Ben was twenty, a computer science student at the community college in Roxbury, and working at 7-Eleven part time. Paul had a series of his own start-up businesses that he ran from home, one always failing and another succeeding, each idea growing from the decay of the previous. He used to freelance on Rentacoder.com, then built himself up as the Goldfinger, so-called because he could solve a client’s coding problem in no time, and always billed reasonably, and moved on to bigger clients that reached out to the Goldfinger with an emergency project here or there.
Since the house that Ben’s father, Paul’s uncle, had left them was big, with spare bedrooms, they decided to rent out the rooms to make extra cash.
In the two-storey house lived Paul and his cousin Ben, Rico from Texas, Kimberley from Vermont who hated when people called her Kimmie so Paul called her Kimmie, a French girl with rusty-brown hair and freckles who everyone called ‘the French Girl’ cause she had only recently moved in, and now Zorka, who Paul announced should be called Zoro cause she always wore black. Zorka said that anyone who called her Zoro would get kicked in the nuts and/or pussy, she said it with such a straight face that no one called her Zoro, except for Ben, who wasn’t there when she made the announcement, and promptly got kneed hard between his legs and doubled over, confused.
Zorka shared a room on the second floor with the French Girl, who was working at the European Wax Center on the crossroads of Beacon and Harvard. When Paul told Zorka she needed to get a job, she told him she didn’t have a high school certificate. Paul said, “Not a prob!” and the next day she had a high school certificate. “You can pay me back when you get a job.” Zorka took the thick piece of paper and inspected it. Then she let out a laugh. It was the first laugh he had seen from Zorka.
“I finish with honours!” Zorka exclaimed.
“Yeah, I figured… why not, you know. I’m sure you would’ve finished with honours anyways…” Paul said and gave her a wink.
Rico was different from the rest of the guys. He was short and chubby, with smooth tanned skin, and no facial hair except for a couple of wisps on his upper lip. He was from the Philippines but moved to Texas when he was three, and now he was studying comparative literature at Emerson College off Boylston Street in front of the Common, and he was there mostly on scholarship. Rico was a shy guy. Three times a week, he worked as a cashier at Whole Foods in Brighton.
Zorka and Rico would sit together on the teal and purple porch of the house, Zorka smoking, Rico twisting blades of grass between his thumb and forefinger.
“I know career,” Zorka said. “It’s like doctor lawyer cash-machine.”
Rico laughed.
“No… careers don’t have to be like ‘doctor lawyer cash-machine’, it’s like, how you want to interact with the world.”
“I wanna… fight maybe.”
“Fight for what?”
“So people don give me shit.” Zorka looked at Rico. “You dunno shit about shit!”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, Zorka, I’m a short, chubby, brown trans kid. You wanna know what getting shit feels like.”
While Zorka was thinking about her career, Paul got her some shifts at the 7-Eleven and Rico got her books to read during her shift. Mostly poetry books, which looked easy to Zorka because they were short lines and only a page or two. For the first time in her life, sitting behind the cash register and watching the petrol pumps hung with their noses in the machines, Zorka felt a sort of calm. She didn’t want to pick a fight. She didn’t feel angry. She just wanted to sit and read and think and look at the sky negotiate its blues and whites.
She decided she wanted an aesthetician’s licence like the French Girl, so the French Girl gave her her books to study and led her through some of the waxing tutorials at home, when she’d sneak back some supplies from work, heat up the wax, and show Zorka how it was done. The French Girl gave her lessons on waxing – upper lip, chin, armpits, bikini line, butt-cheeks, butt-crack, anus… Zorka took to waxing right away. It was methodical and intrusive and she liked that. Her favourite were Brazilians, which she imagined onto those prissy private university girls with a personal sense of accomplishment.
“I make their pussy look like a blind eye. They never see, what do they see, they see nothing.”
Since the French Girl was completely waxed already, compliments of the job, and they had already done Zorka, and Kimberley said, “No way,” and Rico had no hair cause he was Filipino, Paul volunteered Ben.
“Oh come on, Paul, I ain’t gonna get waxed!”
“Sure you are. Zorka needs to practise.”
“But I don’t want to walk around with legs like a girl for a month – no ’fence Rico.”
“It’ll be good for you, Ben. You too stuck on appearances anyways.”
“You kiddin me? They gonna beat the shit outta me—”
“Ain’t no one gonna touch you. If you think hair on your legs makes you a man, then you can draw the hair back on,” and he threw Ben a black sharpie.
Ben walked around with smooth hairless legs and hairless armpits for all of that warm autumn, and something in him changed. He started coding programs just for fun, then getting curious about people who were different from him, then he crashed an MIT party where he met a girl to whom he explained that his hairlessness was a sacrifice to his sister getting her aesthetician’s licence.
“That’s partly endearing,” the girl said, “and partly super-weird.”
But something about his easy way of listening and his dark, bowing eyes kept the girl there.
“So you wanna tell me your name?” Bennie said with a smile.
“Nidhi.”
“That’s cool. I like that name. My name’s Bennie. Or Ben. However you wanna say it. Nidhi, what is that like Indian?”
“Yeah…” the girl said. Then, after a pause, she said, “You don’t go to MIT do you?”
“What makes you say that?” Bennie replied.
Nidhi let out a laugh.
“Just your manner of speaking, Bennie, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I know, right. I’m actually doin a double, MIT/Harvard, because I couldn’t decide so I thought why not, you know. It’s like at a buffet when you end up putting a chicken drumstick and a slice of meatloaf on your plate cause you can’t decide, and it looks weird, but it’s not too bad actually.”
By winter, Bennie and Nidhi were dating and Zorka got her aesthetician’s licence and started waxing at the European Wax Center, where it was considered a point of expertise for the woman who was waxing you to have an accent. Part of the European touch.
At times, Rico and Zorka mumbled to each other with clunky Russian accents like Boris and Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, the tall female spy with sharp eyebrows and a tight smile, and the shorter agent with two evil moustache wisps. Other times, Rico read her poetry from his classes. Zorka kept saying “I don’t get it” to all the poems, except Anne Sexton. She got that. She wrote intrepidly about all the things “no one wanna see” as Zorka put it, like menstruating, masturbating, wanting to die, addictions, incest, cheating, begging…
All My Pretty Ones
Anne Sexton lived and wrote in Massachusetts, Newton, Lowell, Boston. Some of her poems could be a walking tour. One that would lead nowhere, but gave you firm instructions. Like “45 Mercy Street”, up and down Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Charles River…