A False Peace at Best

Sue Ellen Binder and Georgia Hathcock were once invited to a mutual friend’s birthday celebration. Call my girlfriends and I the eternal optimists, but rumor had it that those two had finally agreed to let bygones be bygones. Wrong. Being in the same room with ’em is just as uncomfortable as it was when Georgia came back to town and found out Sue Ellen had married her high school sweetheart. You know what they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It was actually going pretty smoothly, there for a little while. We were having birthday cake and coffee when the conversation turned to aging, and all the funnies that come with the territory. Red was saying that she had gotten to where she didn’t mind it much— at least not compared to the alternative. “I admit,” she said, “I kind of wigged out when I turned thirty,” she said, “but after that, well, they don’t bother me much.”

The rest of the group was pretty divided. Some of ‘em said their birthdays bothered ‘em a whole lot. Some of ‘em seemed to take aging in stride. Georgia hadn’t said anything. “What about you, Georgia,” Red asked. “Do you get depressed on your birthday?”

“Well,” Georgia said, adjusting the skinny straps of her dangerously low blouse, “not really. I mean, I think things are holding up pretty well, if you know what I mean. But when it does get to me I know just what to do. When I get down in the dumps I buy myself a
new dress.”

She may have meant to whisper, but I heard Sue Ellen’s comment from clear down at the other end of the table. She turned to our friend Lisa and said, “The dumps, huh, I always wondered where she bought those kind of clothes.”

~Shellie