“But I’ve known you longer than Dick did,” I said, which sounded slightly pathetic even to my own ears.
“The last time you pulled this crap, we were teenagers, and what did we know about anything?” Dena said. “But we’re adults, which means this is who you really are—a person who goes after the man your best friend is interested in.” I almost wished she were ranting, but she hadn’t raised her voice at all. “I’m sick of your fakeness,” she said. “You’ve always gotten to be the good girl, so go be a congressman’s wife, you know? Spend all your time with the Trommlers and the Hickens and those other uptight couples. Let Charlie buy you jewelry and cars.” Though we’d never ordered, we both had set our napkins on our laps; she crumpled hers, dropped it on the table, and stood. “I hope he gives you everything you want.”
Sitting there after she left, I felt a mild embarrassment at having been abandoned, and also an incredulity at how extreme her reaction had been; it was what I’d feared but hadn’t really expected. And then, less close to the surface than these emotions but perhaps more profound, I felt one more: a great gratitude that she, like Pete Imhof, had never mentioned Andrew by name.
ON MY NEXT
visit to Riley, I didn’t tell my mother or grandmother that I wouldn’t be staying over until we were nearly finished with lunch. With as little fanfare as possible, I said, “I made some plans in Madison tonight, so I think I’ll take off this afternoon.” It was a hot Saturday, and we had just finished chicken-salad sandwiches.
“Really, this afternoon?” my mother said, and my grandmother said, “What sort of plans?” Since my father’s death, I had never come home without spending the night.
I gave my grandmother a look—presumably, she could have guessed the plans involved Charlie, and she also could have guessed that if I wanted to be more specific, I would have—and I said, “Just some people getting together on the Terrace.” This, at least, was true: I’d be meeting a bunch of Charlie’s friends for the first time.
When my mother rose to clear the plates, my grandmother gripped my wrist, holding me back. As soon as my mother was in the kitchen, my grandmother murmured, “She made a Vienna torte for dessert tonight on your account.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize—No, I can stay then,” I said.
My mother came back into the dining room, and my grandmother said, “Dorothy, it sounds like your daughter has a new beau.”
“Oh my goodness.” It was my mother, not me, who blushed in this moment.
“It’s not official yet.” I shot my grandmother an irritated look. “But his name is Charlie, he grew up in Madison and Milwaukee, and I met him through Kathleen Hicken and her husband, remember them?” Volunteering this information was a subterfuge, a way of not volunteering the more noteworthy details of Charlie’s upbringing or his current congressional aspirations. I was uncertain what my family’s reaction would be when I did share the news, given my father’s maxim about fools’ names and fools’ faces. Also, as I sat there, it occurred to me that I had no idea of my mother’s political leanings. I’d always known that my grandmother was a Democrat and my father a Republican, but I wasn’t sure my mother voted.
My grandmother said, “A little companionship can be wonderful. Don’t you think, Dorothy?”
My mother, still standing, lifted the iced-tea pitcher. “He sounds appealing, Alice,” she said, and she disappeared again into the kitchen. When she turned on the water, my grandmother whispered, “I was trying to give her an entree to talk about Lars Enderstraisse.”
“Granny, I really doubt they’re involved.” I, too, was whispering. “Whatever Mom’s mystery errands are, I’m pretty sure they don’t have to do with him.”
“You think you’re the only one being wooed?” My grandmother chuckled, and, speaking at a normal volume, said, “Someone has an awfully high opinion of herself.”
MY GRANDMOTHER AND
I read in the living room that afternoon, she on the couch and I in the chair, and when I went to find my mother, she was weeding tomato plants in the backyard.
“If it’s all right, I think I will stay for dinner,” I said. “My friends aren’t meeting until around nine o’clock.” This was a lie, but my mother’s face lit up.
“Oh, I’m delighted. We’re having a dessert I know you like.”
Watching her—she was on her knees, wearing a white terry-cloth hat—I felt colliding surges of affection and guilt. Why had I not told Charlie from the start that I wouldn’t be free tonight? Our schedules were flexible, we could go out during the upcoming week. But the truth was that I didn’t want to stay in Riley. The pulls of familial love and obligation could not, for the moment, compete with the promise of early-relationship sex. Starlight and beer and our twisting, naked bodies—that was what I wanted, not a seat at a dining room table with two old women eating breaded veal cutlets and Vienna torte. If infatuation was making me selfish, it was not, I supposed, that I’d previously been exempt from a capacity for it; it was more that I hadn’t ever been infatuated, or at least not in a good long time.
I squatted next to her. “The tomatoes look nice.”
My mother set a bunch of weeds on the pile. “Honey, Dena must have told you about Marjorie. Lillian is having a fit.”
I tried to make a noncommittal expression. Of course Dena hadn’t told me about Marjorie, who was one of her two younger sisters.
“You know how that family is, though,” my mother said. “The girls have always been so strong-willed. Mack could be such a disciplinarian, Lillian compensated by being lenient, and it was feast or famine for the girls.” The last I’d heard of Marjorie Janaszewski, she’d gotten involved with David Geisseler, the younger brother of our former classmate Pauline Geisseler; David already had two children with a woman whom he hadn’t married, and he and Marjorie were bartenders together at the Loose Caboose on Burlington Street. “I can’t fault Lillian for worrying, though,” my mother said.
All this time I had been carrying an envelope—it was unsealed, unwritten on—and I held it out to my mother. “That was a good idea about selling the brooch,” I said. “I took it to an antiques store.”
“Oh, bless your heart.” Without looking inside, she folded the envelope and inserted it in the pocket of her skirt.
