Sati Marie Frost’s Reviews > New Year's Eve > Status Update

Gwynnie’s dress was white, too. The fabric of the dress was hidden in huge feathery petals: she looked bird-like, but the bird was no robin or wren. Gwynnie resembled an albino vulture. She had acquired from somewhere a black feather boa, nearly fifteen feet long. She wrapped the slender boa around her neck and circled her shoulders and let it droop down around each wrist.

Gwynnie was as tall as Gary: five foot ten. Tonight she wore scarlet spike heels that put her well over six feet. Her new wig was white. Not blonde, but white. White as ghosts. The hair was very long, but Gwynnie had skinned it tightly back into a two-foot pony tail, and then tied it in a square knot. The knot was as large as Gary’s fist, and the ends of the hair stuck straight up into the air.

And where the silhouettes parted, so did her gown, so that a little diamond of Molly’s flesh showed, just above her belly button. Nobody, Molly thought with satisfaction, but nobody will have a gown to equal this. They’ll all be wearing their little pastel pinks and their little cut lace ivories. I, on the other hand, will be astonishing.

In a fashion season that featured quiet colors, Molly had found a dress of zingy emerald green and black. The hurt-your-eyes green formed a satin background and the black was two stark exaggerated silhouettes of a man and a woman kissing each other. Their foreheads formed the dip of her gown and their lips met, stretched way out like tubes, just where the V of her dress ended.

The borrowed dress was a rich deep cranberry color with a white lace collar: very English country. Its neckline was demure, and from a straight simple seam, the velvet fell in tiny gathers to a high waist and from there it cascaded to the floor and even the tips of her dancing shoes didn’t show.

The black dress was very dramatic: the skirt was satin and velvet in horizontal bands, while the top was a wool knit into whose lace thin black velvet ribbons were threaded. Into Anne’s hair switch Emily was braiding three glittering rhinestone and velvet ribbons. The thick golden braid lay on Anne’s slender back, sparkling against the black wool and the suggestive holes of the lace.

She walked into the house with her snow-dusted dinosaurs. With difficulty she tied the dinosaurs to the ruffle of brocade.

Beth Rose took ten strings in her hand, and ten dinosaurs in silver, blue, scarlet, and gold bumped into her ceiling. “I was expecting flowers.”

Instead of the usual little-girl colors recommended for redheads, she tried dark dusky shadows about her eyes. High up beneath her eyes, she sculptured cheekbones. Then she turned off all the bedroom lights except the tiny reading light by her pillow. The dim light cast mysterious shadows on the new high cheekbones she had drawn in.

Although it covered most of her, it was a very sensuous dress, and more sophisticated than anything she had ever worn. It was not last year’s sweet fragile antique lace, and it was not last summer’s gentle pastel cotton. It was this year’s brilliant elegance.