Girl Parts

by John M. Cusick

  Charlie decided on a theater girl. Twice a year the two schools staged a joint play, and by early September the cast was staying late for rehearsals in the Saint Seb’s auditorium. Rebecca Lampwick was Mrs. Higgins in this year’s production of My Fair Lady. She had big boobs, which she referred to as “the twins,” and a laugh that started high and avalanched into her lower register. Charlie first saw her last year when, after basketball practice, he had crossed the auditorium to use the Coke machines. Then she’d been Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, and her big laugh and black eyes seemed to follow him from up onstage.

  After two days of reconnaissance, he made his move. Rehearsal started at four, and from three fifteen to three thirty the cast lounged in folding chairs in front of the stage. Charlie entered through the fire door and crossed to the back. They were loud and carefree, ignoring him until he veered toward their loose circle. The chatter stopped. Charlie stood like a Sequoia in a thicket of elms. He cleared his throat. Rebecca, who’d been saying something to Eliza Doolittle in a goofy baritone, turned to the newcomer and smiled.

  “What’s up, buttercup?” (This in her normal tenor’s register.)

  “Hi.” Three heavily edited flash cards were tucked reassuringly in Charlie’s pocket. He focused and recited. “I was wondering if . . . you would like to come . . . with me on Friday night . . . to get some Chinese food.”

  “Iambic tetrameter?” Pickering asked. Higgins snickered.

  That day Rebecca was wearing a billowy pirate’s blouse and gypsy earrings, an outfit Charlie thought silly. But up close she was lovely, with skin as white and flawless as windblown snowbanks. The others waited in silent anticipation. They were an incestuous group and wary of outsiders, especially ones like Charlie, who in some circles was considered a jock, despite his dork status. Charlie swallowed and studied the scuff marks on the floor, only looking up when Rebecca spoke.

  There was a lot Charlie didn’t know about Rebecca. Her confidence was showy. She felt fat and repulsive because boys her age never talked to her. Only grown men seemed to like her. They shouted at her from their cars, which made her feel like a freak. Last year her history teacher grabbed her chest while driving her home from Model UN, a secret that constricted like a noose around her throat whenever she thought about it.

  When Charlie stammered his invitation, that rope seemed to loosen enough for her to slip out. A normal date with a guy her age felt like a last-minute reprieve.

  “Yeah. Yes. I’d really like that. Thanks.”

  The next week was endless. When final bell rang on Friday, Charlie was the first out of his seat. His preparations were timed to the minute with no room for dawdling. With no car and no permit, he arranged for a cab to arrive at six thirty. Their reservation was for seven. That gave him three and a half short hours to perfect his transformation.

  The date required a complete personal overhaul, appearance-wise. Charlie planned to shed his fuzzy school self and expose the finer, hipper person he knew was underneath. “Show her your best self,” said the men’s magazine he’d purchased. For Rebecca he’d reveal the Charlie no one knew, the Charlie he’d been saving.

  He imagined himself as a caterpillar morphing in the balmy cocoon of the shower stall. He scrubbed his skin raw and paid extra attention (optimistically) to the undercarriage. Charlie anointed himself with woody cologne and fruity moisturizer. He rarely shaved, and the process was like stripping paint. His new razor made several passes before each stippled red path was clear. He’d selected jeans, a white T, and his father’s suede jacket with the fringed lapels — not because it was cool but because it wasn’t. It was rebellious, quirky, and had an ironic intellectual charm — like him.

  At 6:27 Charlie emerged, a leathery, woolly moth, smelling (due to the combination of cologne and moisturizer) like roasted bananas.

  The cab was twenty minutes late, and Charlie had to repeat the directions three times. At 7:03 they pulled into a lot across from Denny’s. Rebecca lived in a drab apartment building on Cay Street, by the highway. Walking toward the door, Charlie spotted her sitting in the bright lobby reading a magazine. She was wearing a low-cut aquamarine cocktail dress of stiff, shimmering material like scales — a loud outfit, full of personality, which relaxed Charlie somewhat. He called her name but she didn’t look up. He called it again, thinking he really should have brought flowers, and walked into the invisible glass partition that bisected the lobby. The partition chimed like a gong, and Rebecca looked up to see Charlie clutching his nose and mouthing curses. She ran to the door at the far end, and when it opened, Charlie heard a radio grumbling.

  “Oh, Jesus, I’m so sorry. Are you OK? They put this in last year because of break-ins. You know, for security. Let me take a look at your nose.”

  “I’m fine,” Charlie said, his ears turning scarlet. “Really.”

  “They should put up a sign.” Rebecca smiled. “You look really nice.”

  “You too. Should we go up to your apartment? Should I meet your parents now, or . . . ?”

  Rebecca laughed a little socialite’s laugh. “Oh, now’s not a good time. It’s just a mess up there and Dad’s had a long day at work, so . . .”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “Is that our carriage?”

  “It is. I don’t have my permit yet, so . . .”

  “No, no. It’s perfect.”

  She smiled again, and Charlie felt warm all over, even as his nose began to throb.

  Dinner was at the Peony Pavilion, a pan-Asian restaurant with dancing after nine. The food was cheap and the carding policy lax, so it was a popular date spot. When they arrived, some public-school girls were smoking in the stone pavilion outside. Seeing them reminded Charlie of his men’s magazine, Nice!, and its “Ten Surefire Dating Tips from Real Women.” He could only remember one, contributed by Melinda, 21, of Brooklyn: “When leaving the bar, I always love it when he places his hand on the small of my back. It’s sexy and reassuring. It sort of makes me feel owned — but in a good way!” This was Charlie’s ace in the hole, and remembering it made him walk a little faster toward the golden entranceway.

  A waitress in a flowered robe led them to a glass-topped table near the back. Pavilion and Tax Included were the only English words on the menu.

  “I guess it’s order by number, huh?” Rebecca said. “My luck, I’ll wind up with boiled goat feet.”

  “I don’t think they do those.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you like edamame?”

  “What are those?”

  “Salty bean pods.”

  Rebecca giggled. “Oh, Charlie, I like the way you talk.”

  Charlie took a sip of his water. He couldn’t tell if she was laughing at him or not. What was funny about . . . ? Oh.

  “Well, then you’ll love number four,” he said. Number four was Chicken Dong.

  “Hm?”

  “Number four. On the menu.”

  “Oh! Why?”

  “Uh, because.” Charlie coughed into his fist. “Because it’s Chicken Dong.”

  “Dong?”

  “Should go well with salty bean pods.”

  Rebecca blinked. “Oh. OK, now I get it. Ha, ha.” She pronounced it as two words: Ha. Ha.

  Charlie hid behind his menu. By the time the waitress brought the salty bean pods, he was ready to leave. Rebecca talked about her interests, which were theater and Romantic literature. “That’s with a capital R,” she said. She preferred Shaw to Beckett, Lerner and Loewe to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and had no time for Stanislavski. She tossed these names out naturally, but to Charlie they were as foreign as the menu’s squiggles. Gibberish. When it was his turn, he told her about the Epigaea repens he’d seen last week, rare this time of year.

  “Is that a bird?”

  “A flower.”

  She didn’t know any of the scientists he mentioned — they weren’t that obscure — and identified the posies on the waitress’s sleeve as “lavender.”

  They spoke the same
language, but their English was like Mandarin to Morse code. Their body language was no better. Rebecca sent signals Charlie didn’t understand. When she leaned across the table to tease the fringe of his jacket, she was saying, “Charlie, aren’t my breasts fantastic?” But Charlie heard, “Your clothes are intriguing; tell me more about them!” When she moved her shoulders to the music, she meant, “I love this song. Ask me to dance!” But Charlie thought she meant, “I’m so bored, I’m fidgety.” And at the end of the night, when she squeezed his hand and smiled sadly over the electric candle, meaning, “I’m sorry we didn’t really hit it off,” Charlie heard, “Now would be a good time to lean over and kiss me.”

  So Charlie went for it. Rebecca, who wasn’t expecting a kiss at all, and certainly not before the check arrived, turned her head to look for the waitress and turned back in time to see Charlie’s face making a poorly aimed dive toward her own. She yelped and jerked back, sending Charlie farther off course. He tried to abort but put his elbow in the soy sauce. He did kiss her — sloppily, on the chin — before falling almost into her lap, which had retreated with the rest of her a good seven inches from the table. To onlookers it appeared as if an Afroed cowboy had vaulted across the table at an unwilling date, when in reality he had leaned in gracefully (just at the wrong time) and his date wasn’t unwilling (just very, very surprised). Charlie landed at her feet, and the two stared at each other in mute horror for three agonizing beats before the entire room erupted in applause.

  Charlie sat back in his seat and they waited, not looking at each other, until the bill was at last paid. As they left, ignoring several cheers from the tables they passed, Charlie figured at least he had the small-of-the-back trick. But when he went to place his hand, the large bow on the back of Rebecca’s dress was in the way, and since he couldn’t put his palm on her butt, he pressed instead on her mid-back between her shoulder blades.

  To Rebecca, who tended to take responsibility for everyone’s misery, it felt like her date was bodily shoving her out the door. She felt she had humiliated Charlie. The look of startled hurt in his eyes when she yelped — actually yelped! — seared her. On top of that, she’d apparently made him feel bored and awkward during dinner. Now she took his stony silence for anger, and as soon as they reached the pavilion she dropped onto one of the cement benches and started to sob. Charlie wanted to give her space and so turned away, and misinterpreted Rebecca’s sputtered explanations for inarticulate but furious blubbering.

  They were alone until the cab came. Charlie opened the door for her. The cabby’s radio played Johnny Cash, and when they pulled up to Rebecca’s building, she muttered a hoarse “thank you” and disappeared, her skirt swishing behind her like a fish’s tail.

  As the cab’s headlights swept the quiet lot, Rebecca appeared in her bedroom window. She fogged the glass with her breath and wrote what looked like seven digits of a phone number with her fingertip. The building receded, and Charlie tried to make out the numbers, and wondered why she would write them (he had her number already). Only the middle three were legible, 0-7-7, followed by maybe a backward five. As the cab pulled onto Cay Street, Charlie’s tired brain groped one last time before he gave up and closed his eyes against the ghostly trees and the whole awful night.

  Rebecca climbed under her down comforter and stared at the moon through her window. Her cell phone, which she’d left on her nightstand, chirped insistently. She silenced it — she would check her messages tomorrow.

  Her head ached from crying, and her chest felt bound and tight, making it difficult to relax. As sleep began to crowd her thoughts, she thought back on the night and realized that I’m sorry, when read backward from the backseat of a moving cab, fifty yards away, might not make sense.

  Like Charlie, David was an only child. His father was a textbook “busy dad.” David couldn’t picture him without his earpiece and laptop. That was fine with David. Mr. Sun worked hard to give his family nice stuff, like David’s new Caddy, which was so black and smooth light seemed to slip right off it. What got to David was the way his father looked at him sometimes, like he was a bug in the system.

  “What do you do all day, anyway?” Mr. Sun would bark after the second pre-dinner cocktail.

  “I connect with the future,” David would say, which was the Sun Enterprises slogan.

  But he couldn’t talk that way to his mother, who had feelings. She’d cried when she found his cigarettes, and cried again when he said they belonged to Lupe, the housecleaner.

  “Oh, Davie. Why do you want to break my heart?”

  Mrs. Sun was into spiritualism. Her twin had died a few years before, and she’d begun doing séances and buying crystals. She listened for a message from her sister, but so far nothing.

  “Mom, you’ve got to be joking with this stuff,” David would say.

  “Oh, Davie. Why do you want to break my heart?”

  It was the same conversation, over and over again.

  One Wednesday morning, David was summoned to the counselor’s office. The old school shrink had quit Monday. Probably they’d hired another old biddy like Dr. Lightly, who had legs like chicken wattles.

  When he knocked on the door, a man’s voice answered. The new doc was young, with tight tan skin and hair slicked back with oil.

  “David,” he said, standing to shake. He had a voice like cocoa butter. “I’m Dr. Roger.”

  “Is that a first name or last name?” David asked.

  Dr. Roger chuckled.

  Dr. Lightly had hung family pictures on the wall, but now Dr. Roger’s diplomas loomed like an array of television sets. David read the names — Harvard Medical, the Child Study Association of America, and something called the Center for Young Adult Relations (signed by the director and founder, Dr. Froy). The goofy posters of cats and turtles were gone, too, leaving pale patches on the wall.

  “So what’s up, Doc?”

  David sat in one of the squeaky leather chairs. Dr. Roger folded his hands. Dr. Lightly’s rainbow-haired trolls had been replaced by a blotter, a telephone, and a little red wooden bird, the kind that dipped its nose over and over again into a glass of water. Dr. Roger touched its beak, and it started to bob.

  “So, David. How are you feeling today?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Good. I’ve asked your parents to join us.”

  David’s chair squeaked. “Huh?”

  “Hello, David,” said the speakerphone on Dr. Roger’s desk. “It’s your father.”

  “Dad?”

  “Hello? Is this working?” The voice on the phone was different now. Higher. David’s mother. “I don’t know if I’m doing this right. Hello?”

  “I’m missing a lunch meeting for this, David,” Mr. Sun’s voice cut in. “It’s that important.”

  The little lights flashed insistently. David glared at the doc. “What is this? An ambush?”

  Dr. Roger put up both hands. “Whoa, there. Nobody’s ambushing anybody, David. Your parents are concerned, and we all think an open dialogue is best at this juncture.”

  “Hello?” Mrs. Sun said. “David, baby, if you can hear me, this is your mother and we love you very much.”

  “Jesus, Evelyn,” Mr. Sun said. “Fourteen years in that house and you still can’t work the phones?”

  “George? Is that you? I can hear you, but I can’t hear David.”

  “I’m here, Mom,” David said.

  “Hello?”

  Dr. Roger cleared his throat. “David, we’d like to talk to you about last Friday.”

  “What happened last Friday?”

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell us?”

  David did a quick inventory of all the rules he’d broken. Smoking, speeding, staying out past curfew . . . He shrugged.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Did you watch that girl kill herself?” Mr. Sun’s voice crackled on the small speaker. “Did you?”

  David hadn’t thought about the suicide vid since Friday. He swallowe
d. “How did you know . . . ?”

  “That’s not really important,” Dr. Roger said. “What’s important —”

  “I read about it on G-news and checked your browser history,” Mr. Sun said.

  “You went on my computer?”

  “What did he say, George?” Mrs. Sun asked.

  “Your computer?” Mr. Sun said. “Paid for it with your paper route, did you?”

  “I think we’re getting off point,” Dr. Roger said, his smile tight. “David, what’s important isn’t that you watched it. It’s natural to be curious about death. It’s that you didn’t intervene.”

  David started to defend himself but trailed off. Intervening had simply never occurred to him. He felt a vague shame, the way you would if you got to school and realized you’d forgotten to wear underwear. But that made you a spaz, not a bad person. And that seemed to be the implication, that he was bad.

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “What about calling the police?” Dr. Roger offered. “Or her parents? You knew the girl, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I know she went to Saint M’s . . .”

  “So why didn’t you do anything?” Mr. Sun crackled.

  It was an ambush.

  “Hey, people do weird shit . . .” David started. Dr. Roger scowled. “Stuff,” he continued, “on the Internet. There’s probably another sad chick mixing herself a death cocktail right now. I didn’t make her depressed. I didn’t force the pills down her throat. Why are you all acting like it’s my fault?”

  There was silence on the telephone. Dr. Roger folded his hands.

  “David, how much time would you say you spend on the Web per day?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “Just estimate.”

  “Like, maybe six hours?”

  “Is that counting school?”

  “My classes are online,” David said. “What? Am I in trouble for that now, too?”