After each Oprah episode, she was depleted. To have eighty years of preconceived notions shattered, and then rearranged, in just forty-five minutes. But she also felt a new calm as she and Maddie sat in the wicker butterfly chairs in the sunroom surrounded by the ficus and palm trees. Together, they summarized (recapped, Maddie called it) that day’s episode, sharing their favorite moments. Her granddaughter, the na?ve thing, loved when Oprah cried, her faux lash–fringed eyes sparkling in the studio lights as she bit her lower lip. As if, Veronica thought, the woman had ever held back a single tear!
Today’s topic had focused on young girls and their increasingly mature sexuality, and Veronica saw how it had made Maddie squirm. Oprah had invited a sexual psychologist—was that really a job a person could have?—to talk about girls today having sex earlier than ever.
As she and Maddie sipped their cooling tea and nibbled at carrot cake Rosalita had frosted with cream cheese, the forest’s denuded leaves framed by the picture window, Veronica knew she should say something. It was her responsibility, after all. But Oprah’s open, and even chatty, talk of birth control and orgasms and masturbation (a topic Veronica thought would’ve been censored) had made her want to turn the TV off. Eighty years old, she thought, and still a prude. Terrified to talk about what had been unnamable in her father’s house back in Palmyra. Her stepmother Virgie had called the act of sexual intercourse “coupling,” which had felt two steps shy of the mating the cows and sheep did in the barn.
As Maddie shifted in her chair, sighing dreamily—a girl in love, Veronica thought—the sun caught the red in her hair so it glowed coppery. Veronica saw that the girl would, someday, be beautiful. As Ginny had been. Veronica wanted, badly, to summon the right words—the talk she’d avoided with Ginny, assuming, stupidly, she thought, that Ginny would learn about sex from her girlfriends, not some grease monkey from West Avalon who got her pregnant a few weeks shy of her nineteenth birthday.
She tucked a cigarette between her lips and struck her lighter. It wouldn’t catch.
The cigarette fell, rolling under her chair.
“Goddammit.” She threw the lighter across the table so it clanked into the sterling sugar bowl. “Oh my, it seems as if I’m having a tantrum.”
“Here,” Maddie said. “Let me help.”
Her little charade had worked, Veronica saw. The girl was paying attention now.
She watched her granddaughter’s face, focused and serious, as she held the lighter under Veronica’s cigarette, the paper catching with a sizzle.
“Thank you, dear,” Veronica said. “I’ve realized, that in old age, one’s most gallant saviors are other women.”
She offered her granddaughter the pack. Then pulled it back.
“Silly me. I’ve forgotten how healthy you kids are these days. Say no to this and that, et cetera. All those public service commercials.”
“No, it’s okay,” Maddie said, peering over her shoulder as if her parents might walk through White Eagle’s doors any moment. “I do like a cigarette. Just once in a while.”
“Here.” Veronica slid the pack across the table. “I won’t tell.”
The girl lit the cigarette, took a deep breath, and exhaled. She was transformed—a little further from girlhood and a step closer to womanhood. Relaxed and poised. This, Veronica thought, is what they call bonding—a phrase she’d learned from Oprah.
“You’re almost a woman now.”
Her granddaughter paused, and with teacup in one hand, cigarette in the other, she reminded Veronica of Ginny. Hadn’t she had tea with her daughter and shared cigarettes? If she had, it was so long ago, she couldn’t remember. She hoped they had.
“I wish my parents—especially my dad—would stop treating me like a kid.”
“He’s a tough cookie, your father.”
Maddie laughed.
“What is it?” Veronica asked.
“You sound just like Mom. She says that all the time. ‘Tough cookie.’”
“You remind me, very much, of your mother.”
“Is that”—Maddie paused—“a good thing?”
The question surprised Veronica. “Of course.”
The ash at the end of Maddie’s cigarette fell into the dainty porcelain saucer. For today’s tea, Veronica had chosen a Shelley fine bone china set decorated with a lovely pink thistle.
“Oops, I just ashed in your fancy dish.”
Veronica stubbed her cigarette out in her own saucer, not caring if the delicate hand-painted flower burned away.
“Well,” she said, “it’s a good thing your crabby great-grandmother Pencott isn’t here to make a fuss. She could be such a bitch.”
Maddie’s mouth fell open. That feeling of surprising someone, it filled Veronica.
“When I was young, they had a saying for those girls on the show. We called them ‘broken-blossomed.’”
Maddie’s face shifted. It had taken Veronica a few weeks to read her granddaughter—not just what lay on the composed surface, but what wriggled underneath like the minnows that darted across the sandbar when the tide was out. Now she saw fear.
“Were you,” Maddie paused, “one of those girls?”
“No,” Veronica said, “but maybe I wish I had been? There are things much worse.”
“Like what?” Her granddaughter was almost whispering.
“Like knowing nothing. Like waiting for your husband of just a few hours in a room in an inn. Wearing the long white nightgown you’ve worn your whole life.” Veronica laughed. “It even had a high collar. Tiny pearl buttons all the way up the back. A terror to undo.”
The girl looked grateful. “It can be kind of scary,” she said. “Even when you do, sort of, know what to expect. But how could you know nothing? Nothing—really?”
“Nothing,” Veronica said. It was almost impossible for her to believe it herself. “That whole first year, I thought it was something people did with their clothes on. I was too scared to take my nightgown off.”
There was a new look on her granddaughter’s face. Pity.
“And your grandfather, well he’d had it with those buttons. Swore a blue streak.”
They laughed and Veronica was relieved to return to their lighthearted banter. She used the tongs to place two chocolate-dipped macaroons on her granddaughter’s plate, her hands shaking so they barely made the journey from platter to plate.
Maddie nibbled on a macaroon and then let out a long sigh.
“So many sighs today, ma petite amie,” Veronica said as she sipped from her steaming cup of oolong.
“I’m just…” The girl paused. Another sigh as she shifted sideways in the chair so her smooth muscled calves bounced over the wicker arm. Normally, Veronica would protest, but she’d learned to stop herself from critiquing Maddie. She would treat her, she thought, with more kindness than Ginny, whom she’d felt a duty to straighten, enhance, polish. And look how that had turned out.
“Is it that boy from the Castle?”
Maddie looked surprised. Concerned even. She glanced at the hallway and Veronica knew she was imagining the front door, the slate path to the cottage, her father.
“I may have one foot in the grave,” Veronica said. “But I’m still a woman.”
“It’s just that…” Another pause. Maddie twirled her ring. The silver band that read LUCKY. Probably, Veronica thought, a dime-store purchase. She reminded herself to leave her jeweled rings to Maddie. The star sapphire matched the girl’s eyes.