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“A little.”
“The swimsuit model?”
“Is there another Charlotte Olsen?”
“Not in my life,” he said.
Mine either.
CHAPTER 03
Early evening. I sprawled across the bed and painted my fingernails with Charlotte’s blue polish.
“Not that,” Charlotte said, from her palatial walk-in closet. “It’s so last season.”
“It’s Hard Candy. I like it.”
She shook her head, but didn’t push me. Charlotte never did. “Well, on you, it still works.” She rummaged in the closet and held up a satin blouse and velvet jeans in a gorgeous powder blue. “Here, these’ll match.”
“I don’t think so, Charlotte….”
“They’re Gucci.”
My jaw tightened. I loved Gucci. She knew I loved Gucci. But I had my principles. Or at least I had my single solitary principle: not to wear my sisters’ hand-me-downs. “Why don’t you wear it?” I said, with a straight face.
She was eight months pregnant, and a honker. She was wearing a black tank top, a long knit skirt and a belly like an overinflated beach ball. “Because it’s not a size seventy-two.”
“Give it to Emily then.”
Charlotte snorted. “God knows what she’ll show up in. I wish she’d let me take her shopping.” She held up a cream linen dress. “How about this?”
I ignored her. I was sticking to the white blouse and jeans I’d bought with my discount at Banana. “Speaking of Emily.” I screwed the cap back on the polish. “Guess who we ran into today?”
“Ian Dunne. She said you invited him.”
“Well, it sort of popped out….”
“She also said you were putting on quite a show dressing the mannequins. You know, if you want to dress models I can introduce you to a stylist.”
I looked at Charlotte. “You don’t mind?”
“Of course not, Annie.” Her natural pregnancy-glow doubled in wattage. “And I know just the woman. She dressed me for my calendar.”
“I meant, you don’t mind that I invited Ian. And it’s exaggerating to say you were dressed for your calendar.” Charlotte was America’s favorite swimsuit model. She’d won the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue two years in a row. Her calendar sold a zillion copies and I’ve seen her naked looking more modest than she did in some of those swimsuits.
“Why would I mind about Ian?” Charlotte smiled. “Do you remember how you asked him—”
“I remember.”
“It’ll be fun to see him. I can’t wait for David to meet him.”
David was Charlotte’s husband. She’d always dated gorgeous men, because they were the only ones with the egos to think they deserved Charlotte Olsen. Then she’d met David. A shy, unassuming anesthesiologist who looked like a young Billy Crystal. It was love at first sight.
“When’s he get home?” I asked.
Charlotte glanced at the clock. “An hour. And InStyle should be here soon.”
“I still don’t know how you convinced them to shoot Emily’s book party.”
“It wasn’t that hard—The Nation did name Emily one of the ten most dangerous young minds in America.”
“Yeah, number seven,” I said dismissively, because having two famous older sisters was more than I could bear. I’d thought Emily was safely obscure, but as a new Ph.D. at twenty-seven, she’d rocked the feminist world with her dissonant thoughts on pornography. Wonderful. “Somehow I don’t see InStyle caring about dangerous minds.”
Charlotte became suddenly fascinated by the shoes she was holding. “I can’t even wear normal shoes. I have hippo feet.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Something with InStyle?”
She lowered her bulk into a velvet boudoir chair. “I had to promise People, which is owned by the same parent company, exclusive pictures of me and the baby after the birth.”
“Charlotte!” She always tried to keep her personal life out of the spotlight.
“Well, you know. For Emily. David said it would be okay.”
“For that, they should put her in the ‘50 Most Beautiful’ issue.”
She inspected the shoes more closely.
“You asked and they said no?” I said.
“Don’t tell Emily.”
“Believe me, I won’t.”
When a model breaks out like Charlotte had, agents start looking at her sisters—same genes, right? Her agency offered to test shoot me when I turned fourteen. I was tempted, despite them wanting me to lose fifteen pounds, but Charlotte and Dad said no. I sulked, but was secretly pleased. I do look vaguely—very vaguely—like Charlotte. Except in front of a camera, her light hair shines, her tawny skin glows, and her smile blinds unprepared passersby. In front of a camera, I just look like me. Plus, I like to eat.
Nobody ever offered to test shoot Emily.
Dad showed up before David or InStyle, and immediately headed for the buffet.
I knocked a taquito from his fingers. “Wait till the guests arrive.”
“I’m starving. I held off lunch for this.”
“And if Emily catches you?”
He stepped away from the buffet, almost knocking over a vase of flowers. Dad was always nervous at Charlotte’s. The reek of wealth was disconcerting—the mansion in Montecito, the garden, the pool. Actually I was a little nervous myself, as Billy would arrive in an hour and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with him. At least I looked all right. Charlotte hadn’t convinced me to wear her clothes, but she’d done my hair and makeup. She was a cosmetics genius—with me spackled and shellacked, it was obvious we were sisters.
Then she waddled into the living room on David’s arm, and I sighed. She’d made herself up, too, so we were back to looking like strangers. Even pregnant, she was gorgeous. It was rare for me to see her fully made-up, and I’d forgotten how stunning she was. Perfect bone structure, large blue eyes, and lustrous hair that was meant to be long.
“Dad’s hungry,” I said.
“I skipped lunch,” Dad explained.
David’s admiring gaze broke from Charlotte. “I’ll get a plate from the buffet.”
“Emily,” Charlotte and I said.
“Right,” David said. “There’s chips in the kitchen. Back in a second.”
“Get me a slice of cheese,” Charlotte said.
David headed off and I eyed Charlotte’s enormous stomach, realizing I hadn’t capitalized on her condition as much as I should have. She’d grown positively huge. “Sit by me,” I said, and patted the couch. If I were lucky, the InStyle photographer would get a shot of this. The caption: A grotesquely pregnant Charlotte Olsen, and her svelte, much younger sister, Anne.
Charlotte sat beside me and the cushions seesawed me into the air. “You two sick of each other yet?” she asked. Meaning me and Dad, living together.
Dad and I looked at each other. Why get sick? We got along great. Plus, I didn’t have to pay rent, so I could spend my little all on necessities like clothes, mochas, and alcohol.
“Because the guest house is empty,” Charlotte said. “With the baby coming, I thought it’d be nice to have Anne close.”
Sure. I’d already had a lifetime of Charlotte’s secondhand goods, the last thing I wanted was to take care of her second generation. Then reason lifted its shaggy head. The guest house was a cozy cottage with one bedroom, a kitchen with a Wolf stove and Sub-Zero fridge, and a living room out of Metropolitan Home.
“How much for rent?” Dad asked, a shade too eagerly.
“Well, if she’d baby-sit every now and then…”
“No.” Dad shook his head. “Anne needs to pay rent. It’ll be good for her.”
“Dad.”
“How about three hundred?” Charlotte said. “Including utilities.”
Three hundred I could swing.
“Not enough,” Dad said.
“But if she takes the baby a couple times a week.”
“Wait one infantile second,” I said. “I never said I’d help with the baby.”
“Of course not,” Charlotte said. “Only if you had time.” She and Dad looked a little nervous. There’s a bit of Emily in me.
“What do you think?” I asked Dad.
“I’d miss you…” he said, gloomily.
And I realized I couldn’t leave him. It wasn’t like he still had Mom to take care of him. Maybe it’s a youngest daughter thing, but I felt I had a responsibility. And he did like having me around, even if he grumbled about it occasionally.
“…but I’ll help you move next week,” he finished.
When Emily arrived, the photographers positioned her in front of a huge poster for a film called Spanking Schoolgirls. She’d been posed to hide the naughty bits, and hadn’t budged since. I guess she had a little of the model in her after all. Her publisher, Jamie Lombard—early thirties, an ink-stained cowboy, with rugged good looks and a receding hairline—stood proudly beside her. He was a local publisher, and few of his books had ever sold more than five hundred copies. The unexpected success of Emily’s book had left him slightly shell-shocked.
Emily, on the other hand, looked utterly comfortable chatting with a reporter about the dichotomizing of sub-textual prurience or something. As far as I could understand, her point was this: women like to fuck. Not exactly an earth-shattering insight, but apparently if you dress it up in postmodern theory, you get famous for your dangerous mind.
It did make me eye Emily speculatively. She’d been secretly dating someone all summer, and my bet was that he was someone in the “film” trade who she was too embarrassed to introduce to her family. A porn star like Johnny Deep, maybe, or Roger More.
I looked for Charlotte, to expand upon this theory—why had none of us met this mystery man?—and my Aunt Regina drifted into range. She eyed me and said, “I’m glad you’re finally out of mourning.”
This was her joke. Her only joke. My mom—her sister—had died when I was ten, and though I sometimes missed her, I hadn’t been in mourning for twelve years. But Aunt Regina had an arrested image of me from what she called my “Goth Phase” in high school. Every time she saw me since, she was amazed anew that I wasn’t wearing black lipstick.
I gave a courtesy laugh, and starting heaping food on my plate.
“Now you’ve stopped coloring your hair black,” she said, “you look much more like Charlotte.”
“We’re often taken for twins,” I lied.
“Surely not identical,” she said. “Now if only you were a success, like your sisters. How proud your mother would be.”
Before I could kill Aunt Regina and stuff her body in the crawlspace, Billy and Ian arrived—at the same time, like they’d shared a ride. This worried me for some reason, so I raced over to introduce them and be sure the introduction was necessary.
“Ian, this is Billy,” I said, taking Billy’s hand in a loverlike fashion. “Billy, Ian.”
They said hello.
“So this is your boyfriend,” Ian said.
“Yep,” I said—giving Billy’s hand a warning squeeze.
“What?” Billy said. “Me?”
I laughed and dragged him to a corner where I hissingly instructed him that, for the duration of the evening, he was my boyfriend. He claimed he wasn’t. I told him he was. He became stubborn. So I offered an introduction to Charlotte, and he said he’d be my boyfriend for a whole week if he could shake her hand. A month if he could lick it.
We threaded through the crowd as I internally debated the merits of allowing the lick, but Billy dug in his heels when he spotted Charlotte.
“That really is Charlotte Olsen!” he said.
“Yeah.”
“No way. She’s totally—”
“Pregnant,” I explained.
“—hot. She’s totally hot.”
“She’s a water buffalo.”
