Wasted Beauty Read Online Free PDF

fifties. I don’t even know why they make ’em. Ulysses S. Grant was a lousy president and a drunk.”
    “Yessir.” Reba glances at the clock over the drive-through window. Five more hours.
    “Just gimme my money. Did you put the ten dollars in the Christmas Club?”
    “Would you like me to do that, sir?”
    “You do it every week, don’t you?” Van Pelt turns and bellows at Frank in his cubicle. “Cheese Louise, Frank, where do you get these girls?”
    From behind the plate glass, Frank glances up and waves to Van Pelt. Frank wants none of this. A clear drop of pus has appeared on the boil. Anne, Reba’s teller-mate, arrives, crowding into her just as Van Pelt lets out a loud fart.
    “Good morning, Mr. Van Pelt. Is everything OK? Reba?” Anne’s warm, reassuring breast brushes Reba’s arm. Anne, like almost every young mother in town, is overweight and her hair is snipped into a frizzy poodle curl. Reba imagines dropping to her knees, lifting Anne’s sweater and hiding away in those pillowy breasts until the old jerk goes away. Until they all go away. Until everything goes away.
    “Is everyone here a retarded moron?” Van Pelt squeezes the pearl of fluid onto his grimy fingertips and wipes it onto his shirt-front.
    Anne, unaware of his grossness, keeps things moving. “Reba, why don’t you go refill the ATM cartridges?” Anne has it covered. Anne is good at this. I’m lucky this time.
    As Reba stacks piles of tens and twenties, Maureen, the third bankerette, joins her. “See any good-looking guys down in the city Saturday?” Maureen’s breath is shallow and rapid, her fingers gray from pouring the filthy nickels and pennies into the sorting machine.
    “Why don’t you grab the bus one day and take a look for yourself?” Maureen looks more and more dried out with each passing day, like those miniature bouquets of yellow roses they sell at the crafts fair. On Fridays Reba sees Maureen steering her cart at the Shop-Rite, her mom tottering at her side. Maureen’s mom wears the pinched look of a martyr exhausted by life with an unmarried daughter.
    “Go to the city? No thanks. I went down there once with mother and we saw things you wouldn’t believe. A Negro man was standing on a street corner just clapping his hands! Can you imagine? Wearing three overcoats, clapping his hands like a lunatic. I bet he hadn’t taken a bath in a week. I just don’t feel comfortable around those kind of people, especially the blacks, Negroes, whatever you call ’em.”
    Reba loses her count and begins again.
    Having disposed of Van Pelt, Anne sidles up to Reba and Maureen. “He hasn’t been the same since his wife had that stroke. Now she’s blind. I dropped by there once to bring a cake from the church? The place smelled like pee-pee, newspapers stacked all over the place. His daughter told me she won’t even go in there anymore. And he’s not the only one. All the farmers are getting older and older. Sometimes we don’t know they’re there until they die. No one knows they’re there.”
    Across from the bank, the woods are deep. The cars pass on the two-lane and Reba thinks, in those deep woods are the farmhouses and in the farmhouses are the old people. The living dead.
    Maureen chirps, “Reba wants me to go to New York with her and pick up guys.”
    Anne, an eye on Frank in his cell, whispers. “I knew a fella who used to go down there all the time. And you know what he did? Rented stretch limos and picked up whores. Had sex with them in the back while he drove around.” Anne assumes her wisest expression, “I wouldn’t go down there if you paid me a million dollars.”
    Frank emerges clutching a sheaf of paperwork, steps behind the three women and types entries into the computer terminal. Under his breath he says, “Maureen, could you run next door and get me a Diet Coke, please?” In the two months since she’s been there, Reba has learned that this is Frank’s way of warning them to get back