Free Die a Little by Megan Abbott Page A

just witnessed. Something between women who've known each other for centuries.
    Waiting, I watch a tiny, birdlike woman with one shoe in her hand and none on her feet make her quiet way from the parking lot, through the courtyard and to Number 4. Walking with purpose, her eyes focused on the ground, with the funny gait of the barefooted.
    She pushes on the door with the hand that holds the shoe, and it pops open like the top of a hatbox.
    I rise again and walk in slow circles back toward Number 7.
    I lean against the outer wall of the apartment, not intending to--
    but quickly realizing I can--hear Alice and Lois.
    It is only patches, fragments.
    "... not afraid to bring her..."
    "... bring him next time ..."
    "... is the end of everything ..."
    "... watching over me to keep me doing what you ..."
    "... everything she says. You know what he'd do ..."
    "... Don't you see? ... the end of everything ..."
    "... that what you want?"
    The words, their whispery, insinuating tones, their voices blending together--I can't tell them apart, they seem the same, one long, slithery tail whipping back and forth. My head shakes with the sounds, the hard urgency, and my growing anxiety at being somehow involved in this, even if by accident, by gesture.
    The voice--as it seems only one now--becomes abruptly lower, inaudible, sliding from reach. The more I strain, the more I lose to the ambient sounds of the courtyard, the radio, a creaking chair, the cat, the vague clatter of someone knocking shoes together, a bottle rolling.
    Suddenly, the door bursts open and Alice is right in front of me.
    "All right, she's fine. Let's go." Alice grasps my arm lightly and begins marching us both across the courtyard.
    Surprised and confused, I turn around to see Lois leaning against the doorframe.
    "Bye, Sis," she murmurs, looking calmer and quite still, voice returning to its usual vague drawl.
    Die a Little -- 51 --
    Alice moves me forward fast, and I keep looking back at Lois until Alice turns us around the corner and Lois disappears behind the faded yellow hacienda wall.
    In the car on the long ride home, Alice assures me everything is fine.
    "She needs my attention sometimes and will do a lot to get it. It's hard for her to have me married and with my own commitments and not always able to be there. Once I saw she wasn't sick--not really sick--I knew she only wanted to see me concerned about her. It's hard for her since I married. But, truth told"--Alice puffs away on a new cigarette--"she's just going to have to get used to it.
    "Right?" She looks at me, waiting for a response.
    "Right." I nod, without knowing to what I am agreeing. The more she speaks, the more I feel convinced that there is an entirely separate narrative at work here, one to which I might never have access. Nor should I want to.
    At the polished bar at the Roosevelt Hotel. Corner booth. Gimlets.
    Mike Standish leans back and puts forth a long, rich smile.
    "Everyone knew Alice. Everyone in Publicity especially. Most of the women in Costume were old ladies, pinch-faced old maids or pinch-faced young virgins. But Alice ... Hell, maybe they all seemed more pinch-faced because Alice was so ... unpinched."
    He pulls a cigarette from his gleaming case, fat onyx in its center.
    As he taps it leisurely, his smile grows wider. "She would be there at all hours, walking toward you, slow and twisty, a ball gown hanging off one arm, sometimes a cigarette tucked in those red lips. Jesus."
    He lights his cigarette and blows a sleek stream upward.
    "Of course, she wasn't really my type," he concedes with a half shrug. "Too much going on all the time. Made you really nervous.
    Once you started talking to her, she made you feel like the threads in your suit were slowly unraveling.
    "Still, she was awfully fun. We'd take her out, the fellows and I.
    She'd bring along a few friends. We'd go out drinking, to the Hills or on the water, Laguna Beach. To Ensenada once. Once even to Tijuana. No, twice.