when Leo was a teenager, held the family’s air hockey table and pinball machine and was witness to epic games of Ping-Pong between Leo and his father (when the girls came home from college they got in on the fun, too), and late at night when his parents were asleep served as the pot-smoking venue for Leo and his friends. (It was the same way for Thisbe growing up; the American family basement, she has long believed, was invented with marijuana in mind.) Even after Leo moved out, there remained an upstairs-downstairs divide, with the basement serving as rec room, while the rest of the house was consecrated to more high-minded pleasures, to the piano—Marilyn and David still play—and to a slew of board games, which were packed into the cabinets beneath the bookshelves. When Thisbe met Leo, the summer after her junior year at Bowdoin, she would come over to find various Frankels spread across the rug playing Scrabble, Pictionary, Boggle, Taboo. Most of the time she refused join in; the competition was so explicit it unsettled her. Though she’s competitive herself. Those times when she agreed to play, she was as resolved to win as anyone else.
In the dining room, a couple of booster seats are perched on the table, and next to them stands a high chair. Marilyn and David had it made after Noelle’s first son was born. “We wanted it to be an actual piece of furniture,” Marilyn said, and Thisbe, back when procreating seemed at best a theoretical enterprise, said to Leo, “What does she mean, she wants to it to be an actual piece of furniture? It’s a high chair!” Later, she took to surveying the other baby accoutrements, purchased for a grandson who lived six thousand miles away. “I think the diaper disposal should be a real piece of furniture. And the training potty, too.”
In the living room she finds a deck of playing cards, a set of keys, and a flyer from the local policemen’s benevolent association advertising the upcoming auction. An antique reading lamp sits next to the couch, and beside it lie Marilyn’s glasses on top of an open copy of the Times . (The image Thisbe retains is of Marilyn and David up late reading, the smell of wood in the fireplace and of Marilyn’s mulled apple cider, Thisbe and Leo coming home from the bar to find Marilyn and David asleep with their books toppled on their laps, Leo saying, “Come on, kids, time for bed.”) Magazines are strewn across the top of the grand piano— The New Yorker , Harper’s , the TLS —along with some medical journals and, stuck between them, an errant copy of Blueberries for Sal . Thisbe sits down to read, but then, distracted, she wanders across the living room and around the bend, through this house filled with alcoves. One Christmas, she and Leo house-sat for her college professor, and half the fun was seeing what they could find snooping through the closets. She’s suspicious of people who don’t snoop; she thinks it suggests a lack of curiosity. Besides, she has a proprietary regard for this house. It’s here, in Lenox, where she and Leo met, where they spent their first months together.
On the rafters are the siblings’ names and the names of old boyfriends and girlfriends etched into the wood. After she and Leo started to go out, he climbed up a beam and, in a ritual of mock seriousness, crossed out the name of his old girlfriend, Nora, and carved in Thisbe’s name instead. Her gallant boyfriend. It’s been twelve years since then, but she can still make out her name on the rafters; it flusters her to see herself here, living on in this house after he’s gone. A shudder runs through her, though it could be from the cold as much as from anything else. The house feels damp, as it always did, perhaps because it wasn’t winterized when it was first built and because, once it was, the process was done haphazardly and on the cheap. You’d think going to Bowdoin would have acclimated her to the cold, but it hasn’t; even San Francisco
In the dining room, a couple of booster seats are perched on the table, and next to them stands a high chair. Marilyn and David had it made after Noelle’s first son was born. “We wanted it to be an actual piece of furniture,” Marilyn said, and Thisbe, back when procreating seemed at best a theoretical enterprise, said to Leo, “What does she mean, she wants to it to be an actual piece of furniture? It’s a high chair!” Later, she took to surveying the other baby accoutrements, purchased for a grandson who lived six thousand miles away. “I think the diaper disposal should be a real piece of furniture. And the training potty, too.”
In the living room she finds a deck of playing cards, a set of keys, and a flyer from the local policemen’s benevolent association advertising the upcoming auction. An antique reading lamp sits next to the couch, and beside it lie Marilyn’s glasses on top of an open copy of the Times . (The image Thisbe retains is of Marilyn and David up late reading, the smell of wood in the fireplace and of Marilyn’s mulled apple cider, Thisbe and Leo coming home from the bar to find Marilyn and David asleep with their books toppled on their laps, Leo saying, “Come on, kids, time for bed.”) Magazines are strewn across the top of the grand piano— The New Yorker , Harper’s , the TLS —along with some medical journals and, stuck between them, an errant copy of Blueberries for Sal . Thisbe sits down to read, but then, distracted, she wanders across the living room and around the bend, through this house filled with alcoves. One Christmas, she and Leo house-sat for her college professor, and half the fun was seeing what they could find snooping through the closets. She’s suspicious of people who don’t snoop; she thinks it suggests a lack of curiosity. Besides, she has a proprietary regard for this house. It’s here, in Lenox, where she and Leo met, where they spent their first months together.
On the rafters are the siblings’ names and the names of old boyfriends and girlfriends etched into the wood. After she and Leo started to go out, he climbed up a beam and, in a ritual of mock seriousness, crossed out the name of his old girlfriend, Nora, and carved in Thisbe’s name instead. Her gallant boyfriend. It’s been twelve years since then, but she can still make out her name on the rafters; it flusters her to see herself here, living on in this house after he’s gone. A shudder runs through her, though it could be from the cold as much as from anything else. The house feels damp, as it always did, perhaps because it wasn’t winterized when it was first built and because, once it was, the process was done haphazardly and on the cheap. You’d think going to Bowdoin would have acclimated her to the cold, but it hasn’t; even San Francisco
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