Beautiful Girls Read Online Free PDF

a mini-mall with a deli, a clothes shop and a laundromat. Above the stores are apartments with tiny curtained windows. I should move here, she thinks, digging her hands in Bilox’s pockets, which are filled with crumpled bills, sticks of gum, train tickets, ATM receipts.
    Her dad’s pulled through the sepsis, and he’s looking good. In fact, as he becomes sicker he’s more alert and the color has returned to his cheeks. Maybe this is some kind of crazy antibiotic flush, a crazyantibiotic buzz.
    A boisterous nurse with a smock that pulls across her stomach announces it’s time for cognitive tests. “Mr. Meyers, who’s the president of the United States?” she asks, checking his intravenous bags. As his body grows waterlogged and inert, they need to check and see that he’s still home.
    Her dad makes little effort to hide his irritation, but he is more of a charmer than a crab, even in sickness, and finally he smiles wearily. “George Washington,” he mouths.
    “All right, wise guy,” she says. “Let’s try movies and entertainment for $500.”
    He scribbles on his pad, “Frankly my dear I don’t give a flying,” and then for modesty’s sake he’s drawn a line.
    “Oh!” she hollers. “Mr. Meyers is getting fresh.” He offers a half-smile and a silent laugh. He’s always been handsome and easy in a reluctant way. Sometimes while he sleeps, the nurses will confide to Libby, “I like your father.”
    Now as they joke, Libby sees he’s already folding in on himself. “Are you in pain?” she whispers. For a moment he’s quiet, then shakes his head. He can’t name it. They don’t have a language for any of this. Libby pats his hand, and his fingers wriggle against the sheet as if movement might carry him somewhere else.
    As Libby walks down Eighth Avenue, shivering and drinking a beer out of a paper bag, she bumps into Hugh from the laundromat, who tells her he will personally do her laundry this time. Funny, she asks, but isn’t it his personal job to do all the incoming laundry? He tells her he will protect her garments as if her jeans and underwear are the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses. She considers letting him wash her horror clothes, but she doesn’t trust him. Instead she asks him if he wants to sleep with her. He arrives a bit later, shyly slurping on a chocolate drink, and she greets him at the door wearing the daisy-printed muumuu.
    Her law school friends start taking her out for dinners when she arrives back at Penn Station late in the evenings. They eye her speckled clothes, the same mess of a wardrobe she wore through law school, and her headbanded friend Marcy suddenly offers to take her shopping at Loehmann’s. “Maybe it’s time we found your softer side,” she whispers. Libby, tired and drunk, says, “Maybe it’s time for one of my friends to do my frigging laundry.” But the laundromat can do it for her, Marcy insists. Libby just smiles. They have better jobs than hers, and they insist on tiramisu and picking up the checks. Hang in there, they say nicely.
    Her horror friends bring over Chinese food late at night when she’s already under the covers in a bathing suit and knee socks, and they spread out all over the floor, eating lo mein with their fingers and discussing tracheotomies, incontinence and hemorrhaging. Sleep, they tell her, we’ll lock up when we leave.
    Late one evening, Peter the cyclops calls. He’s heard about her dad and wants to know if there’s anything he can do.
    Libby, though wound up and hungry, feels touched. “Come over and do my laundry for me one day.”
    “No, really?”
    “Really.”
    He hedges and then suggests she take it to the laundromat, where they’ll wash, dry and even fold it. Imagine that. “One, two, three,” he says.
    “I did that and they lost my freaking laundry,” she tells him. “It’s gone. Vanished!”
    “Really?”
    “What do you want, Peter?” He’s quiet, and it’s clear he has nothing to offer.