by Ann Hood
When he finishes, he bows to her. She runs to him and hugs him close.
“I love you,” she tells him. And in that instant it is true again.
For as long as Lucy can remember, she changed herself to fit in. She is not proud of that. She has only told Jasper and Julia how as a little girl she wanted so badly to be in the “in” group that she taped a sign on to Harriet Becker’s back that said: I AM FAT. Harriet didn’t know it was there, and walked around school all day like that until a teacher saw it and took it off. But the other girls loved Lucy for doing it and she spent most of her time planning new pranks. Most of them against Harriet Becker, who really was fat, and had head lice and secondhand dresses.
These things embarrassed Lucy. At night she prayed to God to forgive her for being so cruel. She started getting bad stomachaches. She threw up a lot. But she still kept torturing Harriet Becker.
“Did I tell you how I used to invite the girls who I wanted to be my friends over and I’d make crank phone calls to Harriet Becker?” Lucy asks Jasper later that night.
They are in bed by then, watching David Letterman. He has on people doing stupid people tricks.
“Forget Harriet Becker already,” Jasper moans. “You were eight years old.”
“But she was really homely and I told her she had won a part in a movie with Warren Beatty. I told her she was going to go to Hollywood.”
Jasper says, “You’ve been talking about this a lot lately. Why don’t you find her and apologize? Purge yourself of all this guilt.”
“The next day,” Lucy says, “she came to school in her best dress. It was this red velvet one, like little girls wear at Christmas. Except this was in the spring and it was already warm. She even wore her good patent leather shoes. And lace ribbons in her hair. And she told everyone she was going to be a movie star.”
Jasper puts his arm around Lucy. “What is this with Harriet Becker?”
Lucy shakes her head, doesn’t answer him. But she knows that it’s having Katherine here that is bringing all this to mind. Katherine reminds her of how disloyal Lucy always was to herself, how cruel she could be, just to have a friend. It wasn’t until after college, when she moved to New York, that she felt as if she had finally found her real self. That was why she didn’t want Katherine here. She wanted to just live her own life and forget about everything else. But Katherine wouldn’t let her.
“I heard she got hit by a car,” Lucy says finally.
“Did she die?”
Lucy shrugs. “I thought it was my fault somehow,” she says. “That I made her life so miserable—”
“Come on,” he says softly.
She lets herself be kissed. Not long ago, she thought Jasper was the best kisser in the world. She tries to concentrate on that, but Harriet Becker keeps intruding, dressed in her red velvet dress and patent leather shoes. The door to the apartment opens and Lucy hears Katherine walk in. She is humming something cheery. Lucy isn’t sure, but she thinks it’s a song from Annie.
“Do you think I should call him?” Katherine asks Julia and Lucy.
They are in a Mexican restaurant on the Upper West Side. Katherine has just looked at, and turned down, an apartment on Ninety-second and Riverside. “Too small,” she said. “Too far from everything.” It’s the fifth apartment that week she has refused.
Julia is saying, “Which one is this now?”
“Pay attention,” Katherine tells her, sounding very much like a schoolteacher.
“I am,” Julia mutters.
Julia and Katherine do not like each other very much, so Lucy intercedes. “Jack,” she says. “The guy from Grand Union.”
Katherine sips her virgin margarita. “Right,” she says. “We were both in this express lane for like twenty minutes. First the cashier had to get a price on cat food for someone, then the cash register broke down, then the woman in front of me didn’t have enough money.” She shakes her head. “And there was Jack, right behind me, and everyone except us was getting really upset and shouting at the cashier. But we were laughing.”
“Sounds hilarious,” Julia says.
“It was,” Katherine says.
“Look,” Lucy tells her, “you just went out a few nights ago. Give him a chance to call you.”
Katherine rolls her eyes. “I hate being the woman waiting by the phone, though. Women should be able to call too.”
Lucy shrugs. For all the dates Katherine has had, she has used this same theory. It never works. Either the men weren’t going to call her anyway and tell her so, or they feel pressured into asking her out again and have a miserable second date. If they do like her, she sends them funny cards until they stop calling her. To Katherine, though, all these subtleties go unnoticed. She thinks every date is wonderful, every man a potential boyfriend.
“I really liked Jack too,” she is saying. “He’s an investment banker.”
Julia rolls her eyes.
“What?” Katherine asks her.
“Nothing.”
Lucy says, “Just this once, wait and see what he does.” She knows Katherine won’t do it. The last time she promised to wait, then pretended she had called the guy by accident. “I meant to call the number right under his,” she told Lucy.
Katherine points to Lucy’s empty margarita glass. “Salt is really bad for you. I order mine without it. They don’t mind.”
Under the table Julia kicks Lucy gently.
Katherine picks up the bill. “My treat,” she says. “You were both so great coming up here to look at the apartment with me.”
“No,” Lucy says. “I want to pay my own.”
Katherine smiles. “I insist,” she says.
On the sidewalk, they stop and look in a store window at shoes on sale.
“Someday,” Julia tells Katherine, “you have to let me make you over.”
Katherine eyes Julia and laughs. “I don’t think so.”
“If you’re going to live in New York, you’ve got to look like a New Yorker,” Julia tells her.
“Well,” Katherine says politely. “Maybe some night for fun.”
When they turn to leave, a familiar woman starts to call to them from across the street.
“Lucy! Katherine!”
Lucy freezes. It is Meryl King, a sorority sister of theirs. Lucy wants to duck into the shoe store, pretend she hasn’t heard. But Katherine is already waving and shouting back at her.
“It’s the King!” she’s yelling. “It’s the King!”
Julia grabs Lucy’s arm. “The king?’
“Don’t ask,” Lucy says. She is starting to get a stomachache.
Meryl is beside them now, hugging Katherine, jumping up and down. Lucy moans.
“I heard about you and Andy,” Meryl says. She has that false sincere voice that Lucy hates. “What happened?”
Katherine shrugs, gives a small laugh. “One of those things.”
Now Meryl looks at Lucy. “And this one,” she says, poking Lucy’s arm. “Lives right here in New York and doesn’t even pick up the phone. You know we’re practically neighbors?”
Lucy nods vaguely.
“I manage that store right over there.” She points across the street. “If you come in I’ll give you a discount.”
“Okay,” Julia says.
Meryl studies her face. “Do I know you?”
Katherine squeezes Julia’s arm like they’re old pals. “No,” she says. “She’s such a cutup.”
Julia gives Meryl a big fake smile that makes Lucy laugh.
Now Meryl is frowning, trying to understand the joke.
Katherine says, “Guess who else is living here in the Big Apple?”
“No!” Meryl shrieks. “No!”
Katherine nods.
Watching them, Lucy is starting to feel like no time has passed, like she is right back in school, drinking peppermint schnapps and doing line dances with these women. She places her hand on her stomach, trying to calm it.
Meryl is saying, “One of
my roommates is getting married in August and we need a third.”
Suddenly, Lucy becomes animated. “That is so great,” she says. “What luck.”
“Well,” Katherine says slowly, “where is it?”
“Stuyvesant Town,” Meryl says. Meryl is almost six feet tall and very thin. She is wearing large jewelry that makes loud crashing sounds when she moves. She is writing down the address on her business card. “The third has to sleep on the couch,” she says. “Instead of sharing rooms. You know.”
Katherine nods. “Uh-huh,” she says.
Lucy says, “Katherine, you’re going to love that area. This is so great.”
Meryl looks at her watch. It’s big too and has a hologram of a rose on it. “I’ve got to run,” she says. “Call me, Kat.” At the corner she turns. “I mean it about the discount too,” she calls to them. “You too, Julie.”
“Okay,” Julia shouts to her. “I’ll take you up on that.”
They all watch as Meryl disappears into the store.
“What a coincidence,” Katherine says. She is pursing her lips into small thin lines.
“An omen,” Lucy says. “Definitely an omen.”
It is very late at night and Lucy can’t sleep. She is haunted by images of Meryl. Not the Meryl they saw on the street today, but a younger one, dressed in a lime green snowflake sweater and khaki chinos. She keeps remembering one night when she had come in from a date, a fix-up, with a Phi Sigma Kappa. Freddie was kind of nerdy. He looked like John Denver. He was majoring in agriculture. But she pretended to like this guy, just so he’d ask her to the spring weekend, and it had worked. She’d had a date like everybody else but instead of being happy, she felt miserable.
She walked down the dark corridor toward her room. Meryl’s door was open and there she was, all six feet of her, stretched out on the floor, and she was saying to a group of faceless girls, “Lucy is so weird. She drives me crazy.” Then Meryl started to laugh. “I even fixed her up with Freddie tonight.” All the other girls laughed too. Lucy pushed the door open and walked in. “Hi!” she said as bright and cheery as she could. There was an awkward silence. “Well, hello there,” Meryl said. “Tell us every detail.”
Lucy gets out of bed and goes into the living room. Katherine is asleep on the couch, her hair pulled into a ponytail, her face all fresh and scrubbed clean. Lucy sighs. Whatever happened to Freddie? she wonders. At Bum’s Rush she had dumped him for an alumnus who had gone to the weekend alone. The older guy had been a terrific dancer, and he and Lucy had jitterbugged like mad. She’d even spent the night with him at the Holiday Inn where he was staying.
Lucy sighs. She remembers how Freddie had looked, standing alone in the corner as she had danced and twirled around the floor with the other guy. He had kept his head bent, stared down at his shoes. After a few more dances, he was gone.
At her drawing table, Lucy turns on the light. Katherine doesn’t even budge, so Lucy sits down and begins to work on My Dolly. She draws carefully, the face, the hair, the dress. When she finishes, it is perfect. A sad little doll in a badly hemmed red velvet dress. She has a lace ribbon in her hair, drooping sadly against her tangle of yellow curls. To the world, she will just be My Dolly. But to Lucy, it is Harriet Becker who will get all the hugs and kisses from little girls.
Fires
JASPER HANGS A STRING of Christmas lights shaped like chili peppers above his sofa. He spends so much time at Lucy’s apartment that he has never felt the need to do much with his own. But now that Katherine is staying with Lucy, Jasper wants to make his place more homey. Lucy thinks the chili peppers are funny, but her laughter stops suddenly, and then she goes and looks sad again. This has been happening a lot lately.
She hates staying at his place. She hates the entire block with the men who stand in front of the building next door like sentries and the empty schoolyard littered with crack vials and the red and yellow bodega on the corner with the cashier sitting behind a plastic window. She even hates the name of this section of the city, Hell’s Kitchen. In summer, loud music blasts unfamiliar songs from radios and the street floods with water from an open fire hydrant.
Lucy says, “How can you keep living here?”
But Jasper only shrugs. He doesn’t have any answers these days. He wants to tell her things but his thoughts seem muddled, trapped in his brain.
Lucy’s face brightens. “You’ll be the lucky one in twenty years,” she says. “This neighborhood will be the place to live in New York and everyone will think you’re a smart real-estate guy.”
He forces a laugh.
“Someone has to be a pioneer, brave the elements. Break new territory. Someone has to take risks,” she says. “Right?”
“Right,” Jasper says.
In the dark, the chili pepper lights blaze red, like a distant row of stop lights. Otherwise, the apartment is pitch black. Sometimes, Jasper sleeps the entire day, unaware that the sun has come out. Even though Lucy is right beside him now, he cannot even make out the vague shape of her face. There is something disorienting about this, something that makes him feel dizzy and slightly lost.
Jasper whispers into the darkness. “I’ve never really failed before.”
She doesn’t answer, but she squeezes his hand.
“I mean, I always got the parts,” he says. “Always.”
“But you have to try out to get them,” she says. Her voice sounds weary.
“Romeo,” he begins.
She squeezes his hand again. “I know,” she tells him.
He says suddenly, “Where are you?”
Lucy laughs softly. “Right here,” she says. “Next to you.”
Jasper gropes in the darkness, trying to find her. His heart pounds and he can hear his own breathing, quick and frightened until he settles on her shoulder, her neck, feels her hair across the pillow. Then he can breathe normally again.
He tries to think of what it is he wants to tell her. He tries to organize his thoughts into some kind of story, the way in high school he used to organize term papers.
“Remember topic sentences?” he blurts.
“Topic sentences,” Lucy says.
“I remember I wrote this term paper in tenth grade on national parks. And we had to hand in this outline with headings like The First National Parks. And Theodore Roosevelt and National Parks. And The Importance of Forest Fires in National Parks.”
“Uh-huh,” Lucy says.
“This was supposed to help us organize our thoughts. So we could write the paper, you see? So from the outline we developed topic sentences. Like, ‘Yellowstone National Park was created in 1889, the first park of its kind in the United States.’“
He feels Lucy stir. He imagines that she is sitting up.
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
Jasper sighs. He knows he is looking up, toward the ceiling, but he feels like he is upside down. He decides that he will go to Star Magic tomorrow and buy the glow-in-the-dark full moon applique they sell. He’ll stick it to the ceiling to help him feel more centered at night.
“I mean, national parks?” Lucy is saying. “Teddy Roosevelt?”
“I remember doing that paper and how surprised I was that sometimes they let forest fires burn for days. It’s like a natural thing. Even though all those trees and animals die, it’s good sometimes to let it burn out. Even though Smokey the Bear was telling us then how to prevent forest fires. Remember him?”
The bed sighs as she gets up from it. “I don’t know anymore, Jasper,” she says. “Smokey the Bear? Are you serious? I thought we were talking about us. I thought we were talking about you.”
He presses his hands against the wall, to keep himself steady. He presses as hard as he can. He imagines a list in his mind. A neat outline filled with sections like Jasper Shaw: The Early Successful Years. And, The Subsequent Demoralization of Jasper in New York City. And, How Jasper Shaw Became Stuck—Terrified of Failing Even More. He searches the list for topic sentences so he
can form a logical explanation for Lucy.
But the neat outline jumbles, then dissolves. He hears Lucy sigh, and walk away from him, into the bathroom where he knows she will take a bath so hot it will leave her skin bright pink, like a cooked shrimp. The bathroom door closes, and he hears water running into the tub. He imagines her in there, naked, hidden in steam. But he stays in bed, just like this, holding on.
Lucy used to kid him about being the only Hoosier she’d ever met. That was when he still believed he would be on Broadway soon. When he went from dance class to auditions to more classes. When his thighs and hamstrings were sore from working out, and Lucy would massage them with sesame oil, rub and knead them until they became rubbery and he could hardly stand up.
Back then, Jasper used to like to tell her about what he’d done before. How in Greensburg, Indiana, where he grew up, he was such a good dancer that his teacher started to send him the hour west to Indianapolis for classes.
“Ten years old,” he told Lucy, “taking a bus every afternoon to the city for class.”
“You were destined to be a star,” she said. She would trace the definition of his muscles then, lingering on his calves, his inner thighs.
He told her about all the parts he’d danced. He’d leap for her, spin like a skater, dance the mazurka. He used to strut his stuff.
Now Lucy says, “You don’t talk about your work with me anymore.” She shows him her illustrations. Brings him a piece of paper with a faceless doll on it and tells him her ideas. “Now you,” she urges gently.
“Last night,” Jasper says, “I made seventeen blender drinks. One guy in a Brooks Brothers suit got so drunk he passed out with his head literally in his soup.”
“Not that,” she says. She taps his legs lightly. “This.”
Sometimes, during these conversations, Jasper takes a book of matches that is made to look like a painted blue door, and lights each match, one by one. He stares at them, holding on until he feels the heat on his thumb, then quickly shakes it until the flame dies.
For a while, he would chronicle his failures to her. He would even make jokes about the people he’d tried out for, their comments on his height. “Maybe I’ll shave off a few inches here,” he’d say, pointing to his knees. Or, “I have a feeling I’m not in Greensburg anymore, Toto.”
