something a person like her could do. She wanted to know if Todd was the kind of boy you married.
“Well, yeah,” he said, and he managed a smile. “We could, if you wanted to.”
“My father,” she said.
“I know he's old-fashioned,” Todd said. “I'd talk to him. I'd be very—”
Then Susan knew the answer. She knew what to do.
She was going somewhere. If she and Todd went home that night and announced their engagement, she'd have a new language to say no in. She'd be protected.
“We could,” she said. “Yes. This is really something we could do, isn't it?”
“Sure,” Todd said, and laughed affectionately. “We can absolutely, positively do it.”
His poise was back. His forthright, practiced Toddness.
“We could do it,” Susan said. “Oh, sure. Let's get married.”
“Really? You really want to?”
“Yes. Oh, yes. Right away.”
“Right away?”
“Well, as soon as we graduate. I can wear the veil under my mortarboard, we can go straight to the church after we get our diplomas.”
“You're funny,” he said. “You know that? You're a funny girl.”
1969/ Mary wrote on the envelope the phone bill came in: I will not steal. She put the pledge in writing. But she 'went on stealing. She didn't know why she did it. She remembered the first day, in Englehart's. She'd gone to look at stationery for Susan's wedding invitations, just to see if Englehart's stocked anything decent or if she and Susan would have to drive to New York. The salesgirl, young, tentatively pretty under too much base, had shown her the samples. Ordinary cream, a yellowish ivory, a blue milky and shallow as a bus ticket. Borders trimmed with lilies, with doves and spectral white bells. Englehart's wouldn't do. She'd have to take Susan to the city after all. Mary thanked the salesgirl, told her she'd think about it. As she rose from her seat at the counter she knew herself to be an attractive woman in her late thirties, carrying a good navy clutch and graciously rejecting the wares of a store that hired salesgirls like this one, a girl whose common prettiness was wearing away with her youth. In her own youth Mary had seen women like herself, prosperous wives who kindly and firmly rejected the merchandise in neighborhood stores. As she stood, as the sheer satin of her slip fell with liquid ease over her nylons, she saw herself with such clarity she might have been standing outside her own body. She might have been the salesgirl, watching as a woman of stature and property, a woman who wrapped all her gifts perfectly, withdrew from the local stationery store, where the quality was not of the best. Mary's heart rose and she knew a calm, shimmering satisfaction that hovered inside her and then turned to uncertainty, quick as a shattered plate. Her older daughter, an acknowledged beauty, was about to marry a handsome boy on his way to Yale. It was a triumph to have a daughter like that and yet, even as it delighted Mary, Susan's good fortune seemed also to diminish her in some way. She worried that when they appeared in public together she looked fraudulent beside her daughter. She suspected Susan found her sad and slightly humorous. She reminded herself, with a pang of guilt and pleasure, that Susan had not been elected queen. As Mary walked toward the door she heard the salesgirl close the sample book; she heard the heavy muffled thump of the cover. On her way out she stopped to look at address books, because it had occurred to her that Billy was getting to an age when he might need one. The address books Englehart's stocked were second-rate. Their covers were simulated leather, their bindings indifferently glued. Mary stood frowning over one of the books, bound in oxblood plastic, emblazoned with the golden word Addresses, the final s of which had already begun to chip. It was such a flimsy thing, so beneath her, that she felt foolish even looking at it. She glanced around, saw that no one was watching, and almost before she knew she would do it she slipped the address book into her bag. Her forehead burned. Calmly, walking as herself, in heels and pearl earrings, she left the store with the tacky little address book hidden in her bag, its price tag still attached. The tag, when she looked at it, said that the book had cost ninety-nine cents.
She didn't know why she'd done it. She didn't want the awful address book.