What Life is It
The college girls said they would take care of everything: her two cats, her expansive vegetable garden, and her mail, even if it was just throwing out the supermarket circulars. They’d even care for her bees. They had bought Chef Vicki a year-end gift: a ticket to San Francisco and weekend stay in a hotel by the wharf, the fat tourist grotto she never neared when she lived there.
What they didn’t give her was a makeover, a new wardrobe and a different trajectory in life. And she couldn’t just spend the weekend hidden away in her cottage; they already possessed her extra key. So Vicki drove to the airport in Chicago, less than two hours away from the small town in Wisconsin where she cooked for a sorority—the girls loved her curry tofu pops and pizza muffins. She would go to San Francisco. She would hide away in the hotel and watch movies. She would eat junk food for a whole weekend and not feel guilty about it. She would go to a bar and pretend to be someone she wasn’t, a fashion designer, maybe. She would try and not think about the girls in her house, judging her life.
*
The girls looked around her cottage. Strings of skull lights dangled over her front door. Chef Vicki stacked her hats on mannequins’ heads in the entryway. A snow globe collection adorned the windowsill.
Each room was a different crayon color: Chef Vicki always referred to the red room or green room rather than the dining room or the bedroom. “Chef Vicki is a mystery,” the Sorority President said as she wandered from one room to the next.
“Wrapped in a riddle,” another laughed.
The Sorority President liked that when girls uttered a banality, Chef Vicki called out “cliché” and toasted them. She had never been called out on one and saw it as a personal victory.
“I don’t like that she calls us exile; that’s an insult,” the Pledgemaster said.
“She calls Wisconsin exile, not us,” the Sorority President corrected. She was going to attend law school in the fall.
“She loves us,” a girl said. This girl was shy. She liked that Chef Vicki made her feel like she was the most special sorority girl in the room.
“Oh, please, it’s her job,” the Sorority Treasurer said, “she’s paid to act like she loves us.” She didn’t know what she wanted to be, but she tired of everyone talking about getting out of Wisconsin after graduation as if it were a prison. Each winter, she craved the stillness of canoeing on the one of the nearby lakes; each summer, she craved the big expanse of sky that reflected on the snowy hills and reminded her she was part of a larger universe. She wasn’t altogether sure any other place offered that.
“Let’s see what TV she watches,” said another, “I bet she likes the same TV we do.”
*
When Vicki lived in San Francisco, she had been a house sitter for one of her personal chef clients—they were a tech couple before tech was called tech. She took in mail, watered plants, and played with the two cats. She’d get high and check out their cabinet for the fatty foods they promised her they were no longer eating. She would look through their photo albums. She didn’t stop to ponder the family portraits. She examined the older photographs, the ones before the wedding and the school portraits. The wife had bragged that she had been in pageants, that she had been thin in a different life. Vicki had not believed her. But there was the proof in a photo album yellowed and crackly from dried glue. Indeed, her client had been rail thin in that trendy way of the seventies, her ribs protruding. Her smile was all teeth. Clad in a red Farrah Fawcett bathing suit and high heeled pumps, she stood slightly pigeon toed with one hand placed on her hip. She looked delicate and submissive. Now her client was formidable and dressed in tunics to hide her bulge. Each time Vicki visited the house, she opened the photo album and looked at her client’s first life wondering if it had been a sudden change or so gradual her client hadn’t noticed. From the photo albums (which Vicki scoured), the change seemed sudden. Before pictures of beauty pageants and road trips with long legged skinny girls to after pictures where her husband and kids smiled into the camera—for her client no longer appeared in the pictures, she was just recording the life before her.
Vicki rarely invited the sorority girls to her house. She liked coming home from the chaos of the sorority to her little cottage and garden, a refuge from teenaged tittering. She sewed avant-garde quilts with her Stitch and Bitch group and sold them online—she had a three star rating for she often didn’t send things on time. She slept with the bartender who lived in Milwaukee—he still had all his hair at least. And she watched her shows, oh, there were so many shows these days. It was a fine exile, she thought. The girls were wrong to think she’d want to go back to San Francisco and slip on her old life. She’d stay in the hotel, imagine a weekend, and come back with stories to entertain them.
Vicki had always been prone to hyperbole, but somewhere along the way she had wholly reinvented herself. After San Francisco ejected her with its high rents and her friends abandoned her to marriages and careers, she moved to Chicago and landed two hours north cooking at a Wisconsin college. Her private chef resume had impressed them. The girls thought she’d keep them healthy and thin—isn’t that why celebrities hired her?
It’s not that the resume was a complete lie. She had indeed cooked for people in San Francisco who acted like celebrities. But she had never finished college, never graduated from a culinary school unless one counted the adult school class she took in Oakland, and she had never cooked for a Hollywood celebrity. Yet it didn’t matter to the sorority girls. They were an audience to Vicki, new girls filtering through year after year. And with each passing class, Vicki polished her history to an archetypal sheen: Gen X woman mastered her universe and retired to country comfort.
*
The Sorority Girls crammed into her living room and watched movies on her flat screen television. Chef Vicki stored DVDs in old wooden bookshelves. Both seemed old fashioned to them. The Girls chose the romantic comedies and planned a day watching movies and petting Chef Vicki’s two cats. The couch was oversized and worn in the center, as if a person had nested there. The girls assumed the couch was another one of Chef Vicki’s finds. No one imagined that the couch was new and that Chef Vicki was the origin of the indent on the couch. No way would she spend all that time just sitting in one place, the Shy Girl thought.
One girl who was particularly enamored of Chef Vicki sat in an armchair swathed in green velvet.
“Someone famous probably sat on it,” the Sorority President said.
“Didn’t Chef Vicki say she dated the former mayor of San Francisco? I’m going to be a mayor someday,” the Enamored Girl said.
The Shy Girl thought of Chef Vicki with her platinum shag and her chiseled face. She wanted to dye her hair too. She’d wait though, to make it less obvious she was copying Chef Vicki. Once, Chef Vicki had told her she had found a diamond ring at a flea market. It had been overlooked, Chef Vicki said, forgotten. She had bought it for a dollar. Now, the Shy Girl looked through all the miscellaneous boxes at the garage sales in her neighborhood, hoping.
*
Vicki cleaned the cottage before she left for the airport. She purposefully left out the old portfolio of photos her friend had taken of her—back when he was going to be a famous photographer and she was a professional muse. (Last she heard he worked in the social media department of a big university). She took care to put her high school and college journals under her bed. They could be found. Everyone snoops, she thought.
Her recent diaries were different. She hid them deep in the recesses of her closet, locked in a trunk, hidden behind her overcoats, behind the mothballed bridesmaid dresses she kept for Halloween costumes. The girls would need clothespins on their noses to find them.
She long ago stopped keeping a journal that was a diary of her life—she found it too angst ridden and navel gazing. Entries ranged from lists of resolutions to improve herself—resolutions always unmet—to rants about the passive aggressive slights by her friends to complaints about herself. How often could she write, I felt fat today? Now her diaries were a log of the stories she told —too many close calls at homecoming dinners when a sorority alum would recall a funny story of Vicki’s and a current girl would say, “that isn’t what Chef Vicki told us.”
So she kept track: She went to college in New York before transferring to SF State. In actuality, she had been to SF State, but she had only lived in New York for two months, couch surfing with friends who went to NYU. And even now, she couldn’t actually remember how long she attended SF State. Had it been one year? She remembered telling someone she only had only semester left to graduate, but she could no longer remember if it were true. During a brief stint in Los Angeles, she wrote that she worked on a film with a famous actor, so famous she couldn’t talk about him. But she would tell them he constantly farted on set. This was a total lie; she was friends with someone who was friends with someone who did that. Often, she thought this might be an urban myth, because she once overheard someone in a bar tell the same exact tale. Were these kinds of stories just cliché? She toasted herself for the thought.
She wrote down that she dated the former mayor before he was mayor—back when he was just a club owner. This lie she always remembered, but she wrote it down anyway, just to be complete. She had wanted to date him, she wandered into his club weekend after weekend. Once, they danced. This was true.
The Lie List grew each year when a new batch of pledges were forced to help in her kitchen and one of the them asked, “you really lived in San Francisco?”
She remembered the cold salty air of the bay greeting her every morning. She’d go to sleep listening for the foghorns. She remembered admiring the roguish women with piercings and tattoos even before body manipulation was trendy. She remembered the shops along the streets of each neighborhood selling Live My Dream. A girl from Virginia residing in San Francisco. What would happen next, she used to imagine. She tried waiting tables, executive assisting, teaching cooking, and selling marijuana. She was going to live her dream too. What she didn’t remember was the stress of making rent each month, of how she could never afford anything sold in those Live My Dream shops, of how the wind whipped down Geary with such force it would burn her face. When had it stopped being a city of promise? She didn’t remember.
*
“Look what she has in the freezer,” one of the sorority girls said.
The Treasurer pulled out a vodka bottle and said, “vodka tonics, anyone?”
“What else does she have in there,” another girl asked. “Can you imagine if she eats all processed food?”
They laughed.
“Chef Vicki would never do that,” the Shy Girl said. “Just look at her garden.”
The girl looking in the freezer squealed, “Look! A bag full of Snickers.”
“What would Chef Vicki say?” the Enamored Girl says.
“Crap heaven,” they yelled and clinked their vodka tonics together.
*
At the airport, Vicki bought coffee and a doughnut, plugged in her laptop near the gate, and people-watched. It was like visiting a city. She could identify the business travelers with their sleek roller cases and the millenials who traveled in their yoga pants and carried full-sized pillows.
The man sitting next to her sipped his coffee and texted at the same time. He carried a small, inflatable pillow wrapped around his roller case suggesting he was a frequent traveler. His face was tanned; his shirt a crisp linen. He looked like he came from money. Then she noticed a tattoo of a clock on the inside of his arm. She had read somewhere that meant he had served time in prison. Back when she lived in San Francisco, she might have fucked him for that very reason.
“Going home?” she asked.
“Just visiting friends in Frisco.”
“No one calls is that, you know,” she said. “San Fran, maybe, but never Frisco.”
“You’re the Frisco police?” He turned and looked up at her. It was not a friendly gaze.
“No, I just lived there for years, and I’m telling you no one calls is that. People there hate it. Call it The City and they’ll love you. They like to pretend it’s New York.” Vicki laughed and smiled her smile, the one she knew made her eyes crinkle in an attractive way, a way that used to win people over. It was the smile that once got her invited up on stage at the Fillmore.
“San Franciscans actually have a consensus on hating a nickname?” The man shook his head and glanced again at his phone. He didn’t look up. She didn’t remember when she had become invisible to men. He likely dated younger women even though he was in his forties like her, she thought. His hair was too mussed on purpose, his jeans weren’t ragged, just designed to look that way.
“That’s a great tattoo, you know. I read somewhere that,” Vicki said.
“It’s the time my mother died.”
Vicki was relieved to be interrupted before asking about prison time. She hadn’t noticed the hands at all but she didn’t ask for clarification. She saw now that the time was clearly marked 3:10. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“You didn’t kill her.”
Vicki raised her hand to toast him, cliché. He didn’t notice. “It’s a beautiful memorial to her,” she said instead.
The man turned his other arm toward her and there was the exact same tattoo.
“Another member of your family? Oh, I’m so sorry,” Vicki said.
“No. It’s the minute after.”
She didn’t understand. She leaned toward him and looked closely at his tattoo and saw that the long arm was indeed marked to be later than 3:10: 3:11. “It must be painful to lose a parent,” she said.
She half expected him to yell at her. His energy was caged and this made him both attractive and dangerous.
“It’s just fucked up to feel devastated and freed at the same time,” he said. He shrugged.
She didn’t know how to continue the conversation. Both of her parents were in Virginia watching television and sending her dinner money once a month so she could “go out and enjoy herself.” So she nodded and they sat in silence until the flight to San Francisco began boarding and a line of people anxious to get on the plane formed around them. She looked down at her laptop for a few moments, but didn’t know what to check. “I always wanted a tattoo.”
“Everyone says that.”
“But how do you know what you want on you forever?”
“You don’t,” he said.
“It’s because eventually you don’t notice them? Like a scar?”
“It fixes time.”
The man stood up to board. He didn’t say good-bye. No nod, no look of a shared moment. The small roller case and the short-sleeved shirt. He was not prepared for gusty cold San Francisco. He was wearing clothes as if he were going to southern California. She comforted herself knowing he’d look ridiculous in his I-left-my-heart-in-SF sweatshirt.
*
The girls tried on her hats. One of the girls wanted to look at her dresses. “Chef Vicki always talks about those black and white parties down by some pier,” she said, “and what about all those clubs? Didn’t she say she partied in a castle?”
They opened her closets. “Chef Vicki must keep everything she’s ever found,” the Treasurer said. Other girls hung back, they wanted to see her closet too, but they thought it rude. They didn’t try to stop the others though. They were 20, who were they to stop a rude person?
Before long, the cats were ignored and the girls were wearing dresses—mod dresses from the 60s, a poodle skirt with an actual poodle on it, a colonial dominatrix gown of some kind that only the Fearless Girl who first looked in the closet would wear.
They didn’t smell any mothballs.
The President held up a French maid outfit, “Chef Vicki must have been a slut. Didn’t she sleep with the mayor or something?”
The Enamored Girl dreamt, one day I will go to parties and wear outrageous outfits.
*
Vicki wasn’t lying when she said she had always wanted a tattoo. She had even gone so far as to sit in the chair at Body Manipulations with an illustration of the tree of life and the goddess Venus emerging from its branches. She had a famous tattoo artist in San Francisco draw it for her. It cost 300 dollars for the drawing. She climbed onto the table and exposed her lower back and some of her butt. The needle touched her skin and she counted to ten, waiting for the pain to subside. She flinched; she hopped off the table and said she’d return.
Now, at the base of her back where a tramp stamp might be, she had a black inked arc that looked like a letter L written by a first grade left-hander. It was going to be a part of the root system, the tattoo artist told her.
She told her friends that the tattoo was just too damn expensive.
She told the girls she couldn’t show them her tattoo and let them think the salacious thoughts she knew they had.
She didn’t feel like she was lying. She had one after all, that lopsided L wasn’t just a birthmark.
On the plane, she looked for the dismissive man with his truth tattooed on his arms. She didn’t see him. Maybe he had disliked talking to her so much that he was curling himself into the rows, hiding. Vicki was no longer certain what her truth had been, and what, if anything, she could ever tattoo on her body. For a moment, she wondered if she really conversed with the man at all. Maybe San Fran could be Frisco. She boarded.
*
The girls lazed around in Chef Vicki’s cottage dressed in her clothes. They were drunk. They pet her two cats. They never looked under her bed. They emptied her closet instead. The Pledgemaster pulled out a trunk. “Maybe she’s a serial killer and she keeps her trophies in here,” she said. The Enamored Girl pointed out it was locked, but her voice was lost in the vocal fray. They figured out the combination, her birthday.
“It was like Chef Vicki wanted us to open it,” the President slurred. They each took a journal, one pictured Monet’s lilies, another had Klimt’s virgin, others merely leatherbound. All had Vicki’s bubbly cursive slanting downward with each progressing line.
The Fearless One still dressed like the dominatrix picked up a journal—a black one with a sticker of an alien on it—and mimicked Vicki’s voice, throaty and low like she once smoked too much.
“I can’t believe Gillian left me at the castle. How was I supposed to get home? Yellow Cab laughed at me, laughed at me, when I asked them to come to Hunters’ Point. Fuck her. I need new friends.”
Even the Shy Girl picked up a journal—one covered in denim—and read, “I went by the club again tonight. GP was working behind the bar training some newbie. I wish he would just ask me out. He acts like I’m a guy. Could he be gay?” The girls laughed and related and wondered who GP was—“Greg!” “Gilbert!” “Gerry!” “Godfrey!” “Geeky Poo!” They giggled.
The Enamored Girl didn’t read. She sat in the velvet chair and felt bad for Chef Vicki and wondered if she ever found better friends than Gillian and if she herself would ever find better friends than her sorority sisters.
*
Two vodka cranberries and a nap later, Vicki was shuttling to her hotel in the wharf. There was only one friend left in San Francisco. Everyone else had left for the suburbs, for their hometowns, for affordable housing. Only Gillian remained, her wild-haired party friend who was lucky enough to work at a tech firm before it went big, lucky enough to marry her college sweetheart in a Napa Valley wedding before everyone had Napa Valley weddings, and lucky enough to afford raising a child in a city where there were more dogs than children.
Vicki sat on her bed in the hotel room. It was stiff and unyielding. A no smoking sign was bolted to the door, but she could smell the deodorizer covering stale ash. The movies on the flatscreen were $15.99 a pop. Her shows buffered with the internet service the hotel provided for free. The sorority girls had gifted her a place to sleep not a place to hide. She called her friend.
Gillian shrieked. She chastised Vicki for not calling sooner. She chastised Vicki for never visiting. (Gillian had never visited her.) She wanted her to come see the house—“it’s a Victorian flat just like we always wanted. Get this, on Russian Hill!” But Vicki declined with a lie about meetings. Meetings for what, she didn’t know. And she knew Gillian would never ask. She had followed Gillian’s life on Facebook so she had already seen the flat and the view. That’s what they were to one another now—Miss you! Happy Birthday! Great picture! She didn’t want to tread the hardwood floors of her own dream. They agreed to brunch the next morning.
Vicki walked. At the wharf, she jumped when the guy hiding behind a garbage can in a Snoopy mask jumped out at her, laughed and asked for a dollar. It used to be a guy hiding behind a fake branch. In North Beach, she didn’t stop to notice the comedy club she used to frequent had closed or that all the same old men hung out at Caffe Trieste, even the guy missing his foot. She walked the city blocks in the outfit she wore to the airport, looking down to see the street names etched in the cement—it had taken her years to start looking up toward the street lights in Wisconsin. She walked to the Haight and sat on her favorite bench in Buena Vista Park. Surrounded by a sweeping oak groves she remembered she thought this to be a place magic survived. She couldn’t remember where the Grateful Dead had lived, although she told her girls she partied in that very house. She had told them she shook Jerry Garcia’s hand and felt the stub of his finger.
They didn’t know who Jerry Garcia was. And then maybe again Vicki didn’t either. Had she ever liked The Grateful Dead? There was this one boy she liked and he liked them. She tie-dyed tee shirts for them. He played and replayed Sugar Magnolia and called her his Sugar Victoria. She wanted to be the girl with bells on her toes.
She arrived first at Squat and Gobble, the one at the edge of the Castro between their old neighborhoods, a crepe place where they would meet weekly and talk about all things that they had experienced apart even though they walked the world like twins back then. She wore the jeans that lifted her butt and her favorite bulky sweater that hid her belly that was no longer flat. In the hotel room, she looked at her image in the mirror. An older version of her favorite self stared back.
The crepery hadn’t changed at all, mismatched wooden tables and chairs, a blackboard menu. It was one of those places where orders were placed at the counter and the cashier gave you a number. Vicki ordered her old favorite, a mushroom and egg crepe. She took the seat against the wall so she could look for Gillian and still act like she wasn’t nervous with anticipation.
Gillian walked in, waved and stood in line. She looked as she did in all those Facebook pictures; her page obviously not as curated as Vicki’s page, which contained more from her past than her present. Gillian worked her phone screen as she stood in line, seemingly comfortable with the reunion that hadn’t happened yet. Vicki studied her. Her jeans were loose and she wore ballerina flats instead of the boots she’d had once elevated to fetishism. She wore a blazer that looked expensive. She wasn’t as thin as she had been, but her skin still reflected the light. She still glowed. Vicki touched her face, which felt dull in comparison.
Once Gillian ordered and with her number in hand, she walked over and hugged Vicki. She murmured how much the same she looked and Vicki wondered if it were true. “I’m sorry Jack couldn’t come even just to say hello,” Gillian said. “He took Amaretto to the Dolores Park. She had a minor meltdown this morning. Can you believe I have a daughter?” Vicki didn’t hear Gillian breathe between sentences. Who named a child a liqueur? She remembered Gillian once crushed on a guy named Jameson—maybe there was a trend she didn’t know about.
They waited for their food and talked about the edges of their lives. Vicki told Gillian about the bartender and Gillian lamented married sex. They gossiped about mutual friends long gone. Gillian told Vicki about her husband bringing coffee to her each morning and Vicki echoed, “Jack’s a good man.” They nodded through one another’s presentations of their lives.
“You know,” Gillian said and leaned forward. “I still have it.”
“Herpes?”
Gillian laughed. “You know, that art project we found?”
Gillian looked in her purse and pulled out a blue marble etched to like earth and glued into an oyster shell. The found cliché. Vicki could see Gillian kept it pristine, at least as pristine as something they found in a cardboard box on a corner in the Haight. “I still have those Italian leather shoes you found too.” Gillian leaned forward, “I haven’t been treasure hunting in a long time, we should go after we finish here.”
They had furnished their apartments that way, Vicki remembered. They had wandered the streets of the wealthier or artier neighborhoods and picked through what people abandoned to the sidewalk. Expensive shoes, novels, beautiful artwork and furniture that could be refurbished or repurposed. At least that’s how she remembered it. “Do you still have the dresser? The one with the art deco tiles?”
“It was old. All the tiles were cracked. Jack and I put it on the street and it was gone within the hour. It’s in some Millennial’s apartment, I’m sure.”
Vicki leaned forward. “Do you remember Kezar Pub? Is it still there?”
“God, I haven’t been there in ages. They called you Norm.”
“I thought they called me mayor.”
“Honey, I think it was just our group that called you the mayor. Just like what’s his face. Do you remember how you loved him?”
“He wasn’t mayor then.”
“No, he owned that shitty club you would make us hang out at all the time. And you would smile your smile and wait for him to tell you he loved you.”
“He never did.”
“Did you ever have sex with him?”
Vicki hesitated. She hadn’t. But the urge to shape her story was strong. She shook her head free of the urge. Had she lied to Gillian back then? She couldn’t remember. “What do you remember about us back then? I mean, it’s not like I blacked out, but-”
“We were delinquents.”
“Come on, for real. Do you remember that Thanksgiving?”
“When we went to Safeway at three in the morning and I put the turkey under my shirt and pretended I was pregnant? How did we get away with that?”
“I thought I did that,” Vicki said. She remembered waddling and laughing as her friends followed agape with laughter and disbelief. She remembered the ice-cold drumsticks against her belly. She remembered the chill turning into a searing pain.
Gillian shook her head. “I think it was me.” She shrugged. “When I tell the story it’s me. You tell the story, it’s you. Who cares?”
“Did I really get up on stage at The Fillmore?”
Gillian shook her head. “No, of course not. How could you get up there? It’s s a real stage. You did get up at Deluxe—that was more like a platform. Don’t you remember you fell and twisted your ankle?”
Vicki shook her head, it didn’t even sound familiar.
“We went to the emergency room, remember?”
Vicki would have sworn her fifteen years in San Francisco were emergency room free. She would have sworn she had never been to a hospital in San Francisco. She couldn’t even remember where any hospitals were.
They sipped their iced teas. Conversation ebbed. Vicki spotted a tattoo: Amaretto in cursive on the inside of her wrist. She complimented the tattoo.
“That little girl changed everything,” Gillian said.
Vicki supposed her move to Wisconsin changed everything. But she wouldn’t tattoo the state on her wrist. “I just can’t remember anything from those days.”
“Because you danced on a stage at Deluxe rather than a big venue like the Fillmore. Again,” Gillian leaned forward, “who cares?”
Vicki did.
*
They were wearing the hats now. Bundled up on the couch in Chef Vicki’s costumes, watching her television, petting her cats. “Poor Vicki,” they said. They congratulated themselves on their gift to her. “She needed it,” they said. The Enamored Girl was angry. There was no mayor. There was no movie. There was a Lonely Girl who wrote in her diary about how much she loved a man who didn’t know more than her name. Nothing was glamorous at all. Chef Vicki’s life seemed not altogether different from the Enamored Girl’s life right now, a wishing one.
*
Gillian laughed when Vicki told her she was a Chef and Culinary Arts professor at her small liberal arts college. “Everyone,” Gillian said, her bangles clanking, “everyone, remakes their history for public consumption, but really?”
“I do work for a college,” Vicki said again.
“Whatever, Vics, I love you.”
“And you never exaggerate? Your life is an open book?”
“Cliché,” Gillian squealed.
They clinked their drinks together from old habit.
“But honey,” Gillian said, using the word honey like a slur. “Remember when we first met? When you just moved from Los Angeles? You told me you worked for people in Hollywood and you told me Hollywood was by the beach. Did you think I didn’t know where Hollywood was in relation to the shoreline? It was a great story, Hollywood by the beach and you working for producers you couldn’t name. The story is why I liked you.
“So now, you don’t think I actually believe you, Miss Party Girl, are actually a professor, do you? But who cares? We’ve been friends for years and I’ve got your back. Tell me the stories.” Gillian mashed up what was left of her crepe and poured pepper all over it. “Carbs,” she said by way of explanation. “Who cares what life it is. I have a beautiful Victorian, but my parents pay the property taxes and gifted us the downpayment. I work at a tech company, but I’m the HR person. I drive an Audi, but it’s preowned and leased. It’s real enough though, right? Am I lying? No, no, I’m not.” Vicki noticed Gillian’s bangles were on her dominant hand and covered her tattoo much of the time. She wondered if that were on purpose.
Vicki wanted to be back in her garden. The girls couldn’t be trusted to tell a weed from the sprout of a baby carrot. Her cats hated strangers and would probably hide. She wanted to make a new quilt, perhaps with some of the costumes she hid away in the closet. She wanted to put on her bee suit and look at her honey. Gillian kept talking, her bangles clanking as she continued listing her polished life versus her tinny one.
*
The girls lost interest and packed the clothes away. The sugar high of the alcohol had worn off. They were tired and dried out. They straightened the house and watered the plants and pet the cats one last time. The Shy Girl shook the globes so they were all snowing at the same time. The Treasurer yelled at her to fill the vodka bottle with water and returned it to the freezer. The Pledgemaster pocketed a small Hello Kitty figurine she found at the bottom of a box. She announced it was a souvenir of Chef Liar. That’s what they called her now. The President made sure it all looked the same as before—she was smart and had taken pictures with her phone.
They stood outside the door and the Enamored Girl told them she would stay behind. She made up a reason and said she’d find her own way home. No one cared. Alone, she put on Chef Vicki’s hip huggers and a fringy top she found in the closet. The pants were too long and were covered in cat hair. She felt like a hippy from the seventies. She took a snow globe with the Statue of Liberty, a place she’d always wanted to go and laid on Chef Vicki’s bed. She shook it and wondered whether the real Statue of Liberty would be as uncrowded and serene. She had never been to New York City. It would be disappointing, she concluded—it wouldn’t look autumnal and glossy like the moves she’d seen.
The Enamored Girl stared at the ceiling and considered Chef Vicki and her life; she then wondered about her own: the boy she loved who didn’t love her; the times she cut her thigh to remind herself that she felt pain; the exams she studied for but never quite hard enough to be disappointed if she didn’t get an A; her grades—grades that didn’t include As; and her future—her likely one and her dreamed up one. And she wondered finally if the girls would let her stay in the sorority if they knew the truth about her.
*
Body Manipulations looked the same as Vicki remembered it, steampunk red and intimidating. It smelled of dust. Her request was plain, and the man at the counter, his lip pierced, looked bored at her request. She’d heard tattooing on bone was most painful. She didn’t leave this time. She asked him the time and he told her, 4:30. That would do. She told him what she wanted and hopped on the table and lifted her shirt. She refused to flinch. She concentrated on the ceiling and absorbed the burning like a penance. Antique wrought iron looking hands of a clock with no face inked on a left rib. 4:35. It wasn’t all a lie.
Alexandra D’Italia completed her graduate work in creative writing at University of Southern California. She’s published in Gold Man Review, Meat for Tea, South Loop Review, Arcadia, Red Rock Review, and Art Times, among others. Alexandra also won USC’s Edward W. Moses Prize for Fiction. Her short plays have been staged in New York City and Valdez, Alaska. Online Sundries ran a monthly online column of her serialized monologues about a dysfunctional writers group: When the Roundtable is a Rhombus.