Lauren knows this house so well. She may know it better than she knows her own family home, because at home, she was never paying attention, whereas here—there was always a lesson to be learned here. She can scoff at Lulu now, but Lauren was once in her thrall. She’s long since grown out of that. As any child, with any mother, she now regards Lulu as something less complex than what she once seemed: just another person, making another set of mistakes.
Lulu’s crammed the house so full of things that you’re forever noticing details previously unremarked upon. In the powder room on the second floor, Lauren recalls the wallpaper—chinoiserie in blue and white, panoramas of pagodas and flying creatures, but she doesn’t remember the ornamental shelf over the toilet, with its chubby soapstone Buddha, all flopping tits and squinting eyes, a tiny, round box, malachite, swirling, an impossible green. She opens the box. A lone earring, a pearl, missing its back; a half-spent book of matches from a restaurant in midtown; two Italian lire.
She lifts the seat of the toilet, pushes down her pants, sits, confronts a little wrought-iron table, the kind you’d leave in your garden, painted orange, piled high with copies of the New York Review of Books. It would never have occurred to her parents that some guests might like to read while they shit. What happened in her parents’ bathrooms was a matter wholly unrelated to the rest of life; thus, soaps in the shapes of seashells, clustered together in a little porcelain dish, tiny towels with silken flowers on them that were useless for drying your hands, an apple cinnamon–scented candle flickering decorously throughout the evening.