Just Like Beauty - Hardcover

Lisa Lerner has published essays and short fiction in Self, Bust, and other publications. This is her first novel. She lives in New York City.

Excerpt from Just Like Beauty by Lisa Lerner. Copyright © 2002 by Lisa Lerner. To be published in January, 2002 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.


A month after the Amazing Mister Fezundo willed himself to burst into flames, I have a headache and tell my mother maybe it's a brain tumor like Benny Gold's, but all she can say is, "Oh no, Edie. I'm expecting my period, and I'm not in the mood." Her sentence ends on a panicked note and I can feel the possibility of a good day collapsing inside her, how by mid-afternoon, even as she stands in the kitchen thermoconverting Just Like Beans, she will be wishing she could be traded in for her own improved substitute, a Just Like Lorraine. If only that were possible: just like her but not her at all.

The sound track at breakfast is one long, tight-lipped sigh. I crunch quietly, afraid to let my decibels blend in with hers. We are both on edge because Alice Jones, my sacrificial rabbit, is behaving strangely, might even be having a life-threatening reaction to her meds, and short of an emergency phone conversation with Mrs. Vrick, the rabbit expert, and administering two injections of Bun-Be-Calm, there is nothing more we can do but wait and see.

After the second injection, Alice Jones's floppy ears seemed to droop even longer; she's an English Lop and if I were to enter her in a professional rabbit raisers' rabbit show, her twenty-six-inch ears would be better than a hand job to those judges. I'm probably going to feel terrible when I have to skin her to make my fur muff at Pageant. It's the ultimate insult after all her hard hours of practicing the official routines, to be turned into a fashion accessory. But we girls are expected to know how to dominate and then kill animals, and the sacrifice is supposed to be a sign of maturity. Plus, a fur muff will last forever if you care for it right.

My father stares at his breakfast without eating. He has his own little problem. One of the topiary technicians at work gouged the throat of the company president with a pruning hook and then bombed a couple of greenhouses. Dad's rodent features are puffy today, and behind his glasses his blue eyes look like someone's airbrushed even more of the color out. He's got three gravy-colored moles on his cheek. Were they always there? Right now they are interfering with my digestion. I also notice his neck seems fatter, and as usual he has missed 0whole strips of stubble during his shave. If he were smiling, which he definitely is not, his teeth would appear too tiny for his face. Mouse teeth. Before I was born, he was so handsome no one noticed that his eyebrows were nearly nonexistent. His lips look exactly like a little girl's.

Dad and I. We've never had that much to say to each other. He's on the road a lot, peddling topiary. When I was smaller, he'd read the catalogue to me, teaching me the names of trees. When the Adventure Forest came to town, he'd volunteer to drive me there so he could stand motionless at the observation window as I bungeed down the redwoods, and even now sometimes he brings me things from his trips, like a V-release about the Amazing Mister Fezundo's paranormal childhood in Bakersville, California, or once a fist-sized ceramic frog for Valentine's Day. "Kiss it," he joked. "It'll turn into a prince." But his face looked like he'd just swallowed hexane, and later I found out that my mother had told him to say it. He seems happiest when he's wearing that awful vest with fifty pockets as he heads off to net some wings.

Battus philenor, Papilio troilus, Pieris rapae, Everes comyntas. He keeps his ever-growing collection on metal-lyte shelving next to his workbench, each butterfly and moth labeled and carefully arranged on black or white velveteenite, the names written in his girlish handwriting. What does he think about, on those summer days in the high grass, catching powdery wings in his net, with his wife at home glaring unfucked into her magazines, his daughter listening to the pages turn?

He looks at the clock, then raises his cup and sips. His little-girl lips come together in a prim line. "Cold."

"You want me to heat it?" My mother sighs again, and holds open the door to the thermurderator.

"I suppose." He hands her his cup, avoiding any skin-to-skin contact, although it seems to me that one touch would cheer them both up.

She sighs.

It drives her mad, but now he turns on the morning news. He has to hear the API, the Air Pollution Index.

"Great. Another breakfast ruined."

"I have to find out, Lorraine, because it affects the trees," he grouses, looking almost unhappy enough to cry.

"Why can't you just wait to read it after breakfast on your screen downstairs?"

"Because you know I like to hear it while I eat. And I've got to prepare for my Integrated Pest Management meeting at nine, so there won't be any after breakfast."

"Heaven forbid I should obstruct humanity's ongoing fight against pests."

"It's my job. Why do you have to give me a hard time about it?"

"I'm not," she says without looking at him. "Of course I'm thrilled having a basement full of dead butterflies."

"One thing has nothing to do with the other." Miserably, he clicks down the volume on the news.

"Untrue. Dead butterflies have everything to do with why a peaceful family breakfast around here is an impossible dream."

"I only want to hear the API, Lorraine," he sighs, fiddling with the moles on his cheek. "It's five minutes. Can you sacrifice five minutes?"

A forkful of eggs spears the air dangerously close to my father's head as she leans toward him over the table. "I can sacrifice a lifetime. I think I've made that clear." The fork's handle stays rigid between her beautiful fingers just long enough for my father to edge his chair away, then retreats back to her plate with a clang.

Outside, the streets are quiet except for the Insecticide Hut truck making its own pest-management rounds; the fish-faced guard inside his pale pink security patrol station at the entrance to our neighborhood is probably sleeping, dreaming about a better job than waiting for some hysterical nut to call him up and complain that alien grasshoppers have landed in the backyard birdbath. Which is what happened last week when creaky Mr. Pullings drank too much Mondo Surge. Everyone at the neighborhood association meeting had a good chuckle over it according to my mother, even Pullings was laughing until he lost control of his bladder.

The simfab Swiss chalet clock ticks without sound until the little Swiss boy pops out, the floor smells of sweet chemicals, the curtains my mother appliqued hang stiffly at the windows, the hardware of the sink gleams from her religious polishing. Nobody says anything during the API report--very bad news for Rice County, but our county, Slerkimer, reports only mild increases in nitrogen oxides and sulfur compounds. A low API is always good for me, the allergic reaction queen. When it ends, my father switches it off, silently pushes away from the table, and exits. My mother tilts her head back and repeatedly rubs her cheeks, a shaky smile between her hands. "I knew he was going to do that. I had a premonition."

"Mom, please." When she talks like this, my heart grows soft for all the hatchet men locked up in Tenner State Prison. "I was born with an ESP," she is always whispering to people. "I wish it weren't so. It's stressful having all that extra power."

"I knew that technician was trouble, too," she says to his empty chair. "I dreamt those greenhouses would be destroyed, and when I woke up I told your father he should do something. Even after Petey, he still refuses to believe."

Way back before Alice Jones was in our lives, when I was just a kid, our cocker spaniel Petey got lost....