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If there was a next time. Not the initiation, but the opportunity to wear a garment like this one. It deserved better than a plastic hanger in my closet, but until I could get it cleaned and return it to Margaret Hawthorne, I sure as hell couldn’t leave it on the floor of the steamy bathroom.
I wrapped in a towel and walked out with the dress draped over my arm. It would have to hang in the hall closet, because the rod in my room wasn’t tall enough to accommodate the length. I walked through the living room and stopped short. “Holy hell!”
My heart seized. My gut clenched and my ass slammed shut. There was a woman—even one I recognized was a shock—sitting on my sofa. “Hello, Riley.”
“Mrs. Hawthorne.” Once it began beating again, my heart pounded like a jackhammer. Still was. I breathed out a steady exhale.
“Get dressed, darling. We’re going to lunch.” She was as regal as they came. Head high. Perfect hair. Pearls. Ankles crossed.Jerry Springeron the TV. Chants of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” rang out the speakers of my box-style television, and Margaret smiled, fist-pumped as she mouthed along.
I went back to the bedroom, pulled on a pair of leggings and a T-shirt. Then I switched the leggings for jeans and the T-shirt for a blouse that tied over my left hip. By the time I settled on a faux-suede pencil skirt, matching boots and a soft white sleeveless sweater, my room looked like my closet exploded.
Margaret smiled when I emerged from the bedroom. “Two minutes, dear. We’re about to find out if Laroque wants Barbara or Britney.” She pointed first to a woman whose tank top had a broken strap and whose hair was half-in and half-out of her ponytail, then to a redhead who was still prancing around the stage, trying to get around the big guy in the black shirt holding her back.
“Okay.” While I waited for Laroque—a pasty-white guy whose real name was probably Herbert—to make his choice, I secured my hair in a messy bun and took in the condition of my place.
The apartment wasn’t messy, just old. And not in the antique or BOHO kind of way. It was more in the worn-out carpet, flaking stucco, water-stained ceiling kind of way.
Not the kind of place a woman like Margaret Hawthorne belonged. Her shoes cost more than three months of our rent.
After a few moments, she clicked off the TV and stood. “Shall we?” I followed her out and down to her waiting car. I couldn’t be sure if they had a fleet of limos on standby or a service they employed, but I didn’t mind being driven.
“How was your evening?” She wasn’t asking if the satin pillow they’d put under my head had made me comfortable. Spoiler: it hadn’t. She wanted to know if I was happy I’d survived the initiation.
“I’m still here.”
Her smile was patient. Clearly, that wasn’t the answer she wanted. “And?”
“And…” And… “I… slept like a baby?”
She laughed as the car pulled around the block to the McDonalds and stopped. Apparently, Margaret had a favorite restaurant. Not the Oak Room, or Antonio’s, or even the Olive Garden where the bottomless salad and breadsticks when combined with my big purse lined with Ziplock baggies could feed me for a week.
This woman liked her McNuggets. We went inside. The place was packed, but like she was Moses, and they were the red sea, the crowd parted, and we moved to the front. I stared. Maybe it was the way she was dressed. But then she turned and started talking to one of the women.
“Beatrice! How are the children?” Then to a guy with his granddaughter. “Oh, Morris! She’s just as pretty as you said.” These were her friends. And they surrounded us as she introduced me. When I’d met everyone, she ordered—McNuggets and fries—then we took our food to the table.
“So, what did you think of the Society?” Her voice was lower than the happy chirp when we’d walked in.
“It was…” She knew what it was. I had questions. “How did you get involved”—I lowered my voice to a whisper—“with the Society?”
She chuckled at full volume. “Oh, darling. It’s such a fun story.” She chomped a French fry. “Let’s see. I was nineteen. Stonewall was the only school I wanted to go to. My brother went to Harvard. My Mother went to Yale, and dear old Daddy went to Princeton, but Stonewall, with its history and its ivy walls, was my dream.”
She pushed a tub of barbecue sauce toward me. “Thanks.”
“One night, I was on campus, walking home from the library. It was late, about three in the morning.” Stonewall’s library stayed open all night during midterms and exams. “Anyway, I was walking home. I came upon a sight. A man holding a woman down. She was crying.” She shook her head, no longer looking at me, but likely envisioning the replay of that night in her head as she spoke. “She was struggling, trying to get away, but he was a brute. Strong.”
This was an all too familiar story these days. Apparently, back then, too. “You saved her?”
She nodded. “I saw red. So fucking red.” She lowered her voice to a whisper on the F-bomb. “I had a knife in my bag. Small. Just a little something for protection. But I didn’t have anything else. So, I took a tube of lipstick, flicked off the cap and jabbed it against his temple. He thought it was a gun.” She grinned. “I saw it in a movie once.”
I’d seen the same movie. “With that guy from—”
I didn’t even finish before she slapped her hand on the table and giggled. “Yes! Oh, my God. You’ve seen it.”
“Yeah. I loved that movie. Such a smart script.” All the sudden I was Siskel and Ebert.
“And the casting! I could gush.” She waved her hand and popped another nugget like they were her crack cocaine. Some people liked drugs. Margaret Hawthorne liked Mc-Everything. “Anyway. I pulled him off her, then I might’ve pulled a Lorena on him.”
“Lorena?”
