Ashley turned to leave Mermaids Singing, she saw the bargain bin, a wooden wine crate full of books, “The Last Ditch, $1” painted on its side. That long-unsold copy of her novel, its dust jacket now with a new, painful little rip from clumsy handling, sat at the top of the pile.
The bookstore was owned by identical twentysomething twins named Peach and Plum, and Peach took Ashley’s writing class. Ashley sighed, glancing around the empty store autumnally lit by haphazardly placed lamps with dusty shades. A shadow slipped around a corner, and the dry pages of an antique pinup-girl calendar rustled in the shadow’s wake. Perhaps Ashley had once been too harsh to Peach in her criticisms. Her students were often so sensitive about their work.
Deedee Millwood lit another cigarette off the coal of the duty-free Virginia Slim at her lips. Her daughter, Naomi, sat at her side, picking the cheese off a limp slice of airport pizza and mock-coughing melodramatically. Naomi, at sixteen, felt the need to pretend she didn’t smoke, but Deedee knew she did. She could frequently smell the smoke in Naomi’s hair and on the urchin-like, thrift-shop schmattes she insisted on wearing. But Deedee couldn’t scold—her ex-husband, Naomi’s father, would just turn the scolding to his advantage, would probably buy Naomi cartons of unfiltered Camels to overcompensate, would install a hookah pipe and a humidor in her weekend bedroom at his apartment.
Just the thought of Zeke’s competitiveness, his spoiling of their daughter, made Deedee swoon. She wasn’t still in love with Zeke, she was back in love with Zeke, and she found falling back in love far more thrilling than when she’d been simply still in love, back when the divorce was raw and sharp-edged, rendering her hopes pathetic and desperate. Clinging to love was sad; reviving an old love was romantic. Now if she could only convince Zeke to fall back in love too.
Deedee tucked a few skinny, beaded, rat-tail braids behind her ear. She had several such braids, all having been beaded on the stormy beach of the island in the Bahamas from which she and Naomi were returning. Though the beach had been mostly empty the afternoon before because of the rain and the wind, some of the locals had still set up shop to do braids, sell T-shirts and tiedyed scarves, and mix Coco Locos, the rum drinks they served in real coconuts with fluorescent twisty straws stuck in.
Deedee had been making a small fortune selling “marital aids” throughout Omaha and the rural communities of Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota. She had been named salesperson of the year for the Midwest region of Sugar Shop, Inc., earning her a trip for two to Paradise Island in the Bahamas.
Women throughout the Bible Belt, put off by the matronly domesticity of Tupperware and Pampered Chef, hosted the Sugar Shop parties in their living rooms, their neighbors bringing covered dishes and Jell-O rings, to sit for innocent, bubbly presentations of waterproof sex toys and fruit-flavored lubricants and novelty condoms. Sugar Shop, Inc. prided itself on its accessibility. In its brochures it spoke of sex in a coy and flowery language that nonetheless could provoke a roomful of respectable ladies—ministers’ wives, kindergarten teachers—to raucous states of impoliteness. The party’s hostess in a tiny Nebraska town such as Ong or Wahoo or Friend might mix a pitcher of Cosmos or pots of Irish coffee with whipped cream, and though the drinks were often only lightly spiked, the women felt free to unzip their lips and offer indiscretions. They’d let slip the size of their husbands’ schlongs, or they’d all commiserate over their husbands’ laziness or lack of innovation between the sheets.
And through it all, Deedee would maintain her composure—she wouldn’t act prudish, certainly, but she’d offer little more than a wink and a smile as she pulled from her satchel things she introduced as “the Lemon Pucker” or “the Cocoa Puff” or “the Tickled Pink.”
And that was why she was such a success, Deedee believed. By not indulging in the frenzied atmosphere of lighthearted vulgarity, she allowed the women to feel they’d remained unsullied by the Sugar Shop. Deedee kept the parties from descending into bacchanals that might otherwise throb in the women’s heads the next morning like an afternoon infidelity or a late-night online chat with a stranger. No matter what the women confessed while under the influence of an appletini, no matter what product they skittered back to the bathroom to sample, they could leave the party feeling that a check written out to the Sugar Shop was no more sordid than one written to the pharmacist for a refill on birth control or to the highway steakhouse for a dinner that included one too many glasses of Chianti.
At parties, Deedee tiptoed around the discussion of private parts. The honeybee on the lip of the lily, she’d say instead. The sunset on the stormy sea. The devil’s stogie. The candied violet in your heart-shaped box. She was never lewd; hell, she wasn’t even frank.
None of it embarrassed Deedee. She had never been a success before—she still had boxes of unsold Mary Kay cosmetics rotting in her garage, the mascara gone to clumps and the blush dried up. In her closet hung expensive executive suits worn too little to have ever worn out, and she had a desk drawer full of name tags, “Deedee Millwood” echoing in a variety of fonts, mocking the fact that she’d never before, anywhere, been a perfect fit.
“Are you ever offended by what I do for a living, Naomi?” Deedee asked her daughter.
“No, but I’m offended that you’d think that,” Naomi said. “Do you think I’m so judgmental? It really wouldn’t hurt you to get to know me sometime. I’m sorry, have we been introduced?” Naomi reached out, inviting a sarcastic handshake. “I’ve been your daughter for sixteen years. It’s nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much . . .”
“Okay, okay,” Deedee said. She slapped at Naomi’s hand.
“Let’s scoot,” Naomi said, tapping the face of Deedee’s watch, which she’d left set to Omaha time throughout the entire vacation. Eleven A.M., time to board their connecting flight back home.
“We’ll scoot in a sec,” Deedee said. She pointed at her half-smoked cigarette and refused to move. Upon the return to Omaha, she’d be back at work, leading a Sugar Shop party at the Old Market apartment of her best friend, Ashley.
As she continued to smoke, the look of the dilapidated glassed-in smoking lounge, with its awful orange furnishings riddled with burn holes, perked up, became sickly appealing. She suddenly delighted in being cordoned off with these other addicts. The air in the room was a deadly haze of spent tobacco, and Deedee couldn’t bring herself to leave. She grabbed Naomi’s arm and gripped hard, not letting her stand. Despite her fine life, with its brand-new townhouse, roadster convertible, and weekly spa treatments, this return from vacation struck Deedee with a deep panic she didn’t quite understand.
Vivienne Dailey opened that day’s mail when it arrived at her studio: one sole envelope, her name in the block letters of anonymity, the latest from her so-called stalker.
At the end of the year, she’d been featured in an article titled “Flirty and Under Forty: Ten Omaha Beauties to Watch” in a local magazine that chronicled such things. Within days of the magazine hitting the newsstands, Viv and the nine other beauties had begun receiving the disturbing materials. The Flirt, as he was speedily dubbed by the Omaha World-Herald, was sending each woman depraved collages, scissoring the women’s heads and hands and feet from the magazine photographs and rubber-cementing them over the heads and hands and feet of the models in gritty, truck-stop, damn-near-gynecological porno mags. The Channel 7 news had shown one of these collages on TV: Viv’s smiling, severed head pasted onto the body of a busty woman wearing only a navel ring, the model’s nipples and privates pixilated by the TV station’s censors. The model’s hands had been replaced with Viv’s French manicure,
