Among the older set, Anise’s neighbor and best friend Paula and her faithless husband, the cute French bond trader Henri, had split up. Again. Paula was coming, naturally, but everyone wondered if Henri might just turn up too, since he had always been invited before. They were trying to decide what to do about it if he did. The ugly next-door neighbors were already there, of course. They didn’t have a life of their own, with their ramshackle house and ghastly, troubled children—they virtually lived through Anise and Thom.
As they drove from the station, Bess went on and on, pausing only to admire Megan’s low-cut gleaming dress and her newly botoxed forehead that matched Bess’s own. Megan listened, looking out the car window, drinking in the snowy town. Bess, who had grown up in nearby Ardmore, was nonchalant, but it still took Megan’s breath away. Philly’s best address. One of the East Coast’s most exclusive moneyed enclaves. The fabled Main Line.
Bess and Megan were both a little over forty, although each admitted only to thirty. Bess was lovely, blond like all the Daggers, smooth-skinned, perfectly made up, dressed in vintage Versace. Megan herself was still quite attractive, no matter what the old hag had said, with her gym-toned body, her chic auburn shag, her bronze sheath, her Judith Lieber lioness minaudiere.
Bess worked in corporate marketing, Megan in Philadelphia’s top ad agency. They both made good money, lived well, took care of themselves. They didn’t really date anymore—there were no straight, single, solvent men between forty and sixty-five left in Philly, as everyone very well knew—but they went out with each other or various friends and colleagues several nights a week, and frequently drank a bit too much.
At New Year’s, though, Megan knew how to pace herself. She had a system. You start slow, have plenty of hors d’oeuvres, enough dinner to count, and only drink champagne. Her first flute was handed to her by Anise, who greeted them at the door. “My other sister,” she declared as she always did, hugging Meg warmly. “You look gorgeous, darling.”
It was a greeting that never failed to delight Megan, herself an only child of cold, judgmental parents, sparing in their love and praise. As Meg was trading her boots for high-heeled sling-backs, Michelle, the third blond Dagger sister, swept her up in yet another bear hug. Laughing, Meg held her champagne aloft with difficulty to avoid a spill. She fairly purred with pleasure.
“Sisters,” Meg murmured. “The divine Dagger sisters.”
Thom also hugged her and took her overnight bag up to a guest room he called “your room,” which made her laugh even more. If only it were true.
As the party kicked in, she got buzzed enough to enjoy herself. She remained gracious in the presence of the unendurable ugly neighbors, listening to the sad story of their surly daughter’s latest drug-fueled escapade.
Meg exchanged air kisses with Paula and tolerated her whining about her faithless French husband, the delicious Henri. And then there he was. Henri. He did indeed show up—how dare he?
There was a breathless pause as every conversation stopped. Then Anise strolled over and, after the briefest moment, standing before him—would she kiss him or slap him—kissed him on both cheeks. “Henri.”
“Chère Anise,” Henri murmured, holding her hand to his lips. He was darkly handsome with his perfect stubble, kissable mouth, and single diamond earring. The Dagger sisters couldn’t resist him. He enhanced their blond beauty with his own dark European charm. He took a flute of champagne and prowled around the party, providing titillation and frissons of mock horror wherever he circulated. He looked every bit the dissipated Eurotrash he was, lured back, no doubt, by the realization that all the money was from Paula’s family and was still in Paula’s name.
Megan gave a warm hug to Anise’s lackluster daughter Celia and shook hands with her tall, damp-palmed boyfriend. Then she made a point of bonding with the more beautiful daughter Carrie and her college friend Lulu, a blond look-alike from Boston. Meg prided herself on remaining hip—dropping pop culture references and pertinent song lyrics from the latest Grammy winners and catchphrases from hip TV shows like Gossip Girl.
Carrie, tall and glamourous, was particularly striking tonight in a low-cut, short, creamy silk Grecian tunic, which showed off her considerable cleavage and long, tan legs. With her father’s lanky grace and the Dagger blond beauty, Carrie was a remarkable girl and she had always loved Megan. Her friend Lulu, every bit her match, wore a white angora minidress, which had to have been planned to coordinate with her friend.
The college kids were amused by Megan and stayed with her for some time, laughing and making sly comments about the other guests before trailing down to the large family room to warm up the karaoke machine for later. Megan smiled with satisfaction. The Daggers were a large, close-knit WASP clan so unlike Meg’s own small, disaffected, heathen brood. She adored them all and would do anything for them, anything at all.
Meg got some more champagne from the jeroboam of Moët that Michelle Dagger’s brash alcoholic husband insisted on bringing every year. He never tired of hearing the women coo and squeal about how big it was. Meg never tired of drinking good champagne so she endured his usual size-really-matters jokes with aplomb.
Then came the scream. Because Meg observed her stringent party regimen, she was sober, or sober enough, to respond quickly when she heard it. She was the first to arrive in the doorway of the darkened den off the living room, lit only by Christmas lights and candles and typically functioning as a sin bin for guests’ brief, illicit, champagne-fueled encounters.
Meg stopped abruptly in the doorway, causing other party guests to pile up behind her. Anise Dagger was sitting in the center of a velvet-upholstered sofa, her tall, gorgeous daughter Carrie sprawled, on her back, over Anise’s lap, head dangling like a broken doll. Carrie’s long bare arms and legs hung on either side of her mother. Anise held her and looked up at Meg with an expression of pure anguish.
It took a minute to register the tableau, as still and composed as any Renaissance sculpture. Then Meg 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 Pietà,” Meg whispered involuntarily, and guests behind her took up the phrase and repeated it in low tones. Bess pushed past Meg and crouched before her sister and her stricken niece.
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 th
ird 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 Pietà” repeated a number of times. She wished she’d never said it.
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, “After love, after love, after love, after love.” It was a tough act to follow.
Carrie’s college friend Lulu took up the challenge with an overheated version of Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy.” Meg thought she saw something smug and proprietary in Henri’s dark admiring look as he watched the young woman shimmy up and down the structural pole that pierced the makeshift dance floor like a ship’s mast.
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. “I know I’ve been a real bad girl,” she cooed as suggestively as Gwen ever did. She gave a nod of sympathy to Paula, who was disheveled after her clinch with her husband, but who nevertheless looked pleased with herself.
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. “I’m bringing sexy back. Just like a heart attack.”
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 surreptitiously collecting glasses and ferrying them to the kitchen to be tucked into the capacious dishwasher.
Meg kept circulating, watching, stopping only occasionally, like some restless voyager searching for home.
It must have been four a.m. when a scream again rent the air, parting the haze of candle smoke, potpourri, and the mild fug of sweating, tired revelers. Again, Meg reacted, galvanized, as though she had somehow known it was coming.
Again, she drew up short at the doorway to the dimly lit den, adrenaline making her feel suddenly sober. Anise was sitting as before in the center of the velvet sofa, surrounded by candles and Christmas lights, her anguish evident on her lovely face. Again, the tall, gorgeous young woman was draped across her lap, head dangling, blond hair streaming across her face, arms and legs hanging limply.
Meg stepped into the room. It was the same as before, but also completely different. She knew that this time it was Anise who had screamed, not her daughter. Anise howled again, more animal moan than scream.
This time the doll was really broken. A thread of red blood trailed from the corner of her mouth. Anise shifted her grip, almost as if to offer the girl to Megan. The girl’s head lolled grotesquely and her hair spilled to one side.
Megan gasped, realizing that it was not Carrie who Anise held, but Carrie’s college friend Lulu. And Lulu was quite, quite dead.
Anise’s face, pale and ravaged by a terrible grief, told Megan, even without a word, that Anise thought the girl across her lap was her beloved daughter.
“Oh no, Anise. It’s not Carrie. See?” Meg knelt beside her, her impulse to curb Anise’s dreadful suffering blotting out everything, even the awfulness of Lulu’s death. “See?” She touched the girl’s head, sickeningly wobbly on her neck, brushing aside the razor-cut blond shag. Anise, evidently in shock and not far from fainting, slowly, slowly looked down. She slowly, slowly focused her gaze of bottomless pity and terror on the dead girl’s ghastly, waxen face.
Anise stood up abruptly, unceremoniously dumping Lulu’s corpse onto Megan. Meg toppled backward, panicked, scrambling to right herself and get out from under the dead girl, a primitive fear kicking in.
Strong hands helped Meg. Bess pulled her up and steadied her. Thom picked up the girl’s body and laid it tenderly on the sofa where Anise had been sitting. He took a minute to straighten the clothes, pulling down the short angora dress, putting the arms straight at her sides, tilting the head, lolling on the broken neck, so that the thread of blood did not mar the upholstery.
Thom then turned to Anise, but she was already moving, staggering out of the room, shouldering aside anyone in her way, looking for her daughter. Bess followed close behind her.
Meg registered all these details as pandemonium broke out around her. Guests, summoned by Anise’s howls but slowed by alcohol, appeared in the doorway, reacting to the tragedy. Megan heard weeping, at least one person vomiting, someone calling 911. She turned to Thom.
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