Connie went into the kitchen and returned with a small box in her hand, wrapped in silver paper with a pink bow. “Happy birthday,” she said, handing it to Maggie.
“God, I remember it like it was yesterday,” Celeste said with a grin. “Remember the size of you, Con? I mean, people died when they saw you coming down the street. And then Tommy calling us from the hospital and telling me, ‘Celeste, she’s the biggest goddamn baby in the hospital.’ He said that to everyone. ‘Bigger than any of the boys, too.’ God he was excited. I just kept trying to imagine ten pounds of baby getting out of your body. Maybe that’s what put me off having kids. I remember when you brought her home. I’ve never seen two human beings look so goddamn happy. You had such a smile on your face, I’ll never forget.”
Connie looked down at Maggie and smiled. Maggie had finished unwrapping her gift. It was a heartshaped locket with her initials engraved on its face in curly script. “Your first real piece of jewelry,” Connie said, taking it from her and leaning over to put it around her neck.”
“It’s really, really nice,” Maggie said quietly, and she didn’t say any more. But she fingered the locket as she sat on the ground and each time she felt the little grooves of the engraving beneath her fingertips she smiled.
“Monica just called you,” Connie said.
“How? She left for Bermuda this morning.”
“She called from the airport,” Connie said. “She wants to make sure that you don’t throw her bouquet away. She gave me instructions about how to preserve it until she gets back.”
“That little witch,” said Celeste. “You keep that bouquet longer than two weeks, it’ll outlast the marriage.”
“I think you’re jumping to conclusions,” said Connie with a small smile.
“Not because she’s expecting,” said Celeste. “God, if every marriage that started that way broke up, nobody would be married.” Maggie raised her head and listened carefully. “But a man can only take so much and so much of Monica is about two weeks’ worth.”
“Maybe marriage will change her.”
“Ha,” said Celeste, and Maggie laughed. “So,” her aunt added, “you caught the bouquet. You know what that means.”
“She didn’t mean me to catch it,” Maggie said. “She threw it right at one of her friends but it bounced off somebody’s elbow and just landed in my hands. I wasn’t even trying.”
“It’s okay,” Celeste said. “I caught the bouquet at your mom’s wedding and I was already married. Maybe if you’re married and catch it it means you’re next to be divorced.”
The three of them sat looking over the fields behind them. There were twenty-four houses now: four complete, the rest in various stages of framing and finishing. The remains of the charred house had been razed, and another had already been framed in. For a moment Maggie remembered what the fields had once looked like, and then the memory was gone, and she thought that in a few months she would not even be able to remember what Kenwood had been like before the development started.
“It really looks different back here,” said Celeste, who had always been able to read Maggie’s mind.
“It’s going to change the whole place,” said Connie. “They’re going to build twenty-four more after these. Some builder has plans for a shopping center just down the road. We’ll be surrounded.”
“I saw your friend Joe on the avenue yesterday when I was picking up groceries for my mother,” said Celeste. “I told him he missed his chance with me. I haven’t seen him around here too much lately.” Celeste squinted at her cousin in the bright sunlight. She’d always been able to read Connie’s mind, too.
“He’s busier now.”
“Have you finished your driving lessons?” Celeste asked.
“I have my temporary license. My permanent one comes any day now. I drove my mother-in-law over to Calvary Cemetery the other day all by myself. And now at least I have ID if someone in a bar doesn’t think I’m twenty-one.”
“No small accomplishment,” said Celeste, and she arched one penciled eyebrow.
“Give it a break, Ce,” Connie said.
“Are you moving?” Celeste asked.
“I think so. It’s funny how I just lost all my upset about it. My mother-in-law needs us over there. The question is whether to move into her house or the one down the street. Tommy says they may need to sell the other one to pay some of the bills from the business.”
“We really might move?” Maggie said.
“I don’t know,” Connie replied. “Let’s wait and see how your grandmother does.”
“Grandmother, Schmandmother,” said Celeste. “You’ll have five kids soon, and you’ve got four bedrooms. You’ll have to start hanging them from the chandeliers. That’s a nice big house the old lady’s got.”
“Give it a break,” Connie repeated.
“How’s being married, Aunt Celeste?” Maggie asked.
“It’s better this time,” Celeste said thoughtfully. “But still it’s the same. It’s not natural, having someone else telling you what to do all the time. But at least we’re not arguing about how much I spend on my clothes. When I was married to your Uncle Charlie, one little blouse and—pow! He broke my nose once over a winter coat.”
“Don’t tell her things like that, Cece,” Connie said. “It’ll make her think all marriages are like that.”
Celeste lifted her eyebrow again.
“They’re not. Look at my mother-in-law. She’s a changed person since her husband got sick.”
“Probably dancing in the aisles,” said Celeste, lighting a cigarette.
“You know that’s not true. That man was her whole life. That’s the thing the kids don’t understand. I was looking at Monica yesterday and thinking, she has no idea. It’s not just a man. It’s your house, your kids, your family, your time, everything. Everything in your life is who you marry.”
“That’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make, Con,” said Celeste somberly.
Connie stared across the fields, her lips still red with a trace of lipstick from the day before. “Somebody moved into one of those houses yesterday,” she finally said. “I saw the truck from the upstairs window when I was getting ready to go out.”
Celeste shrugged. “Big deal. You know what Sol always says. The more things are different, the more they’re the same.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Maggie said.
“Yeah it does,” said her aunt. “Think about it.”
Upstairs a screen was lifted with a sound like fingernails on a blackboard. “Connie,” came Tommy’s tortured voice. “I need tomato juice.”
Celeste laughed. “I’ll come in with you,” she said as Connie rose. “Put some vodka in it. That’ll make him feel better.”
Maggie stayed out on the patio and thought about what her aunt had said. The more she thought aboutit, the more she thought it was ridiculous. She thought about life with her grandfather gone, her grandmother alone, perhaps her entire family living in the big stone house and hanging out in the gazebo. She thought of Monica with a baby and a husband, never again to go to a dance with one boy and dump him halfway through the evening for someone better looking, and of Helen perhaps getting a part on Broadway and having strange men spend the night at her apartment. She thought of Debbie being Bridget Hearn’s best friend, or maybe thinking she was until Bridget dumped her, and she tried to think they deserved each other, but instead she got a feeling in her chest as though a rib was broken.
She thought of her mother driving her around during the winter months, while the dark outside and the dashboard lights within made a little oasis of the front seat of the car. She knew that even a week from now things would be different. School would start, and she would spend her days in her green uniform blazer and her plaid skirt, her saddle shoes raising blisters on the joints of her toes and the back of her heels after three months in sneakers and flip-flops. On Tuesday they would shop for school supplies, copy books with their spines
still closed tight and pencil boxes that smelled as freshly plastic as Christmas morning. There would be no more nights in the development because she wasn’t allowed out on school nights. Soon all the windows of the new houses would be filled with yellow light and the spindly saplings they were planting along Shelley Lane and Dickens Street would grow up to be trees. And soon it would seem as if Tennyson Acres had always been there, and only the older kids would say “Do you remember before they built the development?” and would know what was inside each of those walls. Maggie wondered if someday the people in the last house by the woods would rip up their wall-to-wall carpeting and find the old Playboys beneath the floor.
The gold of her locket was warm beneath her fingers. She took a letter from the pocket of her shorts. “Dear Maggie,” she read, “I am really glad you are willing to write to me even though we are in the same place and school is starting. I have a lot of things to ask you which are easier to write in a letter than to say to your face. Your face is great but my conversation is not. (HA HA!)” Even now, after reading the letter at least six times, Maggie’s breathing felt funny when she got to that part: your face is great. She wondered if Bruce could dance. He had never asked her for anything but the silly line dances at the wedding, perhaps because his father was there. Each time she had looked at him he had looked away and cracked his knuckles. When his father told him it was time to go, he had pressed the letter into her hand, but before he moved away, he had squeezed it hard.
Inside the house she could hear her aunt and her mother laughing. She wasn’t sure whether her aunt Celeste was wrong about things changing and staying the same, or whether it was one of those differences between children and adults, like the way they were always saying that time went by so quickly when just to get from June to September seemed to take a lifetime.
Maggie walked through her own backyard to the beginning of the development. The soft ground sagged beneath her feet, and she could see in the cement of the curbs that Terence and his friends had been there, putting in hand and footprints, and leaving their initials: TSS, KAK, RVQ. The asphalt for the roads had not been laid yet, and she could feel the pebbles through the soft thin soles of her sneakers. Up ahead of her was the first house to be finished, a ranch house with sliding picture windows in almost every room. Maggie remembered that Richard and Bruce had written their names inside the doors of the kitchen cabinets the day they’d been installed.
Maggie approached soundlessly, close enough to see into the living-room window. A man and a woman sat on a couch against one wall. He was bald, with his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she had a short cap of black hair, like a bathing cap, and tiny black eyes. They held round glasses, almost like bowls, filled with dark amber liqueur, and they sipped at it as they looked around them. Their furniture looked as if it had elbows, it was so angular, and on the wall above the couch was what Maggie was sure must be modern art, a soaring splash of fuschia dotted with black and gray. It was pretty, really, and the gray matched the couch. The man rose and Maggie leapt back, her heart pounding, but when she looked in again she could see that he was only adjusting the picture, and she imagined they had just hung it, hung it before they unpacked any of the cardboard boxes stacked at the far end of the room, before they began putting away their dishes and discovering names written in pencil inside their brand-new cabinet doors.
The woman rose and stared at the picture, a hand on her hip, and then she said something to the man and stood tapping her foot while he made the smallest adjustment. A voice in Maggie’s head said stridently, “I’d bet my bottom dollar they’re Jews,” even though Maggie herself was thinking that they looked mostly Italian, and Maggie recognized it as her grandfather’s voice. And she knew that for the rest of her life, from time to time she would hear that voice within her head.
She wondered if this was what it was like to be haunted. Or perhaps that was what heaven was, the eternal life of your own point of view fired off, every now and then, inside the skulls of unsuspecting friends and relatives. Maggie thought that her grandfather would live that way in her mind, until the day when she died herself, when there would be other people around to remember her. She looked back at the houses of Kenwood, old and familiar, and she looked around her at Tennyson Acres, and the two seemed to her to be the past and the future. She heard her grandfather’s voice again, saying, “There’s the here, and then there’s the hereafter.” That was how it looked to her, the two parts of the neighborhood, like here and hereafter, like what had been and what was to come. Her grandfather was finally having his hereafter, but he was here, too, inside her head, and she was glad of that.
It wasn’t only the dead that lived with you that way. When she closed her eyes she could hear Helen say “Not to decide is to decide,” and her mother saying, with a great throb in her quiet voice, “Not good or bad. Things just are.” She knew that twenty years from now she would still hear all those voices in her head, and she knew that as long as they stayed there she would be able to do all the things she had to do, to make all the choices she had to make. But yesterday, as she had walked down the aisle, looking into the curled heart of the pink rose at the center of her bouquet, she had heard another voice, telling her to lift her chin, to keep her shoulders square, to walk slowly. And suddenly it had come to her, as she was dancing with her father, the stars of darkness exploding inside her closed lids, that the voice she was hearing was her own, for the first time in her life.
OBJECT LESSONS
A Reader’s Guide
ANNA QUINDLEN
A CONVERSATION WITH ANNA QUINDLEN
Jennifer Morgan Gray is a writer and editor who lives in New York City.
Jennifer Morgan Gray: Was there a particular image or idea that inspired you to write Object Lessons? Did you begin with a vision of a particular character, a plot occurrence, both, or neither?
Anna Quindlen: Object Lessons is my most autobiographical novel—like Maggie Scanlan, I am the daughter of an Irish father and an Italian mother—and so the motivating principle was more overarching than it has been in subsequent books, when I’ve often begun with a single character, image, or theme. But I would say that my initial impulse had a good deal to do with the construction of the second-stage suburbs during the 1960s. As much as the counterculture, that sprawl of split-levels and ranch houses changed America and how Americans saw themselves. And it was a metaphor, I think, for taking a good, hard look at the old ways and mores. That’s an important theme of the book.
JMG: Was there a mood you hoped to evoke by calling the novel Object Lessons? Were there any other titles you considered and then abandoned? What are the “object lessons” that you think the characters—Maggie and Connie in particular—learn in the book?
AQ: Oy. Do I have to tell the truth about this? I am terrible with titles, although I’ve gotten better and better over the years. But Object Lessons was my first book, and so I found it particularly difficult to reduce this one to a handful of words. I remember saying, “Titles are so reductionist,” and having my editor reply, sensibly, “Yes, but a book needs to have one.” In fact I dithered so persistently that we dummied up one version of the cover with the line Title TK, which means “Title to come.” Then the director of publicity at Random House read the book and said, “Well, I think it’s all about object lessons, about those central tenets we learn from experience.” It was kind of a kaboom moment. I only wish it had been my kaboom moment!
JMG: You frame the book from its very first pages as taking place in a summer that’s “the time of changes.” Why did you decide to mention explicitly the events that take place later in the novel, like John Scanlan’s stroke and the demise of Maggie and Debbie’s friendship, in the first chapter of the book? Did you know what would happen in Object Lessons when you started writing, or were you surprised along the way?
AQ: I always know what will happen at the end when I begin a novel. The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is
the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That’s how life is most of the time, isn’t it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It’s the getting there that’s challenging. Besides, I don’t think the trajectory of Object Lessons is about John Scanlan, or even Debbie. It’s about that moment when Maggie can think of herself as an individual separate from others. That’s the ending.
JMG: Object Lessons is set in the 1960s as sweeping social changes are beginning to take hold in the United States, but these changes are slow to creep into the town of Kenwood. In what ways did you intend to depict the town as an idyllic place in which to grow up? How did you picture it as being “frozen in time”? How do you think that Kenwood’s reaction to altering the status quo mirrored the reality of the world at that time?
AQ: I don’t think most of what we call the ’60s actually took place in the ’60s. In San Francisco and New York and on some college campuses, sure. But if you go back and look at photos in most places, of most people, you don’t see long hair or tie-dyes. My high school yearbook, circa 1970, has a handful of hippie looks, but mostly people are pretty straight. But the fault lines were beginning to subtly appear. The changes in the Catholic Church. The growing political disenchantment in the years after the Kennedy assassination. The peace movement and women’s liberation. The earth was rumbling during the time covered by this novel. It hadn’t opened yet.
JMG: Some reviewers have wondered if Maggie is, in some ways, a young stand-in for you. How much of your own character is in Maggie? Why do you think that readers are so intrigued by trying to figure out how much autobiography exists in a writer’s fictional works?
AQ: Oh, I think everyone wants to disbelieve the notion of fiction. It’s too much to think that someone could invent an entire believable world from scratch. And that goes double if you’ve been a newspaper reporter as I was, trained to deal in something approaching literal truth. There are certainly similarities between Anna and Maggie, although she is preternaturally wise and a little judgmental in a way I was not at her age. I find her a bit of a pain.
Object Lessons Page 28
