Free Loose Screws by Karen Templeton Page B

relate the conversation between Phyllis and myself. I’ve already dumped on them about my mother, Greg’s phone call, and Bill’s flirting—every Bitch Session needs a little comic relief—although I decided to forgo the Nick business for now. See, Nick was the main course at a particularly hot Bitchfest some ten years ago. Dragging his sorry butt into a conversation now would only raise too many eyebrows—not to mention rampant speculation—for my comfort.
    Anyway. Terrie, sporting about a thousand sleek little braids that hit her just below the collarbone, is giving me her get-on-with-it look. Not one to be rushed, I drag over the cheesecake. It’s presliced. I pick up a slice as if it’s a piece of fruit and bite into it. Much as I adore Nonna’s ravioli, today I go straight for the hard stuff.
    â€œSo,” I finally say, “after my mother leaves with Concetta, Phyllis leads me into her study. So I figure my best bet is to apologize for my mother before Phyllis can say anything.”
    Shelby pops the fork out of her rosebud mouth. “What’d she say?”
    â€œWell, she laughed, which was the last thing I expected. Then she went on about it was just a motherhood thing, you know. Nedra protecting her pup. Then she says something about knowing all about women like Nedra.”
    That got a grunt from Terrie, whose beaded braids were beginning to remind me of a Gypsy fortune-teller’s plastic bead curtain. But don’t you dare tell her I said that. “There are no women like your mother.”
    â€œThat’s what I would have said. But then she said…what was it? Oh, right—” I take another bite of cheesecake “—about how when she was in college, she had to deal with all these liberal, feminist types who were convinced she was whoring herself because she did beauty pageants….”
    I fade out for a moment, chewing and thinking about Phyllis’s pale blue eyes as she spoke, like a pair of small, cautious creatures peering out from behind a thicket of heavily mascara’d lashes.
    Oh, they made a lot of noise, and raised a lot of hell, all those women whose families could afford to pay for their education, about women’s rights and how people like me were setting the women’s movement back by at least three centuries. None of them ever bothered asking me what I really thought, or bothered to consider that perhaps there were worse things in the world than a woman using her looks to get ahead.
    I’d caught a whiff of desperation then, which I’d never noticed before, in her voice, her expression, the way her makeup was a little too carefully applied….
    Terrie smacks my arm, making me jump. “Hey. Back to earth.”
    I blink, fill them in, at least about Phyllis’s comments. Terrie opens her mouth as if she has something to say, only to close it again. Frowning, Shelby reaches for the cheesecake while there’s still some left. As I repeat theconversation as best I can remember it, I realize rehashing it is stirring something inside me, way below the surface, too far down to identify.
    â€œThen she said something about how we all make choices, and that it doesn’t really matter what they are, as long as we’re happy with them—”
    â€œWell, I think that’s very true,” Shelby says.
    â€œâ€”that so many women today seem to forget, or perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge, that sometimes we have to take what seems to be a step or two back in order to get enough momentum to propel ourselves through the barriers men have been erecting in front of them since time began.”
    â€œHuh.” Terrie grabs her own piece of cheesecake, opting as well for the direct-from-box-to-mouth approach. “Spoken like a white woman who had choices.”
    â€œNot as many as you might think,” I say. “She didn’t come from money, remember. Which is why she