Read Online Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls by Rae Lawrence - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rae Lawrence
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like. Curtis had hung four panels of blackboard on one wall of his office and chalked out a calendar that was five feet high and twenty feet long. The parties and weddings he had been hired to plan were written in thick yellow chalk. Work that had been contracted to someone else was written in green chalk. Work that was still up for grabs was in pink. And in white chalk: every social event he had heard about—family barbecues, golf tournaments, cocktail parties, fund-raisers—anything that might generate a last-minute telephone call for a bartender or a few platters of canapés.
It was ten o’clock on a Thursday morning, and Anne was alone in the office, staring at the blackboard. She had been invited to only one party, the annual clambake that Stella and Arthur gave in early August. She had gotten a few invitations to fund-raisers; the envelopes had all been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Lyon Burke,” with labels spat out by a computer that hadn’t been updated in years. Anne had learned to throw these away as soon as they arrived. The days of writing a five-hundred-dollar check for a cocktail party in support of endangered species were over.
The hotel commercials had fallen through. Anne had had a terrific audition, only to find out two days later that the entire campaign was being canceled. Each time she was rejected, it was a littleharder to rebound. She was beginning to feel like an endangered species herself.
It wasn’t just the money. She had been sleeping alone for almost five months now. At first it had felt delicious: the clean sheets, the mound of pillows all her own, waking up at dawn to utter quiet, the long private cup of coffee after Jenn left for school. For the first time in her life, she read the entire newspaper every day, every section in order, every word of every section. She was fascinated by exactly the kinds of articles she used to skim over—war stories from Eastern Europe, news of economic collapse in Latin America, debates over tax initiatives in Washington. But there was no one her age to talk about any of it with. At night, after Jenn went to bed, she felt herself turning into the lonely college girl she had been at nineteen, the girl who spent all evening in the library, all day in classes. The girl who loaded up her dinner tray with the same dinner every evening (a slice of bread, three slices of cheese, a bowl of salad, and a piece of fruit) and sat at the same cafeteria table with the same three girls, night after night.
Curtis and Jerry kept telling her it was time to get out there and date, and she kept replying that she wasn’t ready yet, but of course that wasn’t the truth of it. No one had asked her out. No one even flirted with her. Everything her single friends had complained to her about was turning out to be true.
Not that she had ever really dated to begin with. In high school, everyone went around in groups. One chilly night in tenth grade she had found herself sitting next to a boy at a football game, and he had taken her hand and squeezed, and she had squeezed back, and suddenly they were a couple. He was from a fine Yankee family (bankers and lawyers and four generations at Dartmouth), and she was from a finer Yankee family (the money mostly gone, but the breeding flawless all the way back to the 1600s), and everyone just assumed they would marry and settle down in one of the bigclapboard houses in town. Willie liked to kiss a lot, and sometimes after a beer or two he would slide his hand up under her sweater.
He never formally proposed. They came home for Thanksgiving weekend freshman year (Willie from Dartmouth, Anne from Radcliffe), and on Saturday night, after an evening at the movies with friends, he drove her down a wide side street and pointed to a large Victorian house with a wraparound porch. It belonged to one of his uncles, a man whose children had all settled elsewhere, in Boston and Providence and beyond.
“I want us to live in a house like that,”
It was ten o’clock on a Thursday morning, and Anne was alone in the office, staring at the blackboard. She had been invited to only one party, the annual clambake that Stella and Arthur gave in early August. She had gotten a few invitations to fund-raisers; the envelopes had all been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Lyon Burke,” with labels spat out by a computer that hadn’t been updated in years. Anne had learned to throw these away as soon as they arrived. The days of writing a five-hundred-dollar check for a cocktail party in support of endangered species were over.
The hotel commercials had fallen through. Anne had had a terrific audition, only to find out two days later that the entire campaign was being canceled. Each time she was rejected, it was a littleharder to rebound. She was beginning to feel like an endangered species herself.
It wasn’t just the money. She had been sleeping alone for almost five months now. At first it had felt delicious: the clean sheets, the mound of pillows all her own, waking up at dawn to utter quiet, the long private cup of coffee after Jenn left for school. For the first time in her life, she read the entire newspaper every day, every section in order, every word of every section. She was fascinated by exactly the kinds of articles she used to skim over—war stories from Eastern Europe, news of economic collapse in Latin America, debates over tax initiatives in Washington. But there was no one her age to talk about any of it with. At night, after Jenn went to bed, she felt herself turning into the lonely college girl she had been at nineteen, the girl who spent all evening in the library, all day in classes. The girl who loaded up her dinner tray with the same dinner every evening (a slice of bread, three slices of cheese, a bowl of salad, and a piece of fruit) and sat at the same cafeteria table with the same three girls, night after night.
Curtis and Jerry kept telling her it was time to get out there and date, and she kept replying that she wasn’t ready yet, but of course that wasn’t the truth of it. No one had asked her out. No one even flirted with her. Everything her single friends had complained to her about was turning out to be true.
Not that she had ever really dated to begin with. In high school, everyone went around in groups. One chilly night in tenth grade she had found herself sitting next to a boy at a football game, and he had taken her hand and squeezed, and she had squeezed back, and suddenly they were a couple. He was from a fine Yankee family (bankers and lawyers and four generations at Dartmouth), and she was from a finer Yankee family (the money mostly gone, but the breeding flawless all the way back to the 1600s), and everyone just assumed they would marry and settle down in one of the bigclapboard houses in town. Willie liked to kiss a lot, and sometimes after a beer or two he would slide his hand up under her sweater.
He never formally proposed. They came home for Thanksgiving weekend freshman year (Willie from Dartmouth, Anne from Radcliffe), and on Saturday night, after an evening at the movies with friends, he drove her down a wide side street and pointed to a large Victorian house with a wraparound porch. It belonged to one of his uncles, a man whose children had all settled elsewhere, in Boston and Providence and beyond.
“I want us to live in a house like that,”
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