Girl on the Best Seller List Read Free Page B

her the supreme compliment of going up under her sweater in a moment of passion, Milo abandoned his moral concepts. What happened then completely shocked him. Before he knew what had happened, two pieces of foam rubber whipped him in the eye.
    “Here!” she screamed at him. “That’s all you want anyway! Now for God’s sake, leave me alone!”
    He was left sitting in the old Plymouth by himself, with a pair of falsies on his lap.
    It was that incident which had inspired Milo’s first gift to Gloria — his sculpture of Saint Lucy. He wrote a little note to accompany the present:
    This is Lucy. She’s the patron saint for those afflicted in the eyes. She’s supposed to have lived in Syracuse, and to have suffered martyrdom there about 303. There was a nobleman who wanted to marry her. She was supposed to be very beautiful; her eyes particularly were beautiful. The nobleman kept telling her so, until one day she tore out her eyes saying: “Now let me live to God.” Her day is December 13th. Will you marry me, or am I stuck with the falsies the way the nobleman was stuck with Lucy’s eyes?
    His proposal was accepted.
    Gloria still kept Saint Lucy under a small glass globe on the bureau in their bedroom.
    • • •
    After their marriage, Gloria had genuinely tried to change. She had a permanent wave, and she took care buying clothes. Whenever they entertained, she fixed new dishes and fussed throughout the evening, hurrying to empty ashtrays, refresh drinks, put pillows behind the guests’ backs, trying to say and do the right thing and look the right way. It was overdone — the permanent, the clothes, the hostessing — all of it. They lived in the town Milo was raised in, so that Glo was a newcomer. Milo had never thought of Cayuta as being an unfriendly community, but it soon seemed that way — from Gloria’s vantage point. His friends were as disinclined to accept her as his fraternity brothers had been. Her failure to win their acceptance hurt him deeply. At the same time, he wished Glo could just relax, just not try so damnably hard to be liked.
    He got his wish. Eventually she stopped trying altogether. She went out of her way to dress like some kind of hoyden years younger than herself. She wore blue jeans and flannel shirts (hanging outside her pants) and she cut her hair and combed it in some crazy way that made her look as though she had been caught in a wind tunnel. No make-up. No embellishments of any kind. She was just there; take her or leave her. Milo sensed what she was trying to tell Cayuta:
I
could be attractive if I wanted to be, but I couldn’t care less — not about any of you!
It was along about this same time that she began aspiring to the arts: first oil paints, until she tired of cleaning out the brushes, only to start again at her miserable, glaringly-poor efforts; then the guitar (her fingers weren’t long enough, she complained — you have to have very long fingers); and, ultimately, writing.
    • • •
    She had worked hard on that novel. No one knew that better than Milo. She had sat at that typewriter like someone driven, day after day, and sometimes far into the early morning.
    “I’ll show them,” she would say.
    “Show them what, Glo?”
    He needn’t have asked. He had seen Fern Fulton’s condescending smiles directed at Glo at parties, seen them and resented them, and yet, how many times had he himself flinched inwardly when Glo said something like “Oh, sperry-grass, with that old Dutch sauce Holland days,” at a dinner when asparagus was served, or “Where’s the wash rag and soap,” when a finger bowl was placed before her. And could he ever forget that afternoon at the Cayuta Country Club when Min Stewart had bent over to retrieve a glove she had dropped and Gloria had goosed her? Min Stewart, Cayuta’s formidable septuagenarian social lioness…. It was no mystery to anyone why Min had kept Glo out of the Cayuta Ladies Birthday Club. There was not a soul in