Object lessons by Anna Quindlen Page A

off her nail polish, put on a different color, watch her little stories on television, and be finished and bored to tears by three in the afternoon. She knew she should have figured this out beforehand; when she thought about it, she had told Connie, she realized that the beginning of life was one great event after another, your first bra and first date and first kiss, your proms and dances and finally your wedding, and then suddenly there was nothing to do for the rest of your life. In the beginning she always went to see Connie in the afternoon, particularly when Connie and Tommy were living in Celeste’s mother’s house, in Celeste’s old room. But after the baby was born Connie was too busy to talk.
    Six months after Maggie arrived, Celeste got on the train one day, without a clue as to where she was going, and got off at Times Square. She entered four office buildings, filled out four job applications, and was hired immediately as a secretary. When she got home and told Charlie, he knocked out her right front incisor and threw the poodle out the second-story window. Without a word (she told Connie she couldn’t really talk because of the tooth) she packed her vanity case and went home to her old room. Tommy and Connie had moved the month before to Westchester.
    Celeste still lived at home, in a kind of extended adolescence in which she spent all her salary on clothes and makeup and spent a lot of time criticizing her mother’s cooking. Like Connie, she was a showy combination of black and white, dark hair and white skin, but she was big and getting bigger, a big hefty woman with a big shelf of a bust. When she walked through the garment district to her current job as executive secretary to the president of a blouse company, the Puerto Rican boys who pushed the racks of clothes from building to building would smack their lips and call her “Mama.” She pretended not to notice, but she really didn’t mind.
    “So I think I’m getting married again,” Celeste said, settling back in a chair with a cup of coffee.
    “Uh huh,” Connie said. “Tell me another.”
    “Honest to God,” she said, staring down at the large pear-shaped diamond, yellow as an egg yolk, which she now wore on her right hand and which was the only memento of her last engagement. Maggie had heard one of her Scanlan aunts say that Celeste had the largest collection of yellow diamonds in the world, and when Maggie asked her mother if this was true, Connie only said “That bitch” and slammed out of the room.
    “Why do you want to get married? You have everything. You make a good living, have a nice house, privacy, freedom. You’ve got everything you had in high school except you’re old enough to enjoy it. Besides, you hated being married.”
    “I don’t have kids.”
    “Kids,” said Connie. “You’re a kid. Besides, it would kill your mother. Can you imagine your mother if you had to be married by a judge or something? Or a rabbi? She’d have a stroke.”
    Celeste’s current boyfriend was a Jew. All of her boyfriends since her divorce had been Jewish. She said it was a well-known fact that Jews did not hit women.
    “I know a nice Italian guy I could fix you up with.”
    “You? Who? Get out.”
    “Really. Remember Jimmy Martinelli that I used to date? Remember—you were in class with his cousin Anna Maria?”
    “The one with the glasses? And the nose?”
    “Well, his brother Joseph is working on this construction they’re doing here, on the development—”
    “Oh Jesus, Con,” Celeste said, lighting a cigarette. “My mother is always trying to fix me up with that guy. He’s never been married, right? So what’s wrong with him? He’s like me—can’t live with them, can’t live without them.”
    “I think he’s shy,” Connie said, reaching over and taking Celeste’s cigarette and using it to light her own, a gesture Maggie thought was the height of sophistication. She leaned forward to watch her mother pull in on