The Light of Paris

Ostensibly, my parents had settled in Magnolia because it was in between Memphis and Little Rock, and my father had begun investing in real estate in both cities, but I think they chose it because it was equally inconvenient for both of their families to visit. My mother said she liked it because it was small, barely a city. “Memphis without all the fuss,” she called it, as though Memphis were a latter-day Gotham, all crime-fighting superheroes and threatening skylines. But Magnolia was a Goldilocks city—just large enough to have the cultural amenities my mother enjoyed, just small enough that she could run its social scene with her tiny, well-moisturized fist, just Southern enough for the charm without too much culture shock for my Northern parents, just Northern enough to cool off during the winter months without doing too much damage to my mother’s garden. As much as I complained about it, I’d been in no hurry to escape; it had held me in its slow, sticky thrall until Phillip and I had moved to Chicago.

I took a taxi to my mother’s house, the driver listening to hypnotically aggressive sports talk radio. He left me there, standing in the circular driveway. My parents had bought this house, an old brick colonial with black shutters and a gabled roof over the front door, when they had married in 1945—my mother only twenty years old, my father a few years older, back from a thankfully bland service in the war. They had periodically remodeled the interior, but the outside looked the same as it had since I was a child. I could smell the honeysuckle and wisteria growing along the side of the house, and the summery, green scent of damp soil. The hedges surrounding the property bore tiny white buds that would explode in a few weeks and flower profusely, covering the sidewalk with sticky yellow dust, until they had sown their wild oats and retreated into orderly decency, marking the edge of the property in a military-tight formation.

My mother’s house was in Briar Hill, where the enormous homes near the country club faded into family neighborhoods and trendy stores. The house next door was even older, the original farmhouse for the land that had turned into this wealthy neighborhood, and for years it had been owned by the Schulers, who were descendants of the family who had built it. My mother preferred that sort of thing, neighborhoods with history and old houses and families who had lived in them for years. The Schulers’ children had already been in high school when I was born, so over the years it had seemed emptier and emptier as they moved out, and the only times it came to life were Christmas and Easter, when everyone streamed home with their own families in tow, or the occasional summer Sunday dinner, when they played croquet in the back yard and ate on the porch while the children chased fireflies in the gathering dark.

But now it looked like there was a full-on party happening over there. Standing outside my mother’s silent house, I could hear conversation and laughter drifting over the fence, and people moving back and forth inside. Maybe I should go there instead, I thought. It sounded like much more fun.

Before I could make a break for it, the front door swung open and the familiar scent rushed up at me, dust and old books, wood polish and something floral from the arrangement on the table in the front hall, and under it all, the pale, faint traces of my father’s cigars. Even though he had died soon after Phillip and I were married, it still felt painful to think of it. I took a long, slow breath, inhaling the comforting smell of him. My anger and panic had burned away during the trip and now I was left with a slow, sad burn in my stomach that made the smell of my parents’ house seem comforting.

However, the person standing at the door was not my mother, but a woman about my age, her hair blown out into an appropriate bob, her makeup perfect, wearing a conservative navy suit with a white shell and pearls, straight out of the Magnolia Ladies Association Central Casting.

“Well, well, well. Madeleine Bowers. Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

I squinted at her suspiciously. “It’s Madeleine Spencer, now, actually. Do I … ah … know you?”

She looked at me with a surprised expression and laughed. “You don’t recognize me? I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not! Honey, it’s Sharon Baker. From Country Day?”

“Oh. Wow.” This woman standing here with her French-manicured nails and her spotless outfit was Sharon Baker? In high school, Sharon had been the closest thing Magnolia Country Day had to a bad girl. Most of us had been together since nursery school, but Sharon had blown in at the beginning of ninth grade (the rumor, which she did nothing to dispel, was that she had been kicked out of three other private schools before she had come to ours). She smoked, and dated boys from public school, and her uniform skirt was always too short, and she had wild, loose, curly hair she never seemed to brush.

I’d always been both a little in awe and a little afraid of her, mostly because she didn’t seem to care what anyone else thought. I’d sat next to her during class elections the first year, and when we were supposed to hand our ballots in, I turned to take hers and pass it down, but her hands were empty. “That shit is on the floor where it belongs,” she had said. It had never even occurred to me that was an option. I had voted for Ashley Hathaway, the same way I had voted for her every year since the fifth grade.

“Hardly recognize me, huh? I went all respectable.” Turning toward the mirror by the door, she shook her hair into place, needlessly tugging her jacket straight. “I know. I hardly recognize me too.” She sighed, as though she were a disappointment to herself. “Don’t worry,” she said, turning her cheer back on. “I’m still rotten deep down at the core. How the hell are you?”

“I’m good,” I said, a little timorously. I was still reeling from the great reinvention of Sharon Baker, and a little bit wondering why she was there. My mother and I had never been the best of friends, but I thought getting a new daughter seemed a bit extreme, and Sharon would have been a … surprising choice, even cleaned up as she was.

“And what brings you back to this shit hole?” she asked cheerfully. She was still looking in the mirror, now reapplying her lipstick, a pearlescent pink that shimmered when she popped her lips at the end. It was strange—she looked so perfect and pure, but she still had a mouth like a sailor.

“I’m just in town for a visit.” I had been standing in the doorway, but I finally stepped in. “Not to be rude, but what are you doing here?”

Sharon stopped primping and turned to me, squinting slightly. “Your mother hasn’t told you?”

“Hasn’t told me what? Did she adopt you? Have I been disowned?”

Sharon laughed, a pleasantly rough-edged stone of a sound. Covering her lipstick, she stuck it back in her purse. “You’d better talk to Simone.”

“I’m here, I’m here,” my mother said, rushing downstairs. “I’m so sorry; I was terribly delayed. Have you been waiting long?” she asked Sharon solicitously, and then, noticing me, started and put her hand on her chest. “Well, goodness, Madeleine, are you arriving today?”

I looked down at myself and my luggage. “It appears I already have.”

“I’m sorry, it completely slipped my mind. Your clothes are all wrinkled.”

“I’ve been on a plane.” I’m sure my mother got off planes looking fresh as a daisy, but I, like most mere mortals, was wrinkle-prone. She sighed at me as though it were a personal failing.

“Aren’t you going to close the door?”

“It was on my to-do list. Nice to see you too.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m all aflutter.” She came forward and gave me a brittle hug. My mother was tiny and delicate and beautiful, like so many of the women in my life. She wore essentially the same thing every day—a pair of slacks, a cardigan, and a scarf tied around her neck. She had pearl earrings and a once-a-week hairdo and if you saw her at the grocery store you would pretty much know exactly the kind of person she was, which might be a terrible thing to say but is one hundred percent the truth.

Beauty, in my family, seems to skip a generation. I was not beautiful in the same way my grandmother hadn’t been beautiful—the body that had been unpopular in the 1920s was equally unpopular now, and I don’t think it ever had a heyday at any point in between. We were too tall to be average, but not tall enough to be interesting; we had broad shoulders and breasts that interfered with everyday activities and hips that belonged on a Soviet propaganda poster. When I looked in the mirror, I could see her features looking back at me—one eyebrow higher than the other, wide, milky brown eyes, a forgettable nose, a thin, poutless mouth.

But my grandmother, when I had known her, had possessed a certain elegance. She wore Chanel suits and she always had a glass of wine in her hand, and she never laughed too loud, and when she walked out of a room, you could tell she had been there from the trail of perfume she left behind, as though the room had recently been abandoned by a spirit with a preference for Shalimar. I had none of that ease: I had spent my entire life trying (and failing) to fit my uncooperative body into someone else’s mold. Every ten weeks, I went to a salon where they poured chemicals over my hair to calm it into smooth submission, and in between, I regularly flat-ironed it, the smell of heat and burnt hair filling my nose. I ate as little as possible, especially in public, leaving half my anemic salad on my plate at luncheons. When I remembered all the desserts I had pushed away—the rich cheesecakes, the delicate stacks of fruit and cream, the whirls of ganache—I wanted to weep. It had worked—to an extent—I was thin, but that did not make my shoulders any smaller, my calves any less like the trunks of sturdy young trees.

My mother, on the other hand, was beautiful, a clear genetic anomaly sandwiched between my grandmother and me, with delicate features, fine bones, and hair like champagne and corn silk. She had tried to raise me in her own image, but I was never able to match her easy elegance. I sweated through my gloves at cotillion, and though I followed her instructions on hair brushing to the letter, what made her hair smooth and sleek as a thoroughbred’s mane only seemed to leave mine fluffy and floating, as though I had disobeyed on purpose. I wore the clothes she bought me, though they never seemed to fit right, the shirts riding up no matter how much I tugged at them, the outfits that looked so perfect in the pages of Seventeen somehow losing their allure on me, making me look lumpy, as though I were smuggling packets of flour taped to my sides.

“How was your flight?” my mother asked as she released me, leaving a pale cloud of L’Air du Temps behind.

“Fine. What’s going on next door? It looks like they’re having a party.”

“It’s awful, isn’t it? The Schulers sold the house and the man who bought it has turned it into a restaurant. A restaurant! In this neighborhood! Can you believe it?”

Actually, I could. My parents’ neighborhood had been getting hipper and hipper for years, but my mother would have been unhappy with any change at all.

“Is it any good?”

“How would I know? They’ve turned my front lawn into a parking lot. I’m certainly not going to eat there.”

“To be fair, it’s not really your front lawn. It’s his.”

“It’s close enough. And the noise! Trucks backing in with that dreadful beeping sound, all hours of the day and night. They’ve turned the Schulers’ lovely back deck into a seating area and there’s just the most appalling racket from the garden.”

“So, like, people eating and drinking and being happy? I can see how that would be a major bummer to have around.”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“Sarcasm’s all I’ve got, Mother.” I had slept on the plane, but I was tired and my emotions were still jagged and thin.

“Well, it’s nice of you to come. Isn’t Phillip missing you?”

I neatly sidestepped the question. “Phillip has a business trip to New York this week.” This was true, but not the whole truth.

“Why didn’t you go with him? You could have gone shopping while he was working! That’s what I always used to do when your father had business in New York.” My mother clasped her hands together joyfully, like a little girl who had been given a new doll. I should have sent her to New York with Phillip. The two of them had always liked each other better than either of them seemed to like me.

“Well, there’s the fact that I hate shopping.” The idea of being stuck in a store—or, even worse, a mall—for hours at a time, with nothing to do other than try on clothes made me want to gnaw my own arm off. When I’d been younger and my mother had made me go shopping for clothes, I’d always taken a book, and while she swanned around the Juniors department, I’d crawl under a clothes rack and read until she’d reached critical dressing room mass and I had to go try things on so she could criticize me in public, the way Mother Nature had intended.

“So you’re staying the whole week?”

“That was the plan,” I said. Unless Phillip had been serious, and we really were getting a divorce. A fist twisted my guts at the thought. But I wasn’t going to get into that now. I clumsily changed the subject. “Sharon said you have something to tell me?”

“Well, I have some news.” Way-ull. Two syllables. Though she had been born and raised in Washington, D.C., a Southern accent had grown on her like wisteria. I had excised mine when I moved, taking on the bland, regionless diction of a newscaster, tired of people, including my husband, mentally docking me two dozen IQ points whenever they heard me speak.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Madeleine. You are so dramatic. I just wanted to tell you I’ve decided to sell the house.”

Sharon had been gracefully backing away into the front room, and when I turned to her quickly, my eyes wide open, she all but bolted like a rabbit. I whirled back to my mother. “This house? Our house?”

“Of course this house. Who else’s house would I sell? It’s too big for me, really. Lydia Endicott has the loveliest condominium not far from here, and something like that would be so much easier to take care of.”

Because my mother never admitted to any weakness, I was instantly on alert. She woke up every morning and had dry toast and coffee for breakfast, while torturing whichever housekeeper was unfortunate enough to be in her employ at that time. She dressed (perfectly), she gardened (beautifully), she went to some luncheon function (elegantly), she played bridge (competitively), she had dinner at the club with a single glass of wine (socially), and she came home and went to bed. Her skin was luminous, probably due to the truly staggering amount of money she spent on moisturizers and facials and the vague promises of rejuvenating treatments, and though she was almost seventy-five, she didn’t look a day over sixty. Not even a silver hair on her head, though that may have been due to the ministrations of her hairdresser and not entirely to genetics.

“Are you okay?” I asked, bracing myself for some admission of illness.

She sighed in irritation, turned to the floral arrangement on the front table, and began to fuss with it. “Didn’t I already tell you I was fine?”

“You did, it’s just … what about … your garden?” I asked. It wasn’t the most intelligent question, but the idea of my mother moving someplace where she couldn’t have a garden was strange. She had always had a garden. Multiple gardens, in fact: the front garden, the herb garden, the rose garden, the back garden, the ornamental garden, and the side garden. Oh, and the kitchen garden, for the growing of vegetables she never seemed to eat. And there was also what was affectionately known as “the orchard,” which was actually a somewhat confusing collection of two apple trees, a pear tree, a plum tree, and a handful of raspberry bushes that had lost their way.

“There’s a community garden. Lydia has a plot. And I can have window boxes and planters on the balcony, of course. I mean, I’ll be left off the garden tour, but if it means I don’t have to manage three floors by myself, it will be worth it. I’ve been run off my feet with no housekeeper since Renata left. Honestly. Who gets married during planting season? That girl doesn’t have the sense God gave little green apples.”

“Mother!” I said sharply, interrupting what I knew was bound to be a detailed recounting of how much work the house was to keep up and how terribly busy she was all the time, interspersed with (and I am not kidding here) exegeses on how hard it was to find good help these days. No normal person would consider the housekeeper’s not planning her wedding around my mother’s gardening schedule a selfish act, but my mother was not normal. She was the star of her own movie. “When are you selling the house?”

“That’s why Sharon’s here. She’s a real estate agent. Her mother and I are on the Garden Society board.”

The mind boggled at the idea of Sharon’s having an actual job. We’d had geometry together first period sophomore year and she had regularly stumbled in late, smelling of cigarettes and coffee, asking to borrow a pencil. And now she was going to sell my mother’s house?

“You can’t sell it now! It’s too soon!” My emotions were already off-kilter, and the idea of her selling the house struck me with dumb terror.

“Too soon for what? If you had to take care of this place all on your own, you wouldn’t be saying that. Why, just last week the wiring in the living room was going absolutely haywire …”

My mother launched into a lengthy complaint about finding an electrician, and I tuned her out, trying to get my emotions under control. I hadn’t lived in my parents’ house for years. I went back to visit once a year and spent the entire time arguing with my mother and bumping into the enormous antique furniture that always seemed to be lurking around corners, waiting to surprise me. I had never had any particular feelings toward the house, but right then it seemed like the most important place in the whole world, as if it were a monument slated for demolition, to be replaced by a shopping mall.

“Mother, you’ve lived in this house for over fifty years! How can you sell it?”

“Don’t yell, Madeleine.” My mother flipped her hands into the air, her balletic fingers waving me away. “I’m right here.”

“I’m not yelling,” I said, even though I was.

“Sharon is here to go through the house with me, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop with your hysterics long enough for us to do that.”

“I’m hardly hysterical,” I said, and that, at least, was true.

On cue, Sharon reappeared at the doorway and my mother turned to her as though she were an enormous relief, which she probably was, for all kinds of reasons. The two of them walked into the front room and I followed, mostly because I didn’t have anything better to do. As my mother guided Sharon around as though they were on the Parade of Homes tour, and Sharon took pictures and made notes to herself, I looked around, trying to see the house through someone else’s eyes. I could hear Sharon’s tone, and I knew she was making a colossal list of things my mother was going to have to fix or change or update. I couldn’t wait to hear that conversation.

My parents’ house had always been a showplace, more museum and shrine to family heritage than home. As a child, I had longed to touch everything, largely because it was off-limits, but also because everything was so beautiful. There were delicate bone china teacups to use for tea parties, tiny porcelain figurines I could pose and shift around to tell the stories that were always running wild through my mind (I was an only child of older parents, and often dreadfully lonely), antique furniture to climb, silver to smudge, and perfectly ironed, handmade table linens to drape myself in for costumes—bride, sheik, Greek goddess, attendant at the queen’s ball.

When I was a child, my parents had maintained a few employees—a cook, a housekeeper as well as a maid, a gardener, and the occasional backup dancer, a handyman or a builder, usually. Having “help” had always seemed old-fashioned and indulgent, but looking at the house now, I understood. It had been built for a large family and lots of guests. The furnishings were from another time, when there had been a full staff to take care of the endless dust, the silver that oxidized without any attention, the linens in need of ironing. And my mother was busy. You could make fun of ladies who lunched all you wanted—really, it was my favorite hobby—but my mother’s work mattered. She had raised and contributed literally millions of dollars to charities. And that, even I had to admit, was more important than vacuuming.

I carried my suitcase upstairs and tossed it into my old bedroom, watching Sharon making another note as I did. Probably “Madeleine should put her suitcase away instead of throwing it on the floor.” Duly noted.

“Can I see the attic?” Sharon asked.

“It’s a little chaotic,” my mother said. She pulled at the door, but it had swollen slightly in the heat and wouldn’t budge.

“Let me,” I said. I gave it a firm tug and it popped open, groaning to express its displeasure. The trapped air rushed out at me, stale and musty. “We’re in,” I said, like I was engineering a bank heist.

The stairs were so narrow I had to walk with my feet sideways so they would fit on the treads. When I was little, the attic had been one of my favorite parts of the house, a place to find a hundred mysteries and compose a hundred stories. A dress rack with plastic bags holding my mother’s old clothes, including her wedding gown, yellowing delicately in the silence, and enough vintage clothing to provide me with hours of dress-up entertainment. Boxes and trunks filled with the detritus of family shipwrecks, inscrutable objects from times gone by—shrimp forks, salt cellars, rolling ink blotters, monogrammed wax seals—piles of photographs of unidentified ancestors, and the occasional piece of broken jewelry, which I would generally stick in my hair, so when I came down for dinner I looked like a magpie had built its sparkly nest on my head.

“We could advertise this as a playroom,” Sharon said as she reached the top of the stairs, as though she had heard my memories. I could imagine what she was thinking—toy boxes lining the walls, a pink plastic castle, stain-resistant carpeting—and it made me feel protective of the attic’s homeliness. It had always been playroom enough for me with the ancient, creaking wooden floors and dust-covered hatboxes and trunks.

While my mother and Sharon talked about air-conditioning and Pottery Barn furniture, I sat down by one of the windows and looked out over the yard, the way I had so many afternoons when I was little. I didn’t remember its being so warm, but it certainly was now; sweat was already trickling down my forehead and I lifted an arm to blot it away.

Next door, the restaurant was open for lunch. I could see people sitting on the porch, the motion of servers walking back and forth. Beyond that, the entire yard had been transformed into a garden with slender paths between the beds for easy passage. It was early in the season, but the vegetables were already growing there; besides the tomato plants by the edge, I could see a small herb garden near the opposite fence, rows of strawberries, vines of squash spreading over the ground, and neat, orderly rows of lettuce, blossoming out of the earth like bridal bouquets. My stomach growled. I was definitely going there to eat sometime soon. I had never been one of those people whose appetite fell away under stress and grief. In fact, my consumption of snack cakes rose in direct proportion to my emotional turmoil.

When I turned away from the window, my mother and Sharon had disappeared back downstairs, heading for the basement. Looking around the attic, I imagined going through these things, packing them up, sending them off to auction or to the landfill, and it made me feel terribly wistful, as though I were saying goodbye to a part of myself I would never get back.