Rules for Being a Girl - Candace Bushnell Page 0,9

ziti, her famous meatballs—and bring them over. Still, she’s got to weigh less than one hundred pounds. I remember her swinging me up into the waves when I was a little kid at the beach on the Cape, how strong and tan her shoulders were. These days she feels like a bird in my arms.

“Come sit,” she says now, motioning to the chair across from her, a roomy upholstered holdover from her house back in Brockton. Her room at Sunrise is suite-style, with a sitting area, a bedroom alcove, and a private bathroom she’s outfitted with fancy hand soap from Williams-Sonoma and a curtain printed with arty pineapples. “Tell me about your day.”

“It was okay,” I say, sticking the soup in the mini fridge and hooking my backpack on the coatrack. “Pretty uneventful.”

“Uneventful!” Gram raises her eyebrows, which she fills in every morning with a dark brown Revlon pencil, before getting up and heading over to the tiny kitchenette at the far end of the sitting room, pulling a jug of iced tea from the mini fridge. “How evocative.”

“Sorry, sorry.” I smile guiltily. “I guess it was just kind of tough to be back in school after the weekend, that’s all.”

Gram nods. “You know, people always say that high school is the best part of your life,” she says, pouring me some without bothering to ask if I want it or not. “But that’s just baloney. You’re going to go to college, you’re going to find out just how much there is for you out in the world. You’ll see.”

“I just scheduled my interview for Brown, actually,” I tell her, taking a sip of my iced tea. “So with any luck, you’ll be right.”

“See?” Gram beams. “There you go.” She went to Brown herself—or to Pembroke, technically, which is what the women’s college was called before the university went coed in the seventies. She took me as her date to her fiftieth reunion a few years back, which is when I decided I wanted to go there myself. I still remember the look in her eyes when I told her, the way her whole face seemed to glow.

Now she reaches up with her free hand, tucks my hair behind my ears. “You’re such a good girl, my Marin,” she says. “You don’t always have to be so good though. Lord knows I wasn’t.”

“Oh no?” I ask, unable to hide a smile.

“Don’t laugh,” Gram says. “I’m serious.”

“I believe you,” I say, although actually I don’t. For all her style and sophistication, Gram is one of the most buttoned-up people I’ve ever met: she married my grandpa when she was twenty-two, then raised my mom and her brothers while working part-time as a bookkeeper for a discount mattress company and hosting Tupperware parties on the weekends. I’ve literally never seen her without lipstick; she’s been wearing the same shade of Clinique since at least the eighties. “I want to hear more about this wild and crazy past, Gram.”

“Oh,” she says, waving her hand, the clear polish on her nails catching the sunlight trickling in through the window.

“Oh,” she says again, and just like that I know her mind is wandering. The most surprising thing about Gram’s illness is how fast it can make itself obvious, like she’s walked out of the room even though she’s still sitting right here.

“You want to see if Ina is on?” I ask before she can get flustered, reaching for the remote on the coffee table and clicking over to Food Network. My grandmother is obsessed with the Barefoot Contessa; my mom still buys her all the cookbooks on the day they come out, even though she only has a microwave and an electric kettle in her suite. Still, every once in a while we’ll come visit on a special occasion and find she’s made candied nuts or a specialty cocktail. I suspect Camille has something to do with it.

“She’s not on until four,” my gram says now, frowning; her voice has taken on a different quality, thinner and a tiny bit peevish. “And I don’t like this other woman with all the cattle.” Still, she settles in to watch anyway, her knobby fingers wrapped around her glass of iced tea. I lean my head against the back of the chair.

My mom is prepping chicken cutlets for dinner when I get home from Sunrise late that afternoon, the kitchen warm and cozy even as the early dusk presses against the windows above the sink. The familiar smells