life had been the one she had led up to now, and Connie supposed it would be hard to give that up.
She thought of Gigi Romano again: Celeste had once told Connie that Gigi had no children, only poodles and a midget chauffeur who took her everywhere, moving through the dry warm Las Vegas air in an air-conditioned car. Connie did not think it was going to be easy being Monica Scanlan’s child. No, she thought, from now on it will be Monica Syzmanski. She knew it was unkind, that it was true that she of all people should understand, but she couldn’t help herself: she began to giggle. Joseph giggled too.
She ran one of her hands up and down the bedspread, a quilted flowered spread made out of some sort of synthetic that was supposed to look like silk. Even in the heat it was slightly cool. She knew it was not a Scanlan spread, that she was supposed to have plain chenille, but she hated chenille, felt whenever she saw the spreads in the Scanlan house that she was looking at spare rooms in a convent or a hotel.
She caressed the spread, up and down, up and down. She loved to run her hands over things, to let sand filter through her fingers or to stroke the tiny fur collar of her winter coat. She supposed that that was what she liked about the babies, too, that for a year or so she could run her hands over their bodies, pale pink as the inside of a conch shell, and feel the thrill of their real silk skins. At a certain point she began to feel bad about it, and she stopped. Perhaps it was the memory of that moment in the cemetery years ago with Celeste and her own father, when she had seen into the sexual chasm that opened up, almost overnight, between parent and child. Or perhaps, Connie thought, it was that for a time touching your babies was like touching the best part of yourself. Connie, raised in isolation amid the dead, had never learned to touch others easily, except for her husband, who wanted to feel her just the way she felt her small children, proprietary and sure in the knowledge that he was stroking an extension of himself. She liked the feel of Tommy, too, but not casually, not out of the blue, only when they were actually determined to touch, in bed at night, which happened rarely when she was pregnant and not at all now. He was sleeping on one side of the bed, and muttering when he did sleep. Feeling her belly, she sighed. The phone rang again. When she answered there was a long silence, and the sound of breathing. “Hello,” Connie repeated irritably.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she heard her mother-in-law say. “Is Tom there, dear?”
“He’s at work.”
“Oh, dear. Has he talked to James?”
“I don’t know. I just talked to Monica.”
“You did?” said Mary Frances, her voice trembling. “How did she sound?”
“Haughty.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She sounded fine,” Connie said, lying back on the bed. Joseph began to chew the telephone cord.
“I don’t understand what’s going on anymore,” Mary Frances said, and to Connie she sounded pitiful.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Connie said, and meant it.
“Do you? Oh, good. Oh dear … well, I suppose I’d better call Tommy. Is he still at the cement company, or has he started working with Mark already? I don’t know; your father-in-law told me he was starting in the business, but he didn’t tell me when.”
There was a long silence, and finally Connie said slowly, “I don’t know exactly where he is. He doesn’t know anything about this.”
“I know, dear. It’s just a help to talk to him. He’s a good boy.” There was another long silence, filled by the labored breathing, and then Mary Frances said in a rush, “Of course, the boys do marry, and then what have you got? ‘A son’s yours till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.’ I’ve heard that many times and the other day it was in Dear Abby, can you imagine, so it must be true. ‘A daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.’ You should remember that.”
Connie felt as though she had walked in on Mary Frances naked, as though for the first time she was seeing beneath the pale bouclé coats and the hats with the little veils. She could remember John Scanlan