Read Online All Your Pretty Dreams by Lise McClendon - Free Book Online

polite
questions. After a long pause, sips of coffee and wine, Loreen
pursed her ruby lips. What was it like trying to corral all those
rowdy young college students, she asked.
    One of the New Ulm ladies
squealed. “Are they jumping into each others’ beds?”
    The three ladies slapped
each other on the knees, giggling. Isabel looked around the parlor.
Oh Good Lord. Their eyes shined eagerly. Did they want to live
vicariously through a field camp of twenty-year-olds? Some old
people got incensed about sex, mad anyone was having it. Maybe not
this group. The men and women tipped up their chins,
eager.
    Isabel bit her lip. What
would be best? A joke? A suggestive phrase? She looked up into the
gray eyes of the accordionist, Jon, who had materialized in the
hall, arms crossed on his chest. He fixed her in his cool stare,
amused, as if her embarrassment was high entertainment.
    “ Tell us, Isabel,” Carol
said. “Is it Peyton Place over there— or Melrose Place?”
    One of the men, presumably
a birdwatcher, asked if there were any ‘double-breasted
mattress-thumpers’ on the loose. The New Ulm ladies whooped. Isabel
had never seen so many old people go pink so fast. Next dentures
would fly. Jon continued to smirk, no help at all. His parents were
laughing with the others. The dolled-up woman in the tight skirt
looked around with a strange hunger in her eyes.
    “ Well, ah. I do have to
apply the occasional towel snap to an— to a behind,” Isabel said,
trying to keep her tone light.
    “ A bare behind?” a lady
cackled.
    “ A bare ass, you mean?—
Are they taking showers together? Is that what she means?— Don’t be
silly, Vern.— Don’t bend over in the shower, Vern!”
    More jokes, more laughter.
Isabel felt her face go red. Pesticides— oh, who the hell cares?
Bees? Forget about it. She straightened, trying to recover her
composure. “If there are no more questions then. Thanks for
inviting me.”
    Terry was loitering outside
her door when she got back to the motel. He wanted to go to the bar
again. She blew him off. He shouted something through the door. “Go
away,” she called back.
    A knock while she was
washing her face. Before she could shout again, a girl spoke
through the door: “It’s Kate. I need to talk to you.”
    Kate wasn’t one of the
problem girls. Isabel only knew her through her work habits. She
took orders gracefully, worked hard. She was from Utah where the
worker bee is famous although she made sure everyone knew she
wasn’t like all of that state’s citizens. No, she liked to have
fun. Short with plump cheeks and long highlighted hair, Kate now
looked like she’d been crying.
    “ What’s wrong?” Isabel
handed the girl her hand towel as she sat on the bed. “Has
something happened at home?”
    “ No.” She wiped her eyes
with towel and sighed. “I just had to get away from that bitch.”
She looked up and spit out the name: “ Alison. We were talking in my room
and she says she’s got dibs on Jonny, and she could get anybody—
she’s got a boyfriend back home who calls her all the time— why
does she get dibs? I hate her!”
    Isabel felt her last bit of
energy escape. Girls should have grown out of this by twenty. She
had avoided the sort of bitchy competition that girls sometimes
fell into, in both high school and college. She studied nonstop. No
cheerleading, no soccer, no bars, no drugs: nothing to take time
away from studies.
    Well, that wasn’t exactly
true. Her two best friends in high school were into Goth culture, a
matched set of red-on-black fright hair and black lipstick. At
school they reveled in being different, but they were surprisingly
normal elsewhere, reading magazines, writing in diaries, listening
to salsa and disco. Isabel’s mother thought they were heroin
addicts and gave each other tattoos. Isabel used white makeup but
balked on dyeing her blonde hair black and going totally Goth. (And
here she was, hating her black hair.) That they stayed