was chosen, and poof, it had to be canceled. When I called my father to beg him to stop, his secretary said he was out of the country and couldn’t be reached. I took the train downtown and sat at a coffee shop across from his office, waiting for him to walk out the door, waiting for a new lie to unfold. But he never showed up.
“Are you thinking ‘Swimming’?” I asked. There was a lot of water in the vacation photos. Perhaps that could be a common sport.
“No,” she sighed as she turned the page. “I just like the picture.”
I prattled on a bit, about how clear and cold that lake was, and how the children slept in the boathouse and watched the ducks until it grew dark; how entire families used to canoe to the country club for dinner, dressed in black tie and bare feet. Tuxedos in a canoe, Ellie, can you imagine that! Then I stopped myself. What was I doing, trying to make her yearn for another version of something I couldn’t give her? The family cabin, the yearly treks, the dinners of fresh-caught trout under the moose head in the dining room. The skating parties in the woods overlooking the pond, catered bonfires with hot Mexican cocoa. She would never have that childhood. That’s what my father had taken away—not just the ease of life but the yearly rituals, the boisterous vacations in an assortment of wonderful places, the big houses overflowing with family and friends, the fresh maple syrup in winter and the cod cakes and eggs for breakfast. These things were sold to strangers to pay taxes.
I went to the kitchen and brought out the cookies I’d made. Nothing fancy, just fork-pressed sugar cookies with pink sprinkles since it was near Valentine’s Day, but I’d baked them on parchment paper, as the magazine suggested, and they’d come out perfectly, not the least bit burned on the bottom. I was proud of how well I cooked; I’d taught myself. After the houses were sold and Mother moved to Aunt Caro’s carriage house, I went to Bryn Mawr College, as planned, but with no walking-around money and no understanding of what one could do with a hot plate. I started small, with cocoa, trying to replicate the wonderful flavor of those iceskating parties in the woods. I cut up real chocolate, learned to whip cream, bought a grater for the cinnamon stick. A simple thing, but done well. From there I moved on to French toast, croque monsieurs. It was years before I graduated to the inside of an oven; I found roasts terrifying. But I learned. I persevered. And Mother, well, her friends fed her. She went from being the consummate hostess to the consummate guest, overnight.
The cookies smelled sweet and buttery, but Ellie didn’t look up from the page, not even when I set the plate down under her nose.
I looked up at the clock, fiddled with the hem of my sweater, edged the cookie plate even closer to her.
“Anything strike you?”
“Not yet,” she said, without looking up.
“Shall we just skip to the ones of me, as a little girl? Maybe that would be less grown up, as you put it.”
“No,” she said. “I’d rather just go in chronological order.”
The word sounded heavy in her mouth, as if it were the first time she’d said it, a vocabulary word.
Minutes passed, pages turned. She ate one cookie distractedly as she viewed the scrapbook; she seemed to appreciate neither. I took away the dishes, rinsed them, came back. Cleared my throat, looked around my own living room. Two formal paintings of dogs looked down on us from the mantel. We’d never had a pet, since our yard was so small. But my mother loved dogs—we had three Labradors at the main house—and Theo’s family, as I recall, kept beagles.
“What about ‘Pets’?” I asked.
“I don’t see any pictures of them.”
I frowned. “There’s bound to be some.”
“Not yet.”
“Or… ‘Art,’” I said too brightly. “There’s beautiful art in many of the homes.”
“Was anyone in your family a painter?”
“Well… no.”
She nodded as if the matter was settled.
Another half hour passed. I took to flipping through National Geographics and Ladies’ Home Journals, looking for random ideas and calling out one or two—“Playing Cards”? “Fashion”?—before stopping completely, realizing the futility.
“I don’t think this is going to get solved tonight,” Ellie said. Something in the way she said it, and the way she’d been nodding quietly, reminded me of a psychiatrist.