Falling in Place

Seven

MARY WAS watching as Angela dipped the tiny sable brush into the small glass bottle, wiped the brush on the lip of the bottle, then opened her mouth as though she were singing “o” and slowly outlined her top lip with the plum-colored lip gloss.

Downstairs, Angela’s father was complaining about his latest case to Angela’s mother, who was reading the evening paper and eating an apple. His ranting had driven Angela and Mary upstairs, and then they had started to fool around with Angela’s make-up.

“He lost five hundred dollars over the weekend in Saratoga,” Angela said. “And Mom says that he thinks he’s going to lose this case.”

“That looks great,” Mary said. “Your mouth is so sensual. It looks like Bianca Jagger’s.”

“I’ve got big lips,” Angela said. “I read that if you emphasize your worst features people will think they’re beautiful because you think they are.” Angela shrugged. She was sitting on an old piano stool, covered with red velvet, in front of an Art Deco vanity that her grandmother had given her for her birthday. Inside one of the drawers (her grandmother got the vanity at an auction) there had been a card with ten heart-shaped buttons on it, and in another drawer what was probably the veil from a hat, dotted with little white flowers that had curled into balls with age and dirt — and, best of all, scratched in the top drawer, “Richard loves Daniel.” Angela had taken the veil and the card of buttons and put them in that drawer. She opened it again to see if the message, surrounded by the big scratched heart, was still there. It was.

“He’s really fucked-up,” Angela said. “Maybe he lost a thousand dollars. Sometimes he takes a thousand.”

“Peter Frampton gets his hair curled, I think,” Mary said. “God — I wish I looked like his girlfriend. The one who sued him. She was so incredible.”

“Bobby Pendergast took Annie’s copy of ‘I’m in You’ to the park and was playing Frisbee with it. She went down there and she goes, ‘What are you doing?’ and he goes, ‘He’s a faggot.’ All those Pendergasts are creeps.”

“I don’t see why we’re sitting around waiting to be invited to a party at the last minute,” Mary said. “Big deal anyway — the Fourth of July.”

“What?” Angela said. “You’re liberated or something?” Angela was dotting on lavender eye shadow with a Q-tip. “I told you: Marcy told me that Lloyd was just being cool, and she saw that he was going to ask me to the party. The phone rang twice yesterday, and the person hung up. He’s just afraid to ask. So I’m going to sit here and assume he will.” Angela widened her eyes the way her father did when he punched words. Angela’s father was always telling them, “Get some inflection in your voice. When you talk, you’ll bore people if you don’t emphasize anything.”

“I don’t believe that he had a list drawn up of who he was inviting to this party,” Mary said. “That’s like what my mother would do. She writes notes to herself: Take trash down front.’ Jesus.”

Angela looked at her watch. It was a silver watch with single diamonds at the top and bottom of the face — another gift from her grandmother. She was waiting exactly half an hour, as she always did after dinner, for the food to settle in her stomach, but not be digested. Then she would turn up the volume on the stereo and go into the bathroom and stick her finger down her throat to vomit so she would stay thin. By the time her father shouted for the music to be turned down she would already have thrown up and flushed the toilet — she gagged a few times before she turned up the volume, then ran into the bathroom to finish the job. The lipstick she had just stroked on wasn’t the color she was going to wear to the party anyway, so that didn’t matter. And she had gotten used to the routine: She could vomit without her eyes even watering anymore. Mary was the only one she let in on her secret. Mary refused to do it with her, though. Mary hadn’t even believed her until she watched. “Models do it,” Angela said. “Lots of people do it.” “You’re a pervert,” Mary had said. But Mary thought everybody was a pervert: her brother, because he was fat; Henri, the poodle who had gone to live with Mary’s father and grandmother, because he sniffed crotches; Lloyd Bergman. Mary thought that giving hickeys was perverted. Angela had tried to find out, earlier in the day, whether Mary had ever French-kissed somebody. She knew that if she asked, Mary would tell her that she was a pervert for asking, so she had done it subtly, talking about another girl they knew. Mary didn’t say “yuck,” so Angela decided to assume that she had done it. Then her curiosity overwhelmed her, and she said, “I’m surprised you don’t think Frenching is yucky,” and Mary had said, “Not really.” Of course, that didn’t mean that Mary had done it. If she hadn’t, Angela wanted her to do it at the party. Everybody did that at Lloyd Bergman’s parties.

“We could go see Moonraker,” Mary said. “I don’t want to sit around here all night. Why would you believe his ten-year-old sister anyway?”

Angela looked in the mirror and stuck her index finger down her throat.

“Turn the music up,” Angela said. “Be helpful.”

“You are so disgusting,” Mary said.

“I don’t care,” Angela said.

“You ought to save it in a bag for Lost in the Forest.”

“That’s gross,” Angela said.

“Stop it,” Mary said. “You’re really gross.”

Angela stuck her finger down her throat again, crossing the room to turn the music louder. The record was Parallel Lines. The song was “Heart of Glass.”

Mary decided to ignore Angela; she sat on the velvet-covered piano stool and looked at the tubes and pots and cakes of eye-shadow. She decided to brush some of the gold-colored shadow over her eyes. Angela was vomiting in the bathroom.

“I can count on having to ask every night for an end to the noise, can’t I?” Angela’s father shouted from the foot of the stairs. Angela was still retching in the bathroom. Mary put down the gold-flecked brush nervously.

“Angela!” her father hollered. “Turn that down!”

Mary got up and turned it down. She was relieved that Angela, in the bathroom, had stopped gagging. Angela came out, looking fine, holding Vogue open to a page of a doberman snarling by a model’s ankle. “This magazine is really neat,” Angela said. “Your eyes look gross. That’s the worst color. Put on something nice for the party.”

“If we were going to the party, he would have called.”

“He’ll call,” Angela said.

Mary looked at Vogue. She envied Angela for having subscriptions to every fashion magazine available. They were so much more interesting than She Stoops to Conquer and Pride and Prejudice. That was all just a lot of crap, and didn’t have anything to do with the way people lived, or how they could look better.

“What do you think my worst feature is?” Mary said.

“Your eyebrows,” Angela said. “But they wouldn’t be if you’d just pluck them.”

“My mother’d kill me.”

“She wouldn’t care. She’d like it when she saw how much better you looked. You look like Talia Shire. You can pluck them, you know. The thing is right there.”

Mary picked up the tweezers. They were old and ornate: They had belonged to Angela’s grandmother’s mother. Mary knew the history of everything on Angela’s dressing table.

“I don’t know,” Mary said.

“You’re hopeless,” Angela said.

“You pull out the ones underneath, right?”

“I can’t believe you’ve never plucked one hair out of your eyebrows.”

“Big deal,” Mary said. “You criticize a lot, Angela.”

“Because I’m your friend. Nobody has naturally pretty eyebrows. If you’d tweeze them, your eyes would look bigger. Your eyes are your best feature.”

“Okay,” Mary said.

“It helps if you put an ice cube on them first,” Angela said. “Wait a minute.”

She had a small refrigerator in her room. She took an ice cube out of the tray, shaking her hands to get the flecks of ice off, putting the tray on the rug.

“Don’t drip it in my lipgloss,” Angela said, pushing one of the little pots to the back of the vanity. “You don’t have to freeze your skin pink, either. Just hold it there about ten seconds. Give it to me,” Angela said. Angela took it back to the tray and put the tray in the refrigerator.

“Just do one at a time,” she said. “Pluck mostly in the middle.”

“Now I’ll always have to pluck my eyebrows.”

“So?” Angela said. “You want to, anyway.”

“Shit,” Mary said.

“You didn’t freeze it enough,” Angela said.

“That ice felt gross. Forget it.”

“There it is,” Angela said. “I told you.”

Angela’s mother called up the stairs to Angela. Angela walked across the room and picked up the phone on her night table. “Hi,” she said. “Who’s this?… I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Blondie,” Angela said. “Do you want me to bring it?”

“I’ll think about it,” Angela said. “If I do come, do you want me to bring Blondie?”

“Maybe,” Angela said. “What time are people getting there?”

“Mary might come with me,” Angela said. “If we come.”

When she hung up, she gave Mary a smug smile. Tears were pouring down Mary’s cheeks — mostly the pain of pulling hairs, but also a sudden flash of embarrassment that she was always tagging along with Angela, and Angela was so much prettier; she was the one the boys wanted at their parties. She went on plucking because she thought she should look good for Angela — Angela would stop bringing her along to the parties if she started thinking she was hopeless.

“I bet he was really happy when you said I was coming,” Mary said, sorry for herself.

“Listen,” Angela said. “You’re not going to believe this, but do you know what I read in Cosmopolitan? That one night Marisa Berenson and Diane von Furstenberg, before she was Diane von Furstenberg, were in Paris and they didn’t have dates for New Year’s Eve. Can you believe it? They were sitting around feeling sorry for themselves, and then the two of them went off to a party together, and years later Diane von Furstenberg married Egon von Furstenberg, and look at how famous Marisa Berenson is.”

“I’m not going to be famous,” Mary said.

“So?” Angela said. “You can still marry somebody rich. You have to look good, though. To be honest with you, you’ve got to tweeze out another whole line of hairs.”

“Do you think you’re going to be famous?”

“I think so,” Angela said. “I don’t know as what. My grandmother’s getting me singing lessons in the fall. I might join a band.”

“I can’t believe you’d do that,” Mary said.

“Why not?”

“But you can’t sing.”

“So? I’m taking singing lessons. If you’re pretty, you only have to sing halfway good. I mean, if everybody’s singing together, it’s not like you’ve got to sound like Judy Collins, Mary.”

“I don’t like the way she sounds anyway.”

“Well, then think of somebody you do like, and you don’t have to sing as good as she does. You ought to think about it. There are all-woman bands, you know. I just read about one that played at the Mudd Club.”

“I’m not as pretty as you,” Mary said.

“You’ve got beautiful eyes and beautiful hair. You just don’t spend any time working on yourself. You should take some of my duplicate cosmetics and spend more time learning to make up your eyes.”

“What time is the party?”

“Eight o’clock. I don’t want to get there before eight-thirty, though. And if he’s with another girl when we walk in, we walk out. But I’ll bet he isn’t. I’ll bet he’s waiting for me.”

“How can you be so self-assured?”

“Because I know I look good,” Angela said. “I wouldn’t go over there without any make-up, in this baggy pair of jeans, you know. Did you see the Chemin de Fer jeans my grandmother bought me? I have to lie down to zip them up. Size seven.”

“You showed me. They’re really beautiful.”

“So?” Angela said. “You should get a pair.”

“I wouldn’t look the way you do. You walk right. I don’t know how to walk like that.”

“You think people just know how to walk? You learn to do it.”

“How did you learn?”

“You have to have limber legs. See where that picture’s hanging over there? I stand beside it and kick as high as the bottom of the frame fifty times every night before I go to bed. You have to have really limber legs to wear those jeans, because they’re so tight it’s hard to move in them.”

“I don’t want to go to the party,” Mary said.

“Oh. Great. We sit around half the day waiting for the phone to ring, and I say I’m bringing you, and you decide you don’t want to go. Pluck your other eyebrow.”

“My mother is really going to be mad.”

“If she is, then she’s trying to hold you back.”

“What’s so great about Lloyd Bergman? I can’t understand why you think it’s so cool to get a hickey. He’s not that good-looking.”

“I like the way he looks. He looks like an intellectual.”

“Did you see James Taylor on television?” Mary said. “I don’t know how Carly Simon could be married to him. He has his hair cut like a prisoner. He sings okay, but he looks really old now. Carly’s cool.”

“Should I wear this T-shirt or this one?” Angela said. “The red one’s tighter.”

“Wear that.”

“I guess so.”

“Did you see Bobby Pendergast in his Mr. Bill T-shirt? I wonder if he knows Mr. Bill looks like him?”

“He is so nowhere,” Angela said. “I can’t even believe that Lloyd likes him. I hope he isn’t there tonight.”

“If he is, I’m not talking to him.”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” Angela said. She was putting on a brassiere. “I love brassieres that hook in the front. I think they’re so sexy.”

“Rod Stewart gave all the money he’s earning from that song to some charity,” Mary said.

“God,” Angela said. “Did you see that picture of him at Ma Maison with Alana Hamilton? She’s so beautiful, I can’t even believe she was married to George Hamilton. You know what my mother told me? That he used to go out with the President’s daughter.”

“What President’s daughter?”

“Julie Nixon, I think.”

“I can’t believe that,” Mary said.

“There’s this picture of Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower when they were little kids, standing together. They knew each other all those years. It’s a famous picture. I think Nixon and Eisenhower are both in it.” Angela adjusted her brassiere. “I can’t even believe that people get married without even living with each other. Maybe if you’re the President’s daughter you have to. Then secret service agents live in your house with you. I’d hate that.”

“They do not. They live across the street.” Mary had finished the other eyebrow. “How do I look?” she said. “Can I wear the blue T-shirt if you’re not?”

“Here,” Angela said, draping the T-shirt on the piano stool. “And take a drink of this, too, so that when you show up you say something.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s vodka. What does it look like? It doesn’t have any smell. I read about this model who uses it like an astringent, after her shower.”

“I don’t want any.”

“Oh. So you’re going to go over there and stand around and not say anything. I can’t believe you sometimes.”

“You’re gross. I don’t want any.”

“Do you want it in some orange juice?”

“I don’t want any.”

“Then don’t stand by me when you’re not talking. If you stand there and nobody talks to you, it’s not my fault.”

“If nobody’s going to talk to me, then I’m not going.”

“We’ve got to get going,” Angela said, brushing her hair. “Come on. Or do you think I should put this pineapple barrette in my hair?”

“It’s dumb. You look better without it.”

“These jeans are so cool. My grandmother couldn’t even believe it that people lie down in the fitting room to zip them closed.”

“You’re lucky your grandmother’s cool. My grandmother’s as bad as Lost in the Forest. She’s so senile. I can’t even believe that my father can stand living there with her. Her house is like a museum.”

“My grandmother’s really cool. She used to go to the fights and watch this wrestler called Gorgeous George, who had curled hair. She thought he was so beautiful. And when she was young she lived in Paris for ten years, and sitting in her bathtub she could see the Eiffel Tower. Diane von Furstenberg’s office is in her bathroom. It’s supposed to be really spectacular. I can’t believe she has so much style.” Angela put the brush down. “My mother was talking to my father about how your father doesn’t live at home. She was saying that if he kept losing at Saratoga he ought to go live with his mother. He never would. She lives in Brooklyn and she won’t move, and he says she’s going to be killed. My grandmother who lived in Paris is so neat, and the Brooklyn grandmother is really crazy. She sends Easter cards and makes a big thing of Easter. I don’t even believe that she calls up on Easter, like it’s Christmas or something. She’s not religious, either. She talks about rolling eggs and the Easter bunny and all that stuff. She’s totally weirded-out.”

“What are you going to talk to Lloyd about?”

“I don’t know. I just drink some vodka and see what happens. It doesn’t do any good to plan what you’re going to say.”

Downstairs in the living room, Angela’s father was sitting in a chair, writing on a legal pad.

“I finished Pride and Prejudice,” Angela said. “We’re going over to Lloyd Bergman’s.”

“Bergman and his Mercedes,” Angela’s father said. “He loses more cases than I do. You tell me what he’s doing with a Mercedes. Besides showing off.”

“Your reverse discrimination is disgusting,” Angela’s mother said. “What’s this sudden love for the common man?”

“I don’t think much of anybody. It’s true. There should be a monarchy,” he said.

“I want you to be home by midnight,” Angela’s mother said.

“Okay,” Angela said. “See you.”

“Bye,” Mary said.

“There they go,” Angela’s father said. “Communicative. Well-educated. Happy. Are you girls happy?”

“Give up,” Angela’s mother said. “Everybody doesn’t have to subject themselves to your cross-examination day and night.”

“And such respect for the law,” Angela’s father said. “Such belief in the power of the law. I’m proud to be a lawyer, in spite of the fact that my family would like me to shut up like I’m some stupid store clerk. As it is, you’ve robbed me blind. If your mother didn’t kick in for her couturier fashions, we’d be starving.”

“I told you not to tell him what blue jeans cost now,” Angela’s mother said to her. “Was I right?”

“All this withholding of evidence,” Angela’s father said.

“Bye,” Mary and Angela said again.

“Goodbye,” Angela’s mother said. “At least you’re not going out to gamble.”

It was a half-mile walk to the Bergmans’ house. Angela had a silver flask with the vodka in it in her purse. It was a tiny purse, on a long strap, and it hung at her waist. The flask made it bulge.

Mary’s eyes hurt. She had looked into the mirror too long, staring as she pulled out hairs. She touched her finger to her brow and it felt swollen.

“Do my eyes look okay?” Mary said.

“Sure. That lavender is nice.”

“It feels like the skin is swollen underneath my eyebrows.”

“So?” Angela said. “It’ll go away by the time we get there.”

“I should have held an ice cube there after I finished. Before I put the make-up on.”

“I thought you didn’t like the way it felt.”

“But I didn’t want to go to the party with swollen eyes.”

“You can hardly tell,” Angela said.

“If they were swollen, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“You think you’re going to die of this or something?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, you wouldn’t let me make a fool of myself, would you?”

Angela gave her a disgusted look and shook her head. “Right,” Angela said. “Actually this is a pig party, and that’s why I’m taking you.”

Mary stopped by a wall thick with clumps and swirls of honeysuckle and picked a flower. She sat on the wall, crushing the honeysuckle underneath her. Angela looked at her from the road, sighed and went to where Mary sat. She picked two flowers from the honeysuckle vine and with her free hand pulled her T-shirt out of her jeans so that she could put one flower in each cup of her brassiere.

“I don’t even believe that you’ve got such an insecurity complex,” Angela said. “If you’d feel better if you had a drink, say so.”

“Go without me,” Mary said. “I don’t want to go.”

“I’m going to be really insulted if you don’t come,” Angela said. “I’m going to think that you don’t think I’m your friend.”

Mary twirled the vine through her fingers. She was always in this position: Her father was going to think she wasn’t nice if she didn’t pretend that John Joel was thin; her mother thought she had flunked English just to rebel against her. Now Angela wasn’t going to be her friend if she didn’t go with her.

“If you keep being moody when you grow up, you’re never going to get somebody to live with you,” Angela said. “Maybe if you’d practice smiling, it would help a little.”

Mary was already sure that she wasn’t going to live with anybody. She didn’t want to. She wanted to live alone, and not have to listen to what people expected all the time. She hoped that when she was twenty she didn’t have one friend. She hoped that everybody at the party hated her so she could practice not caring, so people’s opinions wouldn’t matter to her when she was an adult. She would have told Angela what she was thinking, but she couldn’t stand the sound of her own voice. Boys wouldn’t ever like her, because she would never be able to think like Angela. In a million years, she wouldn’t have thought to put honeysuckle in her brassiere. She would never have hidden things working for her, because even things on the surface didn’t work for her. She wished she had worn her own T-shirt, because it was stupid to imitate Angela. Angela was as good as gone, anyway: It was just a matter of time until she was famous, or married to somebody rich. And when she was, Mary wouldn’t be speaking to her anyway.

It was quiet walking along the road — so quiet that she could hear Angela swallowing vodka.