The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Read Online Free Page A

go shopping and she’d buy herself a dress, say. She’d bring it home and hang it in the closet. She wasn’t going to crowd her stuff up it should get crushed just hanging. She’d take out some dress she had from before and she wore it maybe ten times, maybe not even that, and she’d give it to me. It was like that all the time.”
    “I see,” Gibby said. “You felt that all her nice things she would be passing on to you one day.”
    “She promised me. She always said when she was through with a thing, nobody got it but me. My Gloria—Gloria, she’s my daughter—my Gloria, she’s so much like Miss Bell they could even be sisters. She’s a size twelve and a perfect figure. Something it fits Miss Bell, it’s a dream on Gloria. The things they look better even on Gloria than they ever looked on Miss Bell, because my Gloria, she’s got more style. Miss Bell, she’d bring home a new evening dress, real gorgeous, and she’d tell me like it’s now September I should tell Gloria about it because Gloria can figure on it for the Firemen’s Ball New Year’s Eve. That was just the way Miss Bell talked because my Gloria, she don’t go with firemen or like that. Who wants a fireman? They’re never home when you need them. When you’ve got him, where is he? He’s playing pinochle over to the firehouse. Then he falls off a ladder or something and you’re still young and what have you got? A pension?”
    Gibby had to nudge her back on the track again, because once she got going on her daughter Gloria, her talk began running very thin on items that were at all germane to any preoccupations of ours. Slicing Gloria out of the harangue, I can reduce it considerably. Sydney Bell was constantly buying clothes. What she bought was of the glamorous persuasion and it was costly. She never wore anything for more than perhaps four months and often for less time than that and the stuff was still in prime condition when she would give it to her cleaning woman for daughter Gloria.
    This procedure, furthermore, covered everything she wore. It wasn’t only the dresses. The pursuit of the dernier cri was equally relentless in all departments—undergarments, shoes, sleepwear, everything.
    “Even nylons sometimes,” the woman said. “She has drawers full of nylons, some of them she never even wore, and then they come out with something new like it’s a new shade and the stockings so thin all you can see is their seams. You can’t tell one shade from another once they’re on, but Miss Bell, she has to have the new shade or the shell soles or the heels high and pointy in back or whatever it is, and she gives me all the nylons out of her drawer, some she ain’t never even had on at all.”
    “And everything’s gone?” Gibby asked. “Even her nylons?”
    “No,” the woman said grudgingly. “Not the nylons. They’re still there and there’s one set of underwear—old lady stuff like maybe I’d buy for myself except it’s her size and in the closet nothing but her suits and her coat. They’re in there and two dresses, real plain, but nothing really nice, not even a nightgown except that flannel thing she was wearing and the good Lord only knows how she came to have that. She never had nothing like that long as I’ve known her or that one set of underwear in the empty drawer.”
    She went on about how she didn’t even know whether Gloria would want to wear any of the things that were left, except the suits and the coat and the nylons. They were nice. She was bitterly contemptuous of the underwear and the red flannel nightgown.
    “Flannel,” she said, and her voice dripped contempt. “Since when is she wearing flannel to bed? Red, yes, but it’s sheer red nylon with lace set in it here. That was her style.”
    She indicated the location of here by patting her own too ample middle, but we got the idea. Sydney Bell, however sweet, had been the flaming seductress. We had what amounted to a stitch by stitch description of