feels chilly to her. Berkeley is warmer, which is one reason she’s staying there, though she’s a city person and if Calder weren’t so happy at preschool, she might move across the Bay.
In the closet are arrayed sandals, flip-flops, and tennis sneakers—shoes of languor, Thisbe thinks, meant for traipsing through town, and for hitting a shuttlecock behind the house. There’s even a pair of snow boots amidst everything else, though the family is in Lenox mostly during the summer. In the off-season they rent out the house for weeks at a time, though no one can remember when it’s being rented; more than once somebody drove up, only to find the house occupied. It was Leo one time, and he so startled the renter that she pointed a hunting rifle at him. After that, Leo told Thisbe always to ring the doorbell when she arrived unless she wanted his parents to shoot her. A laughable notion: Thisbe can think of no one less likely to shoot a gun than Marilyn or David. Apparently, when Marilyn was growing up she refused on moral grounds to touch a weapon—she even opted out of archery practice at summer camp—and when she became a parent, she didn’t allow her children to play with toy guns. “Good liberals,” Leo said of them, only half derisively; they’d turned him into a good liberal, too.
Upstairs in the hallway everything is as she remembers it—the Kathe Kollwitz etchings on the wall, the faded portraits of Leo’s great-grandparents, the old charcoal street map of Paris. On a glass table sit the family photos, where Thisbe finds a younger version of herself standing next to Leo at his Wesleyan graduation, and another photo, from their wedding, at the New York Aquarium, she in her wedding gown holding a glass of champagne, and behind her, in his tank, the walrus pressed against the glass, making his walrus noises. That walrus alone, Leo used to say, was worth the cost of the wedding; he kept referring to the walrus as his best man. In another photograph, this one taken after Leo’s death, she’s holding Calder, just two years old. In all these photos she plays a supporting role—the girlfriend, the wife, the mother—though there’s also one of her alone, in a yellow sundress, a look of perplexity across her face, taken when, she isn’t sure. This photo, in particular, makes her feel obscurely violated, which is strange because for years there were no photos of her in the house, and she took this as evidence that she wasn’t welcomed by Leo’s parents, at least not by Marilyn, who from the start was suspicious of her, why, she doesn’t know. The only reason she can come up with is that she wasn’t Nora, Leo’s high school girlfriend, who lingered on haphazardly into college, showing up in Middletown when she and Leo weren’t with someone else to perpetrate another act of high drama. The girl with the extra toe , Thisbe called Nora, which, she understood, was mean-spirited (though Nora did, in fact, have an extra toe, at the base of where her first two toes met), and was, besides, the least remarkable thing about her. More remarkable was her capacity for self-destruction, for putting things into her body that didn’t belong and failing to put in things that did. Leo’s mother helped Nora get treatment (for drugs, for anorexia), and because of this, and because Leo knew Nora as long as he did (they were in the same nursery-school class in Morningside Heights), Marilyn saw Nora as a surrogate daughter and was almost as protective of her as Leo was.
The happy girlfriend , Marilyn called Thisbe. Why? Because she was blond and pretty and from California? Because she didn’t have an eating disorder? Thisbe was tempted to protest that she wasn’t happy and to argue, at the same time, that happiness was nothing to be ashamed of, both of which led her down a path she didn’t wish to take, of defending herself to her boyfriend’s mother. What had Marilyn been hoping for? That Leo would marry Nora? It should
In the closet are arrayed sandals, flip-flops, and tennis sneakers—shoes of languor, Thisbe thinks, meant for traipsing through town, and for hitting a shuttlecock behind the house. There’s even a pair of snow boots amidst everything else, though the family is in Lenox mostly during the summer. In the off-season they rent out the house for weeks at a time, though no one can remember when it’s being rented; more than once somebody drove up, only to find the house occupied. It was Leo one time, and he so startled the renter that she pointed a hunting rifle at him. After that, Leo told Thisbe always to ring the doorbell when she arrived unless she wanted his parents to shoot her. A laughable notion: Thisbe can think of no one less likely to shoot a gun than Marilyn or David. Apparently, when Marilyn was growing up she refused on moral grounds to touch a weapon—she even opted out of archery practice at summer camp—and when she became a parent, she didn’t allow her children to play with toy guns. “Good liberals,” Leo said of them, only half derisively; they’d turned him into a good liberal, too.
Upstairs in the hallway everything is as she remembers it—the Kathe Kollwitz etchings on the wall, the faded portraits of Leo’s great-grandparents, the old charcoal street map of Paris. On a glass table sit the family photos, where Thisbe finds a younger version of herself standing next to Leo at his Wesleyan graduation, and another photo, from their wedding, at the New York Aquarium, she in her wedding gown holding a glass of champagne, and behind her, in his tank, the walrus pressed against the glass, making his walrus noises. That walrus alone, Leo used to say, was worth the cost of the wedding; he kept referring to the walrus as his best man. In another photograph, this one taken after Leo’s death, she’s holding Calder, just two years old. In all these photos she plays a supporting role—the girlfriend, the wife, the mother—though there’s also one of her alone, in a yellow sundress, a look of perplexity across her face, taken when, she isn’t sure. This photo, in particular, makes her feel obscurely violated, which is strange because for years there were no photos of her in the house, and she took this as evidence that she wasn’t welcomed by Leo’s parents, at least not by Marilyn, who from the start was suspicious of her, why, she doesn’t know. The only reason she can come up with is that she wasn’t Nora, Leo’s high school girlfriend, who lingered on haphazardly into college, showing up in Middletown when she and Leo weren’t with someone else to perpetrate another act of high drama. The girl with the extra toe , Thisbe called Nora, which, she understood, was mean-spirited (though Nora did, in fact, have an extra toe, at the base of where her first two toes met), and was, besides, the least remarkable thing about her. More remarkable was her capacity for self-destruction, for putting things into her body that didn’t belong and failing to put in things that did. Leo’s mother helped Nora get treatment (for drugs, for anorexia), and because of this, and because Leo knew Nora as long as he did (they were in the same nursery-school class in Morningside Heights), Marilyn saw Nora as a surrogate daughter and was almost as protective of her as Leo was.
The happy girlfriend , Marilyn called Thisbe. Why? Because she was blond and pretty and from California? Because she didn’t have an eating disorder? Thisbe was tempted to protest that she wasn’t happy and to argue, at the same time, that happiness was nothing to be ashamed of, both of which led her down a path she didn’t wish to take, of defending herself to her boyfriend’s mother. What had Marilyn been hoping for? That Leo would marry Nora? It should
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