Sarah’s room shares the top floor with Huck’s office. The second floor is divided between her parents’ room and a guest room, frequently occupied. Lauren strolls past the line of women—it’s always women, these lines—waiting outside of the second-floor powder room, past the door to Huck and Lulu’s inner sanctum, which now as ever has a little folk art painting, a portrait of a girl, strung on a silk ribbon, hanging from a nail on the door, because Lulu, in her enthusiastic collecting, long ago used up all the available wall space. The stairs creak horribly. There’s an unspoken consensus among the party guests that it’s fair to wander to the second floor, queue up there for the bathroom, but anything farther than that is an intrusion, so there are raised eyebrows as Lauren continues past the scrum and ascends to the top floor. She tries to look proprietary.
On the walls: frames, a collage of photographs, hundreds of them. Photographs are meant to be forever, but they’re not. The quality of light, the once-fashionable haircuts and colors of clothing: You can tell these are old from afar, so old they might as well be cave paintings. Everything’s done tastefully, under plastic, but the way the pictures are mounted seems somehow passé, a relic. Lauren doesn’t need to look closely, doesn’t need to scan the pictures to pick out her own face: there beside Sarah’s, girlish attempts at makeup and comic grimaces instead of smiles, on their way out, something to do with boys, she can’t recall now. Or there, hair pulled back into a ponytail that snaked (could it be?) through the gap in the back of a corduroy, suede-brimmed baseball cap. That day, class field trip to a farm, or Storm King, or the Noguchi Museum, something of that order. And Sarah, of course: here, proudly atop a horse, because she had been one of those girls, a horse girl, until the age of thirteen, when it started seeming babyish, like Barbie, Archie comics, drawing with crayons. Sarah as a toddler, utterly recognizable (long nose, wild hair), studying one of her dad’s fat books, a mocking frown on her face, modeling his glasses to boot. Sarah, in overalls, buried in necklaces, because she’d had that phase of making necklaces, stringing beads onto cord and calling it her art. Lauren still has one of those necklaces.
Lauren thinks of her own parents, their suburban split-level with a far less architecturally interesting stairwell, which is also hung with pictures of the children, though only three, one of each of them. Her parents don’t decorate in quite the same way as Lulu; they prefer the store-bought to the timeworn. The door is closed. She knocks.
“You hiding?”
“Just a minute!”
“I said, you hiding?” Lauren jiggles the knob, which catches. Locked. “It’s me.”
The door opens. “Shit. You scared me.” Sarah, fanning away smoke, guilty. “Come in here.”
Lauren closes the door behind her quickly, absurdly afraid of being caught at something. She can’t help it. On the top floor of this house everything she does seems somehow girlish. Sarah drops onto the bed. She’s wearing a navy dress, a little conservative, something that blouses and gathers at the waist in a way that implies the early stages of pregnancy or one’s fifth decade. It’s not a great color for her, but she’s always drawn to strong, declarative shades—blue, black, red—that don’t flatter her skin. She’s somehow not mindful of how she looks in them. Lauren has always been a little jealous of Sarah’s obliviousness to certain things.
There are two beds, matching headboards, matching upholstered benches at their feet. The bench at the foot of the left bed, that’s where Lauren dropped her overnight bag, nights she came to stay. The bench at the foot of the right bed, that’s where Sarah discarded sweaters and shirts, the ones she’d rejected that morning, with the labels Lauren loved, Benetton this, Gap that, Ralph Lauren this, Donna Karan that, the last less hand-me-down than a pilfered-from courtesy of Lulu, cashmere as perfect as a baby’s skin. The housekeeper would come up in the afternoons, put everything away.
“Fuck me, it’s like a museum in here.” Lauren sits on the edge of the bed, her bed. She seems to swear more under this roof, shades of her adolescent self.
Sarah laughs. “A museum to the excellence that is me.” She’s got a pipe in her hand, glass, emblazoned with colorful daisies. “Exhibit A.”
“Exhibit A is trials, not museums.”
“Do you want to get stoned or not?”
“Where did you even find that thing?” Lauren recognizes it, vaguely, studies it with revulsion but also fondness, like a hideous sweater that once made you feel beautiful.
“The jewelry box, in the little drawer, next to earrings you shoplifted from Bloomingdale’s, I think?”
Lauren knows just which earrings Sarah is referring to. “You had pot hidden in here, too?”
Sarah hands her the glass pipe and a tiny, lime-green lighter. She shakes her head. “That, believe it or not, is from the personal collection of Mr. Henry ‘Huck’ Thomas.”
Lauren is holding her breath, feeling the smoke build in her lungs and then it’s in her nose, as if by magic, and her mouth. She opens it, and it escapes—mere wisps. She’d imagined more. “You’re fucking kidding me,” she says with a cough.
“I’m fucking not, my dear.” Sarah has taken off her shoes, folds her feet up under her body so she’s in a sitting position but still looks very attentive. “Arthritis. Doctor’s orders.”
“Oh?” Lauren is coughing more. It’s been a long time since she got high.