Chapter Three
Three
“Have you tried bleach?” Margot calls from her reclined position atop a pool float.
Her head is pounding, the sun casting bright cobweb patterns through her eyelids.
She flops an arm to the side and allows her fingers to graze the water’s cool surface, quivering blue and gold.
She really shouldn’t have drunk so much last night, but she didn’t know that Tony Curtis would show, and he’s always a devil with the Gibsons.
She paddles her way to the ladder, pulls herself out of the water and stands for a while, allowing the day’s molten heat to dry her limbs.
By her toes, a tiny salamander idles, licks its eye.
The air is replete with heat-woozy honeysuckle and a chemical whiff of chlorine.
The kitchen doors have been pulled wide, and the tinny sounds of the Beatles leak out from the radio.
“Paperback Writer.” She hates that cutesy song.
She wraps a towel around her waist, sits, wonders if someone might fetch her some Tylenol if she looks pathetic enough.
“She’s right,” says Elsie. “Lipstick should shift with bleach. Just soak it, hang it on the line. It’ll dry in no time.”
“Kids, stay where I can see you!” Beverley hollers suddenly.
Margot’s head snaps up with a crick. Benjamin and Audrey, who have been chasing each other relentlessly around the lawn, freeze and nod dumbly at their mother.
“I really don’t think I should be airing my dirty laundry for the neighbors.
” Bev turns back to them, adjusting the straps of her polka-dot one-piece. “It’s not a good look for me.”
“Honey, I’d be more worried about that creep at number forty-four ogling your underwear.” Margot pulls a copy of the LA Times from her purse and rests her sunglasses on the top of her head.
“That’s not nice.” Elsie’s British accent barbs the admonishment. “We don’t judge people like that.”
“We do if they are creeps,” Margot replies, overly loudly, turning the pages of the newspaper. “That’s when we do judge, Elsie.”
Margot glances at Beverley, hoping for a laugh, but her friend seems distracted, probably thinking about what happened at the gala last night.
She was so nervous in the run-up to it. In fact, Bev’s been nervous about everything of late.
She wasn’t jittery like this when they met, four years ago.
When Margot first laid eyes on Beverley, she’d felt a stab of jealousy.
Bev was younger than her, but that wasn’t really the issue.
She was also beautiful, with that maddening sort of beauty that just seems to happen.
Beverley didn’t even need to try. Her whole family looked like something from the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal; it was all too easy to picture them gathered at a bowling alley or slurping through straws at a malt shop.
Margot worked hard on her own appearance—getting her hair set, wearing makeup, investing in the expensive face creams she’d heard Liz Taylor used.
It was a cultivation, a tending to a garden that could so very easily turn.
Bev had baggage, sure, and it extended way beyond the fact that her husband was a killer.
Margot had clocked it a mile off: daddy issues, the need for a man to control her.
That was why, Margot knew, Bev was most rattled by her husband’s being put behind bars.
Never mind what he did to that girl with a fire poker.
There was now no one left to tell her what to do.
When Margot and Elsie arrived at her house a couple of hours ago, Bev had told them that things had wound down early at the gala; a bunch of officers had been called back to their precinct because a body had been discovered nearby.
Margot should ask more questions, but she’s keen not to dwell on corpses today—not with this hangover.
“Jesus, I’m melting.” She pours more mint julep from the jug, pokes at it with the swizzle stick and then downs it in three open-throated gulps. She glances at Bev again, sighs.
“You still thinking about last night?” She’ll indulge her. “It sounds like you did a great job.”
“I should never have done it.” Bev shakes her head, lips tight. “All that attention. All that gossip. The neighbors have all been talking about it, about us—I know it.”
“Well, if we did what everyone thought we should do, Bev, we’d be spending the rest of our days prostrate in church.”
Margot has never felt guilty about what her husband did. What was guilt but a useless artifact from the past? She reaches for the cocktail jug and pours herself another large measure. “I will not go gentle into that good night!” she cries as she pours.
The radio announcer signals the lunchtime news bulletin, and Margot notices Beverley shift to hear it better.
“And screw the neighbors. Who cares if people gossip?” Margot continues over the headlines. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Do they know who we are?” Elsie asks, pulling her shawl around her shoulders. “The neighbors?”
“They probably think we’re some sort of fabulous divorcées club.” Margot reaches for the sun lotion and squirts it across her chest.
“More like a survivors’ club,” says Elsie.
“What? That’s depressing.” Beverley frowns.
“Exactly. Stop that. I don’t want to be depressed,” says Margot, lighting a cigarette. “In fact, I want to make margaritas. Beverley, where’s your salt?” She stands, tosses the newspaper onto the table.
“Most men who kill murder their wives or partners,” Elsie continues. “We’re still here, so technically we are survivors.”
Margot rolls her eyes.
“We are,” Elsie urges. “We’re victims in all this, too. Don’t forget that.”
“Sorry, but this”—Margot circles the air in front of her face with a finger—“is not what a victim looks like.”
Elsie huffs loudly. She always was a prude. They’d met only at Beverley’s request. Bev and Elsie had been exchanging letters about their husbands for months, and Beverley thought it would do Margot good to meet someone else in the same situation as theirs.
It is true, though. Criminals’ wives—victims of their husbands’ indiscretions—sometimes had a certain look.
Margot could see it in newspaper articles and rolling coverage on the TV.
Especially those wives who loyally followed their husbands to court, adamant that their Joe/Bob/Frank could never be responsible for such abominable acts.
He was such a kind man, they’d parrot in interviews after trials that laid out in scrupulous, incontestable detail how their husbands had slaughtered multiple people. He never raised a fist at home.
“We’re not simpering wives. We learned the truth; we got mad; we moved on,” says Margot.
“Is this really moving on?” Beverley asks doubtfully. “I just had to relive everything in front of a roomful of cops.”
“Well, I’m drinking cocktails at two thirty in the afternoon. I’ve moved on,” Margot replies.
“I made melon balls.” Elsie shrugs weakly.
—
When the air has turned lilac, the amber trails of the fading sun smearing across the skyline, Margot helps Beverley clear up in the kitchen.
The children are in bed and Elsie has left for the drive back to Burbank, but the TV’s still on in the living room, Ronald Reagan’s voice, bemoaning beatniks and radicals, filtering through the walls.
“Did you decide what to do about the anniversary, by the way?” Margot asks, tightening an apron covered in little brown rabbits around her waist. “Five years—that’s a milestone, right?”
“What did you do for yours?” Beverley asks, wiping her hands on a dishcloth before tossing it on the mint-green countertop. Behind her, the matching refrigerator, covered in children’s artwork, emits a faltering hum.
It felt like both minutes and years since the truth about Margot’s husband, Stephen, had come out. She turns and leans back against the sink, pulling on yellow rubber gloves, a cigarette clasped between her teeth. “Drank about ten Manhattans and passed out on the couch.”
“Margot…”
“All right, all right. I went to church.”
There is a short silence.
“Margot Green! Church?”
Margot knows she does not belong at church. She is not church. She is Hollywood mansions and fuchsia chiffon. But the truth is, she hadn’t known what to do when five years rolled round for her, either.
“Hated every second of it, of course,” Margot continues, changing her mind about the hideous apron and unlacing it with a tug. “But that was years ago now.” She tosses the apron on the counter and waves a hand dismissively after it. “Just do whatever feels right—even if that’s nothing.”
“Well, there is something.”
Margot pauses, intrigued.
Beverley reaches behind the bread bin and pulls out an envelope. “I got this. Someone left it on my windshield last night, after the gala.”
Margot pulls off the gloves, reaches for the envelope and reads.
“They want you to go on TV?” She looks up from the letter. “For the anniversary?”
“Just a local network. Nothing major.”
“That is major. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to ignore it, obviously.” Beverley seems to have rehearsed the answer. “I can’t go on television. I barely got through last night.”
Margot tucks the letter back into the envelope and studies her friend. “You know you don’t have to do this, Bev—any of it.”
“What do you mean?” Bev’s hand goes to her neck, a habit of hers.
“The radio’s been on all day. The TV, too. And your scrapbook, with all the news stuff…” Margot knows Beverley keeps every newspaper article she comes across about crime, kidnapped women, shithead husbands…
“I don’t want to miss anything important.”
“Right. But you do know you are not personally responsible for the safety of other women just because of what your husband did, don’t you?” Margot fixes her eye. “It’s not your fault.”
Beverley briefly looks taken aback, and then the radio flicks over to the evening news. Margot sees her straighten to attention once more. It must be exhausting to be so hyperaware all the time.
“We cannot keep bad people from doing bad things.”
Bev blinks up at her, blue eyes wide, clear and determined. “Can’t we?”