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apartment—a mirror-image of hers, only embellished
with great quantities of clutter—and closed the door behind her.
Then she drew the chain lock. “Make sure you look through your
peep-hole before you open your door to anyone,” she instructed
Kitty.
    Kitty appeared unconcerned. “The island is
full of guys who think they’re Ernest Hemingway. I’m used to it.”
She bounded across the room to her unmade bed and did a belly-flop
onto it, her head propped in her hands and her knees bent so her
feet hovered above her rump. She looked like a superannuated
teenager at a pajama party, eager to gossip and giggle about boys.
“So, what did you think of Joe?”
    “ He’s...very nice,” Pamela
said, lifting a filmy garment of some sort from a chair and
lowering herself to sit. “He wants me to go to his house
today.”
    “ To meet Lizzie Borden,”
Kitty guessed.
    “ Lizzie Borden?”
    “ Okay, his niece hasn’t
taken a hatchet to anyone yet. She’s a maniac, though. Take her
with a sense of humor and you’ll be fine. I adore that
kid.”
    A maniacal child, Pamela thought. Alternately
referred to as a lower order of vertebrate or America’s most famous
ax murderer.
    “ But look, Pamela...” Kitty
tilted her head slightly, her dark eyes narrowing as she appraised
Pamela. “Can we speak frankly? If you’re going to marry Joe, you
ought to jazz yourself up a little, know what I mean?”
    Pamela didn’t take criticism from others
well—usually because she spent too much of her time and energy
criticizing herself. “Jazz myself up,” she said warily, trying not
to bristle.
    “ A couple of weeks down here
and you’ll develop some color, you know? But right now, you look
kind of washed out. Here.” She sprang from the bed, hauled Pamela
out of her chair, and dragged her into the bathroom. A forceful
nudge landed her on the toilet seat. “I’m just going to give you a
little color, okay? Nothing extreme.”
    With that, Kitty attacked Pamela’s face with
a vast array of cosmetics brushes. Choking clouds of tinted powder
billowed into the air as Kitty went at her with blusher and eye
shadow. Pamela tried in vain to glimpse herself in the mirror above
the seat, but all she saw was the reflection of Kitty’s arm
wielding her brushes like Jackson Pollock assaulting a canvas.
    Pamela hoped she wouldn’t look like a Jackson
Pollock painting when Kitty was done.
    “ It’s not as if the
situation between Jonas and me has anything to do with physical
attraction,” she protested feebly as Kitty laid down a brush and
brandished a mascara wand.
    “ Jonas? Did he ask you to
call him that?”
    “ It’s his name.” It only
just occurred to Pamela that she preferred Jonas to Joe. She liked
the Biblical ring of it.
    “ Gee, he never told me that.
I guess he must be serious about you.”
    “ Of course not,” Pamela
scoffed. “He just wants to marry me.”
    Kitty stepped back and assessed her
handiwork. “Not bad. All you need now is...” She rummaged through a
drawer and pulled out a rainbow-striped ribbon. “There you go,” she
said, arranging it around Pamela’s hair. “You ought to do something
about those earrings,” she muttered, now that Pamela’s ears were
exposed, along with the plain gold buttons that adorned the lobes.
“They’re awfully boring. But earrings are one thing I don’t
lend.”
    Pamela almost responded that if necessary she
could borrow some earrings from Joe. Instead, she rose from the
commode and confronted herself in the mirror. The face that stared
back at her looked a bit feverish, but that was an improvement over
her usual waxy pallor. Kitty stood beside her, beaming proudly at
what she’d wrought, making Pamela feel as if she were part of some
pagan ritual, the sacrificial virgin who’d been primped by the
tribal matriarch before offering herself to the gods so the crops
would grow and the local volcano wouldn’t erupt.
    “ So what do you think? You
look gorgeous,”