Putting the notebook aside, I pulled the next one out of the trunk. This one was labeled four years later: 1918. It was more of a diary than the first notebook, though there were still occasional digressions into the mundane: pages of addition adding up to a teenage budget, a list of girls’ names and where they were going to college (I felt a little surge of pleasure at this: 1918 and the entire graduating class of girls—only thirty, but still—were every one of them going to college). In February, I read this entry:
The ’flu is here, and the school is in a complete panic. They can’t send us home, they say, because too many people are sick and we’d only infect them on our journeys. Instead, they’re quarantining us here. Everyone is awfully disturbed, but I think it’s rather romantic. Of course, I don’t have it yet. I’ve always been healthy as a horse, as Mother says, so maybe I won’t get it at all?
And a few weeks later:
Well, Lucinda’s caught it. They’ve run out of spaces in the infirmary, so they’ve gone and turned the gymnasium into another infirmary. She’s there now. Of course, it’s not as bad as it could be—there are these awful photographs of soldiers who are down with it, just shoved into bed after bed anywhere they can find the space—churches, gymnasiums. Abbott ran out of medical staff and teachers to help long ago, and they’re asking the mothers to come. The funniest part—Mother has agreed! I suppose she thinks it’s war service, even though the war is practically over, or so everyone keeps saying.
Anyway, they’ve closed down one of the other dormitories, so I’ve got a new roommate now that Lucinda is gone (and good riddance to bad rubbish, says I); Ruth is only a sophomore, but she’s quite droll and we get on très well. Her sister sent a pack of peanut brittle and we stayed up late last night gorging ourselves and laughing until we felt positively ill (or possibly that was due to the peanut brittle). The good news is there are only half the classes and with the weather so drab I was able to sleep it off. Mother would be furious I ate so many sweets.
To be honest, I feel a little jealous that Mother is coming up here to take care of these other girls. She’s never been up to visit me, not even for Family Weekend. Part of me wishes I would get the ’flu, just a little case, and then she’d have to take care of me, too. When I picture my own mother ministering to mean old Lucinda, sitting by her bedside and dabbing at her forehead with a cool cloth, it makes me more than a little ill with jealousy.
It was so strange to read the entries and think of my grandmother writing them. She had died when I was twelve, so to me she had only been Grandmother, old and stiff and formal to a fault. It was impossible to reconcile the woman I had known with this girl, so honest and young and silly. It could have been my diary, with all the complaints about her mother and the sugar overload.
My stomach growled again, hard and insistent, and I wiped a few more beads of sweat off my forehead. Time to go, then. I’d check in with Sharon to see if she’d strangled my mother yet, and then I’d figure out what to do next. I started to put the notebooks and letters back into the trunk and then paused. In my confusion that morning, I hadn’t packed a book, and these looked like a better-than-average distraction. Maybe I’d find something my mother and I could bond over. Gathering up the packet of letters and the pile of books and notebooks, I stacked my arms full and headed down the stairs.
In my bedroom, I dropped the papers on the bed and went to wash the travel stink and attic dust off my skin. Drying my hands, my engagement ring snagged on the towel, and I tugged it free, staring at it. It had been cleaned a few months ago when I went to Tiffany’s to buy a present for one of Phillip’s nieces (why a five-year-old girl needed a present from Tiffany’s was beyond me, but this was how the Spencer family worked), and it sparkled in the light, the scratches on the metal, evidence of years of bumps, bangs, and scrapes, barely visible.
There was a dark blue thread from the towel stuck underneath the stone. I pulled it out, the thread breaking on either side, leaving a tiny piece of blue fuzz underneath the prong. I picked at it for a moment, a tide of irritation building inside me, pushing aside the sick, sinking fear that had been resting heavily in my chest. Why did Phillip get to be the wronged party? What had I done wrong, other than be honest, admit for once that I was unhappy, that there was something broken between us?
On the counter was a small china dish and I tossed the rings in there, clinking the lid back on with satisfaction. Now I wouldn’t have to look at that piece of lint marring the ring’s perfection. I wouldn’t have to think about it at all. And I certainly wouldn’t pay any attention to its bare and blinding absence on my finger.
four
MARGIE
1924
Five years after her debut, my grandmother was sitting in the parlor, twenty-four years old and generally agreed to be a spinster. She had graduated from college two years before, and now she found herself lost.
“What are you thinking on, Margie?” her mother asked. “You’ve done half of that in the wrong color.”