Girls In White Dresses (6 page)

Ben sold medical supplies for a small company based in Tennessee. Isabella wasn’t sure what it was he actually did. He didn’t go to an office. He worked from his computer at home, and then drove around in his car, delivering products and doing presentations. His workday lasted from about eleven a.m. to three p.m., when he returned home to watch
The Simpsons
and smoke a joint.

Isabella was home sick when she discovered this. “Why are you home so early?” she asked. For a second she thought he’d come back to take care of her. Maybe he’d brought her soup or ginger ale.

“I’m usually done around this time,” Ben said. He settled himself on the couch and Isabella sniffled into a tissue. She stood there waiting for him to ask her if she needed anything. “What?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Nothing.” She took a NyQuil and went back to bed. She had fuzzy dreams until Ben turned on the television in the bedroom and woke her up. Isabella stared at Ben that night while he slept and tried to figure out how he’d gotten there.

Isabella and Ben fought all the time. They even fought the first night they met, when he cut in front of her to go to the bathroom at a bar. She yelled after him and continued to yell at him through the door. “Sorry,” he said when he came out. “It was an emergency.” Ben was tan with messy hair and a white smile. Isabella forgave him and went back to his apartment that night. He had black lights and a gravity bong. He reminded her of the boys she’d been in love with in high school, relaxed and impossibly sure of himself.

The fights they had now were much worse. Isabella had never fought like this with anyone before. With Ben, she had all-out, drunken marathon fights that lasted for hours. She was sure the neighbors thought they were crazy.

Isabella woke up the morning after these fights with a sore throat from yelling and swollen eyes from crying, sure that she had done damage to her insides. Ben was an asshole, a jackass, a dick. But just when Isabella thought the end was near, she felt a little hole of panic open. He was also funny, and could be sweet. Was she really ready to let that go? Wasn’t she partly to blame for the fight?

The ceremony was a full mass and Ben shuffled his feet and breathed loudly through most of it. Isabella kept turning to give him a look. She gave him these looks often, the kind that you give to small children to let them know their behavior is inappropriate. Usually he just ignored her.

After the wedding, they all stood outside the church waiting for the bride and groom to make their exit. Ben smoked a cigarette and talked to some friends, and Isabella watched the clouds and tried to calculate how much longer it would be before they were at the reception and she could get a glass of wine. She was interrupted from her dreaming by Ben’s voice. “Hey!” he said. “Look who it is.”

Isabella saw Ben slapping the hand of his friend Mike, giving him a half hug–handshake–pat on the back. “Mike, you remember Isabella?” Ben smiled at her and she smiled back. Ben almost never remembered to introduce her. He was just excited for her to meet JonBenét.

“Yeah, definitely. How’s it going?” Mike nodded to her. “And this is my girlfriend. You guys have met, right?”

Isabella watched the tiny girl emerge from behind Mike. She was a pixie! Isabella hadn’t even noticed her standing there. All of her features were teeny; her hands and fingers were almost childlike. Isabella stared at her. She couldn’t help it. It was JonBenét, and no one had been exaggerating about the resemblance. If anything, they hadn’t prepared her for this. Isabella got goose bumps just being near her.

“Hi, Ben.” JonBenét had a raspy, breathy voice that made her sound like she’d just been running. “Wasn’t the wedding beautiful? I told Mike in the middle of it that if one more person from his fraternity gets engaged before us, I’m done!” She laughed and turned to Mike. “Right, baby?”

Mike ignored her. “You guys want to get over to the reception? It’s not supposed to start for another hour, but maybe we can convince the bartender to get us some drinks.”

“Yeah, sure,” Ben said. “You guys want to ride with us?”

Isabella gave Mike shotgun so she could sit in the back with JonBenét. “Mike just got a new car,” she said to Isabella. “And I said to him, What’s that? I can’t wear that on my finger.” She laughed and waved her left ring finger in the air.

Isabella laughed and caught Ben’s eye in the rearview mirror. They smiled at each other.

The reception was at a country club in some New Jersey suburb. Isabella felt like she’d been to a million of these weddings. By now, they all blended together in a blur of fabric-covered chairs, pink napkins, and crab cakes. Isabella looked around. The centerpieces made her sad.

“Isn’t this beautiful?” JonBenét said to them. She sounded dreamy, like she couldn’t believe her eyes. Mike put his hand on her back and she smiled up at him. He didn’t look at her. Isabella had once seen a TV show called
Tarnished Tiaras
that exposed the truth behind child pageants. It focused on one mother who offered spray tans to the little girls to make some money. She stared at JonBenét and wanted to ask her if she ever got a spray tan. But she stopped herself.

The bartenders were still setting up. They looked up warily when they saw the four of them approaching. “Hey, man,” Ben said to one. He lifted his chin in a nod and the bartender did the same back. Isabella was always amazed at how people just liked Ben immediately. Strangers in bars and people on the street treated him like an old friend. They welcomed him wherever he went. Isabella didn’t even think he noticed. It was just the way things always were for him.

“You got any Red Bull?” Ben asked. The bartender shook his head.

“Ben,” Isabella said. “You can’t order that.”

“Why?”

“What are you, fifteen? We’re at a wedding.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Relax,” he said. “They don’t have it anyway.”

“But you can’t drink that at a wedding,” Isabella explained.

“You have a lot of rules,” Ben said. “I’m going out for a cigarette.”

Isabella ordered a white wine and stood by herself on the side of the room. She watched the bride and groom arrive and hoped that they wouldn’t come anywhere near her. They had no idea who she was.

When Ben finally came back, about ten minutes later, he was carrying a brown paper bag and smiling a proud smile. “What?” Isabella asked.

“Red Bull,” he said. “I got it at a convenience store down the street. Now I can just order vodka on the rocks. Pretty smart, huh?”

Somewhere after the dinner was served and before the cake was cut, Isabella lost Ben. Everyone at their table was up dancing and mingling. Isabella sat there and drank wine. She felt like a fool.

JonBenét smiled at her from across the room and then walked over to the table. “Hey, Isabella.”

“Hey,” Isabella said. She was happy not to be sitting alone.

“Where did your date go?” JonBenét asked, smiling.

“Oh, I don’t … I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“He’s probably off somewhere with Mike getting into trouble. Boys can be such shits sometimes, right?”

Isabella laughed. JonBenét was being very kind, but Isabella found it hard to look at her straight on for too long. It made the hair on her arms stand up. She thought about the JonBenét footage that showed her in the swimsuit competition of the beauty pageant. She wished she had never seen that part of the documentary. It haunted her.

“So, how did you and Ben meet?” JonBenét asked.

“In a bar,” Isabella said. Sometimes she tried to make the story a little better, to embellish it with details. But she didn’t feel like it right then.

“Mike and I met at a wedding,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, his cousin married one of my friends from college. It’s funny, isn’t it? The way things happen?”

Isabella nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

How she met Ben could have been a cute story, Isabella realized. If they ended up together, she could tell people, “That Ben! So impatient, so impish!” But for that to happen, Ben would have to be a different person. And he wasn’t. He was just a cocky boy who didn’t want to wait his turn. That was all. He had to go to the bathroom. That was their story. The next time someone asked, “How did you meet?” Isabella could say, “Ben had to pee.”

JonBenét chattered on about the different people at the wedding. She talked about her friend’s wedding that she was in next month. “The bridesmaid dresses are beautiful,” JonBenét assured her. Isabella had never met someone so in love with weddings. She tried to picture JonBenét as a bride, but she kept seeing the real JonBenét, overly made up in a poofy dress.

Ben came back about twenty minutes later, and JonBenét stood up. “I should go find my prince.”

“Where have you been?” Isabella asked. “I’ve been sitting here by myself for almost an hour.”

“Whadya mean, by yourself? There’s people all around.”

“These aren’t my friends, Ben. You just left me alone. Everyone’s been staring at me. I was sitting all by myself before she came over here.”

“So what? Are you mad because you had to hang out with crazy JonBenét?”

“She’s not that bad, Ben.”

“She’s crazy,” Ben said, like it was a fact. Like it was something everyone knew.

Isabella felt bad for JonBenét, the way that everyone at the wedding was talking about her, like she was some kind of freak show. No one knew what went on in her relationship with Mike. No one even really knew her. Maybe she loved Mike more than he liked her. And wasn’t that horrible? Wasn’t that sad? But people forgot about that. They didn’t see a tragedy, just a good story. To them, it was just some girl they could point to and say, “Well, at least my life isn’t as fucked up as that.”

“So what if she wants to get married?” Isabella asked. “Why is that the worst thing in the world? It’s not such a crazy thought. She and Mike have been dating for a while. Isn’t it weirder that Mike is avoiding it?”

Ben shrugged. He took the straw out of his drink and downed the rest of it. “Why do you care?” he asked.

“I just think it’s mean the way that you and your friends treat her. I mean, what about Mike? If he doesn’t want to marry her, then why doesn’t he just break up with her?”

“Not everyone is dying to get married, Isabella.”

“I’m not saying that everyone is. But she clearly wants to. And if he doesn’t want the same thing, then shouldn’t they just break up?”

“Why are you fighting with me?” Ben asked. She hated when he did this, when he turned things on her. He could act however and say whatever he wanted, and if she called him on it, then she was the bad person who’d instigated the fight.

“I’m not fighting with you,” Isabella said. She knew that the night was already gone. It was ruined. They should just leave now instead of indulging in an evening of arguments and accusations.

“Really, well, that’s what it feels like. I need a new drink,” Ben said, and walked away.

Ben loved this stupid game show called
Deal or No Deal
. He loved the part when people had the chance to walk away with a ton of money and then made the wrong choice and left with nothing. It made him laugh out loud.

“Don’t you feel bad for them?” Isabella would ask.

“No,” he always said. “They’re stupid. They deserve it.”

When Isabella watched him laughing at those people, she felt like she was sitting next to the cruelest person in the world.

Less than a week after the wedding, Ben moved out. They had finally broken up, and it was just as awful as Isabella thought it would be. She couldn’t sleep and so she stared into the darkness every night. She was alone, and she felt the aloneness in everything she did. But that was just at first. It went away after a while, or maybe she just stopped noticing it.

She never ran into Ben, although she always thought she saw him in a crowded bar or walking down the street. Her eyes played tricks on her everywhere she went. But that, too, went away and then the only time she really thought about him was when she smelled pot.

The weird thing was that long after she got over Ben, Isabella thought about JonBenét. She couldn’t even recall the girl’s real name, and still she entered her mind with alarming frequency. Isabella remembered how she had laughed at JonBenét without really knowing her and how kind the girl had been to her that night. She thought about how everyone gossiped about her behind her back and wondered if she knew. And mostly, Isabella wondered if JonBenét was finally engaged or even married by now. She almost e-mailed Ben once, just to ask. Isabella wished for JonBenét when she threw pennies into fountains, when she blew on eyelashes, and when the clock read 5:55. She wished for her that she was married. She wished for her that she had a beautiful wedding. She hoped she was happy.

A
bby’s family was weird. She had, on some level, always known this, but as she got older it became much more clear. When Abby was four, her dad’s uncle died and left them all of his money—and there was a lot of it. Instead of using it to buy a house or a boat, like normal people, her parents bought a farm in Vermont and spent their days smoking pot and refurbishing antique furniture. Sometimes her dad called her mom Lil’ Bit, and sometimes they let their friend Patches park his trailer on their property and live there. Yes, Abby’s parents were weird, her sister was even stranger, and the whole lot of them together was sometimes too much to bear.

Abby didn’t try to hide this information. In fact, it was usually the first thing she told people. “My parents are weird,” she’d say, as soon as the topic of family came up. “They’re hippies,” she’d add. A lot of times, the people she was talking to would nod their heads like they understood and say, “I know, my parents are total freaks too.” If this happened, Abby had to explain further. “My parents grow pot,” she’d say. “My mom raises chickens for us to eat.” If this didn’t get a rise out of them, she’d say, “My dad once kidnapped the neighbor’s peacocks.” That usually shut them up.

Abby wasn’t complaining when she told people this. She just wanted it out there. It was better, she’d learned, to tell people right up front, instead of waiting for them to ask questions like “What line of work is your dad in?” and having it all come out like that.