Friends with Benefits

by Melody Mayer

  Lydia’s eyes slid to Kiley and Esme, who both looked like little kids about to unwrap Christmas presents. Kiley had called Esme that morning to see if she’d come on the shopping outing, and surprisingly, considering her mood lately, Esme had said yes. Well, Lydia was not about to rain on Esme and Kiley’s parade. She squared her shoulders. She would figure it all out and everything would turn out fine, no doubt.

  X stopped the Beemer at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard and the girls got out. Lydia came around to the driver’s window. “You rock.” She leaned in to kiss his cheek.

  “How could you not love me?” X asked rhetorically. “I introduced you to Billy Martin.”

  “Exactly,” Lydia agreed. “Now I’m about to find the hottest clothes on Rodeo Drive for him to remove, compliments of Platinum’s Platinum card. What’re you going to do?”

  X shrugged. “Drive over to Westwood and stare at college boys, then go pick up your aunt and the kids in Studio City. Ciao.”

  The Beemer moved off into traffic, and Lydia gestured with a flourish toward the long row of boutiques as she took Platinum’s credit card out of her pocket, all her worries instantly on hold. “Behold, the most expensive stores in the world. Behold, Kiley’s boss’s American Express card in my hand.” She looked reverently toward the blue skies over Beverly Hills. “Lord, you can take me now.”

  Kiley swiveled, taking in the splendor. She seemed overwhelmed. “We could get a lot more for our six thousand dollars if we shopped somewhere a little cheaper.”

  Lydia wagged a finger at her before she edged out of the way of a group of Japanese tourists led by a guide. “Kiley, you have the mentality of a girl destined to be middle-class her whole life. That instinct is to be squashed, understand?”

  “I agree,” Esme chimed in. “Today I’m throwing caution to the wind. I’ve been thinking much too much about . . . everything. I just want to have fun. With someone else’s money.”

  “Now, there’s the spirit!” Lydia cheered. “Besides, like I already told you in the car, that girl Alexis is Evelyn Bowers’s new nanny. Which means if I don’t get thrown out of the house, once I get my aunt to cash Evelyn’s check, we’ll be in the chips, ladies.”

  “Thrown out of the house?” Kiley echoed.

  “Nothing, forget it,” Lydia insisted. “Just a little run-in this morning with the merry matron from Moscow; nothing I can’t handle.” She flashed a brilliant smile. “Now, shall we?”

  They started north on Rodeo Drive, past a brick staircase laden with Japanese tourists, bubbling fountains, a latte cart, and what Kiley suspected was an out-of-work actor dressed in garish red nineteenth-century livery garb, who acted as the Rodeo Drive goodwill ambassador. Tourists clamored to have their photo taken with him, preferably in front of Tiffany’s.

  The boutiques were to their right. Shining glass storefronts displayed the most minimal and expensive clothing: One suit in the Armani window. Two dresses in the Gucci window. A single camisole in the Dior window. Lydia bypassed them all but came to a quick stop at the entrance to Chanel. Ground zero, site of her humiliation at the hands of the snotty saleswoman. When Lydia had shopped there with X and tried to charge her purchases to the credit card the moms had given her, the card was declined. That was when Lydia learned she had a one-hundred-dollar limit. The smug face of the French saleswoman had lived on in Lydia’s mind. It was time for some payback.

  She quickly explained her previous Chanel shopping experience to Esme and Kiley. Revenge was going to be sweet.

  They entered the shop. And there she was, the same black-clad skinny young saleswoman. Her glossy chestnut hair was blunt cut to her chin; her cosmetic-free skin shone with patrician perfection. She flicked her eyes over them; clearly, she didn’t remember Lydia. Excellent.

  The saleswoman pressed her fingers together and gave them an almost imperceptible nod. “May I help you, mesdemoiselles?” she asked in her posh French accent.

  “Hey! How y’all doin’?” Lydia asked in a booming, exaggerated Texas drawl.

  The saleswoman winced. “Zere is no need to shout, mademoiselle. ”

  Lydia smacked the saleswoman in the bicep. “Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit, you’re acting like you don’t remember me! I was here just a ways back with my friend? Tried on a whole passel of stuff! And then my danged credit card didn’t work. You had your nose all stuck up like the cat done dragged in a skunk.”

  Lydia turned to wink at Esme and Kiley, who had to stifle their laughter.

  The saleswoman sucked in her cheeks and tried to regroup. “I may recall zis.”

  “Sweet!” Lydia exclaimed. Then her brow furrowed. “Now, let me just ask you a little ol’ question, sweet pea. When we try on clothes, do y’all have to put ’em all back afterwards? Because that must be plum hard work.”

  “It is my job, mademoiselle.”

  Lydia grinned and punched her arm again. “Yeehaw! Because we’re fixin’ to try on pretty much everything in the store.” She opened her arms expansively to Kiley and Esme. “Ladies, go to town.”

  The saleswoman was smart enough to stay out of their way as they each gathered more clothes than they could comfortably carry and brought them into the huge dressing room, which was lined with 270-degree sets of mirrors. Once they were inside and the door safely closed behind them, Esme and Kiley were hysterical over Lydia’s performance.

  “You could be an actress, seriously,” Kiley said.

  Esme pulled her T-shirt over her head. “That was some show.”

  Lydia bowed with a flourish. “We can’t afford a lot of this stuff, but we’re trying it all on anyway.”

  Esme laughed. “I like the way you think. I’d say our budget here should be, say, a thousand dollars apiece. That’ll leave another thousand apiece for shoes, jewelry . . .” Her voice trailed off, and a cloud of shame crossed her face. She stopped midsentence. “I can’t believe I just said that. I shouldn’t buy a thing. I should take my share of this money and give it to my mother.”

  “No, you should not,” Lydia decreed, thrusting a pleated python camisole at Esme. “I’m as generous as the next girl—”

  “No you’re not,” Kiley put in. “You were born rich.”

  “True,” Lydia acknowledged. “But I also know what it’s like to use an outhouse on a daily basis. Ha! Topped ya there, didn’t I?”

  “No arguing today,” Esme said. “I mean it.”

  “Fine,” Lydia agreed. “And once I get the moms to cash the check from Evelyn Bowers, you can both give your share to your moms, if that’s what you want to do. Proving”—she shot Kiley a significant look—“that I know how to be generous . . . with someone else’s money.”

  Lydia pulled on a lilac silk camisole with embroidered straps as Kiley stepped out of her jeans. Lydia took in the sight of Kiley’s white cotton underwear and pointed at her. “When bad underwear happens to good people.”

  “Leave her alone,” Esme chided as she wriggled into a white linen pencil skirt.

  Lydia nodded thoughtfully. “You have a point. I used to worry about fire ants crawling into my noonie cuz I didn’t wear underwear at all. Who am I to talk?”

  Esme laughed. “Your noonie?” She pointed at Lydia’s lacy pink thong. “And where did you get that little number? Borrow it from your aunt?”

  “Nope. She gets free stuff sent to the house all the time. You know, companies hopin’ she’ll wear their clothes. You know Trash lingerie on La Cienega? This was in a box from there that never got opened. The note that came with it was dated two years ago. I thought it was a shame to let it go to waste.”

  Kiley took the red, white, and green floral-print silk halter dress with a fitted skirt from its padded hanger and slipped it over her head. The dress was pretty, but the underwear definitely didn’t work.

  “You need lingerie,” Lydia decreed.

  Kiley reached to the side to zip her dress. “I don’t really want to spend my share of this windfall on underwear.
Waste of money.”

  “Says the girl hoping and planning to undress for the hottest model on the planet,” Lydia said. She scrutinized Kiley and shook her head. “I changed my mind. That doesn’t work; you look lumpy. And I don’t mean your underwear.”

  “Really?” Kiley checked out her reflection in the three-way mirror. “You’re right. Not that it matters. My lumpy ass and I are not going to be getting naked with Tom anytime soon. Maybe ever.”

  She filled them in on last night’s horror with Platinum, and how close Tom and Marym had been—literally and figuratively—when she’d gone off in search of her drugged-out employer.

  “The Tom-Marym thing is all the more reason we need to get you into some sexy undies,” Lydia declared. “There’s an Ama saying: fight fire with fire, not with bananas.”

  Kiley laughed and started to hang up the sundress.

  “Let Miss France in the World-Class Bitch Pageant do it,” Lydia advised. She reached for a pale green eyelet-lace dress with spaghetti straps and a full skirt and tossed it to Kiley. “Try this one. If Tom doesn’t want to take those straps down with his teeth, I’d be wondering about his sexual preferences if I were you.”

  “Do we really have to talk about boys?” Esme asked. “Don’t you ever just get tired of them?”

  “No,” Lydia replied. She checked out Esme’s rear view in the skintight pencil skirt. “If I had an ass like yours, I’d serve dinner off it.”

  Esme shot Lydia a jaundiced look and unzipped the skirt.

  Lydia shook her head. “There is something going on with you. A guy thing?”

  “Drop it,” Esme said. “Everything is okay.”

  Lydia put her hands on her hips. “Everything isn’t okay. Come on, we’re supposed to be friends, you have to—”

  “Fine!” Esme spat. “But only to shut you up. Junior got shot. Are you satisfied?”

  Kiley was shocked. “When? How?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Lydia added. “Is he in the hospital?”

  Esme pulled off the skirt and waved away the details. “Yes he’s in the hospital, it was an accident, he’s okay. No big deal. And I don’t really want to talk about it. Can we finish shopping now?” She reached for a black cocktail dress with a fitted corset top.

  “I can get X to take us to the hospital, if you want,” Lydia offered.

  Esme fingered the material of the dress and shook her head. “He should hate me.”

  Kiley touched Esme’s arm. “Why would you say something like that?”

  Esme raised her face, her eyes flinty. “Because I’m a lying bitch, that’s why.”

  Lydia hung a silk shirt on a hook. “You can’t go talkin’ about our friend Esme that way.”

  “It’s true.” Esme stepped into the black dress. “Never mind. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But—” Lydia began.

  “But nothing. I’m sorry I even brought it up.”

  For a long moment the dressing room was quiet. Lydia didn’t understand Esme. It was clear that she didn’t trust them; not enough to share what was going on with her, anyway. Was it because she came from a poor neighborhood, or because she was Latina? Or both? For Lydia, who easily embraced everyone, it was hard to fathom Esme’s attitude. She hoped Esme would explain when she trusted them more, and she hoped that would be soon.

  Twenty minutes later they’d decided on their purchases: the black corset-topped cocktail dress for Esme, a white strapless tulle for Lydia, and the pale green eyelet-lace sundress for Kiley, who said she liked the fact that her outfit wasn’t as dressy, because she could wear it for other occasions.

  They made their purchases—Lydia was smug when Platinum’s credit card went through—and happily left heaps of clothing in the dressing room for the snotty clerk to rehang.

  Next stop, per Lydia’s decree: a taxi to the corner of Melrose and Crescent Heights Boulevard, to a huge, vine-covered store called Fred Segal.

  “It’s actually a whole bunch of different boutiques all mixed together,” Lydia explained as they stepped through the front door. “You’ve got your Fred Segal Couture, your Fred Segal Feeling, Fred Segal Fun, Fred Segal Sparkle, and so on. Nicole Kid-man bought her daughter her first pair of high heels here, and when Mary-Kate and Ashley are in town, it’s their favorite place to shop.”

  “Which magazine did you get that from?” Esme teased.

  “Not a magazine. TV. Entertainment Tonight,” Lydia said. “They did a whole show from here last week. So, Kiley needs lingerie, we all need shoes, jewelry, what else?”

  “A spare million,” Kiley said, fingering a price tag on a simple sheer embroidered shirt. “This costs eight hundred and forty-seven dollars!”

  Lydia looked at it too. “Well, yeah. But it’s Oscar de la Renta. Come on, shoes are this way.”

  It took them an hour to try on dozens of shoes. Kiley found out that more expensive did not necessarily mean more comfortable. Esme bought red Constança Basto sling-backs with a three-inch heel; Kiley found some silk and beaded Michael Kors sandals that barely had a heel at all—there was only so far she was willing to go to put fashion over comfort.

  Lydia, of course, went all out. She explained that Stuart Weitzman had designed a shoe he called the Cinderella slipper for Alison Krauss to wear to the Academy Awards, when she was nominated for writing the theme song for Cold Mountain. The slippers were four-and-a-half-inch stiletto sandals studded with 565 platinum-set Kwait diamonds. That shoe went for two million dollars. Lydia settled for the Weitzman “in the style of” version, which was festooned with rhinestones and cost high three figures instead of low six.

  After that, they hit the jewelry counter. By the time they finished purchasing their “cheap chic” earrings and necklaces, as Lydia called them (meaning, she explained, they could not yet afford real gems), they taxied back to Awilda Salon in Beverly Hills for blowouts and manicures. Kiley’s dress had been considerably less expensive than the other girls’; both her lingerie and Esme’s shoes had been on sale. That was why they still had enough money left for hair and nails, after which they would be completely busted. They didn’t have enough money to leave a decent tip; Kiley hated that part. But Lydia assured her that as soon as their nanny business took off, they’d come back and tip double.

  Kiley’s stylist there, Amiko, was so diminutive that even in heels she could barely reach the top of Kiley’s head. But she turned out to be as talented as she was tiny; Kiley shook her head back and forth like a shampoo ad, admiring the way the light bounced from the casual waves Amiko had created. Just as Amiko was hitting Kiley’s hair with the glossing spray, Kiley’s cell phone rang.

  Her first thought was: Platinum. Her second thought was: Orange Zone.

  “Hello?”

  “Kiley, it’s Nina!”

  “Nina!” she shrieked, more loudly than she’d intended, because she was so surprised and happy to finally hear from her best friend. At the next station, Esme’s hair was being flat-ironed by Dominic. Esme turned with an inquisitive look when she heard Nina’s name. Lydia’s hair had gotten done first; she was at the nearby manicure station drying her nails.

  “Now she calls?” Lydia queried.

  “What happened to you?” Kiley asked into the phone. “Lydia called, I called—”

  “I know, I know, I’m so sorry,” Nina babbled. “My parents took me to my aunt and uncle’s farm in Lake Mills, Iowa, out in the middle of flipping nowhere, up the road from the Laugens’ place. You remember we went on a hayride there one year?”

  “Yeah, we were, like, ten,” Kiley recalled. “Your aunt made us help her can peaches for hours.”

  “Same place,” Nina said. “My uncle had surgery, my aunt needed help, so I was, like, stuck there for days—sheer torture. Anyway, they don’t have cell service, so I was flipping stranded, and a storm knocked out their power and— Look, never mind, it sucked, but I’m back in La Crosse.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Kiley said. “Listen, about the
nanny job —”

  “I’m so taking it!” Nina interrupted. “My parents are driving me insane. Plus if I have to spend one more night working at Pizza-Neatsa I’m going to spew mozzarella. I told my mother I wouldn’t have sex until I’m out of college if she lets me come to L.A. for the summer to hang with you. So, anyway, I called you first but now I’ll call your friend Lydia. I’m so psyched!”

  Kiley glanced over at Lydia, who was listening intently to Kiley’s half of the conversation. She didn’t even need to get into the fact that the gig would not be just for the summer, and that Nina wouldn’t exactly be “hanging” with Kiley. “Uh, there might be a problem, Nina.”

  “No, there can’t be a problem. Whatever it is, I’ll fix it!”

  “Well, Lydia didn’t hear from you. So she offered the job to someone else, and this other girl took it. In fact, she already started work. Hold on, Lydia’s right here. She can explain.”

  Lydia gestured for the phone and Kiley tossed it her. Careful not to smudge her freshly painted nails, Lydia confirmed that there was no longer a job opening. However, Lydia had another client who might be interested in a nanny. Was Nina interested? By the way Lydia was nodding, Kiley could tell that the answer was yes.

  “So there’s hope, right?” Nina asked when Kiley took the cell back from Lydia.

  “Sounds like it,” Kiley agreed. “Don’t go to Iowa again.”

  “Don’t rub it in,” Nina groaned. “How’s that hot model guy you bagged?”

  “Still hot, and I didn’t bag him.”

  “Yet. When you do, call me and give me details. I have no life.”

  Kiley laughed. “It probably won’t happen at all, but if it ever does, you’ll be the first to know.” They said their goodbyes and hung up.

  “This could work out,” Esme said, rising from her salon chair. “Nina could work for Evelyn’s friend.”

  “Exactly,” Lydia said. “Ladies, we are going to be rolling in clover. This is only the beginning of our empire!”

  Maybe it really would work out, Kiley thought. She hadn’t been very enthusiastic about the nanny placement service because she felt utterly unqualified to be part of one. But on the other hand, things were going so well, so fast—maybe she’d actually be able to save up money toward her Scripps tuition.