Object lessons Read Free Page B

down, without thinking, the answer to the question: Who are you? It was the only time in her school career Maggie could remember not knowing an answer. It had been a kind of psychological trick, really; Sister didn’t even ask them to hand the papers in, just told them to put the answers in their pockets and think about what they had found to say about themselves.
    “What did you write, Mag?” Debbie had asked on the playground, blinking her blue eyes, like Helen’s but paler, smoothing back her black hair, like Helen’s but kinky. In fact Debbie looked like a blurred version of Helen, angles blunted, colors muted. “I put that I am still becoming who I am,” Maggie said. “God,” Debbie sighed. “That’s why you get As and I get stupid Cs.” And she took a piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to Maggie. In Debbie’s rounded writing, with the circles dotting the i’s, was written, “I am Helen Malone’s sister.”
    Afterward, when she was in her own room, Maggie had taken her own paper from her blazer pocket, unfolded it and put it on her bureau. It was blank.
    Helen was the only Malone child with a room of her own. On its door was a small blackboard for messages. It was always full. Maggie passed it now on her way to Debbie’s room, up beneath the slanting roof of the third floor. “In by 11!” Mrs. Malone had written at the top in capital letters, and below “John Kelly called—will call again” and “Can I wear your white eyelet blouse tonight? Aggie (I’ll wash it).” Underneath the second was written neatly in blue chalk “NO.” Her neat penmanship on the blackboard and a glass in the sink were often the only signs of Helen in the Malone house for days at a time.
    Debbie was lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, still wearing her nightgown. “Summer’s just started and I’m bored already,” she said as Maggie came in.
    Maggie sat on the edge of the bed, silent. Debbie shut her eyes. Her nose was sunburned. “Today she got a dozen red roses,” she said finally.
    “Really?” said Maggie. “From who?”
    “Who knows?” Debbie said. “Some guy. She stuck the card down the front of her shirt.”
    “Can we see?”
    “They’re in the living room. She said she’d put them where the whole family could enjoy them. I think that means they’re from somebody she doesn’t like that much.”
    Maggie sighed. “Amazing.” The two girls stared into space. Maggie bit a cuticle. “Your mother said she’ll drive us to the club,” she said.
    “Same old thing,” said Debbie. “Boring, boring, boring.” But she got up and started to put on her clothes just the same. “I’d better get boobs soon,” she said, her voice muffled as she dressed beneath the tent of her nightgown, but Maggie just said “Shut up” and started to look through Aggie’s underwear drawer for her old red bathing suit.
    “Sometimes you’re such a baby, Mag,” said Debbie listlessly.
    “Shut up,” Maggie said again, taking her suit and heading downstairs.

2
    I N LATE AFTERNOON, WHEN THE HUMIDITY had begun to ebb somewhat and the sheen of perspiration on all the children to fade, Connie Scanlan sat down crosslegged on the floor of her dining room to look at her good dishes. She always waited until she was alone to do this, for she thought that if anyone saw her they would surely say to themselves, “Well, she’s finally lost her mind.”
    Her pale knees glimmered amid the china spread out in front of her, as though they, too, were porcelain. Twelve dinner plates, twelve saucers, twelve cups, twelve dessert plates, a tureen, three serving dishes, a coffee pot, a creamer, and a sugar bowl. They were all a pale, pale cream color, with purple and red flowers painted around the edge and a gilded rim, and each dish, each cup, came with its own gray chamois bag, as though they were pieces of jewelry. The china seemed to Connie the only vestige of some foolish feeling she had once had about what her adult