Free Love Anthony by Lisa Genova Page B

it, what am I going to wear?
    It occurs to her that she’s on the other end of this ridiculous question at least once a week with Sophie, her thirteen-going-on-eighteen-year-old. The other two girls will be dressed and ready and waiting at the front door, and Sophie will still bein her room, half-dressed, crazed and crying, clothes tossed everywhere. I can’t go to school! I have nothing to wear!
    Worried more about the girls’ being late for school than Sophie’s fashion crisis, Beth typically offers something quick and admittedly too glib.
    You look beautiful. Just be yourself and it won’t matter what you wear. C’mon, let’s go!
    Now Beth gets why Sophie rolls her eyes and cries harder. She owes her daughter an apology and a trip to the Hyannis mall.
    She tries for a moment to take her own advice. Be yourself . But who is she? She’s Jimmy’s wife, and she’s a mother. And if she gets divorced, if she’s no longer Mrs. James Ellis, and she’s only a mother, then is there less of her? She fears this and feels it already, physically, as if a surgeon has taken a scalpel to her abdomen and removed a whole and necessary part of her. Without Jimmy, she doesn’t recognize herself. How can that be? Who has she become?
    She rolls over and looks into her closet. It’s organized. That’s her. But otherwise, she’s not in there. She sits up and looks at herself in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door, her blond, chin-length hair a matted mess, her blue eyes deeply set and dull, her pajamas pink and nubby. That’s not who I am .
    She gets out of bed and returns to face the pictures on the wall in the hallway. The most recent portraits offer her nothing more than wife and mother. She’d always approved of how she looks in these pictures, her hair not too frizzy from the humidity, her makeup subtle, her nails polished, her clothes pressed. But as she studies herself now, her smile appears forced, unnatural, her posture stiff, like she’s a cardboard cutout of herself. Like she’s posing. She moves back in time and visits the oldest family photo and the portrait from her wedding. Here she sees more of the woman she thinks of as herself. Her smilecontains an unself-conscious abandon, her eyes are bright and happy. Where did that woman go?
    For some reason, she looks up at the ceiling, and there it is, as if the answer were delivered to her from above. The attic!
    She stands on her tiptoes, pulls the dangling white string, unfolds the wooden stairs, and climbs up. A wall of dense, stagnant heat greets her in a hurry at the top. Nearing the end of May, the days have been sunny, but it’s remained cool, only in the sixties, yet the trapped heat up here feels like summer against her skin.
    She pauses before fully committing to going in. The roof is pitched and low, and the wooden ceiling is riddled with protruding nails, making it both impossible and dangerous to stand up straight. And the floor is unfinished, with only a few planks of wood running the length through the center, like a bridge crossing a sea of pink insulation.
    Beth doesn’t like coming up here for fear of either forgetting about the low ceiling and impaling her head with a nail or accidentally stepping off the planks and falling through the fluffy fiberglass floor into the living room. Because of this, she normally visits the attic only twice a year—the day after Thanksgiving to take the Christmas decorations down and New Year’s Day to put the Christmas decorations back. Up and in, out and down, she’s never dallied in here.
    Jimmy’s got a bunch of his stuff strewn all over the far end—fishing rods leaning against the angled ceiling, two of them fallen over, tangled nets, tackle boxes, one of them open, a collection of golf clubs crisscrossed and loose on the floor like a pile of pick-up sticks, the empty golf bag, a single golf shoe, a surfboard, a clamming rake and bucket.
    “Jimmy.”
    With her hands on her hips, she scolds him in her