Frenemies(25)
I smiled at the other dog owner, and whistled for Linus when I could no longer feel my toes. He surprised me by obeying immediately. (It was really cold.) We trudged back to the sidewalk, where I clipped his leash to the metal ring on his collar and tugged him with me across the street.
Back in the steamy warmth of my cozy little hovel, I collapsed on my couch (liberated from my parents’ garage years ago, it boasted that black-and-white zigzag pattern that was now almost delightfully retro) and kicked at the blueberry dress. I’d left it crumpled in the middle of my puny living room when I’d arrived home last night. The blueberry pumps had gone to their maker via a quiet death in the garbage chute.
When the phone rang, I was so busy continuing to justify my hate-on for Henry that I didn’t glance at the caller ID.
That was proving to be a costly mistake.
“Gus,” Helen purred at me. “I took a chance that you’d be home. I’d love to see you, just for a quick chat. Would you mind if I dropped by?”
“Um …”
“Excellent!” she cried. “I’ll be about a half hour.”
Which was how the enemy found her way into my home.
chapter nine
First, though, I threw myself into one of those whirlwind cleaning frenzies, the sort you could only summon the energy to perform when someone was about to enter your house for the first time in years. (Or when your mother called to announce she was dropping by, but that was a whole different level of panic.) Having lived with me when I was eighteen, Helen knew that I had once been lackadaisical about housework, to the point of outright slovenliness from time to time. The fact that this was still true over ten years later was irrelevant. I just couldn’t allow her to assume I was still my eighteen-year-old self, based on my continuing lack of housekeeping skills.
Helen, I was sure, would take one look at the dust bunnies cavorting about in the corners and assume they were stand-ins for deep-seated character flaws she’d long suspected lurked within me. Dust bunnies were representational, as every woman with a subscription to Real Simple knew full well. I refused to let Helen think she had some kind of shortcut into my psyche based on my inability to wield a Swiffer.
It wasn’t only my house that needed cleaning, either. When you’ve had the bad luck to spend an evening with a collection of your nemeses in a Royal Blueberry Bridesmaid’s Gown (with matching bag and shoes), you’ll find that you cannot bear to let your number-one nemesis see you in all your Saturday morning glory. It wasn’t just that I suspected I looked bad. It was that looking bad in front of Helen would prove that Nate had been right to dump me for her. That I deserved it because I was fat, ugly, and unlovable.
Sure, it was pathological. Welcome to neurotic womanhood. It wasn’t like I was alone.
Every woman I knew had specific complaints about that thing that rendered her ugly and unlovable. I’d yet to meet a woman who didn’t have her own secret shame hidden away in there somewhere, clutched in tight fists by her sulking twelve-year-old child within.
Georgia, for example, never seemed to care about her weight or her clothes size. She told me once she’d never in her life fit into clothes below the double digits and paid no attention to it anyway. She enjoyed being statuesque. And yet she hated her ankles. For years, she’d refused to wear short skirts because she felt her ankles were so thick that she ran the risk of having people point and laugh at them. It didn’t matter how many times you told her they were fine, either, she still wept over those shoes with ankle loops and considered herself deformed.
Amy Lee, meanwhile, was obsessed with her thighs. The fact that she was tiny, had never worn a garment above a size four in her life, and had a flat stomach no matter what she ate or how little she exercised? She didn’t care. She was forever railing against the tyranny of bikinis and rattling on about minimizing her thunder thighs.
For me, without question and despite certain Oracle of Delphi moments concerning my own thighs, it was my belly. The belly that refused to turn into abs no matter how many crunches I performed or how few carbs I ate. (This obviously led to alternating phases wherein there were no crunches and only carbs, to soothe the pain.) Either way, the belly hung there over the edge of my otherwise fabulous low-slung jeans, rounded and spiteful, despite my best efforts. I was convinced the belly made me a troll. That it was disfiguring. That it was the outward evidence of my true inner unlovableness. No one could convince me otherwise.
Helen knew about my belly issues. She would be able to glance at me, see the belly that damned me, and use it against me to play on my worst fears. And what could I use against her? She claimed to feel oppressed by her eyebrows, which was weak, to say the least. Eyebrows could be tweezed into submission. My belly just hung out for all to see.
A glance in the bathroom mirror confirmed it: I looked like the sea hag. (Not a sea hag—the sea hag.) It went without saying that I also looked fat. My hair was mushed into vaguely geometric shapes, and the less said about my half-hungover eyes, the better.
Of course Helen was on her way. Of course she, out of all the people I knew in Boston, should get to witness the haggishness.
It was just so unfair.
So I cleaned like a whirling dervish for about fifteen minutes, which involved flinging the contents of my living room into my bedroom and shutting the door, and then attacking particularly egregious problem areas with a Swiffer and some Windex. After that I dove into the shower, where I held my breath and stood under the hottest spray I could handle. Then the coldest spray. Then the hottest again. When I climbed out of the ancient, claw-footed tub (the sort of tub that was only cool when it came with a matching, painstakingly renovated country house—otherwise it was just old and you had to use one of those handheld things clipped to a pole as your showerhead) part of me was shivering and part of me was scalded, but the bags under my eyes were gone.