knew. You’re worse than everyone else because you pretend to be so good.”
“Monica, this will stop,” Aunt Cass said.
“Can I believe my ears?” said Monica shrilly. “We’re defending Maggie? How many times have I heard you talk about how her mother is not our sort, dear? How many times have I heard my father complain that she sucks up to Grandpop so she’ll get more of the money? God, Mother, one night when you were drunk you even called her a wop. Why are we standing up for her now?”
“Monica, you are not yourself,” said Aunt Cass, her face crimson, her voice shaking.
“Oh, cut the Mary Frances routine,” Monica said, falling back into the chair. “This is myself. This is it. This is me, the real me.” She pointed a narrow foot at Maggie. “Who knows who she really is.” Maggie looked down at her fingers holding the charred piece of cardboard as though they were strange to her. She threw the match on the floor. “You’d better learn the facts of life before it’s too late, Maria Goretti,” said Monica. “Or you’ll wind up like your mother.”
“I’d rather wind up like my mother than wind up like you,” Maggie said.
“Same difference,” said Monica.
“No,” said Maggie.
“May we finish fitting the dress now, ladies?” the saleswoman said.
“I don’t think I’m going to need the dress,” Maggie said.
“You’ll probably be in jail,” said Monica.
“No, no, absolutely not, I will not allow this,” said Aunt Cass, who seemed close to tears. “You must be in the wedding. It will seem strange to everyone if you’re not.”
“It will seem strange to me if I am,” Maggie said.
“Maggie, please. I cannot cope if you make trouble.”
Maggie turned back to the mirror. Her face was white and her eyes were glowing. The salon was completely silent, and in the silence she could hear herself breathing;. “What do you think you’ll be doing in twenty years, Monica?” Maggie said in a low voice, and she could tell by the look on her cousin’s face that the question was first unexpected, then unpleasant.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Monica said.
“I do,” said Maggie.
“You can tell the future now, Maria Goretti?”
“I can tell yours.”
“Now let us take the dress off,” said the saleswoman, and she drew the curtains and left Maggie alone again.
18
IT WAS BECAUSE OF THE PARKING LOT that Connie almost turned back, not because of the hospital. She still found parallel parking a problem. She had driven right past her aunt Rose’s house one afternoon because her uncle Frank’s car was in the pitched driveway and she would have had to parallel park at the curb. The hospital lot had head-in spaces: she had tried them at shopping centers twice and found that if she cleared the car on the right, she wound up with her front bumper heading straight at the side of the car on the left, and if she started successfully toward the back of the space, she was sure to see that one side of the car was in danger of being pleated by the back bumper of another. Before Connie had known how to drive she had thought it was a silly adolescent thing, much overrated. She realized now that she had made herself think that about all the things she could not do, like swimming and riding a bicycle, and that there were difficult and elaborate skills the rest of the world had that she lacked. In a way the knowledge had been soothing; the thought of some essential inferiority made her feel more at home with others than her belief in her superiority had.
She had found herself frantic as she drove to the hospital, and she had thought at first that it was because this was only her second time out alone. But then she realized it was about Joey, about what had happened in the parking lot. Staring at her bedroom ceiling the night before, she had replayed it all in her head and felt herself flush all over again, flush and burn. And for the first time she had admitted to herself that the baby within her had saved her from committing adultery. She would have done it, in daylight, with Joseph in the back seat, if some combination of hormones and nerves had not forced nausea to triumph over lust.
She had hung around the kitchen all morning, finding odd jobs for herself, and it was not until she jumped at the sound of a truck door slamming that