Don’t you want to forget someone too?
Lying in the darkness of her mother’s house, Franny tried to imagine a world in which Sapna had lived. Maybe Franny and Kumar would have met again, bumped into each other in a bookstore one day, laughed and said hello and gone on, but she never would have married him, and his sons would never have been her sons. If Sapna could have lived then certainly Beverly could have stayed married to Fix, which would mean no Jack Dine, no Dine stepbrothers, no Christmas party in Virginia. It would also mean no Marjorie though, and that would be a terrible loss when Marjorie had given Fix the benefit of great love. But maybe Bert would have stayed with Teresa then, and fifty years later he might have saved her life by insisting she go to the doctor in time. Cal would have missed the bee that was waiting for him in the tall grass near the barn at Bert’s parents’ house. He could have lived for years, though who’s to say another bee wouldn’t have found him somewhere else? With Cal alive, Albie would never have set the fire that brought him to Virginia, though he wouldn’t have come to Virginia anyway because Bert would have stayed in California. Franny, half asleep on top of the bedspread beside her husband, was unable to map out all the ways the future would unravel without the moorings of the past. Without Bert, Franny would never have gone to law school. She would have gotten a masters in English and so she never would have met Kumar at all. She never would have been in Chicago working at the Palmer House and so she never would have met Leo Posen, who sat at the bar so many lifetimes ago and talked about her shoes. That was the place where Franny’s life began, leaning over to light his cigarette. Somehow, out of all that could have been gained or lost, the thought of having never met Leo was the one thing she couldn’t bear.
The sound of Kumar’s breathing had deepened and slowed, and she got up carefully, felt for her dress and shoes in her suitcase, and changed clothes in the dark.
When she came down the back stairs to the kitchen, Franny found her mother at the breakfast table by herself, arranging petits fours on a tray.
“You know there are people here who will do that for you,” Franny said.
Her mother looked up and gave her an exhausted smile. “I’m hiding for just a minute.”
Franny nodded and sat down beside her.
“This party always seems like such a good idea in the abstract,” Beverly said. “But every time I have it I can’t imagine why.”
They could hear the guests in the other room, the hilarity in their voices raised by the eggnog and champagne. The piano player was playing something faster now, maybe a jazzed-up version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” but Franny wasn’t sure. Twelve days, she thought, she would have killed herself before she ever got to the five golden rings.
Beverly put out the last of the tiny square cakes from the box, pink and yellow and white, each one crowned with a sugared rosette. “Rick came after all,” she said, turning the squares to diamonds. “Now he’s drinking.”
“Matthew said he’d come.”
“I can’t take them all together,” Beverly said. “One on one the boys are fine, or mostly fine, but when they’re together they always have an agenda. They have so many ideas about the future: what I’m supposed to do with Jack, what I’m supposed to do with the house. They don’t seem to have any sense of what conversation is appropriate for a Christmas party. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know why they keep asking me. Do you have any ideas about the future?”
Franny picked up a pale-yellow petit four, the color of a newly hatched chick, and ate it in a single bite. It wasn’t very good, but it was so pretty that it didn’t matter. “None,” she said. “Zero.”
Beverly looked at her daughter and the look on her face was a pure expression of love. “I wanted two girls,” she said. “You and your sister. I wanted exactly what I had. Other people’s children are too hard.”
If her mother hadn’t been so pretty none of it would have happened, but being pretty was nothing to blame her for. “I’m going out there,” Franny said, and got up.
Her mother looked down at the plate of tiny cakes. “I’m going to divide them by color,” she said, pushing them all onto the table with the side of her hand. “I think I’d like them better that way.”
Franny found Ravi and Amit in the basement watchingThe Matrixon a television set the size of a single mattress.
“That’s rated R,” she said.
The boys looked at her. “For the violence,” Ravi said. “Not sex.”
“And it’s Christmas,” Amit said, operating on the logic of wishes.
Franny stood behind them and watched as the black-coated men dipped backwards to avoid being split in half by bullets and then popped up again. If it was going to give them nightmares the damage was already done.
“Mama, have you seen it before?” Amit asked.
Franny shook her head. “It’s too scary for me.”
“I’ll sleep in your room with you,” her younger boy said, “if you’re scared.”
“If you make us stop now,” Ravi said, “we’ll never know what happens.”
Franny watched for another minute. She was probably right, it probably was too scary for her. “Your father fell asleep,” she said. “Wait a little while and then go take him a plate for dinner, okay?”
Pleased by their small victory, they nodded their heads.
“And don’t tell him about the movie.”
Franny went back upstairs and did one full loop around the room but there were so few people she remembered. She hadn’t lived in Arlington since she’d left for college. The wives of Jack Dine’s three sons all wanted to talk to her but none of them particularly wanted to talk to one another. The wife of the son she liked the most was the wife she like the least, and the wife of the son she liked the least was the wife she greatly preferred. What was interesting though, not that any of it was interesting at all, was that the wife of the son she had the hardest time remembering was also the wife she had the hardest time remembering.
At some point in the evening before even a single guest had departed, Franny found herself back in the foyer, and there, without looking for it, she saw her own handbag on the floor, slightly behind the umbrella stand. She must have dropped it there when she came in, putting the luggage down, and without a thought she picked it up and went out the door.
