The Beautiful Anthology (12 page)

On the South Side, the Fat Neighborhood Girl did not have any more Boyfriends and developed a fascination with
The Omen
movies and had satisfying dreams of being seduced by Satan, while her mother fucked a string of men in the other bedroom. She also kept in sporadic touch with the Intelligent Woman, who later introduced her to her future husband: a Heavyset Man who is also an Intelligent Man, though less intelligent than the Intelligent Woman’s Intelligent Man and, while also an Academic, less successful, too.

If this were the Fat Counselor’s story, the Intelligent Woman would be called the Beautiful Woman, because her hair is wild and curly and she goes barefoot with a toe ring and her toenails are always the color of blood in a vial, and she gets her hands hennaed and has a Miró tattoo in the small of her back and wears size four slinky dresses and takes ballet class (at thirty-one!) and her smile lights up a room.

But the Fat Counselor’s not in Greece. She’s at home being fat. So you just forget about that.

In Minneapolis, the Sister of the Beautiful Woman lives with a Slacker Boy who looks like Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
. They are in a band and rarely smile or shower, and though the Band Sister is a Beautiful Woman, too, she hides it under buzzed hair and gaudy makeup and thrift-store boy’s striped pants until the only thing the Sisters have in common is that once, within a span of two days, each was attacked and bitten by a squirrel.

In different cities, mind you. What are the chances!

The Intelligent Woman, though she has a PhD, does not have a real job. Oh, she teaches part time at a few universities and writes the occasional book review, but the money she makes yearly would barely even cover this cruise.

The Beautiful Woman works bringing coffee to Traveling Sales Reps and arranging flight and hotel accommodations for business trips that do not involve her presence, but that many of the Traveling Sales Reps imagine do.

Though everybody thinks she is a Trophy Wife, the Beautiful Woman doubts the truth of this since the Macho Man does not wish her to have a child. Most Trophy Wives bear Trophy Children, don’t they? The Macho Man enjoys driving two cars and owning a lakefront condo; if they had children, the Beautiful Woman might want to quit her job and become a Dead Weight like the Intelligent Woman, and then imagine the bills! What can the Intelligent Man be thinking, letting his Wife get away with that shit?

The Beautiful Woman is less valuable at the moment as a Mother than as a Cash Cow.

The Intelligent Woman and the Intelligent Man are in the process of adopting a Chinese Girl, because Chinese People are usually intelligent and because the Intelligent Woman is Infertile. They are excited about their forthcoming Baby. They are not the kind of people who get hung up on propagating their own genetics when there is a population problem at hand. They are happy for the chance to Do Good. Women who make such a big deal about Infertility are Stupid Dolts with Pointless Lives; Husbands who insist upon their own sperm are Narcissistic Assholes. They, however, are Intelligent People, expecting an Intelligent Baby. They are above bourgeois bullshit like that.

Are they really? Wow.
Are they really?
Hey, what do you want from me? This is what they say when asked.

Back in Madison, Wisconsin, in the private dorm full of out-of-staters like the Intelligent Woman, the Beautiful Woman, and the Aggressive Woman, hostilities brewed. One day, the Intelligent Woman was in the hallway relaying to her Gay Male Friend how the Beautiful Woman had said, Well, I don’t see anybody buying you roses so you really have no right to judge, and the Beautiful Woman came out of her room and said, Don’t you know that I can hear you talking about me? To which the Intelligent Woman said, So what, you said it, didn’t you, so why should you care who hears? To which the Beautiful Woman replied, This is none of your business. Why don’t you stop being such a gossip and butt out? After which the Intelligent Woman warned, You’d better just go back in your room, you little suburban twit, before I kick your ass.

Whereupon the Gay Male Friend exclaimed, Whoa – you can take the girl out of the neighborhood, but you can’t take the neighborhood out of the girl!

To which a year of silence between the Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman was the response.

In the WASP-filled Minnesota suburb where the Jewish Girl and her younger Rebel Sister lived with their Jewish Mother and German Father, the Father was the Sun around which they, female planets, revolved. The Mother was jealous of her Beautiful Daughters, because the Father was obsessed with them and thought of nothing except saving money for their security and making sure they were not hit by cars. The Rebel Sister was tired of having her arm gripped tightly by the Father every time she approached a curb, so she had her head shaved and joined a band and painted vagina-looking abstractions on the walls of her bedroom and wrote beneath them, I am obsessed. The Good Sister got a Puerto Rican Boyfriend and repeatedly injured herself on the gymnastics team. At night in their shared bathroom, the Sisters made fun of their Father and wished that he’d get off their backs – He is
such
a dork, they said. He is so lame.

But when the Rebel Sister (now the Band Sister) was eighteen, and the Mother and the Father sold their pretty house to move to Long Island and live among the Jews, the Sisters could not believe the Mother had won. The new condo had only one extra bedroom, utilized as an exercise room. In Madison and Minneapolis respectively, the Sisters cried for days.

After the Boyfriend dumped her and she became Unstable, the Beautiful Woman acquired a reputation among off-campus Jewish Frat Boys as a Blow Job Queen. For months her Girlfriends, including the Intelligent Woman, tried to keep this hurtful gossip from her, but when news inevitably trickled her way (actually, one of the five guys who lived above Taco Bell on State Street, all of whom she’d blown, told her in an effort to make her leave his apartment so he could study), the Beautiful Woman was secretly proud.

In the fluorescent lights of the cruise ship bathroom, amid giddy tales of simultaneous copulation, the Intelligent Woman glimpses old acne scars embedded along the sides of her own face, like somebody took a smooth, clean picture of the Beautiful Woman and crumpled it up tight then left it there, ravaged under the glare.

And some things – like hearing that a woman who does not receive roses has no right to an opinion in this world – are things you never get over. Even when you receive your own roses, along with diamond earrings and a Victorian house and a Baby From China and everybody seems to respect you more than the person who made that Statement to begin with. You still don’t.

The Intelligent Woman’s Husband turns to her and says, Aren’t you going to take your top off? You’re always dying to take off your top. She looks at him, so pale in the sun, his laboratory-hidden body nearly transparent, the way it looks when he’s working naked in the morning after his shower, bathed in computer-glow. He has been with her on many a foreign beach – they met in France, for God’s sake! – and in addition has fucked her enough times in enough ways to know that, though she is not Beautiful and knows it, she is nonetheless an exhibitionist. She cannot fool him. He stares, waiting.

(It has not occurred to the Intelligent Man that his Wife may realize he has a hankering to see the Beautiful Woman’s juicy C – maybe D? – cuppers. He is too consumed by calculating that the Beautiful Woman, by far a more timid woman than his bold Wife, will only disrobe if his Wife does so first.)

The Intelligent Woman watches her Husband’s eager, glowing body. Once, when she had to get an MRI for her bladder and found herself unexpectedly claustrophobic, the Intelligent Man sat in a folding chair at her feet and held her toes comfortingly until the procedure was over. Every night in their shared bed he spoons her body and breathes into her hair, and she knows her curls tickle his nose but he stays in this position anyway until she falls asleep, and neither of them call it un-Feminist. She finds that she does not want to disappoint him – hasn’t he, in a sense, earned this stupid pleasure?

Men: They are like children. What can you do?

There was a period of time during which the Intelligent Woman lived in a rural college town out East, and the Beautiful Woman lived in Texas. This was shortly after college; both had relocated in order to be with men. The Intelligent Woman’s Intelligent Boyfriend (now Husband) was pursuing his PhD, and the Intelligent Woman made ends meet by waitressing, and for fun answered calls on a battered women’s hotline. The Beautiful Woman, meanwhile, lived with a Former Drug Dealer who was a college drop-out, worked at a gay bar, and liked to Rollerblade through the city. The Former Drug Dealer had given the Beautiful Woman her first orgasm, so naturally she was putty in his hands. At night she waited up for him at his mother’s house (where they both lived) and when he returned, keyed up from all the Hot Men who wanted to convert him, they had the most amazing sex she would ever experience. By day, the Former Drug Dealer still would not go back to college, would not seek a proper job, and dropped acid before Rollerblading between speeding cars – all of which became subjects of many fights.

A Mutual College Friend who also lived in Texas (but had been born there so it was less her fault) wrote to the Intelligent Woman up East: I think that druggie is smacking her around. The Intelligent Woman was shocked. Here her friend, the Beautiful Woman whom all the Frat Boys had so pursued (the Blowjob Queen phenomenon temporarily skipped her mind), was letting herself be beaten by some Rollerblading, non-Jewish Texan! One evening when the hotline was slow, the Intelligent Woman drafted a six-page letter to the Beautiful Woman. It read, in part: You have always suffered from low selfesteem – look at how you let that ugly little Guido kiss you in Ft. Lauderdale even though you knew he was gross – but you have to get out of this relationship and learn to love yourself, because batterers never change and no woman deserves to be hit even if you
have
totally given over all your power to this loser. You are a Beautiful Woman; is that how you want your life to be? That night, the Intelligent Woman went home and made love with her Intelligent Non-Abusive Boyfriend and fantasized about being tied up (at this time, the Intelligent Man had not yet worked up the nerve to actually act out such things) and felt smug that she had done a good deed.

In Texas, the Beautiful Woman read the letter and was embarrassed, not only because the Former Drug Dealer did in fact hit her on occasion but because she knew she
did
deserve it – she had once made such a scene at the bar that he had to have the bouncer remove her, all because she was convinced he was seeing another girl. He didn’t even know any other girls! All he did was Rollerblade and work in a gay bar! Once, too, she had ripped his shirt, just as she had done to the Boyfriend on Bascom Hill back in college, only the Former Drug Dealer struggled right out of his shirt and ran away from her, and she chased him down the street screaming, I blow other guys all the time! Even though it wasn’t true. The Beautiful Woman read the letter from the Intelligent Woman and thought how fortunate it must be to be so certain of one’s own opinions and ethics and what one will tolerate and not tolerate and exactly what to say and do to draw the line. But when she thought about the Intelligent Woman’s Intelligent Boyfriend, she knew she would never date him (though she might kiss him if he tried), because he was too
nice
and would want her to be her own person and do her own thing, and men like that made her tired, too tired to even contemplate, and not at all aroused.

So for the second time in the friendship between the Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman, a silence ensued. This one lasted for six months, after which the Former Drug Dealer did actually cheat on her with a woman (go figure), and the Beautiful Woman allowed herself to be stolen away by an Australian Conservative, and she and her swell Aussie met up with the Intelligent Woman and her new Intelligent Husband to see the Miró exhibition in Manhattan, which the Intelligent Woman thought was miraculous and the Beautiful Woman thought was fine, but really not all that.

Speaking of battered women’s agencies (which tend to be

staffed by Lesbians, do they not?), at the same time as the Beautiful Woman and the Intelligent Woman were writing or not writing to one another from the Southwest and the East respectively, back in the Midwest the Fat Counselor was trying diligently to date chicks. The sex was OK, maybe even a little better than with men; it was the romance that posed a problem. Like sometimes, she and her Partner would be dressed in their loose black slacks and eating by candlelight at a Vegetarian Restaurant, and she would feel strangely as though she were at a dress rehearsal and things were going well enough, but the audience had not yet arrived.

Of course, the Fat Counselor had always been a little in love with the Intelligent Woman, but later, when she abandoned girls and began dating the Heavyset Man she would eventually marry, she readjusted that love to the sisterly kind, which is easier for women to do than men can possibly imagine.

The Heavyset Man may also be referred to as: the Theater Major, Grizzly Adams, Nature Boy, the Heavy Drinker, the Red- Faced Man, Sensitive Man, and Man-Suffering-from-Impotence-in- Times-of-Stress.

The Aggressive Woman lives in Bogotá, Colombia, kidnapping capital of the world. Though South America is resplendent with men who physically resemble North American Guidos, she is still unmarried. Her Friends back home joke that if she were to be kidnapped, the Guerillas would pay a ransom just to have America take her back, and the Mormons she works with (Mormons in Colombia? Don’t ask!) refer to her abrasive manners as Urban Humor in order to be kind.

Sometime after the cruise, let us say a year, the Intelligent Woman says to her Husband, Do you often get hard-ons for other women? And he says, No not at all. And she says, Even when we’re on the beach and you see other women’s bodies right there laid out in front of you? And he says, You mean like when (and says the Beautiful Woman’s name) took off her top in Greece? And she, feigning shock, says, No I didn’t mean
her –
you
better
not have had a hard-on then. And he says, Well I didn’t. And she knows that is true because she checked, back on the beach, watched his azure trunks from behind her sunglasses, but so what? That’s the lucky thing about being in one’s thirties: the dick doesn’t give as much away. Eroticism is in the mind anyway, she thinks, believing thirty-two is a wise age. The dick just has to calm down a little bit before men find out.