the pretty girl
kellye whitney

 

Ann was a pretty girl. Not pretty like a supermodel or a Barbie doll. Not even girl-next-door pretty, the one whose memory lingered for years after she'd moved away. Ann's beauty was special, elusive, a “there's-just-something-about-her” pretty. The kind of pretty that meant bargains for a smile and a short sundress, no waiting in line at the door, and special invitations to the VIP section.

Ann's pretty meant extra in restaurants: extra hot house tomatoes in her salad, a scoop of sorbet in a huge drink laden with out of season raspberries, an umbrella, and later dessert to take home. None of it was reflected in the tab. Sometimes the entrees weren't either.

When Ann needed cheering up people took her shopping, to the movies, and to dinner. Friend Jack for instance, was quite content to sit and watch patiently as she dug out fabulous bargains from jumbled racks of mish-mash sale merchandise.

“What do you think of this?” she'd ask. When he expressed doubt over the item in question, she'd shoo away his opinion and say, “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Indeed he didn't. He was consistently amazed at how great she looked when she put the shoe, dress or hat on, and was more than willing to concede her style savvy. He let her introduce him to her favorite restaurants around town and even took her helpful suggestions on what to order. And when she moved house there was no shortage of volunteers to help, Jack and his friend Sal included, despite the fact that most of her furniture was that heavy as hell, twenty-five-year, old-school, mahogany wood.

Ann was short and petite, with long, shapely legs, a tiny waist, and slightly too round hips. Her bosom was nothing dramatic, but it was enough to make a man's hands itch to measure it as she jiggled gently along the street. Around the middle of high school, coinciding with her new habit of wearing vintage dresses and smoking pot, her name morphed into the more interesting Annie. Most people were picky about their names. It was a source of identity, some might say the cornerstone of who they were, but Ann was strange; she didn't care. Nicknames were ubiquitous in high school.

“You're a freak,” a friend said fondly, studying the smooth golden skin and long frizzy black hair. “I never know if you'll paint the town cherry bomb red or turn into a hermit. But you are gorgeous.”

This extreme behavior, said her sister, might be the result of a chemical imbalance. It ran in the family. But Ann did not take her sister's advice to go and get herself analyzed. I don't even like to take aspirin, she thought. What was the point of getting a prescription for mood elevators that would languish in the medicine cabinet until one of her friend's took them for fun? Besides, Ann did not need a therapist to tell her she had problems. She was herself day in, day out. She already knew she had issues!

She was finicky to the point of obsessiveness about her hygiene and clothes. What she wore might not match, it might even be more than slightly wrinkled, but everything was kept scrupulously clean. She kept extra everything in the trunk of her car with the spare, safe from dirt in labeled Ziplock bags.

Ann would wear a ball gown with bare legs because she had a personal problem with panty hose. The problem was she refused point blank to wear them. Only a select few knew the reason: the sound the hose made when her thighs rubbed together made her so angry she'd rip them right off her legs.

“I looove your dress!” Someone was always telling her, and she began to like revealing that she'd made it.

This need for confirmation was a weakness, she thought, but it was part and parcel of being pretty. Once you get used to a certain kind of attention, and it doesn't take long, you grow to like it, to crave it. The niggling desire to please people was as obsessive and misdirected, she felt, as her overly strenuous housekeeping habits.

When people came to visit, she cleaned up after them immediately. Sometimes she couldn't even wait until they left. She'd just follow behind them, righting touched pictures and returning looked at books to their precise position on the shelf.

She drove her car too fast around the curves on Lake Shore Drive with Cypress Hill's “Insane in the Brain” thumping through the speakers; not because she had a death wish, but because her ex had screamed at her for doing it. Fuck him, she thought, as her car swooped around the bends like a dusty red comet. It have her a perverse thrill to watch the yellow and white markings rear up from the darkness when her headlights hit them. Traffic surged around her wheels like vicious little bugs and she relished her independence to act so recklessly. Now that she was alone again, her behavior went gloriously uncommented upon.

V had seemed so promising when they first met, so affectionate and considerate, a breath of fresh air in a lonely room in her heart. Then he changed. He couldn't understand that a pretty girl will always have a lot of male friends. Not because she was sleeping with them either. Annie was surrounded by men because she was nice to look at, loads of fun, and not fussy and silly like girls can be. But V was jealous and soon he began to act out, accusing her of things that weren't true and treating her mean.

At first she tried to work things out. She accepted his apology and tried to heed his unsolicited advice. No woman was an island after all, perfect in isolated splendor. Ann went out of her way to make V feel like top dog and continued to introduce him to friends and take him around town with her, hoping that he would see that he was THE man in her eyes.

He didn't. He just acted meaner. So she fired him. What was the point of trying to show someone he was her number one man when he ranted and pouted like a spoiled little boy intent on bashing down the walls with his chin? V had graduated quickly from tantrumic outbursts to outright nastiness, snatching and snarling like a crabby little dog. The kind of dog that yips incessantly for months behind a closed door and then appears, sweet and cute, bow drunkenly to one side at the top of its small, hairy head.

Really. Should she wait for him to hit her? Life was too short. Exactly how many times can one person apologize for the same thing before words are just words? Once? Twice? V'd had at least a dozen. At the end his words no longer even registered. They'd passed over into the sing-song realm of a refrain, a pop song chorus, and not even a good pop song.

She enjoyed her space tremendously after he was gone. There was no one to tell her, “I'm hungry,” and look at her expectantly like there was a ham sandwich in her pocket just waiting to emerge and jump into his mouth. Annie did not know how to cook.

There was no one to ask her what they should do in pursuit of their dream. She had looked at him like he was crazy. “I only have the energy to pursue one dream,” she told him. “Mine.” Then sat silently while he yelled at her for being selfish.

There was no one to make her feel like shit for being who she was and to criticize things that she'd been doing for ten odd years. She wasn't perfect, and Rome wasn't built in a day. She was who she was, as Popeye always said. Who was this creep to think that he could expect changes overnight or even to expect changes at all?

Then she got ill. It was difficult to tell if her sickness was physical or mental manifesting in the physical, but she felt like shit nonetheless. V called to inquire why she hadn't called him that day.

“I'm sick,” she said through a stuffy nose and scratchy throat.

“Aw, boo boo sick,” said he and took the train over to keep her company.

That night he was nicer than he'd been since the beginning. He cuddled her, brought her juice, and fetched the little things she wanted from here and there. But in the middle of the night she woke up and he was inside of her. She shook her head no because her throat felt like fire and her body was aching, but he paid her no mind, and she lay there unmoving until he finished.

“We're breaking up today,” she told him that next morning. She had been awake for hours watching him, waiting for him to open his eyes.

“Oh?” he laughed.

Oh yeah, she thought, not bothering to correct his assumption that she was joking. Instead she pondered the normality of their morning behavior sans the kiss she ordinarily gave him.

“I don't want you to get sick,” she smiled, when he wondered at the lack.

Eventually he left. She immediately took the sheets off the bed and threw out his toothbrush. His washcloth went into the hamper and all of his food into the trash. She felt like someone had given her a second chance, and despite her cold, her aches and pains, she went to work and smiled the whole day.

She didn't miss V. She celebrated her single-ness and listened with pity to various female conversations on the bus, in line at the store, and from her few girlfriends about men troubles. Not for me that bullshit, she thought smugly. Then the time for her period came and went and she realized that she was pregnant.

Just my luck, sighed Ann, and swallowed a lump in her throat. I'm always a minute too early or a second too late. She ignored the ache around her heart. She pushed aside the images of a golden skinned baby with a huge, toothless smile and tiny arms outstretched and made an appointment. She climbed into the stirrups, and twenty minutes and twenty-six days later, no more pregnancy.

She recovered physically but something was different. Her friends thought she was having a hermit episode, so they still called to make fun of her for not calling or coming by. They teased her that the hot spots weren't as hot without her there to get tiddly off two beers and trip over the bar stools, or dance outrageously sexy on the dance floor and make the other girls jealous.

“Aann-niee? We miss you,” said one.

“You don't love me anymore,” said another.

“What's wrong with you?” several cried.

Ann did not reply; she started screening her calls. V called one day and, unused to her caller ID, she picked up. After that her machine stayed full. Ann stayed home and listened to her friends wonder aloud where she was at, whom she was talking to, and just when the hell would they see her?

She wondered if people would think she was so fabulous if they knew she had a habit of picking her nose and playing with her snot. That she wiped boogers without the use of Kleenex and talked to herself aloud. How pretty would she be if people knew that in college and the company of bullies she had once terrorized a girl into avoiding her on the street?

That she'd rather kill her beautiful absentee baby than find herself shackled to a worthless man for the rest of her life. That she was so sad some days she didn't leave the house except to work, and even then went the whole day without looking a single person in the eye because she was scared they'd see how scared she was.

Her possible imbalance might be the reason, but with her aversion to therapy and pills, Ann relied only on the restorative power of her sunny yellow “lemons to lemonade” philosophy to pull her through the tough spots.

Gradually she grew tired of her own company. The wilder crazier Annie that everyone knew and loved emerged and her friends rejoiced. But even as they partied, as smoke billowed toward the ceiling fan and bottles were emptied, they recognized a more subdued note in their friend. She was still a pretty girl, even prettier now with a new and unexplained fullness around the bust, but the loud moments of hilarity and merry making were far fewer than the hermit ones. There was a strange quietness about her that should have dulled her gaiety but had created instead a kind of gilded glow. Some of her more astute friends looked at her and felt a flash of sadness, of frailty, but they passed it off as a trick. After all, Annie was a pretty girl. The world was her oyster, and a good portion of its inhabitants would gladly lie down at her feet for a smile. What could possibly be wrong with her?

Silly boys, she thought. Pretty doesn't keep you from getting laid off when your company has no money to pay your salary. When you're pretty and get laid off it means that you don't get severance because you are a “consultant” and that means no benefits, just a chunk of cash every week to do with as you please.

Being pretty and being laid off also meant that hundreds of dollars in additional income picked up typing the occasional letter for a small businessman in the building stopped too, since now there was no convenient computer, email and laser printer set up to base operations from. No more Airborne Express or free postage and supplies with which to carry out personal business. No more free downtown parking spot, breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner from an infatuated coworker.

Come to think of it, being laid off wasn't completely a bad thing because being pretty didn't keep that friendly, generous, overly attentive coworker from getting on her nerves. Not having to see his face every day all day long was a blessing. All those good lunches were ruining her figure anyway, because being pretty meant never having to say “no!”

On the other hand, being pretty doesn't help you hear a “no.” Not when you really want the job but go on interviews with a faux smile hanging on your face. Pretty doesn't cut it then. At least, not when a woman's interviewing you.

Lean times were coming. She'd been through it before, and she wasn't the only one, however she looked. Ann knew the day was coming when people would stop speaking to her on the street just because. Men would stop being so helpful, and the freebies would dwindle and lessen down to almost nothing. Annie just hoped she'd milked being pretty dry and that her insides had blossomed despite the outside fading. Her phone rang.

“Peace.”

“What are you doing?”

Ann wiped sleep from her eye with a small fist. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? You must think you're Jackie O's daughter.”

Ann laughed. “I am. If Jackie O was plumply corseted, jazzily turned out and Black, I would be her daughter.”

Her ruse didn't work completely, her sister still asked what she'd been doing that day, and why she wasn't out pounding the pavement looking for her next crust. But this time Ann did not answer. The urge to convince someone else of her worth had been distant these past days, thank the good Lord. She wasn't moving as fast as she'd like, or perhaps even as fast as she should, but it was enough to keep moving. If she listened to other people, absorbed their beliefs and expectations like a paper towel does spills, what the hell was the point of struggling gallantly on? She would go crazy, break her own heart, and no sane person who knew how it felt would do that voluntarily.

When her heart broke the first time it did so loudly, with horrendous creaking and wailing and long-winded sighs like the wood floorboards of an old house on a cold night. The pain was so sharp it brought tears to her eyes and rendered the rest of her body useless.

The heart could also break softly, like fabric tearing, or the insidious hiss of steam from a cranky kettle. That's the one she knew to watch out for. When a heart breaks slowly, you might not even know it's cracked until a draught of frigid air whistles in and for a moment, it stops beating.

“You're going through that phase of life,” her sister said knowingly. “Quite a few of the women on our father's side of the family have experienced malaise of some kind in their twenties.”

Kindly she did not reiterate her belief that Annie should seek medication. But Paxil, one of her favorite words these days, remained in the air, a voiceless specter hovering over Ann's ear like a wayward hair.

“Just be grateful you didn't waste all of your youth in bad marriages like I did,” her sister said, and her precise, cultured tone rose sharply. “When I left my marriage to T, I had $ 47. My hair was wild on top of my head and there was only one thing on my mind: get out.”

Her sister had confided the story of her second, disastrous marriage over time. The silences, the raging fights, the long unexplained absences, even a stint where in the midst of a serious blue funk she had slept on a park bench to avoid going home. Ann was grateful that she'd never endured such. Having a broken heart was more than enough since it healed slower than molasses could drip. The memory of waves of pain throbbing in tune with her blood eventually softened, but any new distress seemed to revive it, make it echo in her brain until she grew weary and sad all over again.

“I can't imagine it, Linda Mae.”

“Well, Annie Lee, I hope you never do. Living with someone who's tearing you down is the worst thing in the world?”

“So, along with our bad DNA comes an inability to form a meaningful relationship with a man.”

Linda burst out laughing. “Bad DNA?”

“Well, you said this bullshit state runs through the family.”

“Yes, but you have such a way of summing things up!”

“Yeah.” Linda heard the muted whoosh of a lighter. “Thanks for coming out, dad. So.” There was a faint sound of breath exhaling. “In addition to this very difficult time in the world, where in between looking rather furtively over one's shoulder for falling planes and sniper bullets, one must, if you are a female in our family, deal with an instability of temperament. Fits of melancholy.”

“Males too, but yes. It's as though when things go bad, they snowball out of control in our minds if not necessarily in life, though that has also happened.”

Ann laughed softly. “We should write a book. I bet we could get on Oprah's Book Club list easy with this story. It's so ‘Dr. Phil special’, and set right here in Chicago.”

“No, no. I'm too busy baking, and you dressmaking.”

Ann's handy, old-fashioned little talent for sewing had helped her come out of her slump. She started with buttons and hems for her mother, who wore them to work where the other ladies noticed and threw more business her way. Word spread, and Ann often made special trips to her mother's school. She found it was good for business to look as pretty as possible, and soon she was tailoring nephews' school uniforms, sewing monogrammed handkerchiefs, and embroidering grandbabies' baptism dresses.

Ann was also gently pumped for information and offered bright young sons for influence or escort. She gladly took the sewing, but was vague on the offers. She did charge them each three dollars extra for the delivery service though. When she wasn't doing that she was making herself new things, or adding her signature stamp to some thrift store find. Before she trolled the downtown shops for special sale priced finery to look pretty in and soothe ruffled feelings and randomly administered hurts. Now Ann haunted resale shops and sold most of the things she found after gently refurbishing them. She wasn't making as much money as she had been, but she felt better working at home, and business was steadily increasing. She got so busy she didn't have time to keep her own books.

Annie immediately thought of one of her male friends. Ricky was a two-nighter friend. Meaning she could spend a whole two nights in his company before he got on her nerves. She'd slept with him once. They'd been friends for about a year when a few Coronas and a fabulous party had done them both in. They literally had too much fun.

They did not repeat the experience and their friendship settled back to normal with a minimum of fuss. Now she gave him her accounting stuff to do every week, and he got what he called beer money. Some of which he shared. He confided to her on one such night, as she sat in front of her newly upgraded sewing machine and he sat at her desk paying bills and tallying receipts, that he liked this softer her.

“I miss that you don't come out like you used to but you seem much calmer and happier. Dare I say domesticated?”

They'd both had a good laugh over that later when she almost let their frozen pizza burn. Ann wondered what he would say if he knew that last night, she and her paper-chasing sister had sat on the phone for over an hour, listening to the swish-swish of counting money and planning a dozen ways to get more.

“You were pretty before, but you've grown lovelier,” Ricky said quite seriously, and Ann blinked at his tone.

He was obviously sincere and she was touched.

“Thank you,” she said. “I feel better. There's such a thing as too much attention,” she added.

Ricky sat still and quiet for a moment.

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose certain kinds of attention could cause more harm than good. Looking like you can't be all it's cracked up to be?”

Ann laughed but said nothing. Being pretty meant knowing when to keep one's secrets.

 

about the author
Kellye Whitney describes herself as a diehard romantic and has devoured romance novels since the age of 13, when she first made the decision to become a writer. With a BA in news-editorial journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia, Whitney currently earns a living as an editor for a publishing company in Chicago, and as a freelance writer for Vibe and other publications. She has interviewed artists like Kanye West, Destiny's Child and Macy Gray. However, recently her creative urges have prompted more action on her own projects and she plans to publish a romance novel within the next year.

 

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