Made sense to me. We bought a plane ticket to get her to Nevada the day after the conference. I told her that a divorcée dude ranch was probably no place for Annie, and she agreed. Jane and I could easily manage Annie between us when she was gone and she shouldn’t look back. If I were going out with Charles or stuck at a business dinner, Janey would step in. In the weeks before she left for Nevada, Lilly and Annie and I fell into the habits of the early days of Be Your Best. We made vats of spaghetti, played Monopoly late at night when Annie had been put to bed, and plotted out new seminars for the conferences and more splashy sales incentives. We didn’t so much as speak Ricky Luhrmann’s name though the idea of him was everywhere.
The upcoming conference was going to cap off the best year we’d had since we’d started the business. Ruga Potts had done away with the melting lipsticks that went rancid, the colors that changed within three weeks of purchase. The pace-setting salesgirls were supporting whole families now, and this year for the first time we were giving these chosen few real blue diamond necklaces. Lilly and I had waited for this moment for years. We went to the jewelry exchange on Washington Street together, picked them out and went to the Parker House for a celebratory drink. We set them on the table between us so we could look at them while we congratulated each other. Lilly insisted on wrapping them in pretty blue boxes herself and then we put them in the office safe. She had rented a white horse to help with the presentation—she was going to ride him onstage at the moment the diamond-necklace winners were announced. “Remember Barbara Stanwyck on that staircase in Double Indemnity? That’s the entrance we aspire to, baby.”
The conference went off without a hitch. Lilly led the session on “Keeping Our Husbands Happy,” which she’d invented when we lost three solid sellers to husbands who wanted their wives home every night instead of running cosmetics parties. The blue-diamond winners included, luckily, a beautiful twenty-four-year-old wearing a very low-cut dress that got us a picture in the Boston Herald Tribune. Thirty new salesgirls came our way within a week of seeing that picture. I sent congratulatory letters to each of their husbands, including stories from husbands grateful for the vacations and refrigerators their families had bought with Be Your Best income.
“Send them the ‘You can expect more sex if they work for us’ letter,” Lilly called out. Lilly had perfected this one, managing to convey the idea without mentioning the act at all. “Send them the ‘My wife is so much better groomed now that she sells for your company and she’s lost twelve pounds.’”
“We don’t need to do that. These women are making money you can see—that’s enough,” I said.
“Just shows what you know about men,” she said back. She rolled her eyes.
“Next year,” I said, grinning after the last of the conference was wrapped up, “it’s going to be a powder-blue Cadillac as well as three diamond necklaces. Now—off you go to become a divorcée yet again.”
“I’m aiming for ‘gay divorcée.’ I’d lay odds at about even.”
That night Annie and I had a stuffed-animal tea party with sugar cookies and cucumber sandwiches, milky tea, and licorice. Annie suggested we add MoonPies at our next tea because the stuffed animals preferred them to cucumbers. I didn’t blame them, I said. MoonPies it is.
*
Lilly came home from the dude ranch a blonde with a taste for cowgirl shirts and boots. It didn’t last long, and I sort of missed the cowgirl shirts when they ended up wadded behind the Chanel suits. It took her a while to regain her mind. Annie clung to me when her newly platinum-blond mother barreled into the apartment. It hurt my sister, but I could see it from Annie’s point of view as well.
“I scare her,” Lilly said to me that first night after Annie had been dispatched to bed. “I’m the woman who pushed her out her bedroom window and told her to jump.”
“That’s true,” I said. “You did. But I think the cowboy shirt and boots and yellow hair are more what she’s reacting to now.”
“Why is it that kids like everything to stay the same? I can’t stay the same. I look at her looking at me like that, like I’m the Martian mother come home to push her out windows again, and it feels bad. Kids are so judgmental. Narrow. You know, I’d like to be what the child wants me to be but, then again, I don’t. It’s not going to happen.”
“She’ll adjust. What’s that color you’re wearing now?”
“The girls on the ranch called it Hell-Bent-for-Leather Brown.”
“I like it. How about Lusty Wench Red? Night of the Ball Blush. Pirate Girl Pink.”
“Snapping-Eyed Wench.” She laughed.
“I’m not joking. What woman doesn’t want to have a little piratical streak?”
“You don’t,” Lilly snorted. “Got any pie around here?” Lilly sighed. “Or bourbon?”
*
“She’s a little louder than she was when she was a brunette,” Charles Helbrun observed. People expected Charles and I to appear places together now and I was often at his side at his business events. He was a less reliable date for me at Be Your Best parties or Terhune family gatherings, but he showed up enough to be considered my own particular beau.
A little louder? I knew that in his language, “loud” was code for “vulgar,” which was not a compliment. I’d invited him along on a walk with Annie and Lilly, and the afternoon had had some awkward silences—these might have made Lilly seem louder than she actually was when she tried to fill them in. Annie had started the day out being very charming but had gotten less so as her adult company got more awkward and she got hungrier, which made Charles impatient with her.
“Her daughter is very pretty, but she could stand to lose a little weight,” he said at one point when we had fallen a bit behind the others. “She doesn’t want those pounds to hang around when she gets older.”
“Annie is not overweight.” This was true. Annie weighed less than a full bag of groceries and was nobody’s idea of fat. “And my sister has never been vulgar,” I added. “Vulgar means ‘common’ which is not Lilly Terhune. At all.”
“She might not be common, but she can still be vulgar,” he replied. “And her stories about Reno—all horses and barbecues and divorcée man-hating pajama parties. She describes something like a summer camp with gin fizzes and lawyers.”
“If she was that frivolous, her divorce lawyer wouldn’t have congratulated her on how ironclad the Be Your Best paperwork was. Ricky got nothing.”
“For that she has you to thank,” Charles said.
“Your boyfriend doesn’t like me,” Lilly said when we got home from that outing. “Not that it matters what he thinks of me. How’s it going in the romance department with him and you?”