“I don’t think it’s wise for us to be in the same place,” her father said, doffing his glasses and chewing on an end.
“Dad, you could have run into him anytime. All winter. You live in the same town. I mean, why do any of this if you actually care what he thinks?”
“I do not,” her father said. “I do not care what that man thinks. Not one bit.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Amanda, you—I mean, I know you were angry with me initially, that I did not consult you before that first column. But please tell me that all this time later, you understand. The tragedy here is not the loss of Bob’s good name, Amanda. Please tell me you understand that.”
“I’m not stupid,” she said.
“Then act like someone who isn’t,” her father said. “Bob is not the victim. The victims are people who have never even heard his name, whatever its value. You know that.”
She nodded, once.
“Tell me you aren’t going to get into this with him tonight?”
“Of course not. If there’s any unpleasantness, it’ll be painful for you. That’s why I’m worried about tonight. For you.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. We mustn’t do anything to make this difficult for me.”
Her father held the box with the candle in both hands, letting his arms sag as if he was carrying something much heavier.
“I know it’s been a rough year,” he said. “You know how I know that? Because you have become absolutely vicious on this topic. The way you speak to me, about this, it’s gotten quite ugly. I thought I was getting through to you, just now. I thought we were communicating. All year I’ve thought, if I can just make my daughter understand who’s at fault here, then I’ve done my job as a parent. But I see that, in this respect, I’ve failed.”
He began to turn away, then had one final thought.
“You wanted to go to this damn thing. So we’re going. And I’m paying for the privilege. So I’d watch your tone.”
He walked back to the cash register, offering the young salesgirl a tired, still-boyish smile. She laughed at something he said, reaching out to take his credit card between her index and middle fingers.
They should just do it, Amanda thought. That’s what she would tell Madison, tonight. Just give the stuff to the “reporter,” who didn’t sound all that legitimate, honestly. Just give it to him, let it be his problem from now on. Nothing bad would actually happen. There was no way Madison had enough information, enough power, to cause any actual harm.
Either way, somebody—Madison’s father or her own—would have to stand up in public and say those words: I was wrong. I made a mistake.
That’s what’s been missing so far this year, Amanda thought. That’ll ease things up around here. That might make this the kind of place I can imagine staying in for another two years without putting my head in the oven.
She’d read that phrase recently, in English, studying Sylvia Plath as part of the spring poetry unit. She knew it wasn’t literal; Sylvia had just shut herself in the kitchen and tucked towels between doors and floor. It wasn’t in particularly good taste, either, to invoke suicide as linguistic flourish. They’d sat through countless school assemblies, all their lives, about how hurtful casual wordplay could be, how easy it was to rub your own cavalier attitudes like salt into the wounds of others.
But the phrase itself was just so tempting, so appealing on the tongue. And the image itself, the idea that someone could just kneel down and put her face into the heat. There was something undeniably memorable, romantic even, about that.
Her father came up behind her again.
“What are you thinking about?” he said. Amanda decided not to lie.
“Sylvia Plath.”
“Jesus,” he moaned, rolling his eyes.
“You know she put her head in the oven.”
“Everyone knows that. That, trust me, is the only reason she’s famous.”
“Hardly,” Amanda said.
FORTY-ONE
On the night of the Welsh party, Madison went into her mother’s bathroom to watch her get ready. This was not something she’d ever done as a child; there was no echo of past routine, no remembered tenderness in the act itself to make the evening any easier. But still she did it, walked across the second floor and into her mother’s part of the house.
Isabel leaned forward at the waist, her face thrust toward the mirrored cabinet above her sink. She was still wearing only her bra and a half-slip. Two cabinet doors had been left open, the mirrored sides facing each other. When Isabel tilted her head back and leaned forward, her neck and breasts floating toward the mirrors, her reflection repeated into infinity. Dozens and dozens of identical Isabel faces springing forward and receding into some illusory horizontal distance, in the unreachable depths of the green glass.
Madison sat down at the vanity.
“You’ll wrinkle your dress,” Isabel said without turning to look. The dress had been waiting on Madison’s bed when she came in from school that afternoon. It was floor length, silk that poured over her hip bones and pooled at her feet like water, bile green in some lights, yellow gold in others. When she’d found it spread across her taut white bedspread, it reminded her of a half-healed bruise.
Madison stood up again, without comment.
“Oh, go ahead,” Isabel said smoothly, drawing down her bottom lid to apply a thin line of eyeliner to its inner rim. “What do we care if we show up wrinkled for Suzanne Welsh.”
They cared very much; this was the first night the entire family, all five of them, would be going out together, as a team, since the summer. But Madison knew what her mother was doing, knew that sometimes you just say things to fill the air, to shield each one of you from the other’s scrutiny. She nodded.
“Is Dad ready?”
“I’m not sure, sweetheart.”
Madison looked longingly at the chilled glass of white wine sitting on the sink, where a bar of soap should be.
“Is Lily going to come? To watch the boys?”
“They’re going to eat with us, then she’ll come pick them up as soon as dinner is over. I know they’re excited, and I don’t want to keep them from tonight, especially. It’s important for them to see your dad, out, around other people.”
It’s important for me, too, Madison thought.
Madison strained to hear any signs of life from beyond the door that led to her father’s antechamber. He couldn’t possibly still be downstairs, could he? If he hadn’t started to get dressed, then he wasn’t coming.