Cherries In The Snow (25 page)

‘Marc is my publicist,' says Jolene, waving as though he is something she has purchased real cheap on eBay.

Publicist is a degrading job for a woman, but for a man? Sheesh.

He frowns at me. ‘Do you do Cool Yoga?'

‘Not yet.'

‘I can tell. Your aura is a little overheated.'

It is the rudest thing anyone has ever said to me in my life and I have no idea what it means. I know this shallow queen has no business-talking aura. Jolene sends him to work in her
office and I excuse myself to go look at my tan lines. I can gain or lose weight in a day and I can get tan or pale in an hour. Sure enough, there are peachy markings above my pubic bone and weird round patches where the swimsuit has gone Aguilera on my ass. I shower and moisturize, keen to get home and let Marley enjoy my tan, and that makes me remember where the hell I am and with whom. The ex, the de-virginizer, the baby mama knocks on my door. Even her knock is too loud.

‘So you wanna do some yoga?'

I pull on a sundress and open the door.

Montana and Jolene are standing on the other side wearing matching Juicy Couture jogging suits, Juicy monster versions of the fifties' housewife and her spawn.

‘Not massively.'

‘C'mon, you have two plane rides in one weekend. You should stretch out. The cool room is set to minus five.'

Although the heat is oppressive, the idea of doing yoga with Montana and Jolene is more so. ‘I'm going to work on my novel.'

‘Awesome.'

‘Tell her what else you want to do,' says Montana.

‘Watch a video.'

‘After apple bobbing?'

‘She doesn't want to apple bob.'

‘Oh. That's a pity. Well, sure. What video?'

I look to Montana for my cue.

‘The Little Mermaid.'

I can't make out what she is saying as she mimes waves.
‘The Poseidon Adventure?'

Montana shakes her head and re-mouths,
‘The Little Mermaid.'

‘All right, my little mermaid.' Jolene's maternalness outshines her hard body. She is a good person.

Once they get back from the Cool Yoga room, their cheeks all flushed, we all get on the bed. It is remote-control reclinable.

‘This bed is for old people,' I joke.

‘I'm an old person, honey.' She leans over and whispers, ‘Pussy like a newborn baby, though. Kegels. You should start doing them now.'

Oh, Christ. The word
pussy
gives me shivers worse than Marley's use of
cunt
.

Ursula the sea witch fills the screen. I find her terrifying even though she's animated. Montana just watches with this tight little smile.

‘Oh. I like this part.'

‘Do you like when all the people get turned into worms and trapped in cages?' I ask.

‘Ha ha, yes,' she says with a shrug as though to say ‘Crazy I know, but that's just me.'

‘But they're really very sad.'

‘Uh-huh.'

She gets bored with
The Little Mermaid
and puts on
Finding Nemo
. Almost instantly I start to sob and Montana gets a good look at my face, the tracks of my tears.

‘How many times, Jolene, how many times can he lose his fucking son?'

‘I guess a lot of times is the answer.'

Suddenly a spider nips across the bed, shiny and ugly.

‘Fuuuck!'

‘Ten dollars.'

‘Fuuuuuck! A fucking spider!'

‘Yes, there're lots of them around here.'

I scream and scream. ‘I have to go home!'

‘I can't take you till the morning.'

I lock myself in the bathroom to get my composure. I want to go home then and there. She is twenty years older and so
much thinner than me. But all she eats is raw food and cigarettes. In the morning she makes me toast and tea, just like Marley.

I pack my bag and pull on my jeans.

‘You can't go in jeans,' protests Jolene, ‘you won't be comfortable. Here, hang on.'

I follow her to her walk-in closet, where she has hundreds of shoes and hundreds of tracksuits. She holds a few colors against me then settles on a pale blue. ‘Take it. Have it. Give it back next time I'm in New York.'

The car idles outside the airport, Montana sitting in the back in her pink tracksuit. I long to leap into the arms of the skycap. Jolene is being uncharacteristically tentative. ‘So I hope you had a good time.'

‘She didn't,' pipes up Montana, ‘She had a bad time.'

‘I had a great time.'

I look in the back of my compact mirror for an answer, an illegal exam result. There is none, so I hug her tight as I can, feeling her Amazon bones.

She kisses both cheeks. ‘Good luck, kid.'

I turn to Montana. ‘Good luck, kid.'

Montana laughs and blows me a kiss.

‘She'll be back with you guys next week,' says Jolene.

‘Great,' I say under my breath. Then I trundle to my gate in the tracksuit Jolene has given me to wear.

At the terminal I pick up a
New York Post
, which has the following report on Page 6:

I have to fly back via Dallas and get downgraded instead of up. As a surprise, Marley is there to pick me up at the airport and I am royally grumpy. I want to throw the newspaper in the trash with my heart.

‘What is this?' I shove it in his lap as he drives.

‘It's bullshit. She squeezed up next to me when the photographers were nearby, otherwise she didn't give a damn. She was over by some movie star. She gives me the creeps.'

‘Why didn't you warn me?'

‘I wouldn't have known except you told me. No one else I know reads that.'

Bet Jolene has read it. He has no idea. Like Marley would ever even dream of reading a tabloid. I hate surprises. As angry as I am, I hate him seeing me without makeup fresh off a plane, no white lies, the prototype deep in the debris of my handbag. I can't even muster a smile, let alone a kiss.

‘Your cell phone was switched off.'

‘It was?'

‘It was.'

‘Why are you being like this?'

‘Because I'm used to men.'

‘I'm not men. I'm Marley.'

‘What?'

‘Jolene is a little loopy.'

‘She is?'

‘But she's a good mother.'

‘She is?'

‘What did you see in her?'

‘I was impressed.'

‘I bet she was amazing in bed.'

‘No. She wasn't. She was distracted.'

‘Plastic surgery is so gross.'

‘What do you mean? What's that got to do with Jolene?'

‘Nose job, collagen, implants.'

‘Implants?'

‘Implants.'

‘Really?'

‘Uh. Yeah.'

‘I never realized. Maybe I'm very naive.'

‘Maybe you are.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yep.'

‘Wow. You think you know a person …'

The office is very subdued on Monday. Nowadays Holly seems to be out all the time, on a barrage of errands and meetings, none of which we are invited to. Vicki acts like nothing has happened. She never mentions it. But one day, on my way to the ladies' room, I noticed she that has the Page Six item clipped and placed in her datebook.

Montana has been in town for a whole week and she has not hurt my feelings once, largely because I have yet to see her. She and Marley are spending quality time together and I am too desperately on deadline to conjure up new and unusual offenses she might commit, as has been my wont of late. I lie in bed and drift off thinking of all the different ways in which she might express her dislike for me. It knocks me out every time, as effective as counting sheep … sheep circling in my mind like some kind of malevolent conga line.

I am dreading the big Friday-night dinner Marley has planned for his two girls
(his two girls
is my phrase, not his, bursting as it does with a breeziness that does not exist between the three of us). He is taking us to Balthazar, Montana's favorite restaurant, which shows you right there the difference between her and a regular six-year-old kid contentedly drawing on the paper tablecloth at Olive Garden. Montana isn't six, she is a miniature adult – at her worst, a poison dwarf. She loves to eat mussels and dip strips of steak in French mustard so unbearably strong it makes my lips curl just to look at it.

We went to Balthazar on our second date. It is our restaurant. I don't know how I feel about it being her restaurant too.

She says she craves olives, but I doubt her on that, having caught her nose wrinkle as she pops the cocktail stick into her
small pink mouth. She professes, even, to enjoy capers, which riles me irrationally as I have never known if capers are supposed to be a vegetable. They taste of day-old wee and their name is a joke: they are the most unamusing of garnishes.

Funny the things we believe make us adult. For years now I've thought it was being able to swallow, whereas Montana thinks it is being able to swallow olives, both arbitrary and superfluous show-off moves that make your tummy feel sour.

Heart as heavy as a Sunday
New York Times
, I turn up at Marley's house wearing army trousers and a little cropped satin top. The tuxedo trousers I wanted to wear are buried in the depths of my closet and I hadn't had time to venture into its soul-shaking recesses.

‘I've missed you,' says Marley, kissing my mouth, eyes, and forehead, then, ‘Is it really appropriate to wear army pants in a time of war?'

It is going to be a long night. My tummy does things in the night like other people's hair. Rumpled or flat, popping out with no rhyme or reason. I feel like I have a cowlick in my stomach that no brushing can control. Although I had woken up at midnight and gone out for a slice, it is flat.

Montana, skipping down the stairs, takes an instant dislike to my cream satin top. Ooh, the look she gives me as she eyes my exposed stomach, an expression that encompasses both the bold-faced stares of the Latin boys on the 6 train and the scowls of their girlfriends. Magazines talk about actresses who ‘men want to be with and women want to be,' but I'm the girl whose sex appeal, such as it is, is rooted in making everyone feel angry.

That lunchtime I had gone off to get a Tasti D-lite and had my teeth bleached on a whim at a beauty salon advertising one-hour whitening. The effect is the same as a cup of icy soft scoop: I have a headache, my teeth hurt, and I feel a very mild
self-loathing like a perfume transmitted through osmosis from someone else's cardigan.

The self-loathing belonged to the dentist, on whose own clothes the odor smelled more like sour defeat. They say the same perfume is different on different people. In truth I don't think he was a dentist as he visibly blanched when I asked him if he felt my gum line might be receding. In further truth it wasn't a beauty salon but a hairdresser's. Hair was being swept up from around my feet as he placed the rubber trays in my mouth. The worst truth of all is that my teeth weren't even especially discolored, no more so than anyone else's.

But the neon sign said ‘Whiter Teeth in an Hour' and I just felt that if I could have that so instantly gratified, then anything was possible. One-hour offers are almost always my downfall. I left the hairdresser's two hundred bucks lighter and my teeth looked a little whiter if I tilted my head in certain ways, which I kept doing, much to the confusion of the girls at work.

‘Grrrl girls don't get tooth bleaching,' blasted Holly.

What Grrrl girls do and don't do was beginning to feel increasingly oppressive, a punk rock version of a 1950s etiquette guide. I have known since I joined the company that Ivy wants to develop a line of lipsticks that would make teeth look grayer and eyeliners that highlight bloodshot eyes, so I wasn't really surprised.

Holly is often a little crotchety, just usually not with me. ‘You ding-dong,' she said when she saw my teeth, and it stung. The inanity of ‘ding-dong' highlighted, like the lipstick Ivy dreamed up, that what she really meant was ‘dumb cunt.' When Marley first used the word
cunt
to describe my vagina, I was shocked. In England it is a word both terrible and banal, like afternoon tea spiked with arsenic. It was only ever used, back home, as a curse word, never ever to describe
the female genitalia. ‘Oooh, you fucking cunt!' we'd scream at one another in the playground. Or ‘What a cunt,' my dad yelled at the TV newscaster. My mum said it on occasion with her accent stretching it out beyond all decency.

Mum has started doing yoga and I had to hear about it over Dad's shoulder when he called me last Sunday morning. ‘Your mother wants you to know that she's started doing yoga.'

It seemed an aggressive boast, like she was clawing her way back and would soon be younger than me, thin and beautiful again. She could never get over having gotten fat and she has been that way for three decades now. From being a Swedish model of the sixties to elasticated waistbands. She spent much of my childhood wearing a stunned expression and that was before the face-lift. She told me the weight was from her pregnancy with me. Dad confessed recently that that wasn't true and that she was already well on her way to borrowing clothes from Aretha Franklin by the time they got married. She spent her twenties fucking celebrities, all hundred pounds of her. Then she found my dad and let go. Started eating. Stopped taking dexies. She keeps up the little things from the olden days, the false eyelashes, the fake nails … all, to my mind, procrastination.

She did not want to breast-feed. I had a bottle. Jolene says that children should do it till they decide not to. She even went to a support group for breast-feeders. I distinctly remember being horrified by the idea of her tits shoved in Montana's face. Get them the fuck away from me. I had the same memory of first blow jobs. If I suck and suck, this will be over. My mum makes up for her shallowness in the oddest ways. She breast-fed me for a week. I clawed and tugged because I was trying to get away. I wanted to suck my father's nipples. Lie on his chest in bear cub pose.