Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

“But you don’t have to, Mother.”

There was a silence on my grandmother’s end. “Abigail,” she said, “this is Susan’s funeral.”

Grandma Lynn embarrassed my mother by insisting on wearing her used furs on walks around the block and by once attending a block party in high makeup. She would ask my mother questions until she knew who everyone was, whether or not my mother had seen the inside of their house, what the husband did for a living, what cars they drove. She made a solid catalog of the neighbors. It was a way, I now realized, to try to understand her daughter better. A miscalculated circling, a sad, partnerless dance.

“Jack-y,” my grandmother said as she approached my parents on the front porch, “we need some stiff drinks!” She saw Lindsey then, trying to sneak up the stairs and gain a few more minutes before the required visitation. “Kid hates me,” Grandma Lynn said. Her smile was frozen, her teeth perfect and white.

“Mother,” my mother said. And I wanted to rush into those ocean eyes of loss. “I’m sure Lindsey is just going to make herself presentable.”

“An impossibility in this house!” said my grandmother.

“Lynn,” said my father, “this is a different house than last time you were here. I’ll get you a drink, but I ask you to respect that.”

“Still handsome as hell, Jack,” my grandmother said.

My mother took my grandmother’s coat. Holiday had been closed up in my father’s den as soon as Buckley had yelled from his post at the upstairs window – “It’s Grandma!” My brother bragged to Nate or anyone who would listen that his grandmother had the biggest cars in the whole wide world.

“You look lovely, Mother,” my mother said.

“Hmmmm.” While my father was out of earshot, my grandmother said, “How is he?”

“We’re all coping, but it’s hard.”

“Is he still muttering about that man having done it?”

“He still thinks so, yes.”

“You’ll be sued, you know,” she said.

“He hasn’t told anyone but the police.”

What they couldn’t see was that my sister was sitting above them on the top step.

“And he shouldn’t. I realize he has to blame someone, but…”

“Lynn, seven and seven or a martini?” my father said, coming back out into the hallway.

“What are you having?”

“I’m not drinking these days, actually,” my father said.

“Now there’s your problem. I’ll lead the way. No one has to tell me where the liquor is!”

Without her thick and fabulous animal, my grandmother was rail thin. “Starved down” was how she put it when she’d counseled me at age eleven. “You need to get yourself starved down, honey, before you keep fat on for too long. Baby fat is just another way to say ugly.” She and my mother had fought about whether I was old enough for benzedrine – her own personal savior, she called it, as in, “I am offering your daughter my own personal savior and you deny her?”

When I was alive, everything my grandmother did was bad. But an odd thing happened when she arrived in her rented limo that day, opened up our house, and barged in. She was, in all her obnoxious finery, dragging the light back in.

“You need help, Abigail,” my grandmother said after having eaten the first real meal my mother had cooked since my disappearance. My mother was stunned. She had donned her blue dishwashing gloves, filled the sink with sudsy water, and was preparing to do every dish. Lindsey would dry. Her mother, she assumed, would call upon Jack to pour her an after-dinner drink.

“Mother, that is so nice of you.”

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I’ll just run out to the front hall and get my bag o’ magic.”

“Oh no,” I heard my mother say under her breath.

“Ah, yes, the bag o’ magic,” said Lindsey, who had not spoken the whole meal.

“Please, Mother!” my mother protested when Grandma Lynn came back.

“Okay, kids, clear off the table and get your mother over here. I’m doing a makeover.”

“Mother, that’s crazy. I have all these dishes to do.”

“Abigail,” my father said.

“Oh no. She may get you to drink, but she’s not getting those instruments of torture near me.”

“I’m not drunk,” he said.

“You’re smiling,” my mother said.

“So sue him,” Grandma Lynn said. “Buckley, grab your mother’s hand and drag her over here.” My brother obliged. It was fun to see his mother be bossed and prodded.

“Grandma Lynn?” Lindsey asked shyly.

My mother was being led by Buckley to a kitchen chair my grandmother had turned to face her.

“What?”

“Could you teach me about makeup?”

“My God in heaven, praise the Lord, yes!”

My mother sat down and Buckley climbed up into her lap. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

“Are you laughing, Abbie?” My father smiled.

And she was. She was laughing and she was crying too.

“Susie was a good girl, honey,” Grandma Lynn said. “Just like you.” There was no pause. “Now lift up your chin and let me have a look at those bags under your eyes.”

Buckley got down and moved onto a chair. “This is an eyelash curler, Lindsey,” my grandmother instructed. “I taught your mother all of these things.”

“Clarissa uses those,” Lindsey said.

My grandmother set the rubber curler pads on either side of my mother’s eyelashes, and my mother, knowing the ropes, looked upward.

“Have you talked to Clarissa?” my father asked.

“Not really,” said Lindsey. “She’s hanging out a lot with Brian Nelson. They cut class enough times to get a three-day suspension.”

“I don’t expect that of Clarissa,” my father said. “She may not have been the brightest apple in the bunch, but she was never a troublemaker.”

“When I ran into her she reeked of pot.”

“I hope you’re not getting into that,” Grandma Lynn said. She finished the last of her seven and seven and slammed the highball glass down on the table. “Now, see this, Lindsey, see how when the lashes are curled it opens up your mother’s eyes?”

Lindsey tried to imagine her own eyelashes, but instead saw the star-clumped lashes of Samuel Heckler as his face neared hers for a kiss. Her pupils dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives.

“I stand amazed,” Grandma Lynn said, and put her hands, one still twisted into the awkward handles of the eyelash curler, on her hips.

“What?”

“Lindsey Salmon, you have a boyfriend,” my grandmother announced to the room.

My father smiled. He was liking Grandma Lynn suddenly. I was too.

“Do not,” Lindsey said.

My grandmother was about to speak when my mother whispered, “Do too.”

“Bless you, honey,” my grandmother said, “you should have a boyfriend. As soon as I’m done with your mother, I’m giving you the grand Grandma Lynn treatment. Jack, make me an aperitif.”

“An aperitif is something you…” my mother began.

“Don’t correct me, Abigail.”

My grandmother got sloshed. She made Lindsey look like a clown or, as Grandma Lynn said herself, “a grade-A ’tute.” My father got what she called “finely drunkened.” The most amazing thing was that my mother went to bed and left the dirty dishes in the sink.

While everyone else slept, Lindsey stood at the mirror in the bathroom, looking at herself. She wiped off some of the blush, blotted her lips, and ran her fingers over the swollen, freshly plucked parts of her formerly bushy eyebrows. In the mirror she saw something different and so did I: an adult who could take care of herself. Under the makeup was the face she’d always known as her own, until very recently, when it had become the face that reminded people of me. With lip pencil and eyeliner, she now saw, the edges of her features were delineated, and they sat on her face like gems imported from some far-off place where the colors were richer than the colors in our house had ever been. It was true what our grandmother said – the makeup brought out the blue of her eyes. The plucking of the eyebrows changed the shape of her face. The blush highlighted the hollows beneath her cheekbones (“The hollows that could stand some more hollowing,” our grandmother pointed out). And her lips – she practiced her facial expressions. She pouted, she kissed, she smiled wide as if she too had had a cocktail, she looked down and pretended to pray like a good girl but cocked one eye up to see how she looked being good. She went to bed and slept on her back so as not to mess up her new face.