One more, then she would leave. One more, then the pack would be empty. One more, then the pinch of her headache would ease. Or get worse. Nicotine and its surprises.
Louise should be in bed, heavy rollers soothing her fucked up hair. Thick cream cooling her fucked up face. A toothbrush, or her husband’s dick, between her lips instead of a cigarette.
She’d stolen the cigarette. Lighter, too. Not because she’d liked it, because she hadn’t liked the owner. She remembered running out of the bar and back to Marge, coy as a fish when the other woman looked at her sideways. She leaned in and lit Marge’s next cigarette with her new lighter. Marge shrieked, the intended effect. They bowled over laughing. The metal mermaid and her metal tits were now theirs.
Marge looked good when she smoked. Better when she laughed.
God, Louise had done so much shit just to make her laugh. She coughed and thought about jumping. Maybe if this was a building and not a boardwalk.
She lit her last cigarette. It was so long past midnight.
Was Marge laughing now?
Margaret barbequed a rack of bleeding ribs and Lousie stared. Three months ago, the summer of 1951. The day the moon met the sun and told the earth to fuck off.
Margaret had been late for her own garden party, a social faux pas Lousie could only imagine in sweaty nightmares. Louise knocked again on their front door. Her husband, Jeffrey, hunched over and spied through the window. Louise pursed her red lips and cleared her throat. He didn’t move.
She was ready to give up—a cherry pie bought and stuck in a baking dish for nothing—when a flip top veered down the road like a bullet running late. With a screech, its tires skimmed over the sidewalk. Louise jumped back as it jerked to a stop in the driveway.
Her eyes widened—it was a woman who stumbled out of the driver’s seat. Her new neighbor, Margaret, stripped off black driving gloves and dropped them on the seat. Her hair was a mess.
Margaret nodded at Louise. “These machines, huh?”
She didn’t nod back. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You don’t drive?” Margaret stepped easily around both the machine and Louise’s husband. “Why not?”
“You just gave an adequate display as to why not,” Louise said, her cheeks flushing. Just because Margaret seemed to wipe her ass with basic manners didn’t mean Louise could take a shit.
She opened her mouth to apologize, but Margaret was…well. That was the first time she made Margaret laugh.
When they went in for drinks, Jeffrey roped his arm around her waist.Louise tried to be cold all afternoon. She really had. But Margaret poured wine into teacups and barbequed lamb and licked sauce off her thumb and ate half of Louise’s pie and didn’t let Jeffrey, or runny globs of cherry, interrupt her story.
Tony seemed nice.
“Coffin nail?” Margaret asked as they lounged on the back porch and watched the sun dip. She’d held out a Luckies’ cigarette, a ring of red lipstick circling the filter. They were alone. The men had trotted inside, something about hunting trophies and prize rifles and dead animals.
“Thank you.” She meant to add but no.
She coughed immediately.
The next week, Margaret invited Louise shopping. She’d just failed to mention that Louise would be the one driving.
Not arguing nor bribing nor threatening did anything to budge Margaret from the passenger seat. The only instruction she gave was,
“Goose it.”
When Louise and Jeffrey had Margaret and Tony over for wine and charades, the charades improved as the wine diminished. Or, perhaps, they got worse. But they were funnier.
Before Louise could scream to protect her furniture, Tony climbed on the couch. His dirty Chelsea Martin boots sunk in the cushions as he wobbled. He plugged his nose and jumped, a bizarre attempt to
play act scuba-diving.
Jeffrey poured another glass of wine, refusing to take part as anything other than an audience member.
After Louise drew her card, she ran upstairs to her jewelry box and stuffed as many rings on her left ring finger as she could.
“A ring thief ?” Tony asked, his voice muffled from a large bite of not-so-homemade strawberry tart.
Louise shook her head.
The living room was quiet. Jeffrey dug out yesterday’s paper and Tony chewed and Margaret eyed her up and down and Louise became more aware of her own heartbeat.
Margaret’s brown hair flipped at the ends—she’d clearly followed Louise’s sage advice—and it brushed the tops of her shoulders. Bare shoulders. A strapless lemon sundress with white furls clung to her body. Louise had never, would never, wear something that revealed so much skin. It should have looked tawdry, crass. But, God, she just looked beautiful.
“You’re Elizabeth Taylor!” Margaret cried, clutching the stem of her glass as the red wine sloshed forward.
Louise’s eyes snapped back to Maragret’s. “Yes!” she said, dropping against the cushions next to her. Her knee skimmed the other woman’s thigh as they laughed.
Margaret took Louise’s hand, skimming over her many rings. “Very clever, Lou.”
Louise had drunk too many sherries. She felt it in her cheeks and in her belly. In the cold hand Margaret was warming. All she could say back was, “Marge.” But it sure had attitude.
At the end of the night, Marge stood in front of the group and just thrusted her hips over and over. No one got that she was James Dean.
“Why do you only smoke Luckies?” Louise asked Marge, as Jeffrey and Tony argued about how many points Marge’s last strike had got her. Louise knew Jeffrey was wrong.
“The clean taste. A whiff of clove. A hint of bitter cinnamon. Plus, they’re advertised for expecting mothers; they must be the healthiest,” Marge said and inhaled a breath of smoke.
“Really?”
She shook her head. “It’s because of her.” She tapped on the woman drawn on the pack. “The Luckies’ Lady. The way she’s smiling, I don’t know. It’s like she knows a secret I don’t. Maybe one day she’ll tell me. Also,” Marge uncrossed her legs and stabled her foot on the edge of Louise’s chair, retying her bowling shoe, “I can never resist her legs in that circle dress.”
On the way home from bowling, Louise asked Jeffrey if they could stop at the corner store. Maybe the woman would’ve told her the secret if Jeffrey hadn’t said no.
The next Saturday night, they went to a bar and Marge dared Louise to steal a lighter.
At the end of August, Louise stood in front of her full-length bedroom mirror and ran her hands down the cloth of her new circle dress. A blue rose wrapped around her left hip and the green, pointed leaf reached over her stomach. Another bloomed over the right side of her chest, disappearing at the strapless front.
She tugged the material higher over her breasts, but it wouldn’t budge.
No one in the neighborhood could rightly gossip about it being inappropriate. They were having a hot August, after all. Hot as hell.
She turned in front of the mirror, twisting to see how the material pulled in the back, accentuating her hips. Hot as hell.
She’d gone shopping with her mother-in-law last weekend and stopped when she’d seen it displayed. She’d smiled then, thinking of how it screamed Marge. That’s why she’d bought it: a present for a friend.
“Come on! The movie starts in thirty,” Jeffrey called, his voice breaking her reverie.
Oh, Christ. She was a housewife. Her hips didn’t need accentuating.
Her legs didn’t need the flattering sweep from the circle skirt. Her cleavage certainly didn’t need any type of display.
She reached behind her back and popped the top button.Her hand froze at the second button. There was another voice downstairs, “No, I’m driving!”
She wanted Marge to laugh, to tease her. That was why she put it on in the first place.
But, as Louise looked at herself in the mirror, she didn’t think Marge would do any of that. She had a feeling, a feeling that spilled down her throat and into her stomach—if she walked downstairs wearing this—
it would shut Marge up entirely.
She redid the button, grabbed her clutch, and walked downstairs.
Louise and Jeffrey sat in the flip top’s open trunk, their legs hangingover the mouth as Rock Hudson and Doris Day quipped at each other on the drive-in’s gigantic screen. Marge and Tony sat on the grass in front of them, a few feet apart.
Jeffrey leaned in, put his hand on her thigh, and whispered a crude joke about the couple in the car next to them playing backseat bingo. He rumpled her dress when he tried to squeeze her leg. Louise scooted away and busied herself with a handful of buttery popcorn.
Late into the evening, when Marge relaxed her back against the car, her head rested gently on Louise’s knee. She looked at Jeffrey, finally absorbed in the movie.
Under the bright glow of Rock and Doris, Louise’s fingers fell on the curve of Marge’s neck.
Marge loved to make a fuss over Louise’s freezing fingers. She’d once cupped them and huffed hot breath into their hands. A resuscitation, Marge had called it. A resurrection, Louise had thought.
But even so, Louise couldn’t quite bring herself to be surprised when Marge pushed further into the touch. She didn’t move until the credits rolled and Louise turned to pick up her evening wrap. Jeffrey was looking at her. Not frowning, not smiling.
“What?”
He didn’t answer.
Marge drove everyone home. Somehow, they all lived.
Louise had been right earlier. Marge had been stunned by the dress. Shocked.
When they got back to the neighborhood, Tony suggested a nightcap. Jefferey didn’t answer again. This time, he was frowning. Louise looked back to Tony and said, “That sounds perfect.”
When she went to the kitchen to refresh her drink, she heard the familiar click of stiletto pumps behind her.
Marge carefully shut the kitchen door and said, “I didn’t know you owned that much skin, Lou.”
Louise smiled.
“What will the neighbors think?” Marge threw a hand over her face.
“Well, you’re a neighbor.” Louise’s heart quickened as she stood straighter. “What do you think?”
It was then, right then, that Marge kissed her.Not very much later that night, when Jeffrey broke Louise’s heart, he did so by rolling off her, catching his breath, and telling her she would never again see Margaret.
It had been a week since Louise quit smoking and her teeth were whiter, which was nice. But her cold fingers and heart both twitched and itched. Every thought was stuck on it. How it made her heart pound. How it filled more than just her lungs. How soft it was against her fingers, her lips.
Her head was so full of how empty her body was.
She walked three miles to the corner store and smoked an entire pack. The Luckies’ Lady still didn’t spill her guts, the bitch. She just stared at her until Louise cried.
The next day, she put on her sexy dress.
“Marge isn’t home,” Tony said when he answered the door.
She walked in the house and up the stairs. On Marge’s vanity, she found a pack of Luckies.
She took The Lady hostage and left a note in her place: Boardwalk. Midnight.
“Can I steal one?”
“That was my last cigarette.”
They left the boardwalk and bought two packs of Luckies at the corner store. That night, in the back seat of Marge’s blue flip top, the Luckies’ Lady did not tell them her secret, but they did tell her theirs.
Many times over.