in the window of a snooty shop on Forest Avenue.
Charles Jourdan.
$150.
Out of her reach, and while she can make a dress, she knows she can’t make shoes.
It’s a problem.
Then there’s jewelry.
Obviously she can’t have the real thing-diamonds are as beyond her reach as the stars-but she finds that she has a flair with costume jewelry, and Tia Ana helps her pick out a few pieces-a bracelet, a necklace-that set off the dress.
But the shoes.
Kim goes home and looks at the waning days of the calendar-there are more X’s than blank squares-does the math, and realizes that she’s not going to make it.
Her mother might have told her so.
In the few hours between (scant) sleep and cleaning other people’s houses, the former Freaky Frederica, now just Freddie (her hippie days long behind her), sees her daughter’s activity-the photos on the bulletin board, the pattern bag, the comings-and-goings from Mrs. Silva’s trailer. Like Mrs. Silva, she misinterprets it as something to do with a prom or a dance or even (finally!) a boy, but she worries that her daughter is headed for heartbreak because she seems to be overreaching for a social strata in snobby Orange County that she can’t achieve.
Most of the girls at Dana Hills High have money, have access, have, above all, attitude and will quickly sniff out that Kim lives in a trailer and that her mother cleans houses for a living.
She doesn’t want her daughter to feel ashamed and, besides, she’s proud of who they are, who she is, an independent woman making it (just, but making it) on her own.
Kim is smart, Kim could go to community college, maybe even a four-year school on a scholarship if she’d study, but Kim is too interested in the fashion magazines and the mirror.
Freddie tries to tell her so, but Kim doesn’t listen.
What she could tell her mother is that you don’t start your journey of Upward Mobility on the stairs; you take the elevator.
But either way, you need the right shoes.
84
Stan accepts the rolled-up dollar bill from Diane’s hand — oh, Eve — leans over the counter at the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore, and snorts the line of cocaine.
Doc grins at him. “And?”
“Wow.”
Diane is already grinning because Doc, chivalrous gentleman that he is, offered her the first line. Her brain buzzes and the little bees quickly work their way down to her pussy, industrious (“busy as”) and lascivious (flower- to-flower) creatures that they are.
Doc has a sense of reciprocity-Stan and Diane turned him on to acid; now he’s returning the favor with coke. He and John have come over to the store with a sample.
Fair being fair.
Friendship being friendship.
And business being business.
(Not to mention alliteration being alliteration.)
It’s good business to turn the owners of the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore on to a free sample of your new product, because while the bookstore ain’t what it used to be, it’s still a nerve center of the counterculture (read “drug”) community, such as it is anymore.
(The community, not the drug.)
It’s timely.
Stan’s looking for something new, anyway.
He’s tired of selling the hippie stuff, worried he’s trapped in a fading culture, and, truth be told, he’s a little bored with Diane, too.
And she with him.
And the political scene?
The revolution?
That they thought they won when Nixon
— the Uber Villain
— the Evil Stepmother
— be honest, the Scapegoat
— (They are both conversant enough with their ancestral religion to know that the goat was loaded with all of society’s evils and driven from the town) fell from power and The War ended
It’s come to Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter.
Jimmuh Cahtuh.
With his lust in his heart.
Diane doesn’t want lust in her heart, she wants lust in her puss, in her yoni, if you must, and it’s been a while since she’s felt it with Stan. It’s all right… it’s pleasant… but… pleasant?
Funny thing is, even in the free love days-when people were twisted around each other like worms in a coffee can in the bookstore’s back room-she didn’t participate. Neither did Stan. She out of reticence and he, she suspected, more from a fear of disease.
Now they both wonder if they missed out on something.
The other thing they wonder about is money.
It used to be something you weren’t supposed to care about bourgeois but now people seem to want it and people seem to have it.
Like Doc, for instance
Taco Jesus has more than taco money, now, and he isn’t throwing it around or away. He’s buying things- clothes, cars, homes-and it looks good on him, and Diane can’t help but wonder are they missing out on something, or worse have they missed out on something like they’re standing on the banks of a river watching the future flow away from them, and now
Stan is looking at her as if he’s thinking the same thing, but she ponders if he is standing on the bank with her or floating away, and she also wonders if she cares.
She turns and watches John “do a line”-in this new vernacular. All traces of his adolescent cuteness are gone. He’s lean, muscular, and powerful, and suddenly she realizes that she is ten years-a decade — older than she was. This boy, this child who used to sell joints from the bottom of his skateboard, is now a young man. And rich, if you believe the gossip.
Gossip, hell, she thinks-certainly John owns the house two doors down from the one they still rent. And the parade of sleek young women going in and out screams of money, and one morning she saw Stan, his fucking teacup in hand, looking out the window watching one of John’s girls getting into her car, admiring-lusting after? — her long legs, her high breasts, her Charlie’s Angels blonde hair. (Who is the actress-the one with the fake, silly name?) And then he pretended he wasn’t staring, and she wished he had the honesty-okay, the balls-to come out and say, yes, he thought the girl was sexy, because she could see him chubbed up against his faded jeans, the ridiculous bell-bottoms, and if he’d been that honest she might have given him some relief, gone down on her knees and sucked his dick and let him shoot shiksa fantasy into her willing mouth, but instead he said some mealy- mouthed thing about the “superficiality” of it all so she decided to leave him hanging, as it were.
Now John hands her the rolled-up bill-it’s her turn again. Feeling a little silly, Diane pushes a finger against one nostril and inhales with the other and feels the coke blast her brain and then the acrid drip down her throat.
