Read Fashionably Late for Free Online Page B

woman.
    The taxi was approaching the Rockville Centre exit. The dnver was talking to himself under his breath. Karen prayed that he wasn’t outraged enough by the length of the trip to dump her there, at the side of the Expressway. The rain had turned into a downpour. Karen felt as fragile as Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, and like Blanche, at that moment Karen was dependent on the kindness of strangers.
    She directed the muttering driver the rest of the way and at last the taxi pulled up to the brick house with the carefully pruned hedges.
    Karen gave the guy the hundred and pointed the way back. She got out of the cab with relief and turned toward the house. Through the darkness, the lights of the living room chandelier glimmered. Her mother and her sister were waiting for her.
    Karen sighed. Even if Belle was undemonstrative and almost anally neat, she had at least shared something with Karen. Their interest in clothes had been a bondţif only for a time. And if it wasn t quite twenty-four-karat unconditional mother love, at least it had stood them in good stead for many years.
    All that, of course, had changed when Lisa was born.
    Karen’s sister, Lisa, looked nothing like her. Well, of course she wouldn’t. I was adopted, Karen reminded herself, but it still sometimes surprised her to see Lisa after a long absence. They were so very different. Now Lisa, tiny and petite as ever, stood in their mother’s living room. She was one of those small-boned, taut, thin Jewish womenţif Jewish-American princess was listed in the dictionary, they’d use Lisa’s picture to illustrate it. In fact, Lisa looked a lot like their mother who, at sixty-four, still had the slender figure of a girl and the nervous energy that kept her movements youthful.
    Lisa looked across the overdone, mirrored living room and smiled.
    “Look who’s here!” she cried. She was pretty, and sometimes Karen wondered if all of her own designs, which did so much for tall women and so little for petite ones, were not an unconscious hostile response to Lisa’s looks. Karen loved her sister, but Lisa had always had it easy. Six years younger than Karen, she had been an unexpected surprise to her parents, who had long before accepted their barren marriage and compromised with Karen’s adoption. Lisa’s appearance had been an incredible renewal, a vindication of Belle’s femaleness just at the time when other women were starting to contemplate menopause. The pregnancy had given Belle not only a glow, but also a perfect little baby to dress up, play with, and show off. Just at the time when Karen was moving into her gawky stubborn stage, Belle was rewarded and distracted with an easy baby.
    Lisa had accepted all the bows and frills that Karen had already begun to reject. She still wore them. Lisa went along with all of her mother’s suggestions and seemed always to do things the easy way: she got B’s in school, went to Hofstra University for only a year, and her “career” had been running her own small boutique. She married Leonard when he was out of medical school and retired early to have her daughters, just like her mother. And she was clearly her mother’s favorite.
    At least that was the way Karen saw it. Lisa, she knew, felt that Karen had always been favored. That it was Karen, as eldest, who got most of the attention, was considered the smart, the talented, the successful one. My mother has a political gift, Karen thought, and had to smile: Belle could simultaneously make her two daughters feel the other had most-favored-nation status. But maybe that wasn’t just Belle. Maybe it had more to do with us as sisters. Older versus younger. Adopted versus natural. Perhaps sisters never worked this shit out, Karen reflected as she smiled back at Lisa. Underneath all of it, Karen knew she loved Lisa dearly. She had loved her and taken care of her from the first time she saw her, a tiny infant.
    “How was your day?” Belle asked.
    Karen