Rich and Pretty(18)

“I was out west for college. And that kind of stuck. But, we lost our dad, and Riley’s here, you remember my brother?”

“I do, of course.” Now it’s weird that she’s holding the tote bag to her torso like it was an infirm dog, and weird that they haven’t hugged. They were friends, once.

“He and his husband are here, too. We wanted to raise our kids close to each other.”

Lauren makes a somber face. “I’m sorry about your dad.” Condolences, though it was hardly a tragedy. She remembers more: Jill Hansen’s father was a doctor who had invented a mechanical device that fit into broken bodies to do the work of some piece of failed flesh. The family were zillionaires, not uncommon at school—a town house somewhere in the Seventies, an honest-to-God compound on the ocean out on Long Island, where her mother had been a party planner Doctor Hansen picked up at (where else?) a party. Jill had two half brothers who had to have been in their sixties by now.

“I appreciate that, thanks. Anyway, Portland was great, but we just wanted to be here. And we are loving Brooklyn!”

This last: like it’s Disney World.

“What about you? Do you still see anyone from school? You must still be friends with Sarah.”

“I am still friends with Sarah.”

“God, how is she?” A touch of awe, customary when discussing Sarah.

“She’s great! She’s getting married, actually.” Wonderful. Let’s talk about Sarah then.

“Amazing! You’ll have to tell her I said hello. And congratulations and all that. Wait, are you married?”

“Uh, no.” Lauren shakes her head, smiling to communicate that this isn’t a bad thing; her being unmarried is simply a thing. She needs another subject to change to, quickly. “You know, we should all get together some time.”

“I would love that,” Jill says, so enthusiastically it’s clear she’s misread the sincerity.

“Me too,” Lauren says and feels, suddenly, that she would, in fact, love it. Jill Hansen, maybe she’s been missing a Jill Hansen in her life. Lauren is not lonely, exactly, though she is often alone. She has Sarah to tell things to, yes, but no one to whom she might tell things about Sarah. She doesn’t actually believe Jill Hansen will fill this role—Jill Hansen will presumably be too busy caring for her offspring, though now that she thinks about it, where are those offspring, and why is Jill Hansen, a new mother, roaming the streets unencumbered?—but there is something unexpectedly appealing about the idea of the three of them, Sarah, Lauren, Jill, “getting together,” even as Lauren knows it will never happen.





Chapter 6


Her mother’s dress is out of the question. Lulu and Huck married in 1970. Lulu, stick thin, twenty-four, gigantic eyes rimmed in mascara, an earlier marriage (an impulsive four-day union to a middling Mexican musician) annulled. Lulu, then as now, looked incredible. The pictures capture it vividly: chiffon, ruched and belted at the waist, an embellished collar up the neck, her long arms bare but for a gold cuff, the dress trailing to the floor but light enough that it’s drifting, seems to be moving even in the picture for which they posed. Huck’s suit, basic black and not altogether that dated, though the jacket was cut long, and the big tortoiseshell glasses feel very much a relic of the time, as do his sideburns. The picture has hung in the kitchen for Sarah’s entire life.

The dress must be somewhere: Lulu is sentimental. Nevertheless, it’s not for Sarah. The truth, unspoken but many times mulled over, is that she looks nothing like Lulu. An irony, that one, a missed opportunity: the great beauty whose genes turn out to be recessive. It doesn’t make Sarah laugh, even now, nor, though, does it make her cry. There’s little point in that. She’s her father’s daughter: as tall as him, the very same posture, the exact chin, the echoing laugh, the same way of holding a fork—that weird specificity of DNA. She’s learned Lulu: the cock of the head, the purposeful stride, the girlish tendency to touch her own hair, self-taught comportment, a secret project of Sarah’s when she was twelve. Of course, she’d known, much earlier than that, even, how genetics disappoint. Lulu’s hair, just like the hair on that disembodied bust of Barbie, a birthday present on which she was meant to practice the feminine arts, could be pinned up prettily, pulled over her shoulder casually, or folded into a lush, delicious chignon. Lulu wore it to her waist, once upon a time, a much younger woman, though now, in her sixties, it’s mannishly cropped, which has the effect of making her face appear even finer. Those drugstore elastics never seemed to do anything to Sarah’s hair but choke it, like a too-tight bandage that makes your finger swell.

Then the yearned-for breasts, they simply kept growing, adolescence as horror story (isn’t it always?), the areolae spreading like a bruise, Sarah looking on in private shock, shielding herself with a rough towel in the postswim shower. They stopped, eventually, of course, though they hurt her back, sometimes. Those breasts are two of the many reasons she could never wear her mother’s gown down an aisle. There’s also her shoulders (those are Huck’s, too), broad and powerful, not an altogether bad thing, but the effect would be more pleasant if her waist tapered, as her mother’s does, even after childbirth twice over, Lulu in her pleated skirts like a paper doll. Lulu’s means of sustaining herself: occasional bites from a plate piled high, while she darts around the room, making conversation, before scraping the thing into the garbage disposal. She doesn’t need more than a few cubes of cantaloupe in the morning, a cup of tea with honey and lemon in the afternoon, a half of an English muffin, some desultory bites of a salad, the drumstick from the chicken, gnawed with a precision that’s somehow more like a lady than a rodent. Sarah requires more than this to survive, and she has learned to ignore, or not ignore, make peace with, or not wage war against, the excess. That excess, it sits comfortably on her body, everywhere: the slope of chin into neck, that bit from elbow to armpit, that swell just above the waist, with the humorous puckered punctuation of her navel. It’s there, from the back of the knees up: more cushion than she’d like, and it’s stubborn, this stuff, whatever she should call it. She goes to the gym. Nothing changes.