Cherries In The Snow (24 page)

‘Is that an expensive dye job or is it from working outdoors?'

‘Expensive dye job, honey, which is why it looks like I've been working outdoors. My coloring lasts longer because I spend so much time in my cool room doing Cool Yoga. Hair color's come a long way since I was bleaching my teenage mop with lemon juice. I mean Stevie Nicks had great hair in the seventies and they didn't have colorists then. What an amazing woman.'

I have always liked Stevie Nicks's songwriting but have never thought her an amazing woman, definitely not for her hair color. If I had lived in another time, I could be an amazing woman for getting out of bed. I can't figure out what decade that was. I imagine a year in the Middle Ages when women couldn't get out of bed and the country was threatened with ruin and I am the first one to get out and I am made queen. Maybe I'll use that scenario in my novel. Which I plan to work on this weekend.

I notice Jolene's left arm is tanner than her right, from hanging out the window making obscene gestures at motorists who piss her off (all of them).

‘Oh, suck my left one, you moron!' she screams at a car with two children.

‘We had a nipple rouge called that.'

She ignores me. ‘I fucking hate kids.'

‘But you—'

‘I love my own because she is the most brilliant and talented and gorgeous creature ever. Jesus, I don't know what I would have done if I'd had an ugly child.' She shivers. ‘You should see some of her friends. She loved this girl in her class, this little drowned rat who was picking on her. You know, best friends forever at five. She worshipped her and this girl was a shit to her. I went up to her in the playground. “Don't you pick on Montana just because she's pretty and you're ugly.” '

‘You said that to a child?'

‘Don't fuck with me. Don't fuck with me if you're five. Don't fuck with me if you're five hundred.'

I look at her muscles and resolve not to fuck with her.

‘So we're having apple bobbing tonight.'

‘In summer?'

‘Yep.' She eyes me for enthusiasm.

‘Oh, how fun.'

‘Yeah, it was my favorite as a kid. Montana forgets she likes kid stuff and then I trick her into it and she has the best time. She cries when I drop her at a kid's party. She has a really hard time with kids her own age, you know. She's too smart. But on the other hand she wants to be my little baby. The other day I got separated from her in the grocery store and by the time I found her, two minutes later, she was just inconsolable with fear. Don't tell her father.'

‘Marley won't mind.'

‘You don't know Marley.'

I thought I did. It has only been four months, but maybe I don't. What better way to find out than a weekend with the ex?

‘Love at first sight, right?' Jolene looks at me expectantly.

‘Yeah. It was.'

She checks her skin in the rearview mirror. I notice she has small traces of adult acne.

‘Not for me. He followed me around, poor kid, for six months before I noticed him, stretching away in the back of my Pilates class. He was skinnier than a minnow, had just moved out of his crazy family's apartment. I was still working in New York then, hadn't had my brainstorm yet. I have an office there now, of course, but it's so great to work out of my home.'

I see this woman as everything my mother had wanted to be. Not the success (I wonder if it had ever crossed her mind that a woman could have success like Jolene) but the just-so hair color and the way it dries as though it has been in high rollers, the nail shade the same as the truck, even if it is smudged. My mother would admire this woman. And hate her for it. I make an executive decision not to judge the brand of cigarettes she smokes or the dry cleaning draped in my lap.

‘Is Montana okay with me coming?'

‘Why wouldn't she be?'

‘I don't think she likes me.'

‘If Montana didn't like you, you'd know about it.'

I know about it. I fish in my bag for my lip gloss. She peers over.

‘Thank you so much for the package of makeup you gave Montana. We loved it.'

‘You did?' She nicked her daughter's makeup.

‘Yeah. Sexy Rabbi. That's a good one. I had a friend whose dad was a rabbi. I have such a vivid memory of crawling into his lap in a bikini.'

‘Was that a fantasy or a real memory?'

‘In my life, honey, one and the same.'

Her ‘honey' feels a lot like Marmite, salty as hell.

She must have made an unhinged teenager, given the mad
hormones floating around, the ones she seems to have by nature. Or maybe they never left, maybe she is still a teenager and
that
, not Cool Yoga, would explain her toned arms and stomach. Everything is about sex or rooted in sex or tied-around-its-ankle sex, to drown out who she really is.

We reach traffic.

‘Wanna see my breast implant?'

‘Implant singular?'

‘I just have one. Tit dropped when I breast-fed. She'd only take it from the one. Ignored the other completely. My fabulous, fabulous plastic surgeon put a tiny egg-shaped implant in the right one, evened them out. See.' She lifts her top. Underneath is a blue crochet bikini, and I realize she is a woman ever ready to jump in a pool. Although a woman like Jolene would be happy jumping into a pool in all her clothes too. Or naked. I believe the world is divided into people who enjoy being shoved into pools and those it enrages. Those who like people stopping by unannounced and those it makes feel violent.

‘I never wear bikinis. One-pieces are more flattering on me.'

‘Aw,' she replies, patting my arm without looking at me, ‘it's just puppy fat.'

What? Thank God she isn't looking at me or she would see my eyes water. ‘Puppy fat'? What is she talking about? Who asked her, anyway? Hell, I was just making conversation. I know how good I look in a bikini, better than her, skinny one-implant yoga bitch. I stare straight ahead, my arms burning, praying for something terrible to cry about on the radio, but it is still just soft rock. God, let there be a mudslide. Please, please, let there be a disaster so I can have a reason to cry. And then it comes.

We take a turn off the main road and start winding up. Up and up and up. The incline becomes steeper, the road narrower.
At first it is just unpleasant and then it is nerve-racking and then I am terrified. I don't want to die with the insane ex-girlfriend of a man I've only known four months. In a truck with laundry on my lap. At least let it be my own dry cleaning. God, there has to be a thousand dollars worth of sweaters and dresses. I feel the fabric under the plastic, trying to distract myself. Cashmere. Silk. Satin. Oh, God, I'm going to die!

I watch the cell phone range get smaller and smaller on my phone until it vanishes altogether. Englishness takes over, steepening with the road.

‘Um …'

‘Yes?'

‘Um, Jolene?'

‘Yes?'

‘Uh …'

We start driving up a winding mountain path akin to a black run. I put my hands over my eyes and say in a very soft voice, ‘I'd like to get out now, please.'

‘What are you saying?'

She smells of coriander – or is it patchouli? Name the scent, save your life. If I can guess it, I will be okay. If not, then I'm doomed.

‘What is your perfume, Jolene?' I ask much too loud. She looks disturbed.

‘Chanel Number 5.'

‘Aaargh!' I scream.

‘It's not that bad!'

‘No, no, let me out, let me out.'

‘I can't let you out at the side of the road.'

‘Please! Please! I must get out!' I wrestle with my seat belt.

‘What are you doing, crazy girl?'

‘I'm allergic to …'

‘What? What are you allergic to? Do you need a shot?' Her eyes are crazed, her arms ready to spring into Amazonian action.

‘I don't like heights.'

‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘I didn't know. Until right now.'

‘Let's just get up there.'

‘I don't like this.'

‘I heard ya.'

‘I DON'T LIKE THIS!'

‘I HEARD YA!'

Finally the road levels out and dust swirls up around us. We come to a gate and then a red dirt driveway. We drive in silence, tears streaming down my face.

When I get out, my face is red from crying. Montana sees me emerge from the truck wiping my eyes and shaking. She runs up to her mother and into her arms. She peers over Jolene's shoulder at me. Jolene makes a gee-whiz face.

‘What are you doing?' demands Montana.

‘Oh, God. Oh, God, I need to lie down.'

Jolene drops Montana gently to the ground and puts her arm around me. ‘Of course, honey.'

Montana sits close to me and looks intently at the tracks of my tears, which was not at all what Smokey was imagining when he requested that we take a good look at his face. Montana's nose seems to turn even higher in the air as she peers, so she looks like thing one and thing two combined.

‘Would you like to see my snake?'

‘No!' I start to sob again. Montana backs out of the room like you do when menaced by a shark: facing me, moving with small slow steps. I sink onto the bed. I try to get control of myself. Breathe breathe breathe.

‘You should shake the sheets out for spiders,' she says from the doorway.

My sobs start again. ‘I can't. I'm too frightened.'

She shrugs and closes the door.

The air is stiflingly hot. A millionaire and no A/C? It has to be ninety degrees today. I lie very still so no spider can get to me. I cover my ears so it can't go in there. If spiders are to crawl on me, I just don't want to know, like a cuckolded husband. Just let them get on with it. I dream about a ballet performance with my cat and Montana. She is holding him as her dance partner in outrageous positions. He bends his back around over her head. They are beautiful. Then she flings him at me. I catch him and we both curl up, breathing hard. That's how I wake up. But no Sidney Katz. I pray the automatic cat feeder isn't malfunctioning and that none of the neighbors complains about the TV I left on for him. All shopping network, all the time.

When I get up and creep out of the bedroom, no one is there. The house is perfectly round. There are strange religious imagery: gay monks, stucco walls with wrought-iron crucifixes, a weeping Jesus, a Buddhist temple set up in one corner.

In the kitchen Jolene has little cherubs lined up on the shelf beside the salt and pepper, three of them. They are Japanese cutesy, with slit eyes and round bellies. I glimpse myself in the reflective window of the microwave and think I look like them. It was a long trip. And I don't want her to see me looking bad, just as much as I wouldn't want a lover to. It's bizarre. I am trying to comb my hair with my fingers when I hear her come back in.

‘Montana and I are swimming. You okay?'

‘Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. I like your doll babies.'

‘One for every abortion,' she says boastfully.

‘With Marley?'

‘One with him. So you gonna take a dip?'

‘I left my bathing suit behind.'

‘Swim naked. Nobody's looking.'

Uh, apart from my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend and his peering snub-nosed child.

‘No, thanks.'

‘Borrow one of my bikinis.'

‘Do you have any one-pieces?'

‘Oh, right, you prefer one-pieces. See, I was listening. Yes!'

After rummaging in her closet, she returns with something a spider might have woven if it wasn't taking its Ritalin. I retreat to my room to try it on. Technically, yes, it's a one-piece. But it's black crochet with huge cutouts at the sides. It just skims the breasts and there is boob galore out the sides. I've seen Christina Aguilera wearing it in red on a ‘what was she thinking?' page of the
Star
. I adjust and adjust, but there is no adjusting to be done. It is like a philosophical catch-22. Boobage or ass crack?

Gasping for air in the devil-powered heat, I decide to just run and jump. I run through my room, the living room, the garden, and into the pool with a splash worthy of a girl twice my size. As I hit the water, the costume rips off me in one swift movement. I come to the surface for a gulp of air and start bobbing for my swimsuit, my white arse gleaming on the surface of the water, Montana's shrieks of delight audible underwater. I finally grab it and scoop myself back in, not easy when you're in the deep end, and taking the steps so as not to have to haul me and my booty out by my arms, I lie down on the empty recliner and close my eyes, hoping they won't talk to me. Fat chance.

‘Damn, girl, you got some jelly going on,' Jolene says.

‘Boobies boobies boobies,' sings Montana, ‘big bum big bum big bum.'

‘Thank you.' I don't open my eyes.

‘Hell,' hollers Jolene, ‘Marley's a lucky man.'

I think I am going to be sick. Thankfully her cell phone rings.

‘I gotta go take this inside. Can you watch Montana for a minute?'

I open one eye and watch her, peer at her as hard as she does me. ‘Thanks for having me, Montana.'

‘You're welcome.'

‘We apple bobbing tonight?'

‘She wants to. I think it's stupid.'

‘It's pretty stupid.'

‘Let's say we want to watch TV instead.'

‘Okay.'

‘If you say it, she'll have to do it. You're the guest.'

‘Is that what you want?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Then it's a deal.'

Jolene comes back out and flops on the recliner in her blue bikini and deep tan. We are all turned on our tummies, tanning our backs, when a guy comes through the garden and Jolene sits up beaming. He looks about twenty-four and kisses Jolene on the mouth but no tongue, then looks at me.

‘Oh, hey.' He is uninterested. He has that Swedish tattooy thing with punk hair. He is gross.