The Hazards of Good Breeding by Jessica Shattuck

happen—there’s a pause? Good conversations are full of thoughtful pauses.” But this is not what Faith was taught. Faith was taught that silence indicates stupidity—or worse, shyness. Smooth, charming chatter—this was what her mother raised her to know. “And look what it got you,” Dr. Marcus says. “Jack Dunlap.” But here Faith and he do not see eye to eye. Despite all the miserably rugged ski vacations and grim observances of obscure traditions, the bullying and stoic silence and lack of affection that dominated her twenty-four years of marriage, she still sees Jack as having been a catch. Still feels proud that she, of all the pretty Pine Manor girls—and she really was just a girl, not even twenty yet—was the one who snagged him. So perverse but so true!
    Faith takes a deep breath and steps out into the buzz and holler of the lobby, the indistinct sea of madras shorts and yellow polo shirts, children racing through the crowd with the residue of lemon squares and brownies on their fingers, followed by a lumbering Irish setter, who is trotting after them obligingly. “He’s coming, he’s coming, here he comes,” one of the little boys is screaming in a mix of real blood-chilling terror and excitement. Stay calm , Faith tells herself. Calm . She lets the word reverberate in her head. It is a perfect word, really. Repeating it almost accomplishes the task. It makes her think of the glassy black puddles that formed in the driveway of the house she grew up in—the edges of the world, she had imagined them, wormholes that could suck a person through and out the other side to China, or maybe to another universe completely.
    Suddenly someone has hold of her elbow. It is a firm grasp (not Mamie Starks’s, but Caroline’s, thankfully), but almost before Faith has had the chance to appreciate this, her eyes have found a straight line through the whir of bodies to what might as well be a ticking bomb, or a dead body: Jack. He is looking right at her, exploding the word calm into four letters that tumble heavily through her brain, catching and tearing on the delicate tent of assurance she has attempted to erect.
    He wasn’t supposed to be here; Eliot said . . . what did Eliot say? “I’m sorry,” Caroline is whispering, “I didn’t think he would . . . ” But Faith is hardly listening.
    â€œFaith,” Jack says when she is standing in front of him. (Did Caroline steer her over? Or did she come, like some dumb magnet, of her own accord?) He is nodding slightly, distantly—looking over her shoulder as if there is another, more reasonable, more adult Faith there beside her—the mother of Faith the troublesome, frivolous little girl.
    All her words have been knocked flat—even the stumbling, faltering ones that come to her when she is nervous lie prostrate, as indecipherable as colors under a blind woman’s hand.
    â€œPoor Eliot,” Caroline says. “He really kind of froze up onstage.”
    â€œHmph,” Jack says. Faith has not seen him since he brought Eliot down to New York to stay with her over Thanksgiving. He looks both exactly the same as he always has and completely different.
    â€œPoor Eliot,” Faith repeats dumbly.
    â€œHe just got shaken up,” Caroline says. “I’m sure he was surprised to see you. We thought—last we heard, you were supposed to be at a meeting. . . .” There is a snap of irritation in her voice. Caroline has always known how to handle Jack in a way Faith never learned. Even at Eliot’s age she could reprove him for things Faith wouldn’t dream of.
    Faith can see Eliot’s shiny blue costume across the crowd—the other minutemen have rushed past him up the stairs and into the crowd of parents, but Eliot is lingering, hanging back at the top of the stairs, talking to a tall, striking-looking man with dark, almost shoulder-length hair