The Almost Archer Sisters (9 page)

“Fun? For who? It’s fucked. And no.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll do it when I get back.”

“Jesus, Beth. What if he finds out it’s you?”

“He won’t. And look, I know it’s a weird thing to do, but we’re just fucking around. I just want to find out about his ‘last relationship.’ That’s all. Then our girl, you, will disappear, a mystery to all who knew her. Hey, check out the email correspondence, Peachy. You might be a little interested in what my ex-boyfriend thinks of your picture. A young Julie Christie, indeed.”

I looked over my shoulder into the house, past the dark kitchen into the dim living room. I could see Scoots’s butt on the floor next to the couch, his elderly tail moving back and forth like a drugged limb.

“Peachy!” Beau yelled. “Get off the phone! I want a hand job!”

“Beth, I gotta go,” I said, hanging up. I walked back into the living room, scratched the back of Beau’s head, then sat back down at the computer to get another look at Marcus’s face.

“Well? Can I have a hand job?” Beau muttered.

“No. Later. Maybe.”

I had never been on a dating Web site before. The link off Marcus’s ad led to even more faces. I scrolled what seemed hundreds of faces all looking like lost street kids on milk cartons, tanned attractive street kids. I felt so grateful for Beau, so grateful we had hooked up the old-fashioned way, using outmoded methods such as eye contact and beer. I punched in the user name and password. Seeing my own face on the site was thrilling, odd. It was a picture I’d never seen, taken on the porch of the house, face in hands, elbows on knees, the rest of my body out of frame. Jake’s red parka was barely visible along my right side. I looked hearty, healthy, like a hair-commercial model, or like the third-prettiest woman on a soap opera. I clicked on
MAIL
and read Marcus’s initial reply to Almost Me’s wink.
“Nice face. A young Julie Christie. Why no information about self? Write back. Would like to know more about u.”

“What are you doing?” Beau asked, still rapt by the fast cars.

“Looking for a new husband,” I said.

“Well, keep an eye out for a new wife for me, if you don’t mind. Better yet, I’d rather just have a girlfriend. Or just some chick to look at me a couple times a day. That would be nice. Touch me once in a while. She could even be ugly.”

“What about someone who looked like a young Julie Christie?”

“A who?”

I closed the site and shut the laptop and walked to the pantry. I took down two boxes of Hamburger Helper and a can of sweet corn from the high shelves. I suddenly became so dizzy I had to brace myself on the butcher block, not realizing I was standing in the same position Beth would find herself in—or I would find her in—two sorry weeks later.

* * *

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, after the boys went to school and Beau to work, I refilled my coffee cup and turned on the laptop, feeling as anxious as a mad scientist. The dating application was long and imposing. Number one was
Favorite Books
, in the plural. The plural. No one tells you that you must kiss books goodbye when you have babies. Unless you counted
Goodnight Moon
, I couldn’t remember the last book I had read from cover to cover, let alone remembered. Where did that dreamy, distracted girl go, the one who wandered the farm with
Forever Amber
or
To Kill a Mockingbird
tucked under an armpit?
Most Humbling Moment? Best Advice Not Taken? Favorite Color? Favorite President? Moment? Ice Cream? Music that puts you in the mood?
Does the sound of my boys sleeping count? When the house is quiet enough to hear the grandfather clock?
Pet Peeves?
When the kids get up before seven.
Celebrity You Most Resemble?
Beth, maybe. A little around the eyes.

Introspection was exhausting, the idea that people do this every day, and then they update the information with more new things they’d digested, more books, new bands, exciting trips, fresh pictures they liked or disliked. When had I ever subjected myself to this kind of scrutiny, this kind of personal assessment? Maybe those old
Cosmo
quizzes I used to take, writing in a different ink over Beth’s, trying hard to seem as unlike her as possible. I had been trained to assess others, to take inventory of other people’s shortcomings, failures, and foibles, not my own. I became keenly aware of all the things I hadn’t done, what I wasn’t, what I’d never be, and what I didn’t know about myself and might never find out.

In my twenty-eight years on this planet, I had done many lovely things, but I had never really done anything off-putting or different. I had never offended. I’d never been in a band, been to Europe, used heroin or cocaine, been alone on a boat, in a theater, or down a dark alley, written a novel, directed a play, or made a short film, had a near-death experience, seen a UFO, tried on a wedding dress (I had married in a muumuu on account of being
seven months pregnant), gone bleach blond, submitted to a full Brazilian (they do the bum), touched a seal, worn anything made of vinyl, pleather, or ermine, been inside a synagogue, or a mosque, or truly understood how planes fly, or how war, famine, and childhood obesity could have gotten so entirely out of hand.

So I returned to hobbies and picked something that had nothing to do with predicting seizures. Beth had always liked horses, and so I gave Almost Me a pony and Italian, a language she might have picked up from time spent perhaps in a Swiss finishing school. Then I gave Almost Me a yellow racing bike to go with that life. And I chose photography, as it was something I wanted Beth to keep up, the least reason being she was the only person who took pictures of my family. Under
Likes?
I put:
hydrangeas, driving, reading, and anything that makes me laugh
. All true, for Beth and me both. Then back to books, I listed everything I had never got around to reading; Dickinson, Morrison, and even Austen, and so many others that weren’t on my curriculum. But how could I? After one and a half years of school, I had a baby, three years later, another one. Under
Why should I get to know you?
I was thinking of Beth when I wrote:
Because in getting to know myself I am coming to believe it’s a journey better done accompanied. Because life has a shoddy way of throwing me off my high-wire act and I’m sick of landing without a net
. I was thinking of Lou when I wrote:
Because being alone is really only good for a little while, then it becomes an unbreakable habit, one I’m getting too good at
. I was thinking of Beau when I wrote:
Because making love to myself is redundant, plus it’s causing unsightly calluses
. And under
What are you looking for?
I was thinking about myself when I wrote:
Resuscitation
.

Then I wrote a casual howdy, said
Nice profile
, and that I was a
native New Yorker
. I wrote that since I had spent a
few years abroad
, was quite new to this online dating
thing
, and that I was
just out of a long-term relationship. So, be patient with me
, I wrote,
if I need a
little time, back and forth on email, asking questions, before I take the plunge to meet someone new
.

And that I was very much looking forward to hearing from him.

And that he had a great face too.

Then I took out hamburger meat to thaw.

Then I picked up the stray toys off the front lawn, throwing a few worn ones the boys would never miss in the garbage can in the garage.

Then I cleaned out Scoots’s food bowl and dumped in last night’s Hamburger Helper as a treat. I kept a hand on his old back while he ate.

Then I called Beau at the shop to ask him to pick up lettuce.

Then I called him back and asked him to pick up some tampons, even though he hated to buy them, and I didn’t really need them. Why was I being mean? Was it really boredom, or was I turning rotten? Was this a contempt for the truly familiar? I didn’t really feel contempt for Beau, but I had begun to buzz inside like I was filled with hornets and he was handed a heavy stick.

Later that night, Beau drove into town to pick up some milk and I checked the account. There was an email—my first ever— from a man:

My first thought was,
cottage
porch. We live in a five-bedroom farmhouse, jackass! But I also felt a velvety flood overcome me while reading the email. It started at my feet and curled under my chin.
He liked my line about the high wire
. He thinks I’m
cute. Naturally
cute. Beau had never made me feel like less than a babe, but I’d always tossed him a spoonful of scorn whenever he’d show too much enthusiasm for the extra effort I’d put into an outfit for a wedding or a banquet.

“Oh my God, Peach, you’re gonna give me a heart attack,” he’d say, slobbering while I’d galomp down the stairs in a set of tippy spikes, my cleavage like an ass high up front, authentic ass in back harnessed in a Lycra girdle, lips lined and shimmering, hair and eyelashes curled, cubic zirconias like teeny cameras flashing at my ears and wrists. “Do we really have to go to this thing?”

Did I thank him for those hot words? Kiss him coyly on the cheek? Bat one frigging eyelash at my husband’s unabashed joy at
the sight of his poshed-up, curvy wife, her natural tits gushing over the top of a new, pricey bra?

No, I went with hitting him in the upper arm with my clutch. “What, I look like shit every other day? Is that what you’re saying? Like I have time to make myself look like this every day. Lucy has the time to look like this every day and look where that got her.”

I wrote him back thanking him for his note:

How odd for people to meet and mate like this, I thought, scanning the faces, eyes full of marketing and menace. Still there were others on the site who appeared comfortable, built even for this kind of forum, their lives, likes and dislikes, their minds and needs boiled down to their microscopic specifics and what was required for optimum compatibility. I want this and I want that and you need to have this and I hope you have that. I like this music, that book, those kinds of movies but not that kind of food. I’d rather eat Indian. Not big on red hair, but will tolerate if you turn a blind eye to smoking, split ends, debt. I hate cats. Love dogs, horses, antiques. I weigh this much, you must not weigh too
much. Please make lots of money, live here, be from there, go to this school, work on this street and give it to me exactly like that, right there, that’s right, no, don’t stop, okay, move your finger, put the other hand here, bite me, kiss this, slap that, go home, call me, hurt me, marry me, hate me, leave me, love me, shoot me. I mean, Jesus, it took me a year and a half of marriage to find out that Beau hated ketchup. He assumed I liked ketchup. I assumed he did. So the bottle made its cameo on the supper table every night until one of those lulls in conversation found me scanning the food labels. The date on the bottle screamed
two years old
. I uncapped it and we were both hit with a menstrual vinaigrette smell.

Beau shrugged and said, “I don’t eat that shit. Thought you did.”

It took several sessions before I had realized Beau’s foreskin was still intact. How was that possible that I didn’t know that? Beth had never mentioned it in high school, and during the heady days of our counter screwing and boozy courtship, I never saw the damn thing unless it was already as hard and uncoiled as a full fire hose. And was it a sin that it was two years into our marriage before I found out Beau was afraid of elevators? Three years before I asked him about his favorite color? And it was only two years ago, after almost a decade of sharing a bed, food, clothing, smells, fluids, Lou, sons, and money, that Beau had told me in the dark of our bedroom that when he was nineteen, the day before he took the apartment over the tackle shop, his asshole of a stepfather broke into the bathroom, jackknifed him in half with a kick to the liver, and held his head underwater in the toilet for several seconds.

“He waited until I had finished peeing in it,” Beau said.

He couldn’t remember the infraction, perhaps an unauthorized bonfire, perhaps a lifted beer or three, but he did remember standing up, piss and water streaming in his eyes, thinking, I am taller than you now, asshole. But instead of beating him back, Beau went looking for Lou.