Whores on the Hill Read online

  “Her voice makes me want to stick my head in the oven,” Astrid said. She rolled her eyes and laid her head down on her class desk, exhausted. “I’d like to shave her scrawny head bald.”

  Quinn Catherine, regal and luxurious, teased her rooster bangs every morning by checking the mirrored square she kept in her locker. She carried a minicomb in her skirt band for midday touch-ups and borrowed a small can of aerosol hairspray from Taliferro Moss’s purse.

  We knew, we watched them, from the corner of our eyes, suddenly, all the time.

  Taliferro Moss followed Quinn Catherine in the hall like a lady’s own courtesan. She parceled out gum, Tic Tacs, tiny little treats from her crescent Jordache purse that Quinn Catherine passed between her lips carefully outlined in brown lip liner. I bet Taliferro Moss would have carried Quinn’s books if she could have, but that would have been unseemly.

  “Look at the cute couple,” Astrid sneered as Quinn Catherine and Taliferro Moss passed us in the hallway by the gym. “Doesn’t anybody else notice?”

  Quinn Catherine had always been pretty, but now she was sure of herself and vicious. She wore Barry’s Fenwick trophy pin threaded through the front of her cashmere sweaters every day. Teeth bared, her perfect blond pageboy pulled back by a plaid headband, she teased Astrid by saying things like, “What’d you do to your hair, stick it in a blender?” and “Nice urine sweater, where’d you get that, the Thrift?” or “Barry told me to say, ‘Hi.’ ”

  But Quinn Catherine’s favorite thing to do was to lean against her locker, arms crossed across her breasts, in between classes, lazily, like she didn’t have anything better to do, just waiting for our beaded, jangled entry, Astrid, Juli, and me, waiting for the chance to whisper, “He’s mine now, all mine. What can you do about it?” She didn’t even have to say it and we knew.

  So Astrid would smile, coolly, and flip Quinn the finger.

  “What can I do about it?” Astrid drew deeply on a Kool behind the Virgin after school. “Nothing. Who cares? He’s just a shit-for-brains anyway.” She set her jaw, facing the bleak landscape, the burnt, brown hill and depression of black trashy snow.

  “Fuck it, let’s go find some skaters and make them our slaves.”

  So that’s what we did.

  YOU...ONLY BETTER

  One week before Thanksgiving, two weeks after Barry gave Quinn Catherine his pin, it was early in the morning, black as night, and we were circling the East Side’s sterling streets, pulling up slow to the gutter curb and checking people’s recycling bins for empties.

  “Nothing,” Astrid sighed, pulling her blond curls back through the window. “How about that one? Up there?”

  Flashy mansions, Grecian columns, Georgian slate roofs lined the streets. All dark windows and frowning expressions. The lawns were manicured and neat, squared by clipped box-wood hedges. There was a smell to this part of town, the air laced with the smell of the rich, of expensive cut flowers, clean sheets, pricey leather interiors from imported German cars. And another smell on top of that smell, of something so clean and antiseptic it’s never used. Juli was oblivious to it since she lived there, but to Astrid and me the difference between Wauwatosa and the East Side was like crossing country lines. The majority of these houses were dark eight months out of the year—their owners off vacationing in St. Moritz or the Bahamas. Who knows? This was old money, as old as money could be in Milwaukee, attractive and decrepit at once.

  “Hand me that Maglite, would you?” Astrid asked me, fishing her hand around in the backseat. “I want to check this out.”

  We pulled up in front of a blond-brick mansion, its face naked with the summer striped awnings taken down for winter. Now it was blinking bare eyed under spotlights, an old lady without her false lashes.

  “Nice,” Astrid said, training the flashlight on the rows of recycling bins in front of the house. “The mother lode.”

  It was obvious someone lived here. Finally. We sighed with relief, eyeing the green bins filled with Coke cans, plastic milk gallons, smart, squat Heineken bottles. We slammed all four doors of the Audi.

  “Load ’em up,” Astrid said. Juli cracked open the trunk. “Just the bottles now, no cans,” Astrid said, picking out the Heinie bottles.

  “We know.” Juli sighed, irritated. “I think we get it already.”

  The sky was black and cold. There were no stars. We picked our way through the recycling bins, sifting past the plastic soda bottles and tin cans, looking for glass, darkly lit, white glass, blue glass, and the black bottle green.

  We took them all. Juli’s trunk was already half-full with bottles. Champagne bottles from Moët & Chandon, green Perrier bottles, Coca-Cola bottles, Miller High Life bottles with the gold label, glass milk bottles, the really expensive kind you can buy at Organic Express for seven dollars a gallon, imported Orangina bottles like girls with little balloon skirts, but mostly beer bottles, wine bottles, Rolling Rock, Sam Adams, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir. We had an arsenal of bottles.

  “That should do it. Let’s motor.” Juli yawned, closing the trunk on all those bottles. We got back in the car and hit the road, listening to the glass rolling around in the trunk as we hung a left first, then a right, heading for Lakeshore Drive.

  Astrid flicked on the dome light and pawed through a frayed Seventeen magazine, irritated, going, “Great, look at this ‘How to Be a Better You.’ ” She turned the page and pointed to pictures of carrots, eyebrow tweezers, and plaid pants. “Carrots,” she sighed. “Wow, genius.”

  We found Barry’s house easy, even though we never did get invited to the legendary monster kegger he threw every spring. Astrid knew the address by heart, even if she’d never been formally invited.

  Juli’s headlights flashed over Barry’s baby blue BMW parked on the street.

  “There it is.” Astrid kicked the glove box with the heel of her shined Doc Marten. “He parks it in front because he wants everybody to see.”

  We pulled up in front of the BMW we all knew so well and cut the lights. Lakeshore Drive was deserted. Not one car inched its way down the salted, freezing streets. We got out and popped the trunk. We stood there before Barry’s Beemer, in silence, watching our breath cloud before us. A dog barked in the distance at the north end of the block. Then another dog returned its call from the south end, just a low, piercing howl. Astrid dug through her blue suede satchel for a cigarette.

  “We better watch out for those dogs,” Astrid said, her face a flicker of light from her Zippo.

  “You sure you wanna do this?” Juli asked.

  Astrid stood there, holding her cigarette out in her right hand. She stared down the black street, curving around the lip of the lake, giving the illusion, with its nips and tucks, that there was something wonderful just around the corner. She smoked her cigarette like a waitress on the graveyard shift, worn thin. “Yeah,” Astrid said with a brief, sharp nod. “Yeah, let’s kick this, kids.”

  Astrid took the first bottle by the nose, a fat, blue, graceful lady meant for holding artesian drinking water, and chucked it, end over end, at Barry’s windshield. We all stood there, bracing ourselves, scared to shit, waiting for the windshield to shatter. But it didn’t. Instead, the blue water bottle hit the tip of the roof and broke, tinkling blue glass over the front hood of the car.

  The dogs kicked up their barks in the distance, a cacophony of loud clattering yelps. Astrid glanced over her shoulder, first right, then left.

  “Shit. Okay, let’s do this quick,” Astrid said. “Nothing serious. Just litter the shit out of it. Aim for the roof and let the glass trickle down.”

  The dogs were barking now, full-throttle yapping, like machine-gun fire. “Hurry,” Astrid urged.

  We rained that car with bottles, with breaking glass. We went to work. We hit it with bottles from Heineken, Miller High Life, Perrier, bottles from France, from the Netherlands, from old Milwaukee. Astrid scampered up on the back of the car and just whaled on the car, raising beer bottle after beer bottle o
ver her head, like she was serving up tennis balls one after the other.

  It made a horrible noise, but we got caught up in it, and then there was nothing but the noise and us, the barking of the dogs just swallowed up by us, that shattering-glass sound and pop and crash, the sound of our breaths, hammering in our ears, the white clouds before us when we exhaled.

  A light clicked on, casting a hazy yellow glow off the side of Barry’s brick house. The dogs’ barking kicked up. Astrid shouted, “Down!” We dove for the gravel bed behind Barry’s BMW just as the side house door slammed. We heard footsteps on the steps. Then a man’s voice: “Shut up you goddamn animals. Assholes.” We laughed, hunched over in the gravel bed, Juli’s bare brown hands clasped over her mouth. A car zoomed past us, the headlights catching the blond wispy bits of Astrid’s curls and turning them white. But then the clattering dogs went silent, the side door slammed closed, and we were safe, alone, in the black arms of night again.

  And Barry’s baby blue Beemer was covered in pointy, multicolored, gem-faceted shards of glass.

  “Okay,” Astrid exhaled, pausing for rest on Juli’s rear fender. “That was close.”

  We got in the car, sweaty and tired, our arms raw from lifting and throwing. Juli turned on the radio and Genesis whined on some FM station.

  “I’m starving,” Astrid said, quietly. Juli drove down Lakeshore Drive, hanging a right on Clifford, and a left on Downer. Without a word, she pulled into the parking lot for George Webb, the twenty-four-hour diner, and we swung our way, breezy, through the rotating glass doors.

  Astrid made a beeline for our usual table on the right by the windows, a large melon-colored booth. She threw her blue suede satchel in the corner and slid in after it.

  “Do you feel any better?” Juli asked and took a cigarette from Astrid’s soft menthol pack.

  “I want to be like the girls in Seventeen,” Astrid said, and for a minute her mask slipped and she didn’t look like my Astrid anymore. She looked exactly like what she was: a fifteen-year-old girl, scared and unsure of everything, of the world. “You . . . Only Better,” Astrid said. “Isn’t that right?”

  When the anorexic-looking waitress asked us what we wanted to order, we yawned, “Coffee. All around.” The clock over the counter hummed at 5:13 a.m. We ate our eggs, doused with ketchup and Tabasco.

  Astrid stared out the window at the white frozen streets, at the car exhaust puffing smoky white clouds. Everything, our whole young world, swabbed with shades of grey.

  We got back in the car and drove the twenty-six miles to Sacred Heart Holy Angels. The sun clawed its way past the night’s dark clouds. In the backseat, I picked pieces of glass, like gemstones, greenish blue and cerise, out of my jacket. By the time we got to school, the whole sky was a perfect, endless blue.

  WISH I

  Sometimes, I started thinking:

  Wish I had a boyfriend. Pick me up after school in his tinted two-seater, drive me out to the cornfields where the stalks are high.

  Wish I had a guy who was crazy for me. Just gone, beaten, mine. The kind of guy who’d sit in his car, idling, in front of my mother’s house half the night, his hair wet from the shower and wearing a nice, clean, cotton shirt.

  We could go to the Oriental on Friday nights, where we’d lounge in the dark, neither one of us really watching the movie. Park by the beach after, lie in the sand and tell jokes. Toss a tent in the pickup and just go, anywhere. All you’d see is our dust, smoking.

  And more, later. A big apartment in Chicago, right there on Michigan Avenue, with hardwood floors and a big, sexy boyfriend. We’d share a feather-down, queen-sized bed and not get out all day, only maybe to fix a nice breakfast. I’d wear power suits to work, make money, and push guys around all day. Have a big, corner office; a personal assistant who’d ask, “Cappuccino? Caffe latte?”

  These kinds of thoughts, they get you thinking, “All of this can be mine.”

  But then I watched Astrid walking through some party with a guy tugged behind her, his fingers looped in her belt hole, and she’d wink at me laughing, like the road map, the snaking path to the future.

  When I got dressed for school, my mother said, “I don’t even recognize you anymore.”

  I just laughed. “Mom.”

  Boots, shredded tights, short skirt. Barely four months total I had known Astrid and I felt like I had crossed over. Sometimes when I opened my mouth I felt like I could breathe fire.

  Now I knew you could be in control like that. Anything could be yours, you could take it and all you had to do was ask. At the Coffee Trader, Metro, wherever. One minute you’re stirring sugar into your coffee, the next you’re flying through the night beside some hot guy with a pierced lip who whistles through his teeth and calls you darlin’, just a little bit shy.

  “Isn’t it wild?” Astrid said after we’d picked up a couple of punk rockers on Downer, all of us crammed into Juli’s car, sitting on laps and laughing, heading for a garage party on the Southside.

  “Wish I’d met you sooner,” I told her.

  “Pass me a beer, would you?” Astrid reached over me and winked.

  We drove on, the three of us, young and glorious, fierce eyed and smoking, blazing through the night.

  THE ARSONIST’S GIRLFRIEND

  After Juli met the Arsonist, she started saying things like, “Capitalism is an organized system that rapes and exploits the lower classes” and “In Triptorn’s Utopian ideal, all the women wear blue coveralls.”

  “Okay, Che Guevara,” Astrid said, shaking open a bag of fried onion rings. “Want a Funyun?”

  The Arsonist was a lanky senior at Fenwick Prep. He belonged to the debate team, the swim team, Amnesty International, and the Freedom Fighters club. Meaning, he wore a beret without irony. The Arsonist smelled like jock boys’ feet. Juli met him at a party over Thanksgiving break where he was lecturing a circle of kids on the carpet about the cure-all uses of hemp.

  “Hemp can be made into T-shirts or rope. It’s the fiber of the future, man. Hemp is good.” The Arsonist bowed from the waist and the clan of kids, all dressed in black sweaters and green camouflage pants, clapped.

  The Arsonist circulated the party with three fingers of Jim Beam and water in a snifter glass, giving him the kind of sophisticated, cosmopolitan air that Juli never could resist.

  “Tell me more about hemp,” Juli said, sidling up to the Arsonist by the refrigerator and blushing.

  The Arsonist smiled, thumbed his lips, and said, “Okay. You’re cute.” And again, “You’re cute.”

  That’s how Juli stopped eating meat. She stopped wearing leather. Bought a new canvas book bag and a pair of ugly, black pleather sneakers exactly like the kind the Arsonist wore, the very same.

  “Do you know how they test makeup?” Juli whispered in home ec, her eyes wide as clamshells. “On bunnies. I mean, they blind the poor things.”

  So Juli stopped wearing makeup too. However briefly. Swept her eye shadow tins, her mascara wands, her eyeliner, her lip liner, her gloss, her pressed powder, her matte bisque, her tub of ruby rouge into a cardboard box and handed it over to Astrid, saying, “Here. Go to town with this.”

  “Tell me this is a phase,” Astrid said. “Baby, please. I’ll be honest, you look like shit.”

  Juli just grinned like a girl in love, beaming. “Keep it. Really. I’m even off ChapStick.”

  The Arsonist didn’t have a car, of course. He rode a girl’s purple Schwinn he got at the Thrift and slapped a bumper sticker on the rear reflector that read MY OTHER CAR IS A BICYCLE. Although, most of the time, he rode shotgun in Juli’s Audi, a smirk on his thin, skinny lips.

  “I can’t give you a ride,” Juli bleated after school. “Sorry. We’re going to this symposium thing on Leftist Marxism.”

  “No biggie,” Astrid said. “It’s not like we need you or anything.”

  Astrid and I walked to the Walgreens after school. We loved pharmacies. Fingering the penny tubes of purple eye shadow, petting
a palette of lip gloss in burgundies, reds, and pinks. There was nothing we wouldn’t try: French tip manicure kits, eyelash curlers, mood lipstick for $1.69. We loved them all, our tricks of the trade, our favorite pastime, this language of makeovers we were fluent in.

  Astrid idled in front of the hair color section, the Miss Clairol and Frost & Tip.

  “What do you think, Jellybean?” Astrid asked, holding up a carton of Frost & Tip. “As a postbreakup pick-me-up? For my tips?”

  “What’s with Juli?” I asked.

  “Don’t you know?” Astrid asked, digging in her change purse for a five-dollar bill. “The worst thing that can happen to a girl. She’s making herself over. She’s becoming what he wants her to become. That’s what you do when you get all crazy and lose yourself in love. I tried to tell her to stop it. Jesus. Does she care?”

  “I won’t. I’d never, ever do that,” I said, sliding a quarter pack of spearmint gum on the counter next to Astrid’s dye.

  “That’s my girl,” Astrid said.

  The Arsonist worked afternoons at the Tastee-Freez. The one with the giant cardboard cutout of a soft-serve vanilla cone on the front lawn. French fry detail. He’d lean out the back window to smoke a cigarette or sneak a kiss with Juli. Instead of using a hairnet, the Arsonist tucked his brown, shoulder-length hair under his navy wool beret.

  He’d only worked there a few weeks before “the incident.”

  “Have you heard about these guys, these politician guys up for reelection?” the Arsonist preached from his dirty back window to the kids in camouflage pants and black sweaters. “Check it out,” the Arsonist said, passing out leaflets he xeroxed in the Fenwick office. “This guy? Philip Kendall? He’s promarijuana. For personal and medical use.”

  “Dude, if I were eighteen, I would so vote for him,” a tubby, greasy kid said.

  “Pass it on, man. To your brother, your father. You never know.”

  The kids saw the smoke first, billowing out in grey waves behind the Arsonist while he leaned out the back window with both elbows, bumming a cigarette from one of his friends. There were already flames, an orange, licking fire, by the time the Arsonist turned around and realized he’d forgotten about the fryer for an hour, lecturing to his friends instead.