50 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
females or to the waft of estrogen rising
like mist—its makeshift stage not a stage,
exactly, more a dais of the kind used for
elevating politicians above a crowd.
Look now at Beth as she takes an-
other bow! All the colleagues reluctant
to let her go as she waves goodbye to
the left, goodbye to the right, spoons
in hand and blouse fortunately buttoned
up. Groups of women, some strangers,
offer high fives as she threads through
the tables. Constance watches then turns
to Beth’s quinoa, a hearty, fibre-esque
gray. She pictures opening her mouth
and blowing, setting the entire place to
flame or at least reheating the quinoa—
she could do it, too, given what she’s
put down in the course of the past hour,
given her general mood. A little fire
would bring a swift end to Storytell-
ing Wednesdays.
We’re all about inhibition, Mary
Ann, the m.c., recently tenured and
flush from the publication of a best-
selling dystopian novel, announced at
the start of the evening. Losing it. Or
possibly creativity, gaining it, reclaim-
ing it, owning it, she added. Her own
story, kicking things off, had to do with
her firstborn, a Cesarean section, the
doctor’s hands deep in her gut, a re-
curring feeling even after he’d sewn
her up, even after her newborn was a
toddler, those hands still there, root-
ing around.
“Amazing!” Constance says to Beth,
who slides, with a jaunty handoff from
Mary Ann, back into her seat.
“You liked?” Beth says.
“Loved. Completely loved. Insane.
How did you even do that?”
“Practice,” Beth says. “Muscle mem-
ory. Tim thinks it’s a hoot.”
Beth holds two familiar-looking
spoons in her hand.
“Your quinoa’s cold,” Constance
says.
“I know,” Beth says, scooping, chew-
ing. “It’s supposed to be. Well, not cold,
exactly, but not hot. Hot is too much.
Lukewarm is best.”
“I completely agree,” Constance says.
Another mother story, not that anyone’s
asking: a day long ago, summer of ’80 or
thereabouts, Constance scrounging for
spare change and possibly a cigarette
in one of the cloisonné boxes in the
living room. Constance is a teen-ager
in tennis whites, a big match that af-
ternoon. The living room is a room she
rarely enters, sanctioned as it is for week-
end gatherings of adults. They come in
pairs like monogamous swans, arriving
for her parents’ famous cocktail parties,
chitchatting among the heavy walnut
furniture—the coffee table with its
twisted, vined legs, the tiger-oak side-
board laden with silver she and Sally
polish the day before Thanksgiving, or
Christmas Eve. On the walls are the ar-
tifacts from her parents’ collections, her
mother’s framed Hans Christian An-
dersen illustrations, torn from a valu-
able ancient edition, a flea-market steal:
the Little Match Girl, shivering, and
a near-dead Hansel and Gretel. And,
splayed on the living-room couch, one
arm across her eyes as if against a glare,
her mother out cold.
Know Constance has come into thir-
teen like Juliet Capulet, lovesick, des-
perate, a pawn in the vagaries of joust-
ing boys. She keeps a diary under lock
and key and rarely tells anyone her true
thoughts—how she alone can see the
way the world tilts and slips off its axis,
the way no one understands a thing but
her. She feels in her bones that she will
reinvent the universe in the image of
something better, something as of yet
unimaginable but far beyond the hori-
zon of this failing world. She will, she
believes, just as soon as she gets out.
Now she loops her mother’s arm over
her shoulder and drags her up the stairs.
Soon the bridge group arrives, clus-
tering in the foyer—bags and shoes,
expressions. They are here for their
weekly game, they tell Constance, who
has answered the door. They were on
for eleven, they say, and isn’t that her
mother’s car still in the drive?
Who knew? Who didn’t? Constance’s
mother was once not so far from the
rest of them, if measured by this and
that, yardsticks or swizzle, but now she
has soared straight to space: shot to the
moon, tucked into bed where Con-
stance has lugged her.
“Mother’s upstairs,” Constance says.
“She’s under the weather.”
“It’s going around,” Margaret Jones
says.
“I believe she knew we were com-
ing,” Florence Spears says.
“I told her I’d play her hand,” Con-stance says, improvising. “I’m not bad.
I’ve been teaching myself.”
“She’s been teaching herself,” Taffy
Bott says, as if Constance were speak-
ing French and she must translate for
the rest of them.
Constance smiles and holds up the
cards, tall in her tennis whites, her legs
and arms tanned. She explains that they
can play a rubber, maybe two, but she
has a match in an hour and will have
to cut it short.
She has her mother’s eyes—they’d
never noticed!—and a way of looking
as if she might rip their throats. No
doubt she has a killer serve.
Sally arrives to offer lemonade, ten
cents a glass.
“All right,” they say. “If you’re sure,”
they say. Everything almost fine and
what isn’t can be ignored: Constance
subbing for her mother! Little Sally
selling lemonade! Florence Spears tells
a funny story. Taffy Bott shows them
her broken toe, the bruise reaching all
the way to her calf. Margaret Jones has
a summer cold but who doesn’t?
Constance sets up the card table
in the middle of the living room, the
folding one from the garage still sticky
with the spills from Sally’s stand the
weekend before. She sends Sally for
a tablecloth from the kitchen, cock-
tail napkins, a can of peanuts from
the pantry.
The women eat the nuts in fist-
fuls, down their drinks quickly. The
cocktail napkins read “Of all the things
I’ve loved and lost I miss my mind
the most.”Beth walks Constance to her apart-
ment, one of the nondescript new con-
dos on Sheridan near the university.
They burrow against the wind in their
puffy, ugly coats, too cold to speak until
they reach the shelter of the courtyard.
“Would you like a nightcap?” Con-
stance asks her.
“I’ve got midterms,” Beth says.
“Right,” Constance says. “Forgot,”
she says. Sabbatical haze, she adds, her
explanation these days for everything.
“Well, good night,” Constance says,
pulling open the heavy outer door to
the vestibule. “You were great,” she
calls to Beth as the door slowly closes
behind her. Within the vestibule there