I married a man professionally trained to rescue me. I love him more than anything on earth. I am afraid to tell him my whole story, although I feel that the time to do it is coming closer.
Every morning in the shower, I take my finger and draw good luck symbols in the fog on the glass: a heart with my initials, a four-leaf clover, a peace sign, a cross.
I don’t think I’m an unlucky person. I just wouldn’t call myself lucky.
I found myself back at the entrance to The Manses of Castlegate three days later. The twangy troll at the gatehouse was gone, replaced by a large-boned black woman named Shaunette, so identified by the Hobby Lobby name tag that she’d apparently forgotten to take off after her shift. Shaunette was working more than one job, and I mean working. Nothing was going to get past Shaunette.
While Shaunette grilled me about my business on “the property,” I wondered whether her mother had been counting on a boy and had tacked on the “ette” after an exhausting labor. I hoped Shaunette’s zeal for security would save me from spending the next hour or so at an impromptu tea with Caroline that would probably involve a stilted conversation about Impressionism and God knows what else. I debated saying no on the phone yesterday, but Caroline cast her spell of charm and guilt and suckered me in. It is tricky turning down a Southerner. I was going to need to get better at it.
No lucky break from Shaunette. She handed me a forty-percent-off coupon for Hobby Lobby, and waved me through. “We just got some good ceramic roosters in,” she imparted confidentially.
So now I stood under Caroline’s arch, studying its careful geometry, thinking how I would sketch it. I tugged up the front of my sundress, which was sliding down provocatively. I had let a relentless saleswoman in one of the local maternity boutiques convince me that cantaloupe-sized black, white, and yellow polka dots provided a pleasant optical illusion for a woman in the second trimester. I paid $258.97 to look like a pregnant beetle emerging from the rain forest.
The door opened before I could knock, revealing a pretty Hispanic woman in traditional black and white maid garb. I remembered her moving silently through the background at the Bunko party.
“I’m Maria,” she said, all shyness and obedience. But as she led me a few feet down the hall, her swaying hips said something else entirely. She stopped abruptly in front of a lacquered black door marked by an intricate pen-and-ink drawing, which I had passed by without noticing the other night.
It was the first thing that set me slightly on edge.
A Chinese girl lounged on a couch like an exotic bird, provocatively offering a tiny foot to the man bowed and kneeling on the floor in front of her. A crown of pearls rested on her head. Her hands were bound behind her back by black string. The image was bluntly asking: Who holds the power?
Maria twisted the doorknob and nudged me into a mahogany-paneled, windowless room. It was dimly lit by the red and yellow prisms of a Tiffany floor lamp and the orange glow from a gas log in the fireplace. A weak stream from the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling blew the idea of winter on my bare shoulders.
I was not the only guest. Three other women, two of whom I recognized from Caroline’s party, sat stiffly like posed mannequins in chairs placed in a careful semi-circle. Tiffany was closest to the fireplace, pressing a glass of iced tea to the sweaty sheen on her cheek. Three chairs stood empty. One for me. One for Caroline, who had risen and stepped toward me with a tight smile and an outstretched hand. One for someone else.
“Hello, dear.” Caroline’s grip was perfunctory. A purple silk shift draped her slender body like a Grecian statue. Her lipstick matched the brilliant square-cut ruby nestled on a gold chain in the hollow of her delicate neck. The whole effect was bold, simple, and stunning. She gestured to the straight-back chair beside hers. “Please have a seat. You remember Tiffany and Holly, right? And this is Lucinda Beswetherick. I don’t believe you’ve met.”
Frozen smiles from the three women, like Best Actress nominees waiting for someone to rip open their fate. It reminded me of another room, a long time ago. A room I hadn’t escaped. I had wanted to run then, too.
“Super-cute dress.” Tiffany was staring at my polka-dotted wonder. She was mimicking the exact words of the woman who sold it to me. I was pretty sure neither of them meant it.
“Thanks. Nice to see all of you.” My eyes were pulled to the behemoth image rising behind Caroline: a floor-to-ceiling oil portrait of our hostess as a teenager. She sat English-style on a white horse that appeared to have sprung loose from a fairy tale. Either the artist painted a sycophantic lie, or Caroline was devastatingly beautiful in her youth. There was more raw sexuality in this painting than in the implied bondage in the hall.
“We’ll get started when our final guest shows up.” There was a tinge of irritation in Caroline’s tone. She waited for me to sit before sitting herself. Her skirt slipped up several inches above her knees, showing off legs that reminded me of a dancer’s, all sinewy muscle.
Holly, an interchangeable blonde with an interchangeable Birkin bag, sprang to life and bowed her head to her phone, in the middle of a frantic text conversation.
“What’s wrong?” Tiffany’s hyper-whisper easily carried.
Holly didn’t bother to whisper. “Alan Jr. just told me he needs to have a potato carved into a Russian dictator by tomorrow morning. I pay $15,000 a year to a private school and my reward is that I’ll be up at midnight cutting out felt clothes for a freaking potato.” The phone grunted twice and her thumbs angrily tapped another response to the forgetful little person on the other end.
“Do Brezhnev,” Lucinda advised. She spoke with a slight lisp. “Raymond did him last year. We got five extra points for the eyebrows and another ten for all the thumbtacks we stuck in him for medals.”
“Brezhnev had a fetish for them, right?” I asked. The women turned and stared at me blankly. “Medals, I mean. Didn’t he award himself the Lenin Peace Prize?” Silence. “Black feathers would make great eyebrows,” I added weakly.
In New York, this was my skill. Carrying a room, using odd bits of information to insinuate myself and make everyone feel a little more comfortable. Here, I shifted in my seat, rebuffed.
More vigorous thumb action from Holly.
What in the hell are we waiting for?
It was boiling in this room, a hell entirely of my own making. I wasn’t here just because of Mike. Part of me was still that nineteen-year-old girl wanting to be accepted. Will she ever go away? Stop seeking assurance?
“That’s a lovely portrait, Caroline,” I tried. “Very skilled. Who is the artist? Did you sit for it?”
“No one you would know, dear. It’s actually a copy of a photograph taken when I was fifteen. My father sent the photo to an elderly portrait artist in Paris. He is long dead and forgotten, I’m sure. He painted it and shipped it over the ocean. I still remember the day they unbundled it from the truck and hung it in the parlor. My sister was so jealous.”
“And the horse?”
“One of many.” She spoke a little more curtly. The other women in the room tilted our way, like someone had pulled a string through their bodies.
“Are you able to see your sister often these days?”
“My sister is deceased,” she said coldly.
“I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “I had heard about your husband and… son, but I didn’t know…”
There was a sound at the door. Caroline’s head whipped toward it.
Misty stood in the open frame, a living, breathing curse word. A rhinestone-studded T-shirt clung tautly to her chest. A white leather miniskirt hugged her butt, stopping one inch from obscenity. Bare white legs descended into short yellow cowboy boots. She could have passed for seventeen, Caroline’s naughty child who spent the night out without calling. It occurred to me that she might have a personality disorder.