“Are you folding yours?”
“After this afternoon? Yes, I suppose I am.”
“I’m sorry. Married?”
“I wish it were that simple. And I’m sorry, too. More than I care to admit.” She looked around the room again as if she was reassessing the new arrangement of furniture. “You can’t do this because you’re trying to please me or because you feel bad for me or to make up for something that happened decades ago.”
“I’m not.”
“Because you’re not the only one who made mistakes, David.”
“I didn’t assume I was, but I’m relieved to have confirmation that I wasn’t.”
She was pulling her hair back from her face, and in the now brighter lights of the room, he saw a hesitation in her eyes, or, perhaps, a longing to say more. She let her hair drop and her expression changed to one of docile gratitude. He got up and sat beside her.
“You don’t really want me to put everything back, do you?” he asked.
“No, of course not. I don’t even remember what was in here. But maybe we could go through the barn and retrieve a lamp or two to put back?”
“That’s how trouble begins,” he said.
“And this is how it ends?”
“I’m not ready to think about endings,” he said. “But I’m ready to say that for the moment, this plan makes me very happy.”
31
It had been almost a week since Mandy had received the email telling her her SAT scores were available online. At first she’d been tempted to look at them, the same way you were tempted to look at an accident on the highway, just to see how bad it was. But each day it got a little easier to resist going to the website to find out. The scores were somehow less relevant since she’d followed Craig into his basement more than a week ago. In a few days, probably they wouldn’t matter to her at all, no matter how low they turned out to be. What she’d been doing at Craig’s made it seem unlikely she’d even go to college, despite David’s help.
Still, to please David, she was sitting at the table in her room with a fan blowing on her, making another stab at an essay.
Clara Dunston, my arch-nemesis and my soul mate, had her life ruined by social media and a glue gun.
The school that didn’t read the rest of that paragraph was a school Mandy didn’t want to go to anyway.
Clara had been a classmate who’d come to a bad turn in cyberspace, a lesson for Mandy, and one of the reasons why she stayed away from social media as much as she could. She knew she was the kind of person who didn’t fare well in the world of competitive “friend” tallies and “likes” and displays of outfits and fifteen-second video clips you made with your talented BFF. Too bad Clara Dunston hadn’t learned that lesson.
Mandy thought a lot of Clara’s problems stemmed from her mother, one of those big, enthusiastic women who love baking and sewing and “crafting”—an awkward word that meant you took a lot of ugly scraps and used a glue gun to transform them into something equally ugly but wearable. These were homey activities that should have made a person seem clever and interesting but really made you seem like you belonged to a cult.
It didn’t help that Clara’s mother wore long skirts and blouses with ruffles, and it was even worse that she made clothes for her daughter that were shrunken-down mirror images.
Clara was good at a lot of things, but they were all the wrong things. She was a skilled musician, but she played the oboe. She knew how to use a sewing machine, but she used it to make vests out of old curtains. She was athletic, but her sport was throwing the shot put. She had beautiful hair, but she wore it in massive curls that looked as if she’d styled it with soup cans and then forgot to take out the cans. She had cats, which was fine, but she had eleven of them, which tipped into intervention territory.
Mandy had found her interesting, maybe because she was even more of an outsider than she was herself. She and Clara could have learned a lot from each other. But if someone like Michelle, who had selfies posing with pop superstars, could afford to take on Clara as a mascot-like friend (not that she ever would), she, Mandy, could not. Aligning herself with Clara would magnify their problems instead of neutralizing them.
Clara’s biggest mistake had been thinking she fit in. She was always posting pictures of her cats and videos of them doing things that she thought were cute but were not. Licking themselves in embarrassing places, stretching their fat bodies in the sun, climbing a weirdly elaborate carpet-covered structure her father had built that took up most of their living room. She’d been hounded for everything she did, even when it was something a cooler person would be applauded for.
One afternoon when Clara and Mandy were sitting on the sidelines during a gym class, Clara had excitedly told her she was starting a YouTube channel dedicated to pets and unusual fashion.
Mandy had turned to her in sad disbelief. “It’s none of my business,” she’d said, “but you might want to take a break from social media for a while.”
“God,” Clara had said, “you’re not a very imaginative person.”
Mandy wanted to tell her that some people—like the two of them—couldn’t afford to be imaginative; some people had to lie low and duck for cover. The bullying just kept getting worse, until Clara’s mother tried to organize a parents’ group against it. But the problem there was that mothers didn’t want to be associated with her any more than students wanted to be associated with her daughter.
In the end, Clara was taken out of school and the family moved away. That was a relief. Mandy had no idea what happened to her. She’d probably end up winning Project Runway one year and America’s Got Talent the next. Or living on a compound in the South, sewing bonnets.
Either way, Mandy had used her as a role model of what not to do, and that was where she was headed with the essay when she got a text from Lindsay.
Do you know what’s been going on?
Mandy hadn’t heard from Lindsay since the day Craig had picked her up on the village green/traffic island, and she knew instinctively that whatever had been going on was not likely to be good for her.
Do I want to know?
No clue. But you SHOULD.
A few seconds later, Lindsay sent her a screenshot from Wallis’s Instagram account. It was a photo of Mandy getting into Craig’s van. It was a badly composed shot in profile, but it was unmistakably her with her overalls and haircut. Underneath the photo were the words NOT SLUT-SHAMING. JUST SAYING.
It was the middle of the afternoon and the room had that hot, attic-in-July stuffiness that she halfway liked, even if it sometimes made her so sleepy she had to take a nap. Maybe that was why she liked it. But when she saw the photo, she felt as if the walls of the hot room were closing in on her. She turned on her air conditioner, but it was so old, it didn’t work well enough to make up for the high-pitched whining.
Am I supposed to care that a jealous bitch posted me doing something she wishes she was doing?
It’s been shared 350 times!!!!! He’s 27!!!
Mandy couldn’t stop herself from texting back: Actually he’s 28.
There was a long silence, and Mandy figured that Lindsay was trying to think through what it meant that Mandy knew this.
#1—only trying to help #2—fuck you
Mandy stretched out on the bed, a little stung by the harsh words, a little impressed that Lindsay had used the f-word since ordinarily it was the kind of thing she’d gasp or giggle about. Maybe Michelle and Wallis were good influences on her.
Among the many mysterious things Mandy had to think about was why—despite the content—she’d been so happy when she got a text from Lindsay after all this time. And why being with Craig, which you’d think would make her feel good, had started to make her feel lonelier when she was with other people. She officially had a secret life, but it turned out that having a secret life made you feel as if the people you spent most of your time with didn’t know you at all because they didn’t know your secrets.
On
a whim, she texted: movie tonight?
The message came back as undeliverable. Lindsay had blocked her. That was unexpected. Now Lindsay was probably letting her new friends know she’d dumped her and sending them copies of their texts.
She started to sweat. She switched the fan to high so the hot air was blowing on her like a minor hurricane. It wasn’t quite August and they’d already had eight days over ninety. They were predicting huge storms for tonight with microbursts, flash floods, and high wind gusts. This was not a good thing, but the idea of a violent shakeup of the atmosphere had its appeal. It was true she was fucking up all over the place, but the whole planet was so obviously fucked up, it probably mattered less. It was a pain walking up the hill to their house, but at least when Beauport was under water they’d still have dry ground.
She got up and went to the drawer of her desk and took out the money she’d made from Craig. Twelve hundred dollars, all in crisp hundreds he’d taken out of the ATM over the course of a few days. Technically, he was a horrible person, but actually, he wasn’t a bad guy. She had more than enough to buy herself a few of the things she had been wanting for a while—a bright green bicycle she’d seen online; an orange ukulele in the window of a music store in Hammond; a new air conditioner for her room—but then she’d have to answer questions. Even minor purchases would set off warning bells, especially since her mother had, apparently, given up pot. She didn’t know how she knew this—no one had told her—but she knew. She was more focused and alert. She didn’t have that dopey grin all the time, and you had the feeling she remembered what you’d told her two minutes ago, even if you’d rather she didn’t. It was a relief, but also annoying: was she suddenly supposed to send her flowers because she’d stopped a habit she shouldn’t have had to begin with? But who was she to complain about anyone else’s bad habits, considering her new summer job?
When she’d followed Craig into his basement ten days ago, she’d pretty much known she wouldn’t find a scene out of a horror movie with people in cages or chained to the walls, but she hadn’t 100 percent ruled it out. But it was just a basement and a lot less damp than the one in her own house. It was clear someone had started to renovate it by putting up framing and a few sheets of drywall. She imagined that Craig had begun the job and then had abandoned the project. Since then, she’d gotten a clear picture of the fact that he was full of ideas and ambitions for making money and fixing up the house and expanding his business, but he believed he deserved to skip over the drudgework it would take to get where he wanted to go. For example, she was the one who was doing all the actual labor on this business of his.
He led her into the half of the basement that had been partly completed. “I’m almost done with this room,” he said when he noticed her looking around.
She nodded, but there were cobwebs on a bucket with tools in it and dust covering a jigsaw. It was touching that he thought she wouldn’t notice.
He told her to take a seat at a desk in front of a computer with a lot of mismatched parts. Something he’d put together out of castoffs from various jobs. He rolled over another office chair and sat with his leg pressed against hers while he signed in to the computer and brought up a website.
Somehow, she’d known what he was going to show her, so when he did, it didn’t come as a surprise or a shock. The website contained the usual lurid colors and cluttered graphics of every porn site she’d ever seen. He banged a few keys, entered some passwords (his password was a long string of zeroes, more indication of laziness), and then they were looking at a live feed of a woman sitting in front of her computer with a bed in the background covered in stuffed animals. Mandy was almost sure she’d never seen a site like this, but there was, nonetheless, something familiar about it, almost iconic: semi-naked woman with neck tattoo in funky bedroom.
“Why are we looking at this?” she asked, turning to Craig.
He put his hand on her thigh, a gesture that, against her better judgment, excited her. “I thought you’d find it interesting. I thought you were pretty much interested in everything.”
“Some things more than others.”
Still, she turned back to the computer. The woman was white, spectacularly regular-looking, not old or young. She was talking to a group of people who were typing messages to her. “Thanks, Todd52. Yeah, I just got it colored yesterday. Glad you like it. Hi Caveman. No, I move the little fuzzy friends when I go to sleep. Thanks Shrewd Dude. What do you want to see?” She had one of those flat accents that was hillbilly but also the way a lot of townies in Hammond talked. She had a rhinestone stud in one nostril and an uneven dye job. Looking at her, you could smell coffee and cigarettes. She had on a bra, but not the sexy kind, which Mandy guessed was what made it sexy to some of the people watching. Within a few minutes, Mandy felt as if she had been able to assess everything she needed to know.
The longer she watched, the more interested she became. Nothing about it was remotely seductive, and that made it fascinating. You could piece together this woman’s whole life. She probably had a boyfriend or husband who was on the road a lot or maybe in the military. She almost definitely had one baby. It probably was best not to think about the stuffed animals, the “fuzzy friends,” but Mandy loved how out of place and yet perfect they seemed in this picture. Of course she’d have a bad purple dye job, a nose piercing, a job doing porn, and a bed full of stuffed animals. Maybe she was broadcasting from her daughter’s bedroom. There was something about this that was so real, it was heartbreaking. The pale skin, the heavy breasts. Mandy wanted to turn away from it and run and at the same time become a part of it. It was honest, versus the phony world of most of the girls at school who gave blow jobs and called it making love. There were no pretenses here. Yes, this woman was selling herself, but false advertising was not involved. You had to respect her for that.
Craig still had his leg pressed against hers, and she could smell his sweat and his beery breath. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I think that bra is coming off at some point, right?”
“Yeah, she said she’s waiting for another hundred points and then she’ll take it off.”
“Frequent flyer points?”
“You can’t give people money, so you buy points through the site and donate them, but it’s the same thing. This way it’s legal.”
“Nice to know there are still some law-abiding citizens in this country.” That was one her social-studies teacher’s sayings. The teacher was a big right-winger and had these pat sayings that were supposed to be inspirational, but usually sounded like they were somewhere on the racist spectrum. The woman on screen probably also had a target goal for doing more than taking off her bra, and Mandy had zero interest in seeing that part of the show.
“I think I get the idea,” she told Craig. “So this is the job offer?”
“I didn’t say that. But you’d be good at it.”
“I’m actually pretty shy.”
“Actually, you’re not, but you don’t realize that yet. Plus, you understand people. That’s the biggest part of it.”
She did understand people. Not counting herself, of course.
“What’s in it for you?” she asked.
He twisted in his chair and tossed his legs across her lap, like she was his girlfriend. “Money, obviously. Plus solving world hunger.”
“What if I decide to run for president one day?”
“Then I make a lot more money. Anyway, it’s all live so it’s not like there are videos floating around online.”
Everything in the world that was happening at any given moment was recorded, one way or the other. Every time you shopped at a mall or stopped at a traffic light or walked across a street, someone was recording it.
He hugged her around the waist and pulled her up and over to him so she was sitting on one of his thighs. If he told her he wanted her to call him “daddy,” she was out of there.
“I’m not the type these guys expect on a site like this,” she said.
“You’re right. And that’s why you’d have hundreds of guys following you right away. Plus, you’re smart and you don’t give a fuck.”
Sleazy or not, Craig saw her in some way that no one else did. He saw her as the person she’d always felt she was inside but never got credit for being. She told him she’d think it over, which was another way of saying “yes” while pretending to herself she might say “no.” Before the afternoon was out, she agreed that she’d chat with guys, but she absolutely would not take off anything.
He told her she could create a new name, something she’d wanted to do since her father had walked out on them. He made obvious suggestions—Crystal, Brandy, Amber, Madison—but she told him they sounded like a cross between a stripper and a New Age palm reader. She tried on a few names she’d always wished her parents had chosen for her—Jane, Emily, Lisa—but in the end she decided to call herself Muriel, since it sounded so completely inappropriate for the job. The men she chatted with, almost without exception, told her they found her name “hot.” One shock among many. They probably would have liked “Mandy” even more.
So far, she’d done it seven times. Even though on the surface it was all about sex, it was, right below the surface, about something else entirely. She was pretty sure that something else was loneliness. It was amazing how much you could figure out about a guy from a few short messages. They ranged from the creeps whose heavy breathing you could hear even though they were typing, to those who wrote, “You’re a slutty little bitch,” and that kind of original thing. Some were probably equally awful but less obvious about it. “I’ll bet you get good grades.” You got the feeling they were probably old and out of shape, probably in unhappy marriages, maybe had lost their licenses because of a DUI. They sometimes made comments about the government or Hillary Clinton that made it obvious they were on the dark end of what her dad called the lunatic fringe, but in those cases, it was easy to justify that they were giving money to her instead of a group that blew up Planned Parenthood offices. She already had a handful of regulars who asked about her dog and wanted to know where she was planning to go to college, normal things like that. Even sweet things. She knew what kind of person these men wanted her to be from their tone, right from the start. It made her feel strong somehow, as if she was in control. It was confusing that way.
My Ex-Life: A Novel Page 22
