from them, because she reminded them of what she’d done, and because they reminded her of what she’d done. Anyway, she was not a small child, she was almost a woman. She told herself this in her darkest moments, lying in her bed at night, touching her own hair and imagining it was her mother’s, that she was asleep beside her mother.
The past was in the attic of Dyan’s brain. The rest of her had gone to marble. She met Sloane’s father when he was coming up in the world. Outwardly, she was an excited fiancée and, later, a proper wife, a dutiful mother. She was committed, for example, to getting Sloane to North Salem for riding, to the rink for skating. She was a wonderful cook. Her kitchen always smelled of baked pies or sumptuous roasted birds.
When Sloane was in the fourth grade, Dyan looked her up and down. Her only daughter had hips, breasts. Her cheeks were round and pink. The child’s body didn’t quite match up with her age. It looked more like early development than fat, Sloane would think later, gazing at pictures of herself. But in the moment she only saw her mother looking at her queerly.
The next week they had an appointment at the Diet Center, a brick storefront inside a mini mall with cheery red letters and venetian blinds for privacy. In the waiting room, Dyan said, This is for you, honey. I think you’ll be more comfortable if you lost some weight.
Sloane swung her legs under the chair. She looked at the way her thighs spread east and west.
Back at school, Sloane took her diet pills in the stall of a washroom, swallowing them down dry if she had to. They were prescribed by a doctor but she was ten years old and she knew it would look weird to do this in front of other people. Or her mother had told her it might. She couldn’t remember. She did know that her mother was doing it for her, that she thought Sloane would have more confidence if she were slimmer. Everything her mother did was what she thought was best, as all mothers do—invisible service in the shadows of the things for which they themselves had longed.
When Sloane was at home, when she wasn’t at skating camp or riding school or summer camp, Sloane learned of her mother’s past in bits and pieces. She always left a conversation with Dyan wanting to know more about who her mother was. She wanted to know, especially, about the simple things. The first food Dyan had learned to cook at her own mother’s hip. Her favorite dolls and games. Her childhood fears and the first time she’d liked a boy. But Dyan was largely quiet about everything that predated her marriage to Sloane’s father. She never explicitly said she would not answer Sloane’s questions, but she was artful in deflecting them. There was always, for example, something that needed to go into the oven.
When pressed, Dyan liked to recall, with a sort of far-off fondness, that her father had an airplane, a two-seater, and on sunny days when she was a little girl he would swoop out of the clouds and down into the family ranch. The weight and wind of the plane would just about blow the roof off and scatter the grasses and the hair of all the girls and their mother.
Sloane was in the ninth grade when she, without much fanfare, lost her virginity to a boy who lived down the road.
At fifteen she was old for her grade, so in a lot of ways she felt overdue. Luke was eighteen and one of the bad boys. Not terribly bad, but a good-bad, as if Emilio Estevez’s and Judd Nelson’s characters in Breakfast Club merged into one reckless, thick-browed rower. He was on the varsity football team, smoked pot, and had been arrested a number of times.
Sloane and Luke were not technically dating. They’d hung out at other people’s houses. They’d drunk beer together and made out. The night it happened, Sloane sneaked out of the house, climbing out her window and down a drainpipe.
When he opened the door, she didn’t feel incredibly in love or even lustful. He said his parents were in bed and wouldn’t hear them. He didn’t ask her to be quiet walking down the hall. The kitchen and the living room were messy, which made her sad, somehow. That some people went to bed without zipping