Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  “Why?” said Maggie, holding the suit against her chest.

  “One thing and another.”

  “Grandpop says she has to get on board,” Maggie said.

  “Sometimes I wish somebody would squish your grandfather like one of those bugs your brother’s got outside,” Celeste said. “He thinks he can run everybody’s life.”

  “He does run everybody’s life,” Maggie said.

  “I’d like to see him try that shit with me,” Celeste said. “Do me a favor—don’t tell your mother I said shit, don’t tell her we had this discussion, and don’t listen to everything your grandfather says.” Celeste licked her finger and patted down one of her spit curls. “I’ll leave you alone so you can try that thing on.”

  When she was gone Maggie closed the door again and slipped out of her shorts and shirt. With her back to the mirror she put on the bathing suit, tugging the top into place, exhaling exaggeratedly to find out if it would stay up without effort. Finally she turned toward the mirror. The suit was a perfect fit. The green turned her eyes the color of lime LifeSavers; the ruffles made her look as if she had hips, and the bones in the bodice made her look as if she had a bust. She looked down. If she was careful, no one would be able to tell that there were two inches of open space between the top and her own chest. She held her arms out and twirled in front of the mirror.

  Downstairs she heard Damien calling, “Maggie.” She ran to the door and threw her back against it. “Go away, Dame,” she called, and after a minute she could hear the staccato sound of his sneakers running outside. She went back to the mirror and put her hands on her hips.

  From below her bedroom window she heard voices, and looking out she saw her mother standing in the grass, her arms crossed on her chest. She seemed very small, and Maggie felt as if she were looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. She realized that these days she was always seeing her mother from a distance, as if in pictures—framed in a window, frozen in some pose, her face revealed in some essential way. Just yesterday she had come silently into the dining room on bare feet and seen Connie through the door leading to the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, flushed and radiant. Maggie had suddenly thought that her mother looked beautiful, young, more wondrous than Helen Malone. For a moment she had been stunned by her mother’s likeness to someone she could not quite place. And then she had realized that the resemblance was to the picture on her grandfather Mazza’s bureau, in the gold frame next to the clothed statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, the picture of Concetta Mazza at her high school graduation, with black fabric draped round her bare shoulders and a self-conscious happy look on her face, walking in beauty like the night.

  Then Maggie had moved, and her mother had moved, and the moment had been over. That was when she saw the man in the kitchen.

  “Here’s the big girl,” he had said, in a false voice. “I’m Mr. Martinelli. I know your grandfather.”

  “Which one?” Maggie had said, as she sat down at the table and pushed away the coffee cups.

  “The Italian one,” he said in Italian, and Connie turned and said in the same language, “She can’t speak it. You know, they forget. She never hears it.” Maggie understood most of what they were saying, but she just sat with her head down, her hair falling around her face.

  “I’m going to teach your mother to drive,” the man said in the same false voice, smiling at Maggie again, his fingers tapping on a key lying near the edge of the kitchen table.

  “Why?” Maggie longed to grab hold of his eyebrows and pull, and reddened at the thought.

  “Why not?” Connie said, and Maggie shrugged. She knew that she had cast a pall over the kitchen, but she did not care. “Aren’t you finished work?” Maggie said to Mr. Martinelli, suddenly aware that it was quiet out back as Connie began gathering up the dishes.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “But I’ll see you again.”

  “I’m going to the beach next week,” said Maggie defiantly, but when she looked up and saw his face she realized he had been talking to her mother.

  “Is he the one you went to the dance with?” Maggie said after he had gone out the back door, and Connie turned and asked “Who told you about that?”

  “Celeste.”

  “Aunt Celeste. No, it was his brother. Joe was too old. Four years older than me.”

  “He’s really old,” said Maggie.

  Her mother made a sound like a snort and continued to wash the cups. Joseph shrieked from the playpen on the patio and Maggie went outside to see him. “JoJo, JoJo,” she crooned, and the baby grabbed her long hair and stuck it into his mouth. She carried him in on her hip. “He’s hungry,” she said, putting him in his high chair, and then she saw that her mother was being sick in the sink, and she stood and stared and then got a banana and began to mash it in a bowl for the baby. After Connie had wiped her mouth and taken a drink, Maggie said, “Does Daddy know?”

  Connie’s eyes looked enormous. “What?” she said.

  “That you’re going to learn to drive.”

  “Oh. That. No, I think I’ll make it a surprise.”

  Maggie had looked up from feeding Joseph. “It’ll be a surprise, all right,” she had said. “When are we moving?”

  “What?”

  “When are we moving into the new house?”

  “We’re not moving. This is our house.” Connie’s face was very pale and there were gray circles beneath her eyes. “I don’t know where you got the idea that we’re moving.”

  “Grandpop bought us a bigger house. He gave you keys and everything. He says it has a basketball hoop and a little room over the garage I can have for myself.”

  Connie dried her hands on a dishtowel. “Whose side are you on?”

  Maggie felt she was going to be sick, too, and wondered if it was just the sharp vinegar smell lingering in the kitchen. “I didn’t know there were sides,” she said.

  “Never mind,” Connie said. “I shouldn’t have said that. We’re not moving.”

  “Are you sure?” Maggie said.

  “We are not moving,” said Connie in a trembling voice, and Maggie had taken Joseph out of his chair and back to the patio.

  Out on the patio now, Celeste stepped into the sun, a Pall Mall glowing white against the blood red of her lacquered nails. She followed Connie onto the lawn, off balance because the heels of her shoes had sunk into the dirt. They had their backs to her, but Maggie could hear snatches of what they were saying. Celeste threw back her head and, her mouth working like a fish out of water, blew a chain of smoke rings into the still air. Suddenly she turned to Connie and said loudly, “We’ve all gotta grow up sometime, Con.”

  “So when is it your turn?”

  “I’m as grown as I’m gonna get. Here’s the God’s truth—you’re more of a kid than I am, never mind the husband and the four kids and the house. You need to start acting like the mother of a growing girl, not just living in a dream world.”

  “I was never a kid, Cece. How come I was never a kid? It’s not fair.”

  “You’re right,” Celeste said. “But you got no choice now, sweetheart. You gotta hold this family together.”

  “I thought the man held the family together.”

  Celeste blew more smoke rings. “There’s only one thing men hold, and that’s when they got to go to the bathroom. All right, sorry,” Celeste added, seeing her cousin’s face. “But sometimes I think you watch too many movies. Your daughter needs you now.”

  “She doesn’t like me, Ce.”

  “Get out,” Celeste said, dropping her cigarette into the grass and rubbing it out with the pointed toe of her shoe. “What’s to like? You’re her mother. Did you like your mother? Do I like my mother? You need to show her things. Remember how old Rose slapped me when I first got the curse? Boom! ‘It’s an old Italian custom,’ she says. I should have thanked her for preparing me for Charlie.”

  Connie did not answer. She had her arms wrapped around herself as though she
was holding her body together. Maggie could see the construction crew on their lunch break; the two women gave them a little wave, and the men waved back. Maggie moved away from the screen, afraid someone would see her. Celeste put her arm around Connie’s shoulder, and they stood that way for what seemed like a long time: Celeste holding Connie, Connie’s head of black curls on her shoulder, Maggie holding back the sheer white curtains beneath the pink gingham ones. Then one of the men yelled “Back to the grind!” and the women turned and went indoors. Maggie saw that her mother’s face was wet and her long nose a little shiny, and she heard her say softly, her voice breaking, “They’re gonna win, Cece. I can feel it. Ten years from now I’ll be living in one of their houses, sitting on their furniture, wearing their clothes, and my kids will be their kids. She’s already one of them.”

  “Don’t overreact, sweetheart,” Celeste said. “You got the ace in the hole. If your husband has to chose between you and them, he’d choose you every time. He already did it when it mattered.”

  “And what if my daughter has to choose between me and them, Cece? It’s not as simple as Cinderella anymore.”

  “Hey, honey,” Celeste said. “This isn’t like you. You having your friend, or what? The curse upon you? You and me, we always were on the same schedule.”

  Maggie heard her mother laugh, high and a little shaky, and saw Celeste smooth her hair.

  “I wish,” Connie said, with an odd shrillness in her voice.

  “Oh, shit,” Celeste said, stopping and looking down at her cousin. “Not again. Can’t you count?” Maggie wondered what they were talking about, and as she looked down at her mother her eyes began to brim with tears, for no reason she could figure out except that her mother was crying, too.

  8

  ON THE FOURTH DAY OF THEIR ANNUAL trip to the beach, the Scanlan women had their photograph taken at Cap’n Jim’s restaurant. Maggie knew that as surely as her grandmother would disapprove of her bathing suit, and her cousin Teresa would get sunburned so badly she would smell like Noxzema for a month, on the fourth day they would have their picture taken to testify that they were having a wonderful time and were part of a supremely happy family.

  While the photographer set up his tripod, Maggie looked around to see what he would see: Monica laughing, her hair shining in the lights; Teresa, who was the same age as Maggie, her eyes pale blue as eucalyptus mints, her face a little vacant; and the twins, a matching patina of pale pink over their faces and arms, staring down self-consciously at their shrimp cocktails. Mary Frances had gone to the ladies’ room to freshen her lipstick, which had come off on the rim of her whiskey-sour glass. The picture would cost five dollars, and when it was sent to her at home, Mary Frances would put it in the silver frame that held last year’s picture. Maggie had taken the velvet back off that frame one day, and had found seven photographs of the group, starting back when she was six years old, her lips drawn down in an awkward smile to hide the fact that her two front teeth were missing. Monica was eleven in that first picture, and looked, Maggie had been sad to see, much as she looked today, except that there had been the glint of her braces. On Monica, even braces looked good, as if she had jewelry on her teeth.

  “Congratulations, Maggie,” Monica said now, readjusting the bow holding back her hair. “My father says that your mother is going to have another baby.” Monica made the word “another” last a long, long time.

  “So what?” Maggie said.

  “Really? When? Ooooh,” said Teresa, picking up the last shrimp with her stubby freckled fingers. “I hope it’s a girl this time.”

  They were eating by a plate-glass window in the restaurant. It was actually a refurbished tugboat, big and square, with graceless utilitarian lines, which picked diners up at 6:00 and 8:30 from a pier on the bay side of the town of South Beach and sailed along the shore while they ate. Mary Frances took the girls to dinner at Cap’n Jim’s each year because she assumed they liked the novelty of it, and each year they mimed excitement and delight, convinced that it was Mary Frances’s favorite restaurant. In fact after years of Friday night meatless suppers, Mary Frances hated fish, and she had no stomach for the sea; she usually ate little and drank a good deal. Maggie was like her in this; she usually drank so much soda during these meals that she had to go to the bathroom at least twice, each time thinking of what happened after she flushed the toilet this far from land.

  “What are you girls giggling about?” Mary Frances said pleasantly as she came back to the table, although the only one giggling was Teresa. Mary Frances sat down in the middle, between Monica and Maggie, and the photographer fiddled with some dials on his camera. “What a handsome group,” he said, and Mary Frances smiled, and the shutter clicked. “All sisters, I presume,” he said, and Mary Frances laughed, and the shutter clicked again. It was the same photographer as always, wearing a captain’s hat and smoking a cigar. He said the same things every year.

  They had spent the day on the beach, where the sound of the sea and the strength of the sun had lulled them all into afternoon naps, even Mary Frances in her rented beach chair. Her magazine would fall open on her lap, her mouth would goggle a bit, and she would doze, waking suddenly, embarrassed, to say, “My, but it’s warm.” Mary Frances was not entirely comfortable with her granddaughters—she had been the youngest of nine children, and was accustomed to being the baby herself—and she did her best to hide it by playing the role of grandmother the way she expected Billie Burke or Spring Byington would. She affected a sort of breezy elegance, which usually consisted of wide eyes, a half-smile, and the phrase “Well, girls?” all accompanied with a slight sideways tilt of the head. Maggie had once seen a movie starring Greer Garson and had become indignant at the way Greer Garson had imitated her grandmother. It was only in the last year or so that she had realized that Mary Frances herself was doing the imitating.

  On the beach, Maggie had listened to the radio and lain on her back on a towel. The air was white with unalloyed sunlight, and her lips tasted like salt from the sea, and from her own sweat. Around her were girls sparkling with baby oil, their hands always busy with their hair, their eyes moving back and forth along the horizon for some boy or another, their nipped-in waists the perfect counterpoint to their bosoms and their hips.

  And then there were the littler girls, the ones Maggie had been like the summer before, shrill and jumpy, smelling of Coppertone, wet white T-shirts over their cotton suits to keep them from burning, their plastic buckets beside them on their blankets. And the middle-sized ones, like her cousin Teresa, still digging for sand crabs at the water’s edge, still wearing her shapeless nylon tank suit, although she had to slump to keep her nipples from poking its navy-blue surface. Maggie felt as if she belonged nowhere, and to none of them. “Roll over, roll over,” the deejay sang every hour, parroting the children’s song to warn his listeners to tan evenly, but Maggie stayed on her back, afraid that if she lay on her stomach she would dent the top part of her bathing suit.

  Monica was sitting under an umbrella; she tanned only an hour a day because she had read in Seventeen that too much sun gave you wrinkles. Occasionally she got up to stroll down the beach, her pink eyelet suit hugging her body, and Maggie would watch her stop at the lifeguard stand and talk to the two young men who sat there, their zinc-oxided noses two white flags on the horizon. Other boys would stop by, and Monica would swivel from one to another. Finally she came back to lie under the umbrella.

  In midafternoon, when Maggie was falling asleep, the voice on the radio said, “I’ve got a special request here from the guys in the sophomore sports club at Fordham. This one goes out to the beautiful, the untouchable, the incredible Helen. No last names, please.” Then he played a song Maggie had never heard before, by Johnny Mathis, whose voice kept breaking on the high notes. When Maggie looked up at her cousin, Monica was staring out to sea, her eyes narrowed. “Untouchable my ass,” she muttered.

  “What, dear?” Mary Frances said pleasantly.

&n
bsp; “Nothing, Grandmom,” said Monica, and she got slowly to her feet and walked back to the lifeguard stand.

  When Monica was gone, Maggie gingerly turned over onto her stomach. She lay flat for a minute, the sand shifting slightly beneath her cheek, and then she propped herself up on her elbows and looked down. Sure enough, her convex top was now concave.

  “Oooh,” she moaned.

  “What, dear?”

  “Nothing, Grandmom,” Maggie said, pushing out the cups with her finger.

  “I love your bathing suit, Maggie,” Teresa said with a giggle. “You look like a cancan dancer.”

  “Watch your mouth, dear,” said Mary Frances.

  When they were not at the beach, they strolled along the boardwalk, played miniature golf while Mary Frances watched, ate surf and turf at restaurants with imitation fishnets on the walls. Mary Frances told the same stories every year, and over the years Maggie had begun to think there was something sad about them, as though what Mary Frances didn’t discuss was somehow different and darker than these pat anecdotes.

  Maggie knew very little about her grandmother’s past life, except that Mary Frances still mourned Elizabeth Ann, the baby who had died, and Maggie sometimes wondered whether being surrounded by her granddaughters reminded her of her loss. Her aunt Margaret had told Maggie that Mary Frances herself had been born two months after her father had died of tuberculosis and that when she was little she had thought her name was “posthumous child” because so many people called her that. Inevitably the children Mary Frances felt most drawn to were the vulnerable ones. Maggie knew that her grandmother was fondest of Tommy, and she tried not to think about what that meant, for her father and for her. Maggie knew that her grandmother loved her, too, although the rest of the family thought of Maggie as John Scanlan’s pet.

  After they had had their picture taken, a full moon rose outside the window of Cap’n Jim’s, and they looked at the man in the moon as they had cheesecake for dessert. The boat was approaching the pier, and the girls gathered up their white patent handbags and began to follow their grandmother to the door. The guesthouse where they always stayed—“patronized,” Mary Frances said, as though she was somehow condescending to the place—was right across the street from the pier. It was a squat, rather pretty white building with white pebbles instead of a lawn, big pots of geraniums flanking the path to the front door, and a porch that ran around three sides where they spent the evening looking over the sea and rocking in their rocking chairs.