“To be sure.”
“You’re the one who’s been here. No one cares about that firstborn stuff. It’s about what you done, not what position you were born into.”
“I hope he knows that.”
“He’s a shrewd man, your pa.”
“Yeah and a sick one. Sick ones stop being shrewd and start getting sentimental.”
“Not when it comes to money they don’t.”
“And besides, if your pa does start to feel sentimental all’s he got to do is start remembering why he sent him away in the first place.”
“Come on now, Dan, everyone knows that were an accident.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“No … sure, Leo, of course. We meant no disrespect.”
“Why, Anne-Marie, don’t you look fetching?”
Anne-Marie turned to see her cousin, the girl she had grown up with, standing before her, a broad smile drawing a hole in her wide, pink flushed face.
“Thank you, Louise,” she replied calmly, though she turned away briefly and slowly closed and reopened her eyes. She had not spoken with her cousin in weeks but each time she did it drained her. It ate up all her reserves to keep a neutral expression on both her tongue and her face, when secretly she wished God would just grant her lifelong wish and snap the girl’s neck like a twig.
“So thin, though, Anne-Marie, if people were to look at you they’d think we were still in the Depression. You know I think you’ve lost weight again. You been losing it steadily ever since you left home, but I guess that’s what happens when you have to cook for yourself. I noticed Lou is thinner than he was, too. Maybe you should talk him into hiring you a housekeeper, if he can afford it on a local doctor’s wage.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t question him about his finances.” Anne-Marie turned to her plate. Louise cackled in laughter and put a hand on her shoulder.
“My God, what wife doesn’t know how much she can push her husband for? You are a funny one. The very least he can do is get you some Negro girl in the place, preferably one from down south somewhere. They don’t haggle as much as the ones up here. I insist you try, any more weight loss and people will start thinking something’s wrong with you.”
“I’m just fine,” snapped Anne-Marie as her jaw ached under the strain.
“But maybe not,” said Louise, cocking her head to her side and fingering the hem of Anne-Marie’s dress. “Maybe the dress just makes it seem that way. Boy, you can do anything with a sewing machine,” she said, dropping her hand away and smoothing down the cream silk that fell across her own waist and flared out at her hips. Suddenly she laughed. “Remember all those times I’d come home and find you just sewing away, always mending, always poring over your clothes and stuff. Why you didn’t just ask Daddy to buy you something new I could never understand.”
Anne-Marie stared at her cousin. She saw her cock her head to her side and gaze at her as if she were waiting for something, always waiting for something, and then finally smiling as she used to when she saw that Anne-Marie could not think of a way to respond.
“Daddy said you used to get that from your mother, that thriftiness.” She bent nearer to her at this point. “Truth be told, I think he was glad that’s all you got.”
Anne-Marie cleared her throat and tried to turn away. Louise stepped back and frowned.
“Sorry, I forgot how you never mention your mother.”
And she never did—never. I remember my father saying how he had asked about her once. My grandmother had gotten up from her chair and left the room without saying a word, and when he had asked his father why she was that way, all my grandfather could say was, “Some things just run through you so deep, all they leave is a hole.”
And so it was with my grandmother, so that she became little more than a void in the disguise of a woman.
But while Anne-Marie may have refused to talk about her mother, almost everybody else did. They couldn’t help themselves after her uncle’s wife, a rotund woman who had an unfortunate partiality to loudly colored prints, had taken every opportunity at the store or in the street, to explain to her neighbors how her sister-in-law had turned up on their doorstep with a carpet bag, a spaniel puppy and a seven-year-old girl in a blue gingham pinafore.
Soon everyone would come to know that Eleanor Brown had left her husband, a teacher in San Diego, to come back to her home town. The rumor was that he had run up debts and their house was to be sold, though people suspected there were far more shameful indiscretions than these two meager facts. No one said so directly, but everyone knew they would divorce. People, including her own family, had assumed that Eleanor would stay in town under the supervision and support of her brother and create a new life, but it was not to be. In the early hours of a Wednesday morning, three weeks after she arrived, her brother came down to his morning coffee to find that not only had it not been made, but his wife also sat at their table, her head in her hands with a note laid open before her. While brief, Eleanor was certainly direct. The child was to stay with them until she could find a job and a home elsewhere. She left no forwarding address in case they chose to forward her daughter to her as well as her mail. So they were left with this little girl from San Diego whom they had only ever met once before and who was now to be staying with them for heaven knew how long.
At first Eleanor decided to keep up the pretense of parenthood and send them money every month. The amount always varied. Then after two years she sent forty dollars and a wedding photograph of her and her new husband. Her sister-in-law had humphed at this.
“At least she’s not wearing white,” she had said.
That was the last they had ever heard of her.
It was after this that they changed my grandmother’s name. Her aunt had never liked it. She had thought it pretentious, flighty: in short, far too reminiscent of the traits inherent in her wayward mother. So they had taken it away and instead settled her with her middle name Anne, though they thought Anne Brown was far too dour so they had given her Marie as well. They had thought in doing so they were being kind.
So she had lived and grown up with them as Anne-Marie Brown, one of them, but always aware this was by their admission rather than her right, so that at any moment this could be taken away and no one would intervene. How much of this was of her own thinking and how much was gauged by their implication, no one will ever really know. What is known is that one day at the age of nineteen, Anne-Marie had placed the silver tray of honey roast chicken on the protective place mat in front of her uncle and when he stood up and scraped the carving knives against each other, over the clang of metal she announced there and then that she didn’t want to be served any dark meat and that she was planning on marrying Dr. Lou Parks.
Her aunt had dropped her fork, her uncle had put down his carving knife and her cousin had shrieked with laughter.
“You can’t marry Lou Parks,” Louise squealed. “He’s a hundred years old.”
“Forty-nine,” Anne-Marie had replied quietly.
Over the dimming candles and intermittent incredulous gasps and other noises, they had questioned her for over an hour, while the chicken shriveled up and the steamed vegetables began to wilt, until all they were left with was a cold meal and more questions than answers.
How had this happened? they wanted to know. Had she done anything improper? Louise at one point demanded to know if she had slept with him, at which point out of disgust or fright her mother had slapped her across the mouth and Louise had burst out crying, which had only made her mother start bawling herself. Her uncle sat there trying to compose himself, but he was hungry and he stared plaintively at the chicken and mourned the fact that on any other evening, he would by now be sitting in his study, fed and sated, not stiff-backed at the dinner