Don't Cry: Stories (2 page)

“No. I don’t put them on that early. Why?”    
_v

“A waitress might think they were disgusting. I wouldn’t want to sit next to them. The glue stinks.”

The next time she went into the Oasis, she brought a box of Dragon Lady fingernails, and two botdes of red polish, After she got her coffee and rolls, with the usual trouble, she took out the box and laid the flesh-colored spears on the table so Teresa would

notice them and wonder what the hell was going on She got the glue and began working, periodically stopping to hold the claws up to dry.

Teresa didn’t notice, but the guy at the next table did “I didn’t know anybody wore those things anymore,” he said.

“I do,” trilled Dolores in a hideously affected voice. “I’m naked without them.” Lily told her that she sometimes sounded like Blanche DuBois. She held up her taloned hands to her face and leered daintily. .

“Oh, Dragon Lady,” he said, “have mercy.”

His friend laughed and scratched his beard.

I am a sexually potent woman, thought Dolores. Even if I am partially bald. During one of their last fights, Allan had said, “There’s no love in you because there’s no sex in you. Sex is light and fertility and life and communication} "Vou only have this ... pornography and submission and blackness and death! You’re like a faggot!”

“You ass-wipe,” she muttered. She couldn’t help it if fertility didn’t interest her in the abstract. It did interest her in the real. “Do you want to have children?” she asked the man next to her.

“Yeah, one day. Why?”

“Because I like to hear people say they want children. That’s what would make me happy, I think, to have children. My roommate is beautiful and she’s not interested in having children.”

“Your roommate is an idiot, that’s why”

Sasha thumped against Dolores’s table. She was a fat girl, and her fat was lil«* the fur of a Persian cat. Her eyes were arrogantly flat and brown-gold, rimmed with black kohl. She wore a purple skirt with a gold hem and long green stockings with ducks on them. Of Patrick’s friends, she was chief among the Lily haters. “How are you, darling?” she said.

“Bothering somebody. How are you?”

“I’m eating. I’m going from house to house eating my brains out. Now I’m here to get some home fries off the cook. It’s the first day I’ve eaten in two weeks and I’m going to make the most of it.” “Where’s George?”

"I don’t know, getting chemotherapy." She sneered in an affected way that Dolores found absurd but exciting. “I don’t know where the hell he is and I’m tired of people asking me. That’s all I hear everywhere I go. ‘Is she the one who’s having an affair with George Hammond? Are they still together?’ Are there any home ] fries,. Eddie baby? With catsup and mayonnaise? Come sit by me and let me play with the hair on your chest. Only don’t talk to me about George Hammond. I don’t have anyplace to live. I lost my job at the art school and I couldn’t pay my rent. I’d come stay with you except for your creepy roommate.”

“Lily’s not so creepy. You’d like her if you actually knew her.”

“Is it true she bangs her head on the wall?”

“She might.”

“Do you know what she said to me the last time I saw her? She was talking to John Francis about how, when she was fourteen, she used to want plastic surgery to change her lips and her eyebrows, and she turned to me and said, ‘If you could get plastic surgery, what would you do?’ Jesus Christ!”

“She didn’t mean you should get plastic surgery.”

“What are you doing to your nails?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, here’s my home fries. Thanks, honey. Open your shirt. See you, Dolores. My life’s in a shambles.”

Dolores drank her coffee with even more sobriety. Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores.

Sasha was sitting at the counter now, fondling the thin blond cook through his faded shirt, and skillfully nipping up mayonnaise' and-catsup-drenched fries, three fries at a time, with her pinkie extended. She was yelling about George Hammond. What would happen to Sasha? She almost had a degree in Russian, specializing in literature—but then she’d dropped out. Since then, she had been mulling around Ann Arbor in garish skirts and boots, sitting in bars and cafes gossiping all day.

Dolores was the same way, except that the degree she almost had was in history, and rather than gossiping in bars and cafes, she merely sat in them.

Teresa coursed by like a shark, her low forehead predominant as a snout. Dolores felt impotent detestation. Teresa saw the false fingernails, now standing out from Dolores’s hands like evil thoughts. Dolores stared at her nails, like a sea blob heaved up on a hot beach, dimly realizing that its soft, flat flippers won’t help it get back into the water. Teresa sneered and began scribbling on her little gray pad. She ripped off Dolores’s check and threw it at her, mumbling something about needing more table space.

Was strength the ability to make someone leave a restaurant, mostly because they couldn’t bear to be in your presence anymore? Was it being big and loud and going to a bar with other big loud people and making more noise than anyone else there? Insulting someone? People insulted Lily often, and though she pretended not to be affected, Dolores knew she was hurt by it. But she couldn’t stop them from doing it. Did that mean she was weak? On the other hand, Dolores sometimes pushed Patrick around and all he did was say “Dolores!” But he was a promising actor and a successful musician, and she was a flop.

She sweated wonderfully as she ran around the gym. Every day there were lots of other people sweating around the track with her, in headbands and sweatsuits. They were all trying to be strong. The day before, in the checkout line at Kresge’s, Dolores had overheard a girl with pounds of wavy blond hair and bulging calf muscles say to her friend, “And I’m getting up every day and running!” like it was the best thing ever.

Anyone would do anything to be stronger. In the gym next to the track, college students took karate classes. Little teenage girls padded out of the dressing rooms in their white karate uniforms, some of them wearing small gold chains and nail polish. She could hear the instructor yelling at them. “Everyone wants to have control!” he shouted. “And to have control, you have to fight for it, work for it!”

Lily and Patrick were obsessed with working. Whenever you asked Lily how she was, she would either say that she was good, she’d been very productive, or that she was awful, she’d been so unproductive. All night, they would sit at the kitchen table eating toast and working on their projects. Lily had her work for school and her articles for local papers and magazines, and Patrick had his rehearsals and homework, plus his music to write. Lily worked with her long legs drawn up under her and her shoulders in a curl; Patrick sat on his tailbone, his legs spread and his cotton shirt open, his head hanging from his neck like a heavy flower.

After she ran, she stopped by Majik Market to shoplift several eyeliner pencils and a box of peanut brittle. Then she went home to share the candy with Lily. They sat at the kitchen table and ate big slabs of it out of the open box.

People have told me that my sexuality is death-oriented,” said Dolores, crunching her mouthful of candy.

“People have dumb ideas about sex,” said Lily. “How long have you been having sex?”

"Twelve years.”

"If your sexuality was death-oriented, you’d be dead by now.” She was picking through the candy; it looked funny to see her serious face bent over it.

"Well, they didn’t mean literal death. They meant death in the abstract.”

"There’s no such thing as death in the abstract. You’re dead or you’re not.” Lily’s hand dived into the box and emerged with a nut-encrusted chunk. “You can’t have a facsimile of death.” She leaned back in her chair like Patrick and popped the candy into her mouth. She sucked on it, her face slowly becoming tranquil.

“How do you know that if you don’t know what death is like?” Dolores ran her tongue over her molars and found them coated with gnawed candy

Dolores often wanted to die, even though she didn’t know what it was like, either. Allan used to tell her about the recurring nightmares he had, in which his father humiliated him sexually He said it was the same thing as dreaming about death. Dolores thought that if to be humiliated was to be dead, she would be decomposed beyond recognition. But she was crazily alive, stuffed with blood and muscles, going to the bathroom regularly, having conversations.

If she were dead, her blood wouldn’t suffer the pain of struggling to sing while life’s constant attack made it hurt to move in her veins at all. Why couldn’t people be nice? Why did you go into a restaurant and get attacked by a bitch who hated you for no reason? Why did Allan’s friends, when they saw her, look at her with that vague leer and the concern they thought they should have for a disturbed older woman, the expression that felt like a razor across her face? Allan’s friends were young and loud, their bodies hideously forceful in the occupation of space. Even though he was in art school, most of them were law students, always apparently happy and grabbing. Just the sight of them, with their rough, healthy skin and big legs and heavy, porous head hair made her feel horrible, especially when one of them cornered her and tried to be nice. Sometimes she encouraged it, and she was always sorry later.

She remembered a time she’d met one of them at a student party. She and Allan had broken up a few days before. She was fairly drunk and slumped on a couch with a few kids whom she could no longer remember except as a mass of T-shirts and long hair. She was staring at a group of people stomping their way through a dance in the middle of the room. Harvey approached her and shouted through the music that he wanted to walk her home. She chattered to him all the way to her apartment, some grim inner monitor manipulating her shrill babble to impress him with her normality, her happiness. She told him about her projects, her courses at school. He made his voice go gentle; he touched her elbow, put a hand on her shoulder. They sat on her front porch steps, watching ants run in and out of their grainy little nest in the crack of the second step. He was very careful with the way he talked to her; he wanted to show that he respected her. He talked about books and art. He asked her, “But seriously, what is your favorite Faulkner novel?”

But he was neurotic; he was weak. Once when they were arguing, she said, “And everyone in the art department hates you,” even though she had no idea if that was true.

They were sitting on her front porch in the dark of night; she could not see his reaction, but she could feel it: He withdrew into himself and almost began to quiver with emotion. For a moment, she thought he would cry. “Not all of them,” she said hastily. “Just a few.” And he said, “Who? Who are they?”

And still he held her and said, “ I want you to be a strong woman. I know you can be. I want you to be productive.” He held her and she talked about her adulterous, alcoholic father as if he were a character on TV. “He ruined my mother financially and mentally. I don’t even know where he is now. Somewhere in South America, trying to set up a tropical-fish business and fucking some fat eighteen-year-old who’s in the Peace Corps. He’s been through five failed businesses in the last eight years. He ruins everything he touches. Everybody said my mother was crazy when she went after him with the scissors. But I didn’t think so.”

Her mother was putting her life back together, even though she was murderously unhappy. Right after Dolores got out of the hospital, her mother invited her over for sandwiches cut up into four pieces. Her mother sat on the very edge of the couch and Dolores sat on the edge of a chair, with the sandwiches on a table between them. Her mother gripped her cream cheese and olive morsel like she had tweezers for hands. “The problem is that I just never asked ‘What about me?’ ” she said furiously. “And now it’s time for me. Me!”

Dolores had pitied her terribly.

But her mother was tough in her way. She ran her travel business and went to a yoga club and was even having an affair. She was strong, even if her face looked as if it were a mask held in place with staples.

Dolores lay in the dark of her room and said, “And now it’s time for me! Me!” She said it as vehemently as she could, but she knew she had nothing but the dozens of eyebrow pencils and the nail polish and face cream she’d stolen and piled up on her dresser.

T ily and Patrick were having a fight. Dolores looked on with interest, although there wasn’t much to watch. They were only eating breakfast, but they were doing it furiously “You don’t have to pretend that anything’s normal,” said Lily.

“I’m not.” Patrick held up his slice of rye bread and spread it with apple butter evenly and meticulously. Lily was angry at Patrick for not telling off his friends who were mean to her. Maybe they would break up, and then Lily and Dolores could spend more time at the bar talking about how awful men were.

Lily got up in the middle of eating her soft-boiled egg and began sweeping the floor like a robot. “This place is fucking filthy,” she said.

It was. Lily had already swept up a huge pile of dirt and dust and papers and food, and she hadn’t even come close to finishing.

“You don’t have to act like we’re living in a nuthouse,” said Patrick.

“We are.” Lily threw the broom on the floor and went back to her egg, which sat in its rose cup. “It’s not surprising that your friends treat me like shit, when it’s obvious you don’t have any respect for me. You let them do it. If I had friends who called me up and invited me to parties and wouldn’t invite you, I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t treat you like that.”

“You could’ve gone.”

“I wasn’t invited. You and Dolores were. Sasha’s always nasty to me anyway. You saw how she was last week.”

Patrick put down his bread, picked up the knife, and began resmoothing the apple butter. “I saw how you were, too. You didn’t extend yourself at all.”