The Light of Paris(37)
And it was winter for so long. When I got into bed at night, I piled blankets and quilts on myself, the weight as comforting as the warmth. The thermostat might have claimed the temperature was just fine, but the cold sat deep in my bones, where I could feel it even if I was sweating. And then spring came in a burst, overnight the ice melting, giving way to a damp chill that the buds of trees fought through nonetheless, revealing their hopeful promise, white-green and palest yellow clearing away the coating of frost on the branches. Water ran in the gutters, the river’s banks bloomed high and full, and the city’s residents emerged, blinking and shaken, eyes wide open to the miracle of spring. But spring, like fall, does not last. Summer would come in a brief gasp, as though the other seasons had been holding it underwater, and it could raise its head only long enough to exhale the delicious heat, the pressure of the sun, the long, luxurious hours of daylight, before it gasped and went under again.
And even though Magnolia has a winter of its own, I could only imagine its summer. In the depths of winter, when I pictured Magnolia, I could only remember wet, humid days, the air lying on my skin, a soft, damp caress. I thought of how the underside of my hair was always damp, my face always flushed and pink. I thought of my mother’s gardens, an explosion of greenery in soft fronds, long spikes, the pale undersides of leaves, the seductive petals of flowers, coyly hiding their hearts until the sun coaxed them open—roses of butter yellow, peonies pink like ballet slippers, stalks of gladiolus in royal purple, marching up the back fence, dahlia and amaryllis in violent, brazen red. I thought of ice cream cones melting onto my hands, and long, lazy sunsets, and the smell of chlorine and the way the light lay, as though it had been filtered through a golden sieve, on everyone and everything, making the world seem bright and vulnerable and just a little bit more perfect.
And though it wasn’t summer in Magnolia yet, I felt something awakening in me very much like it, the fingers of the sun finding their way into the parts of my heart that had frozen solid, the slow drip of melting in my belly. I stayed up late with my grandmother’s journals, reading about her fear of facing Paris alone, her embrace of it, and Evelyn’s betrayal. It made me think of the pain of not being beautiful, and the wonder of a kiss, and the excitement of discovery, and it made me cry a little for the girls we had been. I wished I had known her.
My own debut had been a disappointment. I had waited for it for years, sat through endless hours of cotillion and deportment classes, thinking the ball would be the brass ring at the end of it all. I’d be a caterpillar turned into a butterfly, an ugly duckling turned into a swan. I’d been part of that existence since I was born, but I had never felt I belonged. My friends and classmates had never gone through an awkward stage. Their hair was smooth and straight, while mine was wavy and disobedient. They were slender and delicate, while I was thick and swimmer-shouldered.
No one was overtly unkind to me. We were all vaguely friends in the way you must all be friends if your entire graduating class numbers a total of eighty girls, but I was never fully included, always on the edge. Most weekend nights I spent alone, painting or reading, or going to a movie with my childhood best friend, Amanda, who had switched to public school and therefore might as well not have existed. During the week, I went to school and then swimming, or to one of the various preparatory functions our mothers set up for us, cotillion or piano lessons, or some fresh hell like the Junior Ladies Association. We were thoroughbreds, led around a ring and told to leap over fences until we learned the skills by heart.
Other girls went to dances, had boyfriends, but as they had been to my grandmother, to me, boys were as mysterious and foreign a substance as radium. There was a boy I saw sometimes at the bookstore, all angles and loose limbs and sleepy eyes that, in retrospect, were probably drug-induced, but at the time simply made him look thoughtful and romantic. Once I dropped my scarf and he picked it up and handed it to me and I blushed. It turned out he went to school with Amanda, but I never asked her to find out more, never told her I was interested in him, never told her I daydreamed of kissing him, of running along River Street with him down to the water, never told her sometimes I looked forward to seeing him, to brushing past him in the fiction section, all week long.
Looking through my high school yearbooks, I pored over photos from parties and dances I hadn’t gone to, looking at my classmates’ pretty Laura Ashley dresses, their wide, bright smiles, their dates. The girls in those pictures were confident and poised, and I was awkward of voice and nervous of stomach. Some nights I lay in bed and the thought of what they had, what I knew, even then, I would never be, made me ache.
At first I thought college would be my moment. I rushed Chi Gamma Delta because my mother insisted, and I was admitted because I was a legacy. They liked me fine, but in the chapter photos, I was always standing in the back row, somehow never managing to smile when the shutter clicked, my face red, my shirt wrinkled, looking like someone who had wandered into the picture accidentally instead of someone who belonged there just as much as anybody else.
My debutante ball had been my last hope, but at my first dress fitting, I knew it was all wrong. I had dreamed for years of an off-the-shoulder dress, had pictured it all, how perfect I would look, like Scarlett O’Hara or Princess Di. When my mother took me shopping, I practically grabbed a dress off the rack, exactly what I had pictured, a perfect white with an off-the-shoulder neckline and a full skirt. But when I had slipped it on and looked at myself in the mirror, my mother and the saleswoman waiting outside, the former imperiously, the latter obsequiously, my heart broke for a last and final time. I leaned my forehead against the cool mirror, closed my eyes, and cried. The neckline I had dreamed of for so many years was unflattering, the folds of fabric on my upper arms made my shoulders look even wider, and the dropped waist hit the center of my hips before billowing out, making me look like a sausage being pushed into its casing. Crying made my face and my chest blotchy. “Come out, Madeleine,” my mother trilled, and I clomped out of the dressing room.