The Private Lives of Pippa Lee Read Free

transported expressions on their faces, as they listened to the rush of the sea.
    This house makes me feel strange, Pippa thought languorously, propping herself up on her elbow and taking a pair of brand-new binoculars from the glass coffee table. The sliding glass doors were open, and Pippa squinted through the powerful lenses at awall of emerald green lawn with an opal of sparkling blue, a tiny, artificial lake – one of the many that dotted Marigold Village – at its center. She jerked the binoculars back and forth until she spied a bird, an oriole, nervously hopping on a willow branch. The bird had a black hood and saffron yellow chest feathers, fading into white at the abdomen. It looked precisely like the glossy picture of a Baltimore Oriole in Pippa’s manual, Birds of the East Coast , which she had bought at the Marigold bookstore only a week before.
    On the day she purchased the manual, she noticed a sign on the bulletin board in the bookstore: ‘Marigold reading group meets every Thursday evening at seven. New members welcome.’ This caught her interest. It might be a good way to meet people. The following Thursday, she was knocking on the door of the prescribed unit, wearing one of Herb’s shirts and a loose linen skirt. She felt she should hide her still solid body from the old women. It seemed only kind. A tiny lady with the tight white curls and pull-on trousers of the nearly aged swung open the door. ‘Another young one!’ she pronounced rather loudly, half-looking over her shoulder. ‘Come on in. Very exciting, us old crones like new blood.’ Pippa introduced herself, walked into the living room, and saw a group of women in their sixties, seventies, and eighties seated in a circle like a witches’ coven, purses tucked by their sides; in each of their laps lay a paperback copy of Sam Shapiro’s latest novel, Mr Bernbaum Presents . Pippa nearly bust out laughing. This was too much.
    â€˜I’m Lucy Childers,’ said the woman who had answered the door. ‘This is, let’s see … Emily Wasserman, Ethel Cohen, Jean Yelding, Cora O’Hara, and – Where’s Chloe?’ Just then, the other ‘young one’ came out from behind the bathroom door. Chloe was of an indeterminate age; her taut face was frozen in a semi-smile, having been ratcheted up several notches and enhanced by prominent cheekbones that looked like Ping-Pong balls under her skin. The two swollen halves of her upper lip drooped suggestively, likea set of red velvet curtains tied at the corners of her mouth, Pippa thought. The tip of her nose was pinched, as though a pair of fingers had squeezed a clay sculpture as a prank. Her eyelids seemed Krazy-Glued open a little too wide. She spoke in a very quiet, level voice, as one might speak to a child having a tantrum.
    â€˜It’s lovely to meet you,’ she said, her startled eyes staring out of that approximation of a face like a prisoner peering out of a chink in a stone wall. Pippa said something polite and looked away, feeling a mix of pity and repulsion.
    â€˜This is Chloe’s last meeting with the club,’ Lucy Childers said. ‘Her husband has recently passed and she’s moving back to the city.’
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ said Pippa.
    â€˜Thank you,’ whispered Chloe.
    Lucy Childers perched herself on the edge of the couch, back straight, her small feet in their white leather nurse’s shoes lined up beside each other neatly, and opened the discussion with her own erudite thoughts, one tiny, stiff hand chopping the air each time she made a point, then moving it swiftly to the side, as though scraping peelings off a table. Lucy admired the symmetry of the book, the careful pacing, the slow but steady drip feed of information – not too much, not too little; she called it a ‘mystery of character.’ Then she turned to Chloe, who murmured, ‘It’s a mean book, but I