I'm Not Julia Roberts

  One rolls her eyes and flicks her brush in Two’s direction, spattering droplets all over him and the ceiling.

  “Watch it,” he says.

  One shrugs. “I am watching it.”

  Two drains his drink and holds it out to One. “How about another?”

  “You know where the fridge is. And get me one, too.”

  Two smiles then, actually smiles, and steps over the radio and out of the room. One paints a face onto the wall, two X’s for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. As if One had just put the finishing touches on a specially commissioned fresco, Alan beams.

  What Beatrix loves about Alan is that he is so hopeful. That he is able to maintain his optimism in the face of overwhelming difficulties that would defeat the most dogged. They met at a marketing seminar hosted by a company that produced vitamins and encouraged a pyramid structure of management. She could sense his profound hopefulness from across the room, saw it shining like an aura all around him. For this man, she thought, there is no mountain high enough. She would have climbed anything, anywhere, with him.

  Watching him painting carefully around the windowsill, his hands so sure, she still wants to make those climbs, even though her own enthusiasm for their vitamin business waned in the early months when they hosted their own parties and tried to convince their friends to join them. Every morning, Beatrix goes to her job as a marketing director at a food company, and Alan gets up, puts on a shirt and a tie, and cheerfully makes his phone calls. And when they sit together at the end of the day, he’ll recount the rude things that people have said to him, and he will chuckle into his mashed potatoes.

  So how, then, does a man like him end up with a child like this one? Biology? Environment? Both? Actually, Problem One reminds Beatrix of her ex-husband, the way that she has always imagined he was as a teenager: cool, snide, selfish. She supposes what drew her to him was the belief that there was something underneath that slick exterior, something small and true that she might take into her hands, something she could feed and grow.

  One has sent Two for beverages three times, twice by splattering Two with paint, once by scrawling a green line down his arm with her fingernail. Beatrix sees the weakness in her son as well, sees how he is drawn to One’s hopelessness like a fish sucked into a boat propeller. One cannot fill herself up, so she will use Two if she can. That’s how she is. That’s how they are.

  “Crap,” says Alan. “We’re running out of paint.”

  “Too bad,” One says. “I guess we’ll have to stop.”

  “No, no, keep going,” says Alan. “I’ve got another gallon in the garage.” He pauses by his daughter’s side. “Thanks for the help, honey.”

  “Uh-huh,” One says. “Remember you said you’d pay me.”

  “Nobody offered to pay me,” says Two.

  “Not my issue,” says One.

  Alan thinks they’re funny, thinks he’s a part of it. “I’ll be right back!” he says, bounding out of the room.

  Problem One tips her can at Two. “He’ll be right back.” The foam insulator slips a bit, revealing the white can, the blue and red lettering.

  Beer, Beatrix says to herself. They’ve been drinking beer this whole time. How did we miss the beer?

  Problem One glances Beatrix’s way, realizes that they’ve been snagged. Her grin spreads across her face like syrup over a pancake, settling, soaking in. “So what?” she says. “So what?”

  “I don’t understand what’s wrong with you,” Beatrix says.

  “Oh, let’s see . . . um . . . you, maybe?” One throws the beer to the floor, where it spills, bubbling furiously, like peroxide on a wound. Two nods in approval, smirking.

  This is, thought Beatrix, how much they hate her, how much they hate their own lives, what they were prepared to do about it. For a moment, she can see clearly into their collective future, watches herself monitoring the liquor bottles, coming home early one afternoon and hearing the soft laughter from her son’s bedroom, the rustling of sheets, enduring the perpetual explosion her home would become.

  “Slut,” One says under her breath.

  With a paper towel, Beatrix wipes her brush carefully, balances it atop the paint can so that it will not drip all over the floor, and slaps One smartly across the face. One opens her mouth to speak, a red rose blooming on her cheek. Beatrix takes a single step closer. “Don’t,” she says, warning her, warning both of them.

  Maybe it’s not the word or the slap or the step, but her expression—the resolve that her ex always said made her eyes flash—that silences them. In her mind, she ticks off the necessary repairs. She will cancel the birthday weekend and let her son go to his baseball game. She will send this girl back to her own mother, who will have to exorcise her child’s demons as best she can. And the two of them, the Problems, will forget this single afternoon of collusion, these brief hours during which they had the same destructive agenda. Hoping for more—for family, for friendship, for a basic level of civility—is too much to ask; she sees that now. She will settle for separate but equal. Or just separate and separate. She will hold on to what little she has and be thankful that it’s still hers.

  Beatrix turns away and inspects the paint job, now seeing yet another thing she will have to fix. “You know what?” she says. “This green reminds me of snot.”

  Problem One frowns in momentary confusion before regaining her composure. She drops her hand from her cheek and tosses her hair. “Duh. That’s what I told you.”

  Alan appears in the doorway, a gallon of Glidden’s eggshell cradled in his arms. “What did she tell you?”

  Looking from the Problems to her husband, Beatrix wants to start this day again, scrape it back, paint it a different shade. For him, for Alan. She bends to retrieve the beer can from the floor, pushes it firmly back into the foam sleeve. “She told me how much she likes the color.”

  “After all that complaining?” he says, watching Beatrix pass the can back to his oddly silent daughter. “I don’t believe it.”

  Beatrix takes the gallon, wincing just a little as the handle bites into her fingers. “Believe it.”

  BALLAD OF THE BARBIE FEET

  In old photographs, they are sweet sickles, the exposed arches a pale, wrinkled surprise. Liv pores over the videos that document her childhood, watches her younger self cat-walking across the suburban landscape with that perfect, tight-hipped slink, and her saucer eyes well up at the sight of what she has lost. She punches the buttons on the remote, cutting the video midstream. “This is your fault,” she says to Roxie, at Roxie. “You and Dad screw up everything.”

  When Liv was just shy of seven, a surgeon calmed the overexcited Achilles tendons that had kept her on tiptoe since she first stood up by herself. For months after the operation, Liv walked like a person wearing swim flippers, as if the world were flat and she could drop off the edge of it at any moment. Roxie and Alan enrolled Liv in ballet lessons, not to dupe her into thinking that professional dance was a viable career choice, but to help her get acquainted with her new feet.

  Nine years later, Liv’s Russian ballet teachers poke at her nonexistent arches with their canes and with their fingers and frown—or worse, purse their lips in pity. “Try the jazz dance!” they suggest, averting their eyes. “How about the hip-hop?”

  “The operation had nothing to do with your arches,” Roxie says. “The doctors didn’t touch those. It was your tendons. They were too tight.”

  “Your underwear’s too tight. Your skull’s too tight,” says Liv, the kind of thing she says when her parents try to explain themselves, explain anything.

  “I didn’t know she seriously wanted to be a ballet dancer,” Alan says. “I thought she wanted to be Mariah Carey.”

  “She just wants to be black,” says Roxie. “No, black and a ballet dancer. She wants to be the world’s premier black ballet dancer.”

  “Black,” Alan says in that flat way that tells Roxie he’s too tired to explore this.

  They are
meeting at their usual place and time: Thursday, nine P.M., in the parking lot of the library. The evening is warm and humid, and beads of sweat form at Alan’s hairline. Roxie resists the urge to blot his forehead with a tissue, shifts her books from one arm to the other. She reads a lot of “women’s fiction” but, lately, finds that the themes pop out at her like lame bumper stickers: Don’t date married men! Don’t marry gay men! Don’t breed with bozos! She has begun to taunt herself with a sweetie-pie brand of magical realism: Mystical events concerning life and love and food preparation happen in France, in Mexico, in India, but none of them will happen here, and none of them will happen to you!

  “Liv blames us. She thinks the operation screwed up her feet and ruined her chances at ballet.”

  “The operation didn’t do it. Nature screwed up her feet,” says Alan. “God did.”

  Roxie snorts at the mention of God. She’s studying psychology, and it brings out all her snotty agnostic tendencies, tendencies that she knows annoy Alan, not because they are dismissive so much as because they are irresolute. It took her twenty-two months of separation before she could decide on the divorce.

  Alan: sweaty, cranky. “Her feet are just fine. She can still dance. Hell, she can walk, can’t she? She’ll get over it.”

  Roxie picks at her cuticles, at the nail on her middle finger that grows at an angle. Her daughter, her job, her studies, her boyfriends, and all these books with their funny-terrible sketches of dating disaster and recipes for personal ecstasy have left her feeling more irresolute than ever. What kind of magic could descend upon the homes and shops of Oak Park, Illinois? The dachshunds of peace! The egg salad of love!

  Not one woman in any of those books had gone on a date at Chuck E. Cheese’s, not one.

  Roxie sighs. “Yes, she can walk. She can breathe and swallow, too. Maybe we should remind her of that.”

  Their split was peaceful, bloodless. Roxie kept the house, Alan the investments, and both kept Liv the best they could. At the time, Liv was infected with what Roxie called “a touch of anorexia,” which meant that she was skinny and peevish and had numerous irritating tics. She’d demand an ice-cream cone and eat it with a fork, scraping the dome with the tines. The vegetarian chili was consumed one bean at a time. At restaurants, she badgered her parents into ordering mozzarella sticks and onion rings and vats of cream sauce but asked for something raw and sprouted for herself.

  “I can’t keep eating all these nachos just to help her get back at us,” Roxie had said to her first rebound boyfriend, an Egyptian chef named Hab. “First of all, it’s stupid and destructive. Second, I’m getting fat.”

  “Fat,” said Hab, placing a hand on her ample hip. “Only in America is fat bad.”

  A few years later, Liv discovered that devouring truckloads of junk food in front of Roxie—she of the perpetual diet—was a far more effective and enjoyable brand of torture, especially since she could burn it all off with one good hissy fit.

  “This is only my second sundae today,” Liv says as she, Roxie, and Alan tour the dance supply store. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m coming down with something.”

  Roxie closes her eyes to roll them in secret. “Do you want a napkin? I like to take a napkin and wrap it around the cup so that my fingers don’t get sticky.”

  “My fingers never get sticky,” Liv says, zeroing in on some gauzy little ballet skirts that cost $75 each.

  Roxie claps her hands together once, loudly, trapping them so that they cannot reach out and smack someone. “How about some jazz shoes? Miss Vronski recommended some brands for you to try.” She wishes she knew a good spell to flip the sundae onto the floor.

  Liv stabs at her ice cream, spraying them all with chopped peanuts. “Thanks a lot.”

  Roxie looks at Alan, whom she’d dragged along for moral support. “What? What did I say?”

  “I do not need jazz shoes. I need new ballet shoes for the talent show,” says Liv. “I choreographed an entire piece by myself, or did you totally forget about that?”

  Roxie tries to imagine Liv as a baby, a tiny Betty Boop with tiny bowed feet. She had suffered from gas, so she smiled all the time. “Of course I didn’t forget,” says Roxie, “but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. I just thought—”

  “Stop thinking,” says Liv, licking her spoon. “You’re not so great at it.”

  “Hey,” Alan says, awake now. “Is that the way you talk to your mother?”

  “It speaks!” says Liv.

  “Is that the way you talk to your father?” says Roxie, grabbing for the ice cream as Liv jerks it away.

  The facts: Alan had an acute midlife crisis, had an affair, and got involved with a sleaze named Mike Ritchie, Mr. Pinky Ring Pyramid Scheme with all his vitamin drinks and diet powders and voodoo. Her husband, who had spent his adult life haggling for deals and climbing the corporate ladder, was suddenly convinced that he could make millions in a couple of short years if he harassed all his friends into becoming “distributors” and handed out flyers at the mall.

  And before she knew what was happening, the crisis crept over to Roxie’s side of the bed and she applied for and was accepted into the doctoral program in psychology at the state university. She took a 50 percent pay cut to work at a twenty-four-hour crisis hot line, where she did everything from counseling the suicidal to ordering the toilet paper.

  And Liv? After her parents’ respective crises, Liv was forced to attend her ballet school as a scholarship student, which meant that she had to swab the sweaty studios in exchange for her classes. “It’s a good thing you hooked up with those suicide people,” she said, “because I’m going to hang myself.”

  In retrospect, Roxie figures that she and Alan wanted to shoulder their burdens as gracefully as their parents and grandparents had but needed to cultivate some actual burdens first. They were tired of being comfortable; they wanted to raise the stakes. They wanted to explore—if not life and death—marital discord, mental illness, professional devastation, financial ruin, crime, and punishment. What didn’t figure into the equation: There are women who still put on fresh lipstick before their husbands come home because they remember when their own daddies left for good and there was never enough to eat. Roxie had no idea that these women would have hated her.

  The man on the phone is sobbing. Though Roxie has been at the hot line for close to two years, the sobbing men are still unnerving.

  It seems, he says, he is getting a divorce. And it also seems, he says, that his soon-to-be ex will be taking the children to Colorado, where a river guide—complete with skinning blade and cowboy hat—will be their new daddy.

  “My ex is shacking up with the Marlboro Man,” he says, sobbing. “He probably hunts. He’ll teach Lenore to shoot a rifle. She’s only six!”

  Roxie takes mental notes. For her thesis, she plans on researching the effects of divorce on the divorced and divorcing. So far, it looks as though the effects are madness, aggression, petulance, depression, weight gain, adult acne, plastic surgery, and Jerry Springer logic. Though she too has a defunct marriage under her belt, Roxie herself feels divorced from divorce. Divorcing people have sordid public affairs with best friends and neighbors. They kidnap pets, set fire to the furniture. They embark on years-long quests to humiliate each other, alienate their own children, destroy each other’s property or credit rating. She and Alan simply aren’t passionate enough for all that drama. It has never occurred to her to pick up a chair and heave it through the picture window or send obscene e-mails to Alan’s new wife.

  She wonders what it would be like to live with a man who made her feel that histrionic, that borderline. There was Hab, of course, oboe-voiced, cinnamon-skinned Hab, who had tried his best to turn her inside out, but in the end it was all so much frantic sex and food fights and a heart so sick that it required antibiotics. Now, when she thinks of throwing caution to the wind, she remembers how quickly it blows back and smacks you in the face.

  Roxie listens to
the man sob about Colorado and imagines pouring him some tea, tucking him into his bed, throwing an afghan over his feet. She has been trained to stay in the moment, but there are certain things she’s learned. Shouldn’t you share what you’ve learned?

  “She’ll hate it,” she says finally.

  “What?”

  “Your wife. She’ll hate Colorado. The Marlboro Man doesn’t read books. He doesn’t understand the theater. He puts ketchup on his eggs, and he coughs without covering his mouth. The cowboy hat will start to look like something else, a tumor, maybe, or a Portuguese man-o’-war.”

  “He’s Portuguese?”

  “She’ll hate it,” says Roxie. “Trust me.”

  Roxie’s boyfriend of the moment is Tate, an easily distracted doctor with lashes so thick that he appears to have glued them on. After Alan, with his touchy internal thermostat, after Hab and all his hot air, Roxie has been trying men who, like camels, are good in the heat. And things had been heating up well enough to prompt a get-together with all their kids at a restaurant of Tate’s selection: Café Fondue. Roxie is hopeful until she sees that Tate’s daughter, Ashleigh, is stacked and sticks her chest out as if she had something to do with it, while his boy, Ryan, seems disturbed or possessed or both.

  Liv fidgets with her Coke and stares at Tate. “I thought you were Egyptian.”

  “What?” says Tate, who had been watching his son jab at the air with his fondue fork.

  “E-gyp-ti-an,” Liv repeats.

  Tate, somehow believing that Liv is actually interested in his heritage, says, “I’m English and Italian. A little bit Greek, too.”

  Liv pokes Roxie in the arm. “What about the Egyptian guy? What’s his name? Hag? Did he dump you or something?”