Commonwealth(95)

The sound of Kumar’s breathing had deepened and slowed, and she got up carefully, felt for her dress and shoes in her suitcase, and changed clothes in the dark.

When she came down the back stairs to the kitchen, Franny found her mother at the breakfast table by herself, arranging petits fours on a tray.

“You know there are people here who will do that for you,” Franny said.

Her mother looked up and gave her an exhausted smile. “I’m hiding for just a minute.”

Franny nodded and sat down beside her.

“This party always seems like such a good idea in the abstract,” Beverly said. “But every time I have it I can’t imagine why.”

They could hear the guests in the other room, the hilarity in their voices raised by the eggnog and champagne. The piano player was playing something faster now, maybe a jazzed-up version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” but Franny wasn’t sure. Twelve days, she thought, she would have killed herself before she ever got to the five golden rings.

Beverly put out the last of the tiny square cakes from the box, pink and yellow and white, each one crowned with a sugared rosette. “Rick came after all,” she said, turning the squares to diamonds. “Now he’s drinking.”

“Matthew said he’d come.”

“I can’t take them all together,” Beverly said. “One on one the boys are fine, or mostly fine, but when they’re together they always have an agenda. They have so many ideas about the future: what I’m supposed to do with Jack, what I’m supposed to do with the house. They don’t seem to have any sense of what conversation is appropriate for a Christmas party. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know why they keep asking me. Do you have any ideas about the future?”

Franny picked up a pale-yellow petit four, the color of a newly hatched chick, and ate it in a single bite. It wasn’t very good, but it was so pretty that it didn’t matter. “None,” she said. “Zero.”

Beverly looked at her daughter and the look on her face was a pure expression of love. “I wanted two girls,” she said. “You and your sister. I wanted exactly what I had. Other people’s children are too hard.”

If her mother hadn’t been so pretty none of it would have happened, but being pretty was nothing to blame her for. “I’m going out there,” Franny said, and got up.

Her mother looked down at the plate of tiny cakes. “I’m going to divide them by color,” she said, pushing them all onto the table with the side of her hand. “I think I’d like them better that way.”

Franny found Ravi and Amit in the basement watching The Matrix on a television set the size of a single mattress.

“That’s rated R,” she said.

The boys looked at her. “For the violence,” Ravi said. “Not sex.”

“And it’s Christmas,” Amit said, operating on the logic of wishes.

Franny stood behind them and watched as the black-coated men dipped backwards to avoid being split in half by bullets and then popped up again. If it was going to give them nightmares the damage was already done.

“Mama, have you seen it before?” Amit asked.

Franny shook her head. “It’s too scary for me.”

“I’ll sleep in your room with you,” her younger boy said, “if you’re scared.”

“If you make us stop now,” Ravi said, “we’ll never know what happens.”

Franny watched for another minute. She was probably right, it probably was too scary for her. “Your father fell asleep,” she said. “Wait a little while and then go take him a plate for dinner, okay?”

Pleased by their small victory, they nodded their heads.

“And don’t tell him about the movie.”

Franny went back upstairs and did one full loop around the room but there were so few people she remembered. She hadn’t lived in Arlington since she’d left for college. The wives of Jack Dine’s three sons all wanted to talk to her but none of them particularly wanted to talk to one another. The wife of the son she liked the most was the wife she like the least, and the wife of the son she liked the least was the wife she greatly preferred. What was interesting though, not that any of it was interesting at all, was that the wife of the son she had the hardest time remembering was also the wife she had the hardest time remembering.

At some point in the evening before even a single guest had departed, Franny found herself back in the foyer, and there, without looking for it, she saw her own handbag on the floor, slightly behind the umbrella stand. She must have dropped it there when she came in, putting the luggage down, and without a thought she picked it up and went out the door.

The dress she’d brought for the party, the party she’d thought was still two days away, was not red. It was a dark blue velvet with long sleeves but still it was no match for the cold, as her shoes were no match for the snow. It didn’t make any difference. She had left the party, slipped away after everyone had seen her. “Where’s Franny?” they would say, and the answer would be, “I think she’s in the kitchen. I just saw her in the other room.”

The cars were all covered in snow, and hers was a rental, rented in the dark no less. She didn’t know what color it was because she’d never actually seen it. It was an SUV, she remembered that, but all the cars were SUVs, as if SUVs, like vests for men, had been a requirement of the invitation. She went down the hill at the end of the drive and when she was in what she thought might have been the general vicinity, she hit the automatic key. A horn beeped just to the left of her and the lights came on. She brushed off the windows with her wrist and got inside. Once she got the heater running she called Bert.