The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud Page B

white wine, everything served on the best china, and the ladies all still there in a blue fog of cigarette smoke when I came home from school, as though there were nothing, nothing to call them away. And the knowledge, which I had even then, that once they left the charmed circle, they were gone forever.
    When I was about seven, in the week before Christmas—before, it must be said, the bookstore years; and it only now occurs to me that they were a direct result of this incident—my mother broke down in tears at the A&P, her face a map of blotches in the sallow supermarket light. I’d asked for something extra—a jar of chocolate Koogle, maybe, which the more indulgent mothers of the day allowed their children to take as school sandwiches, on white bread with butter: your dessert as a main course! The world gone haywire!—and her features crumpled.
    “I’m so sorry,” she blathered, all moist and shamefully public, as I tried to push the cart along and her with it, and kept my eyes to the floor, “but there’s nothing for you or your brother. Nothing at all. I have nothing for you for Christmas. There’s just no money left.” She let out a small wail; I cringed. “I had to have the dishwasher fixed, and then that stone hit the windshield on the highway, and to replace the glass—it’s all so expensive and you see, you see, there’s nothing. And I can’t ask your father. I can’t ask him for more. So there’s nothing for you at all. I am so sorry.” My mother, you understand, lived on an allowance from my father—or a salary, if you prefer: he had a bank account and she had a bank account, and each month he transferred a fixed sum from his account to hers, and with this sum she managed the household. She had spent the housekeeping money on housekeeping, and there was nothing left over for gifts. Even though I was still small, I understood the basics of this arrangement.
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said, trying to console without causing further embarrassment. “I don’t care about presents.” Although I did care, and was disappointed, not least because I was still supposed to believe inSanta Claus, and this outburst seemed like the Wizard of Oz emerging from behind his curtain, an unconscionable breach of propriety and of our necessary hypocrisies. “Really,” I said again, “it doesn’t matter.”
    And suddenly, then—inexplicably to me as I was, but in a way so obvious to me now—she turned viperish, rageful, a temper as shameful in the A&P as her earlier tears. “Don’t ever get yourself stuck like this,” she hissed. “Promise me? Promise me now?”
    “I promise.”
    “You need to have your own life, earn your own money, so you’re not scrounging around like a beggar, trying to put ten dollars together for your kids’ Christmas presents. Leeching off your father’s—or your husband’s—pathetic paycheck. Never. Never. Promise me?”
    “I already promised.”
    “Because it’s important.”
    “I know.”
    And that was an end to it. She’d dried up and put on her sunny smile by the time we reached the checkout, the only sign of her distress a slight smearing of her mascara. We were served by Sadie, the daughter of my old first-grade teacher, a girl who spoke very loudly and slowly as if she, or we, were deaf. She wore her brown hair in a single pigtail on one side of her head and it looked like the handle of an old-fashioned water pump.
    “Mrs. Eldridge,” she bawled. “So good to see you! As always!”
    “You too, Sadie, dear.”
    “Looking forward to the holidays?”
    “You bet! Isn’t it the best time of year?”
    “The best. I love it. Don’t you love it, Nora?”
    I was too busy watching my mother to answer. As she stacked the groceries on the conveyor belt there was an expression of such impassioned nostalgia on her face that she looked like a Norman Rockwell portrait. I could see her genuinely believing what she’d told Sadie, believing that it was the best time