Girls In White Dresses (3 page)

Molly rolled her eyes up at the ceiling. “You know what I mean. Caroline, where did you get that?”

“In the dress-up chest,” Caroline said.

Molly turned to Isabella. “How did that get in there?”

“What else was I supposed to do with it?” Isabella asked. “Goodwill wouldn’t take it.” Brett laughed from across the room and Molly narrowed her eyes.

“They were very in at the time,” Molly said. “You don’t remember, but those dresses were the thing to wear.”

“I’m sure they were,” Isabella said. “That dress has been in the dress-up chest forever, by the way.” Caroline watched Isabella and Molly talk, turning her head as each one spoke.

Isabella could tell that Molly wanted to say more, but she turned away and took a sip of her wine. Isabella took the kids upstairs to get them settled in her room, and she heard Molly talking in the kitchen. “So, Missy thought that Izzy was poor,” she said. She laughed loudly. “I know! Do you believe it?”

There were so many bodies in Isabella’s bed that she was afraid it would break. Little kid limbs were everywhere. Four of her nieces were shoved into the bed, and Isabella kept waking up to feet and hands flying through the air. When she finally fell asleep, she woke up less than an hour later to screaming. Her nephew Connor had been locked in the closet. “You guys,” Isabella said, but she couldn’t get enough energy to really yell at them. Her nephews were blobs of shadows on the floor, and after she rescued Connor, she told them all to be quiet and go to sleep.

In the morning, all of the kids were gone except for Caroline, who sat on the bed talking to her orange teddy bear, explaining how Santa got into the house. Isabella smiled at her. “Where is everyone?” she asked.

“They went downstairs,” she said. “I didn’t want you to be alone.” Caroline touched the top of Isabella’s head with her chubby baby hand, and Isabella wondered how Molly had been able to produce such a sweet child when she was such a horrid person.

There was a missed call on her phone from Ben, but he hadn’t left a message. Isabella had thought it would feel better to be home, away from him. But it didn’t. She called him back and he didn’t answer. She didn’t leave a message.

On Christmas Eve the whole family went to St. Anthony’s to watch the pageant. Caroline was a nervous-looking cow, and waved her hoof as her mother snapped pictures like a spazzy paparazzo. The church was noisy, full of chattering and shuffling, until a pint-sized Jesus and a mini Mary walked out to the manger, and then the whole place became quiet.

Isabella still remembered being chosen to play Mary in fourth grade. Her teacher asked her to bring a doll for the baby Jesus, and she took the job very seriously. She went home and, after careful consideration, picked her Cabbage Patch Kid Rosco. She apologized to the others, and explained that Rosco was little and bald and right for the part. He would make a great Jesus.

Every night, Isabella would wash Rosco’s head in the sink and then carefully dry it. She would dress him in his blue terry-cloth pajamas and tuck him into bed next to her. “You’re going to play Jesus,” she would whisper to him. “Don’t be nervous,” she would say. “You’re going to be great.”

The night she played Mary, she felt holy, as though she were a saint of some kind. “It was my holiest Christmas,” she wrote in her diary.

On the altar, mini Mary said something to Caroline and then petted her as though she were a real cow. Caroline stared at the doll in the manger and Isabella felt something like jealousy. After the pageant, they all walked out into the cold air, their breath making white clouds as they wished everyone they saw a Merry Christmas, and Isabella thought that it didn’t feel like Christmas at all. All the kids went to their own houses to wait for Santa, and in her bed that night, Isabella missed the sound of other people’s breathing.

Back in New York, everything was cold and slushy. “At least the snow was pretty for a minute or two, right?” Isabella asked Mary. Mary just shook her head and closed her door. She had a head cold and new classes to deal with.

Ben was around less and less, and when they were together they seemed to squabble. “Don’t put all your chickens in one pot,” Kristi advised her. “That boy wasn’t for you anyway.” She said it with such authority that Isabella almost believed her.

Isabella got knee-high rubber boots to wear on her walk to work. When she’d first seen people wearing these, she’d thought they were just trying to be cute, but now she realized they were necessary for the three-foot-wide puddles of dirty, cold water that surrounded the curbs and gathered in the streets.

Sharon had decided to go on a diet for New Year’s, and so the muffin game got more complicated. “Are you sure?” Isabella would have to say. “I can’t believe you’re on a diet,” she would sometimes add. The one morning she didn’t get a chocolate chip muffin, Sharon made her file clients by their Social Security numbers. Isabella never made that mistake again.

Even with her boots, Isabella’s feet always felt wet and cold. The heat in their apartment was on full blast, and there was nothing they could do to turn it down. They had to keep the windows open to avoid suffocating, and Isabella was always afraid that the pigeon would come back. At night, she woke up in the apartment sweaty and dehydrated, flapping her arms to protect herself from imaginary birds.

It seemed like spring would never come, but it did. And mysteriously, Ben started appearing more and more. He offered no explanation of where he had been all those nights when she’d tried to call him. He just showed up all the time again, wearing his white baseball hat, smiling and laughing, buying her drinks, dancing, and waking up in her bed.

“What do you think happened?” Isabella asked.

Mary shrugged. “Maybe he was hibernating,” she suggested.

Isabella was promoted at work, and a new assistant was hired to get muffins for Bill and Sharon. When Isabella was training the new girl, Bill said to her, “You have some big shoes to fill. This one here was a dynamo.” He put his hand on Isabella’s shoulder, and she could smell onions. She hoped the odor wouldn’t stay on her sweater. Sharon wished her luck, shook her hand, and gave her a card that had an office full of monkeys on it. On the inside of the card it said, “We’ll miss you at this zoo!” Isabella moved to the floor above and didn’t see any of them much. Sometimes she found herself at the bakery downstairs about to buy muffins before she realized she didn’t have to do that anymore. She thought of Sharon saying, “Oh, I couldn’t,” as Isabella placed the muffin on her desk, and she hoped the new girl understood the rules and remembered what to do.

Mary started her summer internship at a law firm downtown, but at least she was more willing to go out at night. At Gamekeepers, over a game of Scrabble, she told Isabella that she’d be moving out in the fall.

“I need my own place,” she said. “I love living with you, but I have to study all the time. Plus, I should live closer to campus. And you don’t want to live all the way up there.”

“I know,” Isabella said. “I’m distracting.”

Isabella found a one-bedroom apartment on the West Side. She was sad not to be living with Mary anymore, but the new apartment had screens, so that was something.

The last night in the apartment, Isabella and Mary went to Gamekeepers with Ben and his roommate Mike. They played Connect Four and Sorry!, and then Ben pulled Life off the shelf. “How about this one?” he said. “A good old-fashioned game of Life.”

They spun the spinner and gathered jobs and paychecks and children. Isabella hadn’t played in a long time, and she found it sort of boring. Mary and Mike lost interest and got up to order new drinks at the bar.

“You know,” Isabella said to Ben, “when I was little and my family played Life, we had this rule. If any of the pegs fell out of your car, then you lost them. It was considered a car accident and the plastic peg was dead. You had to give it back.”

“Really?” Ben sounded bored.

“Yeah,” Isabella said. She’d told that story before, and usually people at least laughed a little. Ben just looked around the bar.

“Don’t you think that’s kind of a mean rule?” Isabella asked him.

“I guess,” he said. He rattled the ice in his glass. “I have to go to the bodega to get smokes.”

“Okay,” Isabella said. When he left, she pulled one of his pegs out and laid it down right next to his car.

The dead-peg rule had always made Isabella cry. Somehow, her little pegs never seemed to stay put, and they always popped out. “That’s the rule, Izzy,” her brother Marshall always said to her when she tried to protest. It was so rotten, Isabella thought, the way that everyone squealed and laughed when someone’s peg fell out, the way they all clapped at that person’s misery and misfortune. Molly would always pat Isabella’s back when this happened and say, “If you can’t follow the rules, then maybe you shouldn’t play.”

Ben came back inside, but he didn’t notice his dead peg.

Isabella went to the bar and ordered shots for herself and Mary. “Here,” she said, handing it to her. “No excuses. This is a time of mourning. We’re never going to live together again.”

“Don’t say that,” Mary said.

“It’s true,” Isabella said. She could feel herself getting sentimental, which she always was. Sometimes she missed people before they even left her, got depressed about a vacation being over before it started.

“Well then, cheers,” Mary said. They clinked the glasses, touched them to the counter, and drank.

“You’re going to miss me,” Isabella said. “There won’t be anyone to blame for the dirty dishes in the sink.”

“I don’t leave dirty dishes in the sink,” Mary said.

“Exactly,” Isabella said.

Ben and Mike came over and suggested another bar. “This place is beat,” Ben said. He leaned back and stretched his arms.

“We can’t go anywhere,” Isabella told him. “We still have to finish packing. The movers are coming early.”

“Okay,” Ben said. “Talk to you tomorrow.” Isabella noticed that he didn’t offer to help her move, but she didn’t say anything. She and Mary had another drink and headed back to the apartment, which was full of boxes and still had stuff all over the floor.

“What is this stuff?” Mary asked.

“Crap,” Isabella said. “It’s just all crap.” She kicked at a pink hand weight. “When have either of us ever lifted weights?” she asked.

“I think I bought those thinking I’d lift weights in my room,” Mary said.

“How did that go?” Isabella asked.

“Not great,” Mary said. “I think that’s why they were underneath the couch.”

“Here,” Isabella said. She reached into her pocket and took something out. “I stole these for us.” She opened her palm and showed Mary two pink peg people from Life and two pigs from Pig Mania. She handed Mary a peg person and a pig. “They’re us,” she said. “Roommates always.”

Mary laughed. “Who’s the pig?” she asked.

In her new apartment, Isabella glued the pig and the peg person on a piece of cardboard and hung it in a frame by the door. People always commented on it when they walked in. “Hey, look,” they’d say. Sometimes they recognized the peg from Life, and some people even knew where the pig was from, which usually made them laugh. When the glue wore out and the peg person or the pig fell down, she didn’t throw them out. Instead, she glued them right back on and said a silent prayer that they were the only critters in her home.

O
ur friend Ellen dates ugly boys,” Lauren used to say. She said it all through college. She said it to warn attractive boys who were interested in Ellen. “You’re not her type,” she’d try to explain. “It’s weird, I know, but you’re far too good-looking for her.” Most of the time, these boys didn’t listen. They’d just nod and keep staring at Ellen, thinking about how they were going to approach her, as Lauren insisted in the background, “Our friend Ellen dates ugly boys.”

All of Ellen’s friends accepted this. They weren’t surprised when she introduced them to boys with receding hairlines and mild cases of rosacea. They didn’t laugh when she picked out the one guy in the bar with braces and said, “Look at him!” When she got breathy and excited about someone new, they all mentally prepared themselves to meet a guy with a creepy carnival mustache and a mean case of dandruff. Even in first grade, when the only acceptable boys to like were Jon Armstrong and Chris Angelo, Ellen announced that she liked scabby Matthew Handler. It was just who she was. Ellen dated ugly boys.

It was surprising, mostly because Ellen was pretty—and not just your average, well-groomed and well-dressed kind of pretty. She was the kind of pretty that people noticed, the kind of pretty that made people watch her walk by. She had long eyelashes and skin that didn’t seem to have any pores. There was a glow about her, something that always drew boys to her side. If she’d been anyone else, Lauren might have been too jealous to be her friend. But it never mattered, because Ellen would look at all of her admirers gathered round, and point to Mr. Fatty and say, “I choose you.” Lauren got to keep the rest of them.

Some friends are gossips and some are sloppy drunks. If you like them well enough, you ignore this trait and continue to be their friend. And that’s what they did with Ellen—they tolerated her taste in men.

Once, in college, Ellen kissed a guy who lived down the hall from them. They called him the Wildebeest because he was portly with wild curly hair and he snorted when he laughed. He was the guy who got drunk at parties, stripped naked, and did the worm on the floor in a pool of keg beer. They all knew him. They all liked him well enough. And they were all shocked when Ellen announced that she’d kissed him the night before when he’d walked her to her door.

“Hold on,” Isabella said. “Please back up. You made out with the Wildebeest?”

Ellen shrugged. “I didn’t plan it,” she said. “He offered to walk me home and he’s so funny.”

“Of course he’s funny,” Lauren said. “He’s a Wildebeest. Wildebeests are supposed to be funny. But Wildebeests are not for making out with.”

Ellen was unashamed. She just smiled and shrugged and went back to her room. All the girls stared at each other and shook their heads. “Making out with a Wildebeest,” they whispered to one another. “What will be next?”