Рита Браун - Hiss Of Death

Each committee meeting was held at a different member’s house. This spread out the cost of entertaining, but it also drew the group closer. When you see someone’s furniture, pictures, the colors they chose for fabrics and the walls, you gain insight into them. Granted, most of these people had known one another from grade school. Others, like Alicia, had lived in the area off and on for thirty years. Nita Vitebsk was a sixteen-year resident. Toni Enright was originally from Harrisonburg, so she fit right in. Paula Benton, there for two years, was such a sunny personality that the ladies in the group had a hard time remembering when she had first come into their lives. Somehow it seemed she was always there.

Alicia’s subdued and elegant home reflected her tastes and her income. Any woman who has a Munnings on the wall can’t be poor. Sir Alfred Munnings’s canvases, the larger ones, routinely sold for two million and some for more. However, you never felt overpowered or smothered by Alicia’s money. Her home warmly enveloped you.

Susan Tucker’s home contained a mixture of Georgian furniture and some startlingly modern pieces, and Nita Vitebsk’s home was Art Deco. This just about sent the old Virginians into a tizzy. They hadn’t reached the 1930s in design terms just yet. As for Harry’s Virginia farmhouse, it boasted a huge library with many old, valuable books from preceding generations. She’d read most of them. Their monetary worth was a mystery to her. It never occurred to her to hire Jerry Showalter, a well-known antiquarian book dealer, to create an inventory of value. Sandy McAdams, owner of Daedalus Bookshop, encouraged her, too, but his sage advice went in one of Harry’s ears and out the other. The furniture—again inherited, some pieces quite good, especially a Sheraton sideboard—did not scream “new money.” They whispered “slender means but loving care.” The freshly painted walls pointed to some aesthetic consideration, but that was her husband’s. Pharamond Haristeen, D.V.M., had reached the point where he couldn’t stand it anymore, so he had painted the entire house himself.

When you walked into Harry’s barn, you saw perfection. When you trod into the equipment sheds, you saw old equipment fanatically maintained, everything in order, down to the jars of screws, marked with sizes and head types. When you cast your eyes over the vines, the sunflowers, the corn rows, the acres filled with hay just now popping up in force, you saw what mattered to this woman. She never stinted on her horses, who gleamed, or her land.

Harry good-naturedly endured the jibes of her friends. She even submitted to Susan and BoomBoom once dragging her to Nordstrom in Short Pump, outside of Richmond, where they forced her to try on clothes. She had resisted the prices, so they each bought her one outfit, which shamed her into buying the rest. Her husband proved far more grateful for this fashion intervention than Harry.

When the 5K group met at her house, it was invariably clean and tidy. She served fried chicken, the ubiquitous ham biscuits, corn bread, and a wonderful salad with mandarin oranges. She would spend money on food for her friends and for her animals, as well as the wild animals she had befriended. Harry just had a hard time spending it on other things. The credit card debt the average American carried, about fifteen thousand dollars’ worth, sometimes made her wonder if she was as American as she should be.

As they caught up on gossip, politics, taxes, and the effects the severe winter had had on Virginia, each woman was, in her own way, happy to be part of the group. Their work gave them a purpose outside of their own lives, and that seems to make people content.

As they sat at the graceful table—Alicia could never bear to eat with her plate on her knees; she always set the table—they discussed the school budget cuts. They passed on to postal service cuts. Harry was once the postmistress of Crozet. Then on to other things, and Alicia pulled from her blouse a little newspaper clipping.

She rapped her crystal glass with her knife. “Ladies.”

“Is this a pronouncement from Mount Olympus?” BoomBoom, the person Alicia loved most in the world, rolled her eyes.

“No. This is a clipping from The London Sunday Times . I’m not going to read all of it, but you’ve got to hear it. Ready? The Times has converted Australian dollars into pounds, so when I get to that part, bear with me. I’m not converting it back.”

“Can’t wait.” Harry smiled as the others agreed.

“In Adelaide, Australia, a restaurant, Thai Spice, was ordered to pay compensation to a blind man. Ian Jolly, the blind man, wanted to take his dog into the restaurant. Obvious enough. But the waiter, who we shall assume does not speak English as a first language, turned him away because he thought the dog was gay.”

“What!” Nita exploded with laughter.

“Are you making this up?” Paula, too, was disbelieving.

“I couldn’t possibly make this up. No one could. I’ll pass this around. But let me finish. Okay. Thai Spice must pay nine hundred pounds’ compensation. The waiter thought the dog—whose name is Nudge, by the way—was gay. He misunderstood Mr. Jolly, who said this was a ‘guide dog.’ Thought the blind man said ‘gay dog.’ It gets worse. At what must have been a very unusual hearing before the judge, the staff at Thai Spice reported that they thought Nudge was a pet dog who had been de-sexed to become gay!”

How they laughed. That absurd story brought up others. They laughed until they cried.

Later, each woman would look back and recall that at that meeting they were all together and so very happy.

S lut,” Thadia Martin spit.

“Look who’s talking,” Paula Benton fired right back. “And just what the hell are you doing in my driveway at six at night?”

“I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’m sick and tired of your lying.”

“Thadia, you’re back on drugs.”

“How convenient. My past. I haven’t taken a drink or a toot in eleven years. I’m as sober as a judge, and you know it.” Thadia pulled the soft cashmere scarf tighter around her neck, exposing a graceful scarab bracelet on her left wrist. She jammed her hands back into her pockets as the air turned sharp, cold, this Thursday early evening.

“So what are you talking about?” Paula crossed her arms over her chest.

“Cory Schaeffer.”

“What has Dr. Schaeffer got to do with this? I assist him in the operating room.”

“You’re in love with him.”

Paula involuntarily smacked her forehead with her gloved hand. “You’re certifiable. Get out of my driveway.”

“You’ve been sleeping with him for the last year, I know it. I see how you look at him. How you make unnecessary trips to his office, and if he isn’t there you leave disappointed.”

Realizing that insulting Thadia wasn’t going to drive her away, Paula settled down as best she could under the volatile circumstances. “One, I am not sleeping with Cory Schaeffer. Two, he’s not my type. Three, he’s not my type emotionally. He asks for me whenever he operates, so, naturally, I see him in his office as well as in the operating room. If you’re this crazed about Cory, it must be you that’s in love with him. Not me.”

Good-looking Cory had boxed as an undergraduate at Iowa State. He continued as an amateur throughout medical school, still doing bag work, rope jumping, and speed bag work at Heavy Metal Gym. He participated in boxing matches if he felt he was in good condition. Certainly, he looked good to Thadia, or to any woman who admired a well-muscled man.

Thadia’s baby face mottled. “There’s more to it. You’re a liar.”