Autobiography of Us (4 page)

It was in the anatomy books that I found the most astonishing things: diagrams that unfolded like accordions to show tendons and muscles, pages of illustrations mapping out vast territories of veins. A single drawing that outlined all twenty-six bones of the foot. I lost myself in them the way I’d always lost myself in books, only instead of Catherine from
Wuthering Heights
weeping over Heathcliff or Emma Woodhouse getting into trouble over one thing or another, there was the fascinating architecture of the human skull, or the fat gray bellows of the lungs. There were the twin arches of the clavicle, the tiny, saclike alveoli clustered together like buds on the verge of blooming. I traced the bones of the leg up through the hip girdle and let my fingers wander over the pattern of veins. Later, I would stand in front of my bedroom mirror wearing nothing but my slip and start all over again:
lingual artery
,
carotid
,
coronary
,
hepatic
.

I was careful to visit the library only on those days when Alex had something else—her
goddamn elocution
or whatever it was. I told my mother I was going to Alex’s straight from school; to Alex, I said I was going home, that my mother needed me for one thing or another. Each time I lied it bothered me less, as though lying were a sweater I stretched with each use until the shape of it molded to my body. Then there were moments I wished I could take it all back, afternoons as I hurried down the sunny stretch of East Walnut when I longed to do it all over again, to go back to that afternoon in Mr. Percy’s classroom and erase that first lie as easily as chalk from a board. No, I might have said. It’s not Mr. Percy.
This
is what I love—holding the tray aloft, the microscope. The tiny, waxen heart.

But the truth is that I was afraid I would lose her. Not because I’d finally found my heart’s desire, and it was something so crude, so entirely lacking in glamour that I understood immediately Alex would never approve. And not because I had grown up a lonely child, unaccustomed to explaining my many peculiarities, or even because I was already used to maintaining a certain border between private and public, to turning a particular face to the world.
Keeping up appearances
, Mother called it: the silk flower pinned behind her ear; the tear in my uniform stitched up by her neat hand; the complicated recipes she clipped from magazines and followed to the letter, the heat in that small kitchen making her pretty face gleam.
We have to try harder
, she told me as she stood behind me before bed, setting my hair in curlers.
A challenge
, she called it. No, I was afraid I would lose Alex because I knew I’d in some sense already let her go. Because, I mean, I’d found something I loved as much as I loved her.

And so when she asked, I lied. I’d learned how to roast a chicken, I told her, holding up my hands as though to show my scars. I’d spent the day helping my mother polish the goddamn silver.

How little we know the ones we love. How little we know of anyone, in the end.

OF course I lost her anyway. His name was Bertrand Lowell.

He was a year ahead of us in school, a Browning boy like the rest of them. All anyone said about him growing up was that he was a genius, rumored to have received a near-perfect score on the Wechsler-Bellevue. We were juniors at Windridge the day he punched his history teacher in the eye for reasons that remained unclear; even the other Browning boys in the room that day couldn’t put words to the particulars. All anyone knew was that the teacher had been rushed to the emergency room and that Bertrand reappeared in the hallways the following Monday without further explanation. The Lowells were rumored to have made a sizable donation to the school, a story supported by the fact that the teacher—just as quietly as Bertrand had been let back in—was let go at the end of the year.

He hardly looked the part. He was tall and thin, the kind of skinny mothers clicked their tongues over at the pool as they watched their sons cannonball into the deep end, spines gleaming in the California sun. By the time we were in our first year at the university and Bertrand Lowell was in his second, what adolescent fat that had rounded out the corners of his body was gone. Even at nineteen, he dressed like a much older man: dark fitted jackets, dark chinos, and dark shoes. He brushed his black hair down so it lay flat against his head; his cheeks were sunk in like the flesh there had been scooped out with a spoon. He had a wide mouth, thin, mobile lips, and light-blue eyes so pale the pupils seemed to float there in the whites, untethered.

Not that any of that really mattered—the shiny black shoes or the sleek black hair, the slender, almost feminine frame. All anyone cared about was the story of that punch, the way it trailed behind him through the years like a red balloon. It was because of that that all at once every girl in school would have done anything to get his attention. To have known, even for a moment, that he had noticed us.

* * *

But even that’s not right, exactly. I lost Alex twice: The first was long before Bertrand Lowell. She went to a theater camp somewhere north of the city the summer we graduated Windridge—one last hurrah, as she put it, before her mother put her foot down.

“She says I might as well get it out of my system,” she told me. “It’s like someone telling you to go take one last walk with your dying dog. Morbid, really. Macabre.” She frowned. “Either or. Point being, I won’t have any spare time come fall. Too busy chairing the Junior League, according to Eleanor. Pledging Theta Alpha whosie-whatsit.”

“I’m going to miss you.”

She grinned. “I know.”

“I’m going to be so goddamn lonely.” I tried to make my voice light; I’m sure I didn’t fool her for a second.

“You’ll have a fabulous time. Lounging around at the pool and sleeping late every day—I’m jealous.” She got that far-off look she sometimes did when she was reading me a scene from one of her plays, her lips parted slightly to expose the front tooth that bent inward—the result, she insisted, of being dropped as a child, though I could never make up my mind as to whether I believed her or not. “I must be mad, running off to the middle of nowhere with a bunch of God-knows-who when I could spend a perfectly gorgeous few months right here with you. I mean, I must be off my rocker.”

“I’ll write every chance I get.”

“Dear Penelope.” She threw her arms around my shoulders.

“That was weaving,” I mumbled into her hair, but it seemed no sooner had she embraced me than she was already letting go, fluttering her hand over her shoulder like a handkerchief as she disappeared through the front door.

I spent those long, hot days helping my mother with her gardening or in the kitchen, the heat with the oven on close to unbearable. I’m sorry to say I never bothered feigning much of an interest in either activity; of the two, the garden interested me more, though even that I could have done without and mostly did, carrying out my chores with an enthusiasm halfhearted at best. Still, I had to admit it was something to witness my mother at work in the kitchen. She could coax a meal out of anything—a few carrots, half a cabbage, a package of Minute Rice. The results were inspired, products of a happy marriage between her resourcefulness and her artist’s eye for color and symmetry: Lettuce leaves fanned out around the edges of each plate for salad Niçoise; a few Birds Eye peas lined up along the border of the boiled new potatoes; a sprig of parsley arrived stuck into the mouth of a broiled fish for an effect she called
festive
—the taste, she said, nothing without the art of presentation.

I passed far more hours in the kitchen with her than I would have liked those summer weeks. With school over and Alex away, it was harder to think up excuses. Morning, I cracked eggs and chopped onions before slinking off to the library whenever I could, telling my mother I’d found a partner for tennis at the club. I knew what she would think about all that reading if she found out:
Bad for the complexion. Ruins the eyes
. A little back-and-forth before the sun went down, I announced instead. Working on my backhand, I said, Mother looking at me with that crease in her forehead she sometimes got.

“Isn’t there anything else you’d like to do?” she asked at breakfast one morning. “Something a bit more social?”

I shrugged. “Tennis is social.”

“Shrugging is for Italians, sweetheart,” she said absently, frowning down at the little pillow she was mending. She sewed during meals more often than not—
settles my nerves
, she said, though I believe the truth is that she couldn’t bear to waste the time. “And I’m afraid I don’t see how hitting a ball back and forth over a net all day qualifies as social.”

“Internal dialogue,” my father said, lowering the paper to peer at me. “Far less taxing on the spirit than the other sort. Isn’t that right, Queenie?” He winked and I ducked my head gratefully. How I wish you could have known your grandfather then! Already an older man, seven years my mother’s senior and fine-looking without being what you’d call handsome. An honest face, people said in those days. He was what by that point already qualified as a dying breed, a good, kind man who loved his work and family, who went uncomplainingly to the office each morning, worked long hours, and came home weary and smelling of tobacco and ink. Of course he worshiped my mother; we both did.

She licked the end of her thread. “I’m glad you two find this amusing.”

“Now, Eloise—”

“It just so happens invitations are going out next week for this fall’s charity balls,” she went on, “but apparently I’m the only one at this table who cares about Rebecca being included in this season’s most important events.”

“I care,” I offered.

“As do I,” said my father, raising his coffee cup in salute.

My mother eyed us to see if we were mocking her and decided we were in earnest. “I have it on good authority that the boards are particularly selective this year. Eleanor,” she said, with a nod in my direction. “I ran into her at Swenson’s last week. Positively brutal, she said.”

My father closed the paper and tilted back in his chair; he wore the expression of deliberate concern he always assumed when my mother sounded unhappy. “I’d like to know what would recommend a girl better than tennis,” he said finally. “Seems healthy enough.”

“Rebecca?” My mother appealed to me.

“I think a few girls from school might be going to the beach later on this afternoon,” I said slowly. “I could make a call or two.”

My mother gave me the smile she reserved for those rare occasions I surprised her. “The thing about tennis, Walter,” she explained with exaggerated patience, “is that it’s exclusive. The girls have no opportunity for
mingling
. It’s all fine and good to spend time at the club, and under ordinary circumstances…” She let her voice trail off. “But these are extraordinary times, don’t you agree? What with Rebecca headed off to college so soon and all. Extraordinary measures. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” She turned to me again and I sat up very straight, doing my best to look ready, my entire being bent toward mingling.

“Alex said they’ll have dance class for all us first-years this fall.”

“You see, Walter?” She beamed at me.

“What I don’t understand is how it won’t be chaos,” I said. “There are twelve girls in our house alone.”

“And you’re all going to have the most fabulous time.” A few pieces of hair had come loose from my mother’s chignon; they floated by her ears like strands of corn silk, moved gently back and forth by currents of air. “Just think of all the new friends you’ll make!”

“I don’t need new friends.”

She looked at me reproachfully. “Sweetheart.”

“I don’t.”

“
Really,
darling, it isn’t healthy—”

“It must be difficult,” my father interrupted.

“Sir?”

“Your Alexandra,” he said gently. “You must miss her.”

I swallowed against the sudden lump in my throat. “I do.”

“And she’s been a wonderful friend to you over the years,” my mother said briskly, her needle darting in and out. “But you’ll want to be careful.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She tied a deft knot, snapping the thread with her teeth.
“There.”
She held up the pillow in triumph, the new cover stretched taut across the front. “Isn’t that better? I never cared for that old blue ticking. Too Frenchy, and I don’t mean that in a good way.” She gave me a conciliatory smile. “I’m not saying anything we all don’t already know, darling. All your father and I have ever wanted is for you to
enjoy
yourself. Spread your wings.”

“Flap, flap.”

“Hmm?” She frowned. “Besides, Alexandra can afford to be careless. Theater camp, for goodness’ sake! I can only imagine the kind of young men who attend that sort of thing. Hardly husband material.” She clicked her tongue. “Eleanor must be furious.”

“They’re eighteen,” my father protested mildly.

“And I’ve put two and two together, and last time I checked they’ll be nineteen soon enough, then twenty.” My mother’s face could look quite stern, those light eyebrows knit together in consternation. “Am I to be persecuted for thinking of the future? Why, when I think of how Daddy—” Her eyes filled with tears.

“Eloise.” My father looked at me desperately. “Please.”

“But I have you,” I said, too loud. “I have both of you.”

“That’s right,” my father said, soothingly. “You’re both right. It’s just, Eloise, don’t you think she’s a little young to be thinking about marriage?”

My mother stood then, tucking the pillow under her arm and wrapping her spool of thread and needle into the sewing pouch she carried around the house in the pocket of her housecoat. “If everyone’s already made up their mind,” she said, wounded.

My father and I stood together as though her reproof had been a command, the remains of our breakfast scattered across the tablecloth. The toast crumbs Mother would clear away later with the special scraper she’d recently ordered from a catalog, saying she’d seen one at a luncheon and apparently they were all the rage.