The After Party (3 page)

J
oan did what she wanted to do; she always had. When she was young, this had aligned with what Mary desired: Joan wasn't rebellious. And Mary wasn't a prude. Our curfew was generous. We could accept as many dates as we liked, attend as many dances as we wanted, go to as many parties as we cared to. Mary wasn't
on
Joan, the way my mother had been on me. We came and went from Evergreen as we pleased, driven by Fred, funded by Furlow. She had accounts at the stores and restaurants we frequented and everything we bought was charged to them. The transactions remained invisible to us.

But Joan began to change our senior year of high school. She told me less. She snuck out of our room more frequently after I had fallen asleep. I'll never forget waking up in the room we
shared, the yawning feeling of panic and isolation when I realized her bed was empty.

And then debutante season arrived. We had all been anticipating the ball for years. Since we were children. Joan had been as excited as the rest of us the summer before, when we began our preparations.

“This dress,” she said, during one of her fittings, rubbing the white satin between her fingertips.

“This dress what?” Ciela had asked.

“It's like we're getting married. Like we're getting paraded in front of all Houston's eligible bachelors so they can pick and choose among us.”

“That's the idea,” Ciela said, and laughed, but her voice was taut in a way only I noticed.

It both was and wasn't the point. We would be paraded, of course, and though a certain young, handsome bachelor might take a shine to us, we wouldn't be married for another three or four years at least. Two at the earliest.

We all fussed over our white dresses, spent hours with the seamstress, who worked miracles; we all rehearsed our curtsy, our “Texas dip,” over and over, the motions so practiced by the end we might have curtsied to the president himself in our sleep.

Joan was dating—of course—the captain of the football team, a dark-haired boy named John. She spent more and more time with him that fall, less and less time with me, with the rest of the girls. Ciela had said the week before, in the cafeteria as we picked at our lunches, that Joan seemed bored by us. She had begun to disappear from our center table during lunch hour—I assumed to be with
John, though I didn't really know. I'd glared at Ciela until she'd held her hands up in mock surrender and halfheartedly apologized, but I couldn't help but think she might be right.

“The effect will be stunning,” I heard Mary say to Joan one morning, as I was coming down to breakfast. It was a month before the ball, which would be held at River Oaks Country Club in December. Evenings we ate in the formal dining room, mornings at a small pine table in the breakfast room, which was separated from the kitchen by a narrow swinging door.

“You'll look ethereal,” Mary continued. “Like a blond angel.” She had been up for hours, sipping coffee. She always waited to have breakfast with us.

Joan muttered something as I entered the kitchen. She was hunched over a piece of toast. When she saw me she rolled her eyes.

“Good morning,” Mary said, and took in my outfit. She'd make us change if she thought our skirts were too short, our blouses too flimsy. Satisfied, she turned her attention back to her daughter, while Dorie, who now worked as a maid, wordlessly offered me a bowl of oatmeal, a ramekin of raisins, and a glass of milk, without meeting my eye.

Idie was the younger of the two sisters by seven years, and she was delicate and pretty where Dorie was thick and sturdy, with a man's jaw. I always felt I'd gotten the better of the sisters.

Dorie had never really liked me, and she liked me less after my mother died and Idie left my family's employ. But still, I felt a certain affection for her. I knew she missed having Idie down the street, as I did.

“Sit up, Joan,” Mary said. “You'll develop a permanent hunchback if you sit like that. Spines are very suggestible.” She smiled at me as I sat down. “Joan and I are having a little tiff.”

“Oh?” I looked at Joan. It was Friday, football season, so she wore her navy cheerleader's outfit, the blue sweater emblazoned with a red
L
, her hair pulled back in a pert ponytail and tied with a red bow. She didn't look ethereal—she was too solid for that—but she did look like a blond angel. A very tan blond angel.

“Yes, I'm afraid we are. Joan has decided she doesn't want to debut. Doesn't want anything to do with the ball, apparently.”

I choked a little on my oatmeal, and Joan gave me a tiny, almost imperceptible scowl. But this was news to me: how was I supposed to defend Joan when I was blindsided by her choices?

“It's silly,” Joan said, drawing her spine straight, calmly tightening her ponytail. The only sign she was furious was her knife, clutched in her hand.

My feelings were hurt. Of course they were. We'd been talking about the ball since we were children. The past few months we'd talked of little else: Dresses, invitations, escorts. How we would wear our hair. And now, apparently, Joan wanted nothing to do with it.

“Silly?” Mary asked. Her voice was high, her cheeks flushed. It was unusual, to see Mary unmoored.

Joan made an odd, strangled noise, but in an instant, she seemed to compose herself. She waved her hand. “It's fine,” she said. “I'll go.”

“You should—” Mary began, and Joan interrupted.

“I said I would go.” Her manner was falsely cheerful, and I understood this was worse, not to let Mary fight the fight.

“In Littlefield,” Mary said quietly, “I didn't even know what a debutante ball was.” She laughed, and looked toward Joan hopefully. Mary had made herself vulnerable, which she did not often do. Joan turned her head to me, and rolled her eyes again.

Mary saw, of course. She was meant to see. She turned hard again, in an instant.

“Of course you'll go,” she said with finality. “You'll go and you'll like it. Or you won't. Either way, you'll behave.”

I was embarrassed for Joan. Mary spoke to her as if she were ten years old. Joan stared at her plate. I couldn't tell if she was going to cry or erupt in rage. Just then Furlow's frame filled the door, and I was half grateful for the interruption, half annoyed that I wouldn't see how this would play out between Mary and Joan. I quelled the outrageous impulse to giggle as Furlow settled down to the steak and eggs Dorie had just placed in front of him.

“Joanie,” he said, after he'd cut a piece of steak and dipped it in the runny yolk. Furlow's breakfast had always disgusted me. “Lonny wants you to hand out a prize at Houston Fat. Prize heifer, something along those lines. You'll need to pick out something fancy to wear.” He laughed, winked at me when he realized I was the only one looking at him. Both Joan and Mary were staring at their place mats.

Furlow was nice to me, treated me like he treated everyone: as someone he need not concern himself with too much. He moved through the world like a man who owned a great big piece of it.
He had been named one of Texas's fifty wealthiest men for a decade running.

The Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo was Houston's biggest event, held every February, and everyone went. My ears burned a little bit at the news that Joan had been tapped to present an award. She would be dressed to the nines, would float out into the dusty arena, where everyone would watch her, admire her.

“Oh,” Mary said, “Joan isn't interested in any of that. She finds all that business”—she waved her hands in the air, as if shooing away flies—“silly.”

Furlow put his fork down, looked from his wife to his daughter. He began to say something but Joan interrupted.

“I'll do it, Daddy,” she said sweetly. “It'd be my pleasure.”

Furlow's handsome brow relaxed, and he smiled at Mary. I couldn't quite read the tension that existed between the three of them, but I understood that it was Joan and Furlow against his wife.

Mary stood. “Of course you will.”

Joan watched her go, her face blank. Furlow, for his part, finished his breakfast in silence. But his eyes never left his daughter.

I understood that Furlow should have followed Mary. That he was choosing Joan by staying put.

On the way to school we sat in the backseat of the silver Packard, piloted by Fred. For a while Joan wouldn't speak. She didn't get mad often—why should she? Her life was so easy. She herself moved so easily within it. But when she did get angry she turned quiet.

“I didn't know you didn't want to go.”

She shrugged. “I don't care about the goddamn ball.”

I waited a moment. “What do you care about?”

She looked at me. “Sometimes I hate her.” She looked away. “I'm sorry. You don't even . . .” She trailed off.

“Have a mother?” I was stunned: Joan never apologized. “No,” I said. “But that doesn't matter. Tell me.” It was all I ever really wanted, for Joan to tell me: something, everything.

I could see Joan deciding, whether or not to explain further. I thought she wouldn't, and I leaned back into my seat, disappointed. But then she spoke.

“I hate her world. President of the Junior League, treasurer of the Garden Club.” She paused, looked out the window. “Biggest bitch in River Oaks.”

“Joan!” I'd never heard Joan speak of her mother like this.

“What? I hate her world, and I think she hates me.” She played with one of the charms—a solid-gold swimmer, in a swan dive—on her charm bracelet.

“She doesn't hate you,” I interrupted. “She just doesn't understand you.”

“What's there to understand? I don't want to be her.”

“Why?” Mary's life seemed nearly perfect, except she wasn't beautiful. It had occurred to me when I was a child that if she and my mother could have become one person,
she
would have been perfect: my mother's beauty, Mary's power and social prowess.

Joan was that person, I realized now. Beautiful and powerful. She would be like her mother, inherit her mother's position, and her beauty would only amplify her power. There was nothing more she could want, nothing more that girls like us desired.

“It's what you want, isn't it? The same friends, all your life. The Christmas party every December, the Fourth of July picnic every summer. Galveston for a change of scenery. A luncheon every week. Children,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

She wasn't trying to be mean, but her words stung. I did want children. We all wanted children. We needed families or else we would float away; we needed homes to put them in. But I didn't say any of that. I felt silly, suddenly.

“You'll be my friend all my life,” I said.
I
hope
, I thought to myself.

“Of course I will,” Joan said, impatiently. I had lost her. “If you don't know what I mean, then I can't explain it. Anyway,” she said, and opened her purse, removed a tube of lipstick that was too dark to wear around Mary. Flashy, she would have called it. I reached into my own purse and pulled out my compact, held it steady while Joan drew her lips into a grimace and painted them deep red.

“What
do
you want?” I asked, and Joan's eyes darted from her own reflection to my face, surprised.

“I want what you don't want,” she said softly. “I want to leave.”

“Why would you say that?” I asked, my voice shrill. I thought of our debutante gowns, both made in Paris—a place Joan had talked about us visiting together next year after graduation. Mine was off the shoulder, Joan's was delicately gathered and tucked at the waist. They were both silk. They were both the kind of dress you wore once in a lifetime if you were lucky.

“Oh, I don't really mean it.” But she was only mollifying me.
“Here,” she said, “let me do yours,” and without thinking I stretched my lips over my teeth and let her paint them a garish red I would wipe off as soon as we arrived at school.

“You say you want to leave. But where would you go?”

“Somewhere I've never been. Somewhere no one could follow me,” she added.

She meant Mary, I supposed. But I couldn't help inserting myself into the sentiment: somewhere you can't follow me.

“What would you do there?” I asked quietly. Joan simply gazed at me. She was in another world this morning.

“Things I've never done before,” she said. We were pulling up to Lamar. A classmate, Daisy, waved at us; Joan returned the wave and smiled brightly, as if she hadn't just fought with Mary, as if she hadn't just told me she wanted to leave all this—including me—behind.

We were walking up the stairs of the school when Joan suddenly grabbed my sleeve.

“Where did you get this outfit?” she asked. I was wearing a garnet-red dress belted at the waist, with pearl buttons down the front.

“Sakowitz.”

“But where did
they
get it?” she asked, with a shake of her head.

“I don't know where they got it. Maybe Houston.”

“But where did they get the
idea
from? Not from Houston. Where do you get your ideas from, for clothes?”

We had reached the top of the steps; out of the corner of my eye I could see Ciela waiting for me. We had homeroom together.

“From magazines, I guess?
Vogue
,
Harper's . . .
” Tears came to my eyes, even though I knew it was ridiculous to cry. But I didn't understand what Joan was asking.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes!” Her face was very close to mine. “Exactly. I want to go where the ideas are.”

“You want to go to New York? But you don't care about clothes.”

She stamped her foot, and I could see her so clearly as a child, mad because she hadn't gotten her way about something. “New York, Chicago, somewhere big. Somewhere else. And not for the clothes. For the world.”