Esther coughed. “She’s out for a swim. With Stuart.”
“All she ever does is swim.”
Esther walked over to the dressing table and repositioned Fannie’s hairbrushes and face cream, her back to Fannie, until the arrangement was to her liking. Florence must have already told Esther her side of the story, must have already won her allegiance. It was so obvious. Fannie’s mother could barely make eye contact with her.
“All I suggested was that she postpone the trip, not cancel it. I would have thought she’d want to be close by.”
“Of course she would. Does.”
Esther began refolding an already folded blanket at the foot of the bed, neatening the corners and tightening the lines. Sometimes Fannie found her mother exhausting to be around. Esther was always busy, always moving. Both her house on Atlantic Avenue and the apartment above the bakery were neat as pins. She was a talented cook and an accomplished seamstress, too particular to hire help even after she and Joseph reached the point where they could finally afford it. Fannie didn’t think she’d ever seen her mother pick up a magazine.
On Fannie’s best days, she didn’t accomplish half as much as her mother did. Fannie served Isaac and Gussie overcooked meat and mushy vegetables and could barely keep up with the dusting, let alone the laundry. In the evenings, when Isaac asked her how she’d spent her day, Fannie wanted to be able to rattle off a list of errands and other household achievements, but the truth was that entire afternoons passed in which she couldn’t move from the sofa. Fannie so frequently felt overwhelmed—by what, exactly, she didn’t know—that she had begun to wonder if she was even related to the girl she’d been before she married.
“Apparently, Florence doesn’t want anything to do with me—or the baby,” Fannie told Esther.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Well, I don’t understand why she’d choose to leave for France in July, knowing I’m due in August.”
“Your sister loves you. She adores Gussie,” said her mother, then she paused before adding, “and she’ll adore this baby, too.”
Without meaning to, Fannie began to cry. She cried so often these days, it was sometimes difficult to isolate the trigger.
“Fannie, dear.”
“I don’t know what’s come over me. I think it’s just being tucked away in the hospital like this. I know I’m missing all the fun out there,” she said, waving at the window and all that the outside world contained.
Esther walked over to the bed, sat down heavily, and wrapped her arms around Fannie. She spoke softly into her daughter’s hair, “You’re missing nothing that won’t wait.”
By the time Esther left the hospital, the sun was beginning to go down. Out Fannie’s window, beachgoers were heading home to their dinners, and in another few hours, the Boardwalk would come alive with revelers. Fannie let out a long sigh, knowing it would be at least the next afternoon—if not longer—before she saw Isaac or anyone else for that matter.
On one hand, her hospital stay was a nice reprieve from domestic life. Fannie hadn’t cooked or cleaned or shopped in more than two weeks. She’d read three books, all of them titles she’d been meaning to read since the previous summer.
On the other hand, Fannie didn’t feel as if she were in control of her own life. The hospital staff poked and prodded her without approval or apology, she ate when her tray was brought in, and she saw her family and friends when they saw fit to visit. Then there was the biggest anxiety of all—that this hospital stay would do nothing to prevent another early labor.
Fannie strummed her fingers against her stomach. She might feel helpless but there was one thing she could do right now. She could settle this business with Florence.
Fannie’s relationship with her sister had never been easy, not with seven years separating them. She had worked hard to be a good big sister but it often felt, to Fannie at least, as if she and Florence had had almost entirely separate childhoods. By the time Florence entered grade school, Fannie was through with it. By the time Florence was chasing the Pageant Cup, Fannie had quit swimming competitively. And by the time Florence had catapulted herself to Wellesley, Fannie felt even further away from her sister than the three hundred miles between them. She imagined how dull the details of her life must sound when Florence read her increasingly infrequent letters.
It wasn’t just that Florence and Fannie were far apart in age. It was also that, by the accident of birth order, they had received two very different sets of parents. In 1907, when Fannie was born, Joseph and Esther had been busy trying to get Adler’s Bakery off the ground. Joseph was always at the store, and since he could scarcely afford to pay himself a salary, let alone pay for staff, Esther was frequently behind the counter. Fannie spent her early years in the kitchen of Adler’s, trying her best to stay out of the way of hot pans and scurrying feet. When Joseph began to hire bakers and bakers’ assistants, one of their unacknowledged job duties was to keep his only child entertained. They’d give Fannie a small ball of dough and a rolling pin and put her to work.
Florence found a very different scene when she arrived in 1914. Esther was overjoyed at her arrival, having long given up the idea that she might conceive another child. The bakery was doing well, and with the exception of the year Joseph fought with the Allies on the Western Front, he encouraged Esther to remove herself to their upstairs apartment, where she could properly enjoy her daughter’s infancy.
