Free Object lessons by Anna Quindlen Page B

when they saw your mother all dressed up like that. Ten o’clock in the morning and they thought they were seeing ghosts. Jesus, she looked beautiful, but so little, like some little bird. I told your grandfather, never mind that the boy’s not Italian, that he’s an American boy, he’s a nice boy, he’ll be good to her.”
    “What did Grandpop say?”
    “Jesus,” said Mr. Gennaro, letting his rear fall back on his heels, wiping sweat from his forehead with his arm. “I don’t remember. Nothing, probably. Your father was a nice boy. I remember one day he was out back with the old man, trying to help with the tomatoes, but your grandpop didn’t want nothing to do with him. So your father was talking to me. God, that boy got red in the sun. I thought he was going to have a stroke. And all of a sudden he says to me, ‘Mr. Gennaro, I love her with all my heart.’ Well, what the hell could you say. It was beautiful. So what if he was an American boy? All you see are Italian names here,” he added, his eyes searching the cemetery for an exception and finally coming back to JESSUP. “But you have a lot of Italian boys here married to American girls.”
    “We’re all American,” said Maggie a little primly.
    “Yeah, well, that’s one way of looking at it,” said Mr. Gennaro, digging into the marble with his chisel. “Anyway, your parents were a match. Look at all you kids. How’s your dad, anyway?”
    “Fine, I think,” Maggie said. “I think we’re moving.”
    “How come?”
    “How come I think it or how come we’re doing it?”
    “Jesus,” said Mr. Gennaro with a grin, “you are some philosopher. Answer both and let’s see what happens.”
    “I think it because my grandfather said we were, and we’re doing it because he wants us to.”
    Mr. Gennaro’s smile faded. “Your other grandfather.” Maggie nodded. “People aren’t always right, and people don’t always get their way,” he said, looking off into the distance.
    “He’s not people,” Maggie said, but Mr. Gennaro didn’t reply.
    Maggie watched him work for a minute more and then wandered down Consolation Way, her hands behind her back. It had never occurred to her to think of her parents as human beings before, and particularly as human beings with some secret and tenuous connection to one another. When they danced together, as they had last night, or when occasionally they touched, she had always felt that she was watching something artificial and far away, as though they were in a movie, acting the parts of husband and wife. Until now she had always thought of them in much the same way she thought of the house, as something that allowed her to live.
    The night before, she and her brothers had wandered through the field after dinner, counting the holes the construction crew had made, looking into them with a flashlight. Tommy and Connie were sitting on lawn chairs on the patio, and looking back in the darkness Maggie could see them, and see deep into the lighted kitchen of the house, could even see the little trivet over the stove from the Pennsylvania Dutch country that said: No matter where I feed my guests, it seems they like my kitchen best. The bulk of the house was a gray-black shadow, the yellow rectangles of windows floating within its vague borders. Maggie could see twin specks of red near the ground, the tips of her parents’ cigarettes, and occasionally the soft murmur of their voices would stop and her father would say loudly, “Be careful out there. I don’t want to drive to the emergency room tonight.”
    Damien had the flashlight, although both Terence and Maggie tried to take it from him; crickets leapt up from beneath his sneakers, and his thin legs flashed in the beam, as though disembodied. “Here’s another one,” he said, as he came to the edge of another hole; as his brother and sister edged nearer, afraid of falling in, he let the light rove around the sides.
    “They’re not that big,” said Maggie.