Switcheroo (18 page)

“And Sylvie made a hell of a pot roast,” Bob agreed nostalgically, as if she’d been gone for two years instead of only two weeks. With that, he got into Beautiful Baby, wet as she was, and drove off the lot.

Sylvie had already been to her yoga class when she met Marla for breakfast—such as it was. Marla had a loaded plate with toast and eggs and peanut butter and sliced bananas, along with a bowl of yogurt covered with the delicious, high-calorie granola. Sylvie sat opposite, sipping her soy and melon concoction. She’d need the protein to get through aerobics.

Marla was spooning yogurt into her mouth and giggling. “So when he put you on hold, who did he say it was?” she asked again.

After the two women had admitted that they were thinking of secretly calling Bob, they’d decided to call him simultaneously. “He said you were a disabled veteran,” Sylvie said.

“Well, that isn’t true,” Marla explained. “I was never in a war.”

“Only if you count the battle of the sexes,” Sylvie told her.

“I can’t figure out why you walk like a boy,” Marla was saying later, as the two women were working together in a long, deserted spa hallway.

“Maybe because I had an older brother,” Sylvie suggested. “Phil was an athlete. Very butch.”

“Hey, I had an older brother named Butch too,” Marla said. “Well, he was a stepbrother. Or maybe a half stepbrother. What a pig! He made a pass at me when I was eleven.” Marla was on the floor, taping paper spa shoes to the carpet. It looked a lot like a foot diagram from Sylvie’s days at Miss Walker’s School of Social Dancing. “Okay. Now try,” Marla said, getting up off her hands and knees. Was it Sylvie’s imagination or was the girl’s face a little fatter? When Marla bent over, it became clear that her butt was. Thank god for mashed potatoes and butter, Sylvie thought, and smiled to herself.

“Okay. So walk in my footsteps,” Marla commanded. Shrugging, Sylvie placed her feet, one by one, on the places Marla indicated. It made her almost cross one leg in front of the other, throwing her pelvis from side to side.

“That’s it!” Marla cried, watching Sylvie from behind.

“Marla, this is ridiculous,” Sylvie said, turning around. “It’s a hooker’s walk.”

“I never got paid for it in my life!” Marla said hotly.

“What I meant was, this isn’t the way
you
walk.”

“It is when there’s a man behind me,” Marla told her. “Do it again.” Sylvie obeyed and managed to “walk the walk” without toppling like a fallen tree.

Sylvie sat on the toilet, the seat down, and squirmed. For what seemed like an hour she’d been trapped here, being made-up by Marla.

“Come
on
,” Sylvie said. “My behind has gone all pins and needles.”

“Speaking of needles, you could use some electrolysis,” Marla commented as she picked up yet another brush and tickled Sylvie’s chin. The girl had more colors and brushes than Rembrandt. “Blend, blend, blend. It’s the secret to a perfect face,” she confided.

“Would you just stop?” Sylvie asked. “I mean, what’s the point?”

“Ta da!” Marla said. “Just gorgeous.
That’s
the point.”

When Sylvie looked in the mirror, “Oh dear Lord!” was all she could manage at first. “This is what I waited so long for?” Marla had used a heavy base to cover Sylvie’s few remaining yellowish bruises, then painted a whole new face on the blank, poreless canvas.

Sylvie pursed her glistening cherry lips, which now extended below her lip line on the bottom but were drawn in smaller on the top. Below her eyes there were pink streaks on her cheeks, then brown streaks below that, approximating cheekbones and hollows. Her eyes—well, they weren’t
her
eyes, they were the eyes of Nathan Lane in
The Birdcage
—were shaded with three colors and then outlined in black and fringed with lashes that resembled fat black centipedes.

“I look like Norma Desmond,” Sylvie whispered.

“Yeah. But remember, Norma became Marilyn Monroe.” Marla looked at Sylvie’s face in a dispassionate but critical way. “It is a little bland. I could touch it up,” she promised.

That night, charley-horsed and exhausted after her two sessions of water aerobics, Sylvie fell into bed feeling as if her car had landed on her in the spa pool. Everything hurt, but she had to admit she was tighter and firmer than she had been in years. Marla, meanwhile, was sprawled on the armchair watching a movie. “What are you watching?”

“It’s the latest Elise Eliot. I forget what it’s called.”

“Isn’t she wonderful?” Sylvie asked.

“I really don’t know. I’ve never met her.”

Sylvie was too tired to even grin at Marla’s response. She hurt everywhere. “God, I’m fried,” she groaned as she pulled the blanket up with her aching arms.

“I’m hungry,” Marla said. “I’d like something fried. Chicken, or maybe mozzarella sticks.”

“How can you be hungry?” Sylvie asked. She hadn’t had more than a lettuce leaf and a sliver of fish for dinner, while Marla had devoured a steak, roasted potatoes, and two ears of corn, along with an enormous salad drowned in enough dressing to make each woman at the table raise their eyebrows.

“That’s the trouble,” Marla said. “What did I tell you? Once you start to eat you can’t stop. Eating just makes you want to eat more. I wish I had a Three Musketeers,” Marla said.

Sylvie just groaned again and turned on her side. She hadn’t had sugar for two weeks, and anyway, she was too tired to chew.

She lay in bed in the dark until she heard Marla’s snores. Sylvie smiled. Bob may have done everything else in bed with that girl—but he had probably never spent the night with her, so he didn’t know the kind of noises that came out of that adorable nose. In fact, there were dozens, now maybe hundreds of things she knew about Marla that Bob did not.

And it was odd, but the more she knew, the more Sylvie liked the girl. Oh, she was a ditz and not very bright and a bit of a liar, but none of that was her fault. Sylvie actually felt a lot of sympathy for her. What would she have done if she’d been born into a family as dysfunctional as Marla’s seemed to be? What if she hadn’t been bright, and if she hadn’t had musical talent? And their age difference made a crucial economic difference as well. Nowadays, with fewer and fewer opportunities, not to mention her lack of education, Marla wasn’t fit for much. If she hadn’t been pretty, she could have wound up with a permanent job at the fry station in Mickey Dee’s.

How terrifying to be without resources.

It was hard to find your niche in the world, Sylvie thought, and even harder for a woman than for a man. There were still fewer opportunities, and the jobs paid less, yet men no longer possessed the old chivalry that had protected wives and single women. Sylvie knew that having a comfortably well-off family, with a father who had paid not only for her education but for her prom dress and piano lessons and every kind of sports equipment she ever wanted was an enormous luxury. What would it be like to have no one to provide you with those things? What would it be like to have no one to fall back on in case of an emergency? She thought of Marla and how frightened she must sometimes feel.

Sylvie had been so lucky, and she knew it. But what would happen to Marla? Sylvie could imagine the nurturing part of Marla as being good as a mother, but her impracticality, her lack of logic—well, to be honest, her idiosyncrasies and crazy belief system—would make for a really weird upbringing for her child, if she ever had one.

Who would love and commit to a girl like Marla? She was so easy not to take seriously. When Sylvie thought about it, she felt sad and angry on Marla’s behalf. What Bob did was wrong—not just a wrong he’d committed against her but a wrong he’d committed against Marla. Sylvie knew he wasn’t going to take care of the girl, not in the way she needed. He was using her, just as he was using Sylvie. She thought of the old army doggerel: “This is my rifle, this is my gun. One is for shooting, the other’s for fun.” Marla was the gun and—unless she was very wrong—Sylvie figured her husband would sleep with Marla, give her some money and some attention, but never really commit to anything. He needed Sylvie to be his rifle, a tool to keep his life orderly. Bob liked things orderly.

And even if Bob did—god forbid—decide to leave Sylvie for this girl, Sylvie knew that he would never, ever consider having children with her. Where would that leave Marla, who craved them? The more she thought about it, the angrier Sylvie got. Until she realized that it was crazy to feel this kind of outrage on behalf of your husband’s mistress.

They were back in the lounge, Sylvie again at the piano. She had briefed Marla on all her students, their personalities and their skill levels. But though Marla had memorized Lou’s and Honey’s and Samantha’s and Jennifer’s current exercises and name and favorite songs, she still couldn’t identify a sharp from a flat. Sylvie was playing the end of “If They Could See Me Now.” Marla was, as usual, nodding her head, off tempo. “Yes, yes,” she murmured. In desperation, Sylvie made a big, obvious mistake, and she made it loud. Marla looked up and, tentatively, shook her head no. At the no, Sylvie jumped up from the piano stool.

“Good! Good!” she cried and hugged Marla.

“I think you’ve got the wrist action on that. Now the back of the heel. How strong are your hands?” Distatstefully, Sylvie was doing as she was told, but the act struck her as obscene and more than a little ridiculous. Plus her hands were getting tired. How long would she have to keep this up? As if she read her mind, Maria said “Reflexology is ninety percent strength and thirty percent technique.” Sylvie refrained from mentioning that those percentages added up to much more than a hundred. “Hold my foot in your left hand as you work with your right,” Marla instructed.

Sylvie sat, Marla’s feet in her lap, practicing her new “profession.” She had a look of disgust on her face and plenty of disdain in her heart. Sylvie hadn’t expected the whole process to be that difficult but she was finding out that there was more involved than she’d thought.

“I guess I never knew this about myself before, but I can’t stand touching anyone’s feet,” Sylvie said with a grimace.

“Jesus didn’t mind,” Marla said in a superior tone. “Anyway, it’s just because you don’t understand them. They don’t call what you walk on ‘soles’ for nothing, you know. Why do you think people say, ‘Bless my soul’? Feet that hurt are a misery. Plus, they say ‘the foot is the window to the soul.’”

Sylvie looked at the girl as if she were mad. “No they don’t,” she told her. “You already said that the sole is the window to the soul. And they don’t say that either. It’s the
eyes
that are the window to the soul.”

“Whatever,” Marla said and Sylvie tossed her heel. “Ouch. Hey! Be careful. Doing that could permanently hurt a person’s instep for a long time.” She pulled her right foot off Sylvie’s lap and rubbed it. “Anyway, once
you
respect the foot, you’ll get over that sick feeling. Except, of course, if the feet are dirty or they have those big, hard calluses. Oh, by the way, Simon Brightman likes hot pink nail polish by Clinique,” Marla told Sylvie. “I don’t think it works with his skin tones, but let him have his poison.”

“Simon? A guy who
wants
polish on his toenails?” Sylvie asked, disbelief on her face. Sylvie was sitting at the foot of Marla’s lounge chair with Marla’s right foot propped up on her knee. “Wait, I have to write all this down,” Sylvie said as she reached over for her notepad.

“That’s not all they want,” Marla said. “One of my regulars insists I wear pumps that show toe cleavage.”

“What’s that?” Sylvie asked, queasy.

“Oh, you know…when a shoe is low cut and a little tight and it makes your foot crease between your big toe and your index toe. He just loves to look at it. And get this: some of them want to suck toes.”

“What? You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sylvie said, squealing. “What do you do?”

“I’m a professional,” Marla answered without hesitation. Sylvia wasn’t sure if that meant toe sucking was in or out. She gagged.

“The deal was that you would be doing your special customers,” Sylvie said.

“Yes, but what if there’s an emergency call and Bob doesn’t want me to go out in the middle of the night? I’m not gonna let you lose any of my regulars.”

“What the hell is an emergency pedicure?”

“Well, okay. It’s not
just
pedicures. I’m more, like, a therapist. See, my clients feel they can call me any time—night or day.”

“So it’s not just feet?” Sylvie said, pouncing.

“It
is
feet. You know very little about people.”

“Marla, are you a hooker?”

Marla sat up. “Now that was cruel. I have never—ever—gotten paid for sexual intercourse. My specialty is…well…foot fetishes.”

“You mean you actually put it in your mouth?”

“No. Usually I let them suck mine, though. Men love that. The royal family is into it big time. I’ve seen pictures.”

“That is gross. That is
disgusting
.” Sylvie shivered visibly. “You do that with Bob?”

“Of course. He’s a Sagittarius on the Capricorn cusp. That’s a very sensual sign. It’s also probably why his toenails are so hard.”

“I knew there had to be a reason for it. But he
likes…sucked?
”

Marla didn’t speak, she merely licked her lips and nodded her head, giving Sylvie a cat-that-sucked-the-canary look.

“I don’t care,” Sylvie said, rebelling. “He doesn’t deserve to have his toes sucked. Or any other part of his body. And there’s
no
way I could suck strange men’s toes.” Sylvie shut the light and turned her back on Marla.

“Fine. Then we’ll call the whole thing off and I’ll get Bob the hard way.”

The salon was crowded. Each client lined up in one of the chairs before the mirrors, no matter what her age or coloring, was going blonder. They all had blue cream on their roots or foil in their hair. Sylvie was doing both: blonding her hair
and
getting streaks. That was nothing. A chubby dark woman in shorts was going platinum.

“Are you sure I’m going to be Gwyneth Paltrow blonde?” Sylvie asked her beautician, Leonida, nervously.