don’t make a mess and you don’t make mistakes and you don’t call people weeping at four in the morning. You don’t reveal secrets it would be unseemly for you to have. You turn forty and you laugh about it, and make jokes about needing martinis and how forty is the new thirty, and you don’t say aloud and nobody else says aloud what all of you are thinking, which is “Well, I guess she’s never going to have kids now!” and then, still less admissibly, “Is that because she didn’t think she wanted them, or because she didn’t get around to it (silly fool, a failure of time management) or is it, poor lamb, because of some physical impediment (pitiable case)? Why is she single, anyhow? It’s not as if her career has been so spectacular—she’s only a schoolteacher, and among schoolteachers she’s not even Shauna McPhee.”
All these things the Woman Upstairs knows are being said, and she hates knowing, and is infuriated to know, and she valiantly hides both her knowledge and her fury, and everyone remembers her fortieth, held in the bar of the Charles Hotel, no expense spared, as the best party they’ve been to in a long while, a party the way they used to be before spouses and children, and you’ve got to hand it to her, Nora Eldridge really does make you feel that forty is the new thirty—yes, well. All of this you know, and you bury deep, like dead men, but they’re there, the skeletons are there, and you’re always with them.
You’d never tell the story of your friendship with the Shahids for a whole host of reasons—you have your dignity, after all—but among them, you wouldn’t want to seem the unsavory sort of person who might acknowledge, simply in the telling, that people like the Shahids were more compelling, somehow higher on your personal totem pole, than the person to whom you were talking about them. The Woman Upstairs, whose face to the world is endlessly compassionate, would never have such a thing as a personal totem pole. The Woman Upstairs does not aspire in such self-serving ways. She must not appear to have an ugly heart. Who could love an ugly, lonely heart?
Skandar, Sirena, Reza—each of them was, in his or her way, my Black Monk. I had a veritable monastery inside me! Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden, heart’s desires: life, art, motherhood, love and the great seductive promise that I wasn’t nothing, that I could be seen for my unvarnished self and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could—that she must, indeed—leave a trace upon the world. If this were so, then I could be an artist, and then it would be allowed. Who would allow it? They would. How would they allow it? I was waiting for a sign.
Traces, signs, I hoped for some evidence of what I might have meant—of the fact that I meant at all. Finally, a few short months ago, I got it. Finally, all the elucidation at once, the confirmation of what I meant to them. Yes, you hovered so very long in Doubt, embracing Doubt, teasing yourself with it; and then suddenly, at last you knew.
4
This is what’s most surprising about life, really: the most enormous things—sometimes fatal things—occur in the flicker of an eye, the tremor of my mother’s hand. Sometimes you don’t even grasp an event’s importance for a long time because you can’t believe something momentous could possibly appear so nondescript.
Aunt Baby died, mercifully and suddenly, between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year. Never plagued by ill health, which had been her great, spinsterly anxiety, she lived long enough to see the new president inaugurated and then some, and to hope, in her piety, that God had a handle on the economy. In her careful frugality, she didn’t die penniless, and although her estate was divided among six of us—Matthew, me, and those distant cousins in the photos—there was still, after the depressed sale of her Rockport condo and after taxes, a tidy sum of more than a hundred thousand dollars apiece. Matthew and Tweety said the inheritance was for the brat’s college fund—the sensible couple, making the sensible choice. My father got no money, but was made the earthly custodian of two large and unlovely Victorian paintings of cows in the fields, ornately framed, and a silver