Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(44)
“I want to understand you,” she said. “It’s just I don’t!”
I went back upstairs to my bedroom and crawled under the covers. Flurries of snow blew outside the frosted windows. My mother had moved to this more modest house when I’d turned twenty-two, and noise traveled. I could hear them continuing the debate downstairs, my grandmother irate, my mother doing her best to pacify her.
My grandmother had always been my greatest fan, spoiling me in a way my mother never had. She was the one who provided the piles of fresh fruit, new winter coats, the trips to the toy store—indulgences my mother generally discouraged. My grandmother’s love, it seemed, never wavered. Once I’d started college, she took me on regular shopping trips in New York, even setting me up with a personal shopper at Saks Fifth Avenue. We’d go from one department to the next, piling clothes into the personal shopper’s arms. I could point to any garment or accessory, and she would carry it back to a private dressing room, where all the things would be waiting when I came in. That same night, I’d wear one of my new outfits downtown to have drinks at the Odeon, check out a band at CBGB, and head to an artist’s loft party in the Bowery with a gang of friends. The following day, I’d meet my grandmother uptown at the Colony Club for lunch wearing one of the more conservative dresses she’d bought me. I could surf both worlds comfortably, but lower Manhattan, that was my thing.
“Promise me you’ll never take the subway,” my grandmother would say after lunch at the Colony Club, handing me an envelope full of twenties and hailing me a cab on Park Avenue. “I wish you wouldn’t always insist on staying downtown.”
My grandmother stubbornly held out hope that I’d fall into the life she imagined for me: married at twenty-four, say, to a good Upper East Sider, summering in Nantucket or the Vineyard, holding whatever club memberships, maybe even becoming the kind of killer bridge player she was. Now I understood that all the pampering, all the exclusive vacations and beautiful clothing, had been an active attempt to secure this future for me. Clearly, it had not come to pass. In her eyes, then, I had failed. I was single, an artist; I had opted out of the society that was my birthright. Had I become a painter, at least, perhaps the blow might have softened somewhat. A painter was the kind of artist people understood. Renoir, Monet, Picasso. You know. “Frances is the next great painter,” they could have said at cocktail parties.
“You aren’t so worldly, Frances,” my mother sometimes told me, meaning, I think, that I didn’t steer my opportunities to any particular outcome; I was a bit of an idealist. I’d always taken this as a compliment, though I was fairly certain it hadn’t been meant that way.
Whitney and Bobby arrived in the afternoon, Whitney from Palm Beach, his L. L. Bean duffel bag freshly dusted with Michigan snow; while Bobby was just coming from across town. Bobby had recently become a Grosse Pointer again, having moved from Dallas to work at the brewery headquarters. I’d primped in advance of their arrival, now morbidly self-conscious about my appearance, but also excited to see the men in the family, to whom the women’s attention would now, thankfully, turn.
“You look every bit the artiste,” said Bobby when he saw me. Alright—that was more like it.
“Frances, looking good!” said Whitney. “Step outside for a smoke?”
We huddled by the garage door in our sweaters, minimally shielded from the gusting snow. A station wagon crawled along the street and skidded at the stop sign.
“This Christmas is gonna be a f*cking joy ride,” Whitney said with a wicked smile, dragging on his Camel.
Because of our father and Elisa’s elopement, he meant. We were all going out to Jackson together—a trip my father had clearly planned to get us acquainted with Elisa. We were leaving the day after Christmas.
First, though, we were scheduled to see my father and Elisa, right here in Grosse Pointe, the following day. “Change is in the air,” I told my brother.
“No kidding.” Whitney tossed his cigarette into a snowdrift and rubbed his hands together. “As if it weren’t bad enough, Mom moving to this grim little house.”
Whitney and I went inside to find Bobby and my mother talking at the kitchen table. Whitney’s loafers squeaked on the kitchen’s plasticized tile floor; he smirked in my direction. I knew he missed the old house—its proximity to the forest where we played as children, our cousins Pierre and Freddy nearby, the familiarity of every curve on the road when he sped his car home after a high school party. I understood. I missed those things, too. The old house had been part of the old life, the life we’d lost, bit by bit, after the divorce.
“Too many memories in this place,” my mother had said just before she sold it.
At the new house, a 1950s brick box, we might see a neigh bor doing gardening work, inflating a baby pool, or firing up a grill, activities we’d rarely seen on Provencal Road, where gardeners, cooks, and hired pool cleaners were the norm.
But my mother loved that her new neighbors kept an eye on one another’s houses, talked to each other over fences, and dropped off tins of cookies at Christmastime. Perhaps she felt less isolated here. It agreed with her. And since marrying Lloyd, who was now in Oregon visiting his son, she seemed to have dropped ten years from her age. She looked slimmer and happier, though her chronic insomnia over the years had left dark circles under her eyes.