Instant Love: Fiction

by Jami Attenberg

  Contents

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  THE PERFECT TRIANGLE

  SARAH LEE MEETS A MILLIONAIRE

  THE SLEEPWALKER

  WHAT HAPPENED WITH WOLFOWITZ

  DINNER IN WESTCHESTER

  ISLAND FEVER

  MEAN BONE

  THE MANZANITA GROVE

  HE GIVES PAUSE

  INSTANT LOVE

  SARAH LEE WAITS FOR LOVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  Holly is getting her makeup done by the burnout girl she befriended at work. They’re in the bathroom at the back of the pharmacy, and Shelly’s dusting one perfect pastel-colored triangle on each eyelid. Same as hers. She’s been staring at Shelly for two nights a week, 5:00–9:00 PM, most of senior year, and has fallen deeply in love with her makeup.

  Holly has tried to make the same perfect triangles herself at home, usually with Seventeen magazine spread out next to her on the bathroom counter. She looks at the photos and diagrams and memorizes the quick tips, muttering directions under her breath as she stares into the mirror, but it’s no use. Her eyes end up looking more like Picasso’s than Madonna’s. It turns out she’s no good at blending in the makeup. She’s going to suck at blending in for the rest of her life.

  Tonight she’s going on a date, that’s why all the makeupping. She’s going out with a boy named Christian who is nineteen and who likes the Smiths and the Cure and New Order. Holly is seventeen and likes New Order and Echo and the Bunny-men and Joy Division. She knows she should like the Smiths, but Morrissey seems like such a whiny turd. Holly has lied to Christian about this, because he worships Morrissey. Morrissey changed his life forever, that’s what Christian says. He’s a vegetarian now and everything. Meat is murder, he says.

  Shelly likes Aerosmith and Judas Priest.

  That’s how Holly and Christian met, because of music. They were both wearing the same New Order T-shirt, the one with the Brotherhood album cover (which is a classic, even though it is only a few years old), when Christian came in the pharmacy to pick up his father’s heart medicine. No one else wears those shirts in her hometown. Holly lives in a town so small she can barely breathe. That’s the joke, she’s heard it said before: If you want to breathe, go to the next town over.

  Coincidentally, that’s where they sell New Order T-shirts, too, in the next town over. At that little shitty record store in the minimall, between the 7-Eleven and the dry cleaner’s. That’s where they both got their shirts. They talked about that record store for five minutes, how it was such a rip-off but it was the only place around. A line built up behind him, and she thought he was going to leave, but then he stepped to the side and waited, and her heart fucking flung at her chest, hard and fast and repeatedly, because oh my god, this guy is going to like me.

  No one ever likes her like that.

  Because of their age difference, Holly and Christian are keeping their romance a secret. No one wants anyone getting arrested for statutory anything.

  Plus the engine on his car is so loud she can hear him coming from a block away, and she jokes about it with him, but she’s not kidding, that car is a piece of shit.

  And he has shaved the sides of his head and left the hair on top long so that it spills over his narrow face in an awkward way and makes him look vaguely like a celery stick.

  Also, there is the matter of Christian living in his father’s basement because he doesn’t feel like getting a job while halfheartedly taking community-college classes in accounting because he doesn’t feel like going away to college. He doesn’t feel like doing much of anything except riding around in his car and running errands for his dad, talking about Morrissey, and drinking beer from cans in paper sacks. Holly is two years younger than him, and already she knows she is going to blow him away in life, though she’s not sure if she’s allowed to feel that way yet, so she beats herself up for being a big snob. She is no better than her girlfriends, who say things like, “Like I would date a guy who wasn’t in National Honor Society” because all of her friends are smart-girl snobs.

  That’s why she likes this burnout girl so much. Shelly thinks it’s normal to date a guy who goes to community college. Shelly thinks it’s OK to spend an hour putting on eye makeup. It doesn’t matter to Shelly if he smokes or drives a crappy car. He has a car, chica! (Shelly likes to translate words into Spanish whenever possible. It’s the only class she isn’t failing.) At least he has a car. At least you have a boyfriend.

  SHELLY HAS A SECRET that isn’t much of a secret at all. When she was ten, a neighbor kidnapped her and kept her in his basement for ten days. He was fat, with a belly like a pregnant woman’s, and he had a wandering eye. Holly remembers when it happened, because it was the first time she was aware of something bad happening to another kid her age. Sure, there had been divorced parents (like hers), skinned knees and broken arms, and Holly even knew a girl whose dog had died after getting hit by the FedEx truck. But no one she knew had got kidnapped and—she was guessing, everyone was guessing, but no one knew for sure except for the police and Shelly’s parents—raped by some psycho nutjob who got away with it for as long as he did because he was a regular churchgoer, and no one ever suspects a man who is one with God.

  That’s what Holly’s mother said when they finally busted him. She slapped down the newspaper on the kitchen table, three cups of coffee into the morning, and yelled, “Anyone could see the man was crazy! Look at that eye! You wear one little crucifix around your neck and your shit don’t stink.”

  Holly’s mother is a godless heathen. She says this proudly to her two friends in town, who are also divorced and also mothers. They spend a lot of time in the next town over.

  She has thin black hair and is tiny and focused, like a firecracker right before it explodes. She is always suing Holly’s father for more child support. Every time he writes another book, she asks for more money. Holly has a younger sister, Maggie, who has lots of medical bills. Neurologists. Therapists. Pharmacists. “Plus they are two teenage girls, Bill,” her mother would say into the phone. “They eat, they shop, they breathe.” The expenses, her mother hisses.

  Holly’s mother exhausts her.

  Shelly moved away a few months after the trial. She went to live on the other side of the state with her dad, who blamed her mom for what happened. Her mother also blamed herself for what happened, because she was at work, and not at home waiting for her child. And she blamed herself for marrying her husband in the first place. She married him because he was the first one who asked. What if no one else asked? What if? Her life was just one big mistake leading up to her child being kidnapped and molested. So Shelly left and her mother began to drink, and she did this for a few years, she was very good at it, until her boss at the salon told her to cut it out, quit coming to work smelling like you’ve been making out with Bartles & Jaymes all night long or you’re fired. She got herself in a program, went to a lot of meetings, made a lot of apologies, and tried to get her daughter back. A mother should be with her daughter, don’t you think?

  Shelly always complains when her mom is “twelve-stepping” her again.

  Take her, said Shelly’s dad. It’s my turn for some fun. Shelly’s dad throws acid parties now. She sometimes visits him on the weekends and smokes pot with his girlfriend who is only ten years older than her and used to live in Korea and knows how to swear in ten different languages. He’s acting like it’s the sixties again, that’s what Shelly says when she comes back after a visit. He’s trying to turn back the hands of time. El tiempo.

  They are taking turns, this family, with being fucked up. That’s what Holly thinks.

  Shelly’s b
een back in town for a year, and everyone knows exactly who she is; no one has forgotten a thing. People don’t forget things like kidnap and rape and molestation and violation and major jail time in a town so small no one can breathe. No one will touch Shelly. No one wants to go near her, except for the other burnout girls. They recognize her as the kind of girl who has a particular understanding of extreme sorrows inflicted by a different kind of fate than applied to the rest of the world.

  It’s funny, though, because Holly can see how easily Shelly could be something else besides a burnout girl. All the rest of them have a raw look, narrow and paranoid in the eyes, and they’re too skinny (except for the one who is too fat), and have bad skin and wear too much makeup that they’ve probably shoplifted. Whenever Holly walks by them when they are smoking in the school parking lot, they are always laughing dark, bitter laughs, raw and scratchy and pained. They sound as if they’ve stayed up late the night before, when she was in bed by eleven, just as her mother asked her to be.

  But with Shelly, Holly sees puffy soft cheeks, and pink sad lips, and otherworldly gray eyes that are always drifting off toward the sky, toward somewhere else besides the fluorescent peak of the pharmacy. Shelly is soft feathered hair, a real natural blond, dirty blond maybe, but blond nonetheless, and perfect pink-and-purple eyelids, and tight black jeans and a form-fitting black button-down flannel shirt that just hits the waist, and high-heeled black boots with a strap and silver buckle around each ankle. Shelly is quiet until you get to know her, and then she has something to say. Shelly has a secret, that’s what Holly thinks. When you look at her, you know she has a little secret just bursting to get out of her.

  In other words, she’s a real knockout.

  HOLLY SITS on the toilet seat while Shelly finishes her eyes, and stares at the reflection of the bathroom in the mirror. There are so many signs in this bathroom, reminders of how to be a normal person when you’re away from home: Wash your hands. Don’t flush sanitary napkins. Please put the seat down when you’re done—yes, that means you, Alan, Greg, Schneider, and Mario. (“Please” is underlined, and someone has drawn a star next to it.) There is also a framed print of a sketch of a rose over the toilet. A bottle of air-freshener spray rests on the toilet tank. Lilies of the Valley. What valley?

  Shelly tells her to look up, and doses her lashes with mascara. Then she asks if she’s in love with Christian.

  So are you totally in love with him, Holly?

  Christian? Christian who doesn’t like to read anything but NME? Christian who has things like “Buy Jelly” written on his hand?

  Holly laughs as if to say, As if, and Shelly looks at her all soft and puffy and sad, like, How can you not be in love? Don’t you know how lucky you are? And a little bit of: Then why have I spent the last hour doing your makeup if you’re not even in love?

  So Holly says, No? Maybe?

  Finally she lands on: Well, it’s only been five weeks. Which should have been her answer in the first place.

  Shelly tells her to stop squirming or you’ll fuck it all up. While she leans over she sticks the round edge of her tongue out between her lips and holds it there. Some of the pink eye shadow drifts down from Holly’s lid and her applicator onto Holly’s chest.

  Sit still, she says. Do you want to look hot or not?

  HOLLY HATES MAKEUP on principle. Makeup is what other girls wear, girls who need to wear it in order to get attention, or to make themselves feel better, or to feel like they fit in with everyone else. These are girls who cannot carry their weight in the world otherwise. But I am an exceptional person, this is what Holly tells herself in between beating herself up for being such a snobby smart-girl bitch. (She cannot help it if she is the smartest girl, possibly the smartest person, in her AP biology class, and maybe even AP chemistry, too.) She has other things to worry about besides makeup.

  Her mother doesn’t wear makeup. When Holly asked her once to show her how to put some on, she said, “Really?” and Holly knew her mother thought that that was the dumbest thing she had ever heard. Like, why would you want to? Like, what is wrong with you?

  And the truth is, Holly looks better without it. Makeup makes her look darker and older, like she has something to cover up when in reality she has fine, rosy skin, bright eyes with dark lashes, and plump red lips. She is bursting with youth. She doesn’t realize it now, but she will in ten years when she looks back at her high-school graduation pictures. She is a ripe plum waiting to be plucked.

  But if she’s going to have a friend who is a burnout girl, and she’s going to date a guy with no future who sometimes wears eyeliner on their dates, if she’s going to lead this secret, opposite-world life, she might as well try wearing a little makeup.

  EVERY TIME she goes out with Christian, she lets him do something new to her body. She is conducting an experiment. She is her own science project. Mix a hand with the space between the thighs, it feels this way. Apply a tongue to a nipple, it feels that way. Oxygen and water and heat equal steam.

  This seems to be the main purpose of their dates, this getting to the half-naked-on-the-black-leather-couch-in-his-father’s-basement part of it. The couch impresses her. It has a few cigarette burns on it, but otherwise it’s luxurious. All the furniture in Holly’s house is wicker or velour or some sort of flower-patterned fabric. The couch totally works on her. All she wants to do is lie on that couch and make out with Christian.

  They both have become better kissers in the last five weeks, although he still likes to do this tongue-swordplay action that she thinks requires too much effort for the end result. When she kisses his neck instead, he says: Are you trying to seduce me?

  Which is preposterous. She has no idea what she is doing. But she says yes.

  And then he says: Are you turned on?

  He asks her questions like this, and she has to answer yes even if she feels stupid saying it, because if she doesn’t he will stop with the experimenting.

  BECAUSE HOLLY is the smart girl who works after school (Shelly is the cute girl who works after school), her bosses have trained her well and given her important responsibilities. She is asked to count pills, balance the register at the end of the night, and look up prescription histories on the computer. She can search by name or address or type of medication, so one day she did a search for the pill and now she knows everyone who is on the pill in her high school. There were surprises. She told her girlfriends some of their names, and now they all giggle and feel superior when they see them at lunch. But also she thinks: Why are they having sex and not me? None of her girlfriends are on the pill. Neither is Holly. Shelly is on the pill, but she says she takes it just to help her cramps and Holly believes her, because Shelly is always sad because she doesn’t have a boyfriend.

  Shelly runs the lottery machine and video rentals. If someone returns a video late, she pockets the fee and buys scratch-off lottery tickets with it. She splits them with Holly, and the two of them play them at the end of the night when the store is mostly empty. Once Holly won fifty dollars and they both went to Taco Bell after work and got nine million steak tacos and ate them till they wanted to puke.

  Holly loves her pharmacy life. She even thought about going to pharmacy school. She’s awesome at math and science and it seems like such a relaxed job. But when she told her father about it he said, “Really?” in such a dry, bored tone that she dropped it. Her father is a famous writer and doesn’t understand anymore what it’s like to be not famous. And even though in her mother’s house he is Enemy Number One, Holly would hate for him to find her boring, so she drops the pharmacy dream and thinks pre-med instead.

  Sometimes she sees her father on the news or on a talk show, discussing a new book or being an expert on something, and he looks so handsome and confident that she can almost forget he is probably covered in makeup at that moment.

  CHRISTIAN HAS NEVER even heard of her father.

  SHELLY IS DONE. “Perfecto!” she says. She backs out of the bathroom to give Holly m
ore mirror space. Holly leans in, knocks a box of Kleenex into the sink. They’re on special this week. She leaves it there. Instead she focuses deeply on the glowing lavender triangles that lie nestled in a base of delicate pink eyelids. I look like I should be going to a party where a band is playing, she thinks. I look dreamy, yet glamorous. I look so fucking hot.

  And then Shelly leans in next to her, and Holly sees how they match in the mirror. And how the pink and purple complement Shelly’s naturally honeycomb-tan skin, and how the gray in her eyes makes it all look a little risky even, but it totally works. Those eyes take her into the future.

  Holly will see girls like her years later when she has finally moved to New York, when she and her friends from college will dress themselves up in revealing shirts and travel downtown on Friday nights to edgy bars in edgy neighborhoods in search of edgy men to take them home. The girl will be behind the bar. Her eye makeup will be perfect, and she will be wearing a halter top that Holly could only imagine owning, and when she asks the bartender where she got it, she will say, “My friend’s a designer. He made it for me. Isn’t it great?”

  And Holly will want to be her, just as she wants to be Shelly now, because as soon as she has seen Shelly in the mirror, she realizes that she does not look hot. The colors are all wrong for Holly; on her eyes they’re garish, and they make her skin look sallow. On Holly’s eyes, the triangles don’t look mystical or Middle Eastern; they look like children’s blocks. She’s not spiritual or ethereal; she’s a girl who is wearing too much makeup.

  Some girls are made for makeup, some aren’t.

  She can’t take it off, of course. She can’t insult sweet, scarred Shelly. Plus Holly was thinking of having her come over to her house sometime and make her up some more. Shelly would lean over her, breath close, in her upstairs bathroom or maybe her bedroom. They could have a sleepover or something when her mom is out of town.