would’ve taken it personally too.” She waved good-bye, grabbed her coat, and rushed from the apartment.
Peach fully recognized her enrolling in the class as a mite psychotic. But it wasn’t nearly as psychotic as the fact that she’d been workshopping some stories that were based on her affair with Ashley’s husband. She’d read sections of them aloud to the class, including a slightly fictionalized description of the night before last Thanksgiving, when Ashley and Lee and Peyton had all been out of town and Troy had brought her back to the apartment. They’d had sex on the very divan upon which she’d sat that afternoon. She had described the sofa in detail: the purple plush of the cushions worn shiny in spots, the one leg replaced with a couple of crumbling bricks, the sofa probably paid too much for at some trendy vintage shop. Peach had written about how the whole room looked like it had been furnished by precocious newlywed college students: a cinderblock for an end table, books stacked on the mantel, and old albums in the hearth.
As Todd (who was Troy) made love to Peony (who was Peach), Peony imagined herself having successfully wrecked that home, saw herself barefoot in its rooms, sipping Gibsons, tripping out a little soft shoe on its Persian rugs. In Peach’s story, Peony pictured herself tipsy and deeply in love.
Deedee
Do you think your father ever cheated on me?” Deedee whispered, sketching at her easel, and the moment the question left her lips, she regretted having uttered it. All the togetherness of the Bahamas trip had emboldened her, those hours rained in with Naomi, both of them falling contemplative while playing Scrabble by the window in the cocktail lounge, talking and talking, watching the downpour and the wind whipping the fronds from the trees.
“Way, way inappropriate, that question,” Naomi said just above her breath. “How would I know?”
Deedee had driven to Viv’s drawing class directly from the airport, against Naomi’s objections: they were both still mostly dressed for the Bahamas, in Capri pants and flimsy Ts beneath their coats, their hair crushed and cowlicked from naps on the airplane.
They sat at the back of the art class, having come in late, the live model clear at the other end of the long loft studio. Deedee knew she should be home, preparing for that night’s Sugar Shop party, but she hated to miss Viv’s class. More specifically, she hated to miss the chance, if the chance presented itself, to spar playfully with her ex-husband, Zeke. But Zeke now sat on a stool several rows in front of them, near the breeze of a tall window with a broken pane, still in his parka, wearing woolen mittens as he drew.
“He probably didn’t have an affair, right?” Deedee said. The class had only recently graduated from apples and pears to a jittery nude itchy from a case of eczema down her back. “But if he had, and I’d known about it, then I could at least have focused my hatred on a home-wrecker. I could have paid her a visit. ‘Stay away from my family, or I’ll kill you,’ I could have said. And I could have felt better than I’d ever felt in my life. Remember Fatal Attraction?”
“Of course not. It came out before I was born.”
“God, Naomi, you act like I’m so frickin’ out of touch. You watch old movies all the time. I’m talking about Fatal Attraction; it was a phenomenon. And it’s not that old. I’ll have you know that the movies they made when I was growing up were far more provocative than the movies they make now. You kids think you’re so frickin’ sophisticated, so adult.”
“Please don’t say ‘frickin’.’ It sounds so gross. I don’t know why people think that’s so much better than just saying ‘fuck.’ It sounds far more vulgar than ‘fuck.’”
“. . . wash your mouth out with soap,” Deedee muttered. She licked her thumb to rub at pizza sauce still at the corner of Naomi’s mouth, and Naomi pulled away, her face screwed up in disgust.
“And I’m not lying to you,” Naomi said. “I’ve never seen the movie. You always forget that I didn’t fucking hang out with you in college, Mom.”
“Whatever happened to my sweet little girl who would never dream of saying ‘fuck’ in front of her mother? Hm? Really, where’d that darling thing go? I swear she was right here, not five minutes ago.”
But Deedee did still see much of the little girl in her daughter. Naomi’s cheeks had a dull sparkle from the glittery pink blush she’d had brushed on at the resort’s salon the day before, and she’d already chewed off three of the midnight-blue fingernails the manicurist had applied.
Naomi was physically awkward, tall, thin, most likely a virgin, Deedee suspected, maybe even never-been-kissed. She had a mild case of scoliosis that made her self-conscious about the almost unnoticeable limp it produced. Deedee had longed for at least one of the many cherub-cheeked, bee-stung-lipped boys that Naomi worked alongside on the yearbook committee, and in the drama club, and in the flute ensemble of the concert band, to turn out to be straight.
“Have you called Lee yet to tell him we’re back?” Deedee asked as she took some pink pastel chalk and attempted to capture the model’s patches of sore skin.
“I’m meeting him at the thrift shop later this afternoon,” Naomi said, and Deedee was relieved. Just before Christmas, Lee, Ashley’s son and Naomi’s friend since babyhood, had proclaimed himself gay, dropping Naomi into a funk of ennui for days and days. It had disappointed Deedee too. For years Deedee had ignored Lee’s fruity leanings in hopes of her daughter someday marrying her best friend’s son.
Naomi meant the world to her, but the girl had turned out just as Deedee had prayed she never would, the spitting image of Deedee herself at sixteen, just as scrawny and flat-chested, her hair the same dingy-brown shade of mouse. Yet Naomi had more fight, more re-silience, than Deedee had had. The girl that Deedee had been would’ve loved to have been more like Naomi.
The art class, or any other kind of routine weekend commitment, had been recommended by a family counselor, a woman Deedee and Zeke had gone to see last fall in an effort to improve their divorce, to end the one-upmanship, for the sake of Naomi’s sanity. About the time that Deedee and Naomi had moved into a brand-new condo with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the brick streets and renovated warehouses of the Old Market, Zeke had had to move into an apartment building overrun with roaches and college students. He was no longer able to afford the meager rent of his little house on Happy Hollow Boulevard after a near marriage with a younger woman who had literally drunk him out of house and home. According to Naomi, the woman had frequently double-parked her rusted-out El Dorado in front of La Buvette to load the car up with Pommery, a pricey French champagne that she had insisted was the only thing that settled her nervous stomach.
All the new discrepancies in their lives provoked some serious ire. In the therapist’s office, Deedee had eventually admitted to being too boastful about her success, Zeke to being too petty, and for the first few weeks of the art class they’d all sat together as a family, their easels in a row. But soon Zeke had decided that Deedee and Naomi talked too much, bogging his creativity, so he’d taken to positioning himself at the opposite end of the loft.
Mrs. Bloom, the publisher of the alternative weekly, rushed in with her drawing pad beneath her arm, huffing and puffing, her easel’s legs squealing against the floor as she set up too close to Deedee in the back row. Her arms flung about in a bluster as she flipped through her pages of sketches. Mrs. Bloom was always late coming from Ashley’s erotica writing class, though it was only just across the street.
“Conversation heart, girls?” Mrs. Bloom offered after getting settled, holding out the candy in the palm of her hand. Deedee and Naomi declined, but Mrs. Bloom insisted.
“Tres chic,” Naomi said, reading aloud from one of her candy hearts before popping it into her mouth.
“Kiss me,” Deedee read from one. “Be good,” from the other.
“You didn’t even read what you ate, Mrs. Bloom,” Naomi said.
Mrs. Bloom stopped chewing, her mouth full of the hearts,