Object lessons by Anna Quindlen Read Free Book Online Page B

learned it successfully. She was even more amazed to be corrected by her grandfather on two small phrases. When she got home and looked at the New Testament, she had seen that he had been right. She wondered who had made him memorize the Passion; she couldn’t imagine anyone making her grandfather do anything.
    John filled the glasses from a silver shaker with his initials on it which his wife had purchased because she thought it might make a good heirloom someday. He picked up the matching silver tray and turned to Maggie. “Come into the living room for the entertainment,” he said, and his eyes glistened, his wide mouth creased into a humorless tight-lipped grin.
    “What entertainment?” Maggie was still going after the olives.
    “Ha!” her grandfather said, pushing through the swinging door.
    Maggie heard a little stage cough behind her and knew that her cousin Monica had entered the room. She was wearing the moiré taffeta dress with the high waist and enormous puffed sleeves she had worn the week before for her high school graduation. In it she looked beautiful and virginal, her honey-colored hair flipping up on her shoulders, her nails polished the same color as the add-a-pearl necklace her parents had completed as a graduation gift. When Maggie had stopped after the commencement ceremony to congratulate Helen Malone, who had been in the same graduating class as Monica, Helen had smiled slowly and said, “Your cousin wins the award for best disguise.” Looking over her shoulder at Monica now, Maggie thought she knew exactly what Helen meant. With her pretty face and her curved smile, Monica looked kind and sweet. She stared at Maggie with the cool, direct look she did so well. Then she looked pointedly at Maggie’s fingers in the olive jar. “How attractive,” she said, and Maggie withdrew her hand so quickly that the jar toppled over onto the counter, and brine splattered onto her flowered skirt and the linoleum floor. “Most attractive,” Monica said, leaving Maggie to clean up the mess and wish she was back home in her shorts.
    On Sundays, when Maggie went to her grandparents’ house, it was usually with her father. Her mother stayed home with the younger children. Maggie had known everything she needed to know about her mother and her father’s family when she had started to page through Tommy and Connie’s big white leatherette wedding album when she was four years old. She could never understand what had moved the photographer to go up into the choir loft, look down, and take a picture of the congregation, which showed a great massing of relations on the bride’s side of the church and no one behind the groom except his brothers, the ushers, who had appeared in their cutaways in defiance of their father’s wishes. She could never understand why her mother chose to put that picture in the album. “It’s a sad picture, Mommy,” Maggie had said once when she was young, before she had begun quietly to take sides.
    “It shows something,” her mother had said, her lips closing like a red metal zipper. Maggie supposed that whatever the something was, it was long-lived, for her mother came to her in-laws’ home only when a special invitation was issued.
    Maggie was there often. She liked the order, the cleanliness and the smell of polish, smells that were absent from her everyday life. In her grandmother’s living room there was a baby grand piano, a painting of flowers over the fireplace, a corner cabinet filled with china statues of characters from Shakespeare, and enormous quantities of brocade in a color her grandmother called mauve. There was a big kitchen with geraniums on the wallpaper, and curtains that matched, and a pantry with glass-fronted cabinets. All the food behind the glass was arranged in alphabetical order; the family joke was that Mary Frances Scanlan never served mixed vegetables, because she wouldn’t know whether to file the cans under M or V.
    It was the house of people