room available to her. She says she feels now that the Lord meant for her to sit quietly and figure out his mysteries through her reading, and she wouldn’t exchange that opportunity for anything. Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It’s the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson—American dynamism gilded into a platform for individual redemption. It’s religion as detergent. I thank God I was born Catholic. At least our fairy tales involve eyes being put out and women being stretched out on racks—suggesting there is no evasion of pain and suffering. That there is no redemption without suffering, and that suffering is sometimes the point.
Where was I? Forgive me. Sarah haunts me. I think I see Ann in her. Ann isn’t in the sorority girls; I was mistaken. Ann is in Sarah. They have the same eyes. Right before I left home, Ann and I had a fight. Did I tell you about this when you came? Earlier last year, my sister met a man at a dance. He was, she said, a men’s-clothing buyer for Wanamaker’s, and after that dance they spent a few evenings together. She fell for him. He was an Italian, handsome and traveled, and of course he dressed very, very well. He came for dinner. He was not overly ingratiating. He had manners. He asked my father about his job. He asked me what Iowa was like—he had family out there farming and couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in a place like that. But I watched him with Ann and there was an air of the waiting room about him—I got the sense that she was not a specific person to him, just someone pretty he had started chatting with while waiting to be called in for his annual. As someone who often cannot bear to be around even those people she loves, I will never understand this kind of personality—the just-dropping-by-out-of-boredom. I didn’t think it was manners that kept him from looking at her with desire or with the kind of adoration that is subdued because it is in public but still obvious nevertheless. I don’t know anything about romance, but I have my ideas about how people should show that they prefer each other over the vast horde. My father thought he seemed like enough of a gentleman, and to that I said yes, enough to come into a middle-class house and share a meal with strangers, but not so much that he’s going to carry Ann out of here on some steed the way she wants. My father said nothing, and for a moment I regretted saying what I’d said. My father reveres romance—he thinks he and my mother had a great one—and he wants that for Ann the way he wants success for me. The problem is that Ann suspects she’s beautiful but doesn’t truly know it. If she did, she could be dumb and scheming like Undine Spragg and we wouldn’t worry about her.
Some weeks later, this gentleman got a job in Baltimore. She wrote him. After a few letters, though, he stopped writing back. But she kept it up. She wrote a letter a month for six months. When I saw her on the sixth letter—yes, I kept count—I couldn’t take it anymore. “Stop it!” I said to Ann as she sat in the kitchen writing another one. “Ann, he is never going to write back! If he’s not dead, you are dead to him!”
She stood up. She looked at me in a way I had never seen her look at me—as if I were dead to her. Then she walked out to the living room, took her coat, and went for a walk. We didn’t talk for a week after that.
The faith that sent Ann to her pen is the same faith that had her lighting candles for me and my book.
And I haven’t even told you about the girl I saw putting paraffin on her teeth in the bathroom one Saturday night. I asked her what she was doing—this seemed like something out of a courtesan’s toilette circa Versailles—and she said it covered the discoloration and crookedness of her teeth. Or the old lady who’s been here for twenty years, who wears a tiny, violet-colored, violet-sprigged hat with a veil to dinner and an inordinate amount of face powder—you can see the face powder on her smart little jackets—and reportedly