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boys—were eating popcorn and giggling over their umpteenth screening of
Pete’s Dragon
, under the watchful, if tired, eye of Vicki’s weekend nanny.
    “So what do you think her secret is?” Susan asked suddenly.
    Chris’s hands froze in mid-scrape, feeling all eyes directed her way. How could they know? she wondered, feeling her cheeks blush orange, like the shorn carrot in her hand. She’d said nothing, confided in no one. Were they so finely attuned to one another’s needs? After a friendship of only four years, was their protective radar so intense? Could she keep nothing from them, no matter how personal, how shameful?
    Slowly, Chris raised her head, the lies already forming on the tip of her tongue:
Secret? What secret? No, of course there’s nothing wrong
. And if still they pressed her, if they stubbornly refused to accept her heartfelt protestations, dismissed the lie for the obvious fiction it was, what then? Could she really tell them the truth?
    But when Chris looked up, she saw that no one was looking at her with sad, questioning eyes. She saw that no one was looking at her at all. Susan and Barbara were still engrossed in their magazine. Even Vicki had stopped playing with her wayward perm and joined them in ogling a photograph of Raquel Welch spilling out of a tiny white bikini and practicing yoga on a sun-soaked Malibu beach.
    “Her secret?” Barbara repeated. “Are you kidding me?”
    “Don’t tell me plastic surgery,” Susan said.
    “Of course plastic surgery,” Barbara pronounced.
    “You say that about everyone.”
    “Only because it’s true. Come on, guys, she’s over forty.”
    “I heard she had a couple of ribs removed,” Vicki offered.
    “I believe it,” Barbara said.
    “Do you think she had her boobs done?”
    “No.”
    “Yes.”
    “If she did,” Barbara said, “I want her doctor. He did a great job.”
    “Yeah,” Vicki agreed. “Usually when you have a boob job, you get these two big blobs in the middle of nowhere, with these nipples about three inches higher than they’re supposed to be. They look ridiculous. Everyone knows they’re not real.”
    “Men don’t care,” Barbara said, as a great roar emanated from downstairs. “They like ’em no matter how fake they look.”
    “Would you ever have plastic surgery?” Chris asked, letting go of the frightened air trapped in her lungs and joining the conversation.
    “Never,” Susan said, closing the magazine with a decisive hand.
    “Never say never,” Vicki told her, pouring herself another glass of red wine.
    “I’m gonna have the works done.” Barbara patted the ample bosom beneath the pale blue silk of herblouse. “The minute these babies sag, I’m getting a new pair. First sign of a wrinkle, I’m on the operating table. And none of this ‘just make me look rested’ nonsense. I want to look like I just emerged from a wind tunnel.”
    The women laughed. “You’re nuts,” Chris told her. “Why would you ever want to mess with that beautiful face?”
    “Whatever happened to growing old gracefully?” Susan asked.
    “Oh, please,” Barbara said. “What’s so graceful about growing old?”
    “That’s why you all should have married older men,” Vicki told them. “That way you’re always the young one.”
    “Yeah, but isn’t it a trade-off?” Barbara asked, raising one carefully tweezed eyebrow.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean
you
may stay young”—Barbara winked—“but do
they
stay hard?”
    A raucous squeal escaped Chris’s throat as the blush in her cheeks turned from orange to red. She jumped from the table, quickly dropped the carrot scrapings into the garbage pail under the sink and the carrots into the large wooden salad bowl on the white tile countertop.
    “Chris, get your ass back here,” Vicki instructed. “This is very important stuff we’re discussing.”
    “I don’t think we should be talking about this sort of thing,” Chris said, trying not to see Tony’s