“You just think I’m homely,” Sarah says.
“But Mumma was beautiful.”
“I’ve got eyes,” says Sarah.
“She just wasn’t photogenic.”
“Tell me about it.”
I start to, but Sarah has walked away before I get two sentences into my speech about Mumma’s vitality, comparing it to the thick, curly, improbably russet hair she took to the crematorium, and about how if beauty is something you just want to keep on looking at, even when your purpose is to land a fist smack on its snoot, Mumma was right: she was beautiful. Like my youngest daughter, to whom all eyes turn when she enters.
And before whom many hearts quail, that too.
Sarah, at three, banned the letter H from existence; she denied it. Reciting her ABCs, singing on-key, as we noted in fond admiration, she first tried simply omitting it, going directly from G to I, but that threw off both the rhythm and the rhyme of her song, so she merely pressed her lips firmly together and refused to utter the offending consonant. “…E-F-G-umm-I-J-K,” she sang. “You forgot H,” we coached her. “I don’t want that letter,” she explained.
“It’s the terrible twos,” my sisters promised me. When I argued that neither Emily nor Dot had been so terrible at two and Sarah was, moreover, no longer in her twos, they reminded me, “Children aren’t all the same. Look at you and us.”
“She’ll outgrow it,” I was promised by Sarah’s nursery school teachers. Only George saw the same thing I was seeing. After careful observation, “Sarah’s not going to change,” he decided. “I’m going to relax and enjoy her,” he said, and advised me, “You could do the same.”
With Sarah, it has been one thing after another. It was books she didn’t want to read—arguing that literate rats who wanted to create a utopian society exceeded credibility. It was foods she wouldn’t eat—tomatoes for the first ten years of her life, raw or cooked into sauces, after which she adored them, not to mention, as their political seasons have come and gone, lettuce, green grapes, swordfish, beef, veal. All of her life Sarah has walked me out of movies, as being too scary, too stupid, too grim, too unbelievable, and also, more recently, too manipulative, too Hollywood. Everyone assures me, “It’ll get better. Adolescence is a difficult time.” Only George consoles me. “Your mother would have met her match with Sarah.”
“I’ve met my match,” I say.
“Do you think so? You don’t act like you have.”
I raise sarcastic eyebrows. “That’s just because I never engage.”
He raises eyebrows right back at me. “You make her take one bite of everything. You used to sneak tomatoes into dishes then tell her afterward that she’d eaten them and liked them.”
“Tomatoes are a good source of vitamin C,” I point out, and add, “That’s about taking one bite of everything on your plate, about good manners and giving everything a try. That’s what mothers do,” I tell him. “They help their children learn how to get along in the world. I’m just—” but I can no longer not break into laughter. “I’d do better to help the world learn how to get along with my child, seeing that of the two the world is the easier to manage.”
“Your mother would have approved of Sarah,” George tells me.
“My mother liked trouble,” I tell him. “I’m lucky they didn’t overlap. Imagine—I can’t even imagine it. What if I’d had to deal with both of them at the same time?”
“The two of them together would have made mincemeat of you,” George agrees and doesn’t sound all that unhappy at the prospect, although, “I’d have had to come to your rescue,” he realizes.
My pride prickles, stung. “As if. I’m my mother’s daughter. I don’t get beaten down, not easily, not without a fight and not for long. Life is too short to waste it not living the way you want to,” I say, then add, because it’s an unavoidable truth, “If you can.”
“Your mother would have said you always can.”
“Mumma wasn’t always right.”
“She would have said that’s not what matters.”
• • •
A few weeks ago—long enough ago by now to have achieved the ease of a distant memory, like the remembrance of childbirth past (“Oh, yes, that was rather grim”)—Sarah’s oldest sister, Emily, married Elliot Brewster Adams, who is from one of those Boston families greater than the sum of the parts of its names. This was a textbook wedding, for which we consulted three separate texts lest we omit any significant step. The Adamses gave the original engagement party, and various wedding showers were given by various friends and relatives in various suburbs, but the main event was up to Emily’s parents. That is to say, a full-dress, late August wedding with a guest list of over two hundred people for a sit-down dinner was up to me. Luckily for Emily, and for me, George is an actual helpmeet. Moreover, while he blinked at some of the bills, he paid up without questioning, and, frankly, I don’t know which I value more, his generosity with money or his generosity with attention.
The expense of this large, formal wedding did, however, trouble my youngest daughter. “It’s disgusting,” she announced early on in the budgeting process, her mahogany eyes fixed on her father’s hand as it totaled estimates on a yellow legal pad. Then she hurled a glance at me. “Don’t you dare try to do anything like that to me if I get married.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” I promised.
It is, however, typical of Sarah that despite her strong and principled opposition to the manner of the wedding, she willingly masterminded the June bridal shower that Dot gave for her big sister, although whether Sarah did it from a desire to be in charge or in an effort to control some part of the expense, I couldn’t say. I was myself at the end of an academic year and—quite happily, I admit it—unavailable. Because Dot attends a Midwestern college, she couldn’t be on the spot, so Sarah took on the necessary tasks with her usual terrifying efficiency, selecting invitations, mailing them out to the three dozen invited guests and recording RSVPs in a notebook dedicated to the event, then choosing a menu (showcasing her individual key lime tarts, which Emily had particularly requested, but also organizing food preparation into a three-day period), planning the flowers, and rearranging the furniture. Everything was organized; we all knew what we were supposed to do, and when.
The occasion took place with only one crisis, and that not until the dessert course, when we were five tarts short. Fifteen of the invitees had RSVP’d acceptances and Sarah had made seventeen tarts, the correct number for guests, guest of honor, and hostess. Then twenty-two young women arrived at the party. To produce extra napkins, silver, plates, and glasses was simple. Following Mumma’s model, I always prepared too much food. But seventeen tarts remained stubbornly seventeen tarts, not twenty-two. As the meal went happily and smoothly on in the dining room, Sarah and I, simultaneously chef, sous-chef, caterer, and waitstaff, addressed the difficulty in the kitchen. It was clear to me that the only thing to do was cut each tart into four wedges, as if it were a miniature pie.
“Mother!”
“I don’t see any other choice.”
“Everything’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be just the way it is, except for them. Whichever ones they are. Do you know who they are?”
“We have more dessert plates.”
“Picture it—just picture it! And a knife will drag at the filling, you know it will, Mother.”
(The other two call me Mom. But Sarah had gone directly from Mommy to Mother. I am not sure just how to take this and she is the last one I would ask. George, the first one I ask almost anything, advised me not to take it personally.)
I seldom try to govern Sarah, but on that occasion I did, and sternly. “Unless you are willing to simply ignore the fact that there are five more guests than you planned on, Sarah, you’re going to have to compromise.”
“Mother!” Immediately, the air in the room became sunny. “You’re a genius!”
I assumed she was joking. “You know you can’t do that.”
“Why not? Is it my fault if there are five rude people out there? And that nobody does anything about it? They’re not my friends.” Once Sarah is convinced she has right on her side, she is entirely happy to let things make their own way along their own path to whatever disaster awaits them. “I’ll ask which they are and tell them they can’t have tarts. It’s only fair.”
“You can’t ask them that, Sarah,” I wailed and in that, at least, she let me have my way.
After all the guests had departed, my three daughters worked together to clean the kitchen and straighten the furniture, so it wasn’t until late afternoon, the dishwasher ready to resume its final load, that I wandered into the kitchen with a coffee cup I’d picked up in the downstairs bathroom to hear Emily say, “I would have liked one of those tarts. They looked good, Sarah.”
“That’s because they were.”
Emily laughed, asking her other sister, “Did you get one, Dot?”
“I had to be sure everybody else had dessert before I got one myself, didn’t I?”
“Everybody liked them,” Sarah announced with satisfaction.
“Why didn’t you make enough?” Dot asked.
“I did,” Sarah said.
“Palpably false,” Dot said. “I didn’t get one, neither did Emily. Also, Sally Munro—”
“Although, in fact? Sally never eats dessert,” Emily interrupted.
“And Elena and—who else, Em? We were five short.”
Her sisters know enough to set their points relentlessly out in front of Sarah, giving her no time to interrupt. Sarah is at her best picking off one point after another.
“It was DeeDee, because she’s a dessert freak but she eats so slowly that by the time she got back to the table,” and at this point they both turned to face Sarah, “all the tarts were gone.”
“Because you didn’t make enough,” Dot concluded.
I understand sisterly dynamics. I didn’t interfere. Emily would not have made such a tactical error. Emily would have left Sarah to draw the appropriate conclusion. On the other hand, Dot had her little sister’s measure and knew that when she feels wronged, Sarah and Appropriate head for opposite corners of the ring.
Sarah dried her hands and picked up her notebook. She opened it to a list of names and addresses and held it out for her sisters to look at.
“That’s the invitation list, isn’t it?” Emily asked. “We all know who was invited,” she reminded Sarah patiently.
“I know,” Sarah said, also patiently. “And I know who accepted. And I know who regretted. And I know who never even bothered to respond at all.”
Dot had the answer to this. “I told you, when you called me—I remember this conversation, Sarah, I told you not everybody RSVPs nowadays. I told you not to worry about them.”
“I didn’t,” Sarah told her.
Emily understood. “You assumed they wouldn’t be coming.”
“So I want to know who the five people were,” Sarah continued. “Because I don’t remember that many of your friends,” she explained. “It’s not funny, Emily.”
“Not a bit,” Dot agreed. “I have to tell you, Sarah—”
“No, Dot, you don’t.” But Emily’s attempt to warn her sister off was ineffective.
“—that I was a little embarrassed at running out of desserts,” Dot said. “At my shower I was giving for Emily.”
Sarah took a minute, letting all of us, especially Dot, consider the possible responses to this statement. Then, wordlessly, she exited the room, her victory complete.
As soon as the swinging door had swung closed after her, it swung open again and Sarah reentered. We had expected this, Sarah being Sarah. Sarah likes the last word, and the epilogue, too. “I still want to know who they are,” she told Emily.
“But why?” Emily insisted. “That’s if I know. If I noticed. If I remember. I’m not even going to try to remember unless you tell me why.”
“So I can write to them.”
“Write what to them?”
“About their bad manners.”
“You can’t do that, Sarah,” I said, even though I knew I should keep quiet.
“So you do know who they are.”
“Yes, but I’m not telling. It would be rude to write to them.”
“Ruder than to not RSVP? As long as they get away with it, they’ll just go on doing it,” Sarah warned. She would never have ceded the Sudetenland. “And what about the wedding? What if they do it at Emily’s wedding at—What is Dad paying? A hundred and twenty-five a head?”
“Weddings are different,” we assured her. “People feel differently about weddings. They know better.”
“I bet I can figure it out,” Sarah said. “Where do you keep your old yearbooks, Em?”
“What is wrong with you?” Dot demanded. “I feel sorry for you, Sarah.”
Sarah’s curiosity was aroused. “Why would you feel sorry for me?”
“Because you’re never going to get it about yourself,” Dot said. “Like Gran.”
“Gran was more fun than anybody,” Emily reminded them both.
“Yeah, but she was always making things worse. She made things blow up all the time. Explode.” Dot’s hands flew up in the air, gesturing explosions.
Why is it that whenever anybody else attacks her, I defend Mumma?
“Lots of the time, her exploding got good results,” I told Dot. “You loved Gran,” I reminded her. “And she loved all of you, she wouldn’t hear a word against you. I’d have liked to have her for a grandmother, I can tell you that. Much more than the one I got. You girls were lucky.”
We started in telling Mumma stories, then, even Sarah, who has none of her own but who has moved herself into many of ours, sometimes appropriating them entirely, and by the day’s end, we had all forgotten about the tart shortfall and the manners shortfall. Or so we thought, Emily and Dot and I.
We always underestimate Sarah.
• • •
In the weeks between the shower and the event, from June to August (it had to be August because until then weather on the Cape is so unreliable), it was Sarah who could keep us informed about the status of various segments. With her organizational gifts, she was a natural to be in charge of record keeping: expenses, guest lists, gifts received, musical choices, catering and flowers, driving directions from all nearby towns to both the service and the reception, available accommodations for out-of-town guests, travel options from airports in Boston and Providence, bus and train schedules from Boston, Providence, New York, and DC, a list of car rental agencies—each with comparative prices. In short, Sarah was irreplaceable, and she may well have been the primary reason for the equanimity, the serenity, the lambent happiness with which Emily remembers her bridal season.
I let myself slip into equanimity, too, and I should have known better. I’d lived most of my life within Mumma’s sphere of influence so I don’t know why I was surprised to be accosted on the phone one July morning by the groom’s mother. “Do you know what your daughter has done?”
It had to be Sarah. People frequently approach a parent to ask, “Do you know what your daughter has done?” but when it was Emily they spoke of, the voice would be warm or delighted, and the message of some particular kindness Emily had performed. Dot elicited admiration for her team spirit and friendliness, but Sarah…When it concerned Sarah, the question always contained some level of outrage. “Do you?” Christina repeated before I had time to respond to her first inquiry. “Do you know what your daughter has done?”
Yes, I wanted to answer, Yes, and I entirely approve. That’s what Mumma would have said. No, and please don’t tell me, I wanted to say that, too. Instead, I responded with a mendacious innocence, “Which daughter?”
“She’s written letters!” Christina spoke in tones of regal outrage.
“Oh?”
“To people we know! Friends of ours and even business connections!”
“Ah.”
The phone at my ear, I wan
dered over to the sun porch window from which I could look out into a clear summer day and admire the day lilies, their orange and yellow petals highlighted with black streaks and spots, opened to the sky like hands in prayer, or at least in appreciation. Portable phones are to my mind one of the great technological achievements of the times. Bad enough that phones will interrupt whatever is going on, but worse when you can’t move around, to empty the dishwasher, pick up scattered newspapers, look out the window, when the telephone imprisons your body as well as your attention.
“Did you know she was doing that?”
“No,” I said mildly, and quite truthfully.
“I’ve never been so embarrassed!”
Lucky you, I didn’t say. Neither did I apologize or offer sympathy. Mostly, I was curious about these letters of Sarah’s. But I didn’t want to fuel Christina’s anger by asking, and besides, I guessed that the woman wanted to specify the offenses.
“People are calling me up,” she hissed. “Friends of ours, and business connections, too. Asking who she is. If she’s a psychopath.”
“Sarah? I doubt it. If you ask me, the problem is that she’s so relentlessly sane.”
“I should have known better than to ask you.” Christina took a long, audible, calming breath. “Nobody’s called you?”
“No.” Our friends knew Sarah.
Pale feathery clouds occasionally interrupted the perfect watery blue of the sky. I understood that the temperature outside was not as high as it looked, but I could believe it was tropically warm, as I stood looking out the window with the phone at my ear.
“They wouldn’t, would they.” Not a question, a bitterness. “They’re probably used to being hounded about some arbitrary time limit.” The RSVPs, then. “What has happened to the grace in life?” Christina wondered, sorrowfully.
“Well,” I said. “I can’t talk right now, Christina. It’s a little frantic around here.”
“You’ll stop her, of course,” Christina instructed me.
“Probably it’s too late for that.”
“You liberal parents…You ruin everything for the rest of us. Frankly, you’re all very interesting and all that, you Middletons, you Howlands, but I just hope Elliot’s not making a big mistake. I hope he knows what he’s getting into.”