Sisterchicks Say Ooh La La! Read Online Free PDF Page B

Memphis to pack up her mom’s belongings. We planned to make the move from Tennessee to Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend sans husbands, since both of them had been planning a camping trip complete with pup tents and fishing poles. Neither of them expressed too much disappointment when Amy and I announced we wouldn’t be joining them. Amy’s girls quickly made plans with friends for the long weekend, and we all went our separate ways.
    Armed with as many collapsed packing boxes as we could rustle up, Amy and I took turns at the wheel of a rumbling U-Rent truck for the eight-hour drive to Memphis. We packed boxes with fervor, swallowing a teareach time we wrapped one of Grandmere’s flower-painted glass dessert plates or sorted towels that had been embellished with her handiwork decades earlier.
    When we reached Amy’s old room, the nostalgia engulfed both of us. Very little had changed in that pink room. The faded, sagging canopy over the bed came down with sneeze-inducing dust clouds and went in a Dumpster. We found my long-missing navy blue sweater under the bed along with an unopened roll of Necco candies that by all appearances seemed as fresh as they were thirty-plus years ago.
    On the top shelf of Amy’s closet we discovered a black vinyl Barbie case, with one blond Barbie and one Ken tucked inside.
    “Why, hello there, Barbie,” I said in a deep voice, taking the Ken doll and walking him toward the Barbie in Amy’s hand. “Would you like to go to the dance with me?”
    “Why, Ken!” Amy answered in a squirrelly voice. “I never thought you’d ask!”
    We walked the dolls across the top of Amy’s bed. Then, because the only dance they could do with those stiff arms was “The Monkey,” we knelt beside the bed, and I defied my eighty-four-year-old mother by playing dancing Barbies. And I was the one playing with the Ken, no less! I felt a strangely smug sense of “so there!”
    “You know what?” Amy pulled her Barbie off the dance floor, ruining all my fun. “Your mom was right.”
    “Don’t say that.”
    “Well, she was. Look at this doll. The body proportions are unrealistic. I mean, look at these legs. Barbie has no thighs. How many real women do you know have no thighs? And this waist. Yeah, right!”
    “Come on, Barbie,” I said in my best Ken voice. “The night is still young. Let’s dance some more.”
    “I’m going to the refreshment table, Ken,” Amy said in her Barbie voice. “I’ve decided it’s time I got myself some thighs. And maybe a little jelly roll around my middle, too.”
    “I’ll join you. What’s for dessert?”
    “Oh, Ken, you’re so supportive! After all those years of being locked up in that box, and yet just like me, the first thing you think of when you get out is chocolate!”
    We laughed impishly, and Amy added in her Barbie voice, “You know what
stressed
is spelled backward, don’t you, Ken?”
    I couldn’t switch the letters fast enough to figure out the answer, so in my Ken voice I said, “Ahh, it starts with a
d,
right?”
    “Why, yes, it does, Ken. You’re so smart! The answer is
desserts.
Get it? Stressed? Desserts?”
    I cracked up and said in my own voice, “How did you ever figure that one out, Amy?”
    “I heard it somewhere.”
    We laughed and switched back and forth from ourBarbie and Ken voices as we finished clearing out the remains of the closet and stacked the boxes in the living room.
    The last room to pack up was Grandmere’s bedroom. I think all of us kept that one till last because every time we went in there and opened the closet, we caught a faint wisp of her perfume or spotted an article of clothing we remembered her wearing. Grandmere had been gone for more than four years, and yet everything remained in neat order, as if she might return any day now from her long journey.
    “The new owner wants to keep the bed,” Amy’s mom said. “But I told them I was taking the bedding.”
    Amy and I pulled off the comforter and