Everything's Relative

by Jenna McCarthy

  “Well, that dress just came in and I haven’t seen it on yet, so if you try on anything else would you slip it on for me? We have fake bellies you can strap on to see what it will look like . . . You know, when you’re showing. If you ever show, that is. You sure are a tiny slip of a thing!”

  “I don’t really have a lot of time . . . ” Jules said, trailing off. The saleslady looked crushed. The mall was dead and she probably hadn’t had a customer all day.

  “Oh, why not?” Jules said. The woman genuinely looked as if she might cry happy tears as she led Jules to a curtained fitting room.

  “The belly is in there, and my name is Ethel if you need another size.”

  “Right. Thank you, Ethel.”

  Jules closed the curtain, wondering what on earth she was doing. Not only was she not pregnant, but she and Shawn had agreed that they wouldn’t even entertain the idea until he finished law school, which was another two years away. Still, it was a free country. There was no harm in just trying the thing on. It wasn’t like she was secretly flushing her birth control pills down the toilet or anything. Besides, she was only doing it for Ethel.

  She took off her clothes and folded them neatly on the fitting room’s padded bench. She looked at her bra-and-panty-clad thirty-two-year-old body in the mirror and tried to picture herself pregnant. It was impossible. Her stomach was as pancake-flat as it had been when she was seven years old, and her thighs were still lean and taut. In fact, nothing much about Jules had changed since she was a child. She was the same nondescript plain Jane she’d always been, the sort of woman who could pass for anywhere from twenty to forty. She longed for pregnancy curves, for the assurance that she was fertile, but more so, for the promise they represented. If she could create life, after all, she could change the world. Jules wanted desperately to believe that was possible.

  She strapped on the padded belly, which looked like a giant stuffed peanut glued to a stretchy Velcro-tipped belt. It certainly didn’t look like any pregnant stomach Jules had ever seen, but maybe it would look more realistic when she had the dress on. She pulled it off the hanger and over her head and gasped at her reflection. The sundress spilled over and around her prosthetic baby beautifully, making her look legitimately, shockingly pregnant.

  “Well?” Ethel called from outside the curtain. “How does it look? Come out and show me! Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  Self-consciously, Jules peeled back the curtain.

  “Oh my word, you’re adorable!” Ethel squealed. “Come out here and look in the three-way mirror!” A quintessential rule-follower, Jules did as she was told. In the arc of the mirrors, she was transfixed. She turned this way and that, lifting her arms and admiring the way the dress’s stripes created the illusion of curves where none actually existed. She instantly recalled a photo of her mom when she was pregnant with Lexi. In the picture, Juliana had Jules’s slight build, and her sandy-blond hair was cut into a shoulder-length bob nearly identical to the one Jules wore now. Jules squinted at her reflection, dazed by her uncanny resemblance to a ghost.

  “Julia? Julia Alexander? Sorry . . . you’re the married one . . . I think it’s Richards, no, Richardson, right? Julia Richardson, is that you?” Jules’s eyes darted away from her reflection to the face behind hers that now appeared in triplicate in the mirrors.

  “Mrs. Berkovitz!” Jules blurted. She spun around, dropping her arms instinctively in an effort to hide her fake belly.

  “It is you! I thought so but I didn’t know you were pregnant, and then I realized since Juliana’s . . . passing . . . maybe I wouldn’t know. Although you’d think some of those other gossipy biddies in the complex would have mentioned it. Or maybe nobody knows yet? Am I the first? Oh, that would just kill that know-it-all Judith Steinman. Tell me I’m the first.” She clapped her pudgy hands together like a four-year-old seeing her birthday cake for the first time.

  “Well, um, it’s sort of a secret still since we’re not very far along . . .” Jules started. She couldn’t believe she was lying about being pregnant, especially to her mother’s bigmouth neighbor. Jules never lied. It wasn’t in her nature. But what else could she do? And really, what did it matter? Her mother was dead, and it wasn’t like she was crossing paths with the old ladies at Garden Villas all that often. Or ever. Well, other than today, hopefully.

  “I hate to tell you this, but we look like we’ve already popped,” Mrs. Berkovitz said with a knowing smile and a wink. Jules cupped her fake belly protectively; Ethel stifled a laugh.

  “Oh, yeah, well . . . still. Would you mind not saying anything to anybody? Until we announce it officially, that is? You know, just in case.” Jules made the sign of the cross here, hoping lightning wouldn’t strike her dead before she had a chance to get pregnant for real.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Berkovitz promised. “You know, my Aaren is expecting, too. Not due until December. She’s twice as big as you are, but then again we come from Russian peasant stock and she got my birthing hips. That baby’s probably gonna slide out like a wet bar of soap!” Mrs. Berkovitz laughed uproariously at this and Jules tried not to cringe at the messy image of Aaren’s baby-spewing private parts. “Anyway, maybe we’ll see you at the park in the spring.”

  “Yeah, sure, that’ll be fun,” Jules said. She gave Mrs. Berkovitz an awkward hug, trying to keep the woman from feeling her padded peanut belly.

  “Mazel tov,” Mrs. Berkovitz whispered in her ear. “I pray the Lord blesses your womb with as much fruit as it can bear.” They pulled apart and Jules managed a weak smile, not sure how to respond to what sounded like a curse.

  Mrs. Berkovitz followed her back to the fitting room. “It’s such a shame that Juliana didn’t live to see this miracle, may her soul rest in peace,” she said. “She would have been over the moon.”

  “Thanks,” Jules said. What she was thinking was, I can add this little encounter to the long list of reasons I’m thankful my mother is dead.

  Brooke

  “Want to go for a hike this afternoon?” Pam asked. “Hannah is coming, too, and maybe Jess, if she gets all of those all-about-me posters hung up in time.” Pam was the junior teacher in the Tadpole room, a job Brooke wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. Poor Pam spent half of her day in the smelly Little Me Preschool bathroom, bribing a two-year-old Mackenzie or Jackson with a temporary tattoo or some Silly Putty to “pretty please go pee-pee in the potty.” Brooke’s Frog room was right next door, and thankfully the kids were almost always potty trained by the time they got there. There were occasional accidents, of course, but at least Brooke didn’t have to use her classroom stipend for diapers and wipes.

  “Oh shoot. I can’t today,” Brooke said, intentionally vague. She was pretty sure she’d used the dentist, chiropractor, gynecologist, podiatrist, rheumatologist, optometrist and hair appointment excuses to get out of one of Pam’s fitness funfests already. And it wasn’t like Brooke was eager to admit to her friend that she was afraid she would keel over and die if she tried to trudge up Topanga Canyon.

  “Another day, then,” Pam said breezily. She wrapped up her half-eaten brownie and tucked it neatly back into her insulated paisley lunch bag. Who eats half a brownie? Brooke wondered.

  “Totally,” Brooke said, trying not to stare at Pam’s brownie-filled lunch bag.

  “Do you want the rest of my brownie?” Pam asked.

  Shoot. Busted.

  “Oh, no, I’m good, thanks,” Brooke insisted. She willed herself to stop staring at the forbidden bag.

  Pam shrugged and surveyed the yard. It was a perfect winter day, sunny and chilly without a cloud in the sky. A lovely day for a hike—if you were into that sort of thing, which Brooke most definitely wasn’t. Brooke didn’t like to exercise and she didn’t like to sweat. Although she’d been an athlete as a child, now she was carrying enough extra weight to make any form of physical exertion about as enjoyable as a root canal. As
she watched the kids chase one another around the huge play yard, she had a faint flashback to her own days as a runner, when she was young and fit and would go out to the track and push her own limits for hours at a stretch. It seemed a lifetime ago, if not more.

  “Any fun plans for this weekend?” Pam asked now, interrupting her little trip down memory lane.

  Fun plans? thought Brooke. She was pretty sure trying to wrestle the remote control away from her deadbeat boyfriend and shuffling through stacks of bills she couldn’t afford to pay didn’t qualify as fun on any scale. “Nothing special,” she said instead. “You?”

  “I think I’m going to go see my old college roommate in Vegas,” Pam said. “She has tickets to some Cirque du Soleil show that’s supposed to be amazing. Hey, you want to go? I’ll bet you can still get a ticket. We could make it a road trip! It would be a blast.”

  Brooke couldn’t even fathom what it would be like to have the guts—or the money—to just take off and drive to Nevada on a whim. Even if she could afford the ticket and her share of the gas, which she couldn’t, what would she wear to a fancy Las Vegas show? The swankiest place she’d ever been to was probably Red Lobster, and that was in high school. For prom. Thankfully she’d been thin then, so she’d been able to find a cute dress on the JCPenney sale rack for just twenty-five bucks. But in her current shape, which in Brooke’s mind bore a tragic resemblance to Jabba the Hutt, the pickings would be slim at best. Slim, thought Brooke. The irony.

  “Thanks for the invite, but Jake and I have a bunch of work to do around the apartment this weekend,” she said. It wasn’t technically a lie. Jake worked really hard at playing video games most days, and not complaining while he did it for hours on end required Herculean effort on Brooke’s part.

  “Another time, then,” Pam said. She brushed imaginary crumbs off of her lap and stood up. “Hey, Tadpoles,” she called, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Swim your cute little tails over here and let’s go get washed up!” A tangle of loud, sweaty kids rushed in their direction.

  “Hop this way, Frogs!” Brooke shouted over the nearby ruckus.

  Brooke led her charges back to her classroom and began laying out the nap mats.

  “Thank you, Miss Alexander,” said Hala, her secret favorite. Hala climbed onto her mat and pulled her blanket up to her chin.

  “You’re very welcome, Hala,” Brooke said, giving the girl an affectionate hug.

  “I wish you could come to my house and tuck me in at night,” Hala said. “Your breath is way better than my mom’s.”

  Brooke laughed and thought about how much she loved her job. The kids were so special, and so priceless, and so funny. They didn’t care that she was overweight or judge her for it like the rest of the world did. They didn’t tell her that she looked just like Kirstie Alley, and really mean just like Kirstie Alley before she hooked up with Jenny Craig. Spending her days with them was the one good thing in her life. Well, that and no longer having a mother around to make her feel like a worthless loser.

  Lexi

  Lexi looked around to make sure Floyd hadn’t snuck in while she wasn’t looking before she slipped a twenty off the sticky bar and stuck it in the back pocket of her teeny skirt. With a what-the-fuck shrug she downed the half glass of bourbon her last customer had thoughtfully left behind. Waste not, want not, her mother had always said. Not that Lexi was fond of quoting Juliana, but some things just stuck whether you wanted them to or not.

  The Salty Dog was slow on its best night, but tonight was abysmal. Lexi had made a whopping six bucks in tips in four hours, if you didn’t count the two twenties she’d pocketed instead of putting them into the cash register where they rightfully belonged. And Lexi didn’t count them, because she owed her roommate Brad exactly that amount, so it wasn’t like she’d be enjoying any of it. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like she’d be getting an opportunity to score any more cash the easy way tonight, either. She surveyed the room; it was the usual mix of regular old drunks who each had an outstanding tab a mile long. Lexi rolled her eyes at them and poured herself a fresh shot of bourbon. It landed in her stomach with a grumble and Lexi realized she hadn’t eaten a thing all day, with the meager exception of the half-dozen drinks she’d pinched since she’d been on the clock. No wonder her head was so fuzzy. She stumbled backward toward the opening that looked into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Jorge,” she purred in her most gravelly voice. The cook snapped his head to attention at the sound. Lexi twirled a long dark lock thoughtfully around her finger and lowered her chin. “Do you think you could make me a burger on the down-low, before Floyd gets here? And maybe some fries? I’m starving out here and I haven’t made a dime all night.” She leaned ever-so-slightly forward when she said this, offering Jorge an enhanced glimpse of the cleavage that was purposely spilling out of her push-up bra. Jorge blinked rapidly then dragged his eyes back to Lexi’s face. Her lids were half-closed over her pale green eyes, and her lips were drawn into the suggestive sort of pout usually reserved for selfies.

  “Course, Lexi,” Jorge stammered. Jorge had been scolded—more like verbally flogged—by their boss for giving in to Lexi’s food-on-demand requests more times than any of them could count. The rule at the Salty Dog was employees only ate on their breaks, at designated tables, and they paid half the menu price. They were charged with keeping one another accountable when Floyd wasn’t around, of course. But Jorge, like nearly every man with a pulse Lexi had ever met, was utterly powerless to resist her wiles. She knew the cook would willingly take a tongue-lashing from Floyd all day every day if it meant he might get a close-up look at her tits when he delivered her food.

  Lexi blew him a kiss and his brown face turned crimson. If only Floyd were that easy, she thought with a stifled sigh.

  “Well, look who decided to show up today.” Speak of the devil. Floyd had barged through the heavy wooden front door, causing it to slam against the wall and startling Lexi half to death. She grabbed the bar to steady herself. “What a treat for all of us.”

  “Fuck you, Floyd,” Lexi said, high on hunger and liquid courage. She thrust her middle finger in his direction for good measure.

  “If those Friday-night dickwads didn’t sit here all night spending money so they could watch you shake your ass, you’d be telling some minimum-wage schmuck at the unemployment agency to fuck off instead of me,” Floyd said, pulling up a barstool directly in front of her. “If someone would be nice enough to give you a ride to the unemployment office, that is.” He laughed when he said this, and it was all Lexi could do not to grab a glass and hurl it at his ugly, pockmarked face.

  “Fuck you,” she said again, wishing she could come up with a meaner, or at least more original, retort.

  “No, thanks,” said Floyd. “I already had crabs once, and let’s just say I’m in no rush to get ’em again. Hey, Jorge, fix me a burger, would ya?”

  “Coming right up, Floyd,” Jorge said, looking at Lexi guiltily. Her stomach rumbled on cue.

  “Wrap it up to go,” Floyd added. “I’m beat. I think Spicoli here can hold down the fort for the rest of the night. That right, Spicoli?”

  Lexi bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted blood. Then she smiled—the fakest fuck-you smile she could muster—and walked around the side of the bar toward the back bathroom. Her middle finger was raised behind her back.

  “Take a piss on that burger and I’ll give you forty bucks,” she whispered to Jorge as she passed by him. Jorge nodded ever so slightly, a mixture of agreement and apprehension. Lexi didn’t care if she had to pick up three extra shifts this week. The thought of Floyd eating Jorge’s nasty piss burger would be worth it.

  The Sisters

  “Thank you for coming here today, ladies,” Mr. Wiley said.

  “Of course,” Jules said on behalf of her sisters. She shifted uncomfortably in one of Mr. Wiley’s big leather chairs.

 
; “As I explained previously, before your mother passed she made me the executor of her will, so the purpose of today’s meeting is to go over her final wishes with regard to the disbursement of her assets—”

  “Do I get the Chevy?” Lexi interrupted. “Please tell me I get the Chevy. That thing is classic. Not a classic, mind you. But definitely classic.”

  “Lexi, hush,” Jules said. As the oldest of the three sisters—and the only one with an ounce of responsibility in her bones, it was clear—Jules had always made it her job to keep Lexi in line. This had never been an easy task, and from the looks of things, nothing had changed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wiley. Please go on.”

  “I have to say, your mother’s final wishes are a bit unusual,” Mr. Wiley told them. “It seems that she’s laid out several provisions that you’ll each need to meet in order to receive your portion of her estate.”

  “Her estate?” It was Lexi, of course. “Does that include the plastic lawn chairs on her back deck or do those get sold with the condo? Because I could really use some furniture.”

  “What do you mean by ‘provisions,’ Mr. Wiley?” Jules asked, ignoring her youngest sister. “Is this like that crazy movie where the rich old man leaves his grandson everything, but he has to jump through all of these hoops to get it? Because frankly, that only works when you have a ton of money, which unfortunately our mother did not.”

  “Actually, your mother was a wealthy woman,” Mr. Wiley said. Jules looked around his stodgy office, wondering what his frame of reference could be. Juliana Alexander had been modestly comfortable, maybe, but she certainly hadn’t been rich. Jules had never seen her buy a single thing that wasn’t on sale, and all three girls had been humiliated more than once when their mother had tried to haggle over the price of this or that in a department store. “They’ll always knock off at least ten or fifteen percent if you can find a pull or a tear,” Juliana would insist loudly as her daughters cowered and tried to be invisible.