Chapters A Holsom Women's Social Chapter 2
Welcome!
The message flashed across her vision, written in the same flowing script as the invitation. And then the muzak yielded to the sound of lilting feminine conversation, and the world slowly bloomed back into focus. Cherry was relieved to find that she was standing at the edge of a marble floored entrance, on the precipice of a majestically furnished sitting room. A sea of married women flowed gracefully around the elegant furniture, their bubbling voices drifting bits of conversation back to Cherry’s ears.
“…The crackers are compliant with most diets! I would add sugar if I made them for Roger, of course. He sometimes lets me direct the maids in the kitchen…”
“…Yes, they’re new! Henry can hardly keep his hands off them. He calls me ‘Titsy’ now, isn’t that cute? Oh, no it’s not a nickname, dear. All of my documents have been updated…”
“…The taste? It’s as awful as you’d expect, I’m afraid. But I’d do anything for George, and he finds it so convenient, not to mention delightfully entertaining…”
Cherry took a tentative step into the room, the heels of her pleasers sinking into the lush carpet. The pain in her feet distracted her momentarily, and she didn’t notice one woman spin herself out of the swirling crowd to approach the newcomer.
“Why, hello!” A gentle voice called to her, and Cherry found herself taken up by the woman’s glowing smile. “You must be the new Mrs. Crane. I’m Julia Drestin. So pleased to meet you.”
Cherry beamed at the use of her married name. “Yes, Cherry Crane. I’m pleased to meet you too, Mrs. Drestin.” She offered a curtsy, slightly awkward without any arms to guard her balance on the high shoes, and got a far more practiced one in return from the similarly armless Mrs. Drestin. All of the women in the room had been trimmed for their weddings, of course. The final semester of school, which Cherry had skipped to marry early, would have instructed her in performing various social gestures without the use of her arms. Armlessness was the fashion for wives across every town in Holsom, though the exact placement of the snip did vary from region to region. A full removal was in vogue in this part of the country, and Cherry had been glad to discover that her own bare shoulders were on trend. “I was so thrilled to receive your invitation!” She enthused after the exchange of curtsies. “I haven’t had much time to explore the neighborhood since my wedding.”
Her hostess’ smile grew even wider. “Of course, dear. I’m sure you’ll fit right in. And please, call me Julia.” The sincerity of her tone made Cherry feel all the more welcome. Julia was a beautiful woman, tall and with olive skin darkly tanned. Her face showed only the slightest hint of age, but it lent her an air of great experience amongst the crowd of young wives. “Please allow me to make a few introductions before you strike out on your own.”
“Of course!” Cherry replied, and fell in behind the older woman as she was led through the chattering throng. They paused at one group, near a table set with a wide assortment of refreshments.
“This is Clarissa Fritzgerald, who has provided such wonderful snacks for us all this afternoon.” Julia told her, singling out an otherwise tiny woman with cleavage even deeper than Cherry’s own. “Clarissa, this is Cherry Crane.” Clarissa raised her sculpted eyebrows at Julia, but quickly recovered into a thin smile for Cherry.
“Mrs. Crane…so nice to meet you. Again.”
Cherry frowned.
“I’m sorry, have we met before?”
Clarissa’s smile narrowed further, becoming a sneer.
“Oh, yes. An annual event, it seems.”
The other women who had been talking with Clarissa were huddled together, watching Cherry and sniggering. Cherry’s frown deepened, and she saw that Julia was frowning too.
“Pay Clarissa no mind, dear.” Julia said, loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. “She’s growing bitter in her old age.”
Clarissa’s face flushed beneath a mask of makeup. She couldn’t have been any older than Julia herself, but the subject was obviously a sore spot. Her massive breasts wobbled as she huffed loudly at Julia.
“It may be of no concern to you, Julie, but don’t expect me to ignore the danger she represents.”
Now it was Julia’s turn to huff in anger.
“Come along, Cherry.” She spun around to face away from Clarissa’s clique and after a moment Cherry followed suit. “That woman will take any excuse to be impolite. I hope she hasn’t frazzled you…”
“What did she mean, that we’ve met before?” Cherry strained her neck to peer back at Clarissa. The other woman fixed her with a glare. “I don’t think she likes me…” She turned back to Julia, feeling the stare like an itch.
“Oh, do pay her no mind, dear. Clarissa’s home situation has become rather precarious of late, and I believe she blames your husband for it. It’s nothing you need to worry about. If I’d known she would behave this way, I would have avoided her altogether.” Cherry wanted to object that it very much did seem like something she should worry about. How could Francis have caused Clarissa any domestic instability? But Julia cut her off before the words could form. “Oh, here’s Heidi Spencer! Come, Cherry. I’m sure Mrs. Spencer will find you a delight!” And Cherry was whisked away into the swirling crowd.
There followed a flurry of far more polite introductions, so many that Cherry would have found it impossible to remember all the names if her contacts didn’t have the helpful habit of displaying such information above each woman’s head. Mrs. Spencer’s husband was the headmaster at Rockport Finishing School, Mrs. Kelsey’s ran the ritziest restaurant in town, Mrs. Trammerlane designed lovely (expensive!) dresses for her husband’s shop on Main Street, and so on until Cherry’s feet were complaining again from all the running around.
Julia’s selections seemed to represent the cream of the neighborhood crop, and each one had a small circle of lesser women with whom she was engaged in conversation. These other women received no ceremony from Julia, although each of their names popped up the moment Cherry looked at them, too. Once again, she was forced to correct her opinion of the contacts. Despite her disappointment earlier that morning, they really were a convenient aid. When they weren’t blinding her for no good reason.
It seemed that for every woman with a name like ‘Vanessa’ or ‘Suzanne’ there were two or three wives with less modest monikers. Cherry saw women named ‘Cummsy’, ‘Pillows’, ‘Puffy’ and ‘Trollop’, among others on a similar theme. Cute, if a little crude, and certainly more creative than the rather blunt names like ‘Tits’, ‘Lips’, or ‘Nipples’ which were also scattered around. She was glad Francis had chosen something relatively innocuous for her, even if it did prove to be fairly cliché. She counted three other ‘Cherry’s at the Social, though none were of high enough status to get an individual introduction.
After a while, Julia paused and scanned the crowd.
“Well, that’s a proper ‘who’s who’, I think. I’ll leave you to mingle on your own for a bit.” She gestured with her neck towards a group of about a dozen stiff postured women gathered in a tight clump in one corner of the room. “If you’re nervous about making conversation, try those ladies first. They’re easy to talk to; you won’t have to struggle to find the words.”
Cherry thanked her, and then took her advice. The isolated corner seemed preferable to trying her luck in the larger swarm. She made her way over to the group and carefully slid amongst them, mimicking the other women’s rigid posture.
They seemed not to notice her, or perhaps they were too engrossed in their own conversations. Cherry politely waited for a lull in which to introduce herself, but there was never so much as a pause. She daintily cleared her throat, hoping to create an opening, but the chatter continued unabated. None of the women even glanced at her: they were all locked in eye contact with their respective conversation partners.
Just as Cherry was readying herself to leave all of the conversations concluded suddenly, at nearly the same moment all around. Cherry stumbled, stopping herself short of turning to go, worried she had somehow offended them by getting impatient. But still, no one was even looking at her. Although most of the ladies remained in their stiff posture, a few did appear to relax a bit. They blinked, and gazed around the room as if coming out of a trance.
“Oh!” One exclaimed upon noticing Cherry. “Hello!”
“H-hello…” Cherry murmured, mincing over to face the speaker.
“Good timing!” The woman continued, beaming at Cherry, who was taken aback by the sight of her. She was utterly gorgeous. Black-haired like Julia and with breasts almost as large as Cherry’s own, but seemingly larger for the way they overflowed her tight corseted bodice. Her skin was of olive complexion at its base, pale and delicate rather than tanned. Full lips seemed to caress each word she spoke, distracting Cherry from her dark eyes. Her husband must be very proud. “We just finished a group conversation. Do you have a script of your own, or will you follow along with one of ours?”
“Do I have a what?” Cherry asked, only half listening but also genuinely confused.
“A script of your own.” The woman said earnestly. “Or you can always follow along with one of ours.”
“I don’t understand…”
Realization dawned on the woman’s beautiful face. “Oh, my goodness! It seems I’ve made an error. Did Julia send you over to us?”
Cherry nodded. “Yes, she did. My name is Cherry Crane. I’m…” Her voice faltered. After four months she couldn’t exactly claim to be new in town, despite not having seen any of it. She wasn’t even sure where Francis lived, exactly. He had always visited her at home while they were courting. It was possible she was still in Camden, the town she’d grown up in, though that was unlikely. She hadn’t seen a single familiar woman at the Social, even among wives her own age. Faces and names could be altered to fit a husband’s taste, of course, but it seemed far more likely that she was simply in a new town altogether. Still, it had been four months. “This is my first Women’s Social.” she said, instead.
“I’m so happy to meet you! My name is Diane.” Cherry realized that she could have seen as much by simply looking above the woman’s head, but for some reason she was finding it difficult to look away from her face. Diane leaned forward, as if for a friendly hug, and Cherry mimicked her.
They were both married women, and so had no troublesome arms to wrap around each other, but Diane pressed her neck against Cherry’s own in something approximating the gesture. Cherry’s chest pushed against the other woman’s, breasts flattening until they nearly brushed her chin. It was the most contact she’d had with anyone other than Francis since before the wedding. She held herself there perhaps longer than was polite, feeling the warmth of Diane’s skin, her pulse, breathing the heady perfume that wafted from her cleavage. It felt…nice. Diane’s cheek brushed her own as she disengaged from the embrace, and Cherry felt her face heat in response to the touch.
“Julia is so thoughtful to send you over here.” Diane said, straightening. If she had noticed the momentary intimacy she gave no sign. Cherry reluctantly forced herself to ignore it, as well. “We love to welcome new girls!”
Diane was certainly a welcoming presence, but Cherry could hardly say the same for the rest of the women surrounding them. Most had still not even twitched. “Are they…all right?” She whispered to Diane.
“Everyone is thrilled to have you join us!” Diane enthused, as if there was nothing at all amiss.
“Diane…I don’t think she’s familiar with scripting at all.” said one of the nearby women who had begun to stir. She didn’t introduce herself before continuing, but Cherry’s contacts showed that her name was ‘Madison’. She was a brunette perhaps only a few years younger than Julia, which made her among the oldest women in the room. Her chest was not exactly small, but it did seem that way in comparison to Cherry and Diane. “You might want to let me take over the welcome.”
Diane paused, and gave Cherry a searching look. Her voice was a bit more hesitant, but the question didn’t really change. “Do you have a script of your own? You can always follow along with one of ours.”
Cherry just shook her head.
Diane opened her mouth, frowned, and then closed it again, her lips forming into a pretty pout. As if something so obvious had suddenly become a puzzle. She glanced at Madison, her expression clearly requesting the other woman to intercede.
“Diane’s welcome speech doesn’t bother to explain scripting to someone who’s not already familiar.” Madison said, and Diane nodded with relief. “But I can be more flexible. Didn’t your school have a scripted week?”
A woman standing between Madison and Diane, ‘Sprinkles’ according to the contacts, rushed to break in before Cherry had a chance to speak. “Mine did! I nearly flunked it, but thank goodness I had enough extra credit saved up from pageant days. One of my friends had to repeat the whole week twice, which is especially good practice, I suppose, but I don’t think she appreciated it! Anyway, I thought it was part of the standard curriculum?”
Again, Cherry just had to shake her head no. “Maybe it is, but I must have skipped it. My husband didn’t want to wait for me to graduate.”
“Oh, I understand that.” Sprinkles said knowingly. She was about Cherry’s own age, blonde like herself, but in pigtails and pretty enough that Cherry could see why she’d earned plenty of points on pageant days. Words poured out of her like a dam had just burst. “My Thomas was terribly impatient while we were courting. I’m his first wife, you see, and he was tired of waiting. He might not have let me finish school, too, if my father hadn’t started letting him keep me overnight. Still in my purity garments, of course, but that didn’t give him too much trouble, let me tell you—”
“Your father allowed that?!” Madison exclaimed, her eyes shifting from shock to horror as she spoke. Cherry and Diane wore similar expressions. Cherry’s own brief courtship had been fraught with terror that her father might discover what she and Francis did during their unsupervised moments. Purity garments blocked access to a girl’s lower holes, but it didn’t take a creative mind to imagine how they might be circumvented.
Sprinkles flushed, and her voice took on a defensive tone. “I hardly could have done it without his approval, could I? And not just Thomas! Most of my other suitors paid for overnights, too. It’s expected nowadays, when the bidding is competitive!” She raised a haughty eyebrow at Madison. “But I guess you wouldn’t know about that.”
Madison was blushing, too. She had been staring at the floor ever since interrupting Sprinkles. From her repeated winces it seemed more like she was suffering multiple insults throughout the other woman’s rebuttal than a single snide comment at the end. Perhaps she was just especially sensitive about her age. Madison was a good deal older than Sprinkles, and she probably didn’t appreciate reminders that she was out of touch with the latest trends in dating. Though Cherry herself had never heard of such a thing as men paying for ‘overnights’. Perhaps her father would have capitalized in the same way if Francis had not been her only suitor.
It suddenly seemed odd to her that Sprinkles had attracted so many, while she had had only one. Cherry had been quite successful on pageant days herself, after all. For a moment, she thought she could dimly recall a series of hazy male faces, but when she tried to focus on them they all resolved into Francis’ face instead. …What had made her picture Francis, again? It seemed she couldn’t trace her train of thought. She was probably just missing him, like always.
“We have strayed from the topic at hand, I think.” Madison said after an awkward silence. Her tone was chastised, again seeming more as though she had been shouted at rather than merely sassed. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Sprinkles. My tongue…has a mind of its own, sometimes. It often betrays me when I give it too much leniency.”
Sprinkles sighed and let the heat out of her voice. “It’s not your fault, Maddy. I invited your outburst by speaking too freely in the first place.” Something seemed to occur to her because her tone took on genuine concern. “You didn’t get in trouble, did you?”
Madison ignored that last comment and instead turned to Cherry with an apologetic smile. “You see? Conversation carries so many stresses and risks when you must choose the words yourself. We are fortunate that our husbands take that burden from us, most of the time.”
“Is that what scripting means?” Cherry asked, reasoning it out part way from what the women had said already. “That you…follow a script? How does that work?”
“Well,” Madison began, “in Diane’s case, she has a list of responses she can scroll through on her contacts and select whichever is most appropriate.”
“I’m so happy to meet you!” Diane burst in, clearly excited to have something to add. She beamed at Cherry again, and Cherry smiled back. Perhaps Diane had indeed felt something in their earlier connection, but had been unable to express it?
“Scripts can be quite sophisticated.” Madison further explained. “It’s common to have hundreds of possible responses to mix and match, so it can really feel like a regular conversation once you’ve practiced for a while and know your own lines by heart. Diane is a bit simplistic, all things considered.” That earned an indignant huff from Diane. “She’s locked in to welcoming you now, so she can only pick from that script until you leave or a new group conversation begins.”
“I love to welcome new girls!” Diane announced defiantly, as if demonstrating that she was perfectly capable of expressing what she needed to. She reached out with her leg and stroked Cherry’s calf. Cherry returned the affectionate gesture, once again relishing the feel of her own silky skin against Diane’s. What a strange friend she had made! Also like before, the contact continued longer than was strictly necessary, and this time it was not Diane pulling back but rather Madison clearing her throat that signalled the end of the moment.
But it was Sprinkles who spoke. “I’m the same as Diane, when I’m at home!” She offered, trampling whatever Madison had started to say. “Thomas likes me to tell him things, like how I’m feeling or if I need anything, but I’m such a chatterbox I don’t know when to stop talking! He’s a real sweetheart, so he felt super guilty about shutting me up even though apparently I can be annoying. But then he put me on a script and everything is so much better now! I can tell him everything he wants to know and he doesn’t have to worry about sending me off on a tangent! And it’s way better than a gag, because I can still—”
“He lets her go off-script for the Social,” Madison interrupted in a dry tone, and Sprinkles blushed, swallowing the rest of her torrent. “But she still joins in scripted conversations with the group. I—” She winced again, and stared at nothing for a few seconds before continuing with a slight smile. “I have a similar arrangement, myself.”
“That seems…” Cherry started, but drifted off. She was going to say limiting, but it occurred to her that she had had precious little in the way of conversation with Francis since the honeymoon. Even on nights when he stayed with her now the best she could hope for was an exchange of ‘I-love-you’s and maybe a murmured ‘sweet dreams’ before he fell asleep. Perhaps if she had all the right words, words he had chosen himself, he would speak with her more frequently. “…interesting.” She finished, instead. “And what is a scripted conversation like? Both women follow the same script?”
“Yes,” Madison said, and Diane nodded enthusiastically. “Usually one woman leads the conversation and the other receives her own lines to read via her contacts.”
“You can always follow along with one of ours!” Diane chimed, again, with a smile.
Find accompanying notes and illustrations on Slothargy’s DeviantArt and Pixiv