My lips are bleeding and chapped, my blond roots are showing and I hate, I hate, I hate these ridiculous black pumps and these stupid, stupid pearls. Seth holds me up and I walk the best I can, lopsided and gimped. As we make our way to Janet, who is talking to Aaron and Edgar, I step out of my shoes. The concrete is wet with liquor and littered with garbage. Scraps stick to my feet and I cringe, but anything is better than those awful pumps I’ll gladly leave behind.
And the pearls—the pearls have to go. I tug at the strand around my neck. They really aren’t that great anyway—the quality isn’t so high. There’s no knotting between the individual pearls and if you look closely under the right light you’ll see they aren’t all the same size or color. I give the necklace another tug and this time Janet notices and so does Seth and he tries to stop me, to grab my hand away, but he doesn’t think and I don’t let go and the pearls fly and scatter. One lands in Aaron’s drink. I notice one of the Irony Girls crouch down, pretending to tie her shoe, but it has no laces and I see her pocket a pearl. Let her have it.
“What the hell, Mason?” Seth says. He and Janet are crawling around, scooping up as many of the pearls as they can find. Even Aaron and Edgar fall to their knees, scrambling for stray pearls.
“Please stand up,” I say. Everyone is looking. I just want to be normal, to blend in, to have friends who respect my right to drink and fall down and abandon my sensible pumps and shoddy pearls. “It’s not worth it—please.” Finally, Seth stands and brushes himself off. Edgar pulls Janet to her feet. I kick Aaron lightly in the thigh and he stands, too. They try to hand me the few pearls they’ve found but I refuse. “I don’t want them.”
Janet collects the ones the men have found and slips them into my handbag. “You might in the morning.”
My laugh comes up as a snort. Someone taps my shoulder. I turn and it’s Aaron, holding out another pearl. He tries to press it into my hand, but I shake my head and shirk away, avoiding his touch. “Keep it,” I say. “Or give it away.”
“Come on, Mason, just take it.”
“No. Really. But thank you.” I turn away from him, but he doesn’t budge.
I move back and step on a pearl in my bare feet. “Ow! Fuck!” I bend over and scrape the pearl off my foot, letting it roll into the crowd.
“Are you okay?” He touches my shoulder but I slap his hand away. I narrow my eyes; I think I growl. I want to slink away, but the only way out is to walk through the bar, and everyone’s looking; my hair is too big to ignore. My mother called it the rat’s nest. My mother. The pearls. She’s dead in fur and big earrings, lying on Ron’s bed. Janet squeezes my hand. Fuck the pearls, the earrings, my mother, Ron—I’ll just get through the rest of this week and then I’ll be back in Canmore, where everyone thinks I’m a witch. I have no boyfriend and no prospects and my job at the bookstore is boring and going nowhere, but anything is better than this.
Aaron hands me a drink I begrudgingly accept. He looks amused.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. It’s just … you are exactly how I remember you.”
“Clumsy? Stupid? Drunk?” I am offended, incredulous, humiliated, a bitch.
“No—funny.” Aaron knows nothing. “And the way you’d get Edgar into trouble—I loved you for that.” Aaron says this and I fight a smile, the sudden flood of memory. There was the time Edgar and I tried to run away from home after being yelled at for something we almost certainly did, though I can’t recall what it was. We packed our bags but didn’t make it as far as the gates—which were at least a mile from the main house—before being rounded up by Edward in his Jeep. There was also the time I mixed wine with apple juice and fed it to Edgar when he was sick. I told him it was medicine. He drank glasses of it and was drunk by noon and threw up on my mother. And then there were all the times we ruined my mother’s expensive makeup and dressed Aaron as a girl.
I take a big sip of beer, trying to calm myself. I keep my lips tight and try not to laugh but the picture in my mind of three-year-old Aaron in bright lipstick, blue eye shadow and cheeks rouged like a clown is too much and the beer I was holding in my mouth sprays out and onto Aaron. This makes me laugh more and soon I can’t stop. My stomach hurts and my head feels like it may explode. I double over and collapse on the disgusting, sticky floor. Everyone is staring. Aaron lifts me up by my underarms. I’m shaking with laughter, my body limp and heavy. I look at his face and see the makeup and hair I curled and feathered. He’s wearing one of my mother’s sequined tops as a dress. She’s angry and I blame it all on Edgar. That was one of the few times she didn’t write about me in her column; I haven’t thought about that in years.
LAW & TAXES
Now I know why people hate lawyers—and the government—and mustachioed past-middle-age men who keep trying to hug them when they don’t want to be touched.
I’m standing with Ron on the sidewalk outside of the estate lawyer’s office, smoking, and trying to reflect the sun with the Medusa-head gold buttons of the ridiculous Versace suit my mother bought me years ago, during one of her attempts to fancy me up. If I could just get the perfect angle I’m sure I could blind one of these lunchtime busybodies who keep elbowing past and glaring at me for what could be any number of reasons: my smoking, my hair, my suit, my boots, all of the above. Or it could be the fact that I’m standing in the middle of the sidewalk and everyone has to walk around me.
I have no intention of moving. Instead, I move my legs as wide apart as the suit skirt will permit, and take up even more room. It’s not very ladylike and my mother certainly would not approve. But I don’t care about anything—other than getting Ron to stop touching me and shutting him up. He keeps telling me it’s going to be okay, that everything will work out, that he’s there if I need him, that if I’m short on cash, he’s glad to help out. I’d rather turn tricks, but that may not be very lucrative considering the state of my body, with its jiggle and bruises and lumps. At best, I’d be a street whore, queen of the five-dollar blow job. I couldn’t pass for a high-end escort and I would rather die than strip.
I could get a webcam and talk dirty, looking sexy and stoned, for businessmen and suburban dads who haven’t yet made the leap to the hardcore stuff, the ones who pretend if it’s not actually sex then they’re not actually cheating. I could get them off then listen to them talk—or type—about their guilt, their shitty marriages, how it was never supposed to be this way, about how they’re old and can’t believe they’re bald. I’d charge by the minute and rates would escalate the more they whine.
None of this is very realistic. I will not be a whore. I will get in the taxi and go to the hotel. I will pack up my things and check out. Room service, dry cleaning, concierge, everything—it’s gone—just like my emergency credit card, the one my mother gave me, the one I used to pay for my flight down here, the one I was using to pay for my suite at the Fairmont Hotel. The estate law yer said it will be canceled this after noon. I explained I was broke and therefore was experiencing a genuine emergency. He smiled and leaned forward, resting his arms on his big desk. “I know this is a difficult time,” he said. “But there is a set way of doing things.” And by things he meant that there are taxes and expenses to be paid before the estate can be settled. It could take months, or at best, weeks, and until then my mother’s accounts are frozen. I have nothing and am stuck in San Francisco with nowhere to stay.
“You’re more than welcome to stay with me,” Ron says as we stand on the sidewalk. The taxi is taking forever to arrive and I wish I had a snack in my bag. Unfortunately, San Francisco is not the kind of city where you can easily flag down a cab on the street. You have to call and order and wait. “I know it could be—” Ron pauses and looks down. “I know it could be uncomfortable for you, being at your mother’s apartment.”
I’m not really homeless, out on my ass giving cheap blow jobs to junkies and fuckups in the Tenderloin.