“You shouldn’t do that. Um. You can’t do that. It’ll be bad for both of us if they see me talking to you.”
“Then don’t talk to me.”
“Accidentally, though.”
She places the pan on the stove, turns on the gas, and scoops off a corner of butter from the dish nearby and tosses it in.
“How about.” She breathes. The butter sizzles rowdily. “As a favor to me, you hang out in my room while they’re here?”
“No. I’m going to be downstairs. I’m still hungry. You won’t even know I’m here.”
A blanket over the back of the couch covering a tear starts to be pulled into a vortex at the back of his head.
She drops the towel and runs over to extract it. It’s already a third of the way into his head when the doorbell rings.
Shiiiiiiiiitttt.
“Hide!” she hisses. “Hide!”
“You hide!”
The doorbell rings again.
She gives the blanket one last yank and stumbles backward into the wall when it breaks the suction.
“Not a word, not a word. Please!” she whisper-shouts. She throws the blanket on the couch.
The doorbell starts ringing at an alarming BPM, “dingdingindingdingding.” Connie is obviously manning it.
Beddy ties her robe tighter, folds the right collar over the left. She opens the door.
Di’s miniature frame comes into view first. “Hi Beddy,” she says in her glass voice. “I’m so sorry.” She could be apologizing for what happened to Beddy last night, or for Connie’s behavior.
She pulls Beddy into one of her profound hugs that makes the receiver uncomfortable, as if they are part of something too private to be performed in the open.
Then Connie. All six foot-one of her, crowned with the tiara she wore last night. “Jesus, Beddy, a bathrobe?” she says. “A bathrobe? Things are bad.”
Beddy beckons them in silently and shuts the door behind them.
She likes to imagine people, potential friends especially, in doomsday scenarios as personality tests. In a nuclear winter, how would they fare?
Connie would protest everything the loudest: the scant, spoiled food; sleeping on the ruptured concrete; the whirling ash and snow stinging their eyes and lungs and settling in their hair. She would protest the loudest because that is what she does, and with surly blue loquacity. But Di would actually mean it.
Beddy and Connie would be eating her within a week.
Right now Di is overflowing with pity. It is coming out of her sympathetic frown, a frown doubled by her scar. Out of her upturned, inquiring eyebrows. Out of her wringing hands. Beddy has always been frustrated by this quality of hers, and tells herself that if it gets too oppressive, she’s going to have to punt her out the window.
Connie, however, is clearly too agitated for pity. She stalks past both of them into the kitchen so they have to follow.