“Did Aunt Theo really write this? That’s so cool. I had no idea.”
“Yes,” said Clover. “When she was very young. Younger than me, even, I think.”
We would be sleeping in the bedroom downstairs. It had dusty coral walls and two twin beds with brass headboards. The sheets and pillows were mismatched, but in a way, I thought that looked better than matched—like Aunt Theo couldn’t be bothered to try that hard. Clover left us to unpack alone, which I though was nice of her, since of course we had all kinds of things we wanted to talk about right now.
“I get the bed by the window!” exclaimed Val, sitting down on it and sighing. Then she tapped the mattress and said, “Not too comfy a bed actually. And to think, I thought Aunt Theo was loaded. Actually to tell you the truth this place isn’t as fancy as I thought it would be. What do you think, Franny?”
“I love it,” I said immediately and rather protectively. But I saw that Val had a point. There was no television, and the kitchen with the dusty black-and-white diamond floors hadn’t been remodeled in forever. I started to get the impression that Aunt Theo wasn’t big on modern conveniences of any kind.
“Oh my God, I am just dying to read Aunt Theo’s novel. Aren’t you?”
“Yeah, later maybe,” said Valentine, though she’s not as big on reading novels as I am, to tell you the truth. “I’m dying after that flight and I want something sweet ASAP. Lemonade or, I know, let’s go get raspberry lime rickeys!” That was our favorite drink back in San Francisco.
“But where will we be able to find them?” I asked her.
“Oh, Franny!” Valentine flashed me her Big Sister look. “It’s New York City. You can find anything here.”
“Okay, but let’s unpack first.”
Just as I said this, we heard a knock on the door. It was Clover, saying the magic words: “Girls, would you like to go shopping?”
3
Uncommon Cottons
Clover walked like a real New Yorker, elbows out and eyes straight ahead. When she went outside, she took off her glasses with the rhinestones and put on a pair of huge vanilla-colored sunglasses.
“I got them with Theo in Paris,” she said by way of explanation. Then, to Valentine, “You were born there, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Valentine, with a little bit of pride in her voice that I knew her well enough to recognize.
Clover changed the subject by asking us: “Don’t you two have sunglasses?”
We shook our heads.
“Oh, I forgot, San Francisco! Those wonderful dreamy fogs rolling in. I love it, it feels so good on my skin. But in New York in the summer, you’ll want to get sunglasses. That will be fun, picking sunglasses out.”
I was glad that somebody had finally said something good about San Francisco. I felt at such a disadvantage, having been born in California and not Paris, like Val. Or even just the East Coast, where Clover was from and which was obviously superior to the West, or why would Aunt Theo have taken such a strong stand against ever coming to visit us?
But I’d always had this feeling about the East. We had been in New York City one time before when Valentine was eleven and I was eight and the San Francisco Girls Chorus got to perform at Alice Tully Hall, which is part of Lincoln Center. Dad’s big on music and still talks about it: My daughters performed at Alice Tully Hall.
So we performed at Alice Tully Hall and went to tea at the Plaza and had our pictures taken in front of the portrait of Eloise and went on a pony ride in Central Park. We went to the MoMA and the Met and the Museum of Natural History. We both made up our minds that one day we’d come here again.
You know what I noticed right away when we got here? New York has the most beautiful light. San Francisco is beautiful just generally but New York has this light—it just has this richness. It has different dimensions. By now it was going on 6:00 p.m., the heat lifting a bit, and we walked down one of the side streets with all the marvelous old brownstones in all the different shades of brick: red, pink, beige. We don’t have much brick like that in San Francisco.
“Oh, this way,” said Clover, and we followed her down another one of the side streets till we got to this cool vintage store.
“Oh,” Valentine and I swooned, gazing at a full-skirted, fluffy orange dress in the window.
“You could pull off that color,” said Clover to Valentine but not, I couldn’t help but notice, to me.
We went inside and exclaimed over stiff crinolines, bunny-soft cashmeres, tiny beaded purses.
The lady behind the counter started talking to Clover. She was positively ancient but cool-looking. Her eyelids were all sultry with black liner and she was wearing this black linen sort of smock-dress with coils of turquoise on both of her wrists. They looked like underwater creatures, those bracelets, like they might spring to life and bite you.
I eavesdropped on their conversation, catching certain parts.
“But whatever became of the historian?”
“It didn’t work out.”