Revenge of the Cootie Girls (16 page)

It bothered me a little, I admit, how
my
friends and former producers Tamayo and Claire had become such good friends when I wasn't there. At first, I couldn't figure out what they had in common, but it turned out the mixed-race business gave them a lot of common ground. They were both former special-report producers, roughly the same age, late twenties, and closer in age to each other than to me. They both had, under normal conditions, an excess of self-confidence.

On the dissonant side, Claire was a vegetarian, whereas Tamayo was a carnivore and had eaten whale once, which she found a tad oily. She even had an Eat More Whale bumper sticker from an Eat More Whale campaign in Japan a few years back, though as a joke, not because she was for eating whales. Claire is very tolerant of people who eat meat, though she never gives up her campaign to get other people to give it up, but she was pretty rabid about some things, like saving the whales, and didn't have a good sense of humor about it. Still, despite this difference, she and Tamayo had bonded, leading me to wonder how I fit into this Benetton tableau vivant.

Tamayo read my mind. “Hey, look at us, we're like ‘Charlie's Angels' for the nineties. A black chick, a Jap chick, and the token dead redhead. I forgot to tell you, Robin, we have a new security trick for you,” Tamayo said. “It's an Elayne Boosler trick. You get six locks, and you lock three of them, so if a burglar tries to pick your locks he'll always be locking three and unlocking three.”

“Isn't that a great idea?” Claire said. “When she told us …”

“
She
told you this?”

“Last night, at this party we went to. Boosler was there and Tamayo introduced me to her. We would have invited you along, but you were in L.A.”

“I always miss these parties for some reason.” I admit I am a tad starstruck and get a kick out of meeting celebrities. I'd love the chance to say something stupid to Matt Dillon sometime. I guess that's the small-town girl in me.

“I was in L.A. having dinner with my ex-husband and his divine new fiancée,” I said. As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I planned
not
to mention this, because I thought it might upset Claire, especially since Burke's fiancée was packing it up in L.A. and moving to Washington for him, and this was well known.

It did upset her.

“What will I do when that moment comes, when I have to meet Jess and his new fiancée?” Claire said. “Oh God, I'm hyperventilating.”

“Take your head off,” Tamayo said. “Breathe deep. Sometimes people are only meant to take each other partway in life.”

“Where'd you hear that?” I asked.

“From your super,” Tamayo said. “Phil. I had tea with him and Helen after my tarot reading. Claire, you should call Sally. Have a tarot with her, and then have tea with Phil. Pick you right up.”

“Don't call Sally,” I said, exasperated.

Sally would give Claire the usual rap about following her instincts. We all have good and bad instincts, so you can't follow all of them, though Sally certainly tried. Her instincts led her to Dirk, a writer in his second year of writer's block who kicked her naked out of his apartment one night and refused to let her back in to get her clothes and books, despite Sally's screaming and banging on his door.

When she finally got her stuff back, it had all been mutilated by Dirk. Big chunks were cut out of clothes, the CDs were cracked and scratched, and pages were missing from her books. Sally spent a month trying to piece together what was on those missing pages, thinking it was some coded message from Dirk and if she figured it out she won some kind of big prize, like the return of his affection. She didn't give up this quest until she met a new True Love, the one who took off with her life savings.

“You know how Sally makes decisions,” I said. “When the tarot and the horoscope don't provide the answer, she tells herself: If I see a red car before a blue car, I'll do
A
. If I see a blue car before a red car, I'll do
B
. It's hardly a rational process you can invest faith in.”

“You don't get it,” Tamayo said.

We got a cab, and as we rode uptown Claire snapped herself out of her angst by resuming her questioning about Julie. How come Julie had waited so long to contact me?

“We had a falling-out, a long time ago. You know how it is when you're young. You harbor grudges over dumb stuff. Then you grow up and get nostalgic and you let go of the shit and reconnect. You'll know what I mean in about ten years.”

Claire rolled her eyes. She hates it when I play the age and experience cards, but I had about a decade of experience on her, things I'd learned the hard way, like, a little religion can come in handy sometimes, a cat is a woman's best friend, and if you attend an airborne ash-scattering keep your mouth shut and beware the updraft, among other things.

“What did you fall out over?”

“A dress I borrowed and returned in less-than-ideal shape.”

“Pretty dumb thing to nurse a grudge over.”

“Hey, people are killed for less,” Tamayo said. “Right, Robin? Tell her about the chicken and the egg.”

Buried somewhere in my closet is a box of scrapbooks full of stories about people who killed each other for less, entitled “The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back,” e.g., the man who killed his wife in an argument over where to put the mustard on the dinner table. People have been killed ostensibly because they served eggs for breakfast every single day, because they hid the milk behind the vegetables in the refrigerator, in arguments over toast and marmalade, etc. In the Philippines, two brothers fought to the death in an argument over who was prettier, Imelda Marcos or Princess Diana. The Imelda man won.

“Remember the woman who killed her husband with a skillet because he ‘forgot' to mow the lawn for the third day in a row?” Tamayo said.

“I'm sure there was more to it than the lawn,” Claire said, and she was right. The woman who hit her husband in the head fifty-some times with a skillet, hammering him like a nail, didn't do it because of the lawn. She did it because she suddenly decided she'd like him a whole lot better a foot shorter and dead. That Filipino brother didn't die over the debatable charms of Princess Diana. Same with the woman killed over mustard placement on the dinner table. The real issues weren't condiments or Imelda Marcos, because what goddamned difference does it make? Those are the cover arguments for the real issues.

“Isn't it funny how people would rather kill each other than be honest and work things out?” I said.

“It's fucking hilarious,” Claire said. “But there's got to be more to it than just a stained dress. I hope we're not wasting an evening because of her.”

“Yeah, there better be a payoff,” Tamayo said. “There better be major fun waiting for us.”

My first inclination was to keep mum, maybe pout a bit, think to myself that it would be good to see a real friend, like Julie, who understood me.

But I had to admit there was resentment between us.

“There was probably a lot of stuff going on that I didn't understand at the time,” I said. “I think some of it had to do with Doug Gribetz, this boy we were both in love with when we were growing up. Between me and Julie, it became untenable, our both having a crush on the same boy, so we solved the problem by betting on him in a game of Trouble. That was Julie's idea.”

“Oh, my older sister had that game. With the Pop-o-Matic, right?” Claire said.

“Pop-o-what?” Tamayo said.

“Dice in a plastic bubble. You popped the bubble to roll the dice,” I explained.

“That's the kind of thing I wanted!” Tamayo said. “I love my Grandma Scheinman, but she never got the girl stuff right. I'd ask for American toys for Hanukkah or my birthday and she'd send me porcelain dolls and Parcheesi games.”

“Poor Tamayo,” Claire said. She turned to me. “You bet this boy in a game of Trouble?”

“Yeah, the winner got to be in love with Doug Gribetz, the loser got to be in love with Bobby Sherman. And we adored Bobby Sherman, especially Julie.…”

“Bobby Sherman?” Tamayo said.

“He sang the song, ‘Julie Do You Love Me,'” Claire said.

“Julie loved that Julie song. That should give you some idea how wonderful Doug Gribetz was, that the winner got to be in love with him over Bobby Sherman. Anyway, I lost. I know that sounds hilarious, but it was a big issue between us for years. At least for me.”

Doug Gribetz. Even now that name made my heart beat faster. He was the standard by which I judged all other men, and all other men fell short. It was completely understandable that I was in love with him. Every girl was in love with Doug Gribetz. Hard not to be. It wasn't just that he was nice-looking and smart. In a lot of ways, he was the most mature boy I'd ever known. Popular with everyone because he was kind to everyone, even me, and everyone respected him. He had a good heart. We rarely spoke in all the years we shared a classroom, but one time, in third grade, when I was being pushed roughly around a circle of girls, he came up and said, “What are you doing?” in a voice that made all the girls stop and hang their heads a little. He walked me home, and we talked about stuff the whole way. I was on cloud nine. We parted shyly, and never spoke extensively again. After that, I was never tortured by the popular girls while he was present. Did that ever deepen my infatuation.

“Julie ended up dating Doug for a while in eleventh grade. That really burned my butt,” I said.

“What other resentments did you have?” Claire asked.

“Oh gee. Let me think. I resented that she was prettier than me, or at least always acted like she was, and she resented that I got better grades in school even though she thought she was smarter than me, especially in math and stuff like that. That was all a long time ago. It seems so silly now. What we shared was so much greater than the things that tore us apart,” I said.

There was more to our resentment than I was willing to admit to Claire and Tamayo.

“I think she's trying to show you how rich she is and how smart she is, that she can get you going this way,” Tamayo said as we pulled up to a nondescript building with an awning on Park Avenue.

Way to go, Julie, I thought. You managed to get that Park Avenue address, one way or another.

13

P
ARK
A
VENUE
is a grand boulevard with a tree-lined concrete divider that stretches from Union Square downtown up into East Harlem. From Grand Central to the 90s, it is an aberrant stretch of quiet in New York, super-ritzy, with clean, broad sidewalks, buildings with doormen, bright lights, very few shops, and a rather snotty attitude designed to keep the city's less hygienic riffraff at bay. Even at this late hour, you could almost choke on the smell of White Shoulders perfume and old money in the air.

The doorman didn't know who we were and there was no answer on the house phone, which supported my theory that the party was elsewhere, that Kathy had come here after she'd run into Julie and been drawn into the prank and they'd gone on from here. We made up a big story, about our friend Kathy, a cleaning woman who we feared had fallen into a diabetic coma and was stuck in a closet. But the doorman either didn't believe us or wasn't anxious to let a trio of strange women in costume up into his building, and he couldn't leave his post to accompany us.

“Parking garage,” Claire said. We went around the corner to the building's garage entrance, and waited about five minutes before the garage door rolled open and one of the tenants drove out. As casually as possible, we walked in under the closing door. From there, we caught the elevator.

The apartment was on the eleventh floor. There was no answer to our knocks, but the door was slightly open, exposing about a quarter-inch of the door jamb. It gave easily with a firm push.

For a moment, I forgot this was all a big joke, and felt alarmed. Then, I remembered, and laughed. Claire and Tamayo, who had been waiting for my emotional cue, laughed too.

Claire said, “I think they're waiting for us.”

The door opened into a beautiful apartment, as cold as a meat locker. The A/C was cranked up full and there was the scent of aftershave in the air, something expensive with a woodsy cedar undernote, like Chanel Antaeus. The place was decorated with country antiques, the very expensive kind, lots of rough-hewn blond wood cabinets and things with applique. Expensive, and yet comfortable.

“Hello?” I called out. There was no answer.

Claire called. Nothing.

“There's nobody here,” Tamayo said, going into the kitchen. Claire and I went into the bedroom, which was similarly furnished, right down to the antique blue ceramic pitcher and basin on the bedside table. You would have thought you were in nineteenth-century Provence if it weren't for the desk with the computer on it. Didn't seem like Julie's taste, though, at least not the
old
Julie, the one I knew. If she had money, and evidently she did, I figured she'd go way overboard, lots of rococo gilt and crystal chandeliers, like a smaller version of the Plaza Hotel after it was Ivana-ized.

This sure was a long way from the basement suite in the house where Julie and her mom lived with Julie's uncle and his common-law wife. From a grim gray carpet, stained in spots and musty-smelling from the floods every spring, to this, a blue-and-gold Qum carpet worth tens of thousands of dollars. From cast-off square brown furniture with frayed edges to French country antiques, and instead of the cheap print showing covered bridges and mountain vistas, numbered prints by trendy artists.

“Maybe it doesn't belong to Julie. Maybe it belongs to this Anne Winston person,” Claire said.

In the closet, there was nothing but a giant clown costume hanging on a wooden hanger and two big red floppy shoes. On the floor just outside the closet was a telephone, which had big number buttons, all lit up. We followed the cord to the answering machine on the desk.