Maybe he’d have been a little gentler, more inclined to treat me like a little girl instead of a son or a successor, if I’d looked more like my mom . . . but I’d inherited my face and figure from my dad’s mother, Grandma Sadie, who was tall, especially for a woman back then, and busty. I’d learned to modulate my voice (Grandma Sadie’s honk could silence an entire supermarket), and, after an embarrassingly minor amount of begging, I’d gotten my nose done the summer between high school and college. (My father had said, “You look fine!” My mom had asked if I wanted to get a breast reduction, too.)
My mother was Sadie’s opposite, tiny and soft-voiced and sweet. Unlike my grandma, who drove the car and signed the checks and made all of her household’s big decisions, my mother was utterly dependent on my dad. He hired Blanca so she wouldn’t have to clean; he hired a car service so she wouldn’t have to drive after the Accident. When they entertained more than one other couple, he’d hire a catering company to cook and clean. If it had been possible to pay someone to go through pregnancy and labor for her, so she wouldn’t have to suffer even an instant of pain, he would have done that, too.
Until now, she had drifted through life like a queen who had only a few ceremonial duties to discharge. She didn’t work, or take care of me or the house. What she did was amuse my dad. She would gossip and dance and play card games and tennis and golf; she’d listen to his stories and laugh at his jokes and use her long, painted fingernails to scratch at the back of his neck. Her biggest fear, voiced daily, was that she would outlive him and be left all alone in a world she couldn’t begin to handle, so it wasn’t surprising that she became a world-class hypochondriac by proxy. If my father sniffled, she’d schedule a doctor’s appointment to make sure it wasn’t pneumonia. If he had indigestion, she’d want him to go to the emergency room to make sure it really was the tomato sauce and not his heart. She’d stand by the front door in the morning, refusing to let him leave until he’d put sunscreen on his hands, face, and bald spot (his own father had died of melanoma), and in the evening she’d bring him a glass of red wine (okayed because of the healthful tannins). Instead of nuts, he’d take his drink with a little green glass dish filled with vitamins, supplements, fish-oil capsules—whatever she’d read about in Prevention or Reader’s Digest that week.
We would have dinner, the two of them would retire to the den, and I’d go to my bedroom and shut the door, doing my homework or listening to music or drawing in my sketchbook.
I wasn’t the most popular girl in my school, but I wasn’t a total embarrassment either. In high school, I was moderately popular, with a circle of reliable friends and, from the time I was sixteen on, a boyfriend, or at least someone to make out with at the movies. I worked hard on my looks, keeping a food journal all the way through college that recounted everything that went into my mouth and every minute of exercise I’d done. (Recently I’d found stacks of notebooks in my childhood room’s desk drawers describing cottage-cheese lunches and apple-and-peanut-butter snacks. Why had I saved them? Had I imagined wanting to reread them someday?)
In the den, my father was bent over, pulling on his white orthopedic walking shoes, the ones that closed with Velcro straps. I turned away, my chest aching. My father had always been fastidious about his clothing. He’d loved his heavy silk ties from Hermès, the navy blue and charcoal gray Hickey Freeman suits he wore to work. Once a year, he and I would make a trip to Boyd’s, an old-fashioned clothing store on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, where the clerks would greet my father by name. I’d sit on a velvet love seat with a cup of hot chocolate and an almond biscotti from the store’s café, and watch as my father and Charles, the salesman who always helped him, discussed summer-weight wool and American versus European cuts and whether he was getting a lot of use out of the sports jacket he’d bought the year before. My dad would ask about Charles’s sons; Charles would ask me about school and sports and if I had a boyfriend. Then my dad would disappear into the changing room with one suit over his arm and two or three more hanging from a hook on the door, and he’d emerge, with the pants bagging around his ankles, for more discussion with Charles, before turning to me.
“What do you think, Allie-cat? How’s the old man look?”
I would narrow my eyes and nibble my cookie. “I like the gray suit the best,” I would say. Or, “I bet that navy pinstripe would look nice with the silver tie I got you for Father’s Day.”
“She’s got quite an eye,” Charles would say—the same every year.