Page 38

“Hush,”

Sydney said fiercely. “Hush—”

She rolled over and pressed herself against Claire. Claire had to kiss her with such care; she couldn’t leave any marks on Sydney’s satin skin that her husband might see, but Sydney had no such restraints—she kissed her way across Claire’s neck as if drinking her way to the bottom of a bottle of ambrosia. Claire closed her eyes, back arching as Sydney’s lips traveled across the curve of her waist, lower, and she bit down savagely on the side of her own hand to keep from crying out at the end. Cries of passion weren’t supposed to be coming from this house when the husband was away, and Claire knew exactly how cautious they had to be. Not something to forget, even dazed and dizzy and drowning in pleasure.

“Remind me,”

Claire mumbled into the stars behind her own eyelids, “to send a thank-you note to that English boarding school of yours. Whatever they teach their girls, it is vastly superior to any American school district curriculum.”

Sydney gave that wicked laugh of hers again. “Lock a lot of teenaged girls together, and they’re going to experiment!”

“I have always been a firm believer in the scientific method.”

Claire rolled over and pinned Sydney down with nothing more than a featherlight kiss to her throat. “My turn to conduct some experiments...”

Eventually they ended up down in the kitchen, Claire in her blouse and underwear, Sydney in one of her exquisite lilac satin robes that made her look like Ava Gardner. “I’d cook for you,”

said Claire, giving the gleaming range a dubious look, “because you need feeding, you skinny thing. But I can’t cook a bit, so...”

“You sit down, I’ll cook. I’m hardly allowed to, ordinarily, and look at this enormous kitchen!”

Sydney reached for some browning bananas and a packet of dark brown sugar, fished under a back shelf, and came up with a bottle of Black Seal rum. “Proper Bermuda rum,”

she approved. “The only thing for frying up bananas in brown sugar and eating right out of the pan. My mum would make it for me as a treat sometimes—Barrett says it’s too native , and I said it wasn’t so different from bananas Foster, which he couldn’t get enough of on his trip to New Orleans, and he didn’t like me saying that very much.”

She massaged her jaw a little, unconsciously. “I don’t dare have more than a bite, but let me dish up a mess for you. Mum always said you only make fried bananas in rum and sugar for someone you love.”

Claire’s stomach turned over. She looked down at her blouse, plucking at the button coming loose over the bust. “Don’t bother,”

she said, deliberately not looking up. “Can’t have the neighbors wondering about the smell of cooking when you’re supposed to be laid up in bed! Some other time, Sid—”

And she began to make noises about getting on her way, ignoring the tiny flash of hurt across Sydney’s beautiful face. She had no business feeling hurt, not over a bit of illicit peach-satin afternoon fun. Because that’s all this was.

Happy Fourth of July.

Sydney’s Fried Bananas with Bermuda Rum Cease-Fire Halts 37 Months of War.”

“Okay.”

Claire shrugged, not having given the conflict in Korea more than a thought or two over the entirety of those thirty-seven months, and went on shuffling through her mail. But Grace began exclaiming, climbing down off the step stool where she’d been hanging little stained-glass suncatchers in the windows to reflect the light, and Pete (who’d been on a war-movie kick since seeing Stalag 17 , combing his hair like William Holden and trying to walk with a soldierly strut) wrestled the paper around and began reading. “‘Truce signing brings nervous peace to Korea...’ ‘3,313 Yanks to be freed in POW deal...’”

“I don’t see what the fuss is.”

Arlene leaned over his shoulder to read. “It was just a police action, not a real war!”

“Real enough for the ones who died,”

Pete objected. “Look at that: ‘Cost of War to US: Lives of 22,000 Plus 15 Billions.’”

“You’d think we’d have heard more of a hullabaloo in the streets about this.”

Grace leaned over his left shoulder to read, still dangling a blue glass suncatcher from one hand. “When the news came down in ’45 about the war in Europe being over, everyone was running into the streets to celebrate. Shouting and dancing and hugging complete strangers—did anyone even care about this war if they didn’t have someone in it?”

“‘U.S.–British Clash Seen Over U.N. Seat for Chinese Reds,’”

Arlene read aloud, ponytail bobbing. “Wasn’t the whole point to kill off the Reds, and now we’re talking about admitting them to the UN?”

“Who cares ?”

Fliss burst out in an utterly un-Fliss-like shout. “ Dan’s coming home! ”

She burst into tears, sweeping Angela up and weeping into her little ruffled dress. “Your daddy’s coming home! Yes, he is—”

“Well,”

Grace said, laughing as she gave Fliss a hug, “it may not be Thursday night, but this calls for a party.”

“I’ll cook!”

said Arlene quickly. “I’ll make my famous Victory Pie I made for V-J Day!”

It was really all the Victory Pie’s fault, Claire reflected later. The drinks did tend to flow at the parties in Grace’s room, but usually everyone remained at least somewhat vertical. But when Arlene passed around generous wedges of Victory Pie on Grace’s chipped plates—“My flaky Texas piecrust, filled with chicken salad folded together with shredded cheese, crushed pineapple, and slivered almonds, topped with mayonnaise and whipped cream, decorated with carrot curls!”—everyone reached for the spiked sun tea and just did not stop.

“Hey, look at thish.”

Bea was definitely slurring as she reached for the crumpled newspaper that had been passed around, sat on, spilled on, and used as a napkin by this point. It was dark outside now—eight, nine?—and it felt like midnight. “‘Preshident Eisenhower to Attend a Charity Ball Game to Benefit the Red Crosh’—between Washington and Boston! Will likely mark the firsht time Boston slugger Ted Williams has appeared in a Red Sox uniform since hish return from fighter pilot duty in Korea!”

Bea flopped on her back on Grace’s braided rug. “Ted Williams back on the diamond! Kill me now.”

“Shut up about baseball already,”

Arlene moaned, even as Claire said, “You’re drunk”

and removed the pitcher of sun tea from Bea’s proximity to pour herself another slug. It was crashing into her empty stomach like a cannonball, but what the hell. The secretaries at Senator Smith’s office tomorrow weren’t going to notice if she was hungover. Those old maids had probably never had a drink in their lives.

“We’re all drunk,”

Grace declared. Not slurring much herself, though, Claire thought. Tidy as ever, curled on the window seat with her cat in her lap, looking over the rest of the Briar Club, who sprawled in a lazy circle across bed, floor, and chairs, or with backs against walls.

“If we’re drunk , that means it’s time for a game ,”

Arlene declared, pink-faced and glittery-eyed. She’d been waxing giddy over the thought of all those GIs coming home from Korea , men in uniform positively aching to settle down with the girl of their dreams. “It’s called Taboo, back when I was playing with my friends growing up. What is the most shocking thing you’ve ever done? No lying, now!”

“I’m not going first,”

said Claire, because this kind of game felt like a fishing expedition to her. Getting the dirt, so you could use it later. But Reka had already turned away from the wall vine where she was somewhat crookedly slopping a magenta-orange flower and grunted: “Robbery. Bald-faced unabashed robbery.”

And she let out a witchy grin, sharp gray edge of her bobbed hair swinging.

“Look at you, Attila,”

said Grace, stroking the ginger cat. “Robbing the rich to feed the poor, like Robin Hood?”

“Not exactly,”

Reka said and turned back to the wall vine.

“Details,”

Fliss begged, but Reka flapped a hand at her.

“We said we’d spill, not that we’d spill everything! I did mine, it’s someone else’s turn.”

“I tell my mother I read the Bible verses she mails me,”

Bea hiccuped. “But I never read anything but the sports page.”

“That is not exactly a shocker, Bea.”

Nora giggled.

“All right, how about you, MissNational Archives?”

Nora arranged her long stockinged legs beside her like a lady, hands folded primly in her lap. “I am in love with a career criminal, and it’s been over for ages but I don’t seem able to entirely get past it,”

she said, and hiccuped.

The Briar Club pounced. “Those flowers—”

“The Great Dane—”

“Nora, you dark horse, you—”

“That is all I am saying,”

Nora said and tossed the rest of her sun tea down the hatch. “Jesus Christ on a crutch, I’m dizzy...”

And she toppled over and leaned her head on Pete’s shoulder.

Pete briefly stopped trying to look like William Holden, and just looked thrilled. He grinned when they all started yelling Your turn, your turn and ruffled his hair. “I buried Mom’s Chipped Beef De Luxe at the bottom of the trash and told her we ate it. I looked her right in the eye and lied like a rug.”

“Good for you, Hammerin’ Pete. We are citizens of the land of the free, and as such we do not have to eat Chipped Beef De Luxe,”

said Grace. “Fliss?”

“Sometimes I look at Angela and I just feel tired.”

Fliss sighed. “That’s it, just tired . It’s not happening as often as it used to, but it still happens—”

Confessions were rushing now, Claire observed, sitting back on Grace’s narrow couch-bed with her ankles crossed. Something about the velvet dark outside the window, the gin, the empty stomachs and flushed cheeks and the end of a war made everyone want to lean closer. She leaned back, sipping the last of her sun tea.

“My hometown in Texas was invaded by a Communist army,”

Arlene blurted. “And I slept with the enemy.”

Everyone looked at her. “I think you’ve had enough of that gin,”

Grace said, moving to take Arlene’s glass.

“I’m serious! A war game was staged in my hometown. ‘Maneuvers by the US Army and Air Force to Simulate Thwarting an Invasion and Recovering from Attack,’”

said Arlene, clearly quoting from somewhere. “Soldiers parachuted in, playing the part of the invading Communists. Another force came in and ‘liberated’ us eighteen days later, but for over two weeks it was like living in Moscow or something.”

“There is no way something this idiotic ever happened,”

Bea hooted.

“It did too! Curfew imposed in town, churches closed, propaganda movies being shown at the local theater, armed checkpoints. Walk home at night and you’d see the guns of the tanks sticking out of the brush in the woods—”

“And people just let it happen? They didn’t stage a revolt?”

Pete blinked, clearly envisioning himself/William Holden retaking the town against the invading Reds.

“Are you kidding? It was the most exciting thing to happen in Lampasas in years.”

Arlene tightened the band on her curly ponytail. “A town like that, you grow up knowing every man on every ranch within a hundred miles, and suddenly there’s simply thousands of new men in town, clean-cut army boys pretending to have Russian accents. All the high school girls went sashaying by with pies for the soldiers—”

“War games.”

Reka spat the words as though they were an epithet. “ Szar. Those generals and colonels need a few old women on staff at these meetings so there’s someone on hand to say, ‘That is the stupidest idea on God’s green earth.’”

“It wasn’t stupid! It was a simulation . I don’t have to imagine what it would be like if the Ivans invaded.”

Arlene looked around the room. “Because I know .”

“Sugar pie,”

said Grace, “if the Ivans ever do take over Lampasas, Texas, trust me: you won’t be coming by with pies for the invaders.”

“I don’t know, maybe she would.”

Claire grinned, feeling mean. “You led this story off with I slept with the enemy . Which Ivan got into your pants, Arlene?”

“I slept with a paratrooper who came in as one of the invading forces. All the girls were doing it—soldiers get pensions; if you marry one, it’s a one-way ticket out of Nowhereville. So I slept with him.”

There was an ugly gleam in Arlene’s eyes, and Texas was seeping strongly through her vowels—not the syrupy southern belle drawl she put on whenever good-looking men were around, but a flat, mean, ranch-country twang. “Eighteen days later he moves out when the town is liberated, not a backward glance. So I moved here and now I let every man I date assume I’m a virgin. Serves them right.”

“What is it, this thing men have about virginity?”

Grace wondered. “Virginity is so overrated...”

Claire got up to return her glass to the kitchenette area. Grace had left a tube of lipstick on the edge of the table—Revlon Certainly Red. Slipping it into her pocket, Claire sauntered back into the tiny living room. Everyone had moved on from Arlene’s story of hometown Russian invasions, apparently. “—your turn, Grace!”

Bea was insisting, waving her glass of spiked sun tea so it splashed the bed. “What’s the most shocking thing you’ve ever done?”

Claire leaned against the door, folding her arms across her breasts. “Yes, let’s hear it.”

Grace ran a stroking hand down her ginger cat from ears to tail; it arched and purred into her hand. “Assault and battery?”

she said lightly. “Or—oh dear—is cannibalism more shocking? Or the fact that I stole my cherry pie recipe from my neighbor back in Iowa and never told her...”

That got a big laugh. Of course it did, Claire thought, knowing all the tricks someone could use to slide away from questions they had no intention of answering. First misdirect, then make a joke, then redirect the question back on someone else. So she wasn’t surprised when Grace said, “Let’s hear yours, Claire.”

The most shocking thing I’ve done? she thought, arms still folded tight. The fact that she posed for dirty pictures, stole everything that wasn’t nailed down, or rolled around naked with a married woman? The fact that she’d traded her body at sixteen for a steak dinner and a place to stay the night, and that wasn’t the only time? The fact that there really wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do, to stop from going back to where she’d been at sixteen?

She slammed the box shut hard on those memories before they could get out. Even so a tentacle or two wriggled under the lid, waltzing across the surface of her memory with a dry hiss.

“I’m never going to marry my Sid,”

she said finally. “But that doesn’t mean we still don’t meet up whenever we can to do the horizontal tango.”

The best way to answer a question you didn’t want to answer, even better than Grace’s misdirect-joke-redirect routine? Answer with as much truth as you could, but leave out the important details. Everybody clamored to see Claire’s picture of Sid then, and she showed it around—she’d slipped it out of a little silver frame she’d pocketed at an antique shop; hocked the frame but kept the picture because when you liked rolling around with women, you kept a man’s picture in your wallet to deflect suspicion.

After that the clock struck ten and everyone started moaning about how hungover they were going to be tomorrow and began trailing downstairs. Pete had to nearly carry Nora next door to her room. “Grab me those glasses, would you?”

Grace smiled, clearing up her cluttered living room. “Thanks, Claire... You all right? You had an odd expression when the game came round to you.”

“Right as rain.”

Claire dumped the glasses on the makeshift counter as Pete came back to wave a sleepy good night and tiptoed away, the last of the guests to leave. “Cross my heart.”

“Mmm. You sure?”

“Come on, Grace.”

Claire raised her eyebrows. “Quit digging. I know everybody in this house has cried on your shoulder and told you all their secrets by now, but I’m not going to. It hasn’t exactly escaped my notice that everybody spills to you, but you never spill back. I admire that, actually.”

Raising her empty glass in a toast. “But you don’t fool me.”

Grace smiled, not disconcerted at all. The ginger cat strolled across the carpet and she picked him up, tucking him under her chin where he purred like a live fur tippet. “Good night then, Claire.”

Claire stepped back into her flats and headed for the door.