Sally was at the kitchen table on East Seneca with half a glass of lemonade in front of her and our mother on the phone. The house, empty on a late Friday afternoon in July because Harriet had gone up to Rochester to see a friend, was very still, though overhead a desultory fan circled, moving the warm air around. She was drumming her fingers on the tabletop, the now-worthless “brown furniture” table once given pride of place in the Greene dining room. It had recently been treated with some homemade wood paste of Harriet’s, and was glowing. Over the past couple of months, Sally had acquainted herself with every piece of furniture in the house (covered and uncovered) by means of this special concoction. It wasn’t about banishing dirt, either; it was about resurrection.
“I told you I had an internship,” Sally said when Johanna stopped talking. Our mother was on an island off the coast of Massachusetts, and she wanted to know why Sally wasn’t there, too.
“That was months ago. If you’re that interested in antiques, I’m sure we could have found you something in Edgartown. Are you?”
“What?” Sally asked. She wasn’t not listening. But she wasn’t completely listening, either.
“Interested in antiques.”
“My tastes are developing,” Sally said. “I mean, I’m being educated. It’s what happens here in college.”
“You’re studying … furniture?”
“No, of course not. I’m just interested. I still haven’t decided on a major. Has Lewyn?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Oh, Lewyn. He said something about art back in the spring.”
“Art? Like, painting?”
“No, art history. You know, Daddy and I have never pushed you to pick something practical. We want you to follow what gives you joy.”
Sally rolled her eyes. Joy had been one of our mother’s great themes. So very ironic, given Johanna’s noted dearth of it.
“Well, I’m sure the boys appreciate that just as much as I do,” she said.
“Have you talked to them?”
Sally rolled her eyes. She hoped Lewyn was getting this same question from our mother, at least. Or did the responsibility attach only to her, possibly because she was the girl?
“I don’t want to speak for the boys, but maybe we’re, all three of us, kind of feeling out the being apart from one another. You know?”
“No, I do not know. We’ve always been a very close family.”
On what planet? Sally nearly said, but she stopped herself. They had all failed Johanna, all three of them.
“But it’s something we’re each going to have to do, don’t you think? Find our own way? I’m not surprised if the boys aren’t talking much, or that neither of them is keeping in close touch with me.”
From far down the line, she caught the faintest gasp, then another.
“Mom?”
“I took Phoebe on the carousel in Oak Bluffs,” Johanna said. “She was absolutely entranced by her horse. But she never even looked up! You were like that, too, remember? Your brothers were throwing themselves at those stupid rings.”
“Lewyn actually fell off his horse once,” Sally said, relieved.
“We’ll all go back when you get here.”
Sally closed her eyes. She could not get out of going to the Vineyard, but she wanted to spend as little time there as possible. Arriving on the birthday itself was too obvious, and certainly too cruel. She would have to get there a day before, if not a couple of days. At least, with more than month to go, she still had time to … what? Prepare herself? Figure out the answers to our parents’ inevitable interrogations? She couldn’t even answer the questions about the questions. Harrison, Johanna had told her, was in Virginia, or West Virginia, on some kind of retreat for rich assholes: a perfectly on-brand summer activity. Even Lewyn, with an actual intended major, sounded marginally less directionless than before. All Sally herself seemed to want to do right now was think about furniture. The actual birthday, that year, fell on a Monday, which wasn’t ideal but at least it came before the beginning of classes. She told Johanna it was a pity she could not stay longer, but it was all she could spare from her busy, busy new life.
Then she said good-bye and went back to her room on the third floor.
The invitation to move into the East Seneca house had surprised her, though it was also clear to Sally that her new friend required basic help at home. Back in the spring, Harriet had asked Sally to take a look through the bedrooms on the third floor because she was certain there was a corner cupboard up there that a dealer she knew in Deposit had once sold her. Now, apparently, he wanted to buy it back for a New York client in search of that very size, shape, and untouched blue surface. The third-floor staircase was far too steep for Harriet to easily climb, so Sally ascended alone to find four rooms of generous size, each one jammed with heart-stopping objects. Wooden trunks were stacked to the sloping ceilings, and beds on their sides had been slotted under and over other beds. In the dust-filled light she caught the edges of wood everywhere: dark wood, painted wood, stenciled wood. Against the walls, gilt frames leaned against other gilt frames, some empty, some occupied by cracked and dirty canvases.
“D’you see it?” Harriet shouted from the second-floor landing.
“I see a lot of things,” Sally called back truthfully. Then she had to say it again, even louder.
“Big tall piece, maybe eight feet!”
It wasn’t in the first room, or the second (which was weirdly occupied by a line of back-to-back cupboards), or the third (piles of hooked rugs and old blue coverlets), but it was impossible to miss in the fourth. Stately in the corner between the room’s two windows, it had been given an actual cleared space in which to reside. It was a lovely object, tall and triangular with a steel-blue surface and a hand-carved knob. She couldn’t imagine how Harriet had gotten this up here to begin with. Or how they would begin to get it down.
“Those are nice rooms up there,” Harriet had said when she descended a few minutes later. “There’s a bathroom, too.”
“I saw,” said Sally.
“If you wanted to make some space you could move into one. Nicer than that dorm, probably.”
Sally thought of Rochelle Steiner, her randomly assigned roommate. Months before, the two of them had spoken about rooming together again, perhaps in one of the Collegetown dormitories for upperclassmen, but then had come Sally’s aborted visit to Ellesmere over the spring break and somehow an unacknowledged cloud had begun to obscure their time together. Rochelle, while never anything but cheerful and solicitous, was in the room less and less, and had less and less to say, let alone inquire about, on evenings she was present. When asked about her state of mind (and Sally had asked, though not without trepidation), Rochelle had only said that she was worried about her Bill of Rights seminar grade, and how it could impact her choice of upper-level classes for sophomore year. The class was demanding, and she had to study with a few of her classmates on an almost nightly basis if she was going to get an A, which she needed to get into the Functions and Limits of Law seminar next fall, which was completely necessary because that professor would be overseeing selection for the junior year program at the London School of Economics. Rochelle had her heart set on the LSE program. She had never been out of the United States.