Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler Page B

been absent for so much of his life. But something in the way Addison looked at Rima, just quickly and sideways when she finished, made Rima suspect she was the target audience.

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    The story started with Addison’s mother, a little robin of a woman with sentimental ideas about children and their delightful imaginations. Addison recounted the triumph of a dinner party at which she’d told her mother’s guests that she thought that every time a child made a wish and blew out the birthday candles, those same candles relit in heaven as stars. That the stars were the birthday candles of every child who’d ever lived, which is why you could wish on them too. She was six at the time. Her mother had been so enchanted that Addison was often called on to repeat the performance; she was all of twelve before it was finally retired.
    Even at six Addison had known that she was pretending to be more childlike than she was and that the stars were nothing of the sort. A child’s imagination is such a beautiful place, her mother used to say, but it was also, in her opinion, a public place. What are you thinking, little Miss Sunny Day? she persisted in asking Addison. Why that face? Why that tone? Why so quiet? No secrets allowed.
    This put Addison in a difficult position. Her mother wished her to be thinking of fairies and dewdrops, but she was already the knives-and-curses type. You can tell me anything, her mother used to say, and then respond to anything she was told with disappointment or alarm. So Addison was compelled into a life of deceit and charade, which is what always happens whenever honesty is forced upon someone.
    And yet this same mother had a secret so big. When Addison was in high school, she came home one evening after a planning session for the Model UN—her team had been assigned Sweden—to an awkward dinner at which she was told that her father wished to get married. And not to her mother. In fact, he couldn’t marry her mother, because they were brother and sister.
    Apparently (it took some time for Addison to piece this together; she was in shock, and no one there managed a linear narrative), apparently, he’d come to live with her mother to help out during the pregnancy, and since they shared a last name and there was a baby on the way, people had made certain assumptions, which he was too gallant to contradict. But now he’d fallen in love with a court stenographer he’d met at the library, in the travel and adventure section, and he felt the years he’d already given to his sister’s reputation were maybe sufficient. “Nothing will change with us,” he’d assured Addison. “You’ll always be my girl.” The dinner was corned beef, which was Addison’s favorite.
    â€œSo who’s my father?” Addison asked her mother later that evening, when she’d stopped crying.
    â€œLot’s wife,” her mother answered, which seemed unlikely. But was her way of warning Addison not to dredge up old news.
    And then there was a small wedding, in which Addison was carefully made important, and the couple left on a honeymoon cruise, and everyone, the neighbors, the milkman, Addison’s mother’s bridge group, but especially Addison’s mother, behaved as if they’d never thought he was anything but Addison’s uncle. It was an amazing thing to watch. They’d all wheeled in unison like a school of fish.
    Addison counted the corned-beef dinner as the first day of her writing career. In her interviews, this was the point of the story. This was the day that her obligation to her mother was canceled and she was free to begin to think up the dreadful books she would someday write. It took her many more years to do so, but from this day on she never pretended again that her imagination was a frolic through the dewdrops. She gave up the Model UN, and the piano too.
    In telling the story to Rima and Tilda, her point was a