Fashionably Late by Olivia Goldsmith Read Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t that Karen didn’t love and appreciate Belle. She was grateful. After all, Belle had taken her in and cared for her and educated her and taught her so many things.
    Despite Belle’s prejudices and her third-person disembodiment, Belle was a careful, involved mother. Sometimes too involved. Karen felt guilty for being critical of Belle in any way. But wasn’t that the unnatural inheritance of an adopted child: we couldn’t afford to reject a mother when we had already been rejected by one.
    Now Belle picked up the salad plates and compulsively wiped up a miniscule spot of salad dressing beside Karen’s place. It was a silent rebuke. Then Belle went out to the kitchen for the next equally small course.
    Lisa looked across the table at Karen and shrugged. They understood that there was no changing Belle. Lisa lowered her voice. “Are you all right?” she asked. Karen shook her head. “What?” Lisa’s face tightened with concern. “The doctor?”
    “Not now,” Karen told her, and jerked her chin toward Belle in the kitchen. “Talk about something else.”
    Lisa nodded and raised her voice to a normal level. “I really mean it about the job for Stephanie. She needs something like this and I won’t lie. The money will come in handy.”
    Lisa was always short of money. It confused Karen. Leonard had to be doing very well, but somehow it seemed that Lisa was always in some sort of trouble with her Bendel’s account or her Bloomingdale’s card or her other bills. Still, she kept on spending. Karen knew that long ago Lisa had begun smuggling in any new clothing purchases and hiding them around the house. She’d told Karen that since she had no money of her own, she had to beg Leonard for cash. Karen almost visibly shuddered when she thought of living like that, but Lisa seemed to prefer to have too little money and too much time on her hands than to go out and get a job. Since closing her little boutiqueţmore a hobby than a businessţshe had not worked. The idea of working seemed to fill her with horror.
    Karen had to smile. My sister Lisa: a Jewish, female, Maynard G.
    Krebbs.
    Belle returned with the inevitable plates of desiccated chicken.
    Beside the flat, white breast there was some punished broccoli. Belle believed that nothing should be cooked al dente except perhaps her Jell-O, which was frighteningly chewable. To this day Karen didn’t know her mother’s secret for creating that leathery skin on a gelatin cup.
    “I’m looking forward to spending more time with Stephanie,” Karen said aloud. Actually, she had some reservations about hinng her niece as an intern. And Jeffrey was furious about it. “The girls in the showroom are competitive and jealous already,” he had said to her. “We don’t need this.” He was probably right, but Jeffrey had never really liked Lisa or Leonard. He considered them both too provincial and too materialistic, and he thought their kids were spoiled. “Plus, it certainly won’t help Tiffany’s self-image,” he had added as an afterthought, referring to Lisa’s other daughter. Karen had to agree with that.
    “How’s Tiff?” Karen asked now. Tiffany was Lisa’s younger daughter, her fat one. Built kind of like Karen, the girl was already at thirteen almost as tall as her sister, Stephanie, and had to be double Stephanie’s weight. There was no doubt that Tiff was bright, and she did well academically, but there was no denying she was troubled.
    Except, of course, by Belle, who insisted Tiff’s weight was simply a question of lack of willpower and spite.
    “She’s fine,” Lisa said, but her voice tightened.
    “She’s fat is what she is,” Belle said, and stabbed at the dried-out piece of chicken on her plate. “Fat and cranky.”
    For a moment, Karen felt dizzyţalmost as if she might faint. She’d heard this, just this and just like this, before. This is deja vu, she thought. Or perhaps it had actually happened. Then it came to her.
    She had sat