The After Party Read online

  I got into the backseat, and Joan, instead of riding up front with her mother, sat next to me. I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again until Joan touched my knee.

  We were turning onto Evergreen’s red gravel drive; I felt the crunch of the pebbles beneath the tires.

  “Your new life,” Joan said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Joan laughed, but when she spoke, her voice was serious.

  “You don’t ever have to thank me, Cee.”

  • • •

  A week later Joan convinced me to go out. I hadn’t been around anyone my own age besides her for months. Darlene, Kenna, and Ciela had come to my mother’s funeral, but I’d barely spoken to them.

  “It’ll be good for you,” Joan said, dabbing on the lightest coating of lipstick—any heavier and Mary might notice.

  Joan, as a sophomore at Lamar High School, had already been asked to be on the homecoming court. She was a cheerleader, too, one of two underclassmen on the squad. She ate at the center table of the cafeteria, surrounded by the football team. She was invited to every party, every dance. Without Joan I would have been no one, a girl on the fringes of the popular group by virtue of the fact that her family had money, that she lived in River Oaks: a girl with a forgettable face, a forgettable name. But I was saved from this fate because I was Joan’s best friend. I ate lunch with her, went to parties with her, generally benefited from standing at her side. I might have been jealous but I didn’t want the spotlight, didn’t need it. I needed Joan, and I had her.

  Puberty struck some girls like a match. At fourteen years old, a freshman, Joan had breasts the size of melons. That’s what I’d overheard a boy saying, one day after school. She was already the most beautiful, the richest, the most charming, the most everything. Now she had a figure like Carole Landis, too. A figure most of us knew, even then, we would never come close to having.

  Joan had grown right into her body. Other girls who developed early stooped their shoulders, carried their books in front of their chests, but Joan? Our first day of high school Joan wore a brassiere with pointed cups, like the movie stars did. She hid it in her purse and changed in the bathroom.

  This particular night she wore a familiar dress, baby blue with a flared skirt. I’d never seen her necklace before, though. It was a tiny gold star with a diamond chip in its center. It hung in the dip between her collarbones like a glimmer.

  I touched it on the doorstep of the house where Fred had deposited us.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, “Daddy gave it to me.”

  “For what?”

  She shrugged, and I understood she was embarrassed, to have a father who gave her gifts for no reason—for being Joan—when my own father, for all intents and purposes, might as well have not existed.

  Joan rang the bell. When nobody came to the door, she finally opened it, revealing a throng of high schoolers. A boy Joan had been seeing, Fitz, snagged her and they headed upstairs almost as soon as we were inside, while I stood by the punch bowl until I mercifully spotted Ciela. We chatted about nothing and tried to pretend we weren’t watching to see who was watching us.

  “Joan’s been up there for a long time,” Ciela said. She was wearing a short-sleeved plaid dress with a collar. It almost looked like a school uniform, except it was skintight. Ciela dressed like a siren but wouldn’t even let her boyfriend, a senior, touch beneath her bra. I felt a little flare of jealousy—she looked like Lana Turner tonight.

  I was drunk on grenadine and whiskey; the house, in Tanglewood, was gauche and brand-new. You could practically feel the light blue rug turning brown beneath all our feet.

  “She and Fitzy are talking,” I said.

  Ciela eyed me. “You really don’t know what they’re doing up there?”

  “They’re doing whatever they want,” I said. “Joan’s doing whatever she wants.” Defending Joan was a sharp reflex.

  Ciela nodded, took a measured sip of her punch. “She sure is,” she said finally. She smiled at me. “She sure is.”

  Just then Fitz appeared at the head of the stairs and motioned to me; I left Ciela there like we hadn’t been in the middle of a conversation.

  “Joanie’s a little upset,” he said when I reached him. I grabbed the stair rail for balance—I was drunker than I thought—and watched Fitz run a hand through his thick black hair, lick his chapped lips. This close I could see little bits of dead skin clinging to them.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  He nodded in the direction of a closed door at the top of the stairs, which turned out to be a bathroom.

  Joan was sitting on the edge of the tub. A candle was burning on a shelf over the sink, an awful cloying smell. The room was dark except for the flare of the wick but I knew it was Joan, sitting in silence. The dark had unnerved me since my mother died.

  I flipped on the light and Joan turned her face from me, an unusual, somehow terrible gesture. I noticed right away her necklace was gone.

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. Her shrug seemed exaggerated, sloppy, but still somehow elegant. She was drunk, too.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  I sat on the toilet lid, so close to Joan our bare calves touched.

  “You’ve lost your necklace.” I tapped between her collarbones, the hollow where it had sat, and she jumped. When she looked at me her eyes were unfocused.

  “Where were you last?” At first she wouldn’t answer, acted as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “The room at the end of the hall,” she finally said. “It looks like somebody’s little brother’s room.”

  It was somebody’s little brother’s room, done up to look like the Wild West, with horse-shaped pillows on a bunk bed. The bottom bunk was unmade, though the rest of the room was neat as a pin. I spotted Joan’s necklace on the pillow, its clasp broken.

  I went back to the bathroom, knelt down, and held her chin between my pointer finger and thumb and made her look me in the eye.

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked.

  For a moment it seemed as though she was on the verge of telling me something. But then she shook her head. Smiled.

  “Fitzy? God, no. I’m just tired and sozzled. Help me up.” She held out her hands and I took them; when we were standing I folded the necklace into her palm. I never saw her wear it again.

  That was the first time I remember being aware that Joan had secrets. At first, Joan told me about her private life: The boys she kissed; the first time, in eighth grade, she let a boy touch her bra. The way Fitz had turned hard beneath her hand. But she told me less and less, as we grew up. Sex became Joan’s private world.

  That night I fell asleep next to Joan, to the familiar sound of her breathing. I woke in the middle of the night and sat straight up in bed. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad had happened to Joan in that little boy’s bedroom, something she was keeping from me.

  “It’s okay,” Joan said, sleepily, from the bed next to mine. “It’ll be okay, Cee. It’ll be okay.”

  • • •

  I grew accustomed to life at Evergreen. At first it seemed strange; within a month it was home. How quickly the young forget. And though I never quite felt like Mary and Furlow’s daughter, I grew to love them. I like to think they grew to love me.

  Chapter Three

  Joan 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 char
ged 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.