Family Linen Read Online Free

forward—“are you a virgin?”
    â€œNone of your beeswax!” Sybill rises abruptly, furious, but Bob apologizes so meekly that she finds she can’t stay mad. Then she finds herself making another appointment anyway. She’s gone this far, after all. Besides, she knows it’s his job to ask questions like that. She’s not paying him to be polite. Leaving, she notices again the door at the back of the study, the door to the rest of his house, and envisions his wife right there behind it, listening, jealous. How silly! But Bob thinks Sybill’s a very attractive woman, he said so. She shakes hands with him; her hand would make two of his. “See you next week,” she says. Then he slides the glass door open and the heat hits Sybill like a ton of bricks. She hesitates, squares her shoulders, and marches back out into the damp hot rosy world.
    * * *
    Betty is just as jealous as she can be, she must have asked Sybill about Bob a million times. Betty wants to be hypnotized, too. The two women sit at the shiny maple table in Sybill’s dinette, as they do most nights, eating meatloaf, salad, and baked potatoes, while the TV plays on in the living room. Or the great room, as it’s called in the glossy brochures that advertise these condominiums. Betty has a way of running her tongue around the inside of her lips which Sybill has never noticed before; it gets all over her, though. Sybill is worse off, actually, since she saw the hypnotist. She’s had headaches two nights in a row and she’s real nervous. “I’m just as jumpy as a cat,” she says to Betty, who agrees.
    â€œBut Lord, why not?” Betty asks, waving her fork in the air. “If I had a strange man going down in my subconscious on Thursday I’d be nervous, too. Girl, I’d be more nervous than you! What do you reckon he’ll find out?”
    â€œProbably nothing.” Sybill puts A.1. sauce all over her meatloaf. On TV, a blond reporter from California says that twenty-two volcanic eruptions throughout the world in the past year may have contributed to the current bad weather. “Or the cause may be El Niño, a fickle east-to-west countercurrent,” the blonde says. “In any case, this rainy spring, which has caused deaths, floods, mud slides, and havoc, is one of the wettest on record for many parts of the country.” The TV shows houses in Nevada and Utah, sliding down the muddy sides of mountains.
    â€œLook at that,” Betty says.
    â€œI would never buy a split-level in the first place,” Sybill says. “I wouldn’t want to live on a hill.”
    â€œThey say it goes back to your parents.” Betty runs her tongue around the inside of her lips.
    â€œWhat does?”
    â€œEverything,” Betty says. Sometimes Sybill just hates Betty, who only went to high school but acts so smart. Betty, who is a hospital receptionist, is a tall edgy woman with dark permanent curls and a jutting chin. Once Betty was married for three years, fifteen years ago. Now she claims she can’t even remember what that was like.
    Sybill looks at TV where they are talking about Alzheimer’s disease which kills one hundred twenty thousand people annually and is the fourth leading cause of death. Sybill finishes up her meatloaf and lights a Merit and listens closely. Alzheimer’s disease causes memory loss, confusion, speech impairment, and personality change. It doesn’t say if headaches are a symptom or not. Huh. Sybill snorts. She doesn’t believe in Alzheimer’s disease because it doesn’t make sense to her that a disease that major could have been around for so long without anybody even noticing it, or naming it, or talking about it, or anything. The first Sybill ever heard of it was last spring.
    â€œIt’s just popular,” Sybill says.
    Betty lights up too, staring at Sybill strangely.
    â€œThat Alzheimer’s,” Sybill