“We’re starting that in five minutes, though half of the women are always late, and unless we rectify this cheese situation—the cheeses are really so hard…” Margaret trailed off, looking quite disturbed.
“I can do it. Handle it. The cheese situation. If you just point me in the direction of the kitchen? Just a few seconds in the microwave, I know it’s terrible, but it will make them soften.” Evelyn could hear her mother’s voice: Everyone appreciates a helpful guest. And her own: Sing for your supper, Evelyn.
“Yes!” Margaret clapped. “How clever! Rosa does not know what to do with cheeses, and they are blocks of ice, practically. A cheese needs to breathe! It wants to be out in the world! You don’t have to go. I’ll call her in here and tell her. Wonderful. Wonderful!”
Evelyn was looking behind Margaret, trying to figure out why the rosy-cheeked drummer boy in the painting seemed so familiar, when she heard Souse say, “Push, should I wait in the lobby, so they don’t give the macaron fellow a hard time?”
The round O of Evelyn’s mouth matched that of the drummer boy. The apartment appeared to lift up and start spinning around her, and she saw that vase, that table, that rug from years ago. Her hand closed and dampened, as though it were still wrapped around that wadded Tinker Day ribbon, as though it, too, remembered the pressure her ten-year-old self felt to try to hide everything, to try to fix everything, to plaster over her mother’s silences and inappropriate grasping and make New York what she and her mother both hoped it could be. But no, Evelyn thought. No. She was not that girl anymore. She would not let herself be unmoored by some old memory, by some past weakness. She had changed. She could show she belonged. She just had to show she belonged.
She tried not to stare at Push, now with darker hair and in a different apartment but otherwise the same woman as all those years ago. As a third woman who had joined them discussed finishing school in Lausanne, Evelyn unclenched her hand and forced her heart rate to slow.
“Such a shame that the girls these days insist on finishing schooling in New York,” the woman said, and Evelyn shook her head in sympathetic solidarity.
“This is why we must put them through this debutante season, isn’t it? The training is so lacking,” said Push.
“All of us are, to a degree, insecure, so anything that gives us confidence can’t hurt,” said the Lausanne woman, whose calves were thick with muscle.
“Well, American schools used to be different,” Push said. “At Hollins, we were required to wear gloves to dinner, if you can believe it, and take flower-arranging classes. Of course, it was a hundred years ago.”
“Hollins?” said Camilla, stepping off of the elevator at just the wrong time. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Push. Hi, Mrs. Egstrom. Sorry I’m late. Didn’t your mother go to Hollins, Evelyn?”
“Oh? What’s her name?” Push and Souse said together.
“She’s so much older than you, I’m sure you didn’t meet,” Evelyn said. “She was”—she did some subtraction quickly, trying to find a big enough age gap that the women wouldn’t inquire further—“class of ’fifty-three.”
“My!” said Push with a frown.
Realizing she had just cast her mother as somewhere north of seventy, Evelyn let out a Tinker Bell laugh. “I was a late-in-life baby,” she said.
“I have one of those, too,” said Push with a wink. “Wythe’s probably setting fire to the tartlets as we speak.”
Wythe, Evelyn thought. She remembered Push having a small child, back when Push was a Van Rensselaer.
In the anteroom—Evelyn was happy she now knew what an anteroom was—the hostess committee gathered for a brief meeting. The ball’s chairwoman, Agathe, with wispy white hair and the thin frame of a twentysomething, tallied the debs for this year—three Spence, two Brearley, four école, and one Chapin—then admonished the members. “We did an outing, as you are aware, to the children’s center in Harlem in September. It was the only site visit of the year, and the number of people who came could be counted on less than two hands. We must decide whether we ought to continue combining the ball with a charity component when clearly our members have only lukewarm interest in that.”
“I think the ball is focus enough—we have so many other fund-raisers,” said an old and watery-voiced woman in the back, either turning her hearing aid on or off; Evelyn couldn’t tell. “I think it’s lovely to see the young girls learn how to dance and how to behave. Perhaps the site visits and all of that ought to be secondary.”
“I went to finishing school in Lausanne,” boomed the stout brunette, “and there we learned how to speak, how to carry ourselves in society, which the girls are learning as debutantes. I, too, think that’s a marvelous element.”