Tiny Little Thing

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Book: Tiny Little Thing by Beatriz Williams Read Free Book Online
Authors: Beatriz Williams
Tags: Fiction, General, Romance, Historical
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to lock us in our preordained places and watch, breathless, to see if we can break loose.
    To the Hardcastles, Pepper is a rare dish, never before seen at the table.
This is my younger sister Pepper,
I say, by way of introduction, presenting her with garnish.
    Why do they call you Pepper?
the men usually ask.
    She usually winks.
Because I’m that bad.
    As a rule, the women don’t see the satirical curve of her lip when she says this, and they harden up instantly into those frozen polite expressions you get when a wind-and-surf clan of females like the Hardcastles—no makeup, horsey leather faces—encounters the cultivated variety.
    I watch Kitty’s mother, Constance, tighten her mouth at Pepper, and I realize in that instant that I have more in common with my sisters than I realize, and that I’ve really never liked Constance at all. Constance, who threw an aggressive baseball into my unsuspecting stomach that first summer, soon after I knew for certain I was pregnant, and who apologized too profusely afterward.
I should have known better,
she said, shaking her head, and what could I do but accept her apology and tell her it was nothing? The first miscarriage began soon after, but of course I couldn’t blame Constance for that. It was an accident, after all.
    I should have kept my eyes on the ball.
    The Hardcastle
men,
on the other hand. Well, well.
They
interpret Pepper exactly the way they want to, don’t they? Men always do. Pepper’s happy with this arrangement. She’s never had much use for women. Even when we were kids, her friends were mostly boys. Our sister Vivian’s the only glittering double X wiggling her shapely fins in the sea of Y chromosomes surrounding Pepper, and maybe that’s only because they’re sisters, united in their disdain for me, the uptight and obedient Tiny, no fun at all.
    “Honestly, Constance—it’s Constance, isn’t it? There’s so many of you, and you all look alike!”
    Constance’s mouth screws into an anus.
    I have to bite my lip to hold back a hysterical giggle, because Pepper’s exactly right. They do look alike, the Hardcastles. There’s just this look, a distinctive shape of the eyes, the wild thickness of the hair, the relation of nose to mouth to cheekbones. (Caspian, perhaps, is the only exception—in him, the Harrison genes seem to have triumphed.) On the men of the family, the Look is dashing and gloriously photogenic, redolent of football games and windswept sailboats, apple pie and loving your mother. On the women, the proportion is wrong somehow. Coarse, a bit goggle-eyed.
Handsome
is the best you can say of any of them.
    Or is that ungenerous of me?
    Pepper doesn’t care whether she’s ungenerous or not. She doesn’t care that Constance’s poor mouth is about to grow a hemorrhoid.
    What would that be like, not to give a damn what the other women think?
    I observe Pepper, whose head is tossed back in laughter, exposing the peachy column of her throat to the dying afternoon light. (We’re all out on the terrace now; the house is really too hot.) Pepper, in the very throes of not giving a damn.
    It would be fucking wonderful, wouldn’t it?
    Yes. It
would
be wonderful. For a short hour or two, a long time ago, it
was
wonderful. It was freedom.
    I swallow the last of my drink and head into the kitchen to give the orders for dinner.
    •   •   •
    D inner, I’ll have you know, is a smashing success, right up until the point when the fight breaks out.
    Emboldened by two expert martinis—I usually drink only one—and smothered by the persistent stuffiness indoors, I order the dining room table to be brought out through the French doors onto the terrace, overlooking the ocean. The last-minute change rattles Mrs. Crane, but with a few soothing words and the assistance of the doughty Hardcastle men in dragging around the furniture, the table and chairs are soon set, every fork and wineglass in place, candles lit, bowls of priceless purple-blue

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