Goldengrove by Francine Prose

me, but the creature that would have been produced by swapping half of my cells for half of Margaret’s. Maybe it was the weight loss, or the fact that I’d grown taller, but for the first time I understood why Margaret used to say that some day I’d look like her. No one, not even Margaret, could have known it would happen so soon.
    I was glad to see Margaret in me. It was proof that she still existed, even if some part of me must have had to move over to make room.
    I went next door and took off the Hawaiian shirt and hung it in my closet. I would save it to wear, like a magic cloak, for those especially dangerous moments when I most needed its help.

Four
     
    S UNDAYS WERE UNBEARABLE, LONELIER THAN BEFORE . Two, three Sundays since Margaret’s death, I knew the count from the moment I woke. Weeks would turn into months and years, but the meter would keep ticking.
    Margaret’s death had shaken us, like three dice in a cup, and spilled us out with new faces in unrecognizable combinations. We forgot how we used to live in our house, how we’d passed the time when we lived there. We could have been sea creatures stranded on the beach, puzzling over an empty shell that reminded us of the ocean.
    Occasionally, I’d find my parents in unexpected places: Dad in the middle of the stairs, Mom in the garage, as if she’d gone out with a purpose that got vaporized by the paint fumes. She took on massive housecleaning projects that she left half done. She ordered a paper shredder, and on Sundays, instead of music, I’d hear the hum of Mom making confetti from ancient tax returns she’d found in the attic.
    She never again played that Chopin waltz she was playing that afternoon. She took a leave from writing liner notes. She hardly played at all.
    She did keep going to yoga class. From my window, I’d spy on her, balanced on one leg with her hands joined as if she was praying to the lake. Or I’d see her arched over the grass like an upside-down lawn chair. When she stood up, she stumbled. Her arthritis was getting worse.
    She asked if I wanted to join her. She still claimed that it helped. But I couldn’t see how standing on my head would change what was inside it, or how it would help to hear Mom’s friend Sally remind her to relax her shoulders and tuck in her butt.
    Sometimes, after yoga class, Sally would follow Mom home in her car, and they’d hang out in the study where my mother used to write. I’d smell Sally’s cigarette smoke wafting down from upstairs, though before, Mom had never let anyone smoke in the house.
    Margaret never liked Sally. She said Sally was an example of how, given enough vanity and money, you could make your face look like a junior-high sewing project. Margaret was hardly ever mean like that, so it must have been something else. Sally always seemed wary of Margaret. But she’d treated me with a sly, flirtatious weirdness, as if we were coconspirators keeping secrets from the grown-ups. She’d ask how I was and then laugh and say, “You don’t have to answer.” Then we’d both laugh, embarrassed, because she’d thought she was rescuing me from teenage conversational hell, when all I was ever going to say was, “Fine.”
    Now, for my mother, yoga had become like the piano. She tried and failed and lay on the ground and got up and tried again, and got steadily more anxious instead of more relaxed.
    Once, I watched from the upstairs window as Mom crumpled to the grass and Sally went around to the back of the house, where Dad was weeding a patch of bee balm. The afternoon sun picked out the gold streaks in Sally’s hair. I wondered how much time and money she’d spent to make the sun do that. She looked up. I stepped back from the window. I moved closer again as she leaned toward my father, and Dad leaned away. I could tell she was saying she was worried about my mother.
    That night, at dinner, Dad said, “I don’t know what it is, Daisy. Instinct, maybe. There’s something