“Amazing! You’ll have to tell her I said hello. And congratulations and all that. Wait, are you married?”
“Uh, no.” Lauren shakes her head, smiling to communicate that this isn’t a bad thing; her being unmarried is simply a thing. She needs another subject to change to, quickly. “You know, we should all get together some time.”
“I would love that,” Jill says, so enthusiastically it’s clear she’s misread the sincerity.
“Me too,” Lauren says and feels, suddenly, that she would, in fact, love it. Jill Hansen, maybe she’s been missing a Jill Hansen in her life. Lauren is not lonely, exactly, though she is often alone. She has Sarah to tell things to, yes, but no one to whom she might tell things about Sarah. She doesn’t actually believe Jill Hansen will fill this role—Jill Hansen will presumably be too busy caring for her offspring, though now that she thinks about it, where are those offspring, and why is Jill Hansen, a new mother, roaming the streets unencumbered?—but there is something unexpectedly appealing about the idea of the three of them, Sarah, Lauren, Jill, “getting together,” even as Lauren knows it will never happen.
Chapter 6
Her mother’s dress is out of the question. Lulu and Huck married in 1970. Lulu, stick thin, twenty-four, gigantic eyes rimmed in mascara, an earlier marriage (an impulsive four-day union to a middling Mexican musician) annulled. Lulu, then as now, looked incredible. The pictures capture it vividly: chiffon, ruched and belted at the waist, an embellished collar up the neck, her long arms bare but for a gold cuff, the dress trailing to the floor but light enough that it’s drifting, seems to be moving even in the picture for which they posed. Huck’s suit, basic black and not altogether that dated, though the jacket was cut long, and the big tortoiseshell glasses feel very much a relic of the time, as do his sideburns. The picture has hung in the kitchen for Sarah’s entire life.
The dress must be somewhere: Lulu is sentimental. Nevertheless, it’s not for Sarah. The truth, unspoken but many times mulled over, is that she looks nothing like Lulu. An irony, that one, a missed opportunity: the great beauty whose genes turn out to be recessive. It doesn’t make Sarah laugh, even now, nor, though, does it make her cry. There’s little point in that. She’s her father’s daughter: as tall as him, the very same posture, the exact chin, the echoing laugh, the same way of holding a fork—that weird specificity of DNA. She’s learned Lulu: the cock of the head, the purposeful stride, the girlish tendency to touch her own hair, self-taught comportment, a secret project of Sarah’s when she was twelve. Of course, she’d known, much earlier than that, even, how genetics disappoint. Lulu’s hair, just like the hair on that disembodied bust of Barbie, a birthday present on which she was meant to practice the feminine arts, could be pinned up prettily, pulled over her shoulder casually, or folded into a lush, delicious chignon. Lulu wore it to her waist, once upon a time, a much younger woman, though now, in her sixties, it’s mannishly cropped, which has the effect of making her face appear even finer. Those drugstore elastics never seemed to do anything to Sarah’s hair but choke it, like a too-tight bandage that makes your finger swell.