“I know,” Corinne said grumpily. Then she looked down at her dress. She’d worried off one of the pearl embellishments on the bust. Bettina rushed forward with a needle and thread and quickly sewed it back on.
Once Corinne was back in the dressing room, she stared at herself in the mirror, something she often did after being side by side with Aster. Even in a wedding dress, Corinne couldn’t compete with Aster’s radiant beauty. Corinne spent enough money on her looks, but her long forehead, square jaw, and thick eyebrows equated to something more handsome than pretty. Her shoulders were broad like her father’s, her chest small like her mother’s, her legs too thick and pale even after hours of Pilates, countless meals uneaten, and thousands spent on spray-tanning. You’re good stock, her mother had told her when she was eleven years old. She meant it as a compliment, but it made Corinne think of a prizewinning heifer in a county fair. Penelope had certainly never referred to Aster as stock, no matter what she pulled.
It had always been that way. Her parents made excuse after excuse for Aster. Corinne used a knife and fork at eighteen months, Aster threw her food against the wall well into preschool. Corinne studied during recess, while Aster bought test answers on the playground. But their parents always looked the other way. Mason had actually favored Aster, celebrating when Aster got a B, as if she had to do little more than show up for class to earn it.
Corinne preferred her mother’s company anyway, enjoying long, girly weekends of tea at the Plaza and spa trips to Elizabeth Arden when Aster and Mason took one of their special trips to Meriweather or the Berkshires. But with her mother’s attention also came her criticism and instruction. Penelope had come from old money, made a hundred years ago on railroads, and she was very specific about how her daughter should behave. Study French. Attend Junior League. Dress in classic lines. Marry well.
Did they instill any of those values in Aster? Corinne doubted it. The two of them had gotten along as kids—one of Corinne’s favorite memories was holding tightly on to Aster’s hand as they stared, transfixed, at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade floats from a friend’s penthouse on Central Park West. They grew apart as they got older, though . . . and when Aster stopped listening to her. Did their parents give Aster a wide berth because she was beautiful? Did they figure she’d get by anyway, even coarse and unfinished? Well, that hadn’t worked out: when Aster was a year into college, she’d dropped out and settled into the life of a socialite. In the first year of Aster’s downward spiral, whenever Corinne visited their parents at their Upper East Side town house, the air seemed fraught, as though she’d just interrupted an argument. They still made excuses for Aster and bankrolled her life, but they were clearly stressed, especially her father, who suddenly wouldn’t even look at Aster anymore.
The only thing Corinne could do was to follow her mother’s advice to the letter. While Aster took off on a whim to Morocco or went on monthlong bar crawls around Ireland, Corinne shot up the ranks at Saybrook’s, conquering one emerging market after the next. While Aster never took another modeling job, barely showed up for Saybrook’s PR events, and frittered away her allowance, Corinne dutifully invested, acquired, and got engaged.
Now she leaned against the dressing room wall and took breath after breath. Her heart began to slow. Her nerves no longer felt snappy under her skin. She always got so worked up about Aster, but really, what was the point? She gazed at her first reception dress on the hanger, a long sheath in ivory satin and beading. Corinne’s second reception dress, a shorter one she would wear for dancing, hung behind it. Just the sight of them lifted her spirits.
“Are you sure about three dresses for one wedding?” her mother had asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow—as an heiress to Saybrook’s name and fortune, Corinne was expected to dabble in luxury without seeming tacky. But Dixon’s mother had done the same thing, and she practically was a princess.