337 Days #2
Rhea figured faces were like houses: One could create the illusion of an overall more attractive facade by simply installing a beautiful new front door.
She imagined the baby nose was widening her eyes, elongating her forehead, and plumping her lips, none of which was true, and yet, she was convinced.
Rhea’s birth nose was wide, long, and slightly crooked, a triple threat that she believed lowered her curb appeal.
However, her mother’s voice inside her head had thus far prevented her from going under the knife.
When Rhea was a preteen and just beginning to hate her appearance, her mother insisted her unique nose was gorgeous and gave her “character,” and although Rhea could have just chalked that up as a thing mothers say, she worried she would wake up on the surgeon’s table with two adorable nostrils, one eerily straight nasal bone, and zero character.
Rhea admired the teenager’s nose from all angles, trying to convince herself that character was not all that important, until the jarring sound of knuckles on wood snapped her out of it.
She ripped her cellphone out of her pocket and was aghast at the time.
She had been creating her dream life for three hours.
She frantically picked up scissors, glue sticks, dozens of magazines, all her hopes and dreams, and shoved them into a closet. She shuffled her socked feet across her tiny cottage as the knuckles got louder. Her house was a mess, and four loving yet judgmental eyes were about to take it all in.
“Ree Kee!” Ada yelled from outside the front door.
“Coming!” Rhea yelled back as she tossed dirty dishes into her sink, wincing at the sound of a cracking mug handle.
“Coming, coming, coming!” Rhea repeated as she put on jeans, yanked her poofy hair back into a ponytail, and, at the last second, remembered to pull the adolescent nose off her face. She opened the door, completely out of breath.
Ada and Tiny stared at her.
“What the hell was that?” Tiny asked.
“Sweetie, why did it take you so long to open the door?” Ada asked, looking at Rhea with concern as Tiny pushed past her.
“I gotta piss,” Tiny said and headed into Rhea’s lone bathroom.
Tiny sat on the toilet and peed with the door open as Ada dumped a box of party decorations on Rhea’s dining room table, which should have been called a living room table since Rhea did not technically have a dining room.
“Sorry, I was…sleeping.”
“You were sleeping? At noon? Are you sick?” Ada instinctively touched Rhea’s forehead.
“No, I was just napping—I’m fine. How are you? You look amazing,” Rhea said, changing the subject and placing both of her hands on Ada’s protruding belly.
“I’m huge.”
“You’re huge.”
“No, you are not. I’m huge,” Tiny said, pulling up her maternity jeans and exiting the bathroom without washing her hands.
“Yeah, you are truly huge,” Rhea said as she placed her hands on Tiny’s larger belly.
“Can’t we both be huge?” Ada asked.
“Fine.” Tiny relented and turned to Rhea. “We need you to get the rest of the stuff. We can’t do it in our fragile state with all your fuckin’ stairs.”
Tiny handed Rhea the key fob to her Range Rover.
“I’m on it,” Rhea said and stepped out the front door.
Rhea walked down fifty-two steps to her driveway.
Her cottage was on a narrow street off Topanga Canyon Boulevard, which was more of a highway than a boulevard.
The entire town of Topanga Canyon was more of a highway than a town.
Cars sped along the boulevard, yearning to get out of the valley and be closer to the beach, or desperate to get home to the valley and away from their unbearable job by the beach.
The vast majority of towns in America do not have the word “canyon” in their name.
A deep, narrow gorge with cliffs on either side does not sound like an inviting place to build a neighborhood, and yet the residents of Topanga Canyon had done just that.
They perched their homes up narrow winding roads, dangling off precarious cliffsides, giving the town an air of creativity and insanity.
Ensuring the only people who chose to move to Topanga were highly creative and highly insane.
Rhea approached Tiny’s black Range Rover at the end of her driveway and spied no fewer than ten boxes of party decorations in the trunk. She sighed and cursed her empty womb for allowing her to be so capable of carrying so many boxes and began lugging them up to her house two at a time.
“We’ll have to hide all the party stuff at your house, Ree Kee,” Ada told her. “It’s the only place Zoe will never find it.”
That was because Zoe never went to Rhea’s house, and she was not alone.
Rhea’s entire friend group avoided visiting her cottage.
Taking a razor-sharp turn off a busy highway, driving vertically up a winding street, taking an even sharper turn up her narrow driveway, parking and praying the emergency brake was strong enough to hold their car at an unnaturally erect angle for however long they were unlucky enough to stay, made her friends really think before agreeing to stop by.
The first and only time Zoe visited, right around step thirty-six of Rhea’s fifty-two rotting steps, Zoe decided she was never going to go through that ordeal again.
Rhea could see it in her eyes. Zoe seemed to double down on her internal pledge after she entered the one-bedroom cottage that was so small, putting her purse down made her feel like she was taking valuable space away from Rhea.
She’s never coming back, Rhea guessed, and she was right.
Which was why Rhea’s house was the absolute best place to hide all the decorations for Zoe’s surprise baby shower.
The idea was to store everything at Rhea’s house, where no one ever went, and then bring it to Tiny’s house, where everyone always went, right before Zoe walked in for a delightful shock.
Most OB-GYNs frown on shocking women in their third trimester, but there were no OB-GYNs on the guest list.
“Sor-ry, thank you,” Ada said in her singsong voice each time Rhea put two boxes of decorations on the carpet. Rhea’s friends were now sprawled on her couch, eating peanut-butter-filled pretzels.
“We’re cashing these, hope that’s cool,” Tiny said as she waved the bag of pretzels.
Rhea did not know she owned peanut-butter-filled pretzels, but leave it to pregnant women to sniff out even the most obscure snacks.
“Sor-ry, thank you,” Ada said for the fifth time as Rhea put down the last two boxes.
Rhea stopped to catch her breath and drink an entire glass of water. Living in her cliffside cottage was the only gym membership she would ever need.
“Okay, let’s separate everything into two groups,” Ada said as she shoved herself to her feet.
Ada approached the boxes and began to talk the women through her plan.
All of the decorations had some kind of DIY element, which Ada thrived on.
There were burlap banners that needed to be painted and pastel construction paper that needed to be cut into circles and glued into garlands.
Ada also thought it would be amazing to hand out party hats that were personalized with Zoe’s face. So, Ada had printed one hundred and fifty different photos of Zoe; each one needed to be cut out and glued to a cone-shaped hat.
Ada was incapable of doing anything half-assed, so when she came to Tiny and Rhea with the idea of throwing Zoe a surprise baby shower, they were already exhausted. Since this was Zoe’s second child, she had protested the idea of another baby shower, but Ada had other plans.
Ada’s parents were born in Nigeria, and they were both engineers.
They had passed on to Ada their passion for solving problems and the work ethic of immigrants eager to create a new life.
Tiny and Rhea knew they were about to be on the receiving end of that work ethic, but fighting it was futile; Ada was a force that could not be assuaged, so they offered themselves up for cutting, gluing, and painting.
When Ada asked Rhea if she had scissors, Rhea made a big show of looking for them everywhere before sneaking into the closet and pulling them out of the pile of junk she had so recently shoved in there. She told herself she was not embarrassed about her vision board, but she definitely was.
She knew she was the only person in her peer group who still made vision boards.
She felt that manifesting was for your twenties, when you had none of the things you wanted, so you needed to speed up the mystical process of fate with scissors and glue.
But by your thirties, especially your late thirties, Rhea thought, everyone had already successfully manifested most of the things on their vision boards—everyone except Rhea.
She feared she had a glitch in her divine timing and was determined to fix it.
Rhea began cutting a photo of Zoe and her firstborn out of their beach background.
Zoe’s daughter was so impossibly small that Rhea had to do some delicate scissor work around her fuzzy head.
It was a good thing she had spent the morning cutting little children out of magazines; she was developing a skill.
Their companionable silence was broken when Ada innocently asked, “So, Ree Kee…how’s your love life?”