Object lessons by Anna Quindlen

let himself out the back door.
    When he was gone Connie hung all the coffee cups on their hooks in the cabinet, and then took Joseph upstairs for his nap. In the upstairs hallway she stood on tiptoe to look at herself in the mirror. All the mirrors were hung at Tommy’s height, so that the bottom half of her own face, her mouth and chin, were always invisible. She thought perhaps she should get her hair cut. “I’m staying right here,” she said to herself, only half aloud, and wondered as she went downstairs what it would be like to know how to drive, to go wherever you wanted to go whenever you wanted to go there.

7
    O N WEDNESDAY MORNING MAGGIE WAS sitting on the front steps when her aunt Celeste arrived. Damien had collected cicadas in a shoe box, surrounding them with tiny tufts of grass and a collection of sticks, and now he wanted to name them. Once he had used up Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Mickey, Donald and Pluto, he had come to Maggie for help. The two of them argued; she suggested some girls’ names and Damien was sure that all cicadas were boys. When Celeste pulled up in front of the house in her red car, the one with the pleated silver fins, Damien appealed to her for support. She took one look at the bugs, their iridescent backs gleaming in the sun, their squat bullet bodies motionless amid the grass and sticks, and said, “Those are male animals.” Then she opened the screen door and let herself in. Maggie left Damien talking to the bugs and went inside.
    Celeste was not really Maggie’s aunt, but her mother’s first cousin and closest friend; the two women had been like sisters growing up, the only sister Connie was likely to get, the closest person to her as she grew older. Celeste came once a week in the summer, when business was slow. She brought a shopping bag filled with clothes and costume jewelry for her cousin Connie (“poor Connie,” she always said with a sigh) and play makeup for Maggie, which Connie took away and hid on the top shelf of her closet, between the douche bag and the copy of Tropic of Cancer . “This is the new you,” Celeste would announce, pulling Capri pants and a blouse with low ruffled shoulders out of the bag. Then she would force Connie to put on the clothes and a pair of hoop earrings and walk around the living room until they both would laugh so hard Celeste would cry, “I’m going to pee myself,” and run off to the bathroom, little rivulets of mascara running into the lines around her eyes. Maggie never saw her mother wear the clothes Celeste brought after the first time she tried them on; they stayed in her bottom drawer, smelling of sizing. They were not Scanlan clothes.
    “What do you think, Mag?” Connie said, twirling around on her tiny feet, forgetting herself.
    “I don’t know,” Maggie said glumly, which was half the truth, the other half being that Connie looked lovely in an odd, eccentric way, like a Gypsy princess.
    “Oh, don’t be such an old woman,” her mother said. “Ce, come here. Your goddaughter disapproves of me.”
    “Oh my God,” Celeste said, smoothing down her skirt as she returned from the bathroom. “My poor bladder. You girls.”
    Celeste was the only person Maggie knew who was divorced. She had gotten married the year before Connie and Tommy, to a school friend of Tommy’s named Charlie Black, who drank. It wasn’t the drinking that had made her finally leave, although that was a convenient excuse; it wasn’t even the fact that all Celeste’s Max Factor pancake could not conceal her bruises on Sunday mornings at Mass. Maggie had heard her once tell Connie that what got to her was the basic boredom of it all, the sameness of sitting around every evening watching Charlie drink beer in his leatherette recliner, his hair flopping over his forehead, his T-shirt yellow beneath the armpits: Every morning Celeste would clean her house, do her laundry, start dinner, talk to her mother on the telephone, walk the poodle, take