Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [47]
(Oh my. I do sound like Manda. I’ll just stop right here.)
thirty
What could be so bad about attending an end-of-summer barbecue in a beautifully cultivated garden atop one of the most envied brown-stones in Brooklyn Heights?
Ask the hostess. Bethany hates throwing parties. Oh, she’ll deny it. But she hates it. Whereas our mom totally gets off on being the sole person responsible for conceiving and executing her fabulous backyard-on-the-waterfront affairs, my sister totally freaks out, even when she hires professionals for all the traditional party-hostess duties (cooking, serving, cleaning, bartending, etc.) short of greeting her guests at the door.
True to form, my sister met me in full Stepford-on-meth mode.
“Jessie! You’re here! You’re twenty minutes late! I thought you’d never arrive! The MILFs are all here!”
(See? I wasn’t kidding about that MILFs thing.)
The MILFs came together through their husbands, all of whom met G-Money in business school or shortly thereafter while working as tireless young turks on Wall Street during the get-rich-quick tech boom of the late nineties. The threesome invited today had all wisely invested in Wally D’s/Papa D’s Retailtainment Corp. and were now enjoying their good fortune. The husbands spent the afternoon cavemanning the ten-thousand-dollar grill, marveling at the flames (“Ugga. Ugga. FIRE.”) and attacking large chunks of charred flesh with titanium spears (“Ugga. Ugga. MEAT.”).
Their wives were huddled together, wineglasses in hand, gossiping in bemused, beleaguered tones about their spouses’ Cro-Magnon display, conspicuously similar in an Atkins-thin and Blandi-blond kind of way. They were all simply yet expensively dressed. Their body-skimming luxe T-shirts were paired with linen gauchos or swingy, silk twill circle skirts. They wore leather thongs or ballet flats on their pedicured feet. They never over-accessorize. Perhaps a pair of silver hoop earrings, a beaded necklace, a jade bangle bracelet. Each knows that her ostrich-egg-sized engagement diamond is all the bling any tasteful woman needs.
(I had slipped your handmade ring off my finger and into my front pocket. I had learned from Bridget that it would be noticed, and I didn’t want to have that discussion in front of them.)
After careful observation, I have noticed subtle and not-so-subtle differences among these four women that make this group friendship possible. The distinctions comprise a complicated system of checks and balances, one that ensures that any individual MILF does not gain preeminence over any of the others.
My sister is by far the most beautiful of the four, but with her (our) humble middle-class roots and a B.A. from an undistinguished state school, she is undermined by a certain lack of cultural and intellectual sophistication. Dierdre earned a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Virginia, but makes no secret of her sexless marriage. Liesl is a Main Line Philadelphian and has multiorgasmic sex with her husband, but has achieved only an approximation of attractiveness through several painful surgeries and frequent tweaks from an alliance of on-call aestheticians. Meredith has a B.A. from Wesleyan, has sex once a week, and is naturally attractive, though not anywhere close to beautiful. A moderate among extremists, Meredith could upend the whole social order if it weren’t for the tribe’s tendency to gang up against her when she’s acting “know-it-all-y.”
I know I’m oversimplifying here. But I feel at liberty to do so because the MILFs have assigned themselves to similar stock roles. Get a few drinks in them, and it’s not uncommon to hear them refer to one another by the character names of famous TV foursomes. A handy reference guide:
BETHANY=CHARLOTTE=ROSE=SUSAN
DIERDRE=MIRANDA =SOPHIA=BREE
LIESL=SAMANTHA=BLANCHE=GABRIELLE
MEREDITH=CARRIE =DOROTHY =LYNETTE
And if one of them isn’t around, you should hear them fight over who makes the best