realized that the scream, more of a howl, really, had been Carrie’s and that the girl was limp but breathing, weeping extravagantly in her mother’s arms.
“The Bryn Mawr
Anise’s husband Thom shouldered his way into the room and scooped up Carrie, who hung on him, upright but limp, still weeping into his starched white shirt. He shot Anise a look and she returned it with a shrug. Bess was still crouching beside Anise, holding her hand.
Carrie started mumbling and slurring about how life was hell and she couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear it, it was so difficult, so hard, she couldn’t, no, no, no, she just couldn’t. Thom, full of concern a moment ago, stiffened and held her out from him, her head still wobbling on her long neck, her expensively layered hair tousled, eyes red and rolling.
“Carrie, you’re drunk,” he announced sternly in a loud and serious baritone.
“Life is hell, just pure hell, and I can’t.” His daughter paused to hiccup. “I can’t, can’t, can’t bear it. I can’t.”
“Carrie.” Thom shook her slightly, this tall, gorgeous creature, limp and sodden but still beautiful in her lavish distress. “You are going to your room. Right now.”
Megan suppressed a smile. Would the drunken, nearly adult Amazon-like Carrie go to her room like a disobedient child? Poor Thom was clueless. He shook her again until she straightened up enough to walk and nudged her to the door to send her upstairs. She broke loose and turned back to her mother with another bone- chilling wail.
Anise opened her arms and Carrie flung herself back on her mother’s lap, burrowing her face in Anise’s shoulder and blubbering into her neck. Anise shrugged again at Thom and wrapped her arms protectively around her large, distraught daughter, rocking her in her arms. Bess reached up and tenderly rubbed Carrie’s back, exposed in the backless silk tunic. Michelle, the third Dagger sister, squeezed by Megan and rushed to help console her niece.
Poor Thom. He opened his mouth to protest again, but evidently realized he could never prevail against the massed determination of the Dagger sisters when they closed ranks. He stood for a moment, helpless, until Megan took his arm. He let her lead him from the room, the other guests scattering in front of them, muttering and giggling. Megan heard the phrase “Bryn Mawr
Thom rallied then, and called out, “Let’s have more champagne, shall we? It’s almost midnight.” And that, Meg thought, was that.
The party rolled on inexorably. The ball dropped. Kisses were exchanged. Anise circulated again, her composure restored, laughing charmingly about young women and their angst. Even Carrie reappeared, her face freshly scrubbed, tossing her blond hair and looking only slightly embarrassed.
Henri and Paula were evidently having a rapprochement in the butler’s pantry, breathing heavily, startled like deer when Megan discovered them. They were kissing in a dark alcove beside the Sub-Zero, his hand inside her sweater, her pale face reddened where his stubbled chin had rubbed it, his leg between hers, her skirt hiked up around the tops of her thighs. Paula gasped and he laughed darkly when Meg, in search of some ice water, walked in.
Meg, who had herself spent some time in Henri’s arms an hour earlier, her own face still smarting from his fashionable stubble, her own thighs aching where his leg had thrust between them, smiled benignly and closed the refrigerator door, darkening the tiny pantry again. Her smile disappeared as she returned to the dining room, reflecting on the faithless, feckless ways of men, particularly the French.
The college kids emerged from the family room downstairs to announce that the karaoke machine was ready for action. Pulsing rock music beckoned, drowning out the Christmas carols on the iPod upstairs. Most of the revelers who were still standing trooped unsteadily down the steps, ready to continue drinking and watch each other strutting and mugging and stumbling over complicated lyrics sung alarmingly off-key.
With very little prodding, Carrie gave her patented rendition of Cher’s “Believe” in her perfect, sexy, adenoidal alto, complete with reverb on the chorus,
Carrie’s college friend Lulu took up the challenge with an overheated version of Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy
Meg followed, jumping in with a Gwen Stefani number that allowed her to wiggle her well-toned ass while soothing her overheated thighs by clamping them around the pole.
Henri had eyes only for his wife as he vamped to a Kanye West number, almost making Meg believe he had reformed. Then he disappeared, no doubt upstairs kissing someone else’s wife and congratulating himself on his renewed conquest of his own poor spouse. Paula, the pathetic victim of his many indiscretions, was now passed out in a chair in the corner.
An hour later, Meg was moving from pleasantly buzzed into the more dangerous territory of completely torched. Her patented system, she had to admit, was failing. She was on a sofa in the family room trapped between the ugly neighbors. She listened halfheartedly to the ugly wife whine about her dissolute teenagers; on her other side, the ugly husband surreptitiously trailed his pinky along Meg’s thigh. Did he really think that was sexy? she thought irritably. Did the ugly wife really think that dressing for a New Year’s Eve party meant a pilled Fair Isle sweater? Meg raised her glass only to find it empty.
Bess was wrapping her supple leg around the pole, growling like an improbable Justin Timberlake that she was going to bring sexy back. “
Meg was pretty sure those weren’t the actual lyrics. She got up abruptly, interrupting the ugly wife in mid- whine and the ugly husband in mid-whatever. Ignoring their surprised expressions, she headed up the stairs.
Walking fairly steadily, Meg made a fairly complete circuit of the house, from the karaoke-singing sirens downstairs to the trash-strewn buffet table where men like Michelle’s dissolute husband had turned into pigs. Congealed meatballs dribbled from his mouth as he leered at her lasciviously. Another porcine guest saluted her with a chicken wing dripping sauce in one hand, a scum of dip across his sweatered chest.
Hearing a groan as she passed a powder room, dark as a cave, she nudged open the door to discover the ugly neighbor, one hand clamped to his eye, mumbling that someone had hit him and knocked out a contact lens or maybe knocked it in and scratched a cornea. He beckoned her in to help him. But Meg shook her head and kept moving.
She watched as various mini-dramas played out. On the sunporch, the beautiful daughter Carrie, evidently almost sober, talked intently to someone on her cell phone. Upstairs, the mousy daughter Celia sat weeping hopelessly outside a closed bedroom door, crooning her boyfriend’s name.
In the living room, she saw Michelle’s husband again-was he everywhere?-drunk as a monkey, suddenly smile wolfishly and lean in to lick the face of the startled ugly neighbor. The ugly man pushed him, and Michelle’s husband fell against the mantle, laughing manically. He laughed even louder when the ugly husband roughly pushed his own ugly wife, as she tried to wipe the spittle off her husband with her sweater sleeve.
Megan stepped neatly between the two men, the Scylla and Charybdis of the party, both dangerously drunk, staggering, both reaching for her with sticky, amorous hands. The grotesquely ugly man, groping toward Megan, was deaf to the angry scolding of his monstrous, homely wife. Meg left the sorry spectacle behind her and kept going.
Anise in the kitchen talking seriously with her sister Michelle. Lulu laughing huskily as she tottered down the stairs in impossibly high heels, wiping her mouth on the back of her manicured hand. Upstairs, Henri furtively leaving a darkened bedroom in which Megan glimpsed someone-Carrie?-on the bed. Henri sidled past Megan, tucking in his shirt, favoring her with his handsome, slightly sneering Gallic smile. Downstairs, Bess stalking angrily out of the den, her botoxed forehead unwrinkled but her eyes flashing her displeasure. Thom almost
