Desperate Housewives

Three things were a given in Austin’s high society in 2003: Marriages were on the rocks, pills were taken straight up, and ties to the Bush White House were the most intoxicating drug of all. An exclusive excerpt from Sarah Bird’s new novel, How Perfect Is That.

by Sarah Bird

June 2008

(Page 3 of 3)

Kippie Lee split the difference and went for eight powder rooms, and Hunt went for Marigold, the comely young dental hygienist. He’d first been attracted to Marigold because she smelled like Dove soap instead of all the “froufrou crap” his wife had had specially compounded in some Swiss laboratory. The affair turned serious when Hunt asked Marigold where she wanted to go for a weekend getaway and she answered that the redfish were running in Rockport. After that, Hunt stopped caring about powder rooms. Or Kippie Lee.

Whatever toll those powder rooms had exacted on the Teeter marriage, I am glad to have such a wide choice of hideouts. I duck into the first one I come to.

“What the—?”

“Oh, sorry, boys, my mistake.” I quickly back out of the media room, where I have accidentally burst in on Kippie Lee’s son, Hoot, and several of his middle school chums from St. Stephen’s enjoying a sprightly double feature of Good Will Humping and Glad He Ate Her.

Resetting my compass, I make my way to the largest powder room, the one with a small fireplace, lock the door behind me, and collapse onto the lid of Kippie Lee’s Toto UltraMax toilet (same brand the Pi Phi Bulimia Queens use for all their heavy-duty flushing needs). Once seated, I have serious doubts whether I’ll be able to stand again. I can usually put on a good front. A great front. It’s how I’ve survived for the past year since Trey and his mother’s death squad of lawyers pulled the plug on me. But the constant humiliation of serving women whom I used to entertain in my home and who used to entertain me in theirs has taken a heavy toll.

I can’t hold back the tears any longer. I start crying and cannot stop. I am coming unglued, and all I can think about is what a great story this is going to make: the day the caterer locked herself in a powder room and refused to cater. I can hear Kippie Lee bestowing the details of my collapse like party favors.

And guess who the caterer was?

Who?

Blythe Dix. Well, Blythe Young now. The family made her give up the Dix family name.

No.

Yes.

So why wouldn’t she come out of the powder room. Was she high?

“No!” I startle myself by speaking this fierce defense out loud. But it is the truth. I’m not high. Not at this exact minute, anyway. I wanted to do this event with no chemical amendments. And not just because my supplies were running perilously low.

Keeping up the pretense that I am simply helping friends out with their parties for the sheer fun of it is exhausting, but I have no choice. The instant that the 78703 zip code discovers that the Dix family has totally disowned me and that whatever gossamer ties I might once have had to the White House have been severed, I will be tits up. When they realize that catering is not just something I am doing to fill the time between spinning classes but the one activity standing between me and starvation, I will be most definitively hosed. When they twig to the fact that I have moved out of Pemberton Palace and into Bamsie Beiver’s carriage house not because the Palace “brings back too many memories” but because I was “tossed out on my ass without a dime,” I will no longer be of any use to them whatsoever.

The gossips in my head start twittering again. I imagine them zeroing in on my deepest, darkest secret: “I heard that Trey took her to the cleaners in the divorce.”

My answer—which the Pemberton Princesses must nevereverever hear—is, I wish. I could have managed the cleaners. But Trey Dix the Third and his family of wolverines weren’t content to just take me to the cleaners. No, they took me to the taxidermist. I have been gutted but have yet to be stuffed and stitched back up.

“Get a grip,” I order myself as I splash water onto my wrists from Kippie Lee’s cobalt-blue vessel sink etched with dancing nymphs. But no grip arrives. The past year of living on nerves, Stoli, and speed have done me in. I dry my hands on a monogrammed guest towel and study myself in the mirror. I wish there were someone around—someone male with tons of money—to admire how sexy my navy-blue eyes look when they are swimming in tears. How puffed up all the crying has made my lips, how uncontrollable sobbing has plumped my skin the way long bouts of vigorous sex do.

Instead, outside the powder room’s sculpted glass door, I hear the distant echoes of Kippie Lee having the mandatory preparty nervous breakdown, then, ominously, the staccato clacking of Chanel crocodile pumps draws closer. A shadowy form appears at the door. I don’t worry. Kippie Lee’s Southern-girl “niceness,” which, at its most basic, consists of an aversion to making scenes, will protect me from anything truly dire.

Kippie Lee pounds on the door. “Blythe? Are you in there? Blythe, come out. We need to talk.”

The words “need” and “talk” in the same sentence always mean someone—lover or employee—is going to get the ax.

“Little busy in here, Kip-Kip!” Again that indomitable Kappa Alpha Theta pep.

“Blythe, I’m serious.”

Kippie Lee’s dominatrix tone tells me that I might have miscalculated. That this far west of the Mississippi, enough pioneer-gal grit may have entered the mix that a Texas girl will make a scene. I hold my breath and pray that there is still enough of the belle in Kippie Lee that she won’t break down the door.

Kippie Lee leaves and I relax. Unfortunately, the clack returns a moment later followed by the unmistakable snick of a black AmEx card sliding between door and jamb. I am outraged: Kippie Lee is breaking in. Violating the sanctity of the powder room. This I had not expected. Resigned as a prisoner being  led to the gallows, I am almost grateful that the jig is finally up. I am so deeply, deeply tired. Whatever steep descending step in A Rake’s Progress comes next, it can’t be any worse than this.

And then the cavalry arrives.

“Miss Keeply,” Graciela calls out. “They are here. Los otros.”

My minions have arrived.

“Miss Keeply, they want to know, where do you want them to put the tables?”

With an irritated sigh, Kippie Lee removes her card. “I’ll be right there, Graciela.”

Before I can crater again, I give myself a stern talking-to. Have I forgotten that I was born in and raised in and got the hell out of Abilene as soon I could? That I am more of a Texas gal than the whole lot of them? Grit? Try growing up in a double-wide a block off I-20 with a Dairy Queen for your country club and the boys’ JV football coach for your secret boyfriend when you were barely thirteen. Grit? I have more grit in my craw than a Rhode Island Red. The Dixes and everyone else in Zero Three might have reduced Blythe Young to baking humble pie and serving it to them on doilies, but by damn, they will never force Blythe Young to eat it.

I give my nose a definitive blow, then power-flush the Kleenex down the Toto. I have had my moist moment and now it is over. I will hide out while the underlings set everything up, then, if I can just hang on until the guests arrive, it will be smooth sailing from there. Kippie Lee will never make a scene in front of guests. I can safely emerge and throw the absolute best garden party for her my limited means will allow. A party good enough, at any rate, to get that one lifesaving check. In order to accomplish this mission, however, in order to step out of this locked bathroom, I must become a different person. A person with the hide of a rhino, the morals of a hyena, and the metabolism of a hummingbird.

So, once again, circumstances dictate that I reenlist my old defender to effect the necessary Jekyll-Hyde transformation. I fetch the Fendi bag and remove a 32-ounce commuter cup with “Code Warrior” printed on the side. The Warrior entered my life during the early days of Wretched Xcess’s first incarnation, when I had to do the work of ten to meet the demands of my bright dot-com boys. With no one other than myself to depend on—as usual—I was forced to devise a secret formula to keep fluid, electrolyte, and psychopharmaceutical levels stable.

And now, exactly as it has been since Vicki Jo Young gave birth to me 33 years ago, it is Blythe Young against the world. Just a girl who never had family money or even a My Little Pony lunch box when all the other girls in third grade had one doing what she has to do to survive. And right now, she has to do some Code Warrior.

I take all the fixin’s out of my purse and mix up my proprietary blend of Red Bull, Stoli, Ativan, just the tiniest smidge of OxyContin, and one thirty-milligram, timed-release spansule of Dexedrine. I shake, drink, sit back down on the Toto UltraMax, fasten my safety belt, and wait for the g-forces to blow my cheeks back.

My friend Stoli hits the jangled synapses first, smoothing the way for her buddies Ativan and OxyContin to do their jobs. Desperation, mortification, regret, and panic melt away before the Warrior’s might, exposing the bone-deep exhaustion that lies beneath, and I nod off for the first bit of real sleep I have had in weeks.

Moments later, I wake with my heart thudding in a full-blown panic attack. The spansule has dissolved and Code Warrior’s Dexedrine shock troops have hit the beach. My jugular vein is throbbing; I am grinding my teeth and snorting like a bull about to charge. My thoughts cascade past at a frightening speed. I am hurtling through time and space on a psychic luge and fear I might throw up.

In short, I have become precisely the person I must be in order to face the cream of Austin society. How perfect is that?

Excerpted from How Perfect Is That, by Sarah Bird. Copyright © 2008 by Sarah Bird. Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

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