did). I listen and don’t move. The early sun hits the windowpanes and scatters, spinning cracked rainbow circles whenever I move in the water. It’s the sort of thing that would fascinate a baby or a cat. By spring the light in the bathroom and bedroom will be hazy, filtered, a green-yellow instead of its current yellowwhite. Or is that summer? I can’t recall. Part of me wishes I’d kept a photo journal instead of a diary, just to chronicle the light properly. I remember once, on a particularly bright winter morning, as I lay warm and enveloped in our bed, I asked Theo to join me. Well, “ask” isn’t truly the proper word; I dangled my arm outside the tangle of covers and grasped his fingers as he walked by. He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth. His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked. He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he’d tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg. I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow. And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I’d spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign. He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers and he went in and brushed his teeth. The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away. I wonder if I’d find that moment catalogued in my old diary. I wonder if I’d find others that hurt me more.
Some find it silly, the old habit of writing things down. Betsy calls it “Victorian therapy.” Here on the Main Line, we live among people who don’t think too much about their lives. I’m just as guilty—writing it down is not the same as contemplating it, I assure you. However, it provides some assurance that one will remember it.
The last call before Ellie’s was a message from Jaxie, the hostess of our book group. She calls me every month now, to remind me, and to tell me to please bring salad. Salad, as if that was simple, with the produce selections, the washing, the chopping, the pressure of a homemade dressing. In the time salad takes, a pie could be cooling on the sill. As always, I feel no urge to get up and answer the phone, dripping in a towel, to talk to anyone or write anything down. No wonder I’m forgetful!
But then Ellie’s voice comes on, and I’m half tempted to pop out soaking wet and pick up the phone. Instead, I stay, and I smile. She has a husky sound to her, earthy, like Tinsley’s voice. Tinsley has always sounded lovely and charming on the phone. She and Tom had met that way, on the phone, when she solicited him to join an organization at college. He’d fallen in love, he’d once confessed to me, before he’d even laid eyes on her tawny hair and hazel eyes.
“Grandma,” Ellie says breathlessly, “I need you for an important homework project. It’s called ‘Generations’ and it’s an oral history of our family. So call me back right away and let me know when we can get started, okay? We’ve got a lot of work to do, and my mom says we have to work out a time line, so call me back, okay, bye!”
Oral history? That sounded a bit like medicine, sour and unswallowable. The things these teachers think of! Nothing an assignment, everything a project. As if children were archeologists or journalists. As if family truths weren’t better off untold. Who fell out of love with whom. Who lost whose money. Who ran off to God-knows-where. Who never spoke to whom again. I don’t think Tom was ever assigned such a thing; I’ll have to ask him.
This would be tricky, I thought. But what she probably wants is a family tree or photographs. Lord knows I have plenty of photos of myself and Theo to give Ellie, if that’s all she wants. Theo when he was handsome and young and driven, back in the days when we admired ambition, and didn’t see it as heart disease waiting to happen. I remember the photo from the night of my engagement party, at Aunt Caro’s house. Taken at twilight, the fireflies flashing green at the edges of the frame. After all the hoopla and toasts, Theo took me out