look at you,” Maggie said, looking at Barbara’s reflection over her shoulder. Barbara was wearing a pair of nondescript gray sweat pants and an oversize matching sweat shirt. “You look like you’ve just come from a ragpickers’ convention.”
“But this is just for comfort,” Barbara protested.
“Comfort is one thing but dressing in sacks is another.” Maggie grabbed a handful of the back of the shirt and pulled. The fabric stretched more tightly across Barbara’s chest. “There’s a body under this,” she said. “Nice tits.” She pulled the pants in at the seat. “And you’ve got nice hips, a small waist. Yes, there’s actually a shape under all this material.”
Barbara looked, but remained unconvinced.
“Look at your face,” Maggie said, grabbing a fistful of hair and pulling it back, away from Barbara’s face. “Nice eyes. Actually, great eyes. Good cheekbones, good shape. A definite nose, but not too much, and nicely shaped lips. Your skin’s not great, but nothing that a decent foundation wouldn’t cure.” She released Barbara’s hair and the two women stood, gazing into the mirror. “There’s really a lot of potential. We just need makeup, a good hair stylist, and a new wardrobe.”
“I don’t need a new wardrobe,” Barbara said, almost stomping toward her own room. She crossed to her closet, opened the door and flipped on the light. “Just look. There are lots of really nice clothes in here.”
“Nice for a dowdy moderately shapeless old maid, but not for you. You need high shades, sapphire and emerald, deep claret and purple. Oh, you’d look sensational in eggplant.”
“I have all the clothes I need.”
“But not the ones you want. You seem to want to slide through life virtually unnoticed. Nonsense. Make a statement. Be a real person.”
“I am a real person.”
Maggie made a rude noise. “In attitude, you rate a D and in self-esteem you get an F. In looks, I’ll give you a ‘needs improvement.’ And with the improvement will come a change in attitude as well. Are you game?”
Barbara dropped onto her bed. “I don’t know, Maggie. Part of me wants to be adventurous, stick out in a crowd, have men notice me. But the rest is terrified. It’s such a risk.”
Maggie sat beside Barbara and put her arm loosely around the younger woman’s shoulders. “Why is it a risk?” she asked softly.
“It just is.”
“Think about the worst thing that could happen if you walked into a room in a bright red dress with black stockings and black high heels, with golden highlights in your hair and a ‘here I am, come and get me’ expression on your face. What’s the worst thing?”
To her surprise Barbara burst into tears. Helpless, Maggie handed her a handful of tissues and, with her arms around Barbara’s shoulders, let her cry it all out. It took fifteen minutes for Barbara to get calm enough for Maggie to attempt to talk to her again. “You have to tell me what’s eating you.”
Barbara wiped her face and shook her head.
“I can ask Lucy and she’ll find out with that computer system of hers.” Maggie explained Lucy’s ability to replay events in her life at will. She had no idea whether she could even get to Lucy or whether Lucy could bring up bits of Barbara’s past, but she thought it was a decent bluff.
“Oh, no. That would be too humiliating.”
“Well, then, let me get us each a glass of wine and then you tell me what it is that frightens you so much. Where’s the rest of the bottle we were drinking last evening?”
“In the closet next to the refrigerator, and the glasses are in the hutch in the living room.”
“Lord. Unless I was entertaining I left dishes in the sink for days and in my drainer even longer. Okay. You think about how you’re going to tell me the ugly details while I fetch for us.” Maggie left the room.
Barbara listened to Maggie’s footsteps on the stairs and slumped onto her back. Maybe I can just run away. Maybe I can tell her to go to hell. Maybe I can slit my wrists. She sighed. Maybe it will feel good to tell someone about Carl and Walt. But maybe Maggie would just give up on her if she did. Didn’t that serve her purpose anyway, make Maggie go away? Too soon, Maggie returned and thrust a glass of wine into her hand.
“Drink this like it’s medicine,” Maggie said, brandishing the bottle and her glass in the other. “There’s enough here for another half-glass for each of us.”
Staying flat on her back on the bed, Barbara awkwardly emptied the glass, then held it out for Maggie to refill. Maggie emptied the bottle into Barbara’s glass, then stretched out beside her on the bed. Softly she said, “Tell me about him.”
“How did you know it was a him?”
Maggie chuckled. “When a woman has an ego that has been smashed as flat as yours it’s always a man—or a woman. And from the way you gazed at that boss of yours yesterday, I assumed the asshole who flattened your self-esteem was a man.”
“Oh, yes,” Barbara said. “Carl Tyndell was definitely a man, and I guess an asshole, too.”
“That’s the attitude.” Maggie stared at the ceiling, giving Barbara time to decide where to begin.
“I met Carl at a party. It was about four years ago and I had just had my twenty-seventh birthday. Notice I didn’t say I celebrated, because, for some unknown reason, that birthday hit me very hard.”
As she set the scene for Maggie, Barbara could almost see the room, hear the incessant babble of suburban conversation, smell the cold cuts on the dining-room table. A couple she knew slightly from her church had given the party to introduce some new neighbors. She had put her coat on the bed in the master bedroom and as she walked back down the stairs she saw a sensational-looking man talking in low whispers to Walt McCrory, a neighborhood bachelor whom she had dated a few times a few months earlier. The two men laughed loudly, then the stranger worked his way through the crowd and engaged her in conversation.
“I should have suspected something was up the way Walt leered at me,” Barbara said.
“You and this Walt didn’t part on good terms, I gather.”
“We went out for a few weeks. We had dinner a few times, then one warm evening he invited me back to his place to check out his new above-the-ground pool. One thing led to another, but obviously not fast enough for Walt. After I told him I didn’t want to be groped, he called me a cold bitch, incapable of giving a man a decent wet dream much less a hard-on.”
“So he presumably talked this Carl person into picking you up.”
“I guess that’s true, but I was so naive that I didn’t make the connection until much later.”
“We never do,” Maggie said sadly.
“Anyway, Carl and I made dinner plans for a few days later. We had a wonderful meal and a few too many drinks. He was attentive and seemed interested in everything I had to say. His eyes were so deep brown as to be almost black. His hair was also dark brown and he had nice hands. I’m a sucker for men with
