Two Feet Off The Ground Read online

  Two Feet Off The Ground

  by Suzie Carr

  For My Honey Bun – Thank you for coloring my world with your love.

  Chum – Thank you for the journey.

  Copyright © 2011, Suzie Carr. All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

  Also by Suzie Carr:

  The Fiche Room

  Tangerine Twist

  Available via Amazon:

  www.amazon.com/Suzie-Carr/e/B004TEU26A

  Chapter One

  The second I met Paula McKenna I knew I was in deep trouble. Not the kind of trouble that would land me in jail or make my twelve-year-old son, Owen, question my moral integrity. More like the kind that forced me to look inside myself and realize I had a lot of growing up to do if I was ever going to be happy.

  We met under the belly of the Sling Shot ride at Roller Kingdom Amusement Park. Owen introduced her as his soccer coach. She was more of a bronzed goddess to me. She shook my hand and thanked me for being a chaperone. Her skin felt like silk and she smelled just like Zest soap.

  She was so commanding and smiley. As our group herded forward, I studied her from a few paces behind. She pounced around the park sniffing out adventure like a happy-go-lucky puppy dog afraid of nothing but the day ending.

  I liked her instantly.

  She was fearless, a complete and perfect blend of fun and confidence, and I secretly envied people like that. Some thought I was crazy because I’ve never been able to climb a ladder more than three steps, careen down a roller coaster with my hands raised up to the sky, or fly in an airplane since I was young enough to get away with wearing pigtails. I was that person who hung back, holding everyone’s pocketbooks while they went off and had fun. That day at the park was no exception. I sat like a chicken-shit on a bench all day, holding everyone’s crap in my tote bag, smiling like I was having a grand ole time.

  If Paula didn’t have such beautiful curves for me to admire all day, I would’ve been pissed off that I had wasted a perfectly good Saturday in amusement park hell. As a hairdresser, Saturdays were everything to me, especially to my pocketbook. It’s when I double-booked and made all my spending money. It was how I could afford to buy Gucci and Prada. That day may have set me back an outfit or two, but it also granted me a front row seat to glimmering beauty.

  Paula and I first really connected at lunch time. I watched her bend over to pick up an apple core she dropped. Her hips sloped at just the right angle, sculpted like a work of art. When she scooped back up, she caught me staring at her.

  Our eyes locked and time just froze. That’s when I first suspected that Paula McKenna was going to be that one woman who was capable of challenging me in ways no one has ever been able to do before.

  * *

  On my way into work two days later, I called my boss and best friend, Aziza, to find out my schedule for the coming day and to see if I’d need an extra-large coffee to rev me through to lunch. If Flo was still my ten o’clock cut and color, I’d need two. That woman zapped every last drop of energy out of me the minute she pounced at me with her scratchy voice and probing questions. I have to admit that there have been a few times when I had to bite down on my lip to keep from whacking her over the head with the bristle brush. She just didn’t know when to shush her mouth.

  When Aziza answered the phone and immediately asked how my day at the park had gone, I couldn’t help but smile. “I had the best time.”

  “Let me guess,” she said. “A brunette?”

  I think of anyone in this world, Aziza knew me best. Actually, better than even I did sometimes.

  “Like milk chocolate with swirls of caramel.”

  “I want details when you get here.”

  I smiled and must have looked like a sunflower in full bloom as I gunned it through the coffee shop parking lot. I couldn’t get to the salon fast enough. “I’ll bring a couple bagels.”

  “You better bring more than a couple. It’s gonna be a long day. Flo’s already fidgeting in your chair.”

  Clients like Flo seriously made me wish I’d listened to my mother and become a librarian instead of a hairdresser. “I’ll be there in a few.”

  “I’m going to stick her hands in paraffin wax to keep her busy,” Aziza said.

  “Tell her I’ll bring her a glazed donut. That ought to make her happy.”

  * *

  I first met Aziza when we were eight-years-old. She moved into my neighborhood and instantly bonded with everyone. I’d lived there my whole life and failed to befriend most of them. She waltzed right in and attracted them to her like ants to a sugar cube.

  The only reason any of them ever paid attention to me finally was because Aziza insisted they could and should. So, there I was, twirling batons and kicking up my heels alongside them all thinking I was queen shit now because I had a whole nest of friends. Then, the unthinkable happened. Aziza’s family decided to uproot to the other side of town, a heart wrenching fifteen minutes away. Her family’s station wagon hadn’t gone as far as the sycamore tree on the corner of our street before the snobby girls turned their backs on me and ran off to play Barbie dolls without me.

  For years, I played solo in my front yard, mourning for those sunny days with Aziza. I don’t think flowers bloomed on Third Avenue for the three whole summers we lost touch.

  Then, one day, my deadened world blossomed again. In fact, I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said a whole garden of roses, carnations, lupines, and daffodils bloomed from the cement cracks and smiled up to the sky on that day. It was my first day of middle school, and my knees shook so hard that I swore the sidewalk would crumble beneath me. I walked up to the towering stairs in front of the main entrance to the school and just stood there trying to look cool with my new corduroys. I had no idea how I’d survive three whole years at this school. That is until I saw Aziza, with her long, silky black hair, gliding up to me with a posse of pretty girls behind her. I could tell that they would become the popular girls of Woonsocket Junior High School.

  I took one look at their matching jackets and decided I’d do just about anything to make them like me. Hell, I’d even jump out of an airplane if need be. Thankfully, I never had to because for starters, Aziza was too kind to do that to me, and secondly, she did something that most unpopular girls dreamt someone popular would do for them. She invited me to her slumber party.

  My moment of acceptance into the group came that night when I proved I could smoke a cigarette. I lit the first one up and then puffed away all night long, even though I had to run into the bathroom every half hour and puke. Anything to fit in.

  I clicked so well with the group, that by Monday morning a few of the popular boys started to sneak notes into my locker, just like they did to the pretty girls. On weekends, Aziza and I would sleep over each other’s houses and call the boys all night long.

  She and I became inseparable. I looked up to her like she was a celebrity. I could tell that she liked having a protégé like me who adored her realness and loyalty. We just worked. Aziza knew my deepest secrets and I knew hers.

  Well, all except for one.

  In our senior year, I had dragged her under the bleachers to tell her I had sex with Dean King, the captain of the football team, in that very spot the night before.

  Aziza topped that.

  She confessed that she kissed Annie Brown, one of the prettiest girls at school, and liked it.

  A funny thing happened to me when I pictured the two of them kissing. I was turned on to the point that if I hadn’t started to break out into a nervous laughter, I would’ve had an orgasm right there in front of my best friend.

  It wasn’t un
til Owen—who was born nine months after that night under the bleachers–was out of diapers that I finally confessed to Aziza I, too, longed to tangle up with a women.

  Since that pinnacle moment, the two of us shared everything together, even the stuff that cut deep—like many years later, the day Aziza dropped the key to the new Bella Day Spa in my hand— a year before we planned to open it together.

  “You can open and close it anytime you want. I can make you salon manager, so it can feel like yours,” she said to me.

  I guess I couldn’t really blame her. Her parents forked over a two–hundred-thousand dollar gift and she ran with it. She transformed from my best friend to boss overnight. The thing that really pissed me off about this though was I’d never get to see my name next to hers on the incorporation papers like we’d always dreamed about since the day we both enrolled at Rhode Island Beauty Academy. Ms. Lauren Woods should’ve been sitting right up at the top of that paperwork alongside Aziza Asibandi. Instead she had cut our dream into a million little pieces and threw the broom at me.

  It took a few years and several hair splinters later to get past the envy and sting of being just one of the employees. It didn’t help at all that Elite Magazine, the go-to resource for everything and anything in the spa business, featured Bella on the cover of their “Most Luxurious Spas” issue and touted Aziza as the most successful owner of the decade. When I read that, it cut through me like a pair of dull shears.

  She glowed in the article, and it annoyed the shit out of me. Each paragraph applauded her artistic approach to decorating. How she skimped on nothing. Even, Deogie, the salon’s white Boxer mascot, wore silk on her back to remind clients that fashion ruled.

  These were all my ideas. I picked out the patina design for the back wall, the recliner seats for the sinks, the lacy curtains for the romantic effect. I even managed the staff, the appointments, and the public relations that got us on the cover in the first place.

  I was so jealous, I wanted to take a full page ad out in the magazine so I could announce to anyone who cared that Bella’s success was largely due in part to me. You know how I finally got over this jealousy? I woke up one morning not feeling at all like facing my twenty clients and called out sick. Just like that, picked up the phone and told Aziza I wasn’t going in. Instead of getting mad at me, she simply said to me, “I envy you.”

  No one had ever envied me.

  That’s when I cut my leadership reins and let her carve out Bella’s path for herself. And, when I did, I have to say, I enjoyed my freedom and watching her fumble a little. I found myself rearranging my schedule to suit my needs instead of Bella’s. And I loved this. Take this past Saturday at the amusement park for instance. Aziza was back at the spa sweeping up hair and cleaning dirty sinks, while I got to lounge in the sun and fantasize about a doll named Paula.

  “So did you flirt with her,” she said to me that night after we closed up shop.

  “We were chaperoning.”

  “That didn’t have to stop you.” She came up from behind me and laced her fingers through my hair and twisted it up on top of my head. “You need to trim your ends. They’re brassy.”

  “Just massage my scalp, please.”

  I closed my eyes as she circled her fingers around my head. The pressure of the day’s stressful load slowly erased. “Do you think it’d be a bad idea to ask her out for a drink, being that she’s Owen’s coach and all?”

  She slid her fingers down the back of my head and rested them on my shoulders. “Maybe it’s better if you just forget this one.”

  “It’s too late now.” I couldn’t stop thinking about those curvy hips and her mysterious mocha java eyes.

  Chapter Two

  One of the wisest pieces of advice my grandmother gave to me before she died was to make sure my baby knew I loved him. That first week I brought him home, she’d lie in bed with Owen on top of her and hugged him so hard I swore her frail bones would break all over his little body. She’d looked me square in the eye a few times and say, “Raising a great kid requires a lot more than luck. You need to give him structure. Otherwise, he’ll turn out to be one of those screaming brats you see in the toy aisle pissing all over everyone’s nice shopping day with his tantrum.”

  Five days later, she died of cancer right on our living room couch. I was multi-tasking, eating macaroni and cheese while feeding Owen a bottle, and she was taking a nap. My mother carried her pills over to her, and when she wouldn’t budge, my mother started shaking her frantically, yelling at her to wake up. When she didn’t, my mother ran down the street in her silk nightgown screaming that her mother was dead. Selfishly, instead of running after my mother, I just sat numb wondering who was going to help me teach Owen how to crawl, walk, talk, and recite his alphabet. Gran was supposed to. That was our big plan.

  My parents couldn’t. They both spent more than fifteen hours a day pleading their defense cases to judges, and then came home to unwind with a couple of martinis and piles of court papers.

  I remember looking down at Owen at the moment of her death and apologizing to him for the terrible life he was going to have now that Gran wasn’t there to make sure I didn’t screw him up.

  Poor kid flew right into the inept arms of a clueless seventeen-year-old. I was just a kid myself. How was I supposed to understand the complexities of a newborn baby? The first time I changed his diaper after my Gran died, he peed right in my face. I screamed like someone had just thrown spiders at me. I handed him straight over to my mother and begged her to save me. She simply placed him back in my arms, tossed her messenger bag over the shoulder of her tailored suit and dashed out the door.

  Those first few days alone with him I spent wallowing in self-pity. I hated the smelly diapers, the screaming, the throwing up, but more than anything, I was repulsed at the way my body looked. My boobs were so swollen that at moments, even walking across the room brought tears to my eyes. I had to trade my tight jeans in for baggy sweatpants just so I could breathe. I looked like a bag lady thumping around my parent’s house, running from the microwave to the changing table to the basinet. I needed roller skates to keep up with the hectic pace.

  I just wanted my normal life back. I wanted to hop in Aziza’s Jeep Wrangler and race wildly down to the beach to meet up with the rest of our friends who were partying before heading off to college in the fall. Instead, I was stuck cleaning spit-up from my extra large t-shirts.

  Life would never again be normal for me.

  After about a month of this self pitying, Aziza came to my rescue. I had called her up in hysterics one night because I couldn’t stop Owen from crying. The boy wouldn’t sleep. I had circles so dark under my eyes that I looked like I spent the last month getting clobbered like a punching bag. She whizzed over and handed me a cassette of Baroque classical music. “Trust me,” she said. “My mother swears on her soul, that this will do the trick.”

  She plopped the cassette into a portable player and the room filled with French horns, trumpets, and clarinets. I could hear them all, even over Owen’s screams. She lowered the overhead lights and we sat on the edge of the bed together. The smell of baby powder mixed with her flowery scent to create a calming effect. A few minutes into the song, Owen stopped crying and started cooing. Aziza and I stared down at him, and I swear he looked like a little angel.

  Night after night, I’d prepare his bottle, sit in the rocker by his crib, and feed him by nightlight to his favorite classical music. He would just stare up at me with his big blue eyes with his little fingers wrapped around mine.

  I fell in love with him, my baby boy, and realized over time how lucky I was that my life never returned to normal.

  Now, twelve years later, I loved that Owen still craved our bonding time as much as I did. In fact, he was the one who started our Tuesday night ice cream date. On his third birthday he asked to go to the mall to get ice cream. He liked how the walls of the creamery were painted with the same spots as cows. That first night we took tu
rns calling out familiar objects we saw in the spots. Owen had discovered one that looked just like a soccer ball. He named it Oliver.

  Oliver still hung on the wall all these years later. As we stood in line to order that night, I could see him peeking out at us from behind a new smoothie machine. Owen ordered a banana split with two scoops of crazy vanilla and a handful of crushed snickers on top. I finally decided on pistachio ice cream in a cone drizzled in chocolate.

  We sat together on a bench in silence overlooking the carousel ride. I chased a drip sliding down the side of my cone. It got away from my lips and sped down my fingers. I kept chasing it and suddenly the cone imploded like a demolished building. Bits of cone and gobs of green ice cream smashed to the shiny floor. Miraculously, it just barely missed my new lace edged capris I’d bought from Ann Taylor the week before.

  Owen jumped to his feet and threw his wad of napkins down on it. I knelt down beside him and helped him smear the squishy pile from side to side. With the growing tower of napkins between us we must have looked like a couple of Neanderthals huddling around a campfire.

  “So, coach is throwing a party next Saturday,” he said. “And, she’s inviting us.”

  “Us?” I swallowed the exclamation point that threatened to jump out of my throat.

  “Yeah, everyone’s going. There’ll be like a hundred people there. She’s having a pool party.”

  A pool party meant bathing suits, no makeup, no hairstyle, and—I could only assume with the kids being there—no alcoholic beverages to take the edge off meeting her again. I was not going to this party. I’d figure out another way to meet up with her.

  Logic cranked tighter in my brain as I smeared the ice cream into a bigger mess. I shouldn’t even consider Paula in any other context but on a soccer field blowing a whistle. She was too much of an adrenaline junkie anyway. I definitely didn’t need to put myself through that kind of torture.