The Cinderella Pact

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  “Charlotte?” I say as fake lightning flashes over us.

  Charlotte looks up and flinches at the sight of me. Or was it the thunder followed by the sound of torrential rain? “Yes?”

  “I’m Nola. Nola Devlin. Belinda’s editor.”

  Her mouth makes an O, but no sound comes out.

  “Do you want something to drink too?” Momsai asks.

  “Coffee,” I say. “Skim milk on the side, please.” (1 point.)

  When Momsai leaves, I sit across from Charlotte, whose eyes are grotesquely magnified by the coke-bottle lenses in front of them. “This is quite a place,” she says. “Though not a quiet place.”

  “I chose it for a reason,” I say. “I have something to tell you about Belinda.”

  “Oh?” She carefully puts down her martini glass.

  “Yes.” I smile confidently, take a deep breath, and let ’er rip. “You’re looking at her.”

  It is the first time that I have confessed my secret identity and I can barely sit still, I’m so nervous.

  Charlotte blinks her big magnified eyes. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “I’m Belinda Apple,” I try again, wishing she’d just get it so this ordeal would be over with. “I’ve always been Belinda Apple.”

  “But you’re not British.”

  “That’s true. But one doesn’t arf to be veddy British, does one, to fake it?”

  Charlotte cringes. “That’s an awful impersonation. You sound like Maggie Smith.”

  “No, Maggie Smith sounds more Scottish: ‘Gurrls. We willl not be trrraipsing about.’ Believe me, I know. I’ve become an authority on faking British accents.”

  Charlotte takes a long sip of the martini. “So you are a fraud, exactly like that DiGrigio person claimed.”

  “Not exactly.” I pinch the skin on my arm, a crude acupuncture technique to keep me from panicking. “I’m very real. I’m just not very British or, for that matter, very thin.”

  “I’m glad you said it. I didn’t want to sound rude.”

  Momsai comes by and brings me coffee. As she’s about to leave, Charlotte clutches her sleeve and asks—no, begs—for a second martini (3 points).

  When Momsai’s gone, I tell Charlotte the whole story, starting from the application Lori DiGrigio tossed to how I applied merely as a test and then took the job. Charlotte says nothing, though she does manage to drink down to her olives.

  “If you want to stop representing me . . .” I say.

  “Don’t be daft. This is the best thing that could have happened. I love this.” She removes her cell phone, punches in her numbers, and winks at me. “B. J. Martin, please. This is Charlotte Dawson.”

  She bites an olive and waits while B.J. gets on. “B.J., I am sitting here with Belinda Apple. She’s just informed me that she is leading a double life, that she is under investigation by Sass! magazine, and may be in jeopardy of running afoul with the IRS.”

  “What?” I say. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be in trouble with the IRS. I’d paid all my taxes, hadn’t I?

  Charlotte puts a finger in her ear to block out a screaming baby at the next table. “You either put a figure on the table now, or I’m going over to Boardwalk Productions.”

  I can’t help but be fascinated by Charlotte’s wheeling and dealing.

  “I’ll give you five minutes,” she says.

  She clicks the phone shut and casually picks up the plastic menu. “This is awful,” she says.

  “Awful?” It sounded pretty good to me. It sounds like I’m about to get a movie deal.

  “There’s nothing to eat. I’m on a diet, of course.”

  The phone rings. Charlotte picks it up, says, “That’s great,” and hangs up.

  “Well?” I say, so excited I could erupt like the volcano behind me.

  “There’s no choice but the chicken Caesar salad.”

  “No!” I screech. “What about the film deal?”

  “Oh, that.” Charlotte blinks her heavy lashes. “A tentative offer of a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar signing and five hundred thousand if they make the movie of the week, with five percent royalties. It’s not bad.”

  “Not bad? It’s fantastic.”

  “There is a caveat, however. They want to make sure you are as exciting in person as I’ve made you to be. That’s why they’re planning to fly you to L.A. soon. If I were you, I’d brush up on that hideous British accent. I have no intention of telling them that you’re really Nola Devlin from New Jersey.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The three-foot-high pile of red-skinned potatoes on my parents’ kitchen counter should be the first clue that Eileen’s wedding preparations have sent my mother over the edge.

  “Looks like your mother’s cornered the spud market,” my father says, the morning’s paper shoved under his arm as he strolls through the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee.

  My father used to work for Johns Manville until the asbestos company was sued so often for scarring people’s lungs that it declared bankruptcy, pulled up roots, and moved west and made paper products. This sent my father into early retirement and my mother to work full-time down at the muni clerk’s office in Princeton. Part of his grand scheme, as he likes to say, to get the house to himself.

  Dad was born to retire. He spends his uneventful days joyfully fishing, reading, and puttering around, contributing little to the world besides carbon dioxide. Every day he wears a flannel shirt and a gray pair of Dockers. It could be 102 degrees in the desert, and he’d be in a long-sleeve flannel shirt and Dockers. He is a man of few wants and needs.

  “All this for a family Labor Day picnic?” I say, eyeing the two pots bubbling madly on the stove and the one waiting on the counter for its turn. “This’ll make way too much potato salad. I’ll be boiling and peeling for hours.”

  Dad sits down at the kitchen table with a groan. “Guess you haven’t heard. It’s not just the Labor Day family picnic anymore. It’s Eileen’s ‘impromptu’ engagement party. For fifty.”

  “What?” He must be mistaken. No one told me about an engagement party. I haven’t even bought a gift and I have nothing to wear.

  “Bubbles, that hairdressing friend of Eileen’s, heard a rumor that Jim’s mother was planning a big fancy shindig. Well, you know your mother. She couldn’t stand to be beaten to the punch. Or rather, the punch bowl.”

  I can see Mom now, calling all our relatives, summoning them to our house for Labor Day. No way would she allow Jim’s mother the first crack at an engagement party. The wedding is her domain.

  “Eileen doesn’t know. It’s a surprise. Come to think of it, you’re not supposed to know either. Whoops,” he deadpans, “maybe I said too much.”

  If my mother is keeping the party a secret from me, then she must be feeling guilty about something. “What’s going on now?”

  “Everyone, meaning your mother, is worried that you’re J-E-A-L-O-U-S.”

  There is an uncomfortable silence as the letters form into the word I have learned to despise. “You don’t have to spell stuff anymore, Dad. I’m not a kid.”

  “Then you’re the only one. These days I feel like I’m living in a kindergarten, what with all the pettiness going on. Your mother and your sister are on the phone at the crack of dawn and they don’t get off until the eleven o’clock news. I’m going to live in my camper if this keeps up. And I’m taking the TV with me.” He opens up the paper and buries his head.

  “OK, I want to hear exactly why Mom and Eileen think I’m jealous.”

  Dad pretends to be fascinated by the article in front of him, though peering over his shoulder I find it’s nothing but an advertisement of a Labor Day sale—for lingerie.

  “If you don’t spill,” I threaten, “I’ll tell all the guys down at Frank’s Chicken House that you spent Saturday morning checking out the prices on C-cups.”

  He lets out a resigned sigh. “Your mother thinks you’re jealous because you left Eileen’s bi
rthday party early after Jim popped the question and then your sister stupidly chose that Jolinda—”

  “Belinda.”

  “Yeah, her, to be maid of honor. I dunno what the big hullabaloo’s about, but your mother is convinced you’re on the verge of suicide. And that if you knew tomorrow’s picnic was an engagement party for Eileen you wouldn’t come—that is, if you hadn’t thrown yourself off the Raritan Bridge.”

  This is so insulting that I don’t know how to respond without sounding like one more whining Devlin girl. “That’s such a lie. Does Mom actually take me for being that petty, that I wouldn’t go to my own sister’s engagement party because she’s getting married before me?”

  “That’s what I told her. She told me to shut up and mind my own business. Said I couldn’t know because I’m not a girl. So from now on, I’m staying out of it.”

  “That’s so not true.” I pound the cutting board, sending a stack of potatoes rolling to the floor.

  “You mean I am a girl?” he asks, lifting his head from the paper.

  Mom walks in with her arms filled with cut flowers from the garden and nearly trips over one of the potatoes on the floor.

  “Jeez Louise,” she exclaims, falling against the counter. “You guys have a potato fight, or what?” Then, seeing how Dad is studying the two-for-one bra ad and how I’m fussing and fuming, she says, “Oh, no, Pete. You told her.”

  He puts down the paper. “You can’t expect an intelligent girl like Nola to walk in, see two hundred pounds of potatoes, and not guess something’s up.”

  “Mom.” I pitch a potato into the sink. “I am not jealous of Eileen.”

  “Is that what you told her, Pete?”

  My father knows better than to answer.

  Mom turns off the stove and spreads the flowers across what space is left on the counter, maniacally picking out weeds from the red bee balm and black-eyed Susans and blue bachelor’s buttons.

  “I don’t blame you for being jealous, Nola.”

  “I’m not jealous.”

  “OK, angry, call it. Especially after that married man bought you that car and wined and dined you and God knows what else and then never called you again.”

  This is my mother’s new theory, that Mystery Chip—as our family has come to call him—is married. It’s not a bad theory, actually. In fact, it’s probably true. Truer than I would like to admit. But I wish she wouldn’t bring him up in every conversation.

  “I am over Mystery Chip, Mom. And nothing happened anyway. I’m not angry.”

  “Not about Mystery Chip, maybe, but certainly about Eileen. It’s a disgrace, her picking a woman she doesn’t know instead of her only sister to be her maid of honor, just because she’s a celebrity. It’s so upsetting, I’ve spoken to Father Mike about it.”

  “Not Father Mike!” Lord. Does she keep anything secret from that man?

  “He had a lot of insight, Nola, not only into Eileen’s motives but also what you’re going through out there. You know, he’s young. He’s . . .”

  “Good with the youth,” Dad and I singsong together.

  “Anyway”—Mom flicks a slug off a blade of grass—“he explained that there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on a single woman these days. It’s as though a girl’s personality, her virtue, and spiritual qualities don’t count one hoot if she’s not putting out in bed. Sex, sex, sex—that’s all men these days want.”

  “And you had to go to a celibate priest to find that out?”

  There is a snicker from behind the Sports section.

  Mom ignores us. “Society’s not fair to you, honey. Here you are a good Catholic girl—unlike your sister, I might add—saving yourself for a man who will respect your commitment to God, and what happens? Some married, free-loving liberal from Californication—”

  “Sorry to interrupt your sermon,” Dad says, “but this is Nola you’re talking about, right?”

  Mom flips him the bird.

  “OK. Just checking.”

  “Father Mike and I also talked about the”—Mom’s standard throat-clearing here—“the weight issue.”

  In an instant I bristle. That’s all it takes—the throat-clearing followed by a mention of “the weight issue”—for the old triggers to fire. Dad is dead silent as Mom stuffs the flowers into a vase and I stare at the floor.

  Then she wipes off her hands, opens her purse, and pulls out a folded piece of paper, laying it on the counter and patting out the wrinkles. Seeing it, I know why my mother sought the help of a priest. Heck, seeing it I think I’ll go light a few candles myself.

  The paper is a torn-out advertisement from Bride magazine or its ilk, and it features a tall blond model in a deep Christmas-green satin gown that grips her perfectly slim form tighter than a kid’s fist on Pixie Stix. As though that weren’t bad enough, the dress is sleeveless—another designer conspiracy bent on humiliating women everywhere—and in a mermaid cut. Perhaps the most unflattering cut ever known to ass.

  Even if by miracle of miracles I get down to a weight that would please my insurance adjuster, I would still look strangely distorted in a sheath like this, like a fat, green Morticia Addams. And one wonders if this was superskinny Eileen’s plan all along.

  “Eileen’s bridesmaid dress,” I say, picturing my upper arms wobbling for all to see.

  “It’s obscene. The Church won’t allow bare shoulders. You’ll have to wear shawls.”

  I say a silent prayer of gratitude to the Catholic church for sparing plus-size girls everywhere.

  Mom bites her lip. “I can’t talk her out of it. Eileen has her heart set on this design. Five hundred dollars each—too expensive for your cousins and I’m sure for you, too. Like I told her, you’re only a low-level editor. You can’t afford a five-hundred-dollar dress.”

  “Not that low-level, Mom.” I fight the temptation to brag that, actually, I have $100,000 and change set away thanks to Belinda. That I might have a half-a-million-dollar movie deal in the works.

  Mom is in her own world. “The wedding dress is just as indecent—so low cut. Seed pearls. Embroidery. All silk. Something a Donald Trump wife would wear. I’m not kidding. It costs six thousand dollars.”

  “Then Eileen should stop expecting her parents to be millionaires and pick a different dress,” Dad suddenly declares. “I sure as hell’d like to own a six-thousand-dollar car, let alone a dress you wear for one day. She’s spoiled is what she is, Betty, and it’s your fault.” He stomps off to their postage-stamp backyard, gets on his knees, and starts yanking carrots from the garden. Mom and I stand at the back door watching him.

  “Things a bit tense around the homestead, huh?”

  “Eileen’s demanding too much. We always planned on paying for her wedding—yours, too, Nola—but not a wedding like this. Horse-drawn carriages. Caviar and real champagne during hors d’oeuvres. Yesterday she asked if I could get the mayor to use his connections at the Princeton Country Club to let her hold the reception there. I can’t even conceive of what that bill would be like.”

  Unreal. My family is not caviar-and-country-club material. The Manville Knights of Columbus is about as clubby as we get.

  “It’s as though she’s suddenly out to impress, and I know who.”

  Here it comes. I’ve been waiting for this, the moment when Mom turns her wrath on Belinda.

  “Between her giving Eileen the green light to marry Jim ahead of you and now her flying in from England to be maid of honor, you’d think Belinda Apple was the focus of attention and not the couple getting married. Like Father Mike said, only a woman of self-centered and egotistical makeup would behave this way. I wouldn’t mind, frankly, if she disappeared off the face of the Earth. So help me God.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I have to do something, but what? I can’t let my parents drain their retirement savings to pay for Eileen’s wedding. They’re already hard up, ironing used Christmas wrapping paper, rinsing out Glad bags and saving them for leftovers. The next thin
g I know, Mom’s going to be making baskets out of laundry lint.

  The only choice is for Belinda to call and cancel.

  On the other hand, Eileen will not put up with a “Manville Deluxe” wedding. If she is relegated to a standard Saturday afternoon deal at Sacred Heart followed by a cocktail reception at The K of C and a honeymoon in the Poconos, we’ll all pay in years of spiteful Thanksgivings and sniping Christmases. We’ll never have a family gathering in peace again.

  I know what my sister craves: a candlelit winter evening service, an ermine stole, and a horse-drawn carriage whisking her through a sparkling snowfall to a grand and glorious hall decorated with wreaths and mistletoe, where fires burn in huge fireplaces and everyone is in satin gowns of green and red.

  This is why Eileen is so mad for Belinda, because Belinda offers the magical touch of celebrity. This is also why I’m loath to tell her that Belinda can’t come and why I am parked outside Nancy’s house on a lovely September evening, unable to punch in Eileen’s phone number on Belinda’s cell.

  Nancy has invited Deb and me to her spectacular house for an end-of-summer party to mark how far we’ve come since we formed the Cinderella Pact in June. Nearly three months into it, and I’ve lost a total of twenty pounds. I’ve also toned my arms and even my abs substantially thanks to an excruciating Carmen Diva Tae-Bo DVD, though if I am ever fortunate enough to meet Ms. Diva on the street, I feel it is only fair to hurt her as she has hurt me. The way I see it, she owes me a new set of deltoids.

  “What’re you doing sitting in the car, Grandma?” A blond woman I’ve never met before in a black swimsuit and white cover-up is on Nancy’s stone doorstep, waving me in. It’s not until I squint harder that I realize this is no strange woman—this is Deb.

  “Oh . . . my . . . God.” It is all I can say, getting out of the car and taking in her thinner legs, thinner waist and, especially, thinner face. I haven’t seen her in three weeks, and wow! It’s as if the fat’s been sucked out of her. Granted, she won’t be taking home the swimsuit medal from the Miss America Pageant this year, but compared to how she used to look, the new Deb is a completely different person.