The Class Menagerie

get up in the morning and feed them, Willard always slept with Todd, but the cats slept in Jane’s room so they were on hand when she woke up. “Sorry, guys, but I’m not staying,“ she told them.
    Jane dumped her clothes in the dry-cleaning heap in her closet, and put on jeans and a sweatshirt. Leaving the cats watching her in perplexity, she grabbed a few necessities, locked up the house, and went back to the bed and breakfast.
    “I’ve put you in the Gary Grant room,“ Edgar said when she got out of the car. He’d been waiting for her at the back door. “It’s Hector’s favorite place. And I’ve told the others where to find you if they need anything.“
    Jane went upstairs and made herself comfortable in the room she was assigned. Hector did follow her, but didn’t seem ready to settle down for the night any more than the Ewe Lambs did. Jane could hear them down the hall laughing and talking. She got into bed, turned out the lights, and smiled to herself. The house wasn’t terribly well soundproofed and she could still hear them a little. Except that the voices were a little bit lower, a bit more restrained, it sounded just like her house did when Katie had friends for a sleepover.
    She had to be up early and tried to will herself to fall straight to sleep, but it was impossible. Not because of the voices, but because her mind kept replaying snippets of the evening.
    Some parts of it had been fun. Crispy had told some really funny stories about her various moneyed marriages. But between stories on herself, she managed to slip in quite a few uncomfortable ones about the others. “Remember that time you went around with the toilet paper stuck to your shoe all day, Pooky, and nobody told you?“ she said as if it were hilarious. She also managed to remind Kathy of the time she’d planned the giant protest rally and it rained and nobody showed up except the newspaper reporters she’d invited.
    Lila was even worse. Where Crispy’s taunts and digs were fairly harmless and most were delivered with apparent affectionate memory, Lila’s were vaguely ominous. She reminisced at some length about a slumber party, the point of the story seeming to be that Avalon was into drug use then and probably still was. She suggested, without actually saying so, that this might have accounted for the switch in purse contents—that “somebody“ expected to find suspicious substances in either Rooky’s purse or Avalon’s.
    Later on Lila made a point of bringing up the gossip about Bern’s possible Supreme Court appointment. “Think of the scrutiny, Beth,“ she said. “Every aspect of your life under a public microscope. We’ll all watch the hearings and I bet we learn things about you we never knew.“
    But Beth wasn’t playing. “I doubt it,“ she said with a bored smile. “I’m not that interesting.“
    “None of us are,“ Kathy said with a laugh.
    “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll bet anybody who turned a spotlight on you would learn some fascinating things,“ Lila said to her.
    Kathy blushed and blustered and left the room.
    When Lila turned her malevolent attention to Mimi, she failed utterly. “Soong...“ she said ‘as if talking to herself. “Rather a famous Chinese name for an American to have.“
    “Isn’t it?“ Mimi answered. To the questioning looks of the others, she said, “There were three Soong sisters in China. One married Sun Yat-sen, one married Chiang Kai-shek and the other... I’ve forgotten what the other one did. No relation to my husband though. It’s a very common name.“
    “I’m surprised that somebody so ‘aggressively’ American would marry anyone of Chinese descent,“ Lila went on.
    Mimi just laughed and turned to Jane to explain. “Lila, in her subtle way, is referring to the fact that I once wanted to be Doris Day and Sandra Dee all in one. I wish you could have seen me—oh, I forgot! I brought yearbooks.“
    She had dashed off to get them while Jane wandered into the kitchen where Edgar and Gordon were playing gin rummy at the table. Kathy was there, too, leaning into the gigantic open refrigerator, her oversized derriere sticking out obstructing traffic. “Has anybody killed her yet?“ she asked as Jane edged around her.
    “Who? Lila? Not yet.“
    Pooky had followed Jane through the door. “Then I’ll volunteer.“ She squeezed around Jane and Kathy and headed for the back door. “She just got through reminding everybody in the living room that I’m a