“Well,” Peggy said, “they’re no longer cheap.”
Nancy pulled into a parking space and shut off the engine. “No, they’re not, and nothing else about her is either. I just hope you take the point. Chris is right. It’s been bad enough with those stupid newspaper stories, but it’s going to get a lot worse if we don’t do something about it. Show up. Make polite conversation. Pretend that you’re really impressed with what she’s done with her life. That’s all I ask.”
But I am really impressed with what she’s done with her life, Peggy thought, struggling with the door handle and her pocketbook and the brown paper bag all at once. Then she stepped out of the car and looked around, bewildered. There were times when she woke up in the middle of the night and thought she was still fourteen years old. She still lived in the same place and knew the same people. She still went to the same school she’d gone to then, even if it was in a different building.
She turned to say something to Nancy, but Nancy was gone, striding out across the parking lot with her briefcase swinging on the tips of the fingers of her right hand.
If I were Betsy, I wouldn’t come, Peggy thought, and then she changed her mind, quickly, because she had to. She was going to come herself. That was just as bad. If she’d had any self-respect left, she would have refused outright.
2
For Belinda Hart Grantling, it was better this morning than it had been for a long time, in spite of all that nonsense about the dog in Betsy Toliver’s garage. Part of that was that she had someplace to go, and therefore some reason to stay away from Maris. Always before, when Maris had come home, she’d gone to stay with her own parents in their house out in Stony Hill. Now Maris’s parents were both dead, and there was nowhere for her to stay except in one of those motels out on the highway, which weren’t feasible, since Maris wouldn’t drive. It made Belinda insane. She’d rented that bright yellow Volkswagen at the airport, and driven it out here, and now it was sitting abandoned in the English Drugs parking lot while Maris cadged rides from whoever would give them to her. Belinda wondered, vaguely, if Maris had inherited whatever money her parents had. She had a brother with a wife and a child somewhere in Ohio, but surely that wouldn’t mean she’d been cut out of the will entirely. Maybe there was nothing to inherit. Maris never seemed to have any money, and although Belinda knew that was Betsy’s fault—didn’t it figure that Betsy was not only stuck-up, but a miser?—it was still odd that Maris could have the things she had and live the way she lived and not have enough pocket money to buy magazines when she went to English Drugs. Maris had been in residence less than forty-eight hours, and Belinda was ready to kill her. If it wasn’t for that meeting the night before, Belinda would have kicked her out, first thing, as soon as she woke up.
She stopped in the living room right before she left the apartment, and stared at the television screen Maris had left glowing the night before. Maris never turned anything off. Lights, television, faucets—Belinda found herself wandering from one room to the next, shutting things. Belinda found the remote half under the couch and punched the channel changer. She passed Cartoon Network and Lifetime and the Sci Fi Channel and hunkered down with the news shows: CNN, MSNBC, C-Span. Betsy didn’t seem to be on any of them at the moment. Maybe it was the wrong time of day. Maybe they were done live, and Betsy wouldn’t be on television at all the whole month she was in Hollman. The idea gave Belinda a little rush of satisfaction. It wasn’t, Belinda thought, as if Betsy were somebody really famous. She wasn’t a movie star or a rock singer or a model or anybody else important. She was just an intellectual, the way she’d always been. The only difference now was that there were a lot of intellectuals on television for other intellectuals to watch. Belinda couldn’t imagine who else would watch them. She hated those screaming matches over fiscal policy she sometimes stumbled into looking for a movie or a rerun of Designing Women. The shows where they didn’t scream were even worse. Four people in four modern chairs on a gray platform on a black set, talking so reasonably you could barely hear them—and about what? The Bush tax cut. The Clinton legacy. The Laffer curve. Belinda truly hated Hillary Clinton, more than she hated anybody on the planet except for Betsy Toliver herself. You could see what Hillary was all about just by looking at her, another stuck-up smart girl who thought people should elect her God just because she listened to classical music. It was disgusting. It was unfeminine, too. Belinda didn’t understand why all these women didn’t come right out and say they were lesbians. What was the point of the pretense, the husband they didn’t like sleeping with, the children they kept as pets to drag out in front of the cameras when the holidays rolled around and they needed to take a family portrait? Belinda snapped the television off and put the remote where it belonged, on the coffee table. Then she went to the back of the apartment and looked in on Maris, asleep across the daybed in the back room with her clothes from last night still on, including shoes. Belinda went out again and picked up her purse from the counter next to the sink. She took out her wallet and counted the money in it—$17 in bills, $1.26 in change—and put the wallet back and zipped up the bag. There was just something wrong about the whole thing, something so fundamentally unfair. It was as if all those women—Betsy, and Hillary Clinton, and all the rest of them on the news talk shows—it was as if they were all cheating, breaking the rules, going behind the backs of everybody else and stealing things that rightfully belonged to others. The worst thing was, men never seemed to catch on. Men married them for it.