Wharton looks up soulfully, then begins to lick the bedspread.
Tipper putters from the dresser to the dressing table, in and out of the closet, and back and forth to her suitcases. When I was sick, we were often just the two of us, but since school ended, I have only seen my mother with my sisters around.
She changes her dress and combs her hair at her dressing table. “Come here.” She pulls out a wide, shallow jewelry drawer lined with black felt. “I keep things here year-round,” she says, touching her fingers to the pieces. “That way it’s like getting presents every time I open this drawer. I forget what I have, and then it’s like, oh, hello! Aren’t you pretty?”
A game like that is typical of Tipper. She looks for ways to squeeze any last drop of pleasure from a situation, to create joy and surprise whenever she can. “This was my granny’s ring,” she says, holding up a square-cut diamond. She goes on, pointing out pieces, ancient jade and newer sapphires. She sets the treasures gingerly on the table so I may try them on. Each one is a piece of our feminine family history, stretching back through her lineage and Harris’s.
One is her engagement ring, an emerald surrounded by diamonds. My parents met at Harvard Radcliffe, where Harris proposed to Tipper four times before she said yes. “I wore her down,” he always tells us. “She accepted me just to shut me up.”
My mother laughs when he tells that story. “The fourth time you figured out to buy a ring,” she reminds him.
Now, she pulls out a double-strand of dark, glowing pearls, deep gray with galaxies spinning inside them. “Your father bought these for our second anniversary, when I was pregnant with you.” She lets me hold them. They are slippery, and heavier than I expected. She takes them back and clasps them around her neck, where they glisten against the blue of her fresh dress. “It was a very meaningful gift,” she says. “Things weren’t easy then.”
“Why not?”
“I can hardly remember.” She reaches out to touch my cheek. “But I’d like you to have them someday.”
“Okay.”
“The black pearls,” she says, fingering them at her throat, “are Carrie’s.”
Beneath the drawer liner, I catch a glimpse of a photograph, edged in white, with faded orange color. I can only see the bottom right corner. “What’s the picture?” I ask, reaching for it.
She stops my hand. “It’s nothing.”
“Is it Rosemary?”
A look crosses her face. Grief. “No.”
I put my hands behind my back. “I wanted to see it if it was Rosemary.”
My mother looks at me, and for a moment I think she’s going to cry—breaking down in tears over her lost baby. Or maybe, instead, she will tell me it’s okay to miss Rosemary. To be thinking about her all the time, the way I do.
But she steels herself. “Know what?” she says. “I think you should wear them tonight.”
She takes off the black pearls and fastens them around my neck.
8.
LET ME TELL you more about Penny and Bess. People often comment that we are like princesses in a (Western) fairy tale. Three tall blondes with willowy figures. Copies of our mother. We are appealing to people, that way. They like our serious eyes and our merry laughs. We might be waiting to be rescued, people think. We are white cotton and sandy feet, old money and lilacs, each one.
But we are easy to tell apart.
Bess (Elizabeth Jane Taft Sinclair) is fourteen, always running to catch up with me and Penny. She is the hard worker, the people pleaser, the martyr. She cooks with our mother in the kitchen, churning ice cream and baking pies. She sorts her lip gloss by shade, lining up the tubes on a pretty tray on her dresser. She stacks her shirts and sweaters in color-coded piles.
Bess has acne on her forehead. She can’t leave it alone—smearing creams on it, tonics, alcohol, concealer. She wants to take care of that acne, conquer it. She is like our father that way. She has absorbed his work ethic and his pride in that ethic, but also his indignation when effort isn’t clearly rewarded. Bess is a Liberty print, a jar of sharpened pencils, a weekly organizer filled out in neat handwriting. She isn’t always pleasant—not at all. But she is always good.
Penny (Penelope Mirren Taft Sinclair) has a remarkable ability to make people like her, selfish though she is. They want to touch her. She is the beauty of the family, the one you’d pick out of a photograph. When Granny M was alive, she used to remark on it—the magnetism of Penny’s physical presence. “What a belle,” she’d often say, pulling Penny aside and giving her butterscotch candy.
She labeled me “a good girl” and Bess a “little helper.”
If my hair is the color of butter and Bess’s early spring sunshine, Penny’s is cream. She is sixteen and a sleek greyhound of a person. She plays hard when she wants to. She works hard almost never. She loves beautiful things and despises the people she despises with an inflexible hatred.
Penny likes order, but in a different way than Bess does. She wants things to happen easily, without conflict. “Just be normal,” she says to me. Meaning, don’t be angry, don’t rock the boat, just go along. Signs of unrest and turmoil bother Penny. She turns cold and quiet, and that cold and quiet protects her from her feelings. What I mean is, she prefers a smooth surface.
Me, I am an athlete and a narcotics addict.
A leader and a mourner.
On the outside, I am gray-eyed and butter blond, with a strong line to my jaw now, and a mouth full of braces. Pale skin, pink cheeks. A little taller than my sisters, taller than a lot of boys my age. I have the confident walk and good shoulders of an excellent softball player. I stand up in front of crowds with a smile. I fix my sisters’ problems. Those are the qualities anyone can see.
But my insides are made of seawater, warped wood, and rusty nails.
9.
THE MORNING AFTER our arrival, I am up at six. I pull on a sweater over my nightgown, since mornings on Beechwood are chilly. On my way downstairs for coffee, I pause at the door to Rosemary’s old room.
Inside, it is bare. The bunk beds are made up neatly with old quilts from my mother’s collection. Used to be, Rosemary kept about thirty stuffed animals on the upper bunk with her, mostly lions. But they are not here anymore. Not even her favorite lion, a floppy white one named Shampoo.
Rosemary’s books are absent, too: old picture books and chapter books, collections of fairy tales. Gone are her Barbies, her spiral drawing thing, her Magic 8 Ball. The room’s built-in shelves display a few pretty objects I don’t remember—a green-and-white vase, a few books on botanical subjects. When I open the closet, it is empty except for some neatly folded blankets.
Tipper must have worked hard to put every reminder of Rosemary out of sight, not wishing to cause pain to anyone who might wander in here without thinking.
I climb to the top bunk, where my sister used to sleep.
I should have played more “lion family” with her.
I should have done her hair in French braids, though Bess did that.
I should have made cookies with her more, though I did sometimes.
She was the baby who wanted to go up and down the porch steps a thousand times, right leg always stepping up, left leg following. The four-year-old in tutus, running along the walkways with a magic wand. The seven-year-old in a snorkel mask and flippers, stomping in frustration that no one wanted to take her down to the beach. The ten-year-old with a battered stack of Diana Wynne Jones novels; asking for seconds of strawberry rhubarb pie; baking cookies studded with butterscotch chips; demanding I read her fairy tales, even though she was too old to be read to.
“Mother cleared this out when?” Penny stands in the door. Her shiny, pale hair is chaotic from sleep. She wears her green North Forest gym shorts, an old chamois shirt, and beloved slippers that have lamb faces on the toes.
“Don’t know. Maybe Luda did it last fall.”