His eyebrows rose.“News to me.”
“It can stay that way. I’m not wearing it.”
“That’s fine.” He smiled flirtatiously. “Can you just wear it in the bedroom?”
“Lane...”
“You wouldn't have to wear it for very long. I'd get you out of it in no time.”
“No time, huh?”
“Maybe a minute and half, if we're really trying.”
She snorted, laughing in a very unladylike fashion.
The neighborhood around them was so idyllic it hurt Betty’s eyes. Every street was practically a tunnel, covered over by huge beautiful maple trees, expertly manicured to provide an exacting curvature over the concrete. It was spring, and so every flower bloomed—the houses traded off between red roses, blue hydrangeas, yellow daffodils, orange tulips, and then back to roses again. It was staggered like this all down the street, so that no two houses with similar colors were next to or across from one another. Outside, several women gardened at their lawns. Small white picket fences—white picket fences!—denoted the lines between house territories, and a few women had congregated at one, waving with pearl-white smiles at Lane as he drove by.
Betty intuited, somehow, that the smiles were all for Lane and not for her. The women wore tiny, flower-patterned dresses that just barely approached their knees. And heels. Very tall, expensive looking heels. The women were all beautiful.
“Who gardens in heels?” she asked, mostly to herself.
Lane answered anyway. “They have a way here, that’s for sure.”
Their new house was a benefit from his new job as a copywriter for Castle Industries. Passion Heights—their new town—was a company town, with every dollar moving in and out of it centering solely around Castle Industries. Their neighborhood, Service Oaks, was entirely owned by Castle Industries, with every bill and every house paid for entirely on their dime. It hurt Betty’s brain just to think of how much money was being used in this awful place.
What Castle Industries stood for was exactly in opposition to everything Betty stood for. Or, tried to stand for. Or, had stood for. Castle Industries was known for its regular sexual harassment cases, somehow always quietly tied up after just a few weeks of starting. Its heavy promotion of “family values” seemed to be entirely wrapped around some warped view of women stuck at home being nothing but homemakers. They practically funded the whole of one or maybe even both political parties; their money stretched everywhere.
And there was the way all their female employees always seemed so...so...so picture-perfect. There was something strange going on there, but it was always beyond the surface of investigation. To investigate, you needed sources, and nobody from the company was ever willing to talk.
And now, her husband was working for them. The same awful, horrible company that had cost Betty her reputation, that had—
Stop. Calm.
Struggling, she pushed the thoughts of their many injustices aside.
After what had happened in Alder City, she wasn’t sure she would ever be allowed to stand up for anyone’s cause ever again. It was a depressing thought, and as best she could she tried to ignore it.
Thinking of the past—her past—wouldn’t help her now.
Lane guided them up the drive into their new house. Stepping out, the first thing Betty noticed was how large it was. The pictures made it seem small—the painted shutters on the windows, the cobblestone walkway, the brick lining the porch, the little peaked roof—all of that had made it somehow look tinier in photograph form than it was in real life. It surprised Betty, because usually such misconceptions worked the other way, with pictures of homes looking bigger than they were in real life.
But this place was enormous. The porch all by itself, raised off the ground a good two feet and sporting a new sturdy, shiny oak boards, was about the size of Betty’s first apartment back in college.
She opened the door inside, snatching the keys from Lane, and was stunned to see the massive open ceilings, the wide hallways, the endless amounts of closets up and down every room. Everything was so wide and spread out.
There was no furniture yet—that was coming—but there was a radio, strangely. It was playing already, some weird static emitting from it. It sat on the bar in the kitchen—which itself was twice the size of Betty’s first apartment—next to the immense refrigerator that came with the house. She moved to turn the radio off, and hesitated. The static continued. What if someone was there in the house, working? The place was new, after all. What if they wanted it on?
Frowning, she flipped it off. If someone wanted it back on, they would put it back on.
Still, though, she felt oddly guilty right away, and perhaps would have flipped it back on if Lane hadn’t come in carrying stuff from the car.
“Right,” Betty said to herself. “Help out. Come on, Bets.”
For several minutes, she and Lane moved the few items they had stuffed in the car into the house.
“I think,” said Lane, setting down his laptop in one corner, “that now that we have a bigger place for all our stuff, we are going to need new stuff to fill up our new, bigger place.”
Betty laughed. As they walked outside again for another trip, they saw their next door neighbor outside, waving.
She was the first woman Betty had seen outside who wasn’t wearing some strange Stepford-style get-up. She was curvy and had creamy brown skin, the color of coffee with a dash of milk mixed in. She wore tight jean shorts and an over-sized t-shirt, a short bandana wrapped around her head.
Some pig, Betty thought acidly, might think Jasmine was “pear-shaped.” Especially with how strangely flat her chest was compared to the overall curviness of her body. Luckily, Betty herself was empty of such notions.
“Hi!” said the woman. She stepped around the picket fence and walked right up Betty’s lawn. She had a beautiful smile, and hooked her thumbs into her shorts. “I'm Jasmine,” she said with a smile.
“Betty.” They shook her hands. “I like your shirt.”
She pointed at Jasmine's tee—advertising for The Womaniac Podcast. It was a social justice warrior slanted podcast with—naturally—a heavily feminist bent. The episodes came out twice a week, and Betty had started listening to them about a year ago, three years after they had started. She had been, lately, cycling through all the old episodes in an effort to catch up. Every episode had a different focus—sometimes current events, sometimes history, sometimes sports or entertainment. At her current rate of listening, she'd catch up in about three years. She had been, in fact, using her ear buds to listen to the show's host—Lisa Bangor—as she ferried boxes between the car and the house.
“Oh, yeah!” Jasmine nodded, enthused. “I've been a fan for ages. It's weird, though. I haven't seen any new episodes since we moved in.”
“Really?” Betty asked. “A new one came out just yesterday. I'll share it with you.”
“That would be great. I've been just re-listening to the old stuff, some favorites, you know?”
Jasmine's husband, a stocky fellow with red hair and freckles, followed her up to meet Betty, though he used the drive way and cast a disapproving glance at his wife’s path.
Men and their lawns. Betty struggled not to roll her eyes.
“This is my husband, Gregory.”
Lane approached, smiling warmly. They all took turns shaking hands and introducing one another. After a few moments, they had shared the essentials of their stories—Lane had a job with Castle Industries. Jasmine and Gregory Powell were both scholars, staying in a house bequeathed to them by a rather wealthy (and totally dead) uncle. Jasmine studied Assyrian history, and Gregory studied the Ottoman Empire. Twice a week, though, Gregory worked at a temp job at the Castle Industries main office to help pay the bills.
“And what do you do, Betty?” Gregory asked.
“I’m a bit...between employment ideas at the moment,” she said, smiling nervously. She realized suddenly she’d have to come up with som
ething substantial to say. “Lane’s new job makes more than mine did. A very nice salary. So I’m along for the ride. I thought I would work on my novel.”
“You’re a writer!” Jasmine’s eyes lit up. “What’s it about?”
Luckily, Betty was spared the embarrassment of detailing her procrastination, her writer’s block, and her lack of creativity all in a few fumbling, inane sentences when someone interrupted the gathering.
“Hello!” called a clear, shining voice.
Across the street, an incredibly gorgeous young blonde waved to the chatting couples. She approached slowly but confidently, strutting in her red platform heels first across the street, then up the drive, and then across the narrow stone walkway. Never once did she allow her trail to wander into the grass. It was strangely purposeful, as if perhaps she would be committing some horrible sin by letting her feet taint the growth of another person’s property. Betty noticed the glimmers of a snide, reproachful glance at Jasmine’s feet on the grass. Jasmine, for her part, merely backed up further into the grass to allow their circle to grow properly.
The blonde’s dress scooped low around her cleavage, showing off buoyant breasts and a brilliant valley between her globes of jammed titflesh. Long, blond hair was arranged spectacularly in formal locks and curls, as if she were being married later that day.
Jasmine's smile was slight, but it was there. “Hello, Cora. This is—”
But Cora seemed to have her own ideas about introductions. “I’m Mrs. Hank Vance,” said the knockout. “You must be Mrs. Lane Pritchard? And you must be Mister Pritchard.”
Lane bravely tried to avert his eyes from her overflowing cleavage. Gregory, apparently, was less brave—or more bold, depending on your viewpoint. Cora seemed to love the attention, which Betty supposed was the point of her dress.
Betty took her hand. It was soft and even a bit sticky-slick, some manner of substance present. Gardening chemicals? But they smelled so nice...
“Betty Kincaid, actually,” she said.
Cora raised an eyebrow. “Oh? I was so sure you two were married.”
“We are.” Lane smiled. “We have different last names, that's all.”
At this, Cora seemed flummoxed. “That's quite unorthodox! Was there trouble at the registrar? Mister Castle could take of it, I'm sure, and—”
“I'm very happy with my name, thank you. You can call me Betty. What was your name?”
She knew it, of course, having heard Jasmine. But she wanted Cora to feel comfortable saying it.
“Oh, it’s...” her voice dropped to a whisper, bending over to Betty's ear. “Cora.”
Then she pulled up, smiling again. Her breasts had been soft on Betty's shoulder. Warm.
“They don’t like the ‘menfolk’ to hear them say their names,” said Jasmine, plenty of grit behind her smile. “It’s...improper.”
“Is it?” asked Lane. “How...very proper.”
Betty thoughtfully elbowed her husband in the midsection.
“I like it,” said Gregory. “Propriety is in high demand these days. Why not follow it for a while?”
There were glimmers of real, honest intelligence in Cora’s eyes. For a few moments, Betty thought perhaps Cora was simply epitomizing the third-wave of feminism, putting on her uniform and dressing for herself, creating an appearance that she wanted to be known by.
And then the ditzy blonde began to talk at length.
“Oh yes. Really, a woman’s name should only ever be spoken, if we're talking about a man, by her husband. It’s so much more intimate that way, and isn’t that what marriage is all about? I’ve only been here for a month, but really, ever since Mister Vance and I started on the traditions here, we haven’t looked back. It’s like, totally better.”
“Like, for sure,” sniped Betty. “It totally sounds that way.”
Cora nodded brightly, clearly too dim to catch the sarcasm.
Rumbling slowly, the moving truck arrived behind them. The movers piled out from the car. Each one was tall and layered with hulking muscle. Sweat clung to their bodies like second skins, even though the day wasn't that hot.
“Oh, good,” said Lane. He walked over to hail the drivers, but they didn't seem too concerned with his presence.
A wind picked up and Betty caught their scent—hard, masculine, and overpowering. Words failed her for several moments. All three women stood with their mouths slack. Gregory gathered Jasmine to his side, and Lane did the same to Betty. Betty didn’t even know how to protest. For the time being, all she could think of was how good it felt to be held by her Man.
Her Man. Not her man. Not her beau. Her Man, capital M.
Sudden, slick arousal hit her. Thighs loosening, knees spreading apart—and then the wind died down.
“I’m sorry,” said Betty. “I have to, um...we have to supervise.”
What she really wanted, inwardly, was to see if that masculine man smell was still on the movers. And maybe to try out their new bed with Lane. She could yell at him later and tell him what a pig he was for staring down Cora’s dress. But after he gave her a proper fuck like she had earned for being his wife.
She blinked rapidly, noticing Jasmine doing the same.
God, that was a lot of thoughts all at once. Where was it coming from?
“It’s no problem,” said Cora. “Jasmine and I have a few things to discuss anyway before the party tonight.” She took Jasmine's hand. “Don’t we, dear?”
“We...do?”
But Cora pulled Jasmine away, brooking no objections. Lane and Gregory shook hands—a strange man-off of handshake chicken that Gregory clearly won—and then Gregory walked back to his house whistling merrily. He took Cora’s path off the lawn, not once touching the grass.
* * * * *
Very soon, Cora had Jasmine arranged neatly on a paisley blue couch in the drawing room of her house. There was no television there, and probably not one in the entire, warm-color saturated abode. Jasmine, indeed, had not seen one in the entire town; they weren’t even sold at the local electronics store. She knew that because her own television had been broken by the movers—they repaid the full, original cost of the television, of course, which was actually probably more than the six year-old device was worth—and hadn't been able to find a replacement anywhere. She also couldn't find stores that would deliver a television to her door, citing obscure inter-county trade agreements.
There was a radio in the drawing room, however, and Cora had it turned on to a low, almost indecipherably low volume. The static-like white noise was at least pleasant, and filled the space between Jasmine's thoughts. It was the same model that Jasmine had in her own home.
Come to think of it, wasn’t the radio at her own house always on? She had tried to turn it off once or twice, she recalled now, but every time she had, there suddenly was something important to do. Clean off the kitchen table, or dust the bookshelves. The bookshelves were always getting dusty, and the books too. Earlier that morning she had given serious consideration to just getting rid of the books altogether, until she realized that would mean she had no way to research the Assyrians.
It was easier to turn off the radio when she was listening to a podcast—particularly the Womaniac—but that was more and more difficult lately without any new material. She felt like she was just retreading the same ground.
At least, Jasmine considered quietly, she still had internet access, even if none of her streaming shows worked properly. Some sort of plug-in problem. The Passion Heights digital newsletter, featuring all of those delightful little cat videos, worked just fine, however.
“It’s been too long since you’ve moved here for us not to have a good talk with one another.” Cora sat down neatly, at the edge of her paisley blue chair with her long, luscious legs crossed. “We’re the new girls here, after all, you and me and Betty, and I do truly hope we can get along. Can’t we?”
Jasmine smiled. “Of course, Cora. I’d love to get along. I’m afraid I’m not...” h
er smile wavered. “I think I’m still learning how to fit in.”
Cora nodded gravely. “It’s certainly a bit clique-ish here, isn’t it? These ladies really have their friends sorted out. I’ve been wondering if I would ever be able to become close to anyone.”
A sudden, mad wave of relief rushed through Jasmine. Ever since arriving at Passion Heights, she had felt like an outsider.
She thought Cora was “one of them.” A beautiful babe. A lovely lady. An “it” girl, like any number of cheerleaders that had snubbed Jasmine when she was younger, mocking all her nerdish interests and her full figure. What she had never stopped to consider was that Cora had been acting like “one of them” just to have a social circle. In a town full of gorgeous, appearance-obsessed women, how else was one supposed to cultivate friendship?
It was important for an upstanding lady to have pretty friends, after all. Without pretty friends, a man might never want to keep you as a wife.
Wait, that was—
“I’m just so thrilled to be going to the party tonight,” said Cora, speaking clearly over a sudden burst of static from the radio. “Aren’t you?”
Jasmine nodded. “Oh yes. Isn’t that strange, though?”
“What's strange about being thrilled?”
“No,” Jasmine smiled. “I meant that Gregory and I were invited at all. I mean, at least your and Betty’s husband work at Castle Systems. Gregory and I are just scholars. Even if Gregory does temp there.”
“Oh, Passion Heights is just inclusive, dear. We want everyone involved. Isn’t that why you moved here?”
Jasmine had to give her that. Working on a doctorate in the middle of a city had been a great way to get a lot done in coffee shops and also to never have to interact with other people. The isolation was hellish on her psyche after a few years. The allure of a small community like this, where everyone knew each other’s names and would check up on one another, was hard to deny. It may have taken a village to raise a child, but Jasmine still felt like it took a village still to make an adult whole.
Nadia Nightside's Best of 2015 Page 24
