Bittersweet (2 page)

“Weren’t you the one who invited me?” I dared to ask.

“No.” She giggled, as though my mistake was an adorable transgression. “Mum always asks the roommates. It’s supposed to make it feel so much more … democratic.” She saw the look on my face, then added, “I don’t even want to be there; there’s no reason you should.” She reached for her Mason Pearson hairbrush and pulled it over her scalp. The boar bristles made a full, thick sound as she groomed herself, golden hair glistening.

“I won’t go,” I offered, the disappointment in my voice betraying me. I turned back to my math. It was better not to go—I would have
embarrassed myself. But by then, Ev was looking at me, and continuing to stare—her eyes boring into my face—until I could bear her gaze no more. “What?” I asked, testing her with irritation (but not too much; I could hardly blame her for not wanting me at such an elegant affair).

“You know about art, right?” she asked, the sudden sweetness in her voice drawing me out. “You’re thinking of majoring in art history?”

I was surprised—I had no idea Ev had any notion of my interests. And although, in truth, I’d given up the thought of becoming an art history major—too many hours taking notes in dark rooms, and I wasn’t much for memorization, and I was falling in love with the likes of Shakespeare and Milton—I saw clearly that an interest in art was my ticket in.

“I think.”

Ev beamed, her smile a break between thunderheads. “We’ll make you a dress,” she said, clapping. “You look pretty in blue.”

She’d noticed.

T
hree weeks later, I found myself standing in the main, glassy hall of the campus art museum, a silk dress the color of the sea deftly draped and seamed so I appeared twenty pounds lighter. At my elbow stood Ev, in a column of champagne shantung. She looked like a princess, and, as for a princess, the rules did not apply; we held full wineglasses with no regard for the law, and no one, not the trustees or professors or senior art history majors who paraded by, each taking the time to win her smile, batted an eye as we sipped the alcohol. A single violinist teased out a mournful melody in the far corner of the room. The president—a doyenne of the first degree, her hair a helmet of gray, her smile practiced in the art of raising institutional monies—hovered close at hand. Ev introduced me to spare herself the older woman’s attention, but I was flattered by the president’s interest in my studies (“I’m sure we can get you into that upper-level Milton seminar”), though eager to extract myself from her company in the interest of more time with Ev.

Ev whispered each guest’s name into the whorl of my ear—how she kept track of them, even now I do not know, except that she had been bred for it—and I realized that somehow, inexplicably, I had ended up the guest of honor’s guest of honor. Ev may have beguiled each attendee, but it was with me that she shared her most private
observations (“Assistant Professor Oakley—he’s slept with everyone,” “Amanda Wyn—major eating disorder”). Taking it all in, I couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t want this: the Degas (a ballerina bent over toe shoes at the edge of a stage), the fawning adults, the celebration of birth and tradition. As much as she insisted she longed for the evening to be over, so did I drink it in, knowing all too well that tomorrow I’d be back in her winter boots, slogging through the sleet, praying my financial aid check would come so I could buy myself a pair of mittens.

The doors to the main hall opened and the president rushed to greet the newest, final guests, parting the crowd. My diminutive stature has never given me advantage, and I strained to see who had arrived—a movie star? an influential artist?—only someone important could have stirred up such a reaction in that academic group.

“Who is it?” I whispered, straining on tiptoe.

Ev downed her second gin and tonic. “My parents.”

Birch and Tilde Winslow were the most glamorous people I’d ever seen: polished, buffed, and obviously made of different stuff than I.

Tilde was young—or at least younger than my mother. She had Ev’s swan-like neck, topped off by a sharper, less exquisite face, although, make no mistake, Tilde Winslow was a beauty. She was skinny, too skinny, and though I recognized in her the signs of years of calorie counting, I’ll admit that I admired what the deprivation had done for her—accentuating her biceps, defining the lines of her jaw. Her cheekbones cut like razors across her face. She wore a dress of emerald dupioni silk, done at the waist with a sapphire brooch the size of a child’s hand. Her white-blond hair was swept into a chignon.

Birch was older—Tilde’s senior by a good twenty years—and he had the unmovable paunch of a man in his seventies. But the rest of him was lean. His face did not seem grandfatherly at all; it was handsome and youthful, his crystal-blue eyes set like jewels inside the dark, long eyelashes that Ev had inherited from his line. As he and
Tilde made their slow, determined way to us, he shook hands like a politician, offering cracks and quips that jollified the crowd. Beside him, Tilde was his polar opposite. She hardly mustered a smile, and, when they were finally to us, she looked me over as though I were a dray horse brought in for plowing.

“Genevra,” she acknowledged, once satisfied I had nothing to offer.

“Mum.” I caught the tightness in Ev’s voice, which melted as soon as her father placed his arm around her shoulder.

“Happy birthday, freckles,” he whispered into her perfect ear, tapping her on the nose. Ev blushed. “And who,” he asked, holding out his hand to me, “is this?”

“This is Mabel.”

“The roommate!” he exclaimed. “Miss Dagmar, the pleasure is all mine.” He swallowed that awful
g
at the center of my name and ended with a flourish by rolling the
r
just so. For once, my name sounded delicate. He kissed my hand.

Tilde offered a thin smile. “Perhaps you can tell us, Mabel, where our daughter was over Christmas break.” Her voice was reedy and thin, with a brief trace of an accent, indistinguishable as pedigreed or foreign.

Ev’s face registered momentary panic.

“She was with me,” I answered.

“With you?” Tilde asked, seeming to fill with genuine amusement. “And what, pray tell, was she doing with you?”

“We were visiting my aunt in Baltimore.”

“Baltimore! This is getting better by the minute.”

“It was lovely, Mum. I told you—I was well taken care of.”

Tilde raised one eyebrow, casting a glance over both of us, before turning to the curator at her arm and asking whether the Rodins were on display. Ev placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

I had no idea where Ev had been over Christmas break—she
certainly hadn’t been with me. But I wasn’t lying completely—I’d been in Baltimore, forced to endure my Aunt Jeanne’s company for the single, miserable week during which the college dorms had been shuttered. Visiting Aunt Jeanne at twelve on the one adventure my mother and I had ever taken together—a five-day East Coast foray—had been the highlight of my preteen existence. My memories of that visit were murky, given that they were from Before Everything Changed, but they were happy. Aunt Jeanne had seemed glamorous, a carefree counterpoint to my laden, dutiful mother. We’d eaten Maryland crab and gone to the diner for sundaes.

But whether Aunt Jeanne had changed or my eye had become considerably more nuanced in the intervening years, what I discovered that first December of college was that I’d rather shoot myself in the head than become her. She lived in a dank, cat-infested condo and seemed puzzled whenever I suggested we go to the Smithsonian. She ate TV dinners and dozed off in front of midnight infomercials. As Tilde turned from us, I remembered, with horror, the promise my aunt had extracted from me at the end of my stay (all she’d had to do was invoke my abandoned mother’s name): two interminable weeks in May before heading back to Oregon. I dared to dream that Ev would come with me. She’d be the key to surviving
The Price Is Right
and the tickle of cat hair at the back of the throat.

“Mabel’s studying art history.” Ev nudged me toward her father. “She loves the Degas.”

“Do you?” Birch asked. “You can get closer to it, you know. It’s still ours.”

I glanced at the well-lit painting propped upon a simple easel. Only a few feet separated me from it, but it may as well have been a million. “Thank you,” I demurred.

“So you’re majoring in art history?”

“I thought you were majoring in English,” the president interrupted, suddenly at my side.

I grew red-faced in the spotlight, and what felt like being caught in a lie. “Oh,” I stammered, “I like both subjects—I really do—I’m only a first-year, you know, and—”

“Well, you can’t have literature without art, can you?” Birch asked warmly, opening the circle to a few of Ev’s admirers. He squeezed his daughter’s shoulder. “When this one was barely five we took the children to Firenze, and she could not get enough of Medusa’s head at the Uffizi. And Judith and Holofernes! Children love such gruesome tales.” Everyone laughed. I was invisible again. Birch caught my eye for the briefest of seconds and winked. I felt myself flush gratefully.

After the president’s welcome toast, and the passed hors d’oeuvres, and the birthday cupcakes frosted with buttercream that matched my dress, after Ev made a little speech about how the college had made her feel so at home, and that she hoped the Degas would live happily at the museum for many years to come, Birch raised a glass, garnering the room’s attention.

“It has been the Winslow tradition,” he began, as though we were all part of his family, “for each of the children, upon reaching eighteen, to donate a painting to an institution of his or her choice. My sons chose the Metropolitan Museum. My daughter chose a former women’s college.” This was met with boisterous laughter. Birch tipped his glass toward the president in rhetorical apology. He cleared his throat as a wry smile faded from his lips. “Perhaps the tradition sprang from wanting to give each child a healthy deduction on their first tax return”—again, he was met with laughter—“but its true spirit lies in a desire to teach, through practice, that we can never truly own what matters. Land, art, even, heartbreaking as it is to let go, a great work of art. The Winslows embody philanthropy.
Phila
, love.
Anthro
, man. Love of man, love of others.” With that, he turned to Ev and raised his champagne. “We love you, Ev. Remember: we give not because we can, but because we must.”

O
ne too many glasses of champagne, one too few canapés, and an hour later, the overheated room was swimming. I needed air, water, something, or I felt sure that my ankles—bowing under my body’s pressure upon the thin, pointed pair of heels Ev had insisted I borrow—would blow. “I’ll be back,” I whispered as she nodded numbly at a trustee’s story about a failed trip to Cancún. I teetered down the long, glass-covered walkway leading into the gothic wing of the museum. In the bathroom, I splashed tepid water on my face. Only then did I remember I had makeup on. But it was too late; the wetness had already wreaked havoc—smeared lips, raccoon eyes. I pumped down paper towels and scrubbed at my face until I looked like I’d slept on a park bench, but not actively insane. It didn’t matter anyway—we were just going back to the dorm. Perhaps we’d order pizza.

I traipsed back up the hallway, a woman made new with the promise of pajamas and pepperoni. I was surprised to discover the great room already empty—save the violinist packing up her instrument and the waiters breaking down the naked banquet tables. Ev, the president, Birch, Tilde—all of them were gone.

“Excuse me,” I said to one of the waiters, “did you see where they went?”

His eyebrow ring caught in the light as he raised his brows in a “why should I care” I recognized from my own nights working late at the cleaner’s. I went to the ladies’ room and peeked under the bathroom stalls. Tears began to sting my eyes, but I fought against them. Ridiculous. Ev was probably headed home to find me.

“Goodness, dear,” the curator tsked when she caught me in there. “The museum is closed.” Had Ev been by my side, she wouldn’t have said it, and I wouldn’t have quickened my departure. I plucked my lonely coat from the metal rack in the foyer, and plunged out into the cold.

There, in sight of the double doors, were Ev and her mother, their backs to me. “Ev!” I called. She did not turn my way. The wind, surely, had carried off my voice. So I approached, concentrating on my steps so as not to twist an ankle. “Ev,” I said when I was close. “There you are. I was looking for you.”

Tilde snapped her head up at the sound of my voice as though I were a gnat.

“Hey, Ev,” I said gingerly. She did not answer. I reached out to touch her sleeve.

“Not now,” Ev hissed.

“I thought we could—”

“What part of
not now
don’t you understand?” She turned toward me, rage on her face.

I knew well what it was to be dismissed. And I knew enough about Ev to know that she had spent much of her life dismissing. But it seemed so incongruous after the night we’d had—after I’d lied for her, and she’d finally acted like my friend—and so I remained frozen, watching Tilde steer Ev to the Lexus that Birch brought around.

She didn’t come home that night. Which was fine. Normal, even. I had lived for months with Ev with no expectations of her—not of friendship, or loyalty—but by the next day, her dismissal was
gnawing at me, rubbing me raw, like the heels she’d lent me, making blisters I should have anticipated, and tried to prevent.

Despite pulling on her boots and letting them cup my arches; despite allowing myself to wish, with every step I took, that the previous night’s unpleasantness had been an anomaly, the day turned worse. Six classes, five papers, four midterm projects on the horizon, a thirty-pound backpack, the onset of a sore throat, pants sodden with snowmelt, and a hollow, growing loneliness inside. Trudging up our hall as evening fell, I could smell the telltale cigarette smoke whispering from under our door and remembered our RA’s offhand comment about how next time it happened she’d be in her rights to fine us fifty bucks, and I allowed myself to feel angry. Ev had returned, but so what? I had asthma. I couldn’t survive in a room filled with smoke—she was literally trying to suffocate me. My asthma medication’s one benefit—justification for the extra weight I carried—wouldn’t do me any good if I were dead.