Description: Julie is on the verge of a nervous breakdown waiting for Eve to come home. Just when she is about to storm over to the Devon Hotel and get her pretentious on, Eve bursts through the door like the star of a musical opera.
The Miss Teenager Pageant. PART 23.
It was 8:39 and Eve still hadn’t checked in. While Pops lounged in his favorite arm chair scanning the headlines of the evening paper, Juliet was frantically pacing the living room floor. She had read almost every magazine in the stack about three of four times! Well, maybe in all honesty she hadn’t read a single word, but flipping through the pages and perusing photos of the latest dresses and fashion icons counted, didn’t it?
And where the hell was Eve?
She took a breath, albeit a very long one, to calm her nerves. Pops had said a half an hour. She would give her sister thirty minutes and no more. That thirty-minutes was about to expire. Flipping open to the middle of the February issue of Bazaar magazine, Julie pretended to be interested in the content that she hadn’t even glanced at. It could have been men’s suit vests, for all she cared. She bit her lower lip. Counting down the seconds from fifty, Julie spied her coat on the rack from across the room. It would take very little to rush to it, throw it on, and speed in her baby-blue Jalopy over to the Devon Hotel and rap on some doors.
And when she found Eve, she would drag that Glenn Sabine out of the hotel by his skivvies. What kind of a male host – famous or not – shows up unannounced and invites his female contestants to meet him in his hotel room? It didn’t take a mayor to sound the warning bells on that one. Now Eve was late returning home. Missing her favorite meal. Missing Julie’s cooking! Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen…
Another flip of the page, and another as her eyes were glued to the coat rack.
Ten, nine… close enough. She was out of here.
Just then, the double-door shutters to the living room swung open to reveal the object of their intense worry. Eve stood in the doorway glowing like a Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.
“Dust off the mantlepiece, family!” she announced with her arms outstretched. Her voice lifted to the ceiling. “A marriage is about to be arranged!”
The news threw Pops for a loop. “A — A what?” he stammered.
Throwing her head back, Eve smiled wide as she lifted her gloved hand nonchalantly in the air. “Me and Oscar,” she replied. “We’re going steady!”
“Eve Jones!” blasted Pops. “Set down somewhere and un-confuse us. Please!”
Eve glissaded into the living room with her heart aglow and her face shining like the sun. Julie knew her sister. If Eve held in the news any longer, Julie was sure that she would burst like a geyser.
Three hours later, Pops and Julie were sitting on the couch and listening intently to Eve’s overtly longwinded account of everything that went on in Mr. Sabine’s hotel room. Pops was fading, his eyes glazing over as his head dropped. Just as quickly, when he realized he was dozing off, his head popped back up, and he looked around somewhat disoriented, until he remembered that Eve was telling her Miss Teenager story. Julie was all ears, caught somewhere between wondering if she should be happy for Eve or worried sick.
“And Glenn Sabine said he’d personally tutor me in the dramatic arts,” Eve belted out as if it were not midnight but the middle of the day. “He said I had flair, and poise, and enormous promise!”
