Betty looked at her, stricken. "That's what Josie always says." Her eyes filled with tears.
"A hideous experiment," Annie said to her son Charlie when he called a few days later. "Three grown women grafted onto the memory of a nuclear family. Like Frankenstein's monster. There will be mobs of violent peasants. And torches."
"You don't have to go, you know."
"If you think you and your brother can get out of taking care of me when I'm old by giving me permission to abandon my mother in this her hour of need, you have another think coming."
He laughed. "What about your job?"
"I'll commute. I'll buy a gray flannel suit."
But Charlie was too young to get the reference.
"Right," he said uncertainly.
"I can't believe I let them talk me into this," she said.
"Aunt Miranda could talk anyone into anything."
The packing was what delayed them, though at first Betty was willing to leave with nothing but a toothbrush. After all, what was keeping her? What was left?
"Your life?" Annie ventured.
"My life is over."
"That's very dramatic, Mother."
"Just some saltines for the trip," Betty said. "And a cardigan."
But one sweater led to another, which led to matching skirts and trousers, jackets, shoes, and handbags. "And of course I'll need these," Betty said, gathering photos and several large paintings. "And something to sit on. And sleep on. And cook in. And plates and the teapot . . . And I'm certainly not leaving the good crystal or the silver . . ."
In the weeks that followed, the three of them met at the Central Park West apartment to tag furniture and sift through linens and pots and pans.
"It's not as if I'm really moving out," Betty could be heard murmuring. "I'll bring it back again when all this is sorted out."
"If I had a backyard," she said one day, "I could just bury it until I returned."
"After the guns stop? In spite of what Cousin Lou thinks, you're not really a refugee, Mother." Annie was immediately sorry she'd spoken. If her mother could read her tawdry divorce as a heroic wartime thriller, who was she to deprive her of that pleasure? At the same time, though, Annie was exhausted by the giddy self-pity of both her mother and her sister. They seemed to consider this miserable move to be a grand and tragic adventure. Annie envied them, at some level--how could anyone find such heady satisfaction in defeat? But at another level, she had no patience for an attitude that she knew would mean all the decidedly unexciting details, like organizing the mover and ordering packing materials and figuring out how to pay for the unexciting details like the mover and the packing materials, would fall, inevitably, like dead leaves in autumn, to her.
"It's a metaphor," Betty was saying. "You've heard of those, Miss Librarian."
Miranda, who had jammed a straw hat from deep in the closet on top of her head and wrapped herself in a lace tablecloth mantilla, placed herself between the two of them. "Don't fight. The Gypsy family has to stick together."
"The Joad family is more like it," said Annie.
And she could envision them clearly, their mattresses lashed to the roof of the jalopy, making their trek along the dusty roads to labor in the fields of Westport, Connecticut. But she was mollified now, smiling at the thought, for "jalopy" was a word she had always loved.
But even as they packed for their neo-Depression life together, money was in shorter and shorter supply for the three Weissmanns. Joseph and Betty had long ago become accustomed to the bountiful solidity of the upper reaches of the upper middle class. They were, by the standards of any but the rich, rich, and money was a comfort for them, rather than a concern. Betty's shock, now, was real and showed itself primarily in a tendency to undertip.
Things no longer cost what they had when she was young, which was the last time she had taken much notice. She had never paid for anything when living with Joseph. Though not extravagant, considering her age and her class and her economic reality, she had been careless: literally without care. And because she wanted only what was reasonable for someone in her position, there had always been enough to buy what she wanted. Now there was no reason. Or rhyme. Or money.