Элеонора Браун – The Light of Paris (страница 12)
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:
And a few weeks later:
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.
In my bedroom, I dropped the papers on the bed and went to wash the travel stink and attic dust off my skin. Drying my hands, my engagement ring snagged on the towel, and I tugged it free, staring at it. It had been cleaned a few months ago when I went to Tiffany’s to buy a present for one of Phillip’s nieces (why a five-year-old girl needed a present from Tiffany’s was beyond me, but this was how the Spencer family worked), and it sparkled in the light, the scratches on the metal, evidence of years of bumps, bangs, and scrapes, barely visible.
There was a dark blue thread from the towel stuck underneath the stone. I pulled it out, the thread breaking on either side, leaving a tiny piece of blue fuzz underneath the prong. I picked at it for a moment, a tide of irritation building inside me, pushing aside the sick, sinking fear that had been resting heavily in my chest. Why did Phillip get to be the wronged party? What had I done wrong, other than be honest, admit for once that I was unhappy, that there was something broken between us?
On the counter was a small china dish and I tossed the rings in there, clinking the lid back on with satisfaction. Now I wouldn’t have to look at that piece of lint marring the ring’s perfection. I wouldn’t have to think about it at all. And I certainly wouldn’t pay any attention to its bare and blinding absence on my finger.
Five years after her debut, my grandmother was sitting in the parlor, twenty-four years old and generally agreed to be a spinster. She had graduated from college two years before, and now she found herself lost.
“What are you thinking on, Margie?” her mother asked. “You’ve done half of that in the wrong color.”
Margie lifted her embroidery hoop and peered at it closely. “Oh, damn,” she said. “Well, it’s not as if it was any good to begin with.”
“Don’t swear, Margie. You’ll never get a husband with a mouth like a fishwife,” her mother scolded with a tired sigh. She held out her hand. “Give it here. I’ll take the stitches out.”
Margie crossed her eyes. There was going to be no husband. She knew it, and she guessed her mother knew it, and only said things like that to keep the fiction alive, for whose benefit she wasn’t sure. Margie hadn’t been keen on getting married in particular, but she had very much liked the idea of a love affair or two. There had been a time when she had been starry-eyed enough to think some man might see beyond her plainness and find the person underneath and fall madly in love. She thought maybe Robert Walsh had. Oh, but she didn’t like to think of him at all.
“Mr. Chapman is coming for dinner tonight,” her mother said without looking up. She was plucking out Margie’s sloppy, miscolored stitches. When she handed it back, there would be tiny holes where the thread had been, and puckers in the fabric, but Margie would be expected to redo it anyway. What use were these things now? When women had the vote, when girls could go to medical school, when every day little earthquakes of change brought something new? The time of embroidery and silver polishing was ending, and another time, one Margie had only glimpsed the night of her debut, of dancing and parties and women free to do as they pleased, dress as they wanted, had begun. But not in her mother’s parlor. It might as well have been 1885 in there, the décor Victorian, ornate wallpaper and dark wood and enormous, heavy, velvet-covered furniture that seemed to do nothing except produce dust. Her mother, who had been raised in a house even more dependent on rules and rigidity than the one she ran now, had gritted her teeth and barred the door against any change.