Free Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady Page B

the mildewed square on the wall where Daniel’s bureau used to stand, the paper bags of clothes that have taken the place of the bureau drawers, the dusty mess of the vanity table with its filmy mirror.
    Anya yanks the blankets off Carrie’s body. “You have to go to work.”
    â€œWe stayed up too late,” Carrie moans.
    â€œYou drank too much,” Anya says.
    Carrie tries to remember. They sat on the sofa together, their legs in each other’s laps, eating popcorn and watching a video,
Some Like It Hot,
with Marilyn Monroe managing to be so calculating and so innocent all at the same time that of course you wanted her to get the rich man she was angling for. Carrie leaned down now and then to refill her glass from the bottle of wine on the floor. Now and then.
    â€œI’m entitled to suffer,” Carrie says.
    Anya swats her. “Get over yourself, Mom. He’s been gone for a month.”
    â€œIs that any way to speak to your mother?” Carrie says. But she swings her legs over the side of the bed. “Make coffee. Please?”
    Carrie gets dressed in clothes that will make her feel better, a long, diaphanous skirt, a see-through blouse with a tank top underneath, chunky heels. Hardly clothes she ought to wear to the frame shop. Her boss has been riding her about her erratic hours, which has only made her more persistently tardy. Her work is good—the shop does frames for galleries, for half the artists out at Hunters Point where Carrie has her studio, and a lot of the customers request her when they come in because she’s decisive, has a trustworthy instinct for simplicity, is efficient with materials.
    She sits at the vanity table and fishes among tiny compacts filled with delicious creamy colors that she can’t resist. She may have the largest collection of makeup in the city of San Francisco, a collection to rival a drag queen’s. Her hangover gives her some technical problems. Her hand shakes when she applies blush, and it takes two attempts to apply eyeliner. When she reapplies it, one finger stretching the eyelid, she can’t help noticing that wrinkles make the job harder too. She’s exactly of an age, forty-three, to feel shocked that her body is no longer young, no longer a match for the firmness of her desire.
    And maybe this is why she counted on Daniel, crossed her fingers during their four years together—her longest time with any man since Foster—and didn’t see how little that meant to Daniel, who did not have behind him the string of failed relationships that she did. Six years younger, his life still as flexible as his skin, he never questioned the opportunity that beckoned in New York. And she’d had to choose: accuse and make their last months miserable or corroborate in the lie that fate was separating them, severing their great passion. She’d gone with the lie.
    The tattoo on her shoulder, a heart with an arrow through it,shows through her translucent blouse. Daniel’s name is inscribed on the shaft of the arrow, crude and shameless epithet. She and Daniel argued unscrupulously and savagely, made up with sex predictably but gorgeously stoked by their anger, stuffed each other’s pockets with vulgar love notes folded into stiff origami shapes. They fought to keep alive their infatuation, clung to its absolute diction despite his irresponsibility and hers. Her marriage to Foster had taught her the price of accommodation.
    Anya comes back and kisses Carrie’s cheek when she leans down to place a steaming mug on the vanity table. Carrie hands Anya her hairbrush, and Anya pulls up a stool behind Carrie’s chair.
    Carrie used to brush Anya’s hair for hours every day, and now that Anya has cropped her hair close around her face, the better to show off the three holes pierced in each ear, they have reversed places. But Anya hesitates at her task. She says, “You
will
make it to work today,