“I’m meeting him at the thrift shop later this afternoon,” Naomi said, and Deedee was relieved. Just before Christmas, Lee, Ashley’s son and Naomi’s friend since babyhood, had proclaimed himself gay, dropping Naomi into a funk of ennui for days and days. It had disappointed Deedee too. For years Deedee had ignored Lee’s fruity leanings in hopes of her daughter someday marrying her best friend’s son.
Naomi meant the world to her, but the girl had turned out just as Deedee had prayed she never would, the spitting image of Deedee herself at sixteen, just as scrawny and flat-chested, her hair the same dingy-brown shade of mouse. Yet Naomi had more fight, more re-silience, than Deedee had had. The girl that Deedee had been would’ve loved to have been more like Naomi.
The art class, or any other kind of routine weekend commitment, had been recommended by a family counselor, a woman Deedee and Zeke had gone to see last fall in an effort to improve their divorce, to end the one-upmanship, for the sake of Naomi’s sanity. About the time that Deedee and Naomi had moved into a brand-new condo with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the brick streets and renovated warehouses of the Old Market, Zeke had had to move into an apartment building overrun with roaches and college students. He was no longer able to afford the meager rent of his little house on Happy Hollow Boulevard after a near marriage with a younger woman who had literally drunk him out of house and home. According to Naomi, the woman had frequently double-parked her rusted-out El Dorado in front of La Buvette to load the car up with Pommery, a pricey French champagne that she had insisted was the only thing that settled her nervous stomach.
All the new discrepancies in their lives provoked some serious ire. In the therapist’s office, Deedee had eventually admitted to being too boastful about her success, Zeke to being too petty, and for the first few weeks of the art class they’d all sat together as a family, their easels in a row. But soon Zeke had decided that Deedee and Naomi talked too much, bogging his creativity, so he’d taken to positioning himself at the opposite end of the loft.
Mrs. Bloom, the publisher of the alternative weekly, rushed in with her drawing pad beneath her arm, huffing and puffing, her easel’s legs squealing against the floor as she set up too close to Deedee in the back row. Her arms flung about in a bluster as she flipped through her pages of sketches. Mrs. Bloom was always late coming from Ashley’s erotica writing class, though it was only just across the street.
“Conversation heart, girls?” Mrs. Bloom offered after getting settled, holding out the candy in the palm of her hand. Deedee and Naomi declined, but Mrs. Bloom insisted.
“Tres chic,” Naomi said, reading aloud from one of her candy hearts before popping it into her mouth.
“Kiss me,” Deedee read from one. “Be good,” from the other.
“You didn’t even read what you ate, Mrs. Bloom,” Naomi said.
Mrs. Bloom stopped chewing, her mouth full of the hearts, and though she’d already likely jawed the candy into sugar dust, she said, “I can read them with my tongue,” then looked up in deep thought to the ceiling. “Whip me,” she said. “Spank me hard . . . ummm . . . what is it? Suck me . . . fenceless? Hm.” She rolled her tongue around in her mouth, and looked down at her knees to feign concentration. “Suck me fenceless. Well, that doesn’t make much sense, does it, girls?” Naomi giggled, but Deedee knew not to play along. She didn’t want to be the unwitting audience member dragged up on stage for Mrs. Bloom, who’d once been an honest-to-god birthday clown, to pull a bouquet of paper poppies from her nose or to release a barn swallow from her beehive. Mrs. Bloom, before becoming a publisher, had been many things over the years, including the reverend of a nondenominational church, an art therapist at the prison, and an organizer of poetry slams for cancer survivors.
“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,” and Mrs. Bloom looked back up to the ceiling. “FUCK me SENSELESS!” she said, slapping her knee. “Yes. Fuck me senseless, that’s what it says.” She gave Naomi the box of candy, then winked and leaned over to do a little magic trick, pulling a conversation heart from behind Deedee’s ear. “Dream,” it said.
Naomi seemed to be genuinely amused by the dirty joke, leaning forward, covering her mouth to laugh. Deedee only smiled politely and returned to her drawing. Her eyes wandered from the model to Zeke, and she found herself scribbling his cowboy boots, with their leather-stamped yellow roses, onto the feet of the naked woman.
“I’m going to ask Hole-in-the-Knee out on a date,” Deedee whispered to Naomi, referring to the disheveled fortysomething sitting near Zeke. She took another heart from Naomi. Tickle me. “He’s easy on the eyes.”
In the two years since her divorce from Naomi’s father, Deedee had had sex exactly once, with a farm insurance agent she’d met on the Internet. One night in a chat room, without even seeing the man’s picture or hearing his voice, Deedee had decided she’d fallen in love in a way she hadn’t since college. They had made arrangements to meet later that week, at a restaurant in a town that was halfway between them, and she’d driven to the aptly named Chances “R” steakhouse with her heart pounding, her sweat soaking the underarms of a silky red dress with Asian embroidery that she’d bought at full retail from a snooty boutique.
But five minutes into dinner conversation, or maybe even minutes before that, maybe the second she’d seen his gin-blossomy nose and outdated rooster-knit necktie, the love she’d so quickly fallen into, she’d just as quickly fallen out of. The most troubling part was seeing that he was disappointed too. I had my hair done at T’eez for no small amount, she’d imagined herself telling him. My girlfriend who did my makeup works at the Estée Lauder counter at Dillard’s. I’m at least ten times more stunning than you deserve. But they had sex that night in a motel at the top of the exit off I-80, then never even e-mailed each other again.
“You can’t fool me, Mom,” Naomi said. “Your only real interest in Hole-in-the-Knee is the fact that he’s chummy with Dad. You just want to create a little classroom scandale.” She put a Frenchy drawl on the end of the word, mimicking a motivational speaker they’d become infatuated with in the Bahamas, a woman known as Sybil the Guru who’d evangelized to roomfuls of unfortunates, of rode-hards-and-put-away-wets. With the mild tropical storm confining them to their hotel, Deedee and Naomi had made the rounds of the ballrooms, stealing name tags and sneaking into other conventions. “You don’t have a shot at happiness at all,” Sybil the Guru had told one crowd, provoking a mixture of giggles and shocked silence and approving clucks of the tongue. “It’s as simple as that. The women for whom happiness is a possibility are happy already. I don’t have any solutions to offer you, but it doesn’t matter, does it, gals? You just want the problem identified. As a matter of fact, you luxuriate in the problem. Any solution would only muddy things.” The crowd went wild.
Deedee glanced around at the other women in the art class and gauged their ages, estimating that most of them were much older than she was. Then she remembered she was nearly forty, probably the same age as the nude model, who had a lazy slouch inching close to permanent hunchback.
Do I look so old? she wondered. Only a few years before, people had often thought she was in her late twenties. But no one had made that mistake lately. And, really, wasn’t that somewhat of a relief? To not have to care so much if your hair was just right? To fret that she was too thin in some parts and too fat in others? There was only so much, at this point, that she could do.
God, she thought, thinking how long it had been since she’d first seen Fatal Attraction, that movie that Naomi had barely even heard of. Twenty years, probably, had passed since she’d pictured her future in the picture-perfect Manhattan apartment of Anne Archer and Michael Douglas, with its carefully positioned clutter, its dinner
