I Still Dream About You: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dervishes twirling in circles, and they looked exactly like something right out of a movie … but then, to Maggie, almost everybody
did
. Richard had looked exactly like Eddie Fisher.
    When she first met Ethel Clipp, their office manager, with her thin purple hair that stood straight up on her head and her large purple-tinted glasses that made her eyes look twice as large, she had looked to Maggie exactly like an alien bug right out of a bad science fiction movie. In 1976, Ethel had had her colors done by a colorist out at the mall and had been told her best colors were purple and lavender, and she had worn nothing else since. Hazel had nicknamed Ethel “the Purple Flash.” She called Brenda “Thunderfoot,” because she said she could always hear her coming, and Maggie was “Magic City Girl.”
    After Maggie finished dinner, she cleaned up after herself, put the glass and silverware in the dishwasher, and turned it on. She then went to the bedroom, undressed, took a hot bath, brushed her teeth, got into bed, and clicked on the television set to watch the news. As usual, it was all about the upcoming presidential election. Lately, people just said the ugliest things about one another. Then something dawned on her. She wouldn’t be here on November 4 to find out who won. So why watch? The news just upset her. It was alwaysbad. And she had never cared much for politics. She wasn’t like Brenda, who was very involved in politics, or Ethel who was addicted to twenty-four-hour news. Ethel wanted all the news all the time. Not Maggie. She only watched so she could carry on a halfway intelligent conversation with her clients. But now, the idea of not having to watch seemed wonderful. So, she turned it off. And if anybody did ask her something in the next few days, she would just say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
    In truth, there were a lot of things Maggie wished she hadn’t known. Maggie was stunned at what people you just met would tell you about their personal lives. She had never discussed Richard with a living soul, much less a stranger. Maybe she was a prude, but to her, there had always been something so lovely, so civilized about
not
knowing the graphic details. She really preferred people to be a little more vague, but now, especially in real estate, you couldn’t afford to be vague or the least bit sensitive about anything. Today, in order to even stay in the game, you had to be tough, and in Babs’s case, ruthless. Maggie had tried her best to be tough, but she simply couldn’t do it.
    Just another reason she should have married Charles when he’d asked her, but she had been determined to go to New York and become rich and famous and make her state proud. The only problem: she hadn’t thought about
how
she would become rich and famous. She couldn’t sing, act, or dance, and with her obvious lack of musical talent, all she could really do was look good in clothes. But as she found out, in New York, at only five foot seven and a half, she was not tall enough to be a professional runway model. And after a year, the only modeling job she had been able to get was in the mezzanine tearoom at Neiman Marcus’s department store in Dallas. The other career she might have pursued was that of an airline stewardess, but back then, ex–Miss Alabamas did not become stewardesses; they married well and had 2.5 children.
    Maggie could have married well. Most of the kids she had gone to high school with were from the old iron, coal, and steel families, and even though her parents were quite poor, there had been quitea few wealthy “over the mountain” boys who had tried to date her, but the only one she had liked was Charles.
    When she had turned him down, he had been a complete gentleman and had not acted very upset, but she heard later that he had been to the point of almost drinking himself to death after she left for New York City. Why hadn’t he fought for her? Why hadn’t he insisted that she stay home? Why