Little Bitty Lies

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Hon thrives on rudeness,” Katharine said. “He’s Gena’s father. She owns the place. Hon thinks everybody is out to cheat them. So if you’re not rude, you’ll never get your nails done on time. It’s expected.”

  “Who are Ruby and Pearl?” Mary Bliss asked.

  Katharine waved her hand. “They say they’re Gena’s cousins. I don’t think those are their real names, but who cares? Wait ’til you get your sea-salt rubdown. You’ll swear you’re having an orgasm.”

  “Katharine!” Mary Bliss said.

  Hon reappeared with two Vietnamese women in tow, both dressed in pale-pink Spa Serenity jumpsuits. One was tiny, no bigger than an American preschooler. The other was muscular and had a blonde crew cut and a nose ring.

  “Kaffrin,” cooed the butch one.

  “Ruby!” Katharine exclaimed. She enveloped the crew-cut woman in an expansive hug, saying a few words in Vietnamese.

  “Hello,” Mary Bliss said, extending a hand to the other woman. “I’m Mary Bliss.”

  Pearl took her index finger, spit on it, and rubbed it across Mary Bliss’s forehead. “Oh yeah. You the one with the eyebrow. Kaffrin tell us. You come.”

  Before she could protest, Mary Bliss had been wrapped in a pink duster and was lying back in a chair, having her scalp massaged with something that smelled like a combination of mango and Copper-tone suntan lotion. It felt heavenly. Maybe Katharine was right. Maybe she could use a little harmless pampering.

  Five minutes later, another Vietnamese woman dressed in a Spa Serenity jumpsuit entered the mirrored cubicle where Mary Bliss had been seated. This woman was also petite, but she had waist-length black hair and wore four-inch stiletto heels.

  “This Gena,” Pearl said.

  Gena circled the chair three times, yanking at strands of Mary Bliss’s damp hair and clucking her tongue in deep disapproval. She spoke to Pearl in rapid-fire Vietnamese. Pearl nodded several times, and Gena disappeared.

  “What did she say?” Mary Bliss asked.

  Pearl sighed. “She never see hair the color of yours before. Who do that to you?”

  Mary Bliss stiffened. “I do my own hair color. I always have.”

  Pearl shook her head. “You got job?”

  “I’m a schoolteacher,” Mary Bliss said.

  “Good,” Pearl said approvingly. “You stick to kids. Let Pearl do hair color. Okay?”

  A few minutes later Gena was back, holding a plastic bottle of bright-orange goo in her plastic-gloved hands.

  “What’s that?” Mary Bliss asked.

  “New color,” Pearl said, beaming. “Gena invent for you.”

  Gena lunged at her and started squirting the dye on Mary Bliss’s scalp.

  “Wait,” Mary Bliss said, ducking, trying to fend off the dye bottle. “I don’t want a new color. I like my own color. Miss Clairol. Luxe Lynx.”

  “Lynx stinks,” Pearl opined. “You like this. Wait and see.”

  It was too late. Gena had already doused her head with the dye and was vigorously working it into her hair, muttering dire words in Vietnamese.

  “What color is this?” Mary Bliss asked. “It looks awfully orange.”

  Gena said something else.

  “She call it Sunflower,” Pearl said, grinning broadly. “She invent for you. Big honor.”

  “Sunflowers are yellow,” Mary Bliss said. “I’m a brunette. I can’t have yellow hair.”

  “Blonde,” Gena said, speaking her first words of English. “You a born blonde.”

  Mary Bliss shut her eyes. She was going to be blonde. A year ago she would have fainted at the suggestion. But too much had happened. Maybe it was time to go with the flow.

  Half an hour later, she was seated under a massive hair dryer in the communal dryer room. The room was lined with a dozen dryers, and each of them held a pink-clad woman in its clasp.

  She was given a magazine and a glass of chardonnay. She took a sip and had begun to doze off when she felt something jabbing her in the eye.

  She sat up. Pearl was squatting before her, brandishing what looked like a Popsicle stick full of Silly Putty.

  “Now what?” Mary Bliss asked.

  “First wax, then dye,” Pearl said. “No more unibrow. No more lynx.”

  Go with it, Mary Bliss told herself. She took another sip of the chardonnay. Pearl continued to poke at her eyebrows with the applicator of hot wax. After a while she gently laid little strips of fabric over the wax and patted them into place. She could get used to this, Mary Bliss told herself.

  Suddenly, Pearl grimaced and yanked the fabric.

  “Owww!” Mary Bliss screamed. Her flesh was being ripped from her face by this Vietnamese maniac.

  The other dryer women looked up, smiled, then looked back down at their issues of Vogue and Architectural Digest.

  “That hurt,” Mary Bliss whined.

  Pearl smiled, nodded, and pointed to a sign at the front of the room. It was written in Asian symbols.

  “What’s it mean?” Mary Bliss asked.

  “Beauty is pain. Pain is beauty.”

  61

  “Oh. My. Gawd.”

  Katharine blinked several times. She made Mary Bliss twirl around so that she could get the full effect. Then she made all the dryer women look too.

  “Stunning,” was Katharine’s verdict.

  “Perfect.” The pink-clad dryer women put down their magazines and gave Mary Bliss polite applause, using only the palms of their hands so as not to smudge their manicures.

  “Not so bad,” Pearl said, lifting up a lock of Katharine’s sunflower-hued hair. “Better than brown. Huh?”

  Mary Bliss herself was speechless. She did not recognize the woman in the mirror. Her hair was a warm-toned blonde, not yellow at all. It had been cut and softly feathered so that it hugged her head, and she had new wispy bangs that brushed the tops of her newly arched eyebrows. The last time she had bangs she was seven years old. Pearl had insisted on a new hot-pink lipstick color to go with the sunflower. The lipstick, which came in a shiny black phallic-looking tube, was called Hysteria.

  Pearl made Mary Bliss hand over her old lipstick, the one she’d worn for the past seven years. “Look like baby food,” Pearl pronounced, flipping it into a trash can.

  “Well?” Katharine was waiting for her toenails to dry. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary Bliss said slowly. “I guess I’m shell-shocked. It’s not what I expected.”

  “You were attractive before,” Katharine said. “In a schoolteacherish kind of way. Now you’re a bombshell. You know that, right? You’re a bona fide bombshell. You look like somebody’s second wife.”

  “I feel like somebody’s second wife,” Mary Bliss admitted. She was staring down at the long acrylic nails Pearl had painstakingly applied to her own bitten-down fingernails. The new nails were slightly squared, and painted a pale seashell pink that made her hands look long and tanned and elegant.

  “I feel like I should be smoking a cigarette or drinking a martini, or doing something…naughty,” Mary Bliss said, a note of wonder in her voice.

  “Not a martini, sweetie, a cosmopolitan,” Katharine said kindly. “And that’s the whole idea. Starting tonight, you are going to cut loose. And I’m not just talking about a new lipstick color. Remember back at the beginning of the summer? You made me run through the sprinkler with you? And you said we were being baptized. A whole new you. Well, I’ll grant it, you’ve changed on the inside. You’ve boldly gone where you never dreamed of going before. But your exterior was holding you back. All we’ve done today is finish the transformation. It’s the all-new, improved Mary Bliss McGowan.”

  “You think?” Mary Bliss asked, blushing.

  “I know,” Katharine said firmly. She stood up and heel-walked over to the reception desk, where Hon was again screaming into the cell phone. She reached into the pocket of her smock and brought out a platinum American Express card.

  She waved it under Hon’s nose until
he looked up.

  “Hon!” she yelled. “Get off the phone!”

  62

  Mary Bliss’s hands shook as she fastened the single strand of fake freshwater pearls around her neck. She had refused Katharine’s offer of a new outfit. Her pink spaghetti-strap sundress was only two years old, and she’d never worn it to a club function before. It would be just fine. She would be just fine.

  If only.

  If only her heart weren’t racing, and her mouth weren’t cotton-dry. Her hands wouldn’t quit shaking and she kept having to pee every fifteen minutes. All the women in Mary Bliss’s mama’s family had nervous bladders.

  High-strung, her mama had called her. Right now she felt like a live electric wire was running the length of her body. She could generate power for all of northeast Georgia with the electricity running through her body right now.

  “Mom?”

  Mary Bliss turned slowly away from her dressing table. Erin stood in the doorway of her bedroom, wide-eyed.

  “What do you think?” Mary Bliss asked, fluttering her eyelashes in what she hoped was a comic effect.

  “What have you done to yourself?” Erin asked. “Now you’re a blonde? Oh my God, what is going on with you?”

  “Nothing,” Mary Bliss said. “It’s just hair color, honey. It’s a color wash. Nothing permanent. Don’t you like it?”

  “You’ve gone nuts,” Erin said. “I don’t even know who you are anymore. Why have you done this to yourself?”

  Mary Bliss felt a switch thrown. All the electricity stopped flowing. She felt cold and old again. Suddenly, the Sunflower had faded and the Luxe Lynx was back. Pearl was right. Lynx did stink.

  “I wanted a little change,” she said quietly. “We’ve gone through so much this summer. I was tired of looking at the same old me.”

  “Well, I wasn’t,” Erin said hotly. “Did you ever think of that? I liked the old you. I liked having a mother and a father, and a normal life and a normal family. But you’ve gone and fucked that all up, haven’t you?”

  Mary Bliss stood up and walked over to Erin, to hold her, to reassure her that they were still family. But Erin backed away from her.

  “And why are you all dressed up like this?” Erin asked. “Like some kind of, of, hooker or something? Where do you think you’re going?”

  What was this, Mary Bliss wondered. Why was she being interrogated like a child, like a criminal, by her own daughter?

  “I’m going to the dance at the country club,” she said, trying to sound dignified. “You’ve seen this dress before. It’s two years old. And I don’t think it’s very nice of you to talk to me like this.”

  “Nice?” Erin shrieked. “Oh my God. Nice? Who are you going to the dance with? Don’t tell me you’ve hooked up with somebody. Oh my God. Don’t tell me you have a date.”

  “I’m going with a friend,” Mary Bliss said. “It’s not really a date. His name is Matt Hayslip. He lives in the Oaks. We’re going to ride to the dance with Katharine and Charlie. It’s perfectly innocent.”

  “You’ve hooked up with somebody,” Erin cried, running her hands through her hair until it stood on end. “You’ve hooked up with an Oakie. I can’t believe it. You fuckin’ give me all moral outrage when you find out I’m having sex, then you fuckin’ run around like a damn slut!”

  “Erin,” Mary Bliss said, grasping her daughter’s arm. “Stop it. Stop it right now. I won’t have you talk to me this way. I’m your mother. And I won’t have it.”

  “Oh. You won’t have it,” Erin said, her voice mocking. “You’ll have anything you like, won’t you? Meemaw was right. She said this is all a big act you’re putting on. She said Daddy left you because you weren’t sexy enough for him. Meemaw says she knows where Daddy really is. He’s got a girlfriend, and a boat and a beach house, and pretty soon he’s gonna send for me, and I’ll get the hell out of here. I’ll get the hell away from you!”

  “Erin!” Mary Bliss raised her hand to slap her daughter, but she wasn’t fast enough. Her daughter was gone. Running down the stairs, down the hall. “I hate you,” she called to her mother. “I hate you.”

  Somehow, Mary Bliss stumbled downstairs to the phone. She called Katharine. “I’m not going,” she said when her friend picked up. “Call Matt for me, please, tell him I can’t talk right now. You explain it. He’ll understand.”

  “Understand what?” Katharine asked. “Charlie’s out getting the air conditioner running in the car to cool it down. We’re just leaving to come get you.”

  “It’s Erin,” Mary Bliss said. “We had another horrible fight. She was right. I don’t have any right to act like this. I’m a married woman.”

  “I’m not calling Matt,” Katharine said firmly. “I’m sorry, Mary Bliss, but your daughter is a spoiled little bitch. You shouldn’t have to apologize to her for having a life. You’ve sacrificed everything for her. Now it’s time for you to get on with your life.”

  “I can’t go,” Mary Bliss said. “I’m so upset, I’m shaking.”

  “You’re going,” Katharine said. “If I have to carry you there on my back. Now put on your lipstick and your boogie shoes. We’ll be there in five minutes.” She hung up.

  Mary Bliss didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So she did as she was told. But first she went out to the kitchen and polished off the rest of Katharine’s thermos of Bloody Marys.

  When the doorbell rang she was in the downstairs powder room, gargling with Listerine. The vodka seemed to have switched the current back on in her body, and she’d managed to apply a fresh coat of Hysteria to her lips.

  Matt stood in the doorway. He was wearing a pink Polo golf shirt, khaki slacks, and an aged white dinner jacket. He was holding a cellophane florists’ box out in front of him.

  He said what Katharine and Erin had said.

  “Oh my God.” But he was smiling as he said it. “Have you entered the witness protection program?”

  “Should I?”

  “Katharine told me you’d had a do-over,” he started.

  “Makeover,” Mary Bliss corrected him.

  “Whatever. Wow. I had no idea.”

  She blushed. “Do you like it?”

  “I’m getting used to it,” he said. “I like it a lot, I think.”

  She pointed at the box. “Are those for me?”

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “Something came over me. I thought, it’s a dance. I should get her a corsage. I called Katharine, and she said your dress was pink, so I should get something that goes with pink.”

  “How sweet.” She opened the box and found a bracelet of pale-pink roses nestled on a bed of white excelsior.

  “I love this shade of rose,” Mary Bliss said, fastening the corsage around her wrist. “I love roses, period. But now I feel bad because I don’t have a boutonniere for you.”

  “That’s okay,” Matt said. “I’m just glad you decided to come out tonight. Katharine told me you were pretty upset.”

  “I was,” she said. “I still am.” Her eyes lit on the shrub by the front door. It was still covered with gardenia blossoms. She reached down and picked the largest, freshest one on the bush.

  “Hold on a minute,” she said, disappearing back inside the house.

  When she came back a moment later, she was still carrying the florist’s box.

  “Hey!” Matt said. “I was afraid you’d changed your mind and decided to stay home.”

  “No,” she said, her voice level. She held out the box to Matt. “This is for you.”

  He lifted the homemade boutonniere from the box. “Great,” he said. “Where does it go? I haven’t worn one of these things since my wedding.”

  “Let me,” she said. And as she pinned the gardenia to the lapel of his dinner jacket, she noticed with surprise that her hands had stopped shaking. Her face was directly under Matt’s chin. He kissed the top of her head, nuzzled her neck a little.

  From behind them a car beeped its horn. Katharine leaned out the window of Charlie’s
Lincoln. “Get a room, for God’s sake,” she called.

  63

  They were standing by the bar, waiting for the men to bring them their drinks. Katharine nudged Mary Bliss. “Do you see who I see?”

  The Acorn ballroom at the country club was packed. The room was dimly lit to begin with, and tonight it seemed darker than usual, which Mary Bliss decided was a good thing.

  She scanned the room until her eyes lit on a beautiful strawberry blonde who was flirting with the deejay the club had hired to provide music for the dance. Mary Bliss hadn’t seen her in months. “Who? You mean Ava Grace Samford? I thought they were spending the summer up in Highlands this year.”

  “It’s not Ava Grace I’m talking about,” Katharine said. “You’re looking in the wrong direction. Look over there. Under that big bunch of silver balloons hanging by the ceiling.”

  Mary Bliss spotted the balloon bouquet. Directly beneath it she spotted Nancye Bowden, who was doing a wicked shimmy to “Louie Louie.” Nancy was wearing a strapless, ruched silver lamé sheath that reminded Mary Bliss of aluminum dryer vent hose. With every slither Nancy made, the bodice of her dress slipped a little further south, and her surprisingly full breasts were a little more exposed.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mary Bliss said, her jaw dropping open.

  “Can’t believe what?” Charlie asked, rejoining them with the drinks and Matt.

  “Nancye Bowden,” Katharine said.

  “Where?” Charlie asked. He knew all about Fair Oaks’s biggest summer scandal.

  “Check the balloons,” Katharine said.

  Charlie had found Nancye Bowden. “Literally,” he said dryly.

  “The woman in the silver dress?” Matt asked, handing Mary Bliss her glass of white wine. “I’ve seen her around town. What’s her name?”

  “Nancye Bowden,” Katharine said. “The town tramp. Will you look at that outfit she’s wearing? And those honkers which she is happily exposing to God and everybody? Isn’t that amazing?”