Dyan Sheldon - Away for the Weekend

“What’s in there?” Delila points at the bags Beth has put on the desk.

“Oh, you know…” The smell of mesquite is making her feel slightly nauseous; the sight of the chip crumbs makes her think of her mother, who disapproves of eating on beds because it attracts insects. “My toiletries and vitamins and supplements and—”

“Vitamins and supplements?” Delila has a laugh like a bear hug. “What are you supplementing? The whole west coast?”

Beth is looking at Delila’s smile, but she is hearing her mother at the airport. Now you’re sure you have everything, honey? You’re sure you haven’t forgotten anything? Toothbrush? Floss? Spare glasses? Inhaler? Painkillers? Antidepressants? Beta blockers? Eyewash? Earplugs? Sleeping pills? Water? The cream for your eczema? Aunt Joyce isn’t that far away, you know. So if you need anything…

“Well, not just vitamins…” Beth opens the largest of the bags and starts removing jars and bottles. “My mom, you know, she kind of worries a little.”

“A little ?” Delila sits up, her eyes on the display Beth is setting up. It looks like it belongs in the window of a drugstore. “You call that a little? What do you call a blizzard? A snow flurry? Man, about the only thing your Mom’s left out is the inflatable raft in case there’s a flood.”

Beth straightens out the last bottle, making sure it’s perfectly aligned with the others. “My mother doesn’t think it’ll rain that much. She’s more worried about earthquakes.”

“My grandma’s just the opposite,” says Delila. “She says she’s had so much trouble in her life, she’s stopped worrying altogether. What’s the point? Bad luck’s like cockroaches, no matter what you do it always comes back. And anyway, she figures we all have angels looking out for us.”

“Angels?” Beth has enough to worry about in the observable world without involving other dimensions.

“Yeah, you know, hanging around to keep an eye on things.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that they’re doing a very good job,” says Beth.

“You don’t know…” Delila shrugs. “Maybe things would be even worse if they weren’t around. Think about that.”

“Well, my mom definitely doesn’t believe in angels.” If Lillian Beeby had an angel, she’d be fretting about it getting its wings caught in something. “My mom says you can never be too careful.” When her mother dies, those words are going to be etched on her gravestone:

“Man, it staggers me that you finalled with a short story,” laughs Delila. “I would’ve bet anything you specialized in Prophecies of Doom!”

Gabriela enjoyed the flight to Los Angeles so much that you might think she and Beth had travelled on different planes. And they might as well have. Gabriela was the last passenger to board, and by that time Beth already had her eyes closed and her head on her knees. While Beth went over emergency procedures in her mind and tried not to be sick, Gabriela chatted to the people sitting on either side of her, telling them all about the contest and the weekend, and receiving their wishes of good luck in return. Forty minutes before they landed, while Beth was just beginning to believe that the plane wasn’t going to crash and resumed worrying about the weekend itself, Gabriela took over one of the toilets to repair any damage done to her clothes and make-up by the journey, only coming out when the stewardess banged on the door to tell her to return to her seat for landing.

And now here she is at one of the most glamorous hotels in a city of glamour. And so do dreams come true.

“Can you believe it, Gab? Why is this happening to me now ?” Lucinda drops a handful of accessories back on her bed and turns her attention to the hillock of clothes on the chair beside it. Lucinda Abbot is Gabriela’s room-mate for the weekend. Unlike Gabriela, who is showing the composure of the heir to the throne at the christening of an ocean liner, Lucinda’s nerves are jangling like a box of bells on the back of a pickup going over rough terrain. Some day, Lucinda hopes to be as at home in the world of exclusive hotels and luxury cars as a moose in the forest, but that day is far in the future. At the moment, all she wants is to look as if she comes from somewhere stratospherically sophisticated and not a small town in Maine. “I know I packed it. I would never bring that green skirt and not bring the belt that goes with it, too. I don’t want to look like a total hick!”

Gabriela, who is kneeling in front of the tiny table between the beds like a supplicant at an altar, keeps her eyes on her reflection. “This room’s way too small.” This is less a statement of fact than a complaint. After all, even Paradise had its serpents. “I know The Xanadu’s supposed to be the last word in cool and everything. But, really, there are cells bigger than this room.”

“Oh, but this is still a really awesome place,” says Lucinda. “I mean, celebrities and billionaires and people like that stay here all the time – I heard Galatea—”

“Galatea?” Gabriela makes a discouraging sound. “You can bet your last pair of boots that if Galatea stayed here, she wasn’t in this room.” Gabriela, who is adding individual lashes to her own with the precision of a surgeon changing the valve of a heart, drops another into place. “She’d be in a big suite, Lucinda. I mean, look at this place! Galatea wouldn’t even be able to get her hand luggage in here. You can hardly move.”

This is a slight exaggeration. You can move, but not easily or far. For although this room is identical to the one Beth and Delila are in – but on a different floor and in a different colour – it is so crowded that getting from the balcony to the bathroom is something of a trek, even for girls who follow a regular programme of exercise and have been on diets since the age of twelve. The information that Gabriela has left out, however, is that all the things that crowd the room belong to her and Lucinda. Each girl brought with her one very large suitcase crammed with clothes, a medium-sized suitcase packed with indispensable appliances, a smaller suitcase full of shoes, and a metal make-up case. Gabriela, as we know, has put her mirror where the lamp and hotel phone used to be. Lucinda’s is on top of the desk. Also on the desk are a box of heated curlers, curling irons, hair straighteners, three hairdryers (one bonnet and two hand), two manicure-pedicure kits, two facial saunas and the two cosmetic cases. The hanging toiletry bags are hanging – one on the back of the bathroom door and one on the closet door; some of their clothes are stuffed in the closet and the rest are piled on the chairs and the floor for lack of anywhere else for them to be.

“You can’t find anything either. At least I can’t.” Lucinda sighs. “What am I going to do? I had it all planned to wear the green tonight. This throws everything off.” She stares at the green skirt appraisingly. “Maybe it’s not that bad. Do you think I should risk wearing it without the belt?”

“Are you nuts?” Gabriela watches herself blink in the mirrors. “Weren’t you in the limo with me?” All six contestants were picked up from the airport by a Cadillac Escalade driven by a character actor named Ru Morgenstern. By the end of the drive it was clear that, as well as having impeccable taste and knowing more about fashion than Einstein knew about physics, the other girls are competitive in a scorched-earth-policy kind of way. “Those girls are going to look like they just stepped off the runway in Milan tonight. First impressions, Lucinda. We never met Taffeta Mackenzie before. We can’t be flawed, or those girls’ll make us look like major losers.”