idea of the three of them, Sarah, Lauren, Jill, âgetting together,â even as Lauren knows it will never happen.
Chapter 6
H er motherâs dress is out of the question. Lulu and Huck married in 1970. Lulu, stick thin, twenty-four, gigantic eyes rimmed in mascara, an earlier marriage (an impulsive four-day union to a middling Mexican musician) annulled. Lulu, then as now, looked incredible. The pictures capture it vividly: chiffon, ruched and belted at the waist, an embellished collar up the neck, her long arms bare but for a gold cuff, the dress trailing to the floor but light enough that itâs drifting, seems to be moving even in the picture for which they posed. Huckâs suit, basic black and not altogether that dated, though the jacket was cut long, and the big tortoiseshell glasses feel very much a relic of the time, as do his sideburns. The picture has hung in the kitchen for Sarahâs entire life.
The dress must be somewhere: Lulu is sentimental. Nevertheless, itâs not for Sarah. The truth, unspoken but many times mulled over, is that she looks nothing like Lulu. An irony, that one, a missed opportunity: the great beauty whose genes turn out to be recessive. It doesnât make Sarah laugh, even now, nor,though, does it make her cry. Thereâs little point in that. Sheâs her fatherâs daughter: as tall as him, the very same posture, the exact chin, the echoing laugh, the same way of holding a forkâthat weird specificity of DNA. Sheâs learned Lulu: the cock of the head, the purposeful stride, the girlish tendency to touch her own hair, self-taught comportment, a secret project of Sarahâs when she was twelve. Of course, sheâd known, much earlier than that, even, how genetics disappoint. Luluâs hair, just like the hair on that disembodied bust of Barbie, a birthday present on which she was meant to practice the feminine arts, could be pinned up prettily, pulled over her shoulder casually, or folded into a lush, delicious chignon. Lulu wore it to her waist, once upon a time, a much younger woman, though now, in her sixties, itâs mannishly cropped, which has the effect of making her face appear even finer. Those drugstore elastics never seemed to do anything to Sarahâs hair but choke it, like a too-tight bandage that makes your finger swell.
Then the yearned-for breasts, they simply kept growing, adolescence as horror story (isnât it always?), the areolae spreading like a bruise, Sarah looking on in private shock, shielding herself with a rough towel in the postswim shower. They stopped, eventually, of course, though they hurt her back, sometimes. Those breasts are two of the many reasons she could never wear her motherâs gown down an aisle. Thereâs also her shoulders (those are Huckâs, too), broad and powerful, not an altogether bad thing, but the effect would be more pleasant if her waist tapered, as her motherâs does, even after childbirth twice over, Lulu in her pleated skirts like a paper doll. Luluâs means of sustaining herself: occasional bites from a plate piled high, while she darts around the room, making conversation, before scraping the thing intothe garbage disposal. She doesnât need more than a few cubes of cantaloupe in the morning, a cup of tea with honey and lemon in the afternoon, a half of an English muffin, some desultory bites of a salad, the drumstick from the chicken, gnawed with a precision thatâs somehow more like a lady than a rodent. Sarah requires more than this to survive, and she has learned to ignore, or not ignore, make peace with, or not wage war against, the excess. That excess, it sits comfortably on her body, everywhere: the slope of chin into neck, that bit from elbow to armpit, that swell just above the waist, with the humorous puckered punctuation of her navel. Itâs there, from the back of the knees up: more cushion than sheâd like, and itâs stubborn, this