spot where my wedding photo sits on a table next to my parents’. I can feel it there. I don’t look. “Where’s Lucy?”
“She’s upstairs napping. She got in late last night.”
“Okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”
I close the bathroom door and push the lock and stand in front of the gold oval mirror that’s been over the sink since the day we moved into this house. I examine the bags under my eyes, my chalky complexion, and note that I have the unmistakable look of Someone Going Through Something . My mother, being a woman who not only keeps a tube of lipstick in the front pocket of her pants at all times but actually thinks to reapply it throughout the day, has already noticed this, surely, and I’m certain it has only compounded her anxiety about me.
When Lucy and I were eleven and thirteen, Mom signed us up for an “Etiquette for Young Ladies” class at the Lord & Taylor at the mall. In a cheerless fluorescent-lit conference room, where an ancient “20 percent off” poster hung cockeyed on the wall, a middle-aged woman in a too-tight skirt spent three hours of an otherwise perfectly good Saturday morning instructing our gloomy table of awkward preteens on everything from how to set a table to how to properly wash our faces. But what I remember most from this training , antiquated even then, is the distinct realization, as I squirmed and sweated in my suntan-colored pantyhose, that this was another thing that separated me from my mother and my sister, who had not only applied her lipstick perfectly during that particular lesson but had raised her hand and taught the teacher a new trick about how to hold the tube.
Standing in front of the mirror in my parents’ powder room, I am certain that the next forty-eight hours will mean defending myself against Mom and Lucy as they preen around me, poke the tender spots of my psyche, and make me face things that they, as a team, have surely already decided I need to deal with, regardless of whether I am ready.
An hour later, my sister, just up from her nap, flops down on the opposite end of the couch from me. She stabs a cracker into the log of goat cheese that Mom set on the coffee table along with a pile of Triscuits, the ritual cheese and cracker plate that she puts out every time people are in her house.
Twenty minutes after I broke the news to Mom the other night, Lucy called to check on me, and in a rare moment of sensitivity, she said that she’d meet me in Virginia. She would leave her boyfriend Bobby in the city. (“He’s on my nerves anyway,” she moaned, which irked me, of course, since I would kill to have Owen simply be on my nerves right now.) “We’ll have a girls’ weekend,” she said. “We’ll drink wine, eat junk food, watch old movies, paint our nails,” proving once and for all that my sister still thinks that the cure for a grown-up heartache is the crap we used to read in Seventeen magazine and, more to the point, that we really are polar opposites.
“Daphne,” she says now. “I can’t believe this. It’s just…” She throws her hands up in the air. “It’s unbelievable.”
“It sure is,” I say. She and Owen have a normal brother–and–sister-in-law relationship—nothing more, nothing less. Their interactions are essentially polite cocktail party chatter. They pretend to be interested in each other’s jobs. They talk about movies, current events, books.
When we were kids, Lucy was an obsessive reader. I yanked books from her hands to get her to come to dinner and knocked them out of her grip when it was time to get ready for school. I thought for sure that she’d be a great writer someday, or a book critic, an editor, an English professor. But then she surprised everyone when she decided to become a beauty editor at Glow , a woman’s magazine. From what I can tell, this means that she spends her workday sifting through the crates of cosmetics sent to her by the manufacturers and zipping around
“She’s upstairs napping. She got in late last night.”
“Okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”
I close the bathroom door and push the lock and stand in front of the gold oval mirror that’s been over the sink since the day we moved into this house. I examine the bags under my eyes, my chalky complexion, and note that I have the unmistakable look of Someone Going Through Something . My mother, being a woman who not only keeps a tube of lipstick in the front pocket of her pants at all times but actually thinks to reapply it throughout the day, has already noticed this, surely, and I’m certain it has only compounded her anxiety about me.
When Lucy and I were eleven and thirteen, Mom signed us up for an “Etiquette for Young Ladies” class at the Lord & Taylor at the mall. In a cheerless fluorescent-lit conference room, where an ancient “20 percent off” poster hung cockeyed on the wall, a middle-aged woman in a too-tight skirt spent three hours of an otherwise perfectly good Saturday morning instructing our gloomy table of awkward preteens on everything from how to set a table to how to properly wash our faces. But what I remember most from this training , antiquated even then, is the distinct realization, as I squirmed and sweated in my suntan-colored pantyhose, that this was another thing that separated me from my mother and my sister, who had not only applied her lipstick perfectly during that particular lesson but had raised her hand and taught the teacher a new trick about how to hold the tube.
Standing in front of the mirror in my parents’ powder room, I am certain that the next forty-eight hours will mean defending myself against Mom and Lucy as they preen around me, poke the tender spots of my psyche, and make me face things that they, as a team, have surely already decided I need to deal with, regardless of whether I am ready.
An hour later, my sister, just up from her nap, flops down on the opposite end of the couch from me. She stabs a cracker into the log of goat cheese that Mom set on the coffee table along with a pile of Triscuits, the ritual cheese and cracker plate that she puts out every time people are in her house.
Twenty minutes after I broke the news to Mom the other night, Lucy called to check on me, and in a rare moment of sensitivity, she said that she’d meet me in Virginia. She would leave her boyfriend Bobby in the city. (“He’s on my nerves anyway,” she moaned, which irked me, of course, since I would kill to have Owen simply be on my nerves right now.) “We’ll have a girls’ weekend,” she said. “We’ll drink wine, eat junk food, watch old movies, paint our nails,” proving once and for all that my sister still thinks that the cure for a grown-up heartache is the crap we used to read in Seventeen magazine and, more to the point, that we really are polar opposites.
“Daphne,” she says now. “I can’t believe this. It’s just…” She throws her hands up in the air. “It’s unbelievable.”
“It sure is,” I say. She and Owen have a normal brother–and–sister-in-law relationship—nothing more, nothing less. Their interactions are essentially polite cocktail party chatter. They pretend to be interested in each other’s jobs. They talk about movies, current events, books.
When we were kids, Lucy was an obsessive reader. I yanked books from her hands to get her to come to dinner and knocked them out of her grip when it was time to get ready for school. I thought for sure that she’d be a great writer someday, or a book critic, an editor, an English professor. But then she surprised everyone when she decided to become a beauty editor at Glow , a woman’s magazine. From what I can tell, this means that she spends her workday sifting through the crates of cosmetics sent to her by the manufacturers and zipping around
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