Instant Love: Fiction Page 10

  But once a year he would be somewhere wonderful, usually on the West Coast, and they would join him, and it was always exciting because there was an ocean! And blue skies! And there was silence, too, and wide expanses of land and trees and sand that were so enormous and inspirational that Maggie and Holly would forget for exactly three months that they were supposed to hate their father. They would nestle together under the stars at night, in his backyard, and talk about their favorite constellations, while their father was off screwing one of his students.

  Evanston was not California. Evanston had a lot of trees, but the houses were too close together, and flaccid Lake Michigan was a poor substitute for the untamed, wild beauty of the Pacific Ocean. Evanston made Maggie want to nap all day long.

  It was the last summer she was supposed to live with him—her sister, Holly, had already made it out of the system with a self-financed trip to Europe; she sent weekly postcards from beautiful cities, each one reporting both a major work of art she had seen and how many beers she had drunk the night before—and every day, every meal, every conversation with her father made Maggie feel like she had some sort of terminal illness, that she was slowly being killed by a potent and painful boredom. But as she kept most of her feelings inside—mostly because it was more fun in there, but also because she was never proven wrong that way—that boredom turned liquid, like pus inflating a sore.

  AND THEN HE made me get a job, she says now to Robert. He wanted me to be an assistant at the English Department. Staple papers. Make copies. File. Or he said he could get me a job doing research for a friend of his doing a book on feminist iconography in contemporary music.

  Robert raises his eyebrows.

  Madonna, she says.

  That actually sounds fun, honey, he says. You didn’t want to do that?

  I didn’t want to do anything he wanted me to do, she says. Exasperated, like: you should know how I feel about him by now. She feels like stinging today.

  SHE GOT A JOB waiting tables at a country club within walking distance of their house. She had to wear a black polyester dress with a white collar as a uniform. There were tiny black buttons down the front that buttoned nothing, they just hung off the dress. She was told to wear her hair back, so she fastened her thick auburn hair with silver Goody barrettes she bought at the 7-Eleven. She bought black flats with comfortable soles and a dozen packs of tan nylons at Payless. And then she went next door, to the makeup outlet shop, and bought a tube of frosted pink lipstick.

  When she walked downstairs the first morning for work, her father said, “Jesus Christ, I didn’t send you to Princeton so you could look like the fucking maid.”

  HE HAD A POINT, says Robert.

  Maggie stares at him. Lately, each time he opens his mouth he makes her love him less and less. She is trying to decide if he is doing this on purpose or if she is just now realizing for the first time how much he sucks.

  Nothing wrong with a little hard work, she says. You can’t argue with that.

  SHE TOOK THE lunch shifts that summer, waiting on the wives and children of the members who were too lazy to cook their own grilled cheese sandwiches at home. The wives, some older, some younger, were sharp-tongued and particular, and most days operated with a fierce sense of entitlement. Maggie was someone to do their bidding (Never fast enough, never perfectly, they would sigh, as she brought them their food), and consistently neglected to thank her. Their children were better mannered and more respectful—they at least occasionally thanked her for her service—but Maggie still found them wasteful; they ordered food just to take one bite, they heaped out gobs of ketchup they would never use, and they often ordered sugary drink after sugary drink, until Maggie was certain their teeth would turn brown before her eyes. She was silent throughout all of this. She already knew how to keep her mouth shut, keep her thoughts inside. Now she was learning how to focus those thoughts into a particular kind of rage.

  She also learned how to fold napkins in the shape of swans and fans. And she learned how to carry large trays loaded with hot plates flat on her palm. She would glide elegantly through the spacious main dining room, stare out through the wall of windows at the view of the golf course she wasn’t welcome to visit, and never drop a thing. She never spilled when refilling water glasses and coffee mugs, as much as she would have liked to sometimes, right on their spoiled laps. Instead she totaled bills quickly and got people out the door so that they could enjoy their day on the links or at the pool.

  Have a good game, she would say. Don’t forget to use sunblock.

  She was also instructed to memorize everyone’s names so that she could greet them properly. Hello, Mrs. Pollack. Good afternoon, Mrs. Greenhill. Iced tea, Mrs. Hornstein? She was horrible at this, but they never remembered her name, either, and she was the one wearing a name tag.

  Her boss, Eugene, noticed her poor memory, and called her into a meeting one day after her lunch shift. Eugene terrified her. He always put his arm around her and acted like they were buddies, but deep down she knew he hated everything about the country club, including the people who worked for him. At any moment he could turn on you.

  He had a shaggy porn-star mustache and wore three-piece suits in crazy colors like maroon and honey. He thought he was psychic. He always asked everyone what their sign was and when they told him, he would say something like, “You are such a Scorp!” He claimed his boyfriend was psychic, too, so look out, world. Maggie wondered if they even needed to utter any words out loud at all when they were together, or if they just sat there, reading each other’s minds.

  In his office, he was gentle with her.

  “Not everyone has that skill set. You have other talents,” he said.

  Maggie pictured herself shaving off his mustache with a straight razor. She was nicking him, and blood was slipping forth from his skin and dripping down his face in tiny droplets.

  “You are charming and have a lovely smile. And I’ve noticed when you calculate the checks, you do most of the math in your head. That’s very impressive. Not everyone can do that. We definitely don’t want to lose you. So this isn’t a warning or anything, just a suggestion. If you’re not sure of a member’s name, just say ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir’ instead.”

  “Thanks for the feedback,” she said, lying, lying, lying. Being the nicest girl in the world. “I just want to do a good job.”

  But even though it wasn’t a warning, he asked her to switch a few of her shifts to breakfast instead, which meant she had to get there at 6:00 AM instead of 10:00. It was obvious someone had complained.

  Probably Mrs. Pollack. Her husband was the frozen-food king of the Midwest so she thought she owned the place. Maggie never forgot her name, but once had mixed up Mrs. Lowe with Mrs. Kahn, both of whom were Mrs. Pollack’s best country-club girlfriends. They all ordered the same egg-white omelets and side of fruit for lunch every day, wore the same light cotton windbreakers in varying shades of pastels, and had the same hair, short and puffy and vaguely thinning, so that their skulls shined through in the afternoon sunlight. They took turns sending their food back, every day a new problem. The egg whites weren’t cooked enough. The egg whites were cooked too much. Are you sure these are egg whites?

  You try telling them apart, thought Maggie.

  It was probably best that she get out of the lunch shifts. She was starting to fantasize about putting razor blades in the food.

  YOU WANTED to kill them?

  I wanted to wound them.

  I just don’t believe you, he says. You don’t have a mean bone in your body.

  Oh, I’m sure I have at least one, she says.

  THE FIRST FEW morning shifts were bliss, so different from lunch, quieter and faster. There were only men in the mornings, trying to catch a game before they went to work. They would come in, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone, and consume their breakfast hurriedly, as if the plates would be taken away if they didn’t act fast. Maggie liked watching them as they hunched over their Wall Street
Journals, imagining how snotty and shrewish their wives were, how spoiled their children would be acting if they were at home right now. This was their only escape, and they counted on Maggie, young, fresh Maggie, with the freckles and the sleepy eyes; a pretty little college girl, to provide them with peace and comfort.

  This is where she belonged all along.

  Maggie enjoyed her new schedule, too. She looked forward to going to sleep directly after dinner and getting up at 5:00 AM, every day, to feed her men, breezing past her father’s entreaties to play Scrabble with him, or at least watch the news with him, pass a little time, fill a void, before he left to go out with the newest student who was spending several thousand dollars for the privilege to get drunk and sleep with him that year.

  There was always one who caused a big scene at the end of the summer, drank too much at a party and threw a drink on him, or proclaimed her intentions to follow him back to California. In the past few weeks there had been regular hang-ups on the phone when Maggie answered, a game she used to play in high school, and Maggie wondered if her father were dipping a little young this year. But then she saw her one night, picking up her father on the street outside their house, a woman just slightly younger than her own mother, but completely different, lush and blond and hippy, with pink-tinted lips. She wore sunglasses on her head even though it was pitch-dark, and her skirt was too short for her plump legs, and when she saw him she grabbed his arm and then intertwined hers with it. They shuffled off together slowly, linked, and she laughed immediately and loudly.

  Looks like they’ll let anyone into this program, thought Maggie.

  And then Joey Pollack Jr., husband of Miriam Pollack, father of Tyler and Amanda Pollack, son of that awful Mrs. Pollack, and heir to the Pollack frozen-food fortune, took his annual month off for the summer (He had an annual vacation for every season) and decided to spend every day of it at the club. He became the wrench in her plans for a serene summer. A big, noisy, shiny wrench.

  He sat himself in the center of the room, the center table, every day. He was tall and tan and slender, and had an amazing crown of hair around his shining bald head. His teeth were huge and white like a movie star’s. His voice boomed like he was announcing a baseball game; it was impossible to ignore him. And every day, every morning, he talked about blowjobs with his golf partner.

  “The wife and I rented Truth or Dare last night. Have you seen it? Have you seen what Madonna can do with a water bottle? The woman’s got talent all right, but forget her singing.”

  “First date, I got a fantastic blowjob from my wife. Second date, also a great blowjob. The third date I asked her to marry me, and I never got head again. What’s up with that?”

  “All right, I got one for you, buddy. What’s the best thing about getting a blowjob from an Ethiopian woman? You know she’ll swallow. Get it? She’ll swallow!”

  Now him, she thought, I could cut.

  The worst part was how he followed every comment with a winning, glowing smile, and sometimes a wink, too, to let her know it was only a joke, that she was in on it, too. He was only kidding with the constant cock talk, he was really her friend. Weren’t the rest of these guys duds? Wasn’t he the only one worth knowing? And wasn’t he the only one in this whole snotty place who recognized that she was alive? She was oddly attracted to him, too, even though she knew he was a lech and a perv, and probably a philanderer.

  “What’s your deal, Maggie?”

  He was eating his eggs, scrambled and runny, and a piece of whole-wheat toast, no butter.

  “Mr. Pollack?”

  She was topping off his buddy’s decaf.

  “What are you, a college student?”

  “Yes,” she said. “At Princeton.”

  “Princeton, whoa! You must be pretty smart.” He looked up at her, swallowed his food.

  “I do OK,” she said. “It’s a lot of work.”

  “I went to University of Illinois,” he said. “Not as fancy as Princeton but you get a good education there. What are you studying?”

  “English.”

  “English! You should be studying to be a doctor or a lawyer or something. What are you going to do with an English degree?”

  “I could be a teacher, or an editor. Or a writer.”

  “Yeah? You going to write a book about all of us?”

  Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, thought Maggie. I’m going to write a book about you. You and your friends and your blowjob jokes.

  Maggie shrugged, let her lids drop down halfway, then dropped her chin to her shoulder, rubbed it against the raw polyester of her uniform. It was one of her patented shy-girl moves that kept people at bay. Look how delicate she is. Don’t ruin it with too many questions.

  “Don’t forget us when you’re famous, all right?”

  “All right.”

  She heard him say as she walked away, “Cute girl,” and when she looked back, he was staring at her like he would have preferred her to the eggs that morning.

  After she had married the ketchup bottles and totaled her checks and unbound her hair from her barrettes, she walked home dreaming of Mr. Pollack. She imagined he was hiding in the trees, watching her, until she motioned to him to join her. And then finally he did, he was walking next to her, whispering filthy things in her ear.

  AT NIGHT her father ordered another pizza and insisted she tell him about her day.

  Maybe there’s something interesting at this country club, he mused, his fingers to his chin. Maybe I could get something out of it. What are the members like?

  Her father’s books usually took place in testosterone-laden backdrops, like war zones or fishing boats, horse ranches or mountain ranges. The End of Big Sky Country was the title of his latest novel, which Maggie had yet to read. She started to scan the back cover but put the book back on the shelf when she read the headline, “Sometimes a battle for land is best fought hand to hand.”

  I doubt it, said Maggie. They’re all into playing golf and being Jewish.

  He was quiet after that. She knew he would be. Her dad used to be Jewish, but didn’t like to talk about it. She had seen a picture of him from his bar mitzvah, hanging on a wall at her grandmother’s house. He was wearing a yarmulke and a gray three-piece suit, standing behind a podium with a serious smile that displayed a mass of braces.

  But then he went to college, started smoking pot for the next decade, and decided religion was the opiate of the masses. He became this numb mélange of academia, alcohol, and agnosticism, until all that was left in his life was a generic gift-giving winter holiday.

  There is nothing interesting about any of these people, said Maggie. Trust me.

  She knew she was lying, though. Joey Pollack Jr. had begun to mesmerize her. He was the center of her universe for forty-five minutes a day. She waited to see what atrocity would come out of his mouth next. Would he be sexist today? Or would his thinly veiled racism be making a visit? (He had a severe preoccupation with the length and width of the penises belonging to black professional athletes.) Or would he be showing blatant disrespect for the mother of his children today? He was so awesome. He was the most horrible man she had ever met in her entire life, and she was kind of in love with him.

  The day he said the one thing he regretted about having kids was what it did to his wife’s breasts (“Down to here,” he said, his hands, palms outstretched, dropping to his waist), Maggie went to the 7-Eleven after work and bought a box of razor blades. She didn’t know what she was going to do with them. I just want to hold them, she thought. I just want them in my hands. As she paid for them, she glanced up at the security camera. Captured on film. Some waitress in a cheap uniform, and her razor blades. She knew she wasn’t doing anything wrong, but she felt like a criminal nonetheless.

  Up the stairs, into the bathroom, she locked the door, pulled a blade out of the clear plastic box. She held it to her finger, she held it to her forearm. She pulled off her shoes and pantyhose and pressed it up against her k
nee, then foot, then calf. Flat silver blade against pink young flesh. The bathroom tiles were pink and white, and alternated like a checkerboard. She cut her calf, only a little bit, so there was only a little bit of blood.

  This wasn’t right. This wasn’t her. She didn’t want to cut herself. She wanted to cut someone else.

  ROBERT HAS WALKED across the room. It’s their living room, in their house. They live in Westchester, where Robert had always dreamed of living. Maggie has decorated each room lovingly. She loves to shop, and not just for herself, but for other people. She’s what you would call giving. You want to make Maggie happy, just give her a credit card and let her go. That’s what Robert always says about her. It’s easy to make her happy. Let her give.

  You’re freaking me out, he says.

  Good, she thinks.

  You never had a summer where you went a little crazy? Where you drank every day, or you had lots of one-night stands, or you did too many drugs? Where you sunk lower than you ever thought you could? And the only reason you woke up in the morning was just so you could do it all over again?

  I didn’t want to kill anyone, he says.

  I didn’t want to kill anyone, either, she says.

  Me drinking till I puked every night and sleeping with a couple of girls, who, yeah, I never called again, I don’t know their names now, fine, I’m not proud of it, it’s just not the same as slashing someone.

  That was uncharacteristic behavior for you, she says.

  Absolutely.

  Well, for me, too, she says. I was not myself. I was someone else.

  SHE STARTED CARRYING the razor blades in her pocket at work. She would finger the smooth plastic edges of the box when she would reach in to get her order pad and pen. Just a quick touch to make sure they were still there, that they hadn’t fallen out and gotten away from her. She didn’t want anyone finding her blades, finding out that she liked them, or worse, keeping them for themselves. It was easy to imagine her coworkers also wanting to slash up the clientele. The best you could hope for from club members was for them to ignore you. It was when they realized you existed that your life became miserable, because then you were there to indulge them. They paid a lot of money to have someone to order around.