Devils in the Sugar Shop

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Viv’s off,” Deedee said. “These last few weeks she’s seemed so nervous.”

  “She has a stalker, Mom,” Naomi said, packing up her pastels and paper to store in the cabinets that lined the wall. “You’d be a little on edge too.”

  Ashley

  After Peach left her kitchen, Ashley abandoned the preparations for the party, moved by the emptiness of the house to snoop in her son’s room, blaming her impulse on her bottomless glass of merlot.

  Above Lee’s bed hung one of Viv’s revisionist paintings. Ashley had bought it for his seventeenth birthday, and he’d loved it. She now lay back on Lee’s bed and ran her toe up the leg of a black and blond Bo Duke standing next to his Confederate-flagged car. She ran her toe over the whopping bulge in the crotch of his faded jeans.

  Ashley thought about how she and Troy had practically groomed Lee to be an eccentric, making him stay up late when he was fifteen to go with them to the midnight movies at the Dundee Theater. They would sneak in deep-fried dill pickles from the bar next door, and bottles of hard lemonade, and sit in the back for whispered cinematic debates over 81/2 and The Breakfast Club and Stardust Memories. Social Services should have stepped in years ago, she thought.

  “Yoo-hoo,” Deedee said, appearing at Lee’s door, having let herself into the apartment. Ashley jumped, spilling some of her merlot on the bedcover. “Don’t worry,” Deedee said. She ran off, then returned with a bottle of chardonnay from the kitchen. “White wine’ll get it out.”

  As Deedee dabbed away the wine spots, Ashley gave her a peck on the cheek. “Welcome back, doll-face,” Ashley said, pinching one of Deedee’s thin braids between her fingers, running her thumb over the beads. “Not only do you not have an inch of tan on you,” she said, “but you’re damn-near peaked. When’d you get in?”

  “Minutes ago,” Deedee said. “I went to art class, then came over here. The tropics were brutal.”

  “We should cancel the Sugar Shop party then, maybe?” Ashley said.

  “No, I’ve got to throw myself into work,” she said, “or I’ll just daydream about being away. You’re drunk and hanging out in your son’s bedroom?”

  “I raised him to be a quirky freak. He’s doomed. What do normal boys have on their walls, anyway?”

  “My brother had a poster of Cheryl Tiegs,” Deedee said. “And of some girl wearing those sneaker-like roller skates. And with tiny, slick-looking, hot-pink shorts that crept up the crack of her ass. Oh, my god, how I wanted to be that piece of trash when I grew up.”

  “I came in here,” Ashley said, “to look for sordid evidence of some kind. Isn’t that sick? I mean, the boy already came out. So what secrets am I after? Lee would be furious if he found out I went through his things.”

  “Only because he doesn’t understand,” Deedee said, touching her toe to a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. “Don’t you make your boy pick up after himself? You really are a feral little bunch, aren’t you?” She gestured toward Ashley’s T-shirt. “Concrete Blonde, eh?” Deedee said. “What, the Red Hot Chili Peppers was at the dry cleaners?”

  “Wealth has made you despicable.”

  “No,” Deedee said, sitting at Lee’s desk. “Wealth hasn’t made me despicable. It’s just brought out more of the despicability that was already there.”

  “So, Miss Despicable,” Ashley said, “let’s break into his diary. It’s right in front of you.”

  With a straightened-out paperclip, Deedee picked at the diary’s heart-shaped lock. Lately Deedee tended to overdress in pricey designer getups, making Ashley feel always frumpy in her jeans and the old concert Ts she’d been wearing for years. But today, despite being all blinged-out in her chinchilla jacket and fingers full of rings, Deedee looked pleasantly sloppy.

  “These kids, they have no idea what it’s like to be their parents,” Deedee continued. “They don’t think about the fact that we were the ones who made them happen to begin with, and that counts for something. We gave up a bunch of different lives we could have had, didn’t we? He belongs to you. He just doesn’t appreciate that fact, because how could he? So, yes, he’ll be mad if he finds out, which he won’t, but if he does, so what?”

  For some reason, Ashley didn’t worry half as much about her daughter as she did about Lee, even though Peyton lived alone in an apartment in Minnesota. Peyton had a healthy sense of fear that Lee completely lacked.

  Ashley picked up a vintage Playgirl from the 1970s that Lee had left right there on his nightstand, the photo spreads full of slender, flaccid men with bangs and mustaches and packs of Marlboros. “Wouldn’t most boys keep this sort of thing hidden from their mothers?” Ashley said. When looking at the pictures, did Lee imagine himself a child, in pajamas and half asleep, carried to bed by one of the more fatherly of the men? Did he picture the pantsless man in the baseball jersey applying tincture of iodine to his black eye after a fight with a schoolyard bully, then taking him out to the garage to teach him how to slug a punching bag?

  Maybe Lee longed to be taken to baseball games and to be given shaving lessons, to go out to the backyard to toss around the ol’ pigskin, to live the life of a Father’s Day greeting card with its ringed-neck mallards and golf clubs and antique automobiles. Sure, blame strong mothers for gay men, but what about weak fathers? She picked up a tin of clove cigarettes and lit one. “And most boys would want to hide the fact that they smoked. And they’d lie through their teeth if confronted. Where did I go wrong?”

  Deedee tossed the violated diary aside, dismissing it as vague and self-mythologizing, and took the old Playgirl from Ashley to flip through.

  “The other day I ended up at this website for a company that’s making dirty movies for women,” Deedee said, “and they wanted you to take a survey. So I wrote that if I was making a stag movie for ladies, I’d have John Travolta and Debra Winger just like they were in Urban Cowboy, except they wouldn’t be assholes to each other, and I’d have that amber lighting from Last Tango in Paris, but without the depressing sex, and I’d have the music from Vertigo. But then you click to see various results from the survey, and mostly women just seem to want to see fewer penises and better shoes.”

  “You know what? I don’t want to know anything, Deedee,” Ashley said, standing up from the bed, rubbing her temples where a headache had begun to jab at her. “Let’s go.”

  Deedee stopped at a hallway mirror to unbead and unknot her little braids. “Your anxiety about Lee is really just your anxiety about your husband,” she said. “When me and Zeke were starting to have trouble, I became convinced that Naomi was on meth. The girl was only thirteen, a rather immature thirteen at that, and I was on the Internet investigating the things to look for in meth addiction. I remember lying back on her canopy bed one afternoon, stirring my ginger and rye with one of her cherry lollipops, staring at the ceiling, visualizing her whole decline—her sunken cheeks, her gray eyes. I just became entranced by the whole misery of it. It’s projection. How have things been with Troy?”

  “We went to hear Bloodcow last night,” Ashley said wistfully. Troy had become friendly with the punk-metal band’s drummer, a jazz-trained military lad who wrote vulgar poetic rants to the Letters page of the Omaha Street. Ashley and Troy had stayed for a half hour of the band’s thrashing, determined to be gritty and young at heart, sitting at the window of the 49’r, having beers and vodka-pickled maraschino cherries, looking out between the twisting tubes of a neon sign to a view of an auto shop and heavy traffic. As they’d left, stepping lightly along the skinny, icy sidewalk lining the front of the bar, less than a stumble and a fall into the rushing path of cars and trucks, Ashley marveled that the bar’s patrons didn’t regularly meet their deaths after a few stiff belts of Jack. Troy slipped his arm into her coat and around her waist, hooking one finger in the belt loop of her jeans, and pulled her close to his side as they walked to the corner where their car was parked. He nuzzled in to give her a kiss on her cheek and on her neck, his breath warm on her skin. My ear
s are ringing like crazy, he whispered above the ringing in her own ears.

  “Maybe I’m imagining that anything’s wrong,” Ashley told Deedee. “Maybe we’re completely happy. Probably I just shouldn’t mix antidepressants and merlot. Oh,” and she remembered they’d left the bottle of white wine on the stereo speaker in Lee’s room. “Can you imagine if we’d just forgotten it?” she said, going back. After picking up the wine, she squiggled her name in the ring of condensation the bottle had left behind, a wet signature that would evaporate before Lee got home, a small, perishable bit of proof.

  Plum

  Do I look fat in this picture?” Peach asked Plum, holding up her stalker’s latest valentine. Peach had stormed in without a word of greeting, returning from her writing class to plop down at the bookstore’s front desk and riffle and rip through the mail.

  Peach’s head, hands, and feet were glued to a piece of vintage pornography, a photo of a woman with breasts dangling low, her figure overall hour-glassy. The woman posed outdoors, leaning against the tail fin of a Chevy Bel Air, her thick hip cocked and ankles crossed. The picture was not a page torn from a magazine, per usual, but a five-by-seven black-and-white print with serrated edges, which made it seem somehow doubly indiscreet. She could’ve easily been just some woman who, feeling spry, had taken off her clothes one afternoon, maybe for a skinny dip or a romp in the sun. Now here she was, years later, probably somebody’s grandmother, with her youth all hanging out like that.

  “That’s the best you’ve looked so far,” Plum said. “I just don’t understand the way those other women look. The ones with the balloony boobs.” Plum made circular gestures far out in front of herself, where her breasts would be if they were way-out-to-there. “Why did anyone allow that to become sexy?”

  Peach tucked the stalker’s photo between the pages of a book on the desk. “Ashley Allyson saw her novel in the dollar bin,” Peach said. “I had to come up with a quick little song and dance.”

  Plum sat cross-legged on the floor in her long wool skirt, her wire-rim spectacles hooked behind her ears, sorting through a box of men’s pulp paperbacks from the ’50s and ’60s that an elegant old woman, freshly widowed, had dropped off. “Ha, looky this,” she said, holding up one of the comically lurid potboilers. “The Climacticon,” Plum read aloud, “The machine any red-blooded male would pawn his wife to get.” Plum put the book aside, to save for someone. “I can’t believe you’re still taking that writing class, Peach,” Plum continued. “You’re a glutton for punishment.”

  Plum didn’t approve of Peach’s covert chumminess with Troy Allyson’s wife, partly because Plum knew Ashley and liked her quite a lot. And though Plum didn’t know Troy at all, she had long disdained the movie reviews he wrote for the Omaha Street. His tastes ran too much toward the melodramatic—toss up some art-house weepie for him to eyeball in the dark, and it would inevitably lead to a two thousand–word dissertation littered with words like “titular” and “verisimilitude.” Of course a man like him would be mad for Peach; she was as French as an Omaha girl could get. With the runs in her stockings, her fingernails chewed to the quick and painted too dark, she was a foreign-movie suicide on two skinny legs.

  “Does your lover even read,” Plum asked, sneering, “or is he just so impressed with his own brain that all he can do is spend hours in the newsroom, pontificating?” To Plum’s thinking, there were only two types in town: those who were her customers at Mermaids Singing, and those who were not. It was difficult for her to trust the intelligence and instincts of those who were not, and Troy was one of those were-nots. She’d never once seen him in Mermaids Singing, which struck her as a fatal failing for a newspaper editor. Plum’s bookshop was “a fantasia of ephemera and erratica, a funhouse-mirror looking glass held against history and society, a cornucopiac microcosm of the best of times and the worst of times,” according to his very own newspaper in a profile by its freelance book reviewer, a pudgy office temp who performed, at poetry slams, rap about online dating.

  Troy’s put-upon wife, however, stepped in frequently. Ashley never left Mermaids Singing without buying something, and her selections always impressed Plum, leading to animated discussion at the rolltop desk where Plum kept her electric calculator. It was difficult for Plum to condone her twin’s affair, knowing what she knew about Ashley: that she preferred the culinary memoirs of Ruth Reichl over those of M. F. K. Fisher; that she occasionally indulged in 1970s self-help; that she had four different editions of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves; that she’d spent $75 on a racy mini-comic for her son, How to Have Fun with a Strong Girl, signed by R. Crumb.

  “You’re coming to Ashley’s Sugar Shop party with me tonight, right?” Peach asked.

  “Nope,” Plum said.

  “Why not?” Peach asked, whining, gnawing ferociously at a hangnail.

  “Because I love not going places. It’s my new passion.”

  “I can’t go by myself, Lum-Lum,” she said, resorting to nostalgic name-calling. Peach called Plum “Lum-Lum” just infrequently enough for it to maintain its impact, tickling her with its unmistakable sisterliness. “You and Ashley are buddies,” Peach said. “You can talk to her. About literature. What are you bookish girls reading these days? Valley of the Dolls?”

  “You act so dumb sometimes,” Plum said. “Why do you do that? You think it makes you prettier?” But Plum knew that Peach, no bookworm by any means, had long been wanting to give up Mermaids Singing. Peach wanted to go broke owning her own theater, playing the characters she’d someday grow too old to pull off. But Peach hated filling out forms. By the time she got any arts funding, she’d be an eighty-year-old Ophelia, a burnt-out Electra.

  The bark and shriek of a domestic dispute slipped in from the street, through a window at the front of the store open a crack to let in gusts of cool air. The shop was frequently too warm, as the condos upstairs were overrun with the elderly. In particular, there seemed to be a surfeit of septuagenarian divorcées in greasy fur coats succumbing to mange, always flaunting their grand-fathered-in kitty cats (pets were no longer allowed) and constantly complaining to maintenance of the cold. Because of the onion-thin skin of this slow parade of battleaxes, Plum and Peach sweltered in the winter months.

  “Ooh, it looks like an ugly one,” Peach said, walking to the front to watch the couple pass. She stood at the door on tiptoes to see over the blue-finned, red-nippled mermaid (reading Colette) painted on the glass.

  “An ugly what?” Plum said. She walked to the window seat and raised a slat of the blinds. “An ugly husband? An ugly wife?”

  “An ugly fight. Look how he’s getting in her face like that.”

  “But she can’t just walk away, can she?” Plum murmured. “Is he going to slug her? Should we call the police?”

  “No, he won’t slug her,” Peach said. “At least not until they get home. Then bap, a knuckle sandwich.”

  “But maybe not,” Plum said. “Maybe things are different when they’re at home. In the dark of their kennel. At home, they just break open a bottle of us-against-the-world and anesthetize. Maybe it’s only when they’re out in the city, faced with everything they don’t got, that they turn on each other.”

  After a silence, Peach said, “What am I doing, Plum?”

  “That little lover’s tango got you thinking,” Plum said, sitting on the cushions of the window seat, drawing her knees up, putting her arms around them. “It’s like a metaphor. For your affair.”

  “Oh, stop,” Peach said. She sat next to Plum. Peach’s skin was all goose-bumpy, and Plum reached over to rub some warmth into her arms. “Everything can be a metaphor for an affair,” Peach said. “Because, our feelings for other people, that’s all anybody’s ever really thinking about at any given minute, isn’t it? Am I happy alone? Am I happy married? Am I having enough sex? Am I having too much? Is he unhappier than I am?”

  “I really can’t judge you. I have to confess,” Plum said. She stood and walked to a mirror on the wall, cl
ipping and unclipping her earring, a costume-jewelry cluster of silvery rhinestones she’d gotten for a nickel. Toying with the earring seemed the gesture of a soap-opera socialite burdened with tummy-aches of guilt. “I’ve developed a little crush on someone else,” she said. “I don’t deserve Mickey.”

  “Ah,” Peach said, nodding toward the window. “Metaphor, yourself.”

  “Maybe,” Plum said. “I think I’m going to cheat on him.”

  “Feh,” Peach said, an expression she and Plum had affected as girls sitting around in the summer poring over their dad’s old Mad magazines.

  “S’true.”

  “S’not,” Peach said. “You would never cheat on Mickey. I don’t even want to hear about your stupid crush.”

  “Oh, listen to you,” Plum said, turning away from the mirror to glare at Peach. “You describe to me every lurid, carnal detail of your sex life with Troy, and I can’t even talk about a flirtation?” She sat at the desk and picked up the Sugar Shop invite, along with its free coupon. Fifty percent off Garbo’s Tulip, it read. For that sophisticated lady who just vants to be alone, the satiny Garbo’s Tulip hypnotizes with its gentle massage knots and patented “angel pocket.” Fits discreetly in any purse, evening clutch, or makeup bag; includes faux-mink-lined velveteen satchel in one of three tastefully muted colors: Gilded Lily, Platinum Blonde, or Champagne Bubble.

  “I’ve never described carnal details,” Peach said.

  “You don’t have to,” Plum said. “We share a diseased brain.” Plum had a little scar on her temple, to the right of her eye, from a tricycle spin-out when she was four. Peach had a scar on her cheek, to the left of her ear, from taking a spill in a rosebush when she was five. They had long liked to tell people the scars were their only evidence of ever having been conjoined at the head, having been expertly severed from each other in infancy, in a hospital incubator.