Devils in the Sugar Shop Read online

  “Did she do it?” Peach asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Take the dare. Did she go ask the lawn boy if he’d ever finger-banged a girl?”

  “You know, I don’t even remember,” Ashley said. “But I do remember my mom wasn’t home, so we snuck some liquor from the cabinet. We didn’t know what we should drink, so we drank Campari because it was a pretty ruby color. Have you ever had that? Campari?”

  “No.”

  “I’m trying to remember what it tastes like because it tastes like something specific. It had a kind of candlewaxy taste, or a taste like . . . what was it called? Oh, Zotz is what it was, Zotz, that candy that sizzled on your tongue as you sucked on it? How adorable, Peach,” she said, pointing her paring knife at her, moving it up and down, referring to Peach’s dress, too slinky and cool for winter, patterned with flowers the ice-creamy brown and pink and white of Neapolitan. “Did you get that here in Omaha?”

  “Actually, just from down on the corner,” Peach said. “Nouvelle Eve.” Actually, Troy had bought it from Nouvelle Eve in an effort to beg forgiveness for being such a wretched cliché of a married man.

  “I love that shop,” Ashley said, “but sometimes I feel like I might be a little too old for it.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Peach said, standing to go. “You’re not too old for anything. You’re not even forty, right?” Peach knew full well that Ashley would be turning forty in a few weeks. Ashley had coerced Troy into booking a trip to New York for a long, celebratory weekend. They’d have steak frites at Café Charbon on the Lower East Side, see Blossom Dearie at Danny’s Skylight in Times Square, and stay in a little room in the Village with a kitchenette and an unworking fireplace. Peach had made Troy describe the whole itinerary to her in full detail after taking a tumble with him at the Rubberneck one late night on a floral-print sofa with yellowed antimacassars, on the stage set for the theater troupe’s reworking of Streetcar Named Desire, updated to post—Hurricane Katrina.

  “Thanks for the wine,” Peach said, setting the glass on the table without having taken even a taste of it. “I’ve got to get back to the bookstore.” The sad fact was, Ashley was lovely in anything, even in her old T-shirt with her nerdy horned-rims hanging from a chain around her neck librarian-style and her jeans with the ’70s-era patch on its knee of a cartoon souped-up VW bug. Peach had always been jealous of the quirky girls, the charming nut jobs who could dress off the floor and be absolutely eye-catching.

  “Peach,” Ashley said. Peach stopped in the doorway. “I’m kind of, I guess, uncomfortable bringing this up . . .”

  Peach couldn’t breathe.

  “. . . but did I say anything in class that upset you last week? When we were discussing your story? Because if I didn’t say so before, I really do think it has a lot going for it. The characters are so tragic in a way that’s really very heartbreaking. . . .”

  “Thanks, thanks,” Peach said. “Really, thanks, no need to . . .”

  “You feel for them because their situation seems so hopeless, and there’s this vulnerability, that’s, well, it’s tragic, in a way. . . .”

  “Yeah, you said ‘tragic’ already.”

  Ashley paused for a moment or two, biting the tip of the paring knife. “Here’s the thing. The reason I bring it up, and this is kind of embarrassing, but I saw my book in the bargain bin at Mermaids Singing. One dollar. And I guess, maybe, I might have . . . kind of . . . taken it personally.”

  Peach had indeed, personally, put Ashley’s novel in the “Last Ditch” box. Its jacket was an obnoxiously distinctive shade of Pepto-Bismol that snagged her sight every time she walked down that aisle.

  “We have a new part-timer,” Peach said. “This very cute unwashed dope addict boy-poet. We put him in charge of ‘Last Ditch,’ and he probably didn’t realize . . .”

  “Oh, no, of course, stop, stop, yes. Don’t explain. I figured it was something like that. How dumb of me to even say anything.”

  “Don’t worry,” Peach said. “I 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 litt
le 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, and though she’d already likely jawed the candy into sugar dust, she said, “I can read them with my tongue,” then looked up in deep thought to the ceiling. “Whip me,” she said. “Spank me hard . . . ummm . . . what is it? Suck me . . . fenceless? Hm.” She rolled her tongue around in her mouth, and looked down at her knees to feign concentration. “Suck me fenceless. Well, that doesn’t make much sense, does it, girls?” Naomi giggled, but Deedee knew not to play along. She didn’t want to be the unwitting audience member dragged up on stage for Mrs. Bloom, who’d once been an honest-to-god birthday clown, to pull a bouquet of paper poppies from her nose or to release a barn swallow from her beehive. Mrs. Bloom, before becoming a publisher, had been many things over the years, including the reverend of a nondenominational church, an art therapist at the prison, and an organizer of poetry slams for cancer survivors.

  “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,” and Mrs. Bloom looked back up to the ceiling. “FUCK me SENSELESS!” she said, slapping her knee. “Yes. Fuck me senseless, that’s what it says.” She gave Naomi the box of candy, then winked and leaned over to do a little magic trick, pulling a conversation heart from behind Deedee’s ear. “Dream,” it said.

  Naomi seemed to be genuinely amused by the dirty joke, leaning forward, covering her mouth to laugh. Deedee only smiled politely and returned to her drawing. Her eyes wandered from the model to Zeke, and she found herself scribbling his cowboy boots, with their leather-stamped yellow roses, onto the feet of the naked woman.

  “I’m going to ask Hole-in-the-Knee out on a date,” Deedee whispered to Naomi, referring to the disheveled fortysomething sitting near Zeke. She took another heart from Naomi. Tickle me. “He’s easy on the eyes.”

  In the two years since her divorce from Naomi’s father, Deedee had had sex exactly once, with a farm insurance agent she’d met on the Internet. One night in a chat room, without even seeing the man’s picture or hearing his voice, Deedee had decided she’d fallen in love in a way she hadn’t since college. They had made arrangements to meet later that week, at a restaurant in a town that was halfway between them, and she’d driven to the aptly named Chances “R” steakhouse with her heart pounding, her sweat soaking the underarms of a silky red dress with Asian embroidery that she’d bought at full retail from a snooty boutique.

  But five minutes into dinner conversation, or maybe even minutes before that, maybe the second she’d seen his gin-blossomy nose and outdated rooster-knit necktie, the love she’d so quickly fallen into, she’d just as quickly fallen out of. The most troubling part was seeing that he was disappointed too. I had my hair done at T’eez for no small amount, she’d imagined herself telling him. My girlfriend who did my makeup works at the Estée Lauder counter at Dillard’s. I’m at least ten times more stunning than you deserve. But they had sex that night in a motel at the top of the exit off I-80, then never even e-mailed each other again.

  “You can’t fool me, Mom,” Naomi said. “Your only real interest in Hole-in-the-Knee is the fact that he’s chummy with Dad. You just want to create a little classroom scandale.” She put a Frenchy drawl on the end of the word, mimicking a motivational speaker they’d become infatuated with in the Bahamas, a woman known as Sybil the Guru who’d evangelized to roomfuls of unfortunates, of rode-hards-and-put-away-wets. With the mild tropical storm confining them to their hotel, Deedee and Naomi had made the rounds of the ballrooms, stealing name tags and sneaking into other conventions. “You don’t have a shot at happiness at all,” Sybil the Guru had told one crowd, provoking a mixture of giggles and shocked silence and approving clucks of the tongue. “It’s as simple as that. The women for whom happiness is a possibility are happy already. I don’t have any solutions to offer you, but it doesn’t matter, does it, gals? You just want the problem identified. As a matter of fact, you luxuriate in the problem. Any solution would only muddy things.” The crowd went wild.

  Deedee glanced around at the other women in the art class and gauged their ages, estimating that most of them were much older than she was. Then she remembered she was nearly forty,
probably the same age as the nude model, who had a lazy slouch inching close to permanent hunchback.

  Do I look so old? she wondered. Only a few years before, people had often thought she was in her late twenties. But no one had made that mistake lately. And, really, wasn’t that somewhat of a relief? To not have to care so much if your hair was just right? To fret that she was too thin in some parts and too fat in others? There was only so much, at this point, that she could do.

  God, she thought, thinking how long it had been since she’d first seen Fatal Attraction, that movie that Naomi had barely even heard of. Twenty years, probably, had passed since she’d pictured her future in the picture-perfect Manhattan apartment of Anne Archer and Michael Douglas, with its carefully positioned clutter, its dinner parties where sophisticated people got soused on good wine and laughed their asses off and used filthy language. But now that she thought about it, as much as she’d coveted all the domestic tranquillity, what she’d really wanted was Glenn Close’s dirty frizz and toxic sense of style, those hideous black circles all around and around her eyes.

  “That’s all for today,” Viv said, stepping up from the back of the room, rushing to the model to cover her up with a velour robe as if suddenly distressed by her nudity. Viv rubbed the model’s shoulders as if consoling a victim, a woman exposed. Deedee had known Viv since college, and she’d always appeared scrappy and unflappable, all her anxiety funneled into her artwork. Deedee glanced over at Viv’s own easel, the model depicted in pieces, the arms, the legs, the hands disconnected, floating as if in a bottle of formaldehyde.