she knew exactly what Helen meant. With her pretty face and her curved smile, Monica looked kind and sweet. She stared at Maggie with the cool, direct look she did so well. Then she looked pointedly at Maggie’s fingers in the olive jar. “How attractive,” she said, and Maggie withdrew her hand so quickly that the jar toppled over onto the counter, and brine splattered onto her flowered skirt and the linoleum floor. “Most attractive,” Monica said, leaving Maggie to clean up the mess and wish she was back home in her shorts.
On Sundays, when Maggie went to her grandparents’ house, it was usually with her father. Her mother stayed home with the younger children. Maggie had known everything she needed to know about her mother and her father’s family when she had started to page through Tommy and Connie’s big white leatherette wedding album when she was four years old. She could never understand what had moved the photographer to go up into the choir loft, look down, and take a picture of the congregation, which showed a great massing of relations on the bride’s side of the church and no one behind the groom except his brothers, the ushers, who had appeared in their cutaways in defiance of their father’s wishes. She could never understand why her mother chose to put that picture in the album. “It’s a sad picture, Mommy,” Maggie had said once when she was young, before she had begun quietly to take sides.
“It shows something,” her mother had said, her lips closing like a red metal zipper. Maggie supposed that whatever the something was, it was long-lived, for her mother came to her in-laws’ home only when a special invitation was issued.
Maggie was there often. She liked the order, the cleanliness and the smell of polish, smells that were absent from her everyday life. In her grandmother’s living room there was a baby grand piano, a painting of flowers over the fireplace, a corner cabinet filled with china statues of characters from Shakespeare, and enormous quantities of brocade in a color her grandmother called mauve. There was a big kitchen with geraniums on the wallpaper, and curtains that matched, and a pantry with glass-fronted cabinets. All the food behind the glass was arranged in alphabetical order; the family joke was that Mary Frances Scanlan never served mixed vegetables, because she wouldn’t know whether to file the cans under M or V.
It was the house of people who had money. “Mag, are you rich?” Debbie had asked her once when they had ridden up the long driveway on their bicycles, the lawn stretching away on either side. Maggie had answered, honest as always, “They are. We aren’t.”
Now the brocade furniture in the living room was full of people. Her mother was sitting in the corner of the couch, Joseph slumped against her, his eyes half closed as he sucked his middle fingers. Next to her mother was her aunt Cass, Monica’s mother. Uncle James was sitting next to his wife.
“Delivered twins last night, Concerta,” James said with a grin.
“Oh, God,” Connie said, her stomach fighting the martini her father-in-law had pressed upon her. “That poor woman.”
“No, no,” said James, waving his left hand, his wedding band sunk a little into the flesh of his finger, “Very easy delivery. Just popped right out, one after another.”
“For God’s sake,” said Mary Frances Scanlan, putting her drink down on a coaster on the coffee table. “It’s bad enough, shop talk, but your shop talk is the worst, Jimmy.”
“Sorry,” said James pleasantly. “All part of life, Mother. No sense denying it.”
“No sense discussing it,” said Mary Frances as Maggie came in with another tray of drinks. “Maggie, here’s your cherry. Come quick or I’ll give it to one of your brothers.”
Her grandmother held a maraschino cherry by the stem, dangling it, dripping, over her whiskey sour. Maggie always ate the cherry from her grandmother’s drink, trying not to feel the bite of the liquor before she got to the syrupy taste of the fruit. Like so many other customs in her family, it had continued long past the time that those involved enjoyed it. In fact, Maggie could not remember that she had ever enjoyed it; it had simply become tradition and could not be tampered with. By the time she had eaten the thing, the back of her tongue was usually numb. For a moment she thought of refusing, but instead she took the cherry and held it