by Dyan Sheldon
Part Two was the drive to the pizzeria. I sat up front with Duane, and Loretta sat in the back with Kyle (but as far away from him as she could get and still be in the car). Duane and Kyle went on and on about the game. Unlike Loretta, I tried to look interested. Duane kept taking his hands off the wheel and his eyes off the road (the way he does) to explain some play to Kyle, and I’d hear these little gasps from Loretta behind me. She’d never ridden with Duane before so she looked kind of terrified.(I guess I should’ve warned her, and assured her that you get used to it.)
In the restaurant (Part Three), I sat next to Duane and Loretta and Kyle sat across from us. I should mention here that Duane and Loretta had had a couple of disagreements in the past. (The one I remember is when Duane said guns don’t kill people, they’re just a tool. Loretta said guns aren’t a tool to put nails in the wall, they’re a tool to kill people. Duane said cars kill people, too – was she going to ban cars and put all those autoworkers out of jobs? Loretta said it was just as well she didn’t have a gun or she’d be tempted to shoot him.) But Duane is very forgiving (if he weren’t a boy, he’d be a dog), so, even though he thinks Loretta’s a little weird, he didn’t hold it against her. He started off by asking her how she liked the game. Loretta can make honesty look like a fault. She said she wasn’t really paying attention. Still wagging his tail, Duane asked Loretta what she did for Thanksgiving. Loretta said (and I quote!), “We had dinner and then I worked on a talk I’m giving at the Astronomy Club.” Duane thought she was joking and laughed. Kyle said he was starving so we should order an extra-large pizza. Maybe half meatball, half pepperoni. I was on a diet that week so I said I wasn’t hungry and was just going to have a salad. Loretta said, “I don’t eat meat.” That time it was Kyle who laughed (he’d never met a vegetarian before). Over our pizzas, I tried to show Loretta how you talk to boys by example (while Loretta just sat there, chewing slowly). I started by asking Kyle all about himself. School. Sports. What he and Duane had been doing. That kind of thing. He and Duane told us all about the thriller they’d watched the night before (Loretta’s chewing got slower). Then Kyle said he was going to do some travelling after he graduated in June. I said I wanted to go to France. Kyle said he was thinking of Mexico. “I always wanted to see South America,” said Kyle.
And that was when Loretta joined the conversation. “You’re going to have a problem, then,” said Loretta.
Kyle grinned. “Why’s that?”
“Mexico isn’t in South America.”
“Did they move it?” he laughed.
“Sure it’s in South America,” said Duane. “They speak Spanish.”
“They speak Spanish in Spain, too.” Loretta was smiling. This was her doing banter. “But Spain’s not in South America, either.” She got out her phone. “Let’s look at the map.”
Anyway, it was a pretty fast ride downhill after that. I gave up trying to show Loretta the fine art of heterosexual conversation, and the boys just talked among themselves. Loretta and I went to the restroom while the guys were polishing off their desserts. That’s when she let me know that there wasn’t going to be a Part Four. She said she was going to ask her mother to pick her up because there was no way she was getting back in the car with Duane. “He drives like an accident waiting to happen.”
I didn’t believe her. I mean, I know Duane’s driving doesn’t make you think the driving test is foolproof (too close, too fast, doesn’t pay attention, can’t parallel-park), but I didn’t think that was why she was bolting. Her cheeks were flushed. She only gets like that when she’s really wound up about something. “You’re stressing.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I told you. You don’t have to say anything. Just ask them a question. They’ll take it from there. All you have to do is listen.”
“I don’t want to listen.” Stubborn or what? “I want to get out of here.”
And what was I supposed to tell Duane and Kyle?
She said to tell them she got her period and had to go home. “You can’t bowl when you’re doubled over with cramps.”
So Loretta called her mom and went outside to wait for her. When I got back to the table, Duane wanted to know where Loretta was.
“She had to leave. She’s not feeling well,” I said. “You know. A girl thing.”
“Oh, right,” said Kyle. “I was wondering what was wrong with her.”
Loretta
“I learn a lot of things from ZiZi, among them patience”
It’s not going to knock anyone out of their orbit when I say that I’d never had a friend like ZiZi before. My friends had always been like me – academic, serious, motivated, socially inept. If ZiZi is one of the Misses Bubble, we’re the Mses Sticks-in-the-Mud.
Basically, we’re like two sides of the same planet: dark and light.
I’m cautious and realistic; I know how easy it is for things to go wrong – and how often they do. That’s why I plan my days, my months and my years well in advance. I organize my schoolwork, jobs and extracurricular activities on a weekly schedule. I draw up daily lists of what I need to do. In addition to planning, I worry. I worry about things like my grades and the state of the world and the future. ZiZi, however, has an optimistic attitude to life that borders on the delusional. She sincerely believes that everything always works out all right, and because of that she doesn’t go in for too much thinking ahead. The only thing she plans is what she’s going to wear tomorrow; her lists are all for shopping; what she schedules are appointments with her hairdresser. Not that she doesn’t worry. ZiZi worries constantly about things like how she looks and what she’s wearing and what’ll happen to her hair if it rains.
I’m the sort of girl who’s more concerned with being a person; ZiZi’s the sort of person who’s more concerned with being a girl. Which works extremely well for her. She’s pretty, popular and attractive, and so, naturally, she has this amazing self-confidence. Which, to tell you the truth, is one of the things I like most about her. She’s like an emotional heat source; the sun in the form of a teenage girl in short skirts and impractical shoes. ZiZi can walk into a room full of strangers and, within minutes, everybody in there is her friend. I have confidence about my brains and my skills and getting into the college of my choice, but if I walk into a room full of strangers, the odds are that, when I walk out, I’m leaving a room full of strangers behind.
Despite our many documented differences, ZiZi and I balance each other; we work as a team. We’re sort of the yin and yang of friendship. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t things about yang that try yin’s patience. There are plenty.
She’s obsessed with how she looks.
She has terrible taste in boys.
She has terrible taste in boys and she panders to them.
She flirts as naturally as a bird flies.
If there’s one thing you can rely on with ZiZi, it’s that she’s always late.
ZiZi and I were going to the mall together. We set off from her house – ZiZi a step or two behind me because she was looking up something on her phone – talking about the film we’d watched the night before.
“I’m not saying there weren’t some clever bits,” I said as we turned into town. “I just felt that, though all the leads were women, it was still basically a guy movie.” ZiZi didn’t say anything. “Don’t you think so?” It was when she still didn’t respond that I finally realized she was no longer right behind me. I stopped and turned around. ZiZi was four and a half yards back, examining the left shoulder of her jacket in the window of the deli. “Oh for God’s sake,” I called. “Now what?”
“I thought I felt something hit me.”
“Hit you?” I looked up. It was a sunny Spring day. The only things above us were a few wispy clouds but none of them were dropping eggs or frogs or anything like that. “What could’ve hit you?”
ZiZi sighed to let me know that I was being impossible. “Bird poop, Loretta. I once had a bird poop on my brand-new fau
x-suede jacket. I not only had to go all the way back home and change, but it never really did come out.”
By then I didn’t care if an eagle had pooped on her – we were not going back to her house so she could get a different jacket. A different jacket would almost for definite require a different skirt, possibly different shoes as well. On a good day – one when nothing goes wrong and no one else in her family gets into the bathroom before she does – it takes ZiZi at least an hour to be ready to walk out the door. On a bad day – one when she finds a run in her tights or one of her brothers decides to take a shower – it’s even longer. I’d already had two cups of tea and two bagels that morning – two teas, two bagels and a long discussion with Nate about the novel Slaughterhouse Five – all while I was waiting for ZiZi to get dressed. We’d been friends for a year, which meant that I was used to waiting for her – but I wasn’t prepared to wait any more that day.
“There’s nothing on your jacket, ZiZi.” I didn’t look too closely, just in case there actually could be. It wasn’t as if civilization would collapse if she arrived at the mall with a spot on her sleeve. “Now come on or we’re going to miss the bus.”
She didn’t budge. “Are you sure there’s nothing?”
“Positive. Can we please just get to the mall? Today? The rate we’re going, it’s going to be shut by the time we get there.”
“What’d you get in Advanced Exaggeration, Loretta? A+?” She didn’t sigh this time, she huffed – but she started walking again. “You really have to chill a little. The bus isn’t even here yet.” Which was when the bus passed us, heading for the stop in front of the hardware store. ZiZi waved; the driver waved back. “You see?” smiled ZiZi. “That’s Mr Sheski. He’s really nice. He always waits.”
Maybe time and tide wait for no man, but everyone waits for ZiZi.
She gave Mr Sheski a warm greeting when we climbed on board. Mr Sheski said how good it was to see her – like sunshine after a rainy day. ZiZi beamed; she doesn’t always mind when someone exaggerates. Then she asked Mr Sheski how his parrot was. (How did she know he has a parrot? I’ve lived next door to the Shaunnesseys my whole life and I only found out Mr Shaunnessey has a pet snake the Summer it escaped and wound up in our garage – scaring my cat Alice so much that I’m sure she lost one of her nine lives.) Mr Sheski said the parrot was much better.
Normally, I’d rather square dance in platform clogs than go shopping – especially with ZiZi, who would only spend less than five hours at the mall if it were under attack from gun-toting giant lizards from Mars. She goes to the mall most weekends, but this was the first time I’d gone with her since March, when my boots started leaking. I shop out of necessity, not as a hobby. I’d told ZiZi that my present necessity was a birthday present for my mother. This was largely true. My mother never asks me if something looks good on her or if she’s wearing the right colour, but she always asks ZiZi – who, of course, is only too happy to give her expert opinion. Which was why buying a present for my mother with her personal fashion consultant beside me seemed like a good idea.
The other thing I’d told ZiZi was that, while we were there, I thought I might look for something for me to wear to my aunt and uncle’s anniversary party. This was mainly untrue. Not that my aunt and uncle were having an anniversary party – they were – but that I needed something special to wear to it. At the end of the year everybody in the Astronomy Club was going out for a meal together. Gabriel Schwartz was in the Astronomy Club. I’d never said anything to ZiZi in case I jinxed myself, but I’d had a crush on Gabriel since Year Nine when he was my lab partner – we always got the results of experiments first. He isn’t merely enormously attractive – not movie-star handsome, but his face has a lot of character – he’s incredibly intelligent as well. He’s also serious and mature, and not one of those guys who’s only interested in a girl’s looks. Even better, he’s as passionate about the universe as I am. Which was why I wanted something a little different from what I usually wore for the Astronomy Club dinner. I was hoping that, if I dressed up, Gabe would notice that I’m not just another high IQ. Who better to help me find something perfect than Giselle Abruzzio – who knows more about looking good than NASA knows about space travel. Only without telling her the real reason, of course. She’d think I was going over to her side if she knew, and then I’d never hear the end of it.
The mall was so crowded you’d think they were giving things away.
“Of course it’s packed,” said ZiZi. “We live in a consumer society. What you don’t seem to get, Loretta, is that it doesn’t work if people don’t consume. You have to buy, buy, buy. That’s the deal.”
If capitalism collapses, it’ll obviously be my fault.
The way I shop, I know what I need – shoes, a bra, a new drill bit – and I go into a store that sells what I want and, if it has something I like in the right size, I buy it. That’s not what you do when you shop with ZiZi. To begin with, you don’t only shop when there’s something you need, you shop to see if there might be something you’d like to have – or that you would decide you desperately needed if only you knew it existed. You take your time when you shop. You wander through every store as if you’re grazing sheep searching for a perfect patch of pasture. When you find something you like, you spend a long time studying it from every angle. You walk away and mull it over. You turn around and examine it again. You try everything on in two sizes.
“You never buy the first thing you see,” ZiZi advised, “because you’ll only wind up taking it back when you see something you like better.”
It took us less than half an hour to find a blouse for my mom that we both thought she was completely going to love.
Getting something for me was more of a challenge – in the way that walking the Inca Trail is more of a challenge than walking to the kitchen.
ZiZi wanted me to get “something really festive”. Something colourful and feminine. Something soft and figure-flattering. Something she would wear. “You never dress up,” said ZiZi. “Why don’t you let yourself go for once?”
I said I was letting myself go – I was going to the party.
ZiZi groaned so loudly that people looked around.
We developed a routine. In every shop, ZiZi pulled dress after dress from the racks, waving them in front of me like pom-poms. What about this…? Well, what about this…? This one’s to die for! In every shop, I shook my head at every new offering. Too short, too tight, too frilly, too bright. With superluminal speed, it turned into a contest of wills.
I said, “I don’t really do pastels.” Firmly – and again.
“It’s Spring,” said ZiZi. “Pastels are the colours for Spring.” As if that clinched the argument.
I said, “These dresses all look like the seamstress ran out of material halfway through.”
“It’s the style, Loretta.” Sounding the way bored looks. “Get over it. The Victorian governess’s dress is seriously passé.”
“I don’t actually want a dress,” I reminded her. “All I want is a new top—”
“To go with your old, shapeless jeans,” she finished for me.
“That’s a little dressier than what I usually wear.”
“For God’s sake, a plain, coloured shirt would be dressier than what you usually wear.” She rolled her eyes at an invisible audience. “I swear, Loretta, if designers had to depend on people like you, the only thing they’d have their names on would be their bills.”
“It’s a family party, Zi, not the prom.”
She did her impersonation of a bellows losing air. “It’s a celebration, not a funeral.”
“But I’m not like you.” ZiZi thought that if she wasn’t model-perfect, the Four Horsemen of the Fashion Apocalypse would thunder up the street and confiscate her wardrobe. “I don’t want to look as if I’m about to have my picture taken for the cover of some fashion magazine.”
“No. You want to look as if you came to fix the boiler.”
“I just want
to look like me.”
Which, judging by her expression, wasn’t much of a goal.
More eye-rolling; more sighing. “That’s the problem. You don’t really care how you look.”
“That’s not true.” I’m just as insecure about my appearance as everybody else. “Only I don’t agonize over it to the point of Satanic possession the way you do.”
“I don’t agonize over how I look,” declared ZiZi. “I take pride in it. Unlike some people, Lo, I happen to be really glad I’m a girl and not a guy. You don’t get it, but girls dress about a million times better than boys. Girls’ clothes have personality. They’re fun. They’re exciting. And they make you feel good. When you put on an awesomely beautiful dress, you feel awesomely beautiful.”
“You mean, you do. If I put on one of those dresses I’d feel like a roll that was decorated to look like a fancy cupcake.”
“I don’t know why you always put yourself down like that.” She usually tries not to frown – bad for the image and bad for the future of her face. “What am I always saying? You could look fantastic. You have tons of potential. Only you just refuse to do anything with it.”
This was something I could say about all her inner potential, but she didn’t give me the chance.
“And anyway, as usual, you’re not listening to what I’m saying. Girls get to wear great stuff, but boys’ clothes are boring as a power cut. They’re so boring they should all just wear the same uniform and save themselves the trouble of having to decide between the blue shirt and the white.”
“I a—”
“You know I’m right,” ZiZi interrupted. “Men’s clothes give them no chance to express themselves. They’re just dull and samey. Even guys who think they dress well wear the clothing equivalent of white rice. They spend all this money on some handmade suit and designer shirt, but does that make them feel awesomely beautiful? No, it just makes them feel like they spent a fortune on something that looks a lot like what the guy who bought his suit at Walmart is wearing.”
