Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?. Stevi Mittman

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СКАЧАТЬ down, I notice that—ta da—I’m already dressed. And I point this out to Bobbie, who looks me over and simply says, “Not.”

      “Try the skirt,” she insists.

      I remind her that I am going to work, and not as a streetwalker.

      “Part of your work is attitude,” she tells me. I swear she and my mother have read and reread the same chapter of that Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules a hundred times. “And to exude attitude you’ve got to feel it—feel in charge. More than in charge. You’ve got to feel and project superiority. In this skirt and a pair of stilettos, you’re too good for the likes of your ex-husband and for decorating bowling alleys and for everything—except me, of course.”

      She isn’t kidding.

      “Try it on. See if it doesn’t make you feel like an authority.”

      “On what?” I ask, slipping out of my jeans and holding the skirt up in front of my ratty underwear—which I really ought to replace if Drew Scoones is back in my life.

      I can barely make myself put the skirt on, but I know that Bobbie won’t let me refuse it until I do. Meanwhile she roots around in the closet, no doubt looking for shoes I could break an ankle in.

      “Perfect!” she shouts when she reemerges from the closet and takes a look at me. I look in the mirror, trying to see what she sees, while she straightens my shoulders before taking a step back. “What do you think?”

      I stare at the woman in the mirror. “I think I’d never again be able to tell Dana any of her clothes were out of the question.”

      “Maybe, but Rio will eat his two-timing, scum-sucking heart out. Here, you need these, too,” she says, throwing a pair of fishnet pantyhose at me. I don’t make any effort to catch them. “Don’t you want—”

      No, I don’t. It’s been a long time since I cared what Rio Gallo thought about me. And while Bobbie fusses around, picking up piles of discarded clothes, I tell her as much. I have a job, I have kids, I have more important things to worry about.

      “My, my,” Bobbie says, tsking when she looks at her watch. “Don’t you have to meet some salesman over at the Lanes? Where does the time go?”

      I look at my watch. It’s a half hour later than the clock on her nightstand—the one I’ve been carefully watching—reads.

      “I wonder where your jeans are,” she says. I look down and the carpet is completely devoid of any clothing—including mine. “I know they were here earlier.”

      I tell her that this isn’t funny, that I’m late and that I can’t go to the alley looking like I want to have a tryst in one.

      She offers to loan me a pair of her jeans, knowing that I couldn’t get them up higher than my knees, and I order her into her closet to get mine.

      Instead, she comes out with high boots and a white shirt to wear with the little skirt.

      “Couldn’t find them,” she says.

      I look in the mirror. Another job well done by Bobbie Lyons, I think to myself. Not.

      

      SO THIS IS HOW I come to be standing in L.I. Lanes in very high-heeled boots, a very short skirt, a blouse with very few buttons and a pair of very red cheeks.

      “Wow,” Steve, standing behind the counter counting cash, says, and adds a whistle. Mark leans over on his ladder to see what has Rio’s tongue hanging out and nearly topples over.

      “Is the pool-table salesman here yet?” I ask, feigning that superior attitude the skirt was supposed to give me.

      “Back here,” Mark says, only his voice breaks and it sounds like he’s croaking. “With your kids,” he adds, like it’s a warning.

      I walk carefully, because if I don’t, I’ll wind up showing even more leg, not to mention my underwear, when I fall flat on my face.

      The pool-table salesman is facing me, leaning over the table, intent on his shot. His fingers make a bridge through which the cue goes back and forth, back and forth.

      “Oh, God!” Dana, just coming in from the back door of the alley, says when she sees me. She looks quickly around the joint. Her eyes are wide, her jaw drops and out comes a very plaintive “Mo-om! What if my friends or someone who knows me, saw you in that?”

      Which causes Jesse to look up and gasp, which makes the pool-table salesman glance away from his shot and wind up seeing me. That causes him to nearly rip the table with the cue, sending the cue ball over the rail, which hits me in the chest and nearly knocks me over.

      All in the house that Jack built.

      Mark hurries down his ladder, Rio comes running, no doubt to massage my wound, and the pool-table salesman rushes toward me telling me he can’t say he’s sorry enough. Only, with everyone coming at me so fast, I lose my balance on Bobbie’s idiotic shoes and stumble backward.

      Steve, reaching out to catch me before I go down, winds up providing a soft landing as the two of us slip down the two steps and slide past a bunch of kids trying to figure out how to score a second spare in the settee area. We don’t stop until we’re halfway down the alley where, with Bobbie’s skirt around my waist, the heel of her left boot wedges in the gutter.

      Dana dies on the spot. I wish I could, but everyone is making a fuss over me so I can’t just cry and run out of the bowling alley the way she does.

      Jesse is staring and trying not to stare at the same time.

      Rio’s holding up his new camera phone and I just know he’s snapping pictures.

      And Mark is laughing his head off as he heads toward me, taking off his overshirt as he comes.

      “You might wanna…” he says as he drops it in my lap.

      “Wanna what?” I ask him. “Die?”

      He helps me up, despite Steve’s offer to let me stay where I am as long as I’d like.

      The pool-table salesman slicks back his hair and smiles at me. His eyes go up and down any parts of my body he hasn’t gotten a good enough look at. I can’t imagine what parts those could be.

      “Don Pardol,” he says, offering me his hand.

      Ignoring his outstretched hand I scoot past him to the ladies’ room, cursing Bobbie Lyons and her stupid shoes the entire way.

      In the restroom, another area that needs redoing before the grand opening, I tug at my belt until it’s a skirt again, put Mark’s shirt on, grateful it comes down to my knees, and take a look at myself in the mirror.

      I am a wreck, but things could be worse.

      Oh, wait. They are.

      Someone sticks her head into the ladies’ room. “Are you Teddi Bayer?”

      I try pleading the fifth.

      She tells me there’s a policeman СКАЧАТЬ