Spin Cycle by Sue Margolis Read Free Book Online

a sanitary towel commercial.
    “Look, I’ll go,” Rachel said, looking at her watch. “I didn’t mean to stay so long. Sam’s upstairs waiting to be fed and for me to help him with his homework.”
    “OK, but just hang on for a sec while I take this call,” Shelley called out excitedly from the kitchen. “If I’ve got this gig, I want you to be the first to congratulate me.”
    While Shelley took the call, Rachel sat sipping her tea, her eyes wandering round the room. Shelley had only just finished decorating. Rachel smiled. To say her friend’s taste was wacky was an understatement. Ordinary or garden-variety wacky worshipped at the altar of Shelley Peach wacky. For a start both the walls and ceiling were painted deep red. A giant silver disco ball hung from the ceiling, the battered junk shop dining table was concealed beneath a floor-length emerald-green sequined tablecloth and opposite the seventies lime sofa was another table covered in pony skin. The lampshades were made of bubble-gum-pink fake fur and in the far corner, suspended above the Astro Turf rug and half a dozen pots of plastic crocuses, was a wooden garden swing. Shelley called it her tart’s-boudoir-meets-the-Teletubbies look. While Rachel adored the humor and outlandishness of it all, Adam, who had visited chez Shelley only once, had walked into the living room, visibly stiffened and declared in a loud whisper that they had clearly just descended into hell and were standing in Lucifer’s garden room.
    Adam’s visit had been a month or so ago, when the room was still awaiting its finishing touches. Now every surface was covered in glam-kitsch plastic ornaments. Rachel’s favorite was a twelve-inch statue of Marilyn Monroe whose white polythene skirt flew up when a button was pressed in her back. Only most of the time it didn’t and her head fell off instead. In Rachel’s opinion, Marilyn’s sole rival for pride of place was the Elvis toilet paper holder in the bathroom. Every time a piece of paper was torn off, he burst into “Wipe Me Tender.”
    * * * * *
    The two women had become friends from the moment they met four months ago—on the Saturday Shelley moved in.
    Feeling at a loss because she was gigless that night, Joe, her ex, had Sam for the weekend and Adam was at a root canal symposium in Kentucky, Rachel had spent the morning wandering from room to room in her pajamas, dibbing and dabbing at bits of housework, trying to decide how to spend her day. By midafternoon she was still dibbing and still in her pajamas. It was then, as she stood staring out the window at nothing in particular, that she noticed a woman pull up in an exceedingly battered East German Trabant, which had been sprayed fluorescent orange. She was closely followed by what Rachel took to be a hired man and van. The woman was clearly her new neighbor. Curious and having bugger all else to do, Rachel decided to carry on watching.
    The first thing she noticed about Shelley was her breasts. They seemed to emerge from the car a full three seconds before the rest of her. It wasn’t that they were
freakishly
huge—probably no more than Ds, Rachel guessed—they just appeared so because Shelley was five foot nothing and skinny with it. With her cropped copper hair, fuchsia bell bottoms and tangerine and purple tie-dyed top she looked like a multicolored umbrella, a substantial section of which was refusing to fold down. Rachel found it difficult to strike up relationships with beautiful women with perfect figures because they always made her feel that she should be listed in
The Guinness Book of Yuck,
but with her out-of-proportion tits and slightly too-big nose, Shelley appeared reassuringly imperfect body-wise. Moreover, her garish style suggested a vivacious, off-the-wall personality that appealed to Rachel. So when the removal man disappeared just after six, she went downstairs to introduce herself.
    By way of a neighborly gesture she took with her the week-old