“I just suddenly thought of her; I don’t know why.”
Amanda snickered, and Stem gave a groan. They knew why. (B. J., with her strident voice and her grating laugh, had been one of their mother’s more irksome orphans.) Denny, though, studied Jeannie for a moment without smiling, and then he turned to Atta and said, “I think you’ve made a mistake.”
“Oh?” she said. “ ‘Two-faced’ is an incorrect term?”
“In this situation, yes. ‘Polite’ would more accurate. They’re trying to be polite. They don’t much like you, so they don’t invite you to their homes, but they’re doing their best to be nice to you, and so that’s why they ask how you are and tell you it’s good to see you.”
Abby said, “Oh! Denny!”
“What.”
“And also,” Atta told him, apparently unfazed, “they say, ‘Have a nice weekend, Atta.’ How should I do that? This is what I should ask them.”
“Right,” Denny said. He smiled at his mother. She sat back in her chair and gave a sigh.
“Behold!” Amanda’s Hugh crowed, spearing a slice of beef with his carving fork. “See this, Red?”
“Eh?”
“This slice has your name on it. Observe the paper-thinness.”
“Oh, okay, thank you, Hugh,” Red said.
Amanda’s Hugh was famous in the family for asking, once, why there seemed to be a diploma under the azalea bushes. He’d been referring to the white PVC drainage pipe leading from the basement sump pump. The family never got over it. (“Seen any diplomas out in the shrubbery lately, Hugh?”) They liked him well enough, but they marveled at how astonishingly impractical he was, how out of touch with matters they considered essential. He couldn’t even replace a wall switch! He was trim and model-handsome and accustomed to admiration, and he kept seizing on new careers and then abandoning them in a fit of impatience. Currently, he owned a restaurant called Thanksgiving that served only turkey dinners.
Jeannie’s Hugh, by contrast, was a handyman who worked at the college Jeannie’d gone to. The other girls had had their hearts set on pre-med students, but evidently one look at unassuming Hugh, with his sawdust-colored beard and his tool belt slung low around his hips, had made Jeannie feel instantly at home. Now, here was someone she could relate to! They married during her senior year, causing some discomfort among the college administrators.
At the moment, he was asking Elise all about her ballet, which was considerate of him. (She’d been left out of the conversation up till then.) “Is it on account of ballet that you’re wearing your hair so tight?” he asked, and Elise said, “Yes, Madame O’Leary requires it,” and sat up taller—a reed-thin, ostentatiously poised child—and touched the little doughnut on the tippy-top of her head.
“But what if you were frizzy-haired and couldn’t make it stay in place?” he asked. “Or what if you were one of those people whose hair will only grow so long?”
“No exceptions are made,” Elise told him severely. “We have to have a chignon.”
“Well, shoot!”
“And also these flowing skirts,” Amanda told him. “They tie them on over their leotards. Everyone expects tutus, but tutus are just for performances.”
Abby said, “Oh, Jeannie, remember when Elise was just born and we dressed her in a tutu?”
“Do I!” Jeannie said. She laughed. “She had three of them, remember? We dressed her in one tutu after the other.”
“Your mom had asked us to babysit,” Abby told Elise. “It was the first time she was leaving you and she felt safer starting with family. So we told her, ‘Go on! Go!’ and the instant she was gone we stripped you down to your diaper and started trying clothes on you. Every single piece of clothing you’d gotten at your baby shower.”
“I never knew that,” Amanda said, while Elise looked pleased and self-conscious.
“Oh, we’d been dying to get our hands on all those cunning outfits. Not just the tutus but a darling little sailor dress and a bikini swimsuit and then—remember, Jeannie?—navy-ticking coveralls with a hammer loop.”
“Of course I remember,” Jeannie said. “I was the one who gave them to her.”
“Well, we were sort of punch-drunk,” Abby explained to Atta. “Elise was the first grandchild.”
“Or else not,” Denny said.
“What, sweetie?”
“You seem to be forgetting that Susan was the first grandchild.”
“Oh! Well, of course. Yes, I just meant the first grandchild who was close; I mean geographically close. I wouldn’t forget Susan for the world!”
“How is Susan?” Jeannie asked.
“She’s good,” Denny said.
He ladled gravy over his meat and passed the tureen to Atta, who squinted into it and passed it on.
“What’s she doing with her summer?” Abby asked.
“She’s in some kind of music program.”
“Music, how nice! Is she musical?”
“I guess she must be.”
“Which instrument?”
“Clarinet?” Denny said. “Clarinet.”
“Oh, I figured maybe French horn.”