“French Baroque is appalling.” Only she is capable of infusing so few words with so much disdain. “Methinks we’ve had enough of regressing.” She shuts the book firmly. “Shall we now do something more age-appropriate and open the third bottle? By the way, remember how, when you were four or five, you went about talking with some ridiculous made-up accent, sniffing some precious bouquet you unearthed somewhere, drinking milk with your pinkie stuck out, and pretending you were an adopted child of some foreign grandee and we your evil stepsisters?”
“I did not!”
“You most certainly did.”
“You did, you know,” Melissa chimes in, smiling.
“No, did I, really?” I had honestly forgotten all about it. “I must have been a horrible sister,” I say, half laughing, half repentant. “But it was hard growing up as a follow-up act to you two.”
“Nonsense, you were always the prettiest,” Melissa says.
“Maybe so, but it didn’t count for much with our mother, did it? I mean, Gloria, you were tough, you had brains and ambitions, and you, you were so outgoing, and you had that laugh, everyone liked you. But what did I have, apart from my silly blond curls? I wasn’t good at anything, Mom said so all the time. Not good at anything other than mopping dirty bathroom floors, that’s what she told me, over and over, until I really couldn’t stand working in that hotel. You two were always her favorites. Even the name she gave me, I always hated it, the most boring name of the lot… Well, I guess I just needed to get away from home so badly, I had to marry the first suitable man who asked. And Roland was certainly suitable. Of course, we all ran as far and as fast as we could, though in very different directions, no?”
“What a load of horseshit.” Gloria pours more wine into her glass, then, after a moment’s hesitation, mine. “Mother never played favorites. Hers was tough love with all of us, you don’t know half the stuff she said to me and Mel. Every time I brought home a less-than-perfect grade, she told me I’d die drunk in a gutter. ‘Just like your father.’ That’s what she said to me. Every single time. There were days I was sure I would always hate her. Well, what did I know then, I was fifteen. So, fine, she wasn’t easy to live with, but she worked herself sick for us and she raised us the best she knew how… And there is absolutely nothing wrong with your name. It was our great-grandmother’s name. It’s beautiful. And it suits you perfectly.”
Melissa is frowning at me.
“But you loved him, right?” she asks. “When you got married? Didn’t you?”
And just like that—whether because of all the wine I have drunk, or the relief of speaking to my sisters after the decade and a half of near-estrangement, or the coziness of Melissa’s home, her girls’ happy drawings on the walls, her good, stolid husband asleep upstairs, or Gloria’s matter-of-fact, plainspoken vulgarity—something in me breaks loose, something vast and cold slides away, and from below, released, the emotions swell, and the truths, their dark, warm, salty flow much like the sea tide, much like weeping, and I see what I have been afraid to see, what I have hidden from myself for so long behind the story of an innocent lovesick wife put upon by a heartless man who tricked her into a marriage without a spark.
I did not love my husband when I married him.
I never loved him—and deep inside, I must have always known it.
Oh, of course, I was infatuated once—more, I was smitten, for he was handsome, he was brilliant, he was worldly, he was rich, he was ambitious, he was generous, he was absolutely everything a sad young girl with clouds and dreams for feelings could have wished for. And yet I did not love him, not in the deep, true sense, not in the way Melissa loves Tom, not in the way I love my children, not in the way our stern, no-nonsense, widowed mother loved the three of us. But as a child, I had often found her love heavy, demanding, disapproving, damaging even, so I had come to long for a different kind of love to find refuge in, to escape to—an easy love, a pretty love, a fairy-tale love. There is no easy love, of course, but at twenty-one, at twenty-two, I could not have possibly known it, and when something much like it came dazzling into my life, all my future selves, all my unrealized chances, all my untold stories seemed but a paltry price to pay for it—and a price I paid gladly. No one had robbed me of anything—I myself made the choice to give away my freedom, to give away my fire. And it never even occurred to me that I could say no, because how can you say no when fate singles you out, raises you out of the common muck as someone special, someone deserving of an ideal life, a life in which everything is easy, everything soft, everything gentle, and no one ever barks a harsh word, and no one ever slaps you, and no hard-drinking fathers die of heart attacks at the age of thirty-eight, and no hardworking mothers, old and gray before their time, cry nightly at the kitchen table before growing grim and estranged. But in this ideal life, everyone glides with the oily predictability of porcelain figurines in a decorative music box, one-two-three, one-two-three, and your days are like a never-ending teatime, everything polite and elegant and gilded just like some picture of a smiling princess in a powdered cake of a palace in a fairy-tale book. And maybe this life has no depth, and maybe it has no spark, that may be true, everything may well be somewhat flat, everything slightly dulled, even kisses may well taste of dust and ice, because proper fairy tales do not need any depth and you yourself tossed passion away when you married a seemingly flawless man whom you never loved, whom you were not in love with, whom, in truth, you never even wanted to take to your bed, for there had always been something in him, something too slick, too cold, too perfect, something that you disliked, something that held you off. And yet, at the time, it all made such sense, and you were like a young hopeful fly carried away by a luminous drop of sweet nectar, intoxicated, blinded by the luster, not knowing that the fresh-smelling sap would soon calcify into hard amber and you would be trapped in all that suffocating golden light, you would be trapped, trapped, trapped—
“It will be all right, everything will be all right,” Melissa is repeating, holding my shoulders as I weep, speaking to me in that soothing tone I have heard her use with her daughters.
Gloria sets down her glass, abruptly.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she announces, “but I’m a tad inebriated now, and you’re bawling anyway, so what the hell. The cad hit on me when I met him. Put his hand under my skirt. The last time I ever wore a skirt, I believe. Remember that gallery opening I invited you to? You’d only just gotten engaged. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought you loved him. I should have, maybe. Probably. But I was young. We were all so fucking young. Look, I’m sorry, all right?”
“Oh my God. He hit on me, too. At the rehearsal party, the night before you got married.” Melissa releases my shoulders. “He followed me into the ladies’ room and tried to kiss me. I was mortified. That’s why I acted a bit funny at the wedding. And why I never liked visiting you in later years. I felt horrible. Just horrible.”
“Oh, me too,” Gloria says. “Me too.”