Eligible (11 page)

Mary waved one hand back and forth, as if attempting to erase the previous gestures, then held up a finger.

“First word,” Jane said.

Mary held up two fingers.

“Two syllables,” Liz said.

Mary again held up one finger.

“First syllable,” Liz said.

Mary cupped her hand around her right ear.

“Sounds like,” Jane and Liz both said.

Mary tapped her knee. “Bee’s knees,” Jane said at the same time Liz said, “I need you.” Mary was shaking her head. She patted her leg, this time higher, and Kitty said, “Thigh meat. Dark meat. Chicken breast.”

“Tits and ass!” Lydia yelled.

Thankfully, this was when the timer went off, and in a tone indicating that she felt the failure was her sisters’ rather than her own, Mary said,
“Legends of the Fall.”

“What the fuck is that?” Lydia said.

“It’s a movie,” Liz said. “Actually, a book, too, but Brad Pitt was in the movie.”

“Then why didn’t you do that?” Kitty said to Mary. “It’s not like you don’t have an armpit.”

“No, that was hard,” Jane said. “Even if we’d had more time, I don’t think I could have gotten it.”

“I still don’t understand why you were pretending to have diarrhea,” Lydia said, and Mary said with impatience, “It was
fall
like
waterfall.
”

Liz avoided looking at either Darcy or Caroline as Nathan from Procter & Gamble stood and took a scrap of paper from his team’s pile. When he’d unfolded it, he made the same camera-cranking gesture Mary had.

“Movie,” Charlotte said.

Nathan raised a finger.

“One word,” Chip said.

Nathan closed his eyes, balled his hands into fists that he shook by his ears, opened his mouth, and pretended to scream.

Flatly, Darcy said,
“Psycho.”

“Hey,” Nathan said. “Not bad.”

Chip chuckled. “Are you sure you’re not a ringer, Darcy?”

“Seriously?” Caroline said with delight. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Nathan said. “All hail—what’s our team name anyway?”

“The Conquistadors,” Charlotte suggested. “Booyah, Bennet sisters!”

Liz didn’t mind Charlotte’s competitive spirit—she knew the affection underlying it—but Caroline Bingley caught Liz’s eye, and Caroline’s demeanor contained no similar warmth. “So much for family shorthand, I guess,” Caroline said.

The game proceeded much the way it had begun, with Lydia and Kitty making guesses that were as off-color as they were inaccurate; when the answer was
The Sound of Music,
they shouted, “Hemorrhoids!” and “Blow job!”; for Dwight Eisenhower, “Dildo!” and “Threesome!” Her younger sisters’ vulgarity was not a surprise to Liz; indeed, she herself, more than Jane or Mary, could enjoy a dirty joke. However, the difference between Liz and her youngest sisters was their lack of deference to context. Among near strangers, Liz would never have been so artlessly, fearlessly crude. But Kitty and Lydia were always themselves, in a way Liz found both appalling and admirable. They would discuss pubic hair at the dinner table, text in church, refer as unabashedly to their hangovers as Liz would have to a stubbed toe. Perhaps, Liz thought, their nonchalance about judgment or consequence reflected the greater leniency Mr. and Mrs. Bennet had shown them; their parents had, when Liz and Jane were children and teenagers, still been concerned with bedtimes and then curfews, with grades and chores and thank-you notes. Whereas on a recent afternoon, when Liz had asked Lydia if she had any stationery Liz could use to belatedly write to a publicist who’d taken her to lunch in New York the week Mr. Bennet had fallen ill, Lydia had said she didn’t own stationery. “Then how do you thank people?” Liz asked, and Lydia said, “For what?”

But the aspect of Lydia and Kitty’s crassness most noteworthy to Liz was their lack of concern that it would adhere to them. They were such pretty girls, with long blond hair, like Jane’s—Liz and Mary were brunettes—and their bodies, per their dedication to CrossFit, were superbly toned. Plus, they were
young
still, their skin creamy, their eyes bright, no matter how late they returned home on how many nights. Did they not wonder if shouting about dingleberries might in some way detract from their dewy beauty, conjuring an incompatibly, uncomplimentarily vivid image in audiences’ heads? It appeared they did not.

Yet even as Liz felt gripped by embarrassment, she also felt embarrassment’s opposite, a liberating kind of resignation. Her sisters were people who never passed up an opportunity to talk about sex, shit, or combinations thereof; if her family horrified Darcy and Caroline, so be it. It was mostly for Jane that she felt regret, should the evening compromise Chip’s impression of her.

It was during the third round of the game, on Jane’s turn, when the indecency reached its apotheosis. The clue, as it turned out, was “Jingle Bells,” yet, with great enthusiasm, Lydia kept repeating, “Alabama Hot Pocket! Alabama Hot Pocket!” Liz ignored her, and together she and Mary ultimately guessed the answer, but after the turn was finished, Stephen said, “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

Lydia and Kitty dissolved into laughter. Liz stood. “Does anyone need another drink?”

Stephen said to Lydia, “Whisper it in my ear?”

“Oh, please,” Charlotte said. “No secrets. Just say it.”

Liz rolled her eyes at Lydia and Kitty as she passed them en route to the kitchen; once there, after opening a new bottle of wine and refilling her glass, she checked her phone. She’d received no interesting emails and no texts at all.
Sporty
was shipping on Monday, so she knew Jasper would be working most of the weekend.

“I think Caroline is having the cabernet,” a male voice said. “Does that sound right?”

When Liz looked up, Darcy had entered the kitchen and was standing at the counter holding two open bottles side by side.

“I have no idea.” Liz watched as he poured, then she said, “Actually, she must have been drinking the other one, because I just opened that. Here.” Liz took a step forward and reached for the glass Darcy was holding; in one long slug, she finished its contents. When the maroon liquid was gone, she returned the glass to the counter. “Problem solved.”

“That glass was mine,” Darcy said.

“Oops,” Liz said. “Are you worried about my B-minus Cincinnati germs?”

After Darcy refilled the same glass, he looked at her, took a sip, and said, without smiling, “I have confidence in my immune system.” As he poured from the other bottle into Caroline’s glass, he said, “You might recall that it was you yourself, not I, who assigned you a grade of B-minus.”

“I was empathizing with your plight—looking at the world from your perspective.”

“I see.” Everything about him—every inflection of his voice, every expression he made—oozed superciliousness.

“For what it’s worth, my sisters aren’t representative of all people from Cincinnati,” Liz said. “Lydia and Kitty happen to have exceptionally bad manners.”

“I’m well aware that your sisters have exceptionally bad manners,” Darcy said, and Liz immediately regretted her quasi-apology.

She said, “So where are you from that’s so superior to here?”

“I grew up outside San Francisco. Though again, you’re putting words in my mouth—I never said
superior
.”

“Close enough,” Liz said. “And, you know, just for the record, whatever it is you think about the people here, your opinion says more about you than the city. Because I’m not sure what you think other places have that we don’t, but fifteen-dollar cocktails made with locally grown ingredients? We’ve got them. Indie bands? Got them. Reiki healers? We’ve got those, too. Maybe you have to search a little harder, but all that’s here, and so is lots of other stuff, like beautiful old houses that are completely affordable and an awesome riverfront park and nationally ranked sports teams and easy commutes and a mix of races and ethnicities. You can have a really high quality of life in Cincinnati.”

This was without question the most passionate paean to her hometown Liz had ever delivered—in fact, she wasn’t certain she believed all of it—but Darcy simply said, “You’re lucky to be so enthusiastic about the place you live.”

“Oh, I don’t live here,” Liz said. “I live in New York.”

At this, Darcy did something she hadn’t previously seen: He smiled.

“It’s not that I
wouldn’t
live here,” she said quickly, though she wasn’t sure this was true, either. “It’s just that it doesn’t make sense with my job. I’m a writer for
Mascara
magazine, but I came back because my dad had heart surgery.”

“A bypass?”

Liz nodded. “He’s doing well.” Reflexively, she knocked on a wooden cabinet.

“Did he have it done at Christ?” Liz nodded again, and Darcy said, “Their cardiothoracic department is good.”

“Are you fermenting the grapes yourself?” someone said then, and both Liz and Darcy turned to see Caroline. “You’ve seriously been in here for twenty minutes,” Caroline said, and beneath her breezy tone, Liz heard an unmistakable territoriality. How convenient, Liz thought, that Caroline’s managerial obligations had brought her to Cincinnati.

“Liz was just telling me that she’s a writer for a magazine,” Darcy said. “
Mascara,
you said?”

“Oh, that’s funny,” Caroline said. “Do you write articles like ‘Twenty Tips to Be a Tiger in the Sack’?”

“That’s not
Mascara,
” Liz said.

“I’m over Charades,” Caroline said to Darcy. “Want to get out of here?”

More loudly, Liz said, “I know what magazine you’re thinking of, and it’s not
Mascara.
We write about sex, of course, but not in a cheesy way.”

Caroline glanced at Liz. “You what?”

“
Mascara
focuses on serious issues,” Liz said. “I went to Saudi Arabia last year for a feature on gender relations in the Middle East.”

There was something challenging, or weirdly accusatory, in Caroline’s tone as she said, “Did you have to cover your hair?”

“I wore an
abaya
and a head scarf in public,” Liz said.

Caroline smiled faintly. “Aren’t you the world traveler.” Her focus reverted to Darcy as she said, “Charlotte is talking about ordering food, but I’d rather just leave.”

“We can go,” Darcy said.

Charades hadn’t concluded, Liz was pretty sure, though she wasn’t about to insist on extending the game.

Darcy turned toward her. “I’d suggest that the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce hire you, but I guess it’d be a long commute.”

He and Caroline were almost out of the kitchen when Liz said, “Did you just make a joke? I hadn’t realized you had a sense of humor.”

NEITHER MR. NOR
Mrs. Bennet visited the third floor with any regularity, which was why Liz was mildly surprised, while working at her desk, to see her mother standing in the threshold of her room. Mrs. Bennet held out a small cardboard box, its top flaps sticking up. Her tone was unapologetic as she said, “I thought this was for me.”

Several times a day, the doorbell of the Tudor rang, and it was usually either a family friend bearing a casserole or baked goods intended to bring comfort during Mr. Bennet’s recovery or else a FedEx or UPS delivery. About three-quarters of the deliveries were intended for Mrs. Bennet—they accumulated, often unopened, in the front hall and the dining room—and the rest were assorted products and media kits sent to Liz at
Mascara
by publicists and forwarded by the magazine: diet protein powder and samples from celebrity sock lines, forthcoming tell-alls, new kinds of lip gloss.

“Thanks.” Liz stood and took the box.

With a certain ostentatiousness, Mrs. Bennet said, “I have no idea who it’s from.” As her mother turned and walked away, Liz saw that the label featured the logo of and address for
Sporty,
with Jasper’s first and last names above the logo in entirely legible handwriting. Reaching into the box, Liz pushed aside tissue paper to reveal a piece of stationery with the
Sporty
letterhead on which Jasper had scrawled
THINKING OF YOU!
Beneath the paper were a bright red sheer teddy and thong underwear in a matching hue. The items, which presumably would have been flimsy even if well-made, were clearly cheap, which didn’t preclude them from holding a semi-ridiculous allure offset by the humiliating possibility that they had been examined by her mother. Or, thought Liz, the humiliating certainty. But if Mrs. Bennet was not going to ask Liz about the gift, Liz would not offer any explanation.

She called Jasper on her cellphone, and when he answered, she said, “My mom opened your package. She said to compliment you on your discretion and elegant taste.”

Jasper laughed. “You think she knows that opening someone else’s mail is a federal offense? Hey, word on the street is that Noah Trager is being shit-canned later this week. Don’t you think I’d make a good editor in chief of
Dude
?”

“Actually, you would.”

“Edward van Pallandt is co-hosting that benefit tonight for the Burmese dissident. The tickets are sold out, but I’ll bet I can get in. You think I’m jumping the gun if I go and mention my interest in
Dude
to van Pallandt?”