Sister Wolf Read Online Free Page B

pencils?”
    “Rest it, Marit; it’s too hot.”
    “You should quit. Your brain is going to turn to cottage cheese.”
    Lola wiped her sunglasses on her skirt. “Don’t fuss at me, angel. We’ve had this conversation.”
    “Oh, I do recall. The one about how soothing it is to live in an orderly universe. By which you meant that Mrs. Gilliam has lots of servants.”
    Lola did not intend to swallow this remark. She brought up a topic which she knew would be inflammatory.
    “We’re meeting about the cotillion. I believe I mentioned it?”
    Niles Village, incorporated in 1747, had survived without a débutante cotillion for two hundred and eleven years. Lola had plotted the framework for the first Berkshire Ball, to be held on the Labor Day weekend, and for the decades of cotillions to come. Mrs. Gilliam had agreed to be the sponsor. Marit struggled with her temper for a moment, watching the bait dangling out in front of her. The bait was juicy, and she swallowed the hook. She pulled a cigarette out of the package in her shirt pocket. She chain-smoked when she was vexed.
    “You love hiding, don’t you? What you really love is fooling people. Poor dim old Mrs. Gilliam, trying to fix you up and marry you off. Who do you think you are, a double agent?”
    Lola bared her teeth. “If I were a Jew, I gather you’d want it branded on my arm?”
    “I expect you to recognize that you’re acting like a hypocrite.”
    “You backwards bigot,” said Lola, scraping the polish on her thumbnail. “I like dances and pretty clothes. I’m not a man, Marit. I will not wear pants and chop off my hair to suit your scruples.”
    Marit eased up and took a safer tack. She and Lola had a peppery friendship, which allowed for a good portion of strenuous wrangling. Most of the time she admired Lola ungrudgingly for the way she juggled her public and private lives.
    “I don’t approve of débutante mills. I think they are lowering.”
    “Pooh,” said Lola, accepting Marit’s peace offering. “You’re just sour because Luba sent you to France instead.”
    The season that Lola made her bow to society she was chosen Girl of the Year. In Cathorne, Virginia, mothers of belles still took their daughters down a peg or two by reminding them of Lola Paige Brevard. “She wore an ivy wreath on her head, and you’re bothering your daddy for orchids.” “Lola Paige never hung by the phone all day long.” “Serves you right. Lola Paige wouldn’t break a date for a better bid; if she did, she surely never got caught at it!” “There’s slouching and slouching, missy; Lola Paige stood just like a willow.”
    Some part of the local myth was Lola’s beauty, which was not the regular classical kind, but much more vivid. She had short blonde hair that curled like a crown of light, and coal-black eyes that needed no definition from paints or shadows. She was tall, two inches under six feet, and as flat in front as she was behind, but she rustled and floated when she moved, and she was constantly in motion. Her profile made a straight unbroken line from her forehead to the tip of her nose. Her mouth was wide and thin, but she was always talking, so its lack of symmetry went unnoticed. When she talked, she used her hands like a Latin; they fluttered around her face like mating birds.
    Some part of the myth was purely tactics. Lola made her Aunt Fanchon Pickett dress all in black and be her chaperone at big dances in Cathorne and Richmond. Lola broke the rule and wore white her whole coming-out year, even before her official bow at the Seventh Regiment. She made every entrance heavily veiled, in a white mantilla that completely covered her face, foiled by Aunt Fan, in shiny black, who carried Lola’s evening bag and dance card. The chaperone and the dance card were choice anachronisms, which got her equal marks for virtue among the parents and for affectation among her fellow débutantes. Neither opinion mattered to Lola; she knew that no Girl