The Fainting Room Read Online Free

the waved silver hair, the small ears with their tiny pearl earrings, and felt the impropriety of her own red hair, and her ears, whose piercings were off-center because she had done them herself at sixteen using a sewing needle and a piece of potato.
    She tried to smile. “Would you like some salad?”
    “Thank you dear,” said Mrs. Dunlap, and put a very small amount of salad on her plate. And then, “Good heavens, you’ve cut yourself.”
    Evelyn glanced at the bandage around her thumb. “I was cutting a tomato,” she said.
    “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Dunlap. “Hadn’t you better change the dressing?”
    Evelyn looked at the decanter of vinaigrette beside the salad bowl and back at Mrs. Dunlap’s concerned face.
    “Ray made the dressing,” she said. Thinking, I didn’t bleed in it, bitch.
    “Pardon?”
    Oh Jesus—Mrs. Dunlap meant the Band-Aid. Evelyn turned her hand and saw that blood had seeped through; a thin line of blood had collected on the edge of the bandage and was threatening to spill down her knuckle.
    Idiot, idiot, idiot. “Excuse me,” she managed, and grabbing her thumb in her other fist, she turned from the buffet table and made her way through the people who suddenly seemed intent on blocking her path to the bathroom.
    She re-bandaged her finger, then sat on the lid of the toilet and leaned against the wall. Ray made the dressing —Had she actually said that to Gillian Dunlap? She wanted to run out of the house in shame. There were, she knew, a dozen other fauxs pas she had already made that evening without even knowing it. Faux pas , she had learned, meant false step. In the family she had grown up in, a false step could kill you: the high wire was set thirty feet in the air, the act performed without nets.
    If only she could just stay here in the bathroom until the party was over. During the last awful year of living with her first husband, Evelyn had spent quite a bit of time in bathrooms, in the tiny bathroom of their Airstream trailer, to be exact, while Joe raged on the other side of the door. This bathroom, with its huge old bathtub and pedestal sink, was a thousand times nicer. It wouldn’t be bad to pass a couple of hours in here. She could even take a bath.
    There was a knock on the door, a polite tap-tapping, and then a woman’s voice like one of the announcers on Public Radio: “Is anybody in there?”
    It was Marseille Yeager, a psychiatrist married to Alex, the aging Ken doll.
    “Evelyn, is that you?”
    “Just a minute,” Evelyn called in what she hoped was a neutral tone, wondering how Marseille knew it was her. She flushed the toilet to buy herself time and looked in the mirror. Her mascara had smeared only a little; you couldn’t really tell she’d cried. She licked her finger and wiped beneath her eyelids, then ran a hand beneath the sleeves of her blouse to check that the rubber bands concealed under the turned-up cuffs were solidly in place. Sooner or later someone was bound to find out about the tattoos, but so far she’d been lucky and Ray hadn’t told anyone. She took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door.
    “Hello, darling, it’s been ages!” Marseille held out her arms and Evelyn allowed herself to be embraced. Something metal and spiky dug into her chest. When the hug ended Evelyn saw that what had gouged her was a silver brooch with sea urchin points sticking out of it, the sort of abstract design Marseille favored. Marseille with the M.D. after her name, the Ann Taylor suit over a black leotard, the dangerous jewelry—Marseille terrified her.
    “I’ve been thinking about you, Evelyn,” Marseille said. Marseille always spoke in a tone of voice that made what she said mean several things at once. “How are you?”
    Evelyn, knowing that what Marseille meant was Tell me what’s wrong , replied, “Fine, thanks.”
    Marseille laid her hand on Evelyn’s arm and smiled the smile Evelyn imagined she offered to her psychiatric patients. “Evelyn,