with a TV announcer’s inflections, “Lady Godiva Lickable Glitter, $19.95. Perfectly safe for all-over body décor, Lady Godiva Lickable Glitter subtly sparkles, filling your next romantic evening with starlight. Whether you spray on or sprinkle, this glitter pinkens and delights. Quick and easy application (and removal), whether using on your own or with a friend! Available in these exotic flavors: Amaretto, Chambord, Ambrosia, and Crème de Bananes.”
“Want to help me get ready for the party?” Ashley asked Lee. “Peel some apples?”
“I have to go meet Peyton at the thrift shop,” he said. “She’s on her way back to Omaha.”
“Peyton didn’t tell me she was coming home this weekend.”
“It wasn’t planned. She just called me from her cell phone a little bit ago, all upset,” he said.
Ashley took a sip of the wine. “Yikes. What? What is it?”
“You don’t really sound all that concerned to me,” Lee said.
“I said, ‘yikes,’ didn’t I?” she said. Peyton had been in a state of panic since infancy. Since going away to college last fall, six hours from Omaha, her cries of wolf had grown quite pleasantly dim.
“She’s mad at Dad about something.”
“Really?” Ashley said, intrigued. Everybody mad at Dad. Hop on Pop. “What?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. But she must be super-pissed, because she keeps calling him by his full name. ‘Troy Allyson.’ ‘We have to have a talk about Troy Allyson.’ I’m meeting her in a few.”
Ashley knew better than to ask to tag along. For years she’d been jealous of Lee and Peyton’s close-knittedness, mostly because, growing up, Ashley and her older sisters had only ever conspired against each other, hoarding secrets, telling lies. Her childhood had been a hotbed of three misbehaved girls manipulating their parents’ piddly affections.
“I could take you kids out for a late lunch,” Ashley said, slowly holding forth the glass of wine, inching it toward Lee, tempting. “Pot roast at Upstream.”
Lee shook his head at the wine glass and, speaking with his mouth full of cinnamon loaf, said, “I’m on a hunger strike. Food is toxic.” He went to the closet for his thin, death-defying jean jacket. “Besides, you have your pervy little party to get ready for.”
“Maybe I need to cancel it,” Ashley said, “under the circumstances.” One of Ashley’s favorite things to do was cancel plans at the last minute, leaving her with a few hours of unexpected time.
“Nope,” he said, opening the door.
“Oh, Lee Lee Lee Lee, pleeeeease put on some real shoes,” Ashley said. “You think you’re only killing yourself with those flip-flops in the snow, but you’re killing your mother is what you’re doing.”
Lee pulled a pair of Converse sneakers over his sockless feet. “You never dress for winter either,” he said, sneering, and Ashley said nothing more as he left. She leaned back in the cushions of the sofa, drinking the rest of the wine, warmed by the fact that her son, who’d grown so distant in recent weeks, still cared enough to point out the failings they shared.
Peach
Peach could hear that the rest of the writing students had left Ashley’s apartment, but she continued to sit in a rickety wooden chair next to the partially open window, blowing her smoke out, sipping dregs of cold coffee from a china cup she’d found on the kitchen counter. Troy, Ashley’s husband, Peach’s secret lover, always cooked his coffee to a deep black in a dinged-up percolator his grandmother had owned decades ago, and Peach could sometimes taste the acrid bitterness of it on his breath.
“Class dismissed, sweetie, but take your time, relax, just finish your cig,” Ashley said, stepping into the kitchen. “Oh, but don’t drink that slop, it’s the worst. Never touch the coffee in this house.” She took the cup away from Peach, then poured her a glass of wine.
The coffee felt thick in Peach’s throat, and she now found it hard to swallow. She noticed her cigarette and its smoke shivering with the shaking of her hand, so she put it out in the ash-stained saucer on the windowsill.
Troy had no idea that Peach was enrolled in his wife’s class. He always spent Saturdays at his office, where he put in six or seven days a week as an editor at the Omaha Street, outlining everyone’s social obligations, playing to the fires of liberal angst. Every week, Peach read the dire thing from cover to cover in the hopes of getting to know her lover better, to divine something personal from his stories about city council zoning ordination scandals and children sick from licking poisonous lead monkey bars in a park.
Ashley sat at the kitchen table with a colander of apples and a paring knife. “Did you ever play Truth or Dare?” she asked, peeling, and the sound of the sleet that salted against the windowpanes ran a chill up the back of Peach’s neck. She wanted to take a drink to calm herself, but her hands were shaking even more, gently sloshing the wine in the glass. What am I doing here? she thought. I’m no good at this sort of thing. No Truth, please.
“Yeah,” Peach said. “I guess I did.”
“‘Finger-bang’ made me think of it,” Ashley said. “I’m thirteen, fourteen, sitting in an old, leaky, inflatable pool with my friend Deedee, our bikini tops off, reading the dirty parts from my mom’s Harold Robbins novels out loud to each other. We thought we were pretty hot stuff. We started playing Truth or Dare, and I dared her to go ask the neighbor’s lawn boy if he’d ever finger-banged a girl. I just remember thinking it seemed like, I don’t know, the height of dirtiness or something. Finger-bang.” Ashley froze mid-apple, lost in memory.
“Did she do it?” Peach asked.
“Do what?”
“Take the dare. Did she go ask the lawn boy if he’d ever finger-banged a girl?”
“You know, I don’t even remember,” Ashley said. “But I do remember my mom wasn’t home, so we snuck some liquor from the cabinet. We didn’t know what we should drink, so we drank Campari because it was a pretty ruby color. Have you ever had that? Campari?”
“No.”
“I’m trying to remember what it tastes like because it tastes like something specific. It had a kind of candlewaxy taste, or a taste like . . . what was it called? Oh, Zotz is what it was, Zotz, that candy that sizzled on your tongue as you sucked on it? How adorable, Peach,” she said, pointing her paring knife at her, moving it up and down, referring to Peach’s dress, too slinky and cool for winter, patterned with flowers the ice-creamy brown and pink and white of Neapolitan. “Did you get that here in Omaha?”
“Actually, just from down on the corner,” Peach said. “Nouvelle Eve.” Actually, Troy had bought it from Nouvelle Eve in an effort to beg forgiveness for being such a wretched cliché of a married man.
“I love that shop,” Ashley said, “but sometimes I feel like I might be a little too old for it.”
“Don’t be silly,” Peach said, standing to go. “You’re not too old for anything. You’re not even forty, right?” Peach knew full well that Ashley
