A Taxonomy of Barnacles, page 11
“What you need,” Bell corrected, “is to stop doing stupid things like shaving your head.” At this, Bell reached and managed miraculously to snatch back her hat. “How dare you at a time like this? The season starts next week.”
It was perhaps the only thing the Barnacle girls agreed on. Every year, from April to October, the Barnacle house was obsessed. The girls spent hours watching and listening to games and, whenever possible, attending them at the stadium. But their agreement ended there. Bell, Belinda, and Beryl were die-hard Yankees fans; Bridget, Beth, and Benita loved the Sox. Both camps were equally vocal in support of their teams and reveled in frequent virulent debates over their respective merits. Nothing could beat the excitement, Bell felt, of Bucky Dent’s glorious three-run home run during the one-game play-off in 1978 between the Yanks and the Red Sox. The Sox could beat it, Benita argued. And they finally did in 2004 when, pitches away from elimination, they made the comeback of the century, reversing a three-game losing streak to win the play-offs and then the Series.
Of course, Yankees fans had ample evidence of Red Sox failures with which to combat Benita’s bragging. The ’86 World Series was one such example. Only a team of misfits and losers could manage to lose with a two-run lead. Moreover, in Bell’s opinion, the Red Sox recent victory was but a momentary reprieve from a future of continued failure, an act of mercy from gods embarrassed by their pitiful eighty-six-year losing streak. Of course, the 2004 World Series had fanned the flames of rivalry, giving the Yanks a run for their money and the Red Sox a healthy dose of confidence. The Series, aside from being the most dramatic in recent memory, had turned on a dime in a seven-game play-off when Ortiz hit not one, but two walk-off home runs, saving the Sox from infamy and reversing the fate of his team.
“The hat,” Belinda persevered, “is a critical accessory. This guy’s not into green spikes.”
“The only thing that’s critical,” Bell countered, “is that you go back to your room. Maybe if you stay in it long enough, your hair will grow back.”
Thwarted, Belinda regarded her sister with new antipathy then, changing her tack, she offered her most endearingly desperate look before giving up and resuming her path. She stopped at the door and turned her head with an extravagant swivel. “Also, I’m missing my favorite dress. Strapless. Green. Taffeta. So, if you don’t mind,” she said, folding her arms, “I’ll just wait right here until you return it.”
Bell said nothing in response. She only widened her eyes. Then, deciding apathy was her best hope, she allowed her eyelids to droop. Perhaps Belinda was just the narcotic she needed to finally find sleep. Unfortunately, just before submitting to her drowsiness, Bell was roused by a slight movement in her periphery. She lurched suddenly, intercepting the theft and grabbing her hat from harm’s way.
“Get out of my room!” Bell shouted.
“Your room?” Belinda snorted and surveyed it imperiously. Out of habit, she twirled, or rather tried to twirl, a phantom strand of hair much like a person who, after losing his watch, continues to check his wrist. Finding she lacked the hair to twirl, Belinda found a new activity for her free hand and swooped it dangerously close to Bell’s face.
“If you’re not gone in ten seconds,” Bell said calmly, “I’m going to tell Bunny how many times you’ve had sex in her bed.”
“You think you’re so much older and wiser,” said Belinda.
“I am older and wiser. By about ten years.”
“I wouldn’t boast,” Belinda said. “I hope I don’t have as many problems as you by the time I’m your age.”
Bell’s jaw dropped.
Belinda was silent. Sensing that she had struck a nerve, she smiled and, avoiding eye contact, quietly left the room.
It took Bell a moment to recover. Belinda was right. She was a disgrace. She had achieved the impossible. She, an older sister, had managed to lose her younger sister’s respect. Self-pity, however, fueled Bell’s temper and, in turn, her vengefulness. She rushed to her door to yell something rude but, finding the hall empty, thought better of it and sheepishly retreated.
Since it was nearing noon, Bell decided to finally start her day. Pulling a blanket around her shoulders, she traipsed across her room and prepared to brave the apartment. As she walked, she whistled Beethoven’s Fifth. She was glad Barry had forced her to practice the piece as a child. It was appropriate background music, Bell decided, for her downfall. Hers was the same struggle as Beethoven’s, a contest between C major and C minor, a war between nature and nurture, a fight played out, for the moment, on the battlefield of family. Bolstered, Bell skipped to the third movement, to the strange and inscrutible bridge, to the part when the minor theme is usurped by the major one, like a hare by a tortoise, where the minuet becomes a march, when the horn section overwhelms the strings, when ugly ducklings and swans and frogs and princes make their triumphant switch. As she hurried toward the kitchen, Bell decided to make perhaps two cups of coffee.
To Bell’s dismay, Benita was already in the kitchen. She was huddled over the kitchen table, working on a complicated art project whose contents threatened, Bell noted, to infest the family’s food. At the moment, she was threading string through the two top corners of a long, bannerlike triangle cut from a large sheet of construction paper. The rest of the table was covered with cotton balls that had been stretched and disembodied to resemble a bank of snow.
“Oh no,” Bell said at the sight of her sister.
“What’s wrong?” asked Benita.
“Oh nothing,” said Bell. “It’s just that … I thought you’d be at school.”
“They sent me home,” said Benita, “since it’s a Jewish holiday. I tried to convince them to let me stay, but they insisted.”
“I wonder why,” Bell muttered.
Benita looked up. Bell smiled innocently. Benita went back to her work.
As Bell watched, she noted Benita’s imperfections. Her eyebrows were slightly too large for her otherwise delicate face. Her eyes crossed slightly when she concentrated. Her legs, though long and lithe like her sisters’, were a little bit stockier. There was no denying her mental problems. Barry’s emphasis on competition had driven her over the edge. Benita would not stop at chewing glass; the child would kill to win. Luckily, Bell decided with some satisfaction, no one could accuse her of that.
Indeed, Benita had been consumed by the contest since its announcement the night before. At seven o’clock sharp, a half hour earlier than usual, she was practically propelled out of bed, anxious to spend the day finding the perfect strategy. In honor of the occasion, she took some license with her school uniform, eschewing the traditional lower school attire—a pinafore tunic in light yellow or green pinstripes—opting instead to wear her sister’s plaid kilt even though the blue and green tartan was reserved for upper school girls. She paired the kilt with a black T-shirt, despite the school’s universal mandate for collared white blouses. Wearing black, she felt, afforded an added degree of intimidation, just as flouting the school’s strict collar rule suggested her willingness to break rules.
School immediately offered the inspiration Benita craved, with auditions for the Chapin School talent show less than a week away. This marked the recurrence of Benita’s favorite school event, the opportunity to remind teachers, family, and classmates of her superiority. She had won it a handful of times with various songs, dances, and orations, and once with a crowd-pleasing performance of Beethoven’s Fifth on the glockenspiel. And yet, Benita had never enjoyed a consecutive reign. She had been shortchanged by the school’s tacit mandate that excellence be tempered with kindness. As a result of this overly saccharine stance, Benita had been denied the prize several times, suffering several second-place awards so that other, less talented classmates could enjoy their share of the spotlight. Her nemesis Mary Talbot, for example, had benefitted from this affirmative action, led to think she actually deserved first prize for her halting monologues and poor excuse for ballet. As a result, Benita had come to dismiss the talent show as a serious venue. Still, she rose to attention at the sound of the homeroom announcement reminding the girls that tryouts would take place on Monday.
By noon, she had a winning plan. On Monday morning, before the tryouts, she would confront her long-time nemesis, armed with her new information about Mary’s anti-Semitism. Then, with Mary sufficiently humbled, Benita would challenge her to a duel. The challenge would amount to their own private battle enacted before the entire school, not only a measure of skill and popularity, but, at its essence, a contest between Christians and Jews. The talent show provided the perfect venue for such a grudge match, enabling Benita to put Mary Talbot in her place, while earning her family’s gratitude. Aside from earning brownie points for defending her family name, she would surpass the petty achievements of her sisters, clinching first prize in the talent show, and winning her father’s contest by a landslide.
“Want to know how I’m going to win the contest?” Benita demanded. Having successfully threaded the triangle, she began painting glue across its surface area with long leisurely strokes.
“No, not really,” Bell responded.
Benita considered this for a moment, then dismissed it with a shrug. “I’m going to win the talent show this year with a scene from King Lear. Want to know which part I’m going to play?” she pressed.
“Goneril?” asked Bell.
“Nope,” said Benita. “Every single one. I’m going to do different voices and everything.”
Turning away, Bell walked to the stove and lit the flame under the teapot. Perhaps, today coffee would serve as an anaesthetic, not a stimulant.
Still smiling as though in response to a piece of very happy news, Benita began pulling stretched cotton over the sticky triangle. Without looking up from her project, she launched into a new line of questioning. “Did you have a nice time with Blaine?” she asked.
“When?” snapped Bell.
“At the seder,” said Benita. “Don’t even try to deny it. I saw you checking him out.”
“Please,” scoffed Bell. “He’s barely divorced.”
“Exactly,” said Benita. “So he’s looking.” She pursed her lips as though to replicate the punctuation of “dot dot dot.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Bell.
“I saw him looking at you, too,” Benita said.
“You did?” Bell asked in spite of herself.
“Oh sure,” said Benita. “He couldn’t keep his eyes off you.”
Bell smiled hopefully and sat down at the table.
“Oh wait,” Benita said, tapping her head. “I was thinking of Billy. He was staring at Bridget all night. I had it in reverse.”
Stricken, Bell glared at her sister.
Benita shrugged innocently. “You know how it is with those two. Who can tell them apart?”
Eminently pleased with her effect, Benita giggled devilishly. Her pleasure doubled by the simultaneous completion of her art project, she lifted the sticky triangle from the table and, using the string to tie it around the back of her head, held the gauzy mass to her chin and assumed a thespian stance. “Tell me, my daughters, since now we will divest us both of rule, interest of territory, cares of state, which of you shall we say doth love us most? That we our largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge.” For added effect, she threw her voice into the lowest register she could manage and assumed a volume loud enough to project across a large stadium.
Bell stared, transfixed by her sister in spite of herself.
“Pretty good, right?” Benita asked.
But before Bell could muster a response, Benita scurried out of the kitchen, leaving Bell to enjoy a moment of much-deserved solitude. Desperate for any outlet for her irritation, Bell rushed to the refrigerator, removed the most accessible carton of juice and poured it into her mouth.
“How do you spell ‘susceptible’?” asked Bunny.
Bell pivoted to find her stepmother standing inches away. Bunny stood, wielding a legal pad like a shield and fiercely clutching a pen.
“S-u-s-c,” Bell responded, squinting thoughtfully. Embarrassed by her bad kitchen etiquette, she regarded the carton of juice quizzically as though she had meant to pour it into a glass and only just realized her mistake.
“Thank you,” said Bunny. She leaned on the counter and scribbled something on her legal pad, then brushed past Bell impertinently and exited the kitchen.
Once she was alone again, Bell turned back to the refrigerator and emptied the rest of the carton into her mouth. Sated, she replaced the empty carton in the fridge and walked back to the stove. But as she resumed her coffee vigil, she detected something in her periphery. Turning, Bell realized Bunny had taped a note to the refrigerator door.
“WE ARE ALL SUSCEPTIBLE,” the note explained in a threatening font, “TO EACH OTHER’S GERMS. SO,” it went on, “IF YOU DRINK FROM THE CARTON, DRINK THE WHOLE THING OR THROW IT OUT.”
Outraged, Bell surveyed the room and violently tore off the note.
6
Promiscuity
Wary of further contact with her family, Bell resolved to spend the afternoon locked up. No one would bother her in Barry’s office. She would spend the rest of the day organizing her life. She opened the top drawer of her father’s desk to find a sea of gold: Bunny’s lifetime supply of legal pads, Bell remembered, was perhaps the only positive contribution Bunny had made to the family. She had brought it as a dowry of sorts when she moved into the apartment with no more explanation than the ominous claim that her ex-husband was very litigious. Pleased to receive something from Bunny after watching Bunny take freely from her family for so long, Bell availed herself of a brand new legal pad and, despite the association with paperback heroines, commenced writing a list of ways to improve her life.
Number one: Convince Blaine to be the father of her child. Failing this: Find suitable father. Satisfied with these items, Bell progressed to graphs and charts. On one she plotted the progress of her goals, the y-axis demarcating time, the x-axis charting whim. On a bar graph she named each sister and plotted positive and negative traits. On another, she charted the standard deviation of her sister’s IQ. On another, a two-columned “do” and “don’t” list, Bell enumerated simple rules for parenting. On the “DON’T” side, she listed her parents’ practices; she left the “DO” side empty. Finally, Bell designed a list with real practical value; it was a preventive measure of sorts, a history of her romantic mishaps, a chronicle, she thought, of the miseducation of Miss Bell Barnacle. She drew a line down the middle of the page to create two headings. On the left, she wrote the “UP SIDE” and listed boys before Blaine. On the right, she wrote “THE DOWN SIDE” and listed the boys she’d dated since.
First, there was Bernard, insignificant really, as far as their actual romance, but notable because he had been her first and because Bell had broken his heart. Second, there was Boyd, good-looking for a redhead and sexually voracious even by sixteen-year-old standards. Most of the fun with Boyd, however, was had at his mother’s expense (who thought Bell was a bad influence) and, of course, at the sight of Boyd’s shock of red hair. Next was Bashar, Indian and intriguing, wholeheartedly committed to Bell’s education. Bashar put Bell on a regimen of hard-core heavy metal and underground drugs, or was it underground music and hard-core drugs? There was Brad, a teacher; and Bates, a tennis teacher; and Brant, a thirty-five-year-old tennis teacher; and Ben and Blake a Boris and a few others whose names she couldn’t remember.
But Blaine Finch was Bell’s first true love. No one else had even come close. Blaine was tall and wildly handsome and sharper than a talk show host. Blaine was talented and terribly cool. Blaine knew how to ballroom dance. Blaine was good at every sport, but his limbs were still long and graceful. And long ago, though Blaine would never admit it, Blaine was in love with Bell. What a terrible curse it was, Bell thought, to experience the best years of your life before turning twenty-one. She was condemned, thanks to Blaine, to the same nostalgia as a faded child star or an injured athlete.
To be sure, Bell’s obsession with Blaine had much to do with their breakup. Their love affair ended as it started; in the middle of the night. One week after the double proposal, the twins repeated their trip. Billy and Bridget scampered down the fire escape to roam around the dark city. Bell and Blaine remained in the bedroom to enjoy the dark. Bell, sixteen and certain of nothing, was sure of one thing in life. Someday had finally arrived, she whispered. Someday could be tonight. Terrified, Blaine turned cruel suddenly. The proposal, Blaine claimed, was a joke. The deal was no longer on the table; it was meaningless pillow talk. But Bell was not so easily dissuaded. She was outraged at the injustice. And, already well-versed in the law, Bell knew Blaine’s proposal remained valid until it was officially retracted. Finally, Blaine lost his patience and fled, offering this as he departed: The proposal was not only null and void, the love behind it had suddenly turned to hatred. From that moment on, both parties rued the day they had allowed themselves to go so far, let alone with someone who lived so close.
Boyfriends after Blaine were decidedly lame. First, there was Bailey, a rebound gone awry. Next was Bobby, a bad actor with a bad cocaine habit. There was Bryan, a singer-songwriter, an Irish boy with an angelic face and the devil’s own temper. Biff was a model and a couple years younger and not bad in bed but it was no big deal. Biddle was a blowhard and terrible in bed; Bell suspected, in fact, that Biddle was gay. She had tried hard to forget Bjorn, an obese aspiring poet. Bryce, a fiction professor, had taken Bell back to his office after workshop ostensibly to talk about writers, but actually so she could have sex with one. And let’s not forget, though Bell did her best, Bronson, the aging Jewish writer, whom her friends referred to as “the Missing Link” not only because he was so old but because he resembled a chimp.
As her boyfriends grew steadily less promising, Bell’s dread and frustration mounted. With every passing day, she grew more acutely aware of her distance from her deadlines. Each day yielded a new theory, a new plan of attack. Often, Bell made a logical error common to many New Yorkers. A New Yorker caught in rush hour traffic believes that some choice, however awful or ancient, could have prevented her current holdup. An alternate route, an earlier departure, a different cab driver, some better decision would have enabled her to end up somewhere other than where she was now. But, Bell, much like every New Yorker, is helpless at the hands of life’s traffic jams. There is simply no street, no early enough departure, no kind enough cab driver, no correct decision that will enable you to avoid rush hour in New York.
