life. Work was hectic; her boss was threatening to make her share an office with a younger colleague whose boobs allegedly stood up on their own. Brian was working long hours, and Beeks got yanked into school at least once a week to sit in the principal’s office with one of her boys. While she was resigned to all of it, the balancing was weighing her down. But here’s the thing—for the first time in a long while, I actually had something to match Beeks’s struggles. Before, when she’d talked about the balancing, I sat in my enormous staffed house with my one child and no job other than to look cute, stay thin, and show up, and felt inconsequential. Now I actually had something to talk about—I had day-care stories, sleep issues, and job drama. True, I’d have traded it all in for Jack and my old life. But for the time being, it felt good to be able to return fire.

  I told Beeks
about my boys, Gavin, and the ever-present Stacey Figg, and sure enough, as we walked up the stairs to my house after dinner, Stacey emerged from her own house.

  “Uh-oh,” whispered Beeks. “I believe I am about to meet the Figg.”

  “Stacey.” I smiled. “Everything OK?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” she said, closing her door behind her. “It’s not like you to go out at night, and I wanted to make sure everything was all right.”

  “Did you now?” Beeks muttered under her breath. I shot her a look. Beeks’s mutter was never as quiet as she thought it was.

  “All good here,” I said. “Just having dinner with a friend.”

  Stacey’s eyes fixed on Beeks. I had no choice but to introduce them. “Stacey, this is Beeks. Beeks, this is Stacey. Stacey Figg.”

  “No shit,” Beeks said through her teeth. I elbowed her.

  “We work together,” Stacey announced proudly, raising her chin and crossing her arms over her chest. “Do you live around here?” she asked, walking down her steps and coming over to us.

  “No,” said Beeks. “I live in the city. Just visiting.”

  “How do you guys know each other?” She took another step closer to us so that she was almost standing between us and my front door.

  “Old friends,” said Beeks. “Old, tired friends.” She looked at me. “I think I need to be getting home. Brian is away, and last week Stevie took the sitter’s phone and messed with the autocorrect. Every time she tried to type ‘Hi,’ it corrected to ‘Bite me.’”

  Stacey’s eyes grew wide in disbelief and disgust.

  “Nice meeting you,” Beeks said, cutting off any further questioning. She ushered Grace and me into my foyer. As soon as we were inside, before Stacey was out of earshot, Beeks declared, “Wow, you weren’t kidding about the Figg.”

  “Beeks, hush. She hears everything.”

  Beeks laughed and followed me upstairs to put down an overtired Grace. She was asleep before I had even rolled her down into the crib. I bent down to kiss her forehead.

  Before she left, Beeks reached into her giant purse and handed me a package. “For Grace. Get it?” she asked as I opened the plastic bag, releasing a pair of pink fairy wings. Glitter flew out of the bag and onto the floor. I tried not to think about cleaning it up. “She’s a Fairy Freeze employee!” Beeks yelled, very proud of herself.

  “I get it, Beeks,” I said. “And I love that you bought her these.” She must have known I’d completely forgotten about a Halloween costume for Grace.

  “And with that,” Beeks said, opening the front door, “I must be on my way. Happy early Halloween.”

  “Happy early Halloween,” I replied, returning her hug and locking the door behind her, unlocking it and locking it again.

  Halloween. I did not know it then, but on Halloween, Jack would finally reach out.

  Just not to me.

  -16-

  Halloween was on a Saturday this year, so in-school festivities took place the day before. On the morning of October 30, Gavin announced the middle school candy policy: there would be none.

  “This is Principal Burke,” he declared that morning over the loudspeaker.

  “He doesn’t need to announce himself,” said a voice from behind me in the hall. “Nobody else uses the loudspeaker.”

  I turned around. “Hey, Adam,” I said. “Happy almost-Halloween.”

  Gavin’s amplified voice continued: “Just a friendly reminder that any costumes are subject to approval by the administration. Also, any candy found on a student today will be confiscated.”

  “That man . . . ,” I said.

  “Tell me about it. I’m assuming you skimmed his forty-page trick-or-treating manifesto?”

  “Um, I saw it,” I said, shaking my head. “But no, I never read it. How does trick-or-treating work for the kids?”

  “They can go chaperoned up and down Main Street, and there’s a party for them in the gym. Other than that, only faculty families trick-or-treat on campus.”

  “All of which I would have known had I bothered to read the manifesto,” I joked.

  “Listen, tomorrow night some of us are going out for a drink,” he said as kids wove around us in the hall. “Wanna join? No costume required.”

  “Oh, I wish I could. But I can’t miss Grace’s first Halloween. Besides, I don’t have a sitter,” I said. “Maybe next time.”

  “Sure thing, Agnes,” he said, checking his phone for the time.

  I glanced at my watch. Class started in two minutes. “I gotta run, but thanks—another time!” I called as I ran to class.

  “Principal Jerk sent out an email with a long list of rules about costumes,” Guy said from behind his laptop. “He does it every year.”

  “He’s a total dick,” said Caleb.

  “Caleb,” I said, warning him. It was one thing for me to overlook the “Principal Jerk” comment. I had to draw the line somewhere.

  “Yeah,” said Davey, who had just walked into class, both shoes on but untied. “We call it the why-bother email, because, you know, why bother with Halloween if we can’t eat candy and he has to approve our costumes?”

  “Let’s do something fun today,” I said, hoping to distract them from their Halloween misery. “We have a lot to cover in the memoir unit, but I want to warm up with a couple of prompts. Today you’re asking the questions, and I’ll do my best to write five sentences for each one. I want you to see what it’s like to be the one asking, because writing a good memoir is about asking the right questions. OK?” I did not wait for their approval. “Guy, you go first.”

  Guy looked nervous. He shifted in his seat. “What about rules?” he asked. “What’s off-limits?”

  “Sexy stuff,” giggled Davey. He blushed and looked down.

  “Just the usual,” I said. “I think you guys know what’s off-limits, but I’d like to thank Davey for giving us some parameters.” He blushed harder.

  I sat for a few minutes and then called on Guy again.

  “Here is something that nobody knows about me,” he read from his screen and then looked up at me.

  “OK,” I said. “Give me a minute.” I typed something out on my own laptop and then read it aloud.

  “There is something that nobody knows about me. I am addicted to veggie puffs. Veggie puffs are technically a baby food, but I can’t eat enough of them. I love the light, puffy airiness and the way they melt in my mouth as the flavor explodes. I especially love the sweet potato and the kale-strawberry puffs. Combining kale and strawberry is nothing short of genius.”

  I realized I probably had some puffs in my bag. Sure enough, when I reached down into it, my hand fell upon a can. I fished it out and held it up high. “Behold, veggie puffs!” I cracked open the can, stuffed a handful in my mouth, and passed them around.

  Davey jammed a large portion of puffs into his face and was the first to gag. “Ms. P., these are gross,” he said, choking.

  “No joke,” said Guy, who was picking at the puffs one at a time.

  “They may be gross at first, but after a few cans, they start to taste good. Really good. And then, after about ten cans or so, they are all you can think about.”

  Art was throwing puffs directly into Caleb’s mouth. “These things suck,” he said, “but thanks for sharing your food with us.”

  “Yeah,” said Caleb, chewing. “They may be nasty, but they’re better than the popcorn we steal from the teachers’ lounge.” All the boys nodded in approval.

  I knew I had to move quickly to get in as many boys as possible, so I called on the boys in the front row one by one. Davey asked me to write about my earliest memory, which I thought was pretty insightful for a boy who was barely capable of dressing himself.

  “My first memory is of my parents pushing me in a swing,” I said. “The hard part about living in Southern California, if there is a hard part, is that you can’t place a memory in a time of year. I remember the flat wooden seat of the swing, and
I remember sunshine. But sunshine could have been at any time of the year. I remember I was wearing shorts and sandals, but that could have been in June or November.” I stopped for a moment. I hadn’t thought about that swing in a long time, but it was there, right atop my memory pile, waiting for Davey’s prompt.

  I answered as many of the boys’ questions as I could. I worked my way through the class, saving Caleb for last, in case he decided to derail the assignment. “Caleb?” I asked, looking right at him.

  “Well, I was gonna ask why you smile at us so much,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. I read the familiar expression on his face: I dare you not to like me.

  I stared back, and this time I was ready with my own expression. You can’t make me not like you. So stop trying.

  He looked at me, confused. Guy filled the awkward silence. “Yeah, how come you smile at us the way the other teachers smile at Johnny Stark?”

  “Yeah,” said Art. “Even when we’re getting into trouble.”

  “Dude,” laughed Davey. “When are we not getting into trouble?” He reached out to his friends. High fives all around.

  Johnny Stark was a student of mine in another class and one of the few fully functioning middle schoolers at St. Norbert’s. He was, from what I could tell, a sweet, compliant, uncomplicated boy. He was, above all else, a personal favorite of Gavin’s. In fact, he was a member of a group of five or six boys on whom Gavin seemed to dote and constantly praise, often in earshot of as many teachers and students as possible.

  “Anyone can smile at Johnny Stark. It’s pretty easy to smile at a kid who does exactly what he’s asked to do, when he’s asked to do it, who makes you feel like you’re succeeding every day.” The boys in the front row squirmed in their seats. “If you ask me, teachers are supposed to smile at all the kids, but especially at the kids who are sometimes harder to smile at.” I was nervous. By answering this way, I was being more honest with the boys than I probably should have been. I was acknowledging that sometimes they made it hard to like them. I thought about smiling at little Ronan at Sunny Day every time he peed under the slide right in front of me. “I think it’s important to smile bigger at you guys, so I do. I smile bigger.”