Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  She had tried to talk to Tommy about the new house, but it had been useless. When he was home the children were there, and when the children were asleep Connie had usually fallen asleep, too, her eyes running wild beneath their translucent lids in the fitful sleep of the exhausted.

  Celeste had always told her that she had gotten out of her own marriage just in time, even though it had lasted only a year; she had gotten out when they were still talking to one another, even though most of the talking was yelling. It had taken Connie a while to understand what her cousin meant, but now she thought she did. Occasionally in the car she would look over and see another couple in the next lane, sharing the front seat, both of them staring through the windshield, looking straight ahead, saying nothing. Until recently she had not noticed that she and Tommy were doing the same.

  It was not that she did not love him. It was just that she felt as if they were in separate cars, metal and glass surrounding them, oblivious to each other’s sounds. She assumed they had the same destination, but it seemed futile now even to ask. So much had been left unspoken in their marriage, and now they were speechless. She thought that if they moved to the house her father-in-law had bought, they would never hear each other speak again.

  She reached out to touch her curtains. “I’m staying here,” she said, as though saying it aloud would make it so, and she felt a surge of rage so great that it seemed ready to cripple her. “Goddamnit,” she said softly, and then she repeated it, louder. “Goddamnit. I am staying here. I don’t care where the rest of them go. I am staying here.” Tears began to run down her face, the hot tears of rage. She pictured her husband, her children, the chairs and beds and sheets and towels, carted off to the big new house, and she there, alone, in the empty rooms. It was better than imagining herself in those other rooms, none of them smaller than twenty by fifteen, held hostage by John Scanlan.

  After a few minutes Joey Martinelli emerged from the trailer and began to walk across the fields. The workmen stared at his back, and fell silent. Even if she had not seen the coffee mug hanging by its handle on his index finger, Connie would have known he was coming to her house. As he got closer he looked up and smiled at her.

  “You didn’t have to bring it back right away,” Connie said, opening the back screen door and standing aside to let him in.

  “I figured you might want it,” he said, holding out the mug. “I know you girls. My mother has a row of little hooks inside the cabinets to hang the cups. If one hook is empty, it drives her crazy.”

  Connie wished her life was that orderly. She could not remember the last time she had bothered to hang the coffee mugs from the little hooks inside her cabinets. “I always liked your mother,” Connie said. “She used to bring cake at Christmas.”

  “She still brings it to your father,” Joey said. “She’s convinced he’s starving to death. She used to bring him over little things, gravy, chicken, whatever. One of her girlfriends passed some remark about how she was trying to catch another husband, so she stopped doing it. She says your girl takes care of him anyway.”

  “Maria Goretti.”

  “The skinny kid, right? With all the hair? She looks something like you but not too much.”

  “I don’t know who they look like,” Connie said. “Come on in and have a roll.”

  “I just ate,” he said, “but I’ll take some more coffee.”

  He sat down at the Formica table and Connie was sorry to see that it still had rings on it from breakfast. She poured coffee into the mug he had returned and put a doughnut on the plate.

  “Your husband is in construction?” Joe said.

  “Tommy,” said Connie. “He runs a company called First Concrete.”

  “With the striped trucks. They’re pretty good. Expensive. His old man owns it.”

  “I didn’t know everybody knew that,” Connie said, sitting down opposite him.

  “His old man owns everything,” said Joe, wrapping his hands around his coffee cup, and when he saw her face, he added, “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right,” Connie said. “Tommy’s sort of the black sheep. You know. Because of me.”

  “No, really?” said Joe, who knew that this was true because everyone in his mother’s neighborhood said so. He flexed his fingers and studied them as he added, “He got the prize. I know some of the other wives, from dances and stuff. Real Irish girls. Freckles, piano legs, no chest. He got the prize.”

  Connie felt the flush begin on her throat. Her lips buzzed with the blood inside them. Finally Joey looked right at her and added, “You were always so pretty,” as though he dared her to contradict him.

  “Your brother Jimmy have kids?” Connie finally said, when her breath came back.

  “Three,” said Joe, and as if on cue Joseph toddled in from the dining room. “Bear,” he shouted, holding his tattered brown bear aloft.

  “Thanks,” Joe said, reaching for the toy, but the baby pulled it back. “No, no,” he said, and Connie lifted him up and kissed his head. “Bear is his security blanket,” she said. “He can’t go anywhere without Bear. Are you ready for a nap, JoJo?” she added.

  “No,” Joseph said.

  “I gotta go anyhow,” Joey Martinelli said, standing and putting his cup in the sink. “When am I going to teach you to drive?”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Connie said. “I wouldn’t have told you I didn’t know how if I knew you were going to think you had to give me driving lessons.”

  “No, really, it’ll be fun. I taught my brother. I taught my cousins. We’ll find a parking lot somewhere and you can drive around in circles. I don’t know, we might have to find you a phone book to sit on, but I can have you driving in a couple of weeks if you want.”

  Connie was surprised at herself as she said, “Okay, if you don’t mind. I’d really like to get out more. Just do my own shopping, take the kids places, go and see my cousin.”

  “So tomorrow at four I’ll come and we can start. We’ll put the baby in the back seat. Deal?”

  Connie smiled. “Deal.” He stuck out his hand and they shook, the little boy between them. It was an oddly comforting gesture. “Jeez,” he said, looking down, “you have the littlest hands of any girl I ever knew.” He opened his big fist and there it was, lying on his palm as though, Connie thought, it was displayed on a pillow. She pulled her hand away and thrust it deep into the pocket of her shorts.

  “Tomorrow,” Joey said, as he let himself out the back door.

  When he was gone Connie hung all the coffee cups on their hooks in the cabinet, and then took Joseph upstairs for his nap. In the upstairs hallway she stood on tiptoe to look at herself in the mirror. All the mirrors were hung at Tommy’s height, so that the bottom half of her own face, her mouth and chin, were always invisible. She thought perhaps she should get her hair cut. “I’m staying right here,” she said to herself, only half aloud, and wondered as she went downstairs what it would be like to know how to drive, to go wherever you wanted to go whenever you wanted to go there.

  7

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING MAGGIE WAS sitting on the front steps when her aunt Celeste arrived. Damien had collected cicadas in a shoe box, surrounding them with tiny tufts of grass and a collection of sticks, and now he wanted to name them. Once he had used up Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Mickey, Donald and Pluto, he had come to Maggie for help. The two of them argued; she suggested some girls’ names and Damien was sure that all cicadas were boys. When Celeste pulled up in front of the house in her red car, the one with the pleated silver fins, Damien appealed to her for support. She took one look at the bugs, their iridescent backs gleaming in the sun, their squat bullet bodies motionless amid the grass and sticks, and said, “Those are male animals.” Then she opened the screen door and let herself in. Maggie left Damien talking to the bugs and went inside.

  Celeste was not really Maggie’s aunt, but her mother’s first cousin and closest friend; the two women had been like sisters growing up, the only sister Conni
e was likely to get, the closest person to her as she grew older. Celeste came once a week in the summer, when business was slow. She brought a shopping bag filled with clothes and costume jewelry for her cousin Connie (“poor Connie,” she always said with a sigh) and play makeup for Maggie, which Connie took away and hid on the top shelf of her closet, between the douche bag and the copy of Tropic of Cancer. “This is the new you,” Celeste would announce, pulling Capri pants and a blouse with low ruffled shoulders out of the bag. Then she would force Connie to put on the clothes and a pair of hoop earrings and walk around the living room until they both would laugh so hard Celeste would cry, “I’m going to pee myself,” and run off to the bathroom, little rivulets of mascara running into the lines around her eyes. Maggie never saw her mother wear the clothes Celeste brought after the first time she tried them on; they stayed in her bottom drawer, smelling of sizing. They were not Scanlan clothes.

  “What do you think, Mag?” Connie said, twirling around on her tiny feet, forgetting herself.

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said glumly, which was half the truth, the other half being that Connie looked lovely in an odd, eccentric way, like a Gypsy princess.

  “Oh, don’t be such an old woman,” her mother said. “Ce, come here. Your goddaughter disapproves of me.”

  “Oh my God,” Celeste said, smoothing down her skirt as she returned from the bathroom. “My poor bladder. You girls.”

  Celeste was the only person Maggie knew who was divorced. She had gotten married the year before Connie and Tommy, to a school friend of Tommy’s named Charlie Black, who drank. It wasn’t the drinking that had made her finally leave, although that was a convenient excuse; it wasn’t even the fact that all Celeste’s Max Factor pancake could not conceal her bruises on Sunday mornings at Mass. Maggie had heard her once tell Connie that what got to her was the basic boredom of it all, the sameness of sitting around every evening watching Charlie drink beer in his leatherette recliner, his hair flopping over his forehead, his T-shirt yellow beneath the armpits: Every morning Celeste would clean her house, do her laundry, start dinner, talk to her mother on the telephone, walk the poodle, take off her nail polish, put on a different color, watch her little stories on television, and be finished and bored to tears by three in the afternoon. She knew she should have figured this out beforehand; when she thought about it, she had told Connie, she realized that the beginning of life was one great event after another, your first bra and first date and first kiss, your proms and dances and finally your wedding, and then suddenly there was nothing to do for the rest of your life. In the beginning she always went to see Connie in the afternoon, particularly when Connie and Tommy were living in Celeste’s mother’s house, in Celeste’s old room. But after the baby was born Connie was too busy to talk.

  Six months after Maggie arrived, Celeste got on the train one day, without a clue as to where she was going, and got off at Times Square. She entered four office buildings, filled out four job applications, and was hired immediately as a secretary. When she got home and told Charlie, he knocked out her right front incisor and threw the poodle out the second-story window. Without a word (she told Connie she couldn’t really talk because of the tooth) she packed her vanity case and went home to her old room. Tommy and Connie had moved the month before to Westchester.

  Celeste still lived at home, in a kind of extended adolescence in which she spent all her salary on clothes and makeup and spent a lot of time criticizing her mother’s cooking. Like Connie, she was a showy combination of black and white, dark hair and white skin, but she was big and getting bigger, a big hefty woman with a big shelf of a bust. When she walked through the garment district to her current job as executive secretary to the president of a blouse company, the Puerto Rican boys who pushed the racks of clothes from building to building would smack their lips and call her “Mama.” She pretended not to notice, but she really didn’t mind.

  “So I think I’m getting married again,” Celeste said, settling back in a chair with a cup of coffee.

  “Uh huh,” Connie said. “Tell me another.”

  “Honest to God,” she said, staring down at the large pear-shaped diamond, yellow as an egg yolk, which she now wore on her right hand and which was the only memento of her last engagement. Maggie had heard one of her Scanlan aunts say that Celeste had the largest collection of yellow diamonds in the world, and when Maggie asked her mother if this was true, Connie only said “That bitch” and slammed out of the room.

  “Why do you want to get married? You have everything. You make a good living, have a nice house, privacy, freedom. You’ve got everything you had in high school except you’re old enough to enjoy it. Besides, you hated being married.”

  “I don’t have kids.”

  “Kids,” said Connie. “You’re a kid. Besides, it would kill your mother. Can you imagine your mother if you had to be married by a judge or something? Or a rabbi? She’d have a stroke.”

  Celeste’s current boyfriend was a Jew. All of her boyfriends since her divorce had been Jewish. She said it was a well-known fact that Jews did not hit women.

  “I know a nice Italian guy I could fix you up with.”

  “You? Who? Get out.”

  “Really. Remember Jimmy Martinelli that I used to date? Remember—you were in class with his cousin Anna Maria?”

  “The one with the glasses? And the nose?”

  “Well, his brother Joseph is working on this construction they’re doing here, on the development—”

  “Oh Jesus, Con,” Celeste said, lighting a cigarette. “My mother is always trying to fix me up with that guy. He’s never been married, right? So what’s wrong with him? He’s like me—can’t live with them, can’t live without them.”

  “I think he’s shy,” Connie said, reaching over and taking Celeste’s cigarette and using it to light her own, a gesture Maggie thought was the height of sophistication. She leaned forward to watch her mother pull in on the cigarette, her cheeks filling and deflating like those of a little animal. Connie looked up and saw Maggie staring at her. “Aren’t you going swimming?” she said.

  “I guess,” said Maggie.

  “Well, have a good time.”

  Maggie did not move.

  “Vamoose, kid,” said Celeste. “I hope you like your lip pomade.” She put her cheek out for a continental kiss. “You smell good,” Maggie said. “Tabu,” said Celeste. “That’s what Monica wears,” Maggie said. “Shit,” answered her aunt. “Celeste!” said Connie.

  Maggie went upstairs to get her bathing suit and towel. Her face still smelled like perfume on one side; whenever she turned her head she got a whiff of it, making her feel grown-up and a little bad.

  Her room was the nicest one in the house. It had gingham curtains at the window and a gingham spread on the canopy bed, a bulletin board over the desk, and a little dressing table with a gingham skirt. It was like a magazine photograph of a little girl’s room; in fact her mother had painstakingly copied it out of a magazine when Maggie was still young enough to be sleeping in a crib. On the floor next to her bed was an old yellow-and-brown striped suitcase filled with the clothes she was taking to the beach. In the middle of July each summer, Mary Frances took all her female grandchildren of a certain age to a seaside town called South Beach. She thought of this as a great excursion they would remember the rest of their lives. Maggie thought of it as sharing a bedroom with Monica for a week. She remembered that there had been times when she was very young when the trip had actually been fun—the restaurant meals, the hotel sheets smelling of starch, the long days jumping breakers on the beach. Now all she could think of was Monica looking her up and down with that smile.

  She heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and started to close her door when she saw it was Celeste. Her aunt was carrying a brown bag and grinning. She slipped inside and closed the door. “Santa Claus is coming to town,” she said, picking a piece of tobacco from her smile with the end of one long fingernail. She reached ins
ide the bag and pulled out a jumble of green-and-orange print fabric and spread it on the bed. It was a two-piece bathing suit, the top strapless, with small arcs of bone inside so that it looked as if there was a bust in it, even lying there on the bed. Celeste turned the bottom over. The back was covered with row upon row of tiny ruffles. It was the showiest bathing suit Maggie had ever seen, and she could tell by looking at it that it was just her size.

  Celeste suddenly seemed embarrassed by her own audacity. She winked at Maggie. “Can’t go to the beach looking like Shirley Temple when you’re really Lana Turner,” she said, while Maggie tried to remember which one Lana Turner was. She looked down at the suitcase open on the floor. “That’s the bag your mother took on her honeymoon,” Celeste said. “I remember because I filled it with rice. God, she just about killed me. She told me she pulled out her peignoir that first night and the place looked like a Chinese restaurant.” Celeste’s eyes grew thoughtful. “Anyhow, wear this in good health, kiddo. I’m not sure it’s the kind of suit you want to do the breaststroke in. For one thing, you might lose the top. But I can guarantee that everybody will look twice at it.” She kissed Maggie on the cheek and moved to the door, crumpling the bag as she went. “Go easy on your old mom,” she said. “She’s having a tough time these days.”