The Dirty Book Club(2)
Gloria crunched down on a celery stick. “I told you.”
Marjorie sighed. An auburn curl—one of the many to have freed itself from her too-loose-to-begin-with updo—stirred and settled on her cheek. “I know what will make you talk . . .” She was back on her feet, opening and closing cabinets. “Where do you keep the Smirnoff?” she asked, as if anyone would store liquor with the Lenox china.
“Vodka? It’s eleven thirty in the morning!”
“Wow, motherhood has turned someone into a real drag,” Marjorie reported to a studio audience that wasn’t there. Then, glimpsing the clock above the breakfast nook, she clacked across the checkerboard tiles, removed it from the wall, and hung it upside down. “There. Now it’s five o’clock. Might as well add some vermouth and olives while you’re at it. I like mine dirty.” She lifted her store-bought macaroni salad, bumped open the sunroom door with her shapely bottom, and slipped out.
The girls were seated at the Formica table in their usual spots: Marjorie at the head, Dot and Liddy on either side of her, with the butt, as they liked to call it, reserved for Gloria.
Typically, the sun burned through the marine layer by lunchtime, but that afternoon fog, silver as their rising cigarette smoke, blurred the palm trees that stretched above the vaulted glass ceiling and blocked their view of the outside world.
“Who’s thirsty?” Gloria asked, as if offering Tang, not crystal martini glasses sloshing vodka and vermouth.
“Finally,” Marjorie said. “Let’s get blitzed!”
Dot gasped. “Before Guiding Light?”
Liddy pinched the crucifix she’d been wearing around her neck since her twelfth birthday. “You can’t be serious.”
“Mon Dieu!” Marjorie said, having just returned from her first transatlantic flight to Paris. “The French always drink at lunch.”
Dot’s pigtails wagged to differ. “Businessmen, not ladies.”
“Everyone,” Marjorie insisted. “But I guess you’d have to leave town to know that.”
Dot stuck out her tongue.
Marjorie pinched it.
“Come on. Stop being such squares,” she said, distributing the drinks.
Liddy slammed down her ice water. “We are not squares.”
“You’re wearing a pink kerchief on your head, for Christ’s sake!”
“Why do you have to talk like that?”
Marjorie kissed Liddy on the cheek, marking her with a scarlet-red lip print. “You know I love you, Lids, but you’re more buttoned up than Dot’s blouse and Gloria’s mouth, combined!”
Dot pinched her Peter Pan collar. “Buttoned up is the fad.”
Gloria examined her lips in the blade of a butter knife. “What’s wrong with my mouth?”
“It’s girdle-tight.”
“What do you know about girdles?”
Liddy and Dot purred with approval.
Conceived during their freshman year of high school, saying purr was their stamp of approval. It began with the cat’s meow, which was shortened to cat’s, then, meow, and finally, purr.
“It’s become a real bore, Glo,” Marjorie said, smacking a dollop of macaroni salad onto her plate.
“What has?”
“This whole, ‘I can’t confab about Leo’ thing.”
“We’re married! Our leather anniversary is two months away.”
“So?”
“So, being husband and wife for two years and ten months is different than going steady in high school. I need to respect his privacy.”
“With us?”
“With everyone!”
“Says who?”
“Whom.”
“Christ, Dotty, stop correcting me.”
“Gosh, Marjorie, stop blaspheming him!”
“I’m sure he doesn’t speak highly of me, either, Lids.”
They purred.
“Fine.” Gloria pushed her empty plate aside. “You want to know why Leo called?”
The girls leaned forward. Gloria surprised them all by taking a Marjorie-sized gulp of her martini.
“He got me an autographed picture of Audrey Hepburn and couldn’t wait to tell me. That’s why.”
Marjorie placed a pitying hand on Gloria’s knee. “Oh, honey, even I know what an autograph means and I’m in the clouds three days a week.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“It means Leo isn’t coming home tonight.”
Gloria lit a cigarette.
“Every time Leo stays in Los Angeles for work”—Marjorie emphasized work with air quotes—“he gets you an autograph. Janet Leigh, Debbie Reynolds, Tony Curtis, and now Audrey. Do you want to know why?”
Gloria shook her head no.
“So he doesn’t feel guilty about—” Marjorie connected her index finger to her thumb and then poked the hole with a cocktail weenie.
“Are you suggesting my husband is—”
“Marjorie is not suggesting anything,” Dot said. “She’s simply pointing out a pattern. Aren’t you, Marj?”
“No, I’m suggesting.”
Gloria put out her cigarette with a firm How dare you? stamp. “There isn’t any pattern. Leo has to close a very important deal, that’s all.” She lifted the platter of deviled eggs and passed it to Liddy. “Now, let’s eat before the mayo turns.”