by Cheryl Snell
The old actress keeps butterscotch down the ramp of her cleavage. It’s for the kids who gather around her pool while she’s stretched out in a bone-colored bathing suit like some kind of tanned pied-piper. She talks to me about plastic surgery, silent movies, her trophy room. “I call it the I-love-me room.”
She invites me to see it and I’m surprised there are actual trophies. I’d imagined a roomful of photos of men she had slept with.
“I only married Fred for the physical,” she tells me from behind her hand mottled with blue veins, big diamond rings clanking around on her fingers. I show her my new, tiny one. She sweeps her hand over her platinum bun, the same way my mother did when I told her I was engaged. My boyfriend and I had both cheated; I knew it but he didn’t. “It’s ok for a man, but you shouldn’t ever do that again. It’s nasty, and you don’t want to have to keep secrets,” she scolds.
But I like my secrets, the way they dance on the tip of my tongue, how they even the score, keep everything on the brink. I call them secrets but they feel like power. Sensing my mood change, Eve tries to smooth things over. “Why don’t you bring your fellow to my pool after dark? You can skinny-dip for as long as you like. I won’t look!” she says. Pulls out a butterscotch from between her breasts. Holds it out to me like a bribe. Won’t take no for an answer.
Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy, but her most recent writing has appeared in Does It Have Pockets?Switch, Gone Lawn, Your Impossible Voice, Necessary Fiction, Sage Cigarettes, Pure Slush, and other journals
