Read Online Getting In: A Novel by Karen Stabiner - Free Book Online Page B

strategic holes, and machine-aged denim, and replaced them with four pairs of pristine, perfectly pressed jeans and two pairs of Dickies khakis that cost the same amount, total, as a single pair of her discards. Private school girls, who saw nothing wrong with calling their tank tops “wifebeaters,” wore them with push-up bras in a contrasting color, but public schoolers called them “tanks” and piled on two or three at a time over bras with transparent plastic straps, so Chloe had to buy some extras, along with the proper underwear. She needed a new cell phone; she switched to a different styling gel. Whenever Chloe felt like stabbing her parents in the heart she speculated, loudly, about how much better she might have done in the two high school years that really counted, if she had not had to navigate the educational equivalent of a move from France to Sri Lanka.
    “Salad night, honey.” Deena’s voice from the kitchen interrupted her daughter’s internal rant. “Ten minutes.”
    Chloe had made it a policy, since the breakup, never to respond to either of her parents the first time they called. Deena waited for a reply, got none, and blamed Dave for the silence, as she blamed him for everything. Dave, the only man in the known universe who managed not to get rich in advertising, the man who created what was widely considered one of the most offensive television campaigns ever made for an intestinal gas product. The executives who had approved the campaign pretended that they had not been involved and transferred Dave to media sales because they felt too guilty to fire him. Now he told people that he sold time and space for a living, a sure indication of how funny he was not, in case anyone needed proof beyond what Deena referred to as the singing fart commercials.
    When Deena had first confessed her dismay at his downward mobility, he said she was being inflexible and lacked compassion. As his income decreased and her spending did not, he complained further that she was grasping, selfish, and unsupportive; he accused her of everything short of having given him the original inspiration for the gas commercial. Deena replied that Dave had failed to live up to his obligations as a husband and a father. Dave, having recently found sympathy incarnate in a twenty-nine-year-old yoga instructor who frequented a deli he liked, agreed with his wife. He had not done a good job. He was resigning his post in the hope that he would do better as an ex-husband, another line he found amusing.
    If only it were that simple, if only leaving really meant gone. Deena knew all too well that people did not disappear just because they were no longer around. Her mother, Nana Ree, was getting the biggest laugh of anybody about Dave, and she had been dead for four years, felled by an aneurysm in the porte-cochere at Saks and buried in the navy blue two-piece St. John knit that she had purchased mere moments before. She was sitting in a fitting room in heaven shaking her head and muttering, “I told you so,” because she had recognized in her son-in-law the same fool’s belief in change, not effort, that had drawn Deena’s father away from his wife and daughter for life with a North Beach bartender.
    Deena was getting better at not thinking about any of this during the day, but at dusk, with Chloe sequestered in her bedroom and only fresh produce to keep her company, the kitchen filled with unwanted ghosts.
    “Stop it,” she said, sawing at a hapless tomato with more force than its pliant skin required. “Everybody out of my kitchen,” she muttered as she proceeded to dice the memory of her mother and her ex-husband into an exceedingly fine chop. She mutilated tomatoes, olives, avocados, and a takeout rosemary chicken breast,dumped them into a big bowl already half-full of shredded lettuce, and padded down the hallway to knock on Chloe’s door.
    “You can come out now,” she said. “There’s nothing left to get ready, so it’s