The Romance Reader's Guide to Life
Sharon Pywell
To Todd
Faithful friend. Hapless protector.
It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
—OSCAR WILDE
A FEW WORDS FROM LILLY:
Where She Is Now
If you’re reading this, then you aren’t where I am, which is dead. I was delivered here a little prematurely courtesy of some mistakes that might, if I’m going to be totally honest here, have something to do with Vixen Red lipstick and the feelings that cluster around it. I’ve been told I have bad judgment but that’s ridiculous. I have excellent judgment—just check the profit margin from Be Your Best Cosmetics.
See? Excellent judgment.
I call my current location Where I Am Now. It’s hard to be more specific because I myself am not real clear about my location. It’s relatively new to me. If I were you, I wouldn’t find that very satisfying but it’s all I’ve got. More on this later but you might want to know—I’m not alone here. The dog was here to greet me when I arrived.
My sister Neave is in control of a good deal of what you’ll know, and not know. The thing you should keep in mind the whole time you’re listening to her is that Neave is relentlessly, sometimes dully, honest. Also, she thinks that we live in one place and one time. I now know that isn’t the case. My friend the high-heeled dog explained what he could to me and we left the rest to faith. But Neave, the only relief she gets from this limited view of time and space is books, because when she’s inside a book she goes wherever it says to go.
Neave believes in stepping into a book the way I believed in stepping into the Ritz. Things in the Oak Bar are solid and beautiful. You can smell the leather and the gin and after a martini the men are all more lovely. Lovely, lovely men. At five o’clock Henry rolls around the hors d’oeuvres cart that the Ritz bought from the Oceana after its final cruise, and he arranges a few pickled mushrooms and a smoked oyster on toast for me. Love that man.
I don’t think books did Neavie as much good as the hors d’oeuvres cart did me. Books made her both cynical and dreamy at the same time, which is not in my opinion a useful combination. Look at his suit, she’d say, not in a way that means the suit is a good thing, but in a way that said what kind of man spends a fortune on a suit? I’d say a very interesting man. Then I’d note that it was possible she was out of her depth. Here it was, right after Armistice Day, I’d say to her, the streets flooded with newly sprung, often handsome soldiers looking for company, and she was spending her Friday nights bent over a cash flow at work or padding around her kitchen making a pie. Reading a book. She’s not ugly but she’s bookish, which is not a real enchanting characteristic in the world I lived in. Nobody writes love poetry to their bookish mistress while she shlumps around making pies.
I can see inside Neave’s head from where I am and I know what she’d say to me even now, even after I died, if she heard me giving dating advice. What do you know? she’d say. You’re dead.
And she’d be right.
NEAVE
Lynn, Massachusetts—My First Job
Lilly and I were Irish twins, born in 1924 and 1925 in Lynn, Massachusetts. She was a sunny, unsteerable, reckless girl and she grew up to be exactly the same kind of woman. I followed in her wake, sometimes smoothly and other times just bumping along behind her in the chop. It didn’t matter—wherever she was going, I was going there too. We grew up kicking each other’s feet in the same bed, eating the same food, taking each other’s side in every scuffle over the occasionally limited resources in the house we grew up in. Long before we launched Be Your Best Cosmetics together we were each other’s first confidante, most inventive playmate, best defense against every evil. But here’s maybe the most important and wonderful thing about her: Lilly didn’t really think evil existed. Of all the reasons I wished I were her, that’s the big one. That blindness was her doing and undoing; mine too, maybe, but not in the same order. That’s why I’m here telling her story and she’s not.
In 1936, I was eleven years old and oblivious. I didn’t know that Hitler had just gotten production of the People’s Car under way. I didn’t know that some of the dirt I dug in the backyard to make roads for Snyder’s toy cars had blown there all the way from Oklahoma in the great dust storms. I didn’t know that the civil war in Spain had been launched, or that the Yellow River in China had overflowed at levels that were about to cause millions of people to starve. The whole world was going to hell, and I was making dirt roads for Snyder’s metal cars. I was enjoying myself.
Janey was youngest, only six years old in 1936, and Snyder was oldest and the only boy. This made him feel like the odd man out but the fact is, he was odd—not the kind of brother you’d wake up for company in the middle of the night if you had a nightmare. The four of us functioned as a sometimes cooperative group. I knew that if Lilly and Snyder and I pooled our resources we could get a loaf of bread for seven cents and eat the whole thing in the backyard with slices of Daddy’s tomatoes. Daddy loved his garden and hated his job at General Electric doing something with boilers that we didn’t understand. He’d come home looking flat and dark, go to his garden, and walk back into the house a little lighter. The boiler room made Daddy unhappy but overall I’d say that it was his nature to be irritated or squashed by a good deal that went on around him. It wasn’t just the boiler room.