The Good, the Fab and the Ugly

by Compai

“Well, that’s relative,” he declared, propping his soft chin on his chiseled arm, his Elizabeth Arden–bronzered face framed by the Jaguar window. “I mean, you could be me,” he dramatically sighed. “Unappreciated and alone. Terribly unloved.”

  Janie looked up at him, stunned, and he sympathized. It was, after all, pretty hard to believe.

  “Here!” He brightened, digging into his pink and green “Rockit” print LeSportsac tote. He flailed his polo-clad arm out the window, and a glinting gold object arced through the air, landing with a bounce on the grass. “I keep them around to make me feel better,” he explained as Janie got to her feet and padded across the lawn. “They totally work.”

  Janie plucked the squarish, brightly foiled lollipop from the ground, turned it around in her hand, and smiled. “Thanks.” She looked up, smiling again. Don John shivered in his seat, genuinely moved by his small act of good will. “That’s really sweet.”

  “Trick-or-Treat!” he cried, revving the engine.

  And then he was gone.

  The Girl: Blanca (last name unknown)

  The Getup (by day): The loathed “maid’s uniform.”

  The Getup (by night): Bright blue asymmetrical tank by Bebe, black leather mini from Wasteland on Melrose, knee-high lace-up black leather stiletto boots by Pleaser Shoes, exotic purple orchid from Mrs. Beverwil’s greenhouse.

  “Look at this,” Nonna wavered at the foot of an ornately framed oil painting, blinking behind her black horn-rimmed glasses. In order to convince her granddaughter of the old adage, “There is more to life than Internets,” she had arranged a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Of all places, Nikki thought with a heavy sigh. After eight hours on her feet, she’d collapsed into a wrought-iron garden bench, the only one in the gallery, wedging herself into the far right-hand corner. Her bench companion, a grizzled old man in a wilted brown hat, hummed under his breath. Nikki held her breath.

  He smelled like an unwashed fruit crisper.

  “Nicoletta.” Her grandmother rapped her pronged, aluminum cane against the floor. “Come here, please.” She rose to her feet, and the old man’s hum rose with her, swinging into a high, fevered pitch.

  “Take a close look at this one,” Nonna advised, indicating a painting with her crumblingly powdered chin. “What do you think of it?”

  She’d asked that question at least thirty times that afternoon, and the answer was always the same:

  “It’s okay, I guess.”

  “You guess!” Her grandmother rasped with laughter. “If you looked at the painting, Nicoletta, you wouldn’t have to guess all the time.”

  Indulging her, Nikki hooked a flaxen strand of hair behind her ear and really looked. The painting depicted a plate of cherries and a plate of peaches. It was called Still Life with Cherries and Peaches.

  “Notice the redness of the cherries,” Nonna crooned. “The way the bowl tilts forward, inviting you to take a bite. Ach! Wouldn’t it be so delicious, to eat a cherry like that?”

  “You know what we should do?” Nikki brightened. “Go to Whole Foods and get some real cherries.” At the mere thought of Whole Foods, her heart rate elevated, because in addition to cherries, the grocery chain happened to offer free Wi-Fi. And true, she didn’t have her laptop with her, but maybe — while Nonna enjoyed herself in the cheese aisle — she could beg one of the many aspiring screenwriters stationed at the tables for just five or so minutes? “I wouldn’t ask except it’s an emergency,” she’d explain sweetly, and quickly log onto MySpace. Just to check.

  “Nicoletta.” Her grandmother clutched her arm, fracturing her glowing fantasy. “You cannot find such cherries at the market.” She indicated the painting with her withered old hand. “These are cherries you must eat with your mind.”

  “Complete and utter caca,” a clipped female voice interrupted from the right entrance, inducing the man in the brown hat’s second fit of humming.

  “What did you say?” Nikki’s grandmother addressed their mystery intruder, wobbling forward on her cane.

  “I said caca,” she cawed like an angry crow. “As in, ‘Oh! My mind just ate a pretty red cherry, and it tasted of caca.’”

  “This painting is a Cézanne,” Nikki the First informed the woman with a squint fierce enough to unstick her fake eyelashes. “An artist of great importance. A genius! Who are you to say he is what you say?”

  “Who am I?” A spastic blue vein throbbed at the woman’s temple. Black hair fell down her back in one snaking coil, and the sticker name tag on her leather mini–clad hip read BLANCA. “Has it occurred to you that I, too, am an artist? A living artist whose work remains unappreciated — unseen! — because fusty old ladies like you prefer the company of a dead man’s cherries?”

  “My grandmother is not fusty!” Nikki cried, shocking herself right down to her antique gold Nanette Lepore Hot & Bothered flats. She wasn’t sure what fusty meant, exactly, but she could tell by the woman’s tone. It wasn’t nice. More like the kind of word she might scrawl across Nonna’s locker in scarlet lip liner, assuming Nonna had a locker, which she didn’t.

  But still.

  “I apologize,” Blanca sighed, instantly contrite. “It’s merely that I . . . I have an exhibit here. It’s only a two-day thing, and well . . . nobody so far has come.” She threw her elegant head back with a dry little laugh, gazing at the bleak expanse of ceiling. “Nobody!”

  Nikki glanced at her grandmother. Her grandmother glanced back, pursing her bright orange mouth.

  “Well . . .”

  “Oh, thank you!” Blanca blurted, beckoning them both into an adjacent gallery. Nonna sighed her surrender, following the artist at a labored pace, but stopped at the archway, blocking her precious Nikki with a brusque, perpendicular sweep of her rubber-tipped steel cane.

  “We do not want to see anything dead and floating in a jar,” she warned. “Or anything inappropriate for my granddaughter.”

  “Oh, nothing to be concerned about,” Blanca assured her.

  Nonna lowered her cane and together, they stepped into the adjacent gallery. Instead of paintings on the wall, the entire room had been transformed, with garbage encrusting every spare square-inch of space. In one glance Nikki saw dented soda cans, rusted hubcaps, water-stained takeout fliers, crushed cardboard cups, and crumpled receipts.

  “Wow,” she murmured, looking all around.

  “And what do you call this?” Nonna asked, sounding considerably less impressed than her teenage companion. She pushed her horn-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose, and sniffed. “Does it have a title?”

  Blanca paused for effect. “Rodeo Drive.”

  “Really?” Nikki piped up. Like all red-blooded Winstonian girls, she lived for Rodeo. “Why?”

  “Because,” Blanca began slowly, testing her words like overripe cheese. “Even the most famous street in the world has its own special trash. Its own brand of litter. I call it — the detritus of the privileged classes. You find it tossed into waste bins. Strewn along the gutter. And why? Because it is worthless?” In her most impressively crow-like move to date, Blanca actually flapped, springing lightly from the floor. “Well, not to me. For three months, I roamed the streets and picked up their garbage. And now? I have created a thing more worthy, more valuable, than the contents of every luxury window display combined —”

  “Yes, art is priceless,” Nikki’s grandmother interrupted, putting an end to the woman’s very inappropriate rant. She gestured to an explosion of ketchup-stained burger wrappers on the wall. “But this? This is trash on a wall.”

  “Perhaps you should look closer,” Blanca haughtily advised.

  “Ah yes, forgive me.” The old woman patted Nikki’s elbow and amended her statement with a wry smile. “I meant to say it is caca.”

  Obedient as ever, Nikki followed in her grandmother’s wake, but not without a subversive backward glance for Blanca’s benefit, a sweet, apologetic smile. Blanca returned the favor with a gracious, if imperious, nod. S
atisfied, Nikki faced the small archway and quickened her step, but just as she swept beneath the glowing red EXIT sign, something caught her attention. She halted in her tracks, stunned to the base of her spine. Rooting the ball of her foot to the ground, she turned — her eyes as round as Cézanne dishes.

  “Nikki?” her grandmother called. But her brittle voice sounded a million miles away. There — framed by a broken loop of dog leash and overlapping a empty matchbook — was a simple white clothes tag, a single word scrawled across its face. As Nikki drew near, the word blazed out, searing her mind like a branding-iron, until, at last, it was the only thing she could see.

  POSEUR.

  The Girl: Isabel Greene

  The Getup: “You’re too young for getups!”

  Petra breezed from her bedroom and trotted brightly downstairs, a tangled, chlorine-scented ponytail bouncing at her suntanned back. The Monday morning sun streamed through their enormous east-facing French windows, painting glowing runways along the polished hardwood floors. She sailed into the kitchen, tugging the end of her ponytail to her nose, and breathed in deep, surrendering to memories of last night. “Heya!” she sang, still smiling through her golden hair.

  “Hiii, Miss Petra,” Lola greeted her, a piece of yellow thread pulled taut between her teeth. “Hol’ still,” she instructed Sofia, whose tiny, bewildered face peeked out from a giant yellow felt orb.

  “What are you supposed to be, Soph?” Petra smiled down at her four-year-old adopted sister, and quickly shielded her eyes. “Ooo . . . ouch! Are you the sun?”

  “Nooooo . . . ,” her little sister moaned in despair, and Lola grunted, straightening from her crouched position on the floor. She sent Petra a reproving look.

  “No, the sun.” She yanked an iron-on M from her apron pocket, pinching the lowercase letter at either corner. “She is M&M candy.”

  “Oh-oh-oh.” Petra covered her face in a show of embarrassment. “Omigod, of course. What a good idea, Soph! M&M’s are your favorite, right?”

  But Sofia continued to look at Lola, her dark eyes glassy with disappointment. “B-but I do-don’t want to-to be the sun,” she whimpered.

  “Hey.” Petra grinned. She knew she had to act fast before all havoc broke loose. “Do you know who’s coming over?”

  To both Petra’s and Lola’s relief, Sofia loudly exhaled, and her breathing returned to normal. “Who?”

  “My friend Charlotte,” Petra announced. “Remember you met her? When we went to Melissa’s house that time? Remember Melissa? You played with her cute little dog?”

  Sofia responded to her older sister’s cheerful interrogation with numb incomprehension, her small mouth slightly gaped.

  “Anyway —” Petra smiled, sympathizing with Sofia’s con-fusion — “she’s coming over with a real-life ball gown for me to wear to school. Isn’t that fancy? We’re supposed to dress up as Oscar winners!”

  “You are?!” Isabel’s brassier, six-year-old voice interrupted. Petra glanced at the gaping archway entrance, got one eyeful of her sister, and promptly screamed.

  “Why are you doing that?” Isabel frowned fiercely at her older sister as she clapped a hand to her mouth, staggered a small step backward, and leaned up against the kitchen wall. “Sto-op!” Isabel stamped her glittery purple platform-clad foot. “It’s not supposed to be a scary costume.”

  “Yeah,” Sofia echoed in agreement. A frowning Lola stuck the hem of her costume with a pin and got to her feet, raising her eyebrows at Petra.

  “I no make it,” she assured her, turning to Isabel with an appraising look. The six-year-old wore a purple mini-dress in body-molding vinyl. Neon-yellow piping coursed along the sides, curving in at the waist, flaring at the hips, and creating the disturbing illusion of a sexy silhouette. A synthetic wig hung to the back of her knees, drowning her small face and shoulders in a stiff cascade of gleaming brown hair.

  “Izzie,” Petra gasped. “What are you wearing?”

  “My Halloween costume,” she explained, with a defiant stamp of her purple platform. “I’m Yasmin!”

  “What’s a Yasmin?” Petra shook her head in amazement.

  “Not uh Yasmin.” Isabel rolled her eyes. “Yasmin.” To Petra’s dismay, she stuck a pair of candy-red wax lips into her mouth, and posed — hands on her hips, head at a perfect 30-degree tilt.

  “See?” Sofia explained, handing Petra a plastic doll dressed exactly like her sister. “Yasmin is a Bratz.”

  “Isabel . . .” Petra gazed into the whorish doll in her hand in horror. “I’m sorry.” She frowned. “But you can’t go to school dressed like that.”

  “What?!” The red wax lips spilled from her open mouth and fell to the floor on a broken string of drool. “But it’s Halloween and it’s the only time I don’t have to wear a uniform!”

  “I’m not saying you can’t dress up at all,” Petra clarified. “I know. Why don’t you go as a pink M&M? Isn’t pink your favorite color?”

  “No.” Isabel gritted her teeth, puffing at the notion. “M&M’s are dumb!”

  At that, Sofia promptly dissolved into a fit of weeping, and half a second later Isabel joined in, gripping the kitchen island for balance. She howled and heaved, makeup-polluted tears streaming down her flushed cheeks.

  “What the hell is going on in here?” Heather Greene, who hadn’t emerged from her bedroom this early in weeks, shuffled into the kitchen, wearing her oversized black Armani sunglasses and a wrinkled ice blue Fernando Sanchez bathrobe. At the sound of their mother’s voice, the little girls collapsed into complete hysteria. “Why is everybody crying?”

  Petra covered her eyes in exasperation as Lola plucked the blubbering Sofia from the floor, planted her on her hip, and exited the kitchen. “Mom,” she sighed, lowering her hand to her side. “Have you looked at Isabel?”

  Heather yanked the refrigerator door toward her rail-thin body, an effort rewarded by a celebratory jingle of glass: bottled salad dressings, jars of mustard, marmalade, and mayonnaise. She gazed past the chilled shelves, appearing to fix her shielded eyes at a great distance — as if beyond the cartons of soy milk and soggy boxes of Zen Palate takeout there lay another, brighter world. She closed her eyes and inhaled.

  “Mom,” her older daughter gaped.

  “Alright!” She shut the refrigerator and leaned up against it, a frosted bottle of Evian clutched to her plunging silk neckline. She pushed her sunglasses to the crown of her head, roosting them in a tangle of light ash blond hair. “Okay.” She cleared her throat, wincing into the morning light. “What is it? What am I looking at?”

  “You actually think it’s okay for her to go outside dressed like that?” Petra dropped her jaw in shock.

  “Oh, Petra.” Her mother frowned, waving off her concern. “It’s Halloween. And do you have any idea how much time I spent looking for that costume? They were sold out everywhere!”

  Isabel flew to her mother’s side, hugging her knees to her tear-streaked face. “See?” She glared at Petra, gaping her indignation. Somewhere in the distance a bell rang, but it took Petra a good twelve seconds to realize it was the door.

  “Hi, everyone!” Charlotte sailed into the kitchen, dragging behind her the layered skirts of a gorgeous midnight blue silk Oscar gown. Whatever traumas Petra had unwittingly inflicted on her sisters evapo-rated in the instant.

  “Wow . . . ,” Isabel breathed. “You look so pretty.”

  “As do you, you sweet thing,” she lied through her teeth, leaning in to kiss Heather on the cheek. She dangled the black Barneys bag to Petra and smiled. “I brought you one of Mother’s.”

  “Oh, how is your mother?” Heather oozed to her older daughter’s instantaneous annoyance. Her mother loved to act as though she and Georgina were on the best friend-y terms, even though they barely knew each other. Last year, Georgina called the house to invite Heather to a charity benefit for Muscular Dystrophy — along with five hundred other people — and Heather acted as if she’d invited her to come over to pai
nt toenails and braid each other’s hair.

  “She’s wonderful, thank you,” Charlotte oozed in return. “She’s in New York, actually. Daddy’s on location.”

  “I’m just going to change,” Petra blurted, eager to escape this soul-crushing exchange of pleasantries. It killed her to see her mother act so sweet and polite for a perfect stranger. If only she could act that way around her own family once in a while.

  “Oh wait!” Charlotte chirped, and with a reassuring pat on Heather’s arm, kneeled to the floor, where a second Barneys bag sat at her feet. Reaching inside, she peeled apart the layers of tissue, extracted a small, delicious-looking object, and presented it with a flourish, rising to her size six feet.

  “Le Trique or Treat-aire!” she announced with a merry laugh. Heather gasped.

  “Isn’t that extraordinary.”

  “Let me see! Let me see!” Isabel cried, jumping up and down.

  “You’re a master,” Petra intoned, squeezing her tiny elbow, and wishing for one fleeting instant she’d learned how to sew. But of course she hadn’t. Needles and thread had been permanently ruined for her by her father, who used them daily to turn human beings into creepy Hollywood clones. “Melissa and Janie are going to die.”

  “You think?” Charlotte grinned.

  “Puh-lee-ea-ea-se!” Isabel reached for the exquisite couture bag, whimpering in despair.

  As Charlotte presented the Trick-or-Treater to her little sister, warning her to be gentle, Petra bounded upstairs, her black Barneys bag in tow. She whisked into her bedroom, yanked off her pajamas in record time, and tipped the bag on its head, spilling the gossamer gold-embroidered white cotton dress to the floor. Kicking it apart, she stepped inside, tugging the light-as-breath fabric along her enviably lissome frame, located an invisible side zipper, and zipped. Quickly, she turned to the mirror and froze, flushing. Her family so strongly emphasized the importance of beauty, she rebelled by shirking it altogether. She hadn’t dressed up in so long, her reflection blinked back like a stranger.

  “Petra!” Charlotte called, knocking softly on her door. “Sorry, but . . . we’re going to be late.”