Barbara the Slut and Other People. Lauren Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ and I got very comfortable in that apartment. I tried to keep up decorum but she really let it all hang out. By the end of the first week she was walking around in T-shirts and underwear. I had to ask her to put pants on if anyone was stopping by. I still couldn’t be sure she was going to. She left clumps of her hair on the walls of the shower. She left tampons bleeding through wads of toilet paper on top of the garbage. She never washed her dishes. We had cockroaches and she didn’t care. She talked to them. Like, “You little cocksuckers are getting big. You like that fucking pizza, huh.” It was like living with a much grosser but much nicer version of my sister. Or of Tiffany. Or really, a grosser but nicer version of any other girl. Beth gave me a hard time, for sure. But she also wanted to talk to me every day. She brought me pizzas. She watched basketball with me.

      So I missed her when I moved to New York. We tried to keep in touch, but she said she was too busy to come to the city. I was too busy to go back down there. We were supposed to celebrate twenty-four together in August. We have the exact same birthday. But when she got to my apartment and I wasn’t home, she had a panic attack and drove back to Pennsylvania. My sister was the one who invited her because she said I was lonely. They wanted it to be a surprise. It wasn’t, because they kept asking me for each other’s phone numbers. Then the real surprise was that Beth didn’t show up.

      Several weeks later Beth said she was coming to the city to see me. Then she said if I wanted to see her I could meet her and her friend Marnie to go salsa dancing. I did want to see her but not for the price of going salsa dancing. She said she was going to go anyway. I asked her why she told me she was coming to see me if she was really coming to see Marnie. She said I was being a little bitch. She said she knew it wasn’t my fault that I was so sensitive but it pissed her off.

      I wanted Beth to come see me because I didn’t know anyone else. A couple of guys from college worked downtown. I had drinks with them when I first got here. But they weren’t close friends and they were hard to track down. Kelly wouldn’t let me hang out with her friends. She was still mad that I slept with her best friend in high school. This girl was unbelievably hot. I never would have gotten to sleep with her if she hadn’t been at my house every day of her life, and then decided to let me take care of her when she was drunk and on a shit-ton of mushrooms at a graduation party. The next night she came over to say thank you and that I was the nicest guy ever. And by thank you I mean she let me have sex with her then and several other times that summer. And that is called karma.

      So Kelly made it clear that her friends were not my friends. Also because of Kelly, the women in my office thought I was gay, but apparently not the fun kind of gay. Kelly got me a purple shirt to wear on the first day. She knew I would think it was blue because I can’t see reds. It never occurred to me that she would do that again. The last time was in high school. She knit me a yellow hat that turned out to be pink. When I got mad at her about the purple shirt she said it didn’t matter what color shirt I wore. Everyone knew that all men in development were gay and all women in development were straight. Except for on the finance side, and then the women were also gay. In any case, my coworkers kept to themselves. I spent most of my free time with my sister’s dog, Muscle. Other than that I was all alone in the big city. Each night, as I lay under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, under the polluted moon, I wept out of loneliness. Ha. Just kidding. But I was really fucking bored.

      A month after Beth said she was coming to see me and then didn’t, she called. She said she felt bad about the birthday not-surprise and about the salsa dancing, and she was going to visit me for real. I told her I wasn’t going to hold my breath in case she couldn’t find a parking spot on my street and just kept driving until she got to Canada. She said very funny. She was coming Saturday.

      On Saturday morning I made omelets for me and Kelly. Kelly fed half of hers to Muscle. Muscle was a Pomeranian. Kelly shaved him in the summer and it actually did look like he had muscles. But now he had long hair and Kelly called him Pammy because she said he didn’t have a penis in the winter. I preferred to call him Pammy year-round because Muscle was a stupid name for a dog. He was very cute and I loved him. He wasn’t mean like small dogs are mean. He would just sit and keep you company while you were watching TV or eating dinner or taking a crap or whatever. At night he liked to sleep between Kelly’s side and her arm, with his head on her shoulder. When Kelly was out he slept between my side and my arm. He loved to be under the covers except for his head. A tiny, very hairy, yellow person.

      • • •

      Beth called to say that she would be there at one. She got there at twelve forty. Beth had a lead foot. She drove sixty miles an hour in towns, and ninety on the highways. She drove with her left leg up on the dashboard, her left hand holding a cigarette and resting on the steering wheel. It always seemed likely that I was going to die when I drove with her. One time in particular she was driving seventy through town, on a road full of potholes, and the car sounded like it was losing big pieces. I was absolutely certain I was going to die. She called me a pussy for holding on to the door.

      I let Beth in and she gave me a big hug and said, “I love those slippers more and more every day.” My mom gave me these shearling slippers when Tiffany broke up with me and I was spending a lot of time in my dorm room. Now they were full of holes. It felt good to see Beth.

      Since I hadn’t known if she was going to show up, I hadn’t made any plans. Now I was thinking we could take a long walk with Pammy. Talk about life and internet dating. Get sandwiches and eat in the park. Watch a game and cook something healthy, something that Beth could learn from without me explicitly teaching her. I tried to do that when we lived together, to indeterminate effect. When I moved out I thought I’d be glad not to have to take care of her. Now I kind of missed it. At least she showed some appreciation. My sister showed none.

      “What should we do?” I asked Beth, thinking she would say, “Whatever you want.”

      “Shopping!” she said. I had never known Beth to want to go shopping before. Fine, I could do shopping. Beth said she wanted jeans and stuff for yoga and a perfume sample for a girl she worked with. Kelly said she couldn’t come because she had work to do, but she made a list of stores for us to go to in SoHo. When we left she was taking turns putting coats of paint on her nails and her dog’s nails.

      “I think nail polish is toxic for dogs,” said Beth.

      “This is dog nail polish,” said Kelly. It was yellow and Pammy was licking it.

      “What do you two want to do for dinner?” I said.

      “Something free,” said Kelly.

      “What, I buy you dinner?” I said.

      “Oh would you?” She smiled.

      “Let’s cook here,” I said.

      “Sure,” said Beth.

      “You know what I feel like? Diner-style grilled cheese and french fries and root beer,” said Kelly. So much for teaching Beth how to make something healthy.

      “Fine with me,” I said. “Beth?”

      “Sure.”

      • • •

      On the way to the subway Beth and I went into a store with crafts and stuff. I tried to wait outside but Beth wanted to try on all the jewelry and have me tell her how it looked. I thought all the jewelry looked the same. The crafts looked like stuff that Kelly’s friends made, maybe worse.

      Beth bought a ring. We looked in a junk shop next to the subway station and then got on the train. We sat down next to a deaf couple who were signing to each other and laughing hysterically.

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