She considered how her mother must feel after believing her marriage was eternal, only to find out it, too, had a season, albeit an extraordinarily long one. Was it the same way Miranda felt after each of her own fiery breakups, a desire to move on, to revive the delicious rattle of courtship as soon as possible?
She crept up to her mother's bedroom and stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs. Moonlight came softly through the open window. How pale Betty looked in the blue light. She breathed evenly, a gentle sound just shy of snoring. Miranda realized that her mother was old, an old lady, her skin loose on her fragile bones. And then suddenly, piercingly, Miranda knew that her mother did not feel the way Miranda felt after a breakup, that she did not feel a desire to move on, to rattle and mate and bask in a new season of love. She knew that her mother felt like what she was: an old lady alone in a bed.
Within a few weeks, the little cottage underwent a remarkable transformation. Betty's pale-blue-and-cream-colored silk Persian rug lay across the top of the worn old linoleum of indeterminate color. The creamy silk chenille Queen Anne chairs from the living room and leather sofa from Joseph's library had been arranged in cozy proximity in the small space. Even the curtains from the apartment had been adapted to the little room, which now resembled a Connecticut cottage living room in a 1930s movie.
There were other resemblances to the 1930s that were less welcome. The stove dated from that time. The furnace could not have been much more recent. The dishwasher was from the sixties, but its only function now was to hold up the small kitchen counter. Cousin Lou had offered to update all these appliances, but here Betty had drawn the line on his beneficence.
"It's all so quaint," she had said. "And as soon as Joseph, may he rest in peace, sorts out all the legalities, I will be back in my apartment and you can tear this sweet little cottage down . . ."
Cousin Lou winced at the words "tear" and "down" in the same sentence.
"Beautify," Betty corrected herself. "You will be able to beautify. No sense in beautifying new appliances, though, is there?"
Betty was very proud of this sacrifice on her part. She wanted to show strength, to reassure her daughters, to reassure the world at large and, perhaps most of all, to reassure herself. Staying at her cousin's cottage as a family guest was one thing. But being given a new refrigerator, like those poor women on Queen for a Day, was more than her self-respect could stomach.
On weekdays Annie went into the city, surprised by how much she enjoyed the commute. The train rattled on its suburban rails, filled with men and women, but mostly men, in dark suits. The uniformity of the sober colors, the smell of soap, the soft rustle of the newspapers in the mornings, that hour of fresh, gently rocking, clacking repose; then, ten hours later, the weary, wrinkled, communal escape from the long day of responsibility, the comfortable office dishabille of loosened ties and crumpled white shirts--Annie felt herself part of something, a cell in a great breathing bourgeois creature.
As for Betty, she read books with advice for grieving widows, one of which suggested she decorate a jar and then, with her children, write down happy memories of the deceased on slips of paper and place them inside. To facilitate the decoration of the Memory Jar, she immediately headed to Barnes & Noble to buy a book about decoupage. While there, she saw a book for golf widows and came home to declare that she must take up the game immediately.
"But, Mother, a golf widow is someone whose husband plays a lot of golf," Annie pointed out.
"Well, Josie plays golf," Miranda said. "On vacation. It's harder in the city, of course."
"Exactly," said Betty. "May he rest in peace."
Annie gave a defeated sigh, but the truth was, she enjoyed their company now as she never had before; more, certainly, than she had while growing up. As a little girl, she had not been unhappy, just cautious, adopting a quiet, personal camouflage to protect herself from her more flamboyant mother and sister. It was something she had always felt she'd shared with Josie: they were the ones who created the drab leafy background against which the other two blazed with gaudy color like tropical birds. Annie and Josie were the practical ones, too, the ones who remembered the napkins when Miranda and Betty decided on an impromptu picnic in the park, who thought to bring the umbrella when Miranda and Betty decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a cloudy day, who packed the map when Miranda and Betty had a sudden yen to see autumn leaves or spring flowers or Hyde Park or the waves crashing onto the beach at Montauk Point. Annie thought fondly of her stepfather for a moment. She almost wished he had died, she realized with shame, for then she would have been able to remember him as he had been, distant but in a quiet, patient, and reassuring way, someone she admired and looked up to and relied on. Instead, he was a living, unreliable, despicable deserter.
"I found the most wonderful jet bracelet at the consignment store on the Post Road," Betty was saying, holding out her wrist to her daughters.