A Wife of Noble Character (8 page)

“I don't think it has to be one or the other,” Vivienne said, reluctant to disagree with Sissy.

“Girls, listen!” Sissy raised her voice to grab the room. She was climbing on her horse. “A career girl would
be
a career girl by now. Viv, if
that
was up your alley, you wouldn't be here. And we're so glad you're here.” She lifted her glass.

“But I do have a career—I've worked at the store for three years.”

“I mean a career with a capital C,” Sissy said. “A woman who doesn't mind earning more than her husband.”

“I don't think I would mind that,” Vivienne said.

Sissy hooted. “But he would! A man should be a provider.”

“Has Bucky mentioned marriage?” Karlie asked, examining her fingernails.

Vivienne lacked the courage to say what she was thinking deep down—that, really, she didn't know if she wanted to be Bucky Lawland's wife at all. She would never concede this to Karlie. “No, but I'm sure he will.”

A silence followed. Sissy went with her helper to the bar room to retrieve glasses. Waverly just gazed down into her wine. Karlie lost interest in her nails and took up fingering the petals of a white lily, one stem in a dazzling bouquet of more lilies, yellow roses, and undulant ballet-slipper-pink peonies. Vivienne, feeling the wine, resented their secret judgments. If Bucky had been there, she would have grabbed him and kissed him, to remonstrate with her friends, even Waverly, who wouldn't lift her eyes, who pitied instead of judged.

“What is it, Waverly?” Vivienne said.

She hopped off her barstool. “It's just that I wish—I want it to be easier for you. I don't want you to make things more complicated for yourself when your situation is already complicated.” She fished through a kitchen drawer, located an elegant box of long wooden matches, and began lighting the candles scattered throughout the kitchen and great room.

“What does that mean?” Vivienne asked. Waverly regularly spoke in this opaque female nomenclature. The pains Vivienne bore to decipher it often made her feel an inferior member of their gender.

“She means be normal,” Karlie said, tearing the petal from the stem.

Waverly was more measured. “I mean that I think Bucky wants someone consistent. I'm not saying that you aren't consistent, but I think that Bucky is very consistent, so he relates to that.”

“Has he said anything to y'all?” Vivienne said. “Now you're confusing me.”

Both girls shook their heads. Waverly struck a match. “We just know you,” she said.

Sissy returned with champagne flutes dangling from between her fingers. The other woman followed, lugging a case of champagne. They all watched as the woman heaved the case onto the counter.

“In case we decide to open some bubbly!” Sissy announced.

“Because you'll always find an excuse to open some bubbly,” came a steady male voice, and with it low footsteps and then Bracken Blank the man, freshly shaved, a starched white collared shirt tucked into his jeans.

“Hi, Daddy,” Waverly said.

He hugged his daughter, kissed his wife on the cheek, and then stood tall and sturdy in his black crocskin boots, regarding the women in his kitchen.

Karlie became effusive. “Hi, Bracken,” she said.

“Hey, sugar,” he said. “You and Timmy ready for next season? I got that box in Austin. See if I can't watch those Longhorns lose another season. I'm too old for tailgatin' and I want y'all up there enjoying the view too.”

“You know it,” Karlie said.

Vivienne waved, but Bracken held his hand open and aloft. He wanted a high five. “Come on, up high!” he said.

Reluctantly she complied, hating him for it. She'd known Waverly's parents most of her life, but navigating adulthood with Bracken wasn't easy. To Vivienne, he was neither a Mr. nor a man she'd name casually. He was someone else's father, and a father was a totem, an authority. Gradually, however, with time and age, the shadows surrounding his persona were receding, and she saw him now in many shades, none of which were definable. She had no name for Bracken, only a certain formal, polished smile. It was Karlie who was carefree with him.

“Brisket smells good,” he said, his hand on the small of Sissy's back.

“Don't look at me,” Sissy said. “I haven't lifted a finger today.”

“Oh, that's right, I smoked the brisket,” he said, and gave her a sly wink.

Karlie dropped her lily petal, torn into enough bitty pieces to make a gentle snow upon the countertop. “You know,” she said, approaching Vivienne with lowered eyes. Waverly picked up on the frequency and scooted near.

“What?” Vivienne said.

Karlie half-smiled, tucked a few dangling strands of hair behind Vivienne's ears. She loved to play with hair. If she'd been born into another life, Karlie would have been a hairdresser. She had a tender touch with the scalp, and she was an expert sheller of unwanted advice. “Timmy hasn't said anything to me about Bucky getting engaged”—here she made eyes with Waverly, ticking her head to one side—“but he did tell me Bucky thinks you're the most beautiful woman he's ever been with.”

“I wish Bucky told me that.”

“He's probably shy about it,” Waverly said. “That's so cute that he told Timmy.”

“I don't think he knows how you feel about him,” Karlie said. “Maybe he's nervous.”

Bucky came to Vivienne's mind in fragments—facial expressions, gestures, conversations—which she sifted to find a moment of vulnerability. One night caught: They'd had an actual date—not the usual plan-via-text-to-meet-at-a-bar evening but dinner at Brennan's, followed by an earsplitting action flick. Vivienne could barely stand it; Bucky had loved it. Before starting the engine to leave the theater, Bucky had held her face in the dark truck and kissed her. It was the first and only time she'd really felt joined with him.

“Clay and Timmy weren't nervous,” Vivienne said, over the laughter of Bracken and Sissy across the kitchen.

“Clay was nervous,” Waverly said. “He had to get drunk to tell me he loved me.”

Karlie held her wineglass ambivalently aside as she spoke, as if any minute she might toss it over her shoulder. “Timmy has been in love with me since like ninth grade. He didn't need to tell me.”

“But guys always say what they mean when they're drunk,” Waverly said.

“Or what they only feel because they're drunk,” Vivienne said.

“Not about relationship stuff, though,” Karlie said firmly. “If a guy confesses when he's drunk, he really means it, especially a guy like Buck. It's hard for him to be sensitive. Why not seduce him a little?”

Vivienne shrugged. She was on the fence, but maybe Karlie was right. Maybe she could be a bit more aggressive.

“Y'all better get ready before everyone gets here,” Sissy called out.

“I took the bags up,” Bracken said, plopping ice cubes into a glass of whiskey.

“My lord, that must've taken you a while,” Sissy said, sliding her arms around his waist.

“I needed the exercise,” Bracken replied, and smiled down at her.

The Sunflower Room, as the Blanks called it, was always Vivienne's room. She loved the hotel-like smoothness of the yellow quilt, and the bright sunflower-print wallpaper, the room's overall rightness, its clean, delicate stillness. On the bedside table she found a bud vase holding two illicit bluebonnets and a note:
Don't tell anyone! Sissy xo

She smiled, imagining Sissy illegally picking bluebonnets, but it was more likely she sent someone else to do it. There weren't many left in May, and these two were weaklings.

Bracken had set her things in the closet. She slipped off her sandals and massaged her toes into the pliant white carpet. Next, she opened the shutters and the French doors to the balcony and sat outside in the rocking chair, listening to the cicada choir. The moon was bright, almost full, the mowed perimeter of the property a black hem, the night muggy and swollen with the aroma of cut St. Augustine. Just then she heard the buzz-sawing of the four-wheelers. Spotlights reared around the brush. The guys kept revving the engines and hollering.

She gathered they were at some kind of game, because they weren't driving any closer. Annoyed, she waited for them to finish, distracting herself with the sight of two early June bugs drowning in the swimming pool, a pair of dark flailing dots casting tiny ripples in the glowing water. Their fate made her a little sad, so she retreated inside, only to find that getting ready had commenced.

She was three rooms away, but she heard it clearly. It was three-layered: the drone of many hair dryers in use at once, country music playing loud enough to be heard over the hair dryers, and a flock of female voices raised over the music
and
the hair dryers. At this hour, the Blank house was ablaze, its bedrooms charged with laughter, shower-moist and steeped in decadent, purchased aromas. Bracken piped in over the house intercom, “We better not blow a fuse!”

Vivienne pulled out her dresses and draped them on the bed. Then she undressed. The shower water muffled the high-pitched laughter of Waverly's sorority sisters from the University of Texas. Most of these women were from Dallas, some still lived in Austin, a few had married East Coast. The weekend was a reunion for them.

She did a once-over shave on her legs to cover any spots she'd missed that morning. Then she performed a contortionist routine to reach her crotch, jutting her hips and straining her neck to see her progress and to access creases. Vivienne had long been convinced by popular consensus that vaginas were ugly. Men wanted pussies, not vaginas, and pussies were hairless.

She toweled off, imagining future happiness. Marriage would permit her to be a little eccentric; she'd commission paintings for her home and decorate it herself. Not that she wanted to do everything at home herself, definitely not, but the first time that she figured out the washer and dryer—in college—and then folded and put away her own load of laundry, she'd been filled with disproportionate glee at the candle flicker of independence. The fact that she and Katherine paid people to do simple things was now an increasing frustration, born out of a quiet fear that most people did these things on their own and that she may have to do them one day too.

A firm
knock-knock
came at the door. It was Waverly, in a short black dress. “You're not ready?” she said.

Karlie clomped in on five-inch strappy cork wedges, wearing the purple cocktail number Waverly had greeted them in. It was much tighter on her. She opened the balcony door and howled, erupting into drunken laughter. When it occurred to her, mideruption, that Vivienne wasn't dressed, her face abruptly fell. “What the hell, Viv!” she said. “Why aren't you dressed?”

Vivienne withdrew into the closet and emerged a moment later in her new red dress, to the purr of her girlfriends.

“Wow,” Karlie said, in a sort of mean purr.

Waverly made a few little
tap-tap-tap
claps. “You look like a model.”

“My boobs are too big,” Vivienne said, yanking off the price tag.

“At least you're not flat like me,” Waverly said.

The three girls went to the mirror and surveyed the reflection. Vivienne's dress was a simple cut, sleeveless and midthigh length, with sheer red mesh over the shoulders that took the emphasis off her chest. Shaped by her form, it became remarkable. Even without makeup, her hair damp, she'd trumped her friends' hour-long effort.

“I hate you,” Karlie said, surprising Vivienne with the ultimate compliment, an admission of jealousy. “What do I look like, one to ten? Seriously, what would y'all rate me?”

“Stop,” Waverly said.

“We're not answering that,” Vivienne said.

“Because you don't want to hurt my feelings. If you're a ten, and Waverly's, like, basically a ten too, then I'm clearly a four. I'm a troll.”

In a rare moment, likely prompted by Karlie's choice of the word “basically,” Waverly snapped, “Shut up, Kar. We're not rating each other.”

Karlie paled. Vivienne began applying mascara. With Karlie's envy she had the upper hand, and she didn't want to lose it now by stooping to base flattery and end up apologizing for the imposition of her own attractiveness upon Karlie's feeble self-esteem.

But Waverly, realizing she'd hurt someone's feelings, chose the only route she knew, that of sweet indulgence. “You're not a troll,” she said. Indeed, Karlie's only troll-like quality was her height, but even still she wasn't unusually short, and her physique, if thick, was athletic. In the bathroom's bulb flare, her nose was perkily symmetrical, her long auburn hair lustrous and straight with no visible roots, and her eyes, amid their kohl and sparkle, stood out bright blue and spirited. “Don't be so hard on yourself. You're a bombshell.” For confirmation, Waverly turned to Vivienne.

It was Vivienne's unavoidable duty as the impetus of Karlie's minor tantrum to help turn the tide toward agreeability. “You look great,” she said. “Nothing troll-like about you.”

“Well, compared to y'all…” Karlie trailed off, leaning in close to the mirror. She scrutinized her eyes and swabbed her pinky fingertips along the lip of her lower lids. “The humidity in here is messing me up.
Vámonos,
ladies!”

Vivienne stayed back to finish her face and hair. The party was just getting comfortable with itself when she started down the main staircase. Thirty upturned faces watched as she descended. Feeling their eyes, Vivienne held her head high and prayed not to trip on the steep stairs. Sissy, who'd changed into a high-collared zebra-print vest, jangled up to her.

“You look beautiful,” she said to Vivienne. “Now go get yourself a drink and something to eat!”

The flames of Waverly's candles warmed the walls of the great room, igniting the glass eyes of Bracken's antlered trophies. The guests were spread among Sissy's crimson couches, their voices drifting up into the wood-beamed cathedral ceiling above. Vivienne wove through the small crowd, giving and receiving many perfunctory hugs. She scanned the room calmly, seeking out Bucky. Waverly was in a corner by some bookcases, fiddling with the stereo. There was Emily, Waverly's sorority sister—a buyer for Neiman's? Vivienne couldn't remember—but she was pregnant.