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afford. But
     if she says you can qualify, who are you to argue? You move in and then one morning you wake up and wander around and ask
     yourself how the hell you ended up in this mausoleum of granite and marble. This obscene square footage, it makes us all nervous
     in a way—me because I retain a little bit of the bohemian artist thing, Kelly because she misses her single-girl condo, Belinda
     because she’s afraid we can still smell her trailer-park past, and Nancy because she’s not from the South.
    Nancy has red hair and very white skin and it’s a great source of pride to her that, despite her vulnerable coloring, she
     does not freckle. She has a nearly pathological fear of the sun. She dresses as if she’s in the middle of some never-ending
     safari and she keeps a tube of sunscreen in the compartment between the front seats of her car. Every time she hits a stoplight
     she dabs some on herself and her kids. The whole family smells like tropical fruit. Nancy keeps the Weather Channel on all
     day long and surrounds herself with thermometers. At any given time she can tell you what the temperature is. “It’s 94,” she
     will say, “and it isn’t even noon. Can you believe it? No, wait, wait, look at that. It’s 95.”
    She tries, I mean she really tries, but I remember the first time we had book club at Nancy’s house. We came in, we sat down,
     and then she just started talking about the book. Back then there were seven of us in book club and we all kept glancing around,
     not quite sure what to do. I was uncomfortable, but then I was a little uncomfortable with how uncomfortable I was, because
     exactly what did it say about me that I’d let something like that make me so upset? And Nancy just kept talking about the
     symbolism and the point of view until finally Lynn said, “Excuse me,” as if she was going to the bathroom. But she went into
     the kitchen and emerged a few minutes later with glasses of iced tea on a tray.
    “I think you forgot to set these out,” Lynn said softly, and Nancy stared at the glasses as if she’d never seen them before
     in her life. She probably hadn’t seen them in years. They looked like her good crystal. God knows how Lynn had managed to
     find them and drag them out and dust them so fast.
    “Oh,” said Nancy, still confused but trying to rise to the occasion as best she could. “Does anybody want anything to drink?”
    I think of the Yankee woman in the barbecue scene in
Gone With the Wind
and how she referred to the southerners as “puzzling, stiff-necked strangers.” I suspect that is how Nancy sees us, as puzzling
     and stiff-necked, as people who splash around a kind of surface friendliness but who are easily offended when she breaks rules
     she didn’t know existed. Perhaps she views her time in North Carolina as some sort of extended anthropological study. She
     does look a bit like Margaret Mead, peering out from her oversized hats and gauzy scarves, taking mental notes about the incomprehensible
     rituals of the aboriginal people. Because there are a lot of rules and even though Kelly and I may not always follow them,
     it’s a bit shocking to come up against someone who doesn’t even seem to know what they are. You don’t put dark meat in your
     chicken salad. You write a thank-you note and send it through the U.S. Postal Service instead of relying on an Ecard. You
     don’t correct anyone’s pronunciation of anything. You call anyone over seventy “ma’am” and you call your friends “ma’am” if
     you’re mad at them. You don’t brag about how cheap you got something, or, even worse, how much you paid for it. Especially
     not real estate. Now, on the flip side, it’s perfectly okay to drink like a fish, or curse, or flirt with someone else’s husband.
     In fact it’s a little insulting if you don’t. To refuse to flirt with her husband implies your friend chose badly, and if
     you and she both damn well know she chose badly, you