Page 22 of Catch a Kiwi
“Because I am?” I shouldn’t be amused, I should be annoyed that instead of cleaning out my waterlogged house, I was knee-deep in sticky mud and wielding a shovel, but I couldn’t help it.
“Nope,” she said. “If you were hard-nosed, you wouldn’t have taken us to the hospital. You’d have dumped us at the fire station. That wouldn’t even be hard-nosed. It would be normal.”
“Not for Kiwis.”
“Nope. She thinks you’re hard-nosed because you didn’t want to fuck her.”
“Pardon?”
She didn’t appear especially abashed. “I’m guessing you know the word. All right, have sex with her. Which makes you gay, probably, because every guywants to have sex with Summer. Not just because she looks the way she does, but because they can tell she’s not going to say yes. She’s a challenge, which is sick, but there you go. Reality.”
This was not comfortable. “That’s some view you have of men,” I said.
“Right? Wonder where I got it. There was this one motel owner who wanted to give us free rent. Summer told him that she was worth a whole lot more than five hundred a week, and she was so far out of his league, he couldn’t even see the boundary. You should’ve seen his face.” She stopped. “Wait. You’re not helping us because you want to fu— to have sex withme,are you, because I look about fifteen?That’d be so skeevy. You’re probably forty-five.”
“I’m thirty-nine, thanks,” I said.
“More than twice as old as me. No, thanks. Anyway, I’ve slept with exactly one guy and it wasn’t all that fabulous, so good luck with that, unless you’re into women who don’t know what they’re doing. I was raised by an ex-hooker, is why. Summer’s probably great at it—you don’t marry super-high-end guys if you’re not great at sex—but she won’t do it. So you know.”
I picked up a gumboot, possibly a match to the one in the van, tried to sort out how to answer all that, and settled on, “You’re too young for me, no worries. And your cousin’s very beautiful.”
“Yeah, obviously, even since she’s gained weight. She says she’s never going on a diet again, now that she’s not with Felipe and doesn’t have to be Barbie. Being beautiful isridiculous. You’d think, yay, you’re beautiful, job done, but if you’re, like,professionallybeautiful, there’s all this maintenance. It’s serious business.Waytoo much work. Thank God I’m not, except I don’t believe in God. Thank the universe I’m only semi-good-looking, I guess.”
So many questions. I said, “Barbie?”
“She looks like one, doesn’t she?” Delilah said. “She actually used to be one. That, or a Disney princess. Cinderella or Rapunzel, because of the hair, then Elsa at the end, onceFrozencame out.She madegreatmoney with Elsa, even better than Barbie. You can’t believe what you can charge for that, especially in Seattle. You need a place with plenty of rich people. Rich people with no judgment.”
“Rich people want to meet Barbie?” A scratched frying pan and, farther up, another gumboot, bringing the count to three. “Is this a …” I didn’t want to say “fetish.” The mind boggled.
“Their daughters do,” Delilah said. “Theme birthday parties, with wholesome acting and nauseating smiling kindness, leading little girls in soaring, optimistic song and telling them that a dream is a wish their heart makes. It’s revolting. She had a whole rack of costumes, but Barbie was the easiest. Regular clothes, just shorter and tighter. Or sluttier, depending how you look at it. You’d be surprised what Barbie outfits look like on a woman who actually looks like Barbie. That’s how she got into software engineering, though. Isn’t that bizarre? She’s Barbie at a birthday party, and next thing you know, she’s got an SAT coaching business and is majoring in software engineering. Well, not as bizarre as the time it turned out to be a bachelor party, and they wanted her to be a Barbiestripper.I didn’t even know what a stripper was. I was about five. My aunt was ready to call the cops when Summer came home and told us, because she was still underage. Summer said nothing would happen to them, though,and you know she was right. They’d just have asked what Summer was doing there. Probably arrestedher.”
“What?” I said stupidly.
“I remember it mainly because Summer was so pissed. You’d think she’d be crying, having to escape from all these drunk guys telling her, ‘Unzip it, Barbie. Show us what you got,’ and pawing at her. Instead she kneed the one who grabbed her and yelled at them that she was a child and they were committing sexual assault against a minor, and stormed off. She was kind of a badass then, believe it or not. She looked like she’d cried, too, because her makeup was smeared—especially her lipstick. I remember she looked like a clown. But she said she didn’t. Probably true. She’s a lot tougher than she looks. Obviously it was traumatic, though, or I wouldn’t remember it so well.”
This was the past, and it wasn’t my business anyway. I breathed my reaction out, spotted something yellow up the hill and did some more sideways hill-kicking to get there, dug it out, and held it up.
“Summer’s purse!” Delilah said. “She’s going to be stoked. Not that there’s much in there.”
“Good,” I said, throwing it in the bag, and then, because I was still stupidly worked up over long-ago trauma to a woman I barely knew, “How did the software engineering happen, exactly?”
“Oh, she was in college then, doing the Barbie and Elsa thing. Did a big birthday party for some Microsoft exec’s kid, and he started talking to her afterwards. Probably creepily, even though Summer never says, but in the midst of his whole pretend-fatherly schtick, he told her she had a good brain and asked what she was majoring in. She said math, and he told her she should change to computer science, that there were more jobs and more money in it. He told her to call him and gave her his card and said he could get her aninternship, but she didn’t, so obviously itwascreepy. She has pretty good radar.” She picked up a mud-smeared book and tossed it into my bag. “I’m talking a lot. Must be trauma.”
I said, “So she didn’t get an internship.” It was probably intrusive, hearing all this when Summer hadn’t wanted to tell me anything, but here Delilah was, freely volunteering it. Besides, you never turned down information.
“Nope. But he also told her that with her SAT scores—what kind of older guy hits on a college girl by asking about her SAT scores? At his daughter’s birthday party? A geeky guy who never got the cheerleader, I guess—that she should be tutoring rich kids, not playing Barbie. So that’s what she ended up doing. She got into college admissions counseling, too. She had a whole business. Much entrepreneur. She kept on doing it all through college, along with her internships, until she went on the show. Summer has what you’d call an overdeveloped responsibility gene. Like, that’s her jam, being responsible, which is why I’m here with her, obviously. She didn’t think she should leave me alone, even though I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. It’s also why she still lived at home after she could’ve moved out. My aunt stopped having to work in fast food on nights and weekends once Summer had those gigs and just did the house cleaning. Cool for me, because somebody was usually home when I was a little kid. Especially since my mom was in prison. Cooking meth with her loser boyfriend. I got lucky.”
My head was spinning. “The show? What show?”
“I’ll tell you later. If you help me pick out a car. That’ll be, like, the Arabian Nights. Leave them wanting another story. It’s like I can’t stop talking, though. It must be the near-death experience, or the concussion messed up my frontal lobe and erased my impulse control. I’m usually much darker than this. I need to go show Summer that you found her purse. She’s going to plotz.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s Yiddish. It means faint with excitement.”
“You’re Jewish, then?”
“No,” Delilah said. “I told you. I’m nothing. I just like Yiddish.” And headed up the hill.
