The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(51)
She didn’t make such wishes anymore. But she knew what boys thought of her. The dime. The bitch. If they did talk to her, it was just to ask about her mom in a way that made her skin crawl.
Everyone liked Elisabeth’s mom, who was pretty and fun and trendy in her skinny jeans and knee-high boots. She worked in a local boutique, and after closing took Elisabeth to dinner at downtown restaurants where divorcés hovered by the bar in designer jeans and dress shirts, or polos embroidered with the scrolling logos of Palm Springs golf courses and Napa Valley wineries. Elisabeth looked just like her, the men said when stopping by the table to be friendly. Those gorgeous, sea-green eyes. That skin. Elisabeth’s mom always grinned and thanked them, radiating warmth as if to assure them that her beauty meant nothing to her. That she was not even aware of it.
The anchorman, Steve, was bolder than the rest. He pulled a third chair to their table without asking, flashed bleached teeth. He wore makeup for his job on TV, and orange foundation crusted in the folds of his eyelids and the grooves of his nostrils.
He leaned over the table and winked. “You know,” he said, “when you grow up, you’re going to be a knockout.”
Elisabeth’s mom beamed and patted the back of her hand, a reminder to be gracious.
Elisabeth clicked her teeth shut. Made a small, closed-mouth smile. “Excuse me,” she said.
As she stood, Steve’s eyes traced her height. Five foot ten in flats. As she walked through the restaurant in her scoop-necked sweater and jeans, three old men in a booth grinned at her with mouths full, jousted at her with their knives. She passed the clanging kitchen—two busboys, leaning by the open door, swiped their palms on their aprons and trailed her with their eyes. She bowed her head. If she looked at them, she’d have to smile, pretend she liked it. If they talked to her, she’d have to say hello, act flattered like her mom would, make small talk, which she was so painfully incapable of doing. So she raised her chin and stared ahead. Her body was a long elastic and she held it taut.
When she got back from the bathroom, her mother was sipping a martini and laughing and Steve was sitting close beside her, stroking the ridge of her thumb, whispering secrets into her hair.
People said Elisabeth was beautiful. Her mom said she was lucky, with a golden complexion and a body built for clothes. But the beauty was foreign to her. She wore it like expensive jewelry she knew was dangerous to own.
It seemed that she had always felt this way. She remembered a Memorial Day weekend when she was six or seven years old, at the Mendocino Valley ranch where Mill Valley parents went to play. The ranch crowned a hill at the end of a long dirt road that corkscrewed up through madrone and manzanita trees. Around the house was a clearing, and beyond that, hills of grass tall enough to hide in.
During the day adults would hike around the hills or sprawl in chaise longues by the swimming pool or pass out on towels on the lawn with paperback novels and bottles of beer. And inevitably, in the blaze of a late afternoon, Elisabeth’s mom would wake red-bellied and howling for aloe. Elisabeth would bring her the bottle. She’d squirt the cold green gel into her palm and rub it over her mom’s belly, chest, shoulders, and neck, skin hot to the touch and goosebumps rising, angry red.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep!” her mom would moan. “Why didn’t you wake me, Liza-Belle?”
“Stop flinching,” Elisabeth would say. “The gel will help. It always helps.”
Her mom would laugh, tears glistening in her eyes. “My sensible girl. Where did you come from? How did you come out of me?”
When dusk fell, the crowd would gather at the fire pit. The adults smoked sweet-smelling cigarettes, flames playing on their faces, orange against the blueing dark, and laughed at jokes that Elisabeth didn’t understand and so stopped listening to. She stepped closer to the fire, bracing against waves of heat. Above the flames the air rippled like warped glass, and gold sparks spit and sizzled in the sky.
Then hands gripped her waist and she was pulled back, settled onto a man’s lap. He was a friend of her parents and didn’t have kids of his own. Everyone had been swimming and she still wore her one-piece, pink with small black polka dots and a short, wavy skirt around the hips. Damp, it stuck to her body. On the man’s lap she pulled the fabric from her skin with a sucking sound, creating a bubble of air, and then popped it against her belly. The man laughed. He said her hair smelled like lemonade. From across the campfire her mother explained that she squeezed lemon in Elisabeth’s blond hair so the chlorine wouldn’t turn it green. The man held her close against his chest, big hand blanketing her belly, heart beating fast against her back. Her swimsuit pulled against the secret place between her legs and there were sudden little stars bursting all over her body that made her face burn and she thought if she stayed absolutely still maybe nobody would notice and she would not have to explain.
Then the grown-ups wanted to have grown-up time, so the kids had to go to bed. They slept in tents on the lawn; there weren’t enough rooms in the house for everyone who wanted to shower and change and sleep, and grown-ups needed privacy more than kids did. So Elisabeth changed clothes in one of the tents, quick quick, no lock on the door—not even a door, a half circle of shiny nylon, so thin, and the zipper dangled there at the end and there was no way to hold it closed and change at the same time. She could only stand and watch the zipper as she peeled the damp swimsuit from her body. Her skin was cold and clammy underneath and her thin hair crunchy from its lemons and its hours in the sun. Her dry clothes, a purple T-shirt and shorts and pink cotton underwear dotted with tiny panda bears, lay on the sleeping bag beside her. As she reached down for the underwear, there was the shriek of the tent unzipping. The friend was there, looking. She froze with her panties in her hand. What was she supposed to do? Scream?