Her litany of self-congratulation stalls when she opens the refrigerator and discovers that she has only one egg. Good at improvisation Tally may be, but not even she can make a quiche with one egg. She has forgotten that Gwen is going through a phase where she exists on hard-boiled eggs, eating them for breakfast and lunch. Stupid fad diet. Tally will have to drive to the little grocery store at the top of the hill, an errand that quashes her spirits. She has lost at her own game. Plus, she hates the gloomy makeshift grocery at the top of the hill, which seems to exist only to remind her how far she is from everything, how her husband has chosen a place that is the worst of all worlds-in the city, yet as remote as any suburb, with nothing within walking distance, and no sidewalks on which to walk, anyway. She wants to move to Paris.

She wants to move to Paris . It’s a stupid thought, petulant and impossible. Such a notion should flit across her mind and disappear in the minute it takes to grab her purse and car keys, yet it lingers, stubborn and defiant. Get out, she tells the thought, as if it were a neighbor’s dog that has wandered into her house. I have a wonderful life. I love my husband, and he adores me. I have terrific kids and I was young when I had them. I won’t even be fifty when Gwen goes off to college. I’m already doing what I want to do, what I was meant to do. Nothing is holding me back.

I want to move to Paris.

She turns on the car radio, hoping to drown out her own thoughts. “Those Were the Days.” An oldie, at least a decade past its prime. Clem clearly drove her car at some point in the past few days.

What Tally actually wants is a do-over, to move to Paris at age eighteen, to return to a time when she had such choices. The problem is, she is forever destined to make the same choice, because the facts never change: she was eighteen, accepted at Wellesley, having a wonderfully secret affair with a thirty-two-year-old man, her father’s colleague and her uncle’s best friend.

And she believed she was pregnant, although she never told Clem that. If she had to get married-and she thought she did-at least the groom could believe it was pure love. Besides, she wasn’t an artist then, she wouldn’t have dreamed of Paris, or even New York. She thought her choices were Clem or Wellesley. If she had found a way to get rid of the baby, it just would have been Wellesley and then another, possibly lesser, version of Clem four years later. Girls of her time and class were not programmed to bring home the bacon. Her dilemma-the eternal human dilemma-is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future. But there’s a reason that there’s no game show where they throw a car, a washer-dryer, and a goat onstage and ask you to select forthrightly among them. Where’s the drama in that? Where’s the suspense? The only possible surprise would be the one-in-a-million person who picks the goat, on the grounds that he doesn’t drive and already has a serviceable washer-dryer.

If Tally ever had three wishes, she expended them long ago, on the most mundane things. Everyone has wishes-and everyone squanders them. The fairy tales got that right. Magic exists only to screw with you. Eggs, for example. She wished for eggs not five minutes ago, and while most people think a wish should produce the desired thing at that instant, in a puff of smoke, who’s to say that her wish isn’t being granted as she drives to the store, money in her purse? Somewhere on the planet, in this very city perhaps, a person is wishing for eggs right now and can’t have them. So Tally wishes for Paris and somewhere else right now-in Logan Airport, the airport of her youth-a beautiful young woman is waiting to board an Air France flight, a rucksack at her feet, her future wider and broader than the ocean she’s about to cross. Whatever you want at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for. In the time it takes her to work this out, Tally has driven the mile to the store, parked, gone in, and grabbed a carton of eggs, checking the expiration date. She can’t begin to list all the stale, expired, past-their-sell-date items she has brought home from this store.

And now she is waiting in an interminable line because the store is, of course, perpetually understaffed. She tries to hold on to the serene, wise persona she discovered in the car, focusing on the back of the head in front of her. Be in the moment. Breathe. Live. That’s the secret to happiness. Notice the pink-and-blue flowery scarf, over pink curlers, which are twisted around pinky-red hair, the material of the scarf thin enough so one can see how sparse and dull the hair is. Sad. Ugliness is sad.

The woman turns, as if she knows she’s being judged.

“Oh.” Tally tries to cover the rudeness of her shock, tries to make the exhalation sound more what-a-pleasant-surprise than fuck-you-look-awful . “Hi, Doris.”

“Hello, Tally.” Doris Halloran holds up her box of Hamburger Helper, as if Tally is a higher authority to whom she must report her nutritional decisions. “It’s what they want.”

“Gwen loves it, too. I guess I’m meaner than you because I never let her have it.”

“That girl gets prettier every day.”

Tally wants to say thank you, except she doesn’t feel as if her daughter has been complimented. Doris’s tone is almost accusing, as if Gwen has achieved her prettiness by guile. Custom dictates that Tally should respond with a kind comment about Doris’s children, but she is stumped. She never sees the boys anymore, come to think of it. When did they stop coming around? Mickey, too, no longer visits. The candy drawer hasn’t needed to be replenished in some time. Let’s see-Tim, the lummox as Clem calls him, is probably the same stupid frat-boy-in-training he always was. Go-Go can’t be any worse than he’s been, although there are rumors linking him to the cats that have been found suffocated in the neighborhood’s old insulated milk boxes. Sean, the best of the lot, is a natural-born politician. Tally doesn’t consider that a compliment, but Doris might.

“That Sean,” she says. “He’s a charmer. All your boys have”-grasp, grasp, grasp-“such distinctive personalities.”

Tally wonders if Doris is as curious as Tally is about who broke up with whom, if Doris doubts Sean’s version of events the way Tally doubts Gwen’s. Something happened. Her hunch is that Gwen traded up, realized there was greater cachet in a Gilman boy or a football hero.

Tally wonders if she doubts her daughter because she is aware of her own proclivity for lying. Fudging, as she prefers to think of it. Or maybe nudging- easing a complicated truth toward something simpler, more comprehensible. Tally never lies for advantage or gain. Her lies are no different from, say, a fresh coat of paint or wallpaper in an old house. Something pretty over something unsightly. There’s never been a home that didn’t eventually require updating or renovation. A life is the same way. You live inside it for a long, long time if you’re lucky. Things fray, break, go out of fashion. There’s no shame in bringing a life up-to-date.

She buys her eggs, wishing the store stocked fresh herbs, but one would be hard-pressed to find so much as a jar of dried oregano here. She should have her own herb garden, but the property is too shady to grow anything but ferns and a few complacent flowers. Why hadn’t Clem seen that flaw in his dream lot? It’s formidably dark, with trees to the east, west, and south. The northern light is good for a painter-or would have been, if Clem had been thoughtful enough to include a studio for Tally. She paints in a prefab toolshed bought at Sears, which means choosing between freezing or running a space heater in the winter, a dangerous option around her oil paints and turpentine. I didn’t think you were that serious about painting, Clem said when she asked for her little cabin last year. He was sad; Clem hates to disappoint Tally. Clem, to his credit, did not bring up all the other things tried and abandoned. Throwing her own pots. The novel, which never got far enough along to have a title, other than The Novel . Macrame. Candle making. Jewelry making. Okay, so he was entitled to be dubious, especially given her decision to keep her latest project under wraps, refusing to let anyone see it until she’s finished. But she is finding-what does a painter find? Writers discover their voices. Tally guesses she’s on the verge of achieving her vision of things.

In the parking lot, she notices that Doris Halloran is still sitting in her car, hands gripping the wheel, yet she hasn’t turned on the engine. Poor thing. Although she looks at least ten years older than Tally, she is actually younger, younger even than Tally’s real age, about which she is always a little vague.

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