Bird in Hand Read Free Page B

kinds of minute assessments of other females, searching for clues that would show her how to act, how to carry herself, how to pull off being a woman. Her own mother was uninterested in social niceties; when Alison was growing up her mother wore paint-spattered T-shirts for days in a row and tied her hair back with rubber bands. She went barefoot all summer and wore sneakers when it got cool. It was almost worse that she was effortlessly beautiful; she had no tricks or techniques to pass along to a shy and insecure daughter. In fact, it puzzled her that Alison was interested in learning those things she so assiduously avoided. “Why do you buy these trashy rags?” she’d ask, pausing over a stack of Seventeen s and Glamour s on the floor of Alison’s bedroom. “They perpetuate such absurd stereotypes.”
    “I like them,” Alison would say, snatching the magazines from under her mother’s inquisitive gaze. “There’s a lot of information—”
    “About the crap they want you to buy.”
    “Not only that,” Alison would say, without the tools or the fortitude to make a reasoned defense. Her mother was right, but it wasn’t the point. However unrealistic or unattainable, the paint-by-numbers makeup guides and ugly-duckling before-and-afters gave Alison a sense of possibility. They made her feel that she might one day transform herself into the kind of woman she dreamed of being—confident, savvy, sure.
    How ironic, she thought now, fleetingly, as the elevator ground to a hesitant stop at the fifth floor before it settled into the right notch and its doors lurched open, that for a while, when she lived in New York, she actually was that woman—or a reasonable imitation—and now she was feeling as vulnerable and insecure as she had back in high school. It takes so little to strip the gears, she thought, to find yourself pedaling in place when you thought you were moving forward.
    “Are you a friend of Colm’s?” the peacock said suddenly, turning around as they stepped out into the hall.
    Colms. Colm. Alison panicked for a moment; the word sounded made up, like the name of a Star Trek alien. Oh, yes, Colm—the name on the invitation, Colm Maynard; it was his apartment. “No,” she said. “I’m an old friend of Claire’s.”
    “From Bluestone?”
    Alison nodded.
    The peacock narrowed her eyes and gave Alison a once-over. “Fascinating.”
    Even from halfway down the hall, the buzz of the party was audible, with an occasional shriek of laughter rising above the din. Pushing open the door to 512, the peacock exclaimed, “Darling!” in the general vicinity of a cluster of twentysomething publishing types, throwing up her hands and disappearing into the crowd.
    In the long entry corridor, people were juggling drinks and business cards. They barely acknowledged Alison muttering “Excuse me—pardon—excuse me” as she nudged past, inching her way into a large, dimly lit room. Stepping back against the beige linen-covered wall, she looked around. The apartment was enormous, rooms leading into other rooms, all of which seemed to be filled with people. She could see a bar at the far end of the living room, set against the panoramic backdrop of the East River, with a young man in a starched white shirt with rolled-up sleeves mixing drinks. Several fresh-faced women—moonlighting college students, Alison suspected—were circulating trays of teeny-tiny brightly colored hors d’oeuvres. The crowd was dense and animated, densely animated; for a moment Alison saw it as one breathing organism. She shook her head, dispelling the illusion. That was an old trick from childhood, a way to transform an intimidating situation into something remote and featureless that she could observe from a distance.
    Claire’s hardcovers were piled in stacks on tables around the room. The cover, hot pink with white letters, featured a slightly blurry photo of a martini glass, tipping sideways, splashing droplets of blue liquid