by Sarah Bird
I plaster on a glittering smile, pinch my cheeks, then ring the bell. Surrounded by chafing dishes and cans of Sterno, I force myself to forget all the times when I was greeted effusively as a cherished guest, a friend, an equal. No, let’s be honest; when I was married to Trey, when I was Mrs. Henry “Trey” Dix the Third, I was better than Kippie Lee, better than any of them. They sought me out, a treasured addition to the guest list. When asked, “Who’s coming?” my name would be the first one a hostess coyly dropped. Like many a divorcée before me, though, I learned to my eternal sorrow that it was never my name they were dropping.
It was the illustrious Dix family name with its magical White House links being dropped. And in Austin, Texas, in 2003, the third year of the reign of our former governor, it is all about White House links. Austin Republicans had suffered through more than thirty years since they’d last had a Texan in the White House. And that one had been a—shudder—Democrat. For three decades Rs had watched their city kowtow to every D who ever tossed a bluebonnet seed onto the side of a highway with Lady Bird. Now is their time to ride the glory train, and they are all highly determined to get their tickets punched.
Kippie Lee certainly is. Apparently, back in Midland, Laura Bush used to babysit for her. Or maybe Laura was her godmother or camp counselor, I can’t recall. Whatever the feeble connection with the First Lady, Kippie Lee has somehow managed to enshrine it in Xanadu and leverage them both into total social dominance of Pemberton Heights.
I ring the doorbell again and consider Kippie Lee’s dubious White House connections. Laura Bush’s true inner circle claims that since Kippie Lee wasn’t even born back when they were giving hand jobs in Midland, she is a rank pretender. That hasn’t slowed Miss Kip down. She and the coven cherish the few tenuous Bush connections they have and desperately seek out new ones. No one was sought more desperately than my ex, Trey Dix the Third, since the Dixes and the Bushes go way, way back. All the way back, in fact, to the Jurassic period when the petroleum that both their families’ fortunes were built on began forming. This meant that for the brief, shining duration of my marriage, I too was a White House connection and the Zero Three-ers cultivated me like a hothouse orchid.
My skin prickles as I wait at the front door, now more Jehovah’s Witness than hothouse orchid. I feel a laser beam of attention skitter across my back and turn to see who is staring at me. As usual, there are no actual human beings on the street other than a couple of yardmen. When I look up, however, up to my former home, Pemberton Palace, perched above the neighborhood majestic as a potentate on a throne, I find my former mother-in-law staring down at me. Peggy Biggs-Dix’s nickname, the Iron Chancellor, never seemed more apt. A bulldog in pearls and a summer frock, the sun glints off her iron-colored hair and the iron-colored lenses of the binoculars she holds to her eyes.
I feel her up there gloating and punch the doorbell furiously. Still no one arrives to rescue me. I press my ear to the door and hear furious whispering, most of it coming from Kippie Lee. But when Graciela, the live-in housekeeper, finally opens the door, the Kipster is nowhere in sight.
“Miss Blight, can you go to the back?”
“The back? The service entrance?” I am certain I’ve heard wrong. Kippie Lee was one of my stalwarts, one of the women I called my Flying Buttresses because they had supported me so solidly when my marriage crumbled. Actually, the marriage imploded more than crumbled. One day Trey and I are doing a mat Pilates class together, the next a lawyer, a lawyer, is telling me that my marriage is over. In the immediate aftermath of that bomb-shell, Kippie Lee poured endless glasses of Pinot Grigio and agreed that Trey was a Dix in more than last name.
And now this? Asked to use the service entrance?
There could be no more definitive signal that I have officially plummeted from Up-to Downstairs. I hide my shock and humiliation and chirp out with more pep than a Texarkana girl rushing Kappa Alpha Theta, “Not a prob!”
Feeling Peggy’s vulture gaze drilling into me, I drive the little minivan around to the back of Gigando Manse and consider the deep irony of my demotion to Downstairs: I was never really Upstairs. Not on paper where it mattered. Not after the Dix family’s team of carrion-eater lawyers slid that prenup under my pen.
The tears I will not allow to fall make Pemberton Palace look wobbly and long-ago, like something out of a misty fantasy. Fantasy has always been my stock-in-trade. It’s what I built two careers on: event coordination and photography. Some would say that my last incarnation as Trey’s bride was little more than a canny career move. All I have to say to those slanderers is: “Check out the prenup.” Would that I had been half as calculating as I am accused of being. And would that such calculations had occurred before I signed that damn prenup.
As I scuttle back and forth unloading foil-wrapped trays, flowers, and rented polyester tablecloths, I see the silver lining in this service entrance cloud: I am sheltered from the Iron Chancellor’s rapacious gaze and, even better, Kippie Lee won’t be monitoring the supplies that financial necessity has forced me to lay in. I am stuffing the evidence of my cost cutting into the trash when our hostess herself appears in the kitchen.
“What’s that?” Kippie Lee asks, stopping me from shoving the trash compactor closed.
I whirl around, making sure that the sunlight catches the Zac Posen in just the right way. “Kip-Kip! Wow, you look amazing.” Amazing is what most of Kippie Lee’s crowd think she looks. With her long straight expensively bleached hair and long straight fastidiously starved body, K.L. has always modeled herself after fellow Tejana Jerri Hall. She has whittled herself away, however, to the starved, hanging-on-by-a-thread look of a fellow sister in desperation. Her doll-baby-bright, blue eyes glitter a little too intensely; her size 1 Pucci frock hangs a little too loosely. Kippie Lee appears to be in the crisis phase with a straying husband when she is in danger of giving him what he wants and making herself disappear altogether.
I point to her shoes and squeal, “You got the Chanel croc heels! I was so going to get those exact heels.”
Kippie Lee tips her left shoe from side to side, examining it as she recalls, “God, they made me wait, like, two months before…” She catches herself and stops suddenly; my feint into friendship has failed. Once again all business, Kippie Lee yanks open the compactor, and her mouth drops in horror as she reads the name on the wrapping I was trying to hide. “Sam’s Club?” She points to the trays of food waiting to be presented to the cream of Austin society. “This is what you’re going to serve?”
“No, no, of course not.” I pirouette to shield the trays of Sam’s taquitos I’d planned to slip through customs as Petites Tournedos Béarnaise à la Mexicaine.
“Blythe, you promised me a true fête champêtre, a classic English garden party. The menu we agreed upon was amuse-bouches to include, but not to be limited to, mustard-seed-crusted tuna loin with an herb-coconut sauce and quail stuffed with goat cheese.”
I hold up a finger to silence Kippie Lee and furiously punch numbers into my cell phone. “Guillaume, bonjour. Comment va avec les amuse-bouches?” I pause, nod thoughtfully, and throw out an occasional enthusiastic, “Bien, tres bien!” as I listen to the dead silence of a dead cell phone whose bill I haven’t been able to pay in months.
I snap the cell shut and announce triumphantly, “My staff is putting the finishing touches on the tuna loin even as we speak.”
“Are those…” Kippie Lee snags a flower from one of the buckets I bought from a street vendor on the way over. “Carnations?” She might as well have asked, Used toilet brushes?
“What?” I squint with irritation at the flowers. “Oh, damn, Les Fleurs du Mal messed up my order. Don’t worry, I’ll get it sorted.” I purposely say “sorted,” not “sorted out.” Dropping the occasional Anglicism—“one off,” “brilliant,” “chuffed”—has a nice distancing effect. I work my thumbs and forefingers frantically as a pachinko player as I simultaneously punch a text message into my phone and juggle to
keep the dead screen out of Kippie Lee’s sight.
“Blythe, you promised masses of peonies and lilies, and many sets of the Dix family antique Royal Winton china in the coveted Dorset pattern. And croquet. You said there would be croquet.”
I can recall nothing about this Victorian fantasy I apparently painted, though I do like the croquet flourish, and answer smartly, “A staff member just called to say he has secured the precise croquet set used by HRH and that he is on his way right now to set it up. I’ll check to make sure he has it.”
Before I have a chance to make a pretend call on my pretend phone about the pretend croquet set, K.L. begins manhandling the smudge pots I picked up at Family Dollar, then spritzed with Glade. “These aren’t your signature votives.” Masses of votives in colors and fragrances that harmonized with masses of flowers used to be the signature element of Wretched Xcess events. In plummier days, when Trey’s lobbying clients were picking up the bills, the votives had been soy-based marvels compounded with my own signature fragrance.
“Kip-Kip, if you had given me the advance we agreed upon I could have—”
“You know I wanted to, but Hunt put his foot down.”
Now we are on very thin ice indeed. The major reason that poor Kippie Lee is hosting this or any other party is to silence the rumors regarding trouble here in the starter castle. Rumors about how Hunt Teeter, Miss Kip’s philandering asshole of a husband, has been getting the kind of cleanings from his nubile young dental hygienist that left Happy Rockefeller a widow. Unfortunately for K.L., though, if you want to throw a big the-marriage-is-fine party, El Hubbo has got to put in an appearance. Ominously, Kippie Lee had not been able to wrangle Philandering Asshole into making so much as a cameo. In the end, she was forced to settle for this, the all-gal-pal weekday garden party.
“Well, without an advance—”
“Duncan and Cherise told Hunt that they were not completely in love with what you did for her opening.”
“Duncan and Cherise Tatum? The Tatums were mad about that event. I perfectly matched the food to Cherise’s remarkable show of button art. Cunning pieces. Little button men holding little button hearts out to little button women. Button dogs lifting button legs on button fire hydrants. Button girls chasing button butterflies. I picked up the motif perfectly and served a complementary buffet every bit as fanciful. How perfect was that?”
“You served Eggo waffles, Necco wafers, pepperoni kebabs, and circles of bologna on Ritz crackers.”
“Yes! Wasn’t it inspired? Buttons? Circles? Circles of life, circles of friends, circles of food. They adored it.”
“They stopped payment on the check.”
“All right, Kippie Lee, I’ll level with you. A few Wretched events might have been the tiniest bit less than flawless after…” I pause before going on to identify the Damocles’ sword hanging over K.L.’s head. “…the divorce.” Waiting for a gush of sister feeling to well up, I blink back tears that I don’t have to summon so much as simply stop fighting for one second. “Well, a woman really finds out who her true friends are.”
Kippie Lee takes a second to imagine all her friends drinking Belmontinis at the Belmont without her and a few drops of compassion do actually moisten her arid expression. I push this tiny opening. I’d heard that even though Hunt Teeter’s firm had made one fortune on legal prestidigitation when the venture capital money flowed to the dot-commers, then another fortune when it was rerouted through bankruptcy court, his wife’s extravagance was rumored to have been the final straw, the one that caused him to stray. What Kippie Lee’s three-teardown Xanadu had ended up tearing down was her marriage.
I decide to play that card. Sniffing, I go on bravely, “I guess, though, what I miss most is my house. My home.”
Kippie Lee puts her hand on her mouth, suppressing the horror that rises at the thought of losing the house that cost her so much.
“I mean, of course, I could have stayed on”—I raise a born-again finger toward Pemberton Palace—“up there. But it brings back too many memories.”
Kippie Lee places a hand on my arm.
Bingo! The buttress is flying again. This is my opening; I have to scoot through it while I can. “At least George and Laura have stayed on my side.”
“The Bushes?”
“Yes, we visited them so many times at Kennebunkport. Gathering of the clans, all that. Forty-one and Junior.” I press my index and middle fingers together to symbolize the closeness between Trey’s father and the forty-first president of the United States. “Bar wants me to do something clambakey for her this summer when the whole gang gathers. You didn’t hear it from me, but…” I glance around the empty kitchen and Kippie Lee leans in. “Bar hates Peggy. Loathes her. When Bar was doing fund-raisers for Planned Parenthood back in the Texas years, Peggy was on the board, and it got so bad that Bar had her banned.”
“Really?”
I nod affirmatively.
Kippie Lee drags herself back to the matter at hand, though with considerably less vehemence now that I have again reestablished my White House–insider status. “Okay, but the votives?”
I look down and pretend once more to read a message on my cell phone. “Jean-Philippe just texted. The votives are on the way, Kips.” I turn my nervous hostess around and give her a gentle push. “Now, you, my little goddess, all you have to worry about is making yourself even more fabulous than you already are. Scoot, scoot, scoot.”
Kippie Lee leaves and I slump onto a hammered-copper bar stool. After sitting for a moment, I notice that I can’t catch my breath and that my hand resting on the two-inch-thick textured-glass countertop is trembling with a palsied rattle I cannot control. With a macabre syncopation, my right eye starts twitching. I put my twitching hand against my twitching eye and feel my spastic colon tick like a time bomb.
Pausing only to grab my silver Fendi hobo, I rush out. I’m cracking and have to find sanctuary before the meltdown. Thank God for K.L.’s adoration of Texas’s first and still most glamorous celebrity-socialite, Becca Cason Thrash, who has thirteen powder rooms and two bedrooms in her twenty-thousand-square-foot Houston home. Thirteen to two. The ratio mesmerized Kippie Lee, who believed that it held the secret to earthly happiness. When she tried to duplicate it, however, her husband put his foot down. “What the hell do you think we’re running here?” Hunt had demanded. “A potty-training academy? Four is the absolute maximum number of crappers I will allow.”
Kippie Lee split the difference and went for eight powder rooms, and Hunt went for Marigold, the comely young dental hygienist. He’d first been attracted to Marigold because she smelled like Dove soap instead of all the “froufrou crap” his wife had specially compounded in some Swiss laboratory. The affair turned serious when Hunt asked Marigold where she wanted to go for a weekend getaway and she answered that the redfish were running in Rockport. After that, Hunt stopped caring about powder rooms. Or Kippie Lee.
Whatever toll those powder rooms had exacted on the Teeter marriage, I am glad to have such a wide choice of hideouts. I duck into the first one I come to.
“What the—?”
“Oh, sorry, boys, my mistake.”
I quickly back out of the media room, where I have accidentally burst in on Kippie Lee’s son, Hoot, and several of his middle school chums from St. Stephen’s enjoying a sprightly double feature of Good Will Humping and Glad He Ate Her.
Resetting my compass, I make my way to the largest powder room, the one with a small fireplace, lock the door behind me, and collapse onto the lid of Kippie Lee’s Toto UltraMax toilet (same brand the Pi Phi Bulimia Queens use for all their heavy-duty flushing needs). Once seated, I have serious doubts whether I’ll be able to stand again. I can usually put on a good front. A great front. It’s how I’ve survived for the past year since Trey and his mother’s death squad of lawyers pulled the plug on me. But the constant humiliation of serving women whom I used to entertain in my home and who used to entertain me in theirs has taken a heavy tol
l.
I can’t hold back the tears any longer. I start crying and cannot stop. I am coming unglued and all I can think about is what a great story this is going to make: The day the caterer locked herself in a powder room and refused to cater. I can hear Kippie Lee bestowing the details of my collapse like party favors.
And guess who the caterer was?
Who?
Blythe Dix. Well, Blythe Young now. The family made her give up the Dix family name.
No.
Yes.
So why wouldn’t she come out of the powder room. Was she high?
“No!” I startle myself by speaking this fierce defense out loud. But it is the truth. I am not high. Not at this exact minute anyway. I wanted to do this event with no chemical amendments. And not just because my supplies are running perilously low.
Keeping up the pretense that I am simply helping friends out with their parties for the sheer fun of it is exhausting, but I have no choice. The instant that the 78703 zip code discovers that the Dix family has totally disowned me and that whatever gossamer ties I might once have had to the White House have been severed, I will be tits up. When they realize that catering is not just something I am doing to fill the time between spinning classes, but the one activity standing between me and starvation, I will be most definitively hosed. When they twig to the fact that I have moved out of Pemberton Palace and into Bamsie Beiver’s carriage house not because the Palace “brings back too many memories” but because I was “tossed out on my ass without a dime,” I will no longer be of any use to them whatsoever.
The gossips in my head start twittering again. I imagine them zeroing in on my deepest, darkest secret: “I heard that Trey took her to the cleaners in the divorce.”
My answer—which the Pemberton Princesses must never-ever-ever hear—is, I wish. I could have managed the cleaners. But Trey Dix the Third and his family of wolverines weren’t content to just take me to the cleaners. No, they took me to the taxidermist. I have been gutted but have yet to be stuffed and stitched back up.