hear Lulu, because you always can hear her, that big laugh from deep in the throat, the mix of tongues in which she speaks, her native Spanish, her never-wholly-Americanized English, a touch of French, when warranted, for emphasis. Lauren can picture her; sheâll be standing in profile, head tilted back a bit, kind of like the woman in that Sargent portrait that so scandalized the public he had to revise it, adding a dress strap. Thatâs how Lulu always stands; she thinks it shows to best advantage her âgood side.â In her cotton dress, Laurenâs underdressed, but her relative youth makes up for this. Sheâs not one of the powerful matrons in geometric, collarless blazers, not a Ph.D. in a pencil skirt. Sheâs just some girl. She doesnât see Huck anywhere. She climbs the staircase.
Sarahâs room shares the top floor with Huckâs office. The second floor is divided between her parentsâ room and a guest room, frequently occupied. Lauren strolls past the line of womenâitâs always women, these linesâwaiting outside of the second-floor powder room, past the door to Huck and Luluâs inner sanctum, which now as ever has a little folk art painting, a portrait of a girl, strung on a silk ribbon, hanging from a nail on the door, because Lulu, in her enthusiastic collecting, long ago used up all the available wall space. The stairs creak horribly. Thereâs an unspoken consensus among the party guests that itâs fair to wander to the second floor, queue up there for the bathroom, but anything farther than that is an intrusion, so there are raised eyebrows as Lauren continues past the scrum and ascends to the top floor. She tries to look proprietary.
On the walls: frames, a collage of photographs, hundreds of them. Photographs are meant to be forever, but theyâre not. The quality of light, the once-fashionable haircuts and colors of clothing: You can tell these are old from afar, so old they might as well be cave paintings. Everythingâs done tastefully, under plastic, but the way the pictures are mounted seems somehow passé, a relic. Lauren doesnât need to look closely, doesnât need to scan the pictures to pick out her own face: there beside Sarahâs, girlish attempts at makeup and comic grimaces instead of smiles, on their way out, something to do with boys, she canât recall now. Or there, hair pulled back into a ponytail that snaked (could it be?) through the gap in the back of a corduroy, suede-brimmed baseball cap. That day, class field trip to a farm, or Storm King, or the Noguchi Museum, something of that order. And Sarah, of course: here, proudly atop a horse, because she had been one of those girls, a horse girl, until the age of thirteen, when it started seeming babyish, like Barbie, Archie comics, drawing with crayons. Sarah as a toddler, utterly recognizable (long nose, wild hair), studying one of her dadâs fat books, a mocking frown on her face, modeling his glasses to boot. Sarah, in overalls, buried in necklaces, because sheâd had that phase of making necklaces, stringing beads onto cord and calling it her art. Lauren still has one of those necklaces.
Lauren thinks of her own parents, their suburban split-level with a far less architecturally interesting stairwell, which is alsohung with pictures of the children, though only three, one of each of them. Her parents donât decorate in quite the same way as Lulu; they prefer the store-bought to the timeworn. The door is closed. She knocks.
âYou hiding?â
âJust a minute!â
âI said, you hiding?â Lauren jiggles the knob, which catches. Locked. âItâs me.â
The door opens. âShit. You scared me.â Sarah, fanning away smoke, guilty. âCome in here.â
Lauren closes the door behind her quickly, absurdly afraid of being caught at something. She canât help it. On the top floor of this house everything