Every Last One Read Free Page A

some kind of inserts in the skirt. Maybe lace, so that part of the dress you could see through? Does that make any sense?”
    I breathe and try not to make my breathing sound like a sigh. If Ruby hears me sigh she will say, “I told you you didn’t have to come.” Everything for Ruby is an either/or. I think this may be a keystone of her personality, although it may be her age, too. My mother says I was the same, but she seems to refer to most of motherhood as a martyrdom. Her widowhood, her real martyrdom, we have never really discussed. “It must have been so hard foryou when Daddy died,” I said one evening when we had been watching the sun go down over the golf course behind the condominium where she and Stan live. She waved her hand, a gesture of dismissal. “That’s life,” she said. “And everything turned out fine.” She waved her hand again, this time at the green on the fourteenth hole, water diamonds arcing from the invisible sprinklers buried belowground. We could hear Stan in the kitchen, doing the dinner dishes. Maybe he was what she thought of when she thought of having a husband, not the man I could only vaguely remember: longish sideburns, a heavy jaw, the smell of citrus cologne, a dry kiss on the crown of my head. For some reason, my father liked to call me Mary Elizabeth Ever After, one of those nonsense names parents make up. I had one for Ruby, too: When she was small I used to call her Ruby Tuesday, and she would frown and say, “That is not my name.” I had done the same to my father, hands on hips, brows knit together: That is not my name. Oh, your mother was willful, my mother says to my children sometimes, shaking her head and exchanging glances of complicity. I am so middle-ground these days that it seems impossible to believe, but I suppose that is the progression: the sharp edges of youth ground down by life. A razor becomes a knife becomes a paperweight. It’s difficult to believe it will ever happen to my own children, especially my daughter.
    “I’m having a hard time seeing it, but maybe that’s just me,” I say.
    Ruby sighs loudly. “I don’t know,” she says.
    “Did you try the blue one?” I ask.
    “It’s such a magazine dress,” Ruby says. When I was a girl, I used to sometimes rip a picture of a dress from a magazine and take it into town to see if anyone had it, or something like it, something like it but cheaper. If Ruby sees a dress, or something like it, in a magazine, this means it is devalued by ordinariness.
    The phone rings. It is my oldest friend, Alice, who was my college roommate and now lives in New York City. “What does chicken pox look like?” she says, without greeting or identification.
    When we were in college, Alice divided men into three categories: boyfriend material, husband material, and father material. Since we graduated twenty-two years ago, she has met many of the first and almost none of the last two. Her son, Liam, is three now, and was fathered by Donor No. 236: medical student, sandy hair, tall, mathematical, methodical. Because I am a good friend, I’ve never mentioned that the shorthand description of the nameless Donor No. 236 sounds something like a description of my husband, who Alice called “the straightest guy on earth” until she realized I was serious about him. Sometimes there are people you love because you learned to love them a long time ago, because when you say, “Remember the night we went skinny-dipping in the dean’s pool?” she does.
    Alice and I had a period of frost when my children were small. When we talked, the sentences were empty—how’s work, where did you spend the holidays, how are your parents? “You’ve lost yourself,” she’d finally said. Of course, I had. Now Alice has, too.
    “How large an area does the rash cover?” I ask, while Ruby taps one foot insistently and tugs at a long ringlet.
    “There’s just one blister, but it’s very red and angry. And he’s been out of sorts all