The difference being, we didn’t fuck each other. Well, Reg and Jee took a pause and went into the private shower booth. Jee was brought up in a Bangkok brothel so she had no sense of privacy, but Reg was shy. I was grateful. This way they would shower off the smell of sex before we went out to eat.
Beth and Pog got into a sponge-fight. I stayed out of it. I sat on the edge across the circle from them and felt the warm water jets like little taps on my chest and legs, taps that said wake up, this feels good.
It did feel good. I closed my eyes and breathed in the steamy air, naming my teammates by scent: Pog sweat and peach shampoo, Beth sweat and handmade soap with rosemary in it, Jee and Reg fucking in the private shower booth and mixing up a potent nose-cocktail of boy- and girl-sweat and sex secretions and Jee’s oily conditioner. Cricket smelled like baby powder. Had she gotten out of the basin? I opened my eyes.
Cricket had shrunk back to her usual shrimpy four foot ten, but she still had the face of a child. She sat on her heels in the basin, arms wrapped around her knees, her face turned up, eyes closed, while the foamy water lapped over her thighs, and the jets hit her from both directions. Droplets sparkled like rhinestones in her half-tamed, black, fuzzy hair. She looked like a live nymph in that Roman fountain.
For a moment the screeching and echoing subsided. My head filled with the scents of my teammates and the picture of naked Cricket perched in the fountain.
I focused again on the water jets hitting me. At first they were multiple streams of stimulation, tag, you’re it, coming from seemingly everywhere. Then I felt them as a series of waves, like reassuring strokes, gentle but never-ending. Then I felt individual streams. Then individual drops. Time stretched.
“That was fun,” Cricket said cautiously when we were dressing to go out to Greek Islands for dinner.
My mom had a cat like that once. First the head-bump against the leg. Then if you didn’t respond, all-out assault.
I was drawing on my mouth with lip pencil. I didn’t respond.
Here it came. “Do you think I can get good enough to really play with you kids?”
“Sure. You have some drilling to catch up on.”
“Drilling. That’s doing the same thing over and over. Like you do.”
“Athletics is a process. It’s all about muscle memory. Ninety-nine percent of it is practice, not games against another team in front of an audience. I’ll get you started on footwork and movement with the ball tomorrow.”
She sent me a speculative look. What was that about? “I had so much fun. Do we practice every day? Do you always go out to eat afterward? I’ve never eaten in so many different restaurants in my life. We always had kids. I had to cook. Nobody can afford to feed four kids in a restaurant all the time. And the way we eat here! I’m amazed at my appetite. You ladies seem to put away enough for twenty teenage boys. And how you drink! Me, too,” she added in a bemused voice. “I’m not sure I like being drunk. I can’t pay attention. If I drink beer in the morning I’m fuzzy all day. I notice you don’t drink a lot in the morning.”
I smiled cautiously around my lip pencil.
“It didn’t seem like the breakfast beer affected our performance. Is that because we’re demons? If we can do this stuff with our bodies, why don’t the rest of you change your bodies much? Is it because you’ve been demons longer than I have? I wonder what else we can do. What if we had extra hands? That could be fun! I don’t even know for sure how I want my body to look yet. Do you like this dress? Am I too short for this dress? I can get taller. But just a little this time. Look!”
“You’re fine.” I glanced at her. “Breathe, will you?”
She wore Beth’s sharecropper dress. “What do you think? Do I look as young as you girls yet?”
“Uh,” I said. To her disappointed puppy eyes I said, “Forty, maybe.”
Just like that, she was chirpy again. “I’m working on it,” she said with spirit. “Jee says that when I think I look twenty, she thinks I look nine.”
“I know,” I said, hoping to stem the flood.
“That’s too young,” Cricket said uncertainly.
I had noticed that if I was short with her, she got hurt, and if I let up, she bounced right back. So I said, “It’s who you are. You’ll get the hang of it.”
She returned to fussing with her hair. “How’s this? This is what I looked like at thirty. Do I look young enough now? I wonder if basketball players react to an older woman the way your customers do. Maybe it shoots their horse.” She put her right hand up and then smacked it down with her left.
She chattered all the way to the Greek restaurant.
CRICKET
As they got ready for bed, Amanda said, “If you’re not careful, we’re gonna make an athlete out of you. You have aptitude.”
“Thank you, schviti! You’re so nice.” Warmed through, Cricket kicked off her fancy shoes and slithered awkwardly out of her restaurant-going dress.
“No, I’m not. I’m a woman short on a basketball team that can’t get any fair competition.” Amanda swabbed off the gunk she’d painted on herself three hours ago. “I need you.” She laughed at the mirror. “That Break Dance Grandma thing really threw me.”
“Tell you a secret about that,” Cricket said, soaking a handful of tissues with alcohol and scrubbing her own face. “I did that a little over two years ago. Hurt myself pretty bad. I was just so fed up with everyone treating me like I was gonna die any second. I never let on how much it hurt. My chiropractor and a year of physical therapy set my back straight, and my left hip was never the same, but it was worth it.”
“C’mon. That granddaughter never found out?” Amanda shot her a side-eye.
Cricket sighed. “Well, yeah. That was what set her off.” Gloom descended on her. “She campaigned the whole family to get me put in the Loriston Home, and for once they agreed with her. Even Lauren,” she remembered with a pang. She’d felt ganged up on and defeated. Sharon had been able to bustle her out of the condo she and Irving had lived in, and Cricket had not resisted.
“Looks like Lauren has changed her mind about that,” Amanda offered. Cricket looked at her, and she added, “She told me while you were signing autographs. I think she knows you’re not human anymore. And she’s okay with it. She admires you.”
Thank goodness for Lauren. “She thinks you’re pretty neat, too,” Cricket said, and watched a slow blush overtake her roomie.
In the morning Beth took Cricket out in an old battered Audi sedan to look at hotel suites. She wasn’t letting up on this celebration of life thing.
“The catering manager will try to steer you toward a ballroom, but I don’t find those very comfortable. I think you’d like a big suite with big windows, a nice view, and at least two bathrooms.” Beth glanced at Cricket. “You probably have plenty of elderly family members.” Then she flushed.
“Don’t try being tactful with me, honey. I’m through all that and out the other side.” Cricket didn’t feel relaxed. This whole party thing had her wigged.
Beth smiled. “Besides, it’s more homey.”
Cricket had a daughter-in-law who was the managing type. She’d been a pain in the heinie until her own daughter was old enough to boss her. That had been hilarious, until the daughter-in-law’s daughter—Sharon of course—decided to organize Cricket too. Maybe if Cricket acted sulky, Beth would give up on the project.
“Whatever,” she pouted.
But Beth was a match for that. “We’re doing this,” she said in what Pog called Beth’s mom-voice. “If you just disappear, there will be an uproar. Someone reports you missing, and someone else reports you murdered, and the police get involved, and then the fights about money start.” Suddenly she sounded haunted.
“Okay.” Cricket sighed. “Is that how you met your young man?”
“Doyle? He’d love to hear you call him young.”
“Oh, is he younger than you?”
“Maybe a couple of years,” Beth admitted. “I’m f
ifty. Of course I tease him for chasing jail bait. Me,” she added, catching Cricket’s glance. “How I look now.”
“Why don’t you recruit him and get him a demon body? Then he’ll get all young too.”
Beth pulled the old Audi into an Oak Street parking ramp. “I hadn’t really thought of that.” In silence she drove up a few ramp layers, parked, and turned off the engine. She stared out the windshield thoughtfully. “Oh, no, I’m sure he wouldn’t go for it. The Regional Office, you know,” she said, pointing downward.
“So he’s Catholic or something?” Cricket said. “You know. Scared of the devil? Doyle looks like a nice boy. What’s he like, anyway? The devil I mean.”
“Never met him,” Beth said. “But that’s an interesting question. I haven’t been a sex demon very long myself. I’m still getting used to looking out of the same eyes at the world and having the world see me, well, the way I look now. And sometimes,” she said, and dimpled, glancing sideways at Cricket, “I feel like a completely different person. Doyle doesn’t like my, hm, my past-life personality much. He says I was a uptight hypocrite.”
“Nice mouth.”
“Oh, he’s right.”
They walked out of the ramp and crossed the street to a boutique hotel Beth had chosen off the internet.
“You know, I never thought about that before. What you said,” Beth said. “Recruiting Doyle so he’d—” She stopped.
They paused at the hotel door, which a doorman in a pith helmet, short pants, and nice calves sprang to open.
“So Doyle would live forever?” Cricket said, ignoring the doorman.
“Well, we’re just seeing each other casually.” Beth smiled at the doorman and pulled Cricket into the gloom of an elegant room like the lobby of a tiny private club. She whispered, “I don’t even know how much time I want to spend with him. What if we got tired of each other?” She blushed. Cricket guessed that Beth had been married to the same man most of her life.
“Then you break up. So what? You’d be leaving him with something pretty special.”
Beth was silent.
“Something to think about,” Cricket added. She felt a little guilty for poking at Beth’s tender spots. But she’d learned long ago, from dealing with her managerial daughter-in-law and granddaughter, that you had to remind them that you weren’t a pushover. Maybe now Beth would back off.
This was not how it worked out.
Cricket sat on a little gold chair in the hotel’s fanciest suite, drinking free champagne while Beth and the catering manager went over lots of paperwork. Beth was in hog heaven. She tried to get Cricket to decide between mini crescents and sushi rolls as if the fate of the free world depended on it.
Cricket had never realized before how lucky she was that all her kids and stepkids were boys. With her first husband, they were too poor to throw big bar mitzvahs, and then later of course the boys’ brides’ parents had to organize the weddings. Sharon’s mother divorced Cricket’s third son early, but that hadn’t stopped her from trying to sucker Cricket into working on Sharon’s wedding. Sharon herself had wanted Cricket to get involved in Lauren’s sister’s wedding, but after suffering two weeks of meetings Cricket had wiggled out by sending a big check and then showing up at the ceremony.
This reminded her of those meetings. The whole thing gave her a headache.
She tuned out and turned to the counter-irritant of scrolling through her text messages.
Cloris invited her to the zoo to look at the baby hippo. Danny, Irving’s grandson, wanted to do lunch, no doubt to talk about his ex-girlfriend. Guilt pinched Cricket. They loved her. They missed her. What could she tell them? The twins wanted her to get a medical checkup after the break-dancing-on-Clark-Street thing. She’d have to do this Celebration of Life thing for sure, now.
Lauren had sent a photo of herself wearing roller skates and an intimidating amount of padding, in the act of falling down and about-to-be-run-over by a jostling crowd of similarly-dressed girls.
Sharon had left twelve texts and three voice messages. Ugh.
The phone rang. She looked, and her heart sank. Speak of the devil. But if she had a choice between discussing her own funeral with the catering lady and talking to Sharon— “Hi, Sharon.”
“Bubbe, where are you? I’ve been worried sick about you!”
Cricket could have written this conversation out in advance. You got a call from Helen at the Loriston Home.
“I got a call from Helen at the Loriston Home. She says you’re going to Brazil? Lawrence wouldn’t tell me anything! Since when are you well enough to travel? Did Dr. Mehta say you could go? Have you any idea what the innoculations are like? You’ll be sick for weeks! What if you drink the water down there by accident? Do you have any idea what that could do to your system? Bubbe? Bubbe, are you there? Are you listening to me?”
Cricket tried to hold back the ocean. “Honey, I can’t talk right now, I’m in a meeting.”
Sharon bristled audibly. “Who with?” Sharon had the idea that nobody else in the family was to be trusted to help Cricket with anything.
“The catering lady at this nice hotel.” Cricket should have thought first before she spoke. Story of her life.
“Why? I thought you were leaving the country! You’re not—my god, you’re not getting married again!” Sharon’s voice dropped an octave into the command zone. “Who is he? Did you meet him at the Loriston Home?”
Cricket felt a hand on her arm. Beth. Of course the whole meeting was getting this call, because Cricket always put her calls on speaker so she wouldn’t catch the radiation.
Beth pointed at the phone and made silent words with her lips. “Hang up!”
“I can’t!” Cricket mouthed back to her. She held the phone at arm’s length away from her and whispered, “She’ll just try and come visit me. And I don’t want her to,” she added with her lips only.
Beth put her hand out for the phone, which was quacking louder and louder. Cricket shrugged and gave it to her. Oh boy. This should be good. Clash of the titans.
But Beth handled it beautifully. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Immerzang is in a meeting right now. When can she call you back? I see she has your number. That’s very courteous of you. Of course, madam. Thank you. Goodbye.” She thumbed the call dead and put the phone far out of Cricket’s reach. “And that’s how it’s done.”
“She’ll be after me now,” Cricket pointed out. “She won’t rest until she finds out where I’m staying. She’ll pester me to death.”
“Make an appointment to meet her at that Home place.”
“No way.”
“And then blow off the appointment,” Beth said coolly. She was scowling, though.
“She’ll call for another appointment.”
“Do it again. Keep doing it until she gets the message.”
Cricket raised her eyebrows. “Is that what they do on the North Shore?”
“Actually, on the North Shore, I’d meet her, and then I’d see to it that she got food poisoning.” Boy. Don’t piss Beth off, huh?
“Not in my hotel, please,” the catering lady said. She shuffled papers on the table. “So I think we’re getting close.”
Beth poured the last of the champagne into her glass and knocked it back. “Very close. Let’s go over the music—” And they were off.
Cricket got up and wandered restlessly around the suite, admiring the chachkes, trying out the bathroom, and sniffing the fancy soaps that weren’t even wrapped in that paper you can’t tear open when you need soap in a hurry. She had a stomach ache and a headache and a familiar feeling of hopeless annoyance. Nobody rubbed Cricket the wrong way like Sharon. She should have known Sharon would call after she talked to Lauren. Lauren had this blind spot. She thought her mother could be handled, so she went and told her stuff. Lauren handled Sharon by getting another tattoo. Well, first Lauren had handled her mom by changing into a girl. Sharon still hadn’t fully coped with that.
This was not an option for Cric
ket.
Well, up until now, it hadn’t been. Cricket wondered if she could get her fancy new demon body to pretend to have a tattoo. Maybe she could get it to look like a man!
Of course, then she’d have to be in Sharon’s presence to show her. And listen to the fallout.
Amanda had done that. Made herself look like a man. Or, to be accurate, she’d looked like a man trying to look like a woman. Cricket felt oddly stirred. One of the million and one things she’d left off her bucket list, for practical reasons, was Being a man. Until now, she had figured that that was in the department of reincarnation, only she didn’t believe in reincarnation.
Now, of course, reincarnation didn’t believe in her. But she had new options.
And this party ahead of her.
With a heavy sigh, she went back out to the meeting.
Beth and the catering lady concluded the deal. Cricket ponied up her credit card. She realized that she might be putting herself into the hands of another Sharon here, by letting Beth run this party—she was darned if she’d call it a celebration of life, horrible things. But Beth had convinced her that something would have to be done about her family. Okay, talking to Sharon had done that. That and a zillion texts and phone messages from the rest of her family. Beth was now trying to convince her that it might work. Cricket doubted if she could ever be as cool as Beth had been on the phone with Sharon.
The demon girls were opening her eyes about a lot of things these days. Having a younger body made a difference. And yet, maybe it was the attitude. Pog had attitude in bucketfuls. Jee seemed sometimes just an inch away from loading a shotgun. In her quiet way, Amanda projected a gentle but firm message: Don’t mess with me. Even Beth, the normalest of them all, had this ruthless streak. Was that the part Doyle liked, or the part he didn’t like? Have to ask him.
So Cricket gritted her teeth and signed all the papers. They booked the suite. They ordered food. They ordered flowers. They ordered a cello-piano duo. They went to lunch.
“What I don’t get is how this fancy-schmantzy party is gonna keep them off my back,” Cricket said around a mouthful of deep-fried macaroni-and-cheese nugget. “Won’t Sharon worry I’m spending her inheritance?”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 67
