The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [57]
“Clare’s parents are very good to Lucy. They live quite near us. Quite near: we all live on the campus, in faculty housing. Clare’s father was, as a matter of fact, a colleague of mine. A friend. It was difficult because, well, we were friends, and he’s only ten years older than I and he didn’t want Clare to marry me. He thought she was trying to rescue me. ‘I don’t want a rescue marriage for my daughter, Adam, no thanks. Not for my only child.’ But then, well, I guess everyone comes around. Lucy’s their only grandchild.”
She hadn’t wanted to hear anything about her. Clare. But now, hearing that she’s younger, rather than feeling competitive or jealous, Miranda says, Yes, that’s right, that’s good. She sees that Adam needed an attention and devotion you had to be young to provide. Maybe this attention had to do with sex, maybe it was estrogen level; or maybe it was based on the anxiety that you might not be chosen, that you might miss out on something essential if you weren’t listening in the right way, if the man didn’t feel you were. Yes, she thinks it is about being chosen. An older woman has either lived with not having been chosen or learned that having been chosen doesn’t shape a life as much as she’d once thought.
She has watched younger women listening to men talk about themselves: the women rapt, entirely attending. And she’s watched older women: their eyes flicking to another corner of the room: a handsome man, a woman friend, the drinks, or the hors d’oeuvres. It’s a good thing, she hears herself saying to herself, surprised that the thorn in her flesh that had been Adam’s wife has suddenly and simply fallen out. As if it dropped on the sidewalk and she had kicked it onto the street. Run over, stepped on by strangers. In any case, entirely gone.
They are shown cotton nightgowns. Miranda insists that Adam extract a surety from the saleswoman: that they are looking at nothing but 100 percent cotton. The saleswoman—her hair sprayed in a stiff helmet, her lips outlined in a dark, almost-black outline, her eyes shadowed in greenish gold—looks displeased. Then Adam says something to her, shrugging, and they both laugh.
“What did you say?” Miranda asks.
“I noticed the calendar on the wall. The lettering is Hebrew; the photograph is a Jerusalem skyline. I told her you were buying these for your mother-in-law, who’s Israeli. And that we all understood that Israelis are people who have the highest powers of discrimination. I told her that if you gave your mother-in-law anything but pure cotton, she’d make you get right on the plane, come back here all the way from California, to return them.”
When did it happen, Miranda wonders, that Adam had acquired the skill of joking with salespeople? When they were young each purchase was an agony for him. She wonders if he is more at ease when he is speaking Italian.
She smiles at the saleswoman. But she still cannot entirely relax.
“Read the tags, Adam,” she says, “make sure they’re pure cotton. Read the washing instructions.”
He reaches into his pocket for his glasses. He bends his head to read the tags. Leaning, reading, fingering the cloth, their faces, their hands, are closer than they’ve ever been. Suddenly he is overcome by a scent that is emanating, he thinks, from her face, rather than her body. It is light, unpowerful. A powdery scent of roses. It is familiar; he knows it from somewhere else, somewhere in his past. It isn’t a scent that he associates with Miranda, but with someone else. It isn’t his mother. Or hers. An arousing, unplaceable memory.
“One hundred percent cotton. Of the highest quality. You can bet the farm on it.”
“Thanks, now I just have to get myself a farm.”
Miranda is pleased with her purchases. Each of the nightgowns clearly different from the others. Hannah would be annoyed if she thought Miranda had not been attentive and imaginative in her selection. If she suspected Miranda had done it perfunctorily, as a duty, not taking into consideration who Hannah was. She very well may ask how much Miranda spent. Miranda will refuse to tell her