Safety Net-ism: the

belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.

DIVORCE ASSUMPTION:

A form of Safety Net-ism, the belief that if a marriage doesn't work out, then there is no problem because partners can simply seek a divorce.

a chance to eat." And talk about pretense! They kept the same unread copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung lying on the table for three days running. I tell you.

At a nearby table, Mr. Baxter, Claire's father, sat with his glistening and be-gemmed business cronies ignoring his progeny, while Mrs. Scott- I Baxter, his fourth (and trophy) wife, blond and young and bored, glow­ered at the Baxter spawn like a mother mink in a mink farm, just waiting for a jet to strafe the facility, affording her an excuse to feign terror and eat her young.

The whole Baxter clan had en masse been imported from L. A. that weekend by the highly superstitious Mr. Baxter, a New Age convert (thanks to wife number three), to avoid a most certain doom in the city. Shakey Angelinos like him were luridly envisioning the strangely large I houses of the valley and canyons being inhaled into chinks in the earth with rich glottal slurps and no mercy, all the while being pelleted by rains of toads. A true Californian, he joked: "Hey, at least it's visual."

Claire, however, sat looking profoundly unamused by her family's spirited, italicized conversations. She was idly tethering her paper plate loaded with a low-calorie/high fiber lunch of pineapple bean sprouts and skinless chicken to the outdoor tabletop while forceful winds, unsea­sonably fierce, swept down from Mount San Jacinto. I remember the morbid snippets of chitchat that were being prattled around the table by the hordes of sleek and glamorous young Baxters:

"It was His ter, not Hitler, Nostradamus predicted," one brother, Allan, a private school Biff-and-Muffy type, yelled across a table, "and he predicted the JFK assassination, too.'"

"I don't remember the JFK assassination."

"I'm wearing a pillbox hat to the end of the world party at Zola's, tonight. Like Jackie. Very historical."

"The hat was a Halston, you know."

"That's so Warhol."

"Dead celebrities are, de facto amusing."

"Remember that Halloween a few years ago during the Tylenol tampering scare, when everyone showed up at parties dressed as boxes of Tylenol..."

"... and then looked hurt when they realized they weren't the only ones who'd come up with the idea."

"You know, this is so stupid being here because there are three

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23