I opened my eyes, and Daisy had propped herself up on her elbow on her side, while she’d been talking. Her eyes, a little glassy from the gin, were wide, searching mine.
She reached up and stroked my cheek with her fingers. “My dearest, sweetest Jordie. Thank heavens you’re here,” she said softly.
Her thumb made a soft circle around my cheekbone, and my face warmed. “Are you still drunk?” I asked her. This Daisy, though, was so different from the last drunk one I’d witnessed, years ago, just before her wedding. Her anger had been replaced with a still sort of melancholy, an unusually soft longing.
“Maybe a little,” she admitted. Her thumb swirled across my cheekbone and then grazed my lips. She giggled. She was definitely drunk. More than a little.
“You should go to bed,” I told her. “But drink a tall glass of water first. You’ll have a killer headache in the morning.” I should know. It had happened to me a few times, or maybe, a few hundred.
“Can’t I just sleep here with you, Jordie?” She strung her words together like a pouty song. Then her thumb moved down my chin and traced the front contours of my neck. I heard myself moan softly, and I bit my lip to try and keep from making another sound.
Daisy giggled again, then moved across the bed and kissed me softly. She might’ve been going for my cheek, but her drunken aim put her lips somewhere just on the corner of my mouth, the side of my chin. Then she lowered herself down on the bed, put her cheek on my shoulder. “Oh Jordie.” She gave another big exhale. “You’re the only one who really loves me, the only one.” She was murmuring now.
She turned her cheek a little, nuzzling it into my shoulder. And then I heard her breathing even, felt the weight of her body sigh against the bed. She was sound asleep.
Catherine July 1922
NEW YORK CITY
MY SISTER HAD BECOME A new woman this summer. MYRTLE the turtle cast off her shell, and she had suddenly, at the age of thirty-six, blossomed into someone else altogether, someone rosy-cheeked, well-dressed, and a little bold. Even the tone of her voice changed, became higher pitched, aggressively louder.
She came into the city with a new regularity. Nearly every weekend. And she would telephone me when she was finished with Tom, invite me up to her apartment, pour me a glass of whiskey from a seemingly endless stash Tom kept in a locked drawer.
We’d lie on her couch there and drink a little and tell stories about our weeks. It was the way I’d always imagined city life with my sister before I’d ever moved to New York, and I was glad to finally have it, and her, nearby. Even if it meant that she was being unfaithful to George.
I was no saint, of course, no matter what Myrtle thought. It didn’t bother me about the cheating, as much as it did the excuses Myrtle made for Tom. I didn’t relish her being anyone’s mistress. Daisy’s Catholic, she said, so she won’t give Tom a divorce without a fight. But it’ll happen, in time.
Catholic. So maybe Daisy was the one who was the saint then? Part of me wanted to telephone Jay up in West Egg and ask him what was really going on, but whenever I thought of Jay now, it was only with disgust. I wanted nothing to do with him. Maybe out in East Egg he was carrying on his own affair with Daisy, and part of me almost hoped he was. Because then, perhaps that would mean Tom truly would leave her, that he would do right by my sister.
* * *
I DIDN’T ACTUALLY meet Tom until one Sunday afternoon in early July. Myrtle telephoned me just after lunch, told me to get a taxicab up to 158th right away. “Tom’s here and we’re having a party,” she exclaimed, her voice effusive with a lustful sort of joy. “Oh, and Cath,” she said. “Tom just bought me a dog!”
She hung up before I could ask her anything practical about the dog. Where on earth would she keep it, and who would take care of it during the week, and what would George say if she dared bring it back home? I supposed she would expect me to take care of the dog. And who kept a dog in a small city apartment?
I pushed that thought away for the time being, put on a nice dress, drew in my eyebrows and my lips, and slipped on my dressiest pair of heels.
“Are you going to church?” Helen asked me from her spot on the couch when I walked out of my bedroom. She had her hair in rollers and was wearing her housedress and flipping through a copy of Town Tattle—Myrtle had stacks of them in her apartment, and I brought her read ones back for us each weekend. Helen lowered the magazine, caught my eyes, and laughed. We both knew she was joking, about church. Neither one of us was a practicing anything.