The Light of Paris(17)

While my mother and Sharon talked about air-conditioning and Pottery Barn furniture, I sat down by one of the windows and looked out over the yard, the way I had so many afternoons when I was little. I didn’t remember its being so warm, but it certainly was now; sweat was already trickling down my forehead and I lifted an arm to blot it away.

Next door, the restaurant was open for lunch. I could see people sitting on the porch, the motion of servers walking back and forth. Beyond that, the entire yard had been transformed into a garden with slender paths between the beds for easy passage. It was early in the season, but the vegetables were already growing there; besides the tomato plants by the edge, I could see a small herb garden near the opposite fence, rows of strawberries, vines of squash spreading over the ground, and neat, orderly rows of lettuce, blossoming out of the earth like bridal bouquets. My stomach growled. I was definitely going there to eat sometime soon. I had never been one of those people whose appetite fell away under stress and grief. In fact, my consumption of snack cakes rose in direct proportion to my emotional turmoil.

When I turned away from the window, my mother and Sharon had disappeared back downstairs, heading for the basement. Looking around the attic, I imagined going through these things, packing them up, sending them off to auction or to the landfill, and it made me feel terribly wistful, as though I were saying goodbye to a part of myself I would never get back.

In front of me was a low, small trunk. Leaning forward, I opened it to find a stack of folded, faded fabric and a wooden box with a sliding top that turned out to be full of dark pebbles, rescued from the gentle smoothing of the water by some curious hand long ago. Below those were an accordion file full of financial paperwork, a stack of envelopes bound together so tightly the rubber band had bitten into the centers of the envelopes on both the top and the bottom, a pile of books, and a few composition books, their covers yellowed and dry. Picking one up, I flipped through the pages. It was a mishmash of things: a listing of clothing comprising a girl’s wardrobe, some poetry, a draft of a letter to the aforementioned girl’s mother with lots of cross-outs and exclamation points, a hastily drawn calendar, and some absentminded doodles. I looked through, smiling, thinking this could have been any girl’s diary, really, from anytime. Substitute high-heeled sneakers and short overalls for petticoats and gloves and it could have been written today, but the dates sprinkled throughout the pages told me it was from 1914. I flipped back to the front cover and there, in a valiant (if failed) effort at pretty penmanship, was my grandmother’s maiden name: Margaret Brooke Pearce.

Putting the notebook aside, I pulled the next one out of the trunk. This one was labeled four years later: 1918. It was more of a diary than the first notebook, though there were still occasional digressions into the mundane: pages of addition adding up to a teenage budget, a list of girls’ names and where they were going to college (I felt a little surge of pleasure at this: 1918 and the entire graduating class of girls—only thirty, but still—were every one of them going to college). In February, I read this entry:

The ’flu is here, and the school is in a complete panic. They can’t send us home, they say, because too many people are sick and we’d only infect them on our journeys. Instead, they’re quarantining us here. Everyone is awfully disturbed, but I think it’s rather romantic. Of course, I don’t have it yet. I’ve always been healthy as a horse, as Mother says, so maybe I won’t get it at all?

And a few weeks later:

Well, Lucinda’s caught it. They’ve run out of spaces in the infirmary, so they’ve gone and turned the gymnasium into another infirmary. She’s there now. Of course, it’s not as bad as it could be—there are these awful photographs of soldiers who are down with it, just shoved into bed after bed anywhere they can find the space—churches, gymnasiums. Abbott ran out of medical staff and teachers to help long ago, and they’re asking the mothers to come. The funniest part—Mother has agreed! I suppose she thinks it’s war service, even though the war is practically over, or so everyone keeps saying.

Anyway, they’ve closed down one of the other dormitories, so I’ve got a new roommate now that Lucinda is gone (and good riddance to bad rubbish, says I); Ruth is only a sophomore, but she’s quite droll and we get on très well. Her sister sent a pack of peanut brittle and we stayed up late last night gorging ourselves and laughing until we felt positively ill (or possibly that was due to the peanut brittle). The good news is there are only half the classes and with the weather so drab I was able to sleep it off. Mother would be furious I ate so many sweets.

To be honest, I feel a little jealous that Mother is coming up here to take care of these other girls. She’s never been up to visit me, not even for Family Weekend. Part of me wishes I would get the ’flu, just a little case, and then she’d have to take care of me, too. When I picture my own mother ministering to mean old Lucinda, sitting by her bedside and dabbing at her forehead with a cool cloth, it makes me more than a little ill with jealousy.

It was so strange to read the entries and think of my grandmother writing them. She had died when I was twelve, so to me she had only been Grandmother, old and stiff and formal to a fault. It was impossible to reconcile the woman I had known with this girl, so honest and young and silly. It could have been my diary, with all the complaints about her mother and the sugar overload.

My stomach growled again, hard and insistent, and I wiped a few more beads of sweat off my forehead. Time to go, then. I’d check in with Sharon to see if she’d strangled my mother yet, and then I’d figure out what to do next. I started to put the notebooks and letters back into the trunk and then paused. In my confusion that morning, I hadn’t packed a book, and these looked like a better-than-average distraction. Maybe I’d find something my mother and I could bond over. Gathering up the packet of letters and the pile of books and notebooks, I stacked my arms full and headed down the stairs.