Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [92]
“Don’t make it sound gross,” her sister said. “Come on.”
Lauren pressed her lips together. She and Betsy had shared a room for fifteen years, and every single night, Betsy had turned to the wall when she changed into her pajamas. Lauren used to wonder if Betsy would ever let a boy see her naked. She’d honestly been surprised when Betsy had announced that she was pregnant.
“Please, Lauren? Please? Before Mom and Mrs. King get back? Please? I don’t want to ask Jerry to do it. It’s too humiliating.”
Betsy started to cry a little bit, her nose running and dripping down to her mouth. It made Lauren want to vomit.
“Oh my God, fine,” Lauren said. “Let’s just do this.”
Months afterward, when Lauren’s niece had turned cute and roundheaded, and Betsy had gone back to her prudish ways, Lauren teased Betsy about this moment.
“My vagina feels dry today,” she would say out of nowhere.
“You’re disgusting,” Betsy would say.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Are we not allowed to talk about our vagina’s moods? I was under the impression that this was a safe space,” she said, gesturing to the car. Lily babbled in the backseat.
“You know what, Lauren? Don’t be a bitch. I had just gone through thirty hours of labor and they should have done a C-section and they didn’t, and I hadn’t been alone with anyone I could talk to about it.”
“It’s fine,” Lauren said. “I’m totally cool with it.”
Once when they were walking down the street and saw a dead pinkish slug on the ground, Lauren hit Betsy on the arm and pointed to it. “Look at that. Did that fall out of your vagina?”
Betsy narrowed her eyes. “I hope when you have a baby, your vagina tears into a million pieces,” she said.
“Well, thanks to you, dear sister, I’m not sure I will ever have a baby.”
“Oh, you will.” Betsy laughed like she knew something. “Believe me, you will.”
Lauren was scared by Betsy’s knowing voice. Betsy was two years older and Lauren sometimes had to remind herself that Betsy didn’t know everything. Still, it scared her to think that labor had turned Betsy into a person who talked out loud about her vagina ripping. If that’s what it did to Betsy, what would it do to her? For a while, she stopped teasing Betsy about it. If karma existed, then it wasn’t a good idea, Lauren decided. Then, last Thanksgiving, when the turkey was all done and stuffed, little dried cranberries and hunks of corn-bread stuffing falling out of the open cavity, Lauren put her arm around her sister and motioned to the turkey.
“You know what that reminds me of?” she asked.
“Go to hell,” Betsy said, and Lauren laughed and laughed. Karma be damned.
On their twenty-seventh date, Mark made macaroni and cheese at Lauren’s apartment. They had planned to order Chinese food, but Lauren had had a late lunch and wasn’t hungry, so Mark decided to make a box of Kraft. They sat on the couch and watched sitcoms, and he ate the neon orange noodles as he always did, in huge, heaping spoonfuls. He ate the whole pot and then leaned back and rubbed his stomach. He let out a giant belch and then a happy sigh.
“Lovely,” Lauren said. He smiled.
The two of them sat and watched TV in silence. Then they got into bed and read. In the quiet, Lauren thought about her pastel client from Kansas City staring at the empty place where the baby’s wall would go. She looked over at Mark.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever eaten macaroni and cheese at my apartment,” she said.
Mark put his finger in the magazine to keep his place and moved his eyebrows together. “Huh,” he said. “I guess it is.” Then they both went back to reading.
Willard died on a cold November morning. Lauren found him tilted to the side. He was turning white and only one fin was paddling. She was sure he’d had a stroke. She sat in the kitchen with him for a while, and then (believing it to be the humane thing) she took him to the bathroom and flushed him. She did it quickly.
Lauren washed out the bowl, then threw it out. She should have gotten him a real fishbowl. He’d deserved that much. The kitchen looked empty without him there, and