Free Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes Page B

judgment. Eleanor felt the tug of family allegiance. Ginny was her daughter, and Priya was now her granddaughter. It was done.
    Eleanor wiped imaginary dirt from her hands. There would be no more dwelling on the negatives.
    “I’ll get some nice photographs later,” she said, moving a strand of hair from Ginny’s eye and placing it behind her ear. “Why don’t the boys put on the game and leave us ladies to preparing?”

GINNY
    Her mother had named her for Ginger Rogers, and seemed forever disappointed that Ginny couldn’t sing or dance or watch a Ginger Rogers movie without passing out on the couch before the final credits.
    Also, her namesake churned through five husbands. Ginny was lagging.
    Several years earlier, her mother sat Ginny down: “I want you to know that if you are a lesbian, I am okay with that.” This sentiment was undercut by the fact that her mother whispered lesbian. “Your father and I accept you no matter who you are.”
    “Mom, my problem is that I date too many men, not too few.” Ginny knew lesbians aplenty, and often thought it would simplify her life if she could rally to the cause. There had been a few halfhearted, clumsy attempts in college; she just didn’t have it in her.
    “But you never seem able to settle on one, and I have to ask myself, as your mother, what is wrong . I wish you could find a man like Douglas.”
    “Douglas is my brother. ”
    “Someone like him. Denise says Jodie Foster is a lesbian. She also went to Yale.”
    “If I go on Jeopardy!, I can take Homosexual Oscar Winners for five hundred dollars.”
    “It’s just… don’t you think it’s awkward, teaching what you teach, and… Ginny, friends ask me what you are doing, what you areteaching, and when I say family studies, they ask, quite naturally, does she have a family of her own.”
    “If I taught ancient Egyptian history, would they ask if I was ancient Egyptian?”
    “How is a mother supposed to have a serious conversation with her daughter when everything is a clever answer?” When her mother slipped into the third person she was minutes away from tears.
    “I’ve told you a million times, Mom, it wasn’t until the fifties that Americans began marrying in their late teens—and only because they were so traumatized by the war. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a single twenty-five-year-old woman was the statistical norm.”
    Of course, Ginny wasn’t exactly twenty-five.
    “Oh, none of it even matters to you!”
    Which wasn’t true. But Ginny believed in putting on a brave face. When she was young her father had told her that it was important not to rub her disappointments in people’s faces, and not to ask for pity. The lesson—one of the few her father had ever imparted—resonated. Because she understood, even as a child, why he was saying it. Her mother always seemed so… fragile. So Ginny would reveal anger, or annoyance—but not pain. When she was feeling lousy, this was a small act of heroism she could perform. She could at least say, I protected someone.
    Her mother would simply never understand how things had changed for women Ginny’s age. They had the right to work, the right to pursue careers, but they were dating men who had been raised by housewives, women like her mother who sent them off to school each day with neatly packed lunch boxes, each containing a favorite sandwich, a juice box, a bag of yogurt raisins, and a peeled carrot they were told they absolutely must eat if they cared at all about their mothers’ wishes or a vitamin A deficiency; mothers who sewed buttons and baked bread and served warm milk with honey before tucking them in; women who, in all matters of finance and business and geography, deferred to their husbands. So even though their girlfriends workedthe same hours, slaving away under the same fluorescent lights, staring at the same dull gray cubicle walls, even though their girlfriends, on occasion, made more money, that childhood image of a