“Do you have it in you to print off these pictures?” Jee said, pulling a cable out of her purse and sticking one end into her phone.
“Print?” I said.
“V’là.” Jee pointed. A thirty-dollar inkjet printer sat on the desk.
“Will it work?” I said. “I’m a little drunk.”
“I’ll give it a try.” Jee got to it.
Meanwhile I showed Beth how to close the cut on her foot. “Visualize. Remember the hair thing?”
“But that’s just hair,” she said, but she narrowed her eyes at her sliced-open foot. “Oh! It’s working!”
“Lemme clean you up. We need to get dressed and get out of here.” I swabbed her down with more bath towels and threw them in the kitchen garbage, along with Beth’s old phone. Then I put my clothes on. By the time I was done, Jee had not only printed off the pictures but she’d taped them to the walls all over the living room and bedroom, and she’d managed to get Beth dressed, though not shod.
I finished getting Beth’s sandals on. “C’mon, girl. See? Not even a scar.”
“Wow,” Beth said groggily.
“Do you think Farrah will like these?” Jee handed her some of the naked pictures. The resolution was very nice, for inkjet.
Beth gasped. “Oh, no.”
“What did you do that for?” I said. “Stop her!”
Beth was crumpling the photos. Jee snatched them away before she could destroy them. “Noo!” Beth wailed. “It’s so dirty! I look like a filthy, dirty whore!”
“You want Blake to find these,” Jee said, slowly and distinctly. She uncrumpled the pix and laid them out on the carpet right by the front door.
“Boy, she’s an annoying drunk,” I muttered. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not drunk!” Beth objected. “I’m in shock.”
“Riiight,” Jee said. We got her out the door and whisked across the hall to the stairwell. Eight floors down, we exited into the lobby, and managed to make it onto the front sidewalk without meeting a soul.
“Sweet,” I said. “Very slick.”
“Very messy, I hope,” Jee said.
“Fingers crossed.”
In the car, Jee sat in back with Beth. I tried to keep an eye on them in the rear-view mirror.
Beth’s new slutphone rang. Had to be someone from her old life. She took the call. Jee tried to snatch the phone away, but Beth wouldn’t let her.
“Darleen? What’s the matter? Honey, slow down! I can’t understand what—oh.” She listened, and I listened, too, trying from the driver’s seat to make sense of her daughter’s hysterical squeaking. “I see. Okay. No, please don’t say anything to anyone. Darleen,” Beth said, her voice finally steely, “this is important. Don’t tell anyone you spoke to me.” She hung up.
Jee lit into her. “What are you doing? Don’t you realize you’re compromising your getaway? How can you start a new life if you won’t let go of the old one?”
I shook my head. I was beginning to think this girl wasn’t ready to let go of her old life. Like, terminally not.
“They’re holding him. They think he killed me,” Beth said.
“Well, do you care?” Jee said.
“Of course I care!” Beth blazed. “I don’t want him to go to prison for killing me when he didn’t!”
Jee turned a face of fiendish awe toward the front seat. “Wow. That could be cool. Want to set him up?” she said to Beth.
“Back off, revenge queen,” I said. “Focus, Beth.”
Beth was hyperventilating. Jee made her put her head between her knees. The kid was probably still a little tipsy, too.
I pulled the car into a 7-Eleven lot and turned around in my seat. I needed some eye contact with our new teammate. “Beth, pay attention, okay?”
Jee let her sit up.
“Okay. I’m listening.” Beth sniffled and gulped.
“We do not want to be on police radar. We are not invisible, but we’re darned close. Do you know what that means?”
Beth blinked, then nodded. “You don’t have any papers.”
“Actually, we have identities, but they’re fakes. We even pay taxes...on our ‘trust funds’ from our ‘rich uncle.’” I pointed downward. “We can hoodoo things to protect ourselves from routine intrusions like audits, keep fire inspectors off our property, pass the emissions tests at the DMV, that stuff. But if the cops take notice of us in a murder investigation, we don’t have a lot of ways to stay invisible. Sadly, that little red flashy thingy the Men In Black use is still just fantasy. We really don’t want to have to end up, I dunno, disposing of a cop’s body or something. It’s not an option.”
“Oh, I don’t know—” Jee started, her mind apparently still on mayhem.
I cut her off with a gesture. “This means, Beth, that you can’t afford to keep contacting people who knew you when you were Mrs. Blake Saunders. If worst came to worst, we could probably fake your death, but then you would have to stay dead. That means stay away from those people.” I sharpened the eye contact. “That means your kids.”
Tears filled Beth’s eyes. “I know. I said I would be okay with that. I thought they were through with me, just like Blake.” The mention of his name seemed to toughen her. She took a deep breath through her nose, sniffling, but straightening her spine. “I didn’t expect this to happen.”
I just looked at her. What could I do?
She didn’t even notice that she was young again. She freaked at sexual feelings. She thought she was a filthy dirty whore and she hadn’t even turned in one monthly report yet, which boded ill for her opinion of the rest of us. I had a broad back, and Amanda probably didn’t care what anybody thought of her, but Jee wouldn’t take kindly to being called names.
Maybe I should sign us all up for mud wrestling or something. Get her to inhabit her body. Work all our yayas out.
“I need lunch,” I muttered.
“Hell, yeah,” Jee said.
Beth brightened. “Lunch?”
Beth
Beth felt hysterical. She knew quite well that she shouldn’t speak to Darleen, or let Darleen call her on the slutphone, or tell anyone that Beth Saunders was alive and weird. But being scolded for doing it by Jee messed up her head: who was Jee anyway, a barely-post-teenager, to order around a woman old enough to be her mother? And yet she also felt like she was back in high school, and her best friend and severest critic had just yelled at her. The teenager inside Beth wanted to roll over and lick Jee’s shoe.
Pog and Jee argued about where to have lunch so long that, in the end, they parked the car near a factory next to a food truck—a “roach coach” Pog called it—and bought everything he had. The Latino gentleman running the truck hadn’t wanted to sell his entire inventory to them; he had a regular route, he said, and his customers would be annoyed. But Jee rubbed herself up against him in a very unladylike way, and Pog handed him a thick stack of twenties, and in the end he took the money and ferried fresh supplies to the car as the three of them ate spicy little tamales, tacos running with grease and meat juices, tortas made with barbecued pork and an unfamiliar bread, buns and cakes called postres which were surprisingly lightly sweetened, bottles of Gatorade, bottles of Mexican fruit sodas in all colors, papaya slices, watermelon slices, apples, oranges, potato chips, candy bars, Rice Krispie treats, and bottled water.
Beth made a pig of herself. Everything tasted great.
When they had bundled up the last of the paper napkins and foil and waxed paper and candy bar wrappers and pop bottles and handed them back to their on-street caterer, Pog drove up Ravenswood Avenue and parked again outside a bar called Cheaters. Beth considered, following her roommates into the bar, that the name was sickeningly apt. She caught sight of them all, reflected in the front window as they swaggered in: Jee first, a bronze hussy with bold eyes, then Pog more demure, like a weather girl made up to be a hooker. And, Beth realized, herself. She looked as blonde and slim as Pog, and her makeup made her look like Pog’s sister. Beth star
ed into the plate glass of the bar window and was shocked when that trollop looked back, her trampy eyes disapproving, even scornful, despising.
That’s me, she thought. Oh, dear. Look at me.
Pog looked back at Beth, reached for her hand, and dragged her through the door. “Come on, Cinderella. Your slutty stepsisters have something to talk to you about.”
Beth felt her tamales turn hard in her tummy. She swallowed.
They took a booth in the back and ordered two pitchers of margaritas on the rocks and a bottle of tequila on the side, while male eyes followed their every move. Pog and Jee didn’t say a word. The drinks came.
Pog poured for everyone. She drank, placed her drink carefully in front of her with her fingertips, and folded her hands on the table.
“Beth, we need to talk about your orientation.”
Thinking of the special training Reg was enduring at this moment, Beth swallowed again. “Yes?”
“We don’t think you get it,” Jee said. “What this is, what we do.”
“Who you are,” Pog said.
“I’m a slut,” Beth said harshly. “Right?”
The sluts looked at each other. “Harsh,” Jee said, looking pleased.
“It’s her head. She can’t have anything in it except what’s been put there,” Pog said excusingly.
“Well, she’d better empty some of that shit out of her head, or she’ll never be able to do this work,” Jee said.
“She may not even know what’s in there,” Pog said.
They turned and looked at Beth like two sleek cats examining a mouse. For the moment, Beth didn’t feel like a slut. She felt fifty years old, looking into the faces of the kind of woman who had slept with her husband year after year and finally stolen him away, along with the rest of her life.
“Who are you, Beth?” Pog said gently.
If she hadn’t been looking straight at her worst enemies, Beth might have burst into tears. She tightened her throat until the urge to cry went away. “I guess I don’t really know any more.”
“It seems to me,” Pog said in that kind voice, “that you don’t like the person you think you have become, or are becoming. So let’s back up a bit. How is she different from who you were?”
Beth’s teeth clicked shut. “Look,” she said through them. “Everyone I know—back in my old life—they all seem to think that divorce is like breaking your leg. Sure it hurts, but you take your meds and you do your physical therapy and you’ll be out of that cast before you know it. They know it’s not that easy. They just...don’t want to be my friend any more. I’m not a person to them any more. I worked with them in the PTA. I volunteered with them at the hospital, at the Junior League. I skied at Vail with them. Our families shared villas in Jamaica. I wiped their kids’ noses at the same time that I wiped my kids’ noses. And suddenly my husband dumps me, and I don’t exist any more. I’m nothing,” she said, her voice rising with incredulity and hurt.
Pog said, “There’s no shame in being driven out of your old life. At least, we don’t feel any. We were all driven out of our old lives to some degree or another.”
Beth hiccuped. “Is that why you became succubi? Because you were driven out of your old lives, like me, and had nothing left?”
“You’re asking the question the wrong way,” Pog said. “We allowed ourselves to be driven out of our old lives because we were women.”
That sat in the air for a while.
“Can I ask you something?” Jee said. “Did you enjoy all that? The PTA and the Junior League and whatever?”
Beth drew in an indignant breath and stopped, full of air. She blinked. “I had to do it. I suppose I enjoyed it.” She slumped. “Not much, actually. I did it because it was expected. I did it well.”
“I can change the oil in my car well,” Jee said, “but I don’t do it.” She leaned forward and put one forefinger on the back of Beth’s hand. “I do what I want to do. I love doing it. I feel great about myself. I don’t do anything unless it’s fun.”
Beth bridled. “That’s the most selfish thing I ever heard in my life.”
Pog shot Jee a glance.
Beth realized she had just insulted someone who had thrown a man off a balcony for saying something she didn’t like.
“Oookay,” Jee said. “‘Nother question. Did you expect to spend your whole life doing all that shit for all those other people? Did you never think about retirement?”
Beth opened her mouth to snap that it wasn’t shit to do good for others. Then she realized that she had, too, hoped that when her kids graduated college, when Darleen married and had her own children, when Jeff began planning his internet start-up, someday soon she might be able to slow down a little. Run fewer errands. Attend fewer committee meetings.
“I suppose,” she said slowly, “I thought of it as an obligation. All of it. You do your part, and eventually....” She trailed off. “Eventually, I suppose, you earn the right to stop doing it.”
Jee raised her eyebrows at Pog. “Over to you.”
Pog said, “So you were sort of banking your good deeds?”
“Sort of,” Beth said, looking resentfully from one to the other. What was wrong with that? Her husband, after all, had been working long hours for decades. He would get to retire.
After getting paid a sickening amount of money, said her treacherous inner slut. Which he won’t share with you.
“So,” Jee said, “you’ve been laying up treasures in heaven.”
“Counting mitzvahs,” Pog said. “That’s Yiddish,” she added as Beth blinked. “‘Mitzvah’ means ‘good deed.’ In Judaism you do mitzvahs not because you get something for doing them, but because you’re supposed to do them. It’s an obligation you owe, so that you can call yourself human.”
“Yes,” Beth nodded. “Exactly.”
“Ah,” Jee said. “That’s where we have an advantage. We’re not human.”
Beth felt her eyes go round. “You were once, weren’t you?”
“And what a miserable thirteen years those were,” Jee said. She lifted a palm as Beth opened her mouth in shock to say, I’m sorry. “Don’t ask, don’t tell. That’s our motto. We did all this,” she gestured gracefully with her slender, jeweled fingers at her own elegant person, “so we could put it behind us.”
“That’s kind of the point,” Pog said, rushing in, Beth thought, to change the subject. “It doesn’t seem like you’re ready to put it behind you, Beth. And what we want to do is sit down and make a list with you. A post-death-of-Beth-Saunders bucket list. What’s it going to take for you to feel done with your old life?”
“Because until you’re done with it, you’re a liability,” Jee said frankly.
Beth got it. She felt awful.
“I’m so sorry. You’ve taken me in and given me everything. I’m not—I’m not adjusting very well, am I?” She gave a hot sigh.
“Well, if you think you’ve turned into a filthy dirty whore because you’re young and pretty again, I’d say that’s a big no,” Jee snarled.
Beth cringed. “I said that, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Pog said.
“I’m sorry,” Beth whispered, bowing her head. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“What for?” Pog said. “I’ve been a filthy dirty whore all my adult life. I didn’t do it all by myself, of course. I had help. From a lot of people. It wasn’t my first career choice. But I’ve managed to make quite tasty lemonade out of all those lemons.”
Beth made an uncomfortable sound in her throat.
“What about you?” Pog said, still pushing. “What’s on your Beth bucket list? We’ve all taken new names, by the way. You may want to get rid of ‘Beth.’ If Beth is really gone—and only you can decide that—what would you want to do before you hold her funeral?”
Beth blurted, “They’ve arrested my husband for killing me.”
“Ex-husband.” Jee reached out and poked her in the forehead with a teeny plastic straw. “Focus, Beth. Okay
, good, everybody thinks you’re dead. Except your daughter, who just talked to you on the phone. You dumbbell.”
“Jee,” Pog said. “Beth, you seem to think that working with us and getting a young, healthy, beautiful face and body is some kind of punishment. But think of it this way. Once you file your first report, you’ll start getting rich off your work. What if you look at this as the reward you’ve been waiting for? You’ve done all your mitzvahs. You’ve earned your vacation.”
Jee interrupted, “You’ve cleaned out your desk and turned in your company badge and lanyard. They’ve sent you the packet with your retirement benefits, which suck, considering how faithfully you’ve worked, but never mind that now. You’ve had your exit interview and they lied like rugs and you’ve just sat there and took it.”
“Jee,” Pog said again. “The point is, you’re not quite ready to move on.”
“We’re back at physical therapy again,” Beth complained.
“Yes. What? Do? You? Want? Now?” Jee said. “Right now. What will make you feel complete? What will convince you that you’ve earned that good time you’ve been promising yourself all these years?”
Put like that, Beth realized that deep inside, she indeed felt exactly as if she’d been cheated of her retirement benefits.
The thought made her flush with shame. You were supposed to do it for love. You were supposed to love waiting on your family hand and foot, chauffeuring them places, running their errands, washing their clothes, doing for them everything from changing their poopy diapers and doing their homework to picking up the dress shirts they threw on the floor two feet away from the laundry hamper.
But the years passed and the chores didn’t let up and the love seemed to fade. What had she thought? That eventually you got paid for that work?
Nobody else did. Her best friend had hired an au pair, a Romanian girl with weak English, to do those things for her children, and the au pair had been paid in room, board, and pocket money. Yes, they’d taken her to the ER and paid the bill when the two-year-old broke the au pair’s nose, and again when the twins tripped her in the kitchen and she set fire to a pan of hot fat. And they’d gotten rid of that girl at the end of the year and hired another. One who wasn’t so accident prone.
Coed Demon Sluts_Beth Page 10
