Drowning Barbie Read Online Free PDF

Charlie.”
    â€œYou two are annoyed. I understand and I am sorry about that. I will take it, then, that you are temporarily out of the loop.”
    â€œNot temporarily.”
    â€œWe’ll see.” Charlie hung up. Ike sighed and thought of Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren and RED and wondered if there was ever an ending to a career foolishly begun in the darker reaches of the CIA.
    More importantly, now that Charlie had resurrected it, had Ike finally said goodbye to Eloise’s ghost?
    ***
    Ruth believed she handled stress about as well as anyone she knew, except Ike. Her cure was to do more. That is, if work stressed her out, she’d just work harder. If something in her private life, her not work life, caused her to pause, she simply pushed on through. Truth be told, that part of her life had been anything but stressful. Her relationship with Ike, which had started out about as oddly as any, had over time found a comfortable place, a rhythm. It could have gone on forever just as it was. But it wasn’t going to—not now. Las Vegas and tequila had seen to that. So, a new game. Until now, the faculty, confronted with their coupling had, as a whole, managed with varying success to look the other way. Long before Ike appeared on their doorstep, they had bought into the de rigueur notion of “celebrating diversity.” Most of them had done so as a knee-jerk response to the then-fashionable idea. None had actually considered what it meant beyond recruiting the occasional minority student—Latino, African American, gay, and so on—whatever the social imperative suggested to be important at any moment in time. All agreed that it was a good thing they did and so they “celebrated.”
    Having their PhD, DLitt president sleeping with the town sheriff, however, forced some of them to rethink their early subscription to the concept. Somehow, Ike and Ruth as a couple, a sexually active couple, didn’t fit the broader intent. Yet, objecting to Ruth’s choice exposed in them a level of hypocrisy which they found difficult to internalize. So, they looked the other way and hoped in time the whole affair would just go away. It hadn’t. Ruth had dealt with this as with everything else. She soldiered on, daring anyone to say something. No one had.
    That was then and this is now. It was one thing to be perceived as having a fling with a “townie,” as one or two of her students did each year, and more than one faculty member did as well. But those flings were considered anomalies and not to be taken seriously. For Ruth to flaunt the norms of her “class” by actually marrying the man created a wholly different problem. She had not found an easy way to work through that. Her relationship with Ike could no longer be allowed to be viewed as a mere trifle, a whim, or a peccadillo, on her part, even when in fact it never really was. She’d permitted that camouflage to exist when she knew in her heart it was essentially disingenuous. Now it would no longer disguise anything. She had stepped over the line and the man many of her people viewed as “the hick” would soon be moving into the president’s cottage permanently.
    And for this, she felt stress. Even an old divorce years before did not leave her in such a state. Sometimes while in the shower or lying in bed late at night when sleep eluded her, she thought about what it would be like when the two of them reached this place in their relationship. At those times she had difficulty catching her breath. She knew she wanted Ike more than anything—didn’t she? She did, but…
    â€œWhat’s wrong with me?” she’d mutter to the shower head or the ceiling. “I told Ike I’ve wanted this since…” Then she would recall the night up in the mountains. He’d just finished telling her about Eloise, his bride of a hundred days, accidently killed by an assassin in Switzerland.