and demanded hair grease—which of course she didn’t have—the comb finally snapped and my grandmother gave up.
“Maybe the water will help,” she said, defeated.
I didn’t understand why we needed to be so presentable to go swimming in the first place—not until she turned into the driveway of a clubhouse that looked like something out of a fairy tale. Though we were there to swim, it took us two hours to get anywhere near the pool. My grandmother walked us around the looping paths of the private lake, encouraging us to feed the ducks and asserting how pretty the lake was, as if trying to convince us of something. She took us for brunch in the clubhouse; the tables were a dark oak and the ceiling above us was decorated with crisscrossing gold latticework. I made myself dizzy mapping out an imaginary chart of constellations.
Halfway through our pancakes a woman in the tallest heels I’d ever seen a person actually walk in came into the room. “Lydia!” she said when she saw my grandmother. Until then I hadn’t thought of my grandmother as having a first name. The woman’s skirt swished from side to side when she walked, and up close, the thin brown straps of her high-heeled sandals wrapped delicately around her ankles. She kissed my grandmother on both cheeks and then turned to us expectantly.
“It is so good to see you out again, Lydia,” she said. “And who are these little dolls you have with you?”
“Marianne, meet my granddaughters, Allison and Tara,” my grandmother said evenly.
Marianne’s face flickered for a second, and then resettled into its previous blank enthusiasm.
“Ta-ra,” she said, stretching it out like it was two words. “This one must be Amanda’s.”
Amanda was my mother’s name, but the way she said Amanda, she might have been saying the earthquake or the flesh-eating disease. Still, I didn’t think much of her identifying me right away. Of course I was my mother’s daughter: I had her eyes, her heart-shaped mouth and one-dimpled smile, her round face, only darker.
“Yes, I remember Amanda,” Marianne went on. “I guess she never changed, did she?”
“She grew up,” said my grandmother, with a nervous laugh.
“They all do,” said Marianne, who went on to talk about her sons, an orthodontist and a deputy mayor. My grandmother looked uncomfortable, even after Marianne went to sit at her own table. Though usually she advised us to chew each bite twenty times, because we were young ladies, not wolves, she rushed us through the rest of our breakfast, admonishing us that our eggs were getting cold, even when we could still see the steam rising from them. After the meal, my grandmother relaxed again, but she made us walk around the lake for half an hour in order to let our food digest.
When we finally got to the pool, Allison and I were done with decorum. We threw our sundresses on the hot concrete and cannon-balled into the water, ignoring our grandmother’s shouts that we should be more careful, and who did we think was going to pick our things up from where we’d left them? We played Marco Polo while our grandmother sunbathed and read the kind of novel I could tell from the cover my mother would have called the waste of a perfectly valuable tree. When we got tired of Marco Polo, we tried doing handstands in the shallow end, and seeing who could hold her breath longest; and when that got boring, we played rock-paper-scissors to see which of us had to get out of the pool and go ask our grandmother for a penny to dive for. I lost. I climbed the ladder and saw that my grandmother had been joined by a woman in sunglasses and a straw hat.
“Grandma,” I called, and both women looked up, startled. I asked my grandmother for a penny and she rummaged through her purse to oblige.
“Amanda’s, I take it?” the woman beside her asked. She said my mother’s name with the same tone as the woman from breakfast. My grandmother nodded.
“What’s Amanda up to these days?” the woman asked, pressing her mouth into a thin-lipped smile. She turned away and reached for her sunscreen, as if already bored by the answer.
“She’s a doctor,” said my grandmother. I opened my mouth to clarify that she wasn’t a doctor doctor, but my grandmother shooed me away. I started to run off, then slowed down behind her, waiting to hear what else she said about my mother.
“Tara’s adopted,” my