So why the heck would I want to inject myself with some funky substance just because all the appearance-obsessed females in town were doing it? If peer pressure—and dire threats from Cissy—hadn’t inspired me to don white and debut at eighteen, it sure as heck wasn’t going to work now.
“Baawk, baawk,” my so-called pal, Janet Graham—the culprit responsible for my presence at this particular Pretty Party—squawked in her best chicken imitation, even flapping her elbows to get the point across.
I loaded up my verbal slingshot.
“If everybody jumped off Reunion Tower with Sub-Zero fridges strapped to their butts, would you do it, too?”
I flung the words at her and stared her down, waiting for her comeback. Oh, and she’d have one, too. I could bet my rarely touched investment portfolio on it.
Janet never lacked for words. She edited the society pages for the Park Cities Press newspaper, the rag that covered the upscale Dallas neighborhood I’d grown up in, and she wrote much of its contents. Janet knew everyone who was anyone in the city, and she always had something to say about each one of them (the choicest cuts saved for private snarking sessions).
“I see,” was all she said at first, and cocked her head, sending ringlets of bright red hair cascading over her shoulders—a new and very feminine look for her, as she usually went for no-nonsense cuts. She studied me with eyes made all the wider by her black-rimmed “smart girl” glasses. “So, my self-confident compadre, you wouldn’t try a little of Dr. Sonja’s super-new wrinkle eraser? Not even to wipe out those lines between your brows?”
Lines?
“What lines?” Instinctively, my fingers went up to poke the terrain north of the bridge of my nose.
“The ones you’ve had since high school, Andy.” She sighed and smoothed the lapels of her 1940s style jacket, armed with shoulder pads that had the wingspan of a 747. “You always scrunch up your brow when you contemplate something, and it’s given you premature creases.” She sighed again, agitated, “You’re doing it right now.”
I ambled over toward a mirror, as there were several large gilt-framed ones hanging on the velvet-papered walls in Delaney Armstrong’s gargantuan downstairs hall bathroom. The whole mansion was overstuffed and ostentatious enough to look like an old-fashioned bordello (not that I’d ever seen an old-fashioned bordello, but I had been in a strip club once that had red velvet ceilings and chandeliers).
Did I mention that Delaney was the hostess for this evening’s soiree plugging Dr. Sonja’s miracle cures? And that I’d been tricked into coming by La Femme Janet, who’d invited me out for a friendly “let’s catch up” dinner, only to pull one of her “oops, I nearly forgot, I have to cover this teensy-weensy event for the paper. It’ll just take a sec. Want to go with me?”
Grrrr.
She was almost as bad as my subversive Mummy Dearest, and I was far too gullible for my own good. I would never learn, would I?
I squinted at my reflection, contemplating it so thoroughly my brow was pleated like an accordion. Even when I forced a blank expression, the pleats didn’t erase, not completely.
Well, shiver my splintered timbers.
Janet was right.
I did have a permanent pleat between my eyebrows.
Why had I never noticed?
I saw my redheaded chum smile in the silvered glass as she showed off pearly whites that belied her own fortuitous upbringing: we’d both attended the Hockaday School for Girls, though Janet had been ahead of me by a few years. Still, she’d been a rebel in her own right, and I had admired her for it, more so when I’d committed my own heinous act of rebellion (namely, skipping out on my cotillion).
“Maybe I like my lines,” I grumbled, and I wanted to mean it, even if I didn’t feel the sentiment wholeheartedly. Did frowning make wrinkles worse? I wondered, and turned my back on the mirror.
“You like your lines?” Janet laughed. “C’mon, sweetie, don’t lie to me. No woman in her right mind wants to look like a Shar Pei.”
What about left-minded women? I wanted to ask, but instead said, “There’s nothing wrong with growing older naturally.”
So long as my wrinkles didn’t bother my boyfriend, Brian Malone. At least, I assumed he didn’t mind that I wasn’t as crinkle-free as polyester. But if he did—if he was that superficial, which he wasn’t—he wouldn’t be worth it, would he?
“It doesn’t matter anyway. I’d never shoot up my creases with sheep poop,” I declared, and Janet crossed her arms over her brass-buttoned chest, looking skeptical.
“Doesn’t hitting forty scare you, Andy?”
Forty?
Hello? I had nine more years to worry about that. Though Janet was closer still, possibly the cause behind her sudden interest in Dr. Sonja’s crease-eradicating potions.
“How does the saying go? That getting old is better than the alternative,” I responded, in lieu of a real answer.
“Tell that to all the teenage girls who are already getting peels and Botox to stop the lines they haven’t even earned yet,” Janet said with an arch of sculpted eyebrows, and I shook my head at how absurd that sounded.
Okay, so it was trendy for teenagers to have antiwrinkle gunk injected into their faces as “preventive” measures (’cuz, God forbid, they should live past thirty and develop crow’s-feet). So plenty of society matrons in my mother’s crowd threw Pretty Parties where Dr. Sonja came armed with her syringes and filled their faces with concoctions made from human placenta and cow fat. I’d been raised in a world where middle-aged wives were routinely dumped for newer models, so I could understand harboring that kind of fear.
But I was neither a self-conscious teenager nor a youth-obsessed society matron; and, though I’d recently hit thirty-one and had the creases to show for it, I was not about to have foreign substances shot beneath my skin so I could purportedly shed a few years.
Did anyone really know what that goo would do in time? Maybe it would harden like concrete and turn once-human faces to statues.
Besides, I liked to think when I expressed an emotion, my facial muscles followed suit. I knew too many women who smiled and looked as numb as movie zombies.
Hello? Can you say ‘Cher’?
Or this evening’s hostess, Delaney Armstrong, a fellow prep school alum from the Hockaday School for Girls. She’d never been beautiful in the classic sense, but bright-eyed and energetic: the kind of girl who’d taken charge of things, like pep rallies or dances or club meetings. Delaney’s square-jawed features probably would’ve aged very attractively. Only Delaney hadn’t allowed for growing old naturally. She’d had so much dermabrasion, peels, and Botox that her entire face appeared frozen and vaguely swollen. Her once nut-brown hair had been dyed pale blond and highlighted to within an inch of its life. Her lips looked like someone had inflated them with a tire pump.
I’m not sure whose idea of beautiful that was.
Perhaps Delaney’s hubby liked having a wife who could double for a wax statue at Madame Tussaud’s. If I ever met the man, I might be tempted to ask.
“Dr. Sonja’s giving everyone freebies,” my insistent pal, Janet Graham, tried again, as if that would entice me. “She wants to get everyone good and hooked, so they’ll keep running back to her office for more.”
“Pass,” I told her.
I had no intention of letting Dr. Sonja fill up my cracks with spackle made from squid intestines, not even if it was on her dime.
The whole fast-food mentality of the anti-aging business creeped me out immensely.
The hip and trendy cosmetic dermo had even opened up several Pretty Place clinics in various upscale shopping malls around the city. So, after you bought your size two, low-rise, boot-cut jeans at the Gap and picked up a salad to-go from La Madeleine, you could pop into The Pretty Place for wrinkle shots and a brow wax.
How convenient.
“You’re really not curious to try a little?” Janet bugged me, shrugging when I said most assuredly, “No.”
/> “Well, I’m thinking of having my lips done,” she said, toddling over to the nearest mirror on stiletto heels and then proceeding to pout at her reflection, resembling a demented fish more than Angelina Jolie. “What d’you say, Andy? Could I use a little plumping?”
“Pillows should be plumped, not lips,” I groused. Janet looked perfectly fine to me. She’d always had her own sense of style, never playing to what was trendy or popular. So what had gotten into her? Why would she suddenly want to look as artificial as the Park Cities socialites she wrote about?
“You can say that, Andy, ’cuz you’ve got good lips. Mine are as thin as a bird’s.”
“I didn’t know birds had lips.”
Janet nudged me. “Stop it, Andy. I’m serious.”
“You can’t be,” I said, because…well, she couldn’t be. It was so not like Janet Graham to fret over less-than-ripe lips. She was more apt to get worked up over sexism or racism, or drivers on Central Expressway who talked on their cell phones and applied mascara while weaving from lane to lane. So why was she suddenly so concerned about appearance?
“I’m dead serious,” she assured me, squirming uncharacteristically. “What’s so wrong with wanting a sexy mouth?”
I wished I didn’t believe her, but I did.
She had the most earnest look on her face, maybe even a little sad, like a woman who was questioning her self-worth and finding it lacking; though it was hard for me to believe that someone as independent and tough as Janet Graham would ever lack in self-confidence. I’d watched her blaze through Hockaday with her ever-changing hair colors and artful adjustments to our uniform of white blouse and plaid, never pushing the envelope far enough to get in trouble but making it clear that she wasn’t like everyone else.
She wasn’t just a breath of fresh air, she was positively tornadic, knocking down everything in her path, never letting anyone tell her “that can’t be done,” and leaving a lot of stunned glances in her wake.
I’d been two years behind her, but had felt every bit the outsider that Janet seemed proud to be, so I couldn’t help but admire her. I had cheered from the sidelines as she’d left Big D in pursuit of a career in the theater, returning less than triumphant after mere bit parts on soap operas and off-off-Broadway shows that closed within hours of opening, and taking on a stint as a society reporter with the Park Cities Press on a lark, only to realize she was damned good at it.
Janet wore vintage clothes, dyed her hair red as a fire engine, and had all of Dallas society at her fingertips. Literally. She could speed-dial Mrs. Ross Perot or Mrs. Jerry Jones via cell phone if the mood struck her.
So why the heck was she suddenly worried about thin lips?
Janet had never put a lot of stock in her appearance, beyond looking like, well, herself. She wasn’t like the dozen society snobs in Delaney Armstrong’s living room who practically lived and died by the sword (or, rather, by the scalpel); who thought that winning meant the tiniest nose, the roundest breasts, the fullest mouth, and the thinnest thighs.
If Janet wasn’t out to one-up other women in the eternal “who’s the fairest of them all” debate, then it had to be because…oh, gosh.
“You’ve got a man,” I blurted out, because it was the only thing that made sense. Why else did a normally sane and rational woman suddenly turn nonsensical?
Her eyes went wide, and her mouth—with its perfectly normal-sized lips—hung open just a spell, long enough for me to figure I’d hit that sucker on the nose.
“You’ve met a man who thinks Angelina Jolie is the feminine ideal,” I went on, sure that I’d figured it out, brilliant detective that I was (well, I’d read enough Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes in my growing-up to qualify for a GED in Detection, at least). “So you want fat lips to please him.”
“Andy, you know me better than that,” she remarked with a lift of her chin, only to tag on, “I’m just maybe a little too caught up in something I’m working on, for the paper. It’s got me to thinking about perception.”
“Perception?”
“Looks, perfection, what men want from women, how others view us, what makes someone attractive. Lots of things.” Her eyes clouded for a moment, then she shook it off. “I can’t say more about it yet, Andy. But I will reassure you that I will not change any part of my body to please anyone but myself.”
Uh-huh.
I’d told myself that same story before I’d fallen for Malone. It was easy to make all those feminist proclamations before your heart completely turned to mush. Look at what Ted Turner had done to Jane Fonda. Nothing on that woman was real anymore. And good ol’ Ted had dumped her for a younger model regardless.
So had Janet found her own Ted? After so many years of being single—and professing she would remain so forever?
Hmm.
But I didn’t debate her or interrogate her. I’d find out any scoop soon enough. It was inevitable. Janet was a gossip columnist, for heaven’s sake. Eventually, she’d have to spill her guts.
“Then promise me you’ll leave this Botox bash tonight without going all Morgan Fairchild on me, okay?” I said, and put a hand on her padded shoulder.
“Good God, girl, that’s why I invited you to tag along with me,” she quipped. “To remind me that I’m not like them. I just write about ’em.”
“Did you say you invited me?” I parroted. “Wasn’t it more like tricked me.”
“Semantics.” She wiggled bejeweled fingers—Janet did so appreciate good costume jewelry. “You give me strength, my friend, so I will pass on Dr. Sonja’s freebies and do a little more research before I make a decision. I don’t need to jump into lip plumping right this minute. What I do need is a decent steak and some onion rings.”
“Now you’re talkin’.” I grinned.
The aliens from Planet Superficial that had momentarily possessed my friend’s brain had released it with no obvious residual damage.
Phew.
After a final glance in the mirror—and a quick primping of her curly ’do—Janet turned to me, suggesting, “How about we take off now and go get that dinner? I don’t need to stay till the end for the door prizes. I’ve seen enough here to write my story. Besides”—she shrugged—“if I hang around any longer listening to well-to-do women bitch about boob jobs and face-lifts and liposuctioned thighs, I think I’ll have to throw myself under the nearest Mercedes. I might have to chronicle the self-absorbed insanity of the rich and plastic, but I don’t want to catch it.”
Ah, now there was my comrade who liked to color outside the box. It was good to have her back after that Nip/Tuck moment.
I grinned. “That’s the Janet Graham I know and love.”
She nudged my arm, and the familiar spark returned to her eyes. “How does Bob’s Steak and Chop House sound? You can’t even tell there was ever a fire,” she added, because there had been one, a year or so back. But it wasn’t because of overcooked tenderloin.
It sounded lots better than hanging out at Delaney’s with a bunch of wine-sipping women lining up for needle sticks.
Yuck.
“Give me smashed potatoes over a vial of cow placenta any day,” I said, and headed out of the quiet of the posh loo, catching the opening beat of the Village People doing “YMCA” and praying we could slip past the living room unnoticed.
As I led the way toward the front door, I buttoned my jacket to ready myself for the cool November air, ignoring Janet’s whispers about slowing down.
We were so close to getting away, I could smell freedom as clearly as I could Delaney Armstrong’s overpowering White Linen perfume.
“I should probably let Delaney know we’re leaving,” she whined, glancing behind her. “She was kind enough to add me to the guest list so I could research a story.”
“Make up your mind,” I said, and paused as she contemplated whether to keep moving or head back to bid Delaney farewell.
While I tapped my foot on the floor, I stared at Delaney’s family portrait, hung above an el
aborate Italian console in the foyer, in which the Armstrong clan posed in their English garden out back. Delaney smiled so tight it looked like it hurt. Beside her sat her husband Jonathan, who had GQ looks from his thick brown hair to the cleft in his chin. On either side stood their twin girls, wearing matching lavender dresses.
Glancing at the picture-perfect tableau made my teeth ache.
“All right”—Janet turned back toward me—“you win. I’ll just give Delaney a jingle in the morning to say merci.”
“Let’s boogie then, chickie!” I caught Janet’s wrist, eager to hustle her out of there, and we would’ve surely snuck out unchecked if at the very moment I reached for the nickel-plated handle, the door hadn’t pushed wide open, nearly butting into my nose as a woman in pink barreled in.
She was drunk as a skunk, stumbling forward on tottering high heels, big poof of blond hair flying, waving something dark in her hand—a clutch purse?—and leaving the reek of gin in her wake.
“Oooph,” Janet gasped, running into my back as I came to a cold hard stop.
Who the heck would be nuts enough—or, rather, smashed enough—to crash Dr. Sonja’s Pretty Party, one being covered by the society editor of the Park Cities Press, no less?
I caught the crasher’s profile as she charged toward the living room, and a familiar name rose to my lips. I was sure I was wrong, until I heard the slurred voice as she howled, “You quack, you ruined my face!”
Nope. I was right on the nose.
Miranda DuBois, I knew without a doubt, co-anchor of the Channel 5 evening news, famous for her dimpled smile and ample cleavage; but, long before that, a classmate at Hockaday, one of the pageant girls I’d avoided like the plague. Not that she wasn’t nice enough, but it had always felt more like saccharine than sugar to me.
“Look at me…I’m a monster! My life is ruined!”
By the sound of her raving, I guessed that the long-term effects of bleaching her hair had damaged her self-control.
The woman was acting totally bonkers.
“Oh, my, now this is what I call a story,” Janet murmured as she stepped around me to get a reporter’s eye view of the goings-on.
Too Pretty to Die Page 2
