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.”
“That’s the plumping sensation,” I reply. Or, I don’t know, she could be having a reaction to the niacin . . .
“It’s more like a burning sensation.”
“It’s a tingling sensation that soothes while it plumps.” Or that’s what Sylvia said anyway.
“It feels like somebody just punched me in the mouth.” Whoa. That stuff works fast. Jasmine’s lips have gone from reedy to Angelina Jolie on a pouty day in just a few seconds. And it doesn’t look like she’ll be needing the lipstick either as her lips have turned a blistering red. Hmm. I think this might not be the intended effect. “I’ve got to get this stuff off!” She jumps from the chair. “Have you got a wipe?”
“Nope,” I answer, thinking about the dried-out pack back in the car.
“Here,” says Perfect, and hands Jasmine a pack from somewhere. “Use these.”
Too late I realize they are in fact the Miss Havisham wipes that somehow got stashed in the makeup kit. Jasmine pulls the first one from the pack and puts it straight on her mouth. The mummified wipe instantly bonds with the semen plumper, and Jasmine now has a coating of wipe dust over everything. She looks like she’s been making out with a snowman. She runs
straight out of the room. Everyone else is frozen to the spot in horrified delight. A second later a howl comes from the bathroom.
“Fuck’s sake, no soap!” A couple of the gigglers start up again. “It’s not funny!” Jasmine reenters the living room. “I’m going to have to go to the ER.” Lizzie has had the presence of mind to find a damp cloth and some ice and nervously offers them up to Jasmine, who furiously wipes at her lips and then presses the ice pack to her mouth. I can see that the lower half of her face is flushed red. Goodness. Perhaps she should go to the ER. From the corner of my eye I see Violet pulling out the sponge tip from the plumper, about to eat it.
“No, Violet.” I rush forward and grab it out of her hands. “Don’t touch that stuff.” Jasmine removes the ice pack from her mouth. The right half of her upper lip is fantastically swollen. If I didn’t know better, I’d presume she’d been in a brawl. “You seem to have had a bit of an adverse reaction to the lip plumper,” I observe unhelpfully. Though looking at her now, her entire face and neck are actually turning a little pink. But that may just be because she’s super angry.
“That stuff is toxic,” she says. “It should be kept away from the public.” She probably has a point. “How much did you pay for all that junk?”
“Six hundred dollars.” Come to think of it, that does seem an awful lot now for a relatively small amount of crappy product.
“Why?” asks Jasmine. Honest to God, it looks like she’s done a round in the ring.
“Why what?” I ask.
“Why are you intent on selling these awful products to innocent people?”
“I wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t destroyed my only other employment opportunity.”
“You were going to work for Bean à la Bean?” asks Lizzie.
“Was going to. Until Jasmine shut the whole thing down. Now I’m trying to do this. I need to feed my children.” I point toward Violet, who’s chewing on the corner of the makeup case as if to demonstrate she’s so starved she’s been reduced to chomping on faux leather for daily sustenance.
“I’ll write you a check right now”—Jasmine scrambles through her purse and pulls out a checkbook—“for one thousand dollars if you promise never to inflict these products on anyone in this room ever again.” The red-faced titterers have become stony silent. Jasmine’s crossed the line from entertainingly rude to embarrassingly hostile, and the whole room is feeling icky. She rips the check off the stub. “Here, take it.” She presses it into my chest and then snatches the makeup case away from Violet.
“Hey!” says Violet. “I was eating that.”
Jasmine flings open the front door with an unnecessary flourish and stomps to the curb, where the garbage bins are perfectly lined up. She throws open the lid of the first one—again with an unnecessary essence of heightened drama, in my opinion—and proceeds to empty the entire contents of the case into the trash.
“Wow,” says Lizzie. Wow, indeed.
“I feel like at least some of that stuff should have gone in the recycling bin,” I say.
“In the future, don’t take your problems out on us,” Jasmine says, throwing the emptied case in after the makeup. “I appreciate that you and your husband are having financial issues, but that doesn’t give you license to poison half the women in your neighborhood.”
“We may be ‘having financial issues,’ but at least Peter isn’t banging the nanny,” I murmur. Lizzie looks at me sharply. Oops. I think she might have heard that.
“What was that?” asks Jasmine, gripping the rim of the garbage bin. Jeez, she must be really rattled by all of this. She’d never consider putting her hands anywhere near there otherwise.
“Nothing,” I say.
I’d dearly love to tell her that her husband’s infatuated with the woman she’s employed to watch her child. Especially as Jasmine’s cost me a much-needed job and just completely embarrassed me in front of a bunch of women I’m going to have to hope and pray I never run into ever again. However—I’m not the kind to bring a gun to a knife fight. Her marital mayhem is not my mess to sort out. It’s partly her own fault anyway for employing a nanny with an inhuman hip-to-waist ratio.
“Come on, Violet.” I retrieve Jasmine’s check from the floor where I let it fall earlier. Embarrassed to the point of nausea, I fold it in two and try to subtly tuck it into my pocket—but I’m clearly fooling no one. This has done nothing for my generalized inferiority complex.
“I want to stay. This party’s fun!”
“We’re going,” I say, grabbing her hand.
The distance from Lizzie’s porch to mine has never seemed so long. The second we’re home, I draw all the blinds on the east side of the house and blast Journey as loud as I can so I don’t have to hear the drunken laughter as they pack themselves into their SUV hybrids and swerve on home. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to carry on being Lizzie’s insufficient-but-more-or-less-okay neighbor after this. She knows I’ve seen her catty side. I know she knows we’re broke. The delicate ecosystem of our relationship has been more or less ruined. The O’Haras might be moving to Riverside much sooner than anticipated.
CHAPTER 18
“Twenty minutes, Peter! Twenty minutes! It’s nine in the morning—I’m not going to hear back from any college student within twenty minutes!”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ll have been up all night partying and drinking and doing all the things we’re always too tired to do since we turned thirty, and now they’ll be sleeping.”
“Not necessarily,” says Peter. And just to annoyingly accentuate his point, my phone makes a lethargic ding right at that moment. It’s a text message from the girl who watched the kids the night of our failed attempt at drinks with the writing room. It shows my level of desperation that I’m more relieved than annoyed at Peter being proved right. My relief evaporates in a hearty puff upward the minute I read the text: Sorre cant help u got econ this am.
“Damn it. Arielle can’t do it.” I show Peter the text. Well, at least that proves my point about her being up all night drinking. Or maybe she’s always that shitty at spelling and grammar. I am currently anticipating text messages from three more potentially sleeping college students. Peter and I have a problem right now. Or, actually, it seems to be metamorphosing into my problem, as it looks like Peter is putting on his shoes.
“Wait! Are you going? You can’t just go!”
“Amy. You’ve got no fewer than three babysitters about to text you back. One of them will certainly be able to come over and watch the kids.”
“Not to get here within twenty minutes. And what if they’re psychos?”
“They will be fine. It will be fine. We don’t live at the end of the earth. People have cars. People can get from one place to another place within twenty minutes. I have to go.”
“You can’t!” He can’t!
“Amy, I’ve got to.” And with that, he holds up his hand in what is probably supposed to be an apologetic gesture, and before I can physically stop him from doing so, he heads out the door and he’s gone. What. The. Fuck.
So, as you may have gathered, Peter and I have a scheduling conflict this morning. It’s all about as messed up as it can be. I got a call yesterday asking me to come in for an interview this morning for an agronomist position I applied for a couple of days ago. And then first thing this morning, Peter gets an e-mail summoning him to a meeting—apparently, some fool he e-mailed Draker’s Dark to is interested in producing it. Peter’s so eager to get to his meeting with these people that he won’t dare ask them to postpone. I’ve called FMC Trading to ask about rescheduling my interview, and the soonest they can get me in after today is three weeks from now. I know someone else will have that job three weeks from now, so I told them I’d keep today’s meeting.
About seven thirty, in an act of Herculean pride swallowing, I knocked on Lizzie’s door and asked if she could watch the kids for a couple of hours. Billy’s school is closed for “teacher training”—don�
��t they know what they’re doing by now?—so he’s lumped into the whole equation too. Things were a little cool between us, kind of understandable given what happened last week, and she said she was too busy to watch the kids this morning. Doing what, she didn’t say, but she did pointedly remind me that she recently gave me the numbers of four babysitters to be used exactly in situations such as these, so here I am. Waiting for texts. Like a desperate teenager.
How could Peter just walk out the door like that? Is that the new ruling? Whoever gets their shoes on last is lumbered with the childcare crisis? Is that a male thing or a Peter thing? I would never pull a stunt like that. And is that an Amy thing or am I just hardwired to please? Gender equality, my b-hole. It’s all good and fine until some dude pulls the asshole move. It’s times like this when I wish, dream, that we had family living closer. Even some e-smoking, alcoholic great-aunt who force-fed the children Cheetos—any viable humanoid to help us out in situations like these.
Two more dings, one right after the other . . . Neither one of them can do it. Allegedly, they also have economics this morning. Are they all in the same class? Wasn’t that rather shortsighted of Lizzie? Though I suppose she only needs a sitter for date night, so it doesn’t much matter to her what they do during the day. One sitter left. There’s no reason to think she’ll actually te—ding.
And there it is. Sitter number four. And she can’t make it either. I feel my face go ice-cold with panic. What am I going to do? Am I really going to miss this job interview? Is that really going to happen? I am about to Google “Is it okay to leave five-year-old looking after three-year-old?” when I remember a fragment of a news story I recently heard about the government logging everyone’s web searches. They’ll have social services round before I’m halfway down the street. What do people do when shit like this comes up? I surely can’t be the only woman ever to have been faced with this situation. I turn to the Google oracle once more. And within forty seconds I have my plan. If it’s good enough for Michelle Obama, it’s certainly good enough for me.
Life After Coffee Page 15
