No one was overtly unkind to me. We were all vaguely friends in the way you must all be friends if your entire graduating class numbers a total of eighty girls, but I was never fully included, always on the edge. Most weekend nights I spent alone, painting or reading, or going to a movie with my childhood best friend, Amanda, who had switched to public school and therefore might as well not have existed. During the week, I went to school and then swimming, or to one of the various preparatory functions our mothers set up for us, cotillion or piano lessons, or some fresh hell like the Junior Ladies Association. We were thoroughbreds, led around a ring and told to leap over fences until we learned the skills by heart.
Other girls went to dances, had boyfriends, but as they had been to my grandmother, to me, boys were as mysterious and foreign a substance as radium. There was a boy I saw sometimes at the bookstore, all angles and loose limbs and sleepy eyes that, in retrospect, were probably drug-induced, but at the time simply made him look thoughtful and romantic. Once I dropped my scarf and he picked it up and handed it to me and I blushed. It turned out he went to school with Amanda, but I never asked her to find out more, never told her I was interested in him, never told her I daydreamed of kissing him, of running along River Street with him down to the water, never told her sometimes I looked forward to seeing him, to brushing past him in the fiction section, all week long.
Looking through my high school yearbooks, I pored over photos from parties and dances I hadn’t gone to, looking at my classmates’ pretty Laura Ashley dresses, their wide, bright smiles, their dates. The girls in those pictures were confident and poised, and I was awkward of voice and nervous of stomach. Some nights I lay in bed and the thought of what they had, what I knew, even then, I would never be, made me ache.
At first I thought college would be my moment. I rushed Chi Gamma Delta because my mother insisted, and I was admitted because I was a legacy. They liked me fine, but in the chapter photos, I was always standing in the back row, somehow never managing to smile when the shutter clicked, my face red, my shirt wrinkled, looking like someone who had wandered into the picture accidentally instead of someone who belonged there just as much as anybody else.
My debutante ball had been my last hope, but at my first dress fitting, I knew it was all wrong. I had dreamed for years of an off-the-shoulder dress, had pictured it all, how perfect I would look, like Scarlett O’Hara or Princess Di. When my mother took me shopping, I practically grabbed a dress off the rack, exactly what I had pictured, a perfect white with an off-the-shoulder neckline and a full skirt. But when I had slipped it on and looked at myself in the mirror, my mother and the saleswoman waiting outside, the former imperiously, the latter obsequiously, my heart broke for a last and final time. I leaned my forehead against the cool mirror, closed my eyes, and cried. The neckline I had dreamed of for so many years was unflattering, the folds of fabric on my upper arms made my shoulders look even wider, and the dropped waist hit the center of my hips before billowing out, making me look like a sausage being pushed into its casing. Crying made my face and my chest blotchy. “Come out, Madeleine,” my mother trilled, and I clomped out of the dressing room.
“Oh, my,” the saleswoman said, looking at me in my dream dress.
“That is a disaster,” my mother said. “Certainly we can do better,” she said to the saleswoman, who nodded and practically fled back out onto the floor to find some alternatives. When we were alone, my mother looked at me. “Don’t cry. We’ll find something suitable. Now take that off. Please,” she said, and her voice was almost pleading. We found a dress, of course, but it wasn’t the one. It wasn’t the one I had dreamed of. Nothing ever seemed to be the way I had dreamed it.
? ? ?
I spent my morning cleaning the kitchen while my mother flitted in and out, sitting down at my father’s desk to make phone calls (apparently this was Serious Business and needed to be conducted in the office, because every other phone call I’d ever known her to make had been in the kitchen or the living room), and then dashing out to a meeting or to sort donations for the Collegiate Women’s Society rummage sale. Next door at the restaurant, they served lunch and then dinner, and I heard the sounds of laughter from the back yard as I worked my grim way through the house. I had grown so used to the condo, to living on one level, that each trip up and down the stairs seemed exhausting. No wonder my mother wanted to sell that place; everything seemed to take ten minutes longer than it should have.
A little after eight, my mother out at another dinner that I had politely refused to attend, my cell phone finally rang. I had to rush madly for it, scrambling for my purse on the front table, as it trilled robotically at me once, twice, three times. The blossoms in the flower arrangement on the front table were fading, and a few petals had fallen onto my bag while it sat there. They fluttered to the floor while I finally pulled out the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” Phillip said.
My stomach sank a little, but why? A few days ago, hadn’t I been calling him, praying for him to answer, to tell me it was all a mistake?
“Hello,” I said again, because I wasn’t sure what to say next.
“I’m home from New York.”