Carolyn Gaebler

      Aunt Sophie broke her hip tying back the peonies. There is a big vegetable garden out back, now mostly overgrown, that my great-grandmother planted with asparagus for her exacting husband during the lean years between the wars. Out front, she also trained wisteria vines up the porch and planted peony bushes at the top of the hill. Aunt Sophie felt responsible for keeping the front of the house, if nothing else, looking neat. And when the peonies bloomed in May, like they do every year, too big and heavy for their stems, she went in with a ball of twine to restrain them and tripped on a root and fell.



      Aunt Sophie is my grandfather’s second cousin, but they were both the only children of only children and so each other’s childhood playmates by adult decree. Aunt Sophie is six years older, which compensated some for her being a girl. She moved into the house on the hill before my great-grandmother died; Aunt Sophie moved in to take care of her. Grandpa and his children lived more than an hour away by car, and they could not drive to Baraboo each time Grandpa’s mother felt dizzy, so Aunt Sophie came in their stead, and she stayed because she didn’t have anywhere else to go.



      She managed to flag down a mailman from where she lay, supine in the garden. The mailman called an ambulance, which took her to the hospital, and the hospital called my mom. I suppose they must first have telephoned some nearer kin. Aunt Sophie has a daughter, who I met once when I was very small but I don’t remember, who ran away to California in the sixties, and ultimately received a doctorate in something called intergenerational psychology from an unaccredited university, but who, as far as anyone knows, has always had a minimal relationship with her mom. Cousin Elsa might have told them to call Grandpa, who would have told them to call the daughters-in-law.



      My mom arrived as soon as she could. She said Aunt Sophie had already said something racist to one of the nurses when she got there, but the nurse explained that it happens a lot when you gave the elderly strong drugs. Aunt Sophie was in a lot of pain. They said she might not walk again, or if she did, she might need a walker from now on, and that things like going to the bathroom, or tying her shoes, anything that involved bending, would be very difficult. They screwed a metal pin into her hip that night.



      The daughters-in-law, my mother and my four aunts, worked out a schedule where they would take turns visiting Aunt Sophie in the hospital and cleaning out the house. They kept her in the regular hospital for ten days after the surgery, because she was slow to wake up and she kept fainting when they tried to get her out of bed, or else trying to sit up straight and then growing suddenly weak. She had a hard time breathing and swallowing, so for a while they put her on an all-purée meal plan, which she found both insulting and gross. On the tenth day, they told her blood pressure was stable, and she demanded to go home. But she couldn’t get out of bed yet without help, or walk more than a few steps when she did stand up, so they sent her to a rehabilitation hospital in Verona, a nursing home, where she could stay for up to one hundred days, or longer if we paid. 



      Meanwhile, I was released from another hospital in Chicago. Aunt Sophie and I were discharged on the same day. It was clear that I would not finish the semester, and possible that I would not finish medical school. I didn’t want to go home. My mother, who had been driving round trip from Baraboo to Chicago, and only stopping in Milwaukee to change clothes for the past four days, didn’t much believe in therapy, but she believed in helpfulness and frugality, and she was not about to rent an apartment for me while I looked for work, if that was what I was getting at. She thought I should take a job at a hospital in Milwaukee, preferably something menial, like nurse’s assistant, until I got myself pulled together and decided if I wanted to finish school. And I could help the boys study for their SATs and help her with laundry and grocery shopping and trips to the dump, which she was behind on, God knows, between poor drugged up Aunt Sophie, who called her hospital gown “this ignominy” and kept trying to sneak out of her room, catheters and all, to attend to her toilette, and nervous wreck me. My mother, on some level, I think, felt that medical school was a selfish choice, and that pride goeth before a fall. I was so embarrassed that my hands had gone numb. Look, I said, if you take me home, I am going to have a panic attack. 



      Eventually, like Aunt Sophie, I would cease to notice the intractable, thin layer of grease that seemed to seep outward from all cracks and crevices of the kitchen, or the damp state of the carpets, or the dust that, because I have a mild form of asthma, sometimes, just before I went to bed, would make me double over and wheeze. But in those first days I, along with my mother and aunts, was appalled. They had cleaned the house from top to bottom with vacuums, sponges, brooms and mops, and nothing seemed to make a difference, they said, except the finger bowls full of baking soda that Aunt Mary had placed in all the corners, which helped absorb the close, organic smell of the downstairs rooms.



      My mother said I was taking some time off, but the aunts were sharp enough, and they didn’t ask me any questions, they just kept saying I was a real saint to look after Aunt Sophie and told me about their own children’s lives. Sam was going to astronomy camp, and Silas was lifeguarding, and Janet was going to Mexico for the summer months. My mother and father got married and then had me—those things happened in very rapid succession, I believe—while they were still in law school, and I am the oldest cousin by half a generation.



      We set up a bedroom for her in my great-grandfather’s, study, so that she wouldn’t have to negotiate the stairs. The aunts made casseroles and put them in the freezer. My mother made arrangements to drive out to Baraboo with Peter, my oldest little brother, who just got his license, in separate cars, and then drive back in one car, so that I could use her old van. Aunt Hattie and my mom were there on the day we brought her home, flanking her and supporting her from underneath the elbows as she made her way gingerly up the front steps. Thank you, girls, she said, and then promptly fell asleep. 



***



      If Aunt Sophie was surprised that I had moved into one of the upstairs bedrooms, she didn’t let on. She was selfish in that funny, childish way; she was pleased that I had moved in, would be unsurprised if I stayed, and equally unsurprised if I moved away. I drove her to and from physical therapy and heated meals for her that the aunts had frozen. She could shower alone, sitting on a chair, but she could not get in and out of the tub, so she would call me once she had undressed, and I would steady her as she climbed in, politely averting my eyes, and help her climb out again when she called to say she was done, and then we would both pretend to forget that part of our routine. They say that most people who break a hip over the age eighty do not regain full mobility, and most people over eighty-five die from complications within a year. Aunt Sophie was eighty-nine—actually, we believed Aunt Sophie was ninety, but she believed, and so the hospital believed, that she was eighty-nine—but she appeared to be rapidly recovering her strength. It must have brightened her life some, to see so many people, to have so many appointments marked in green ink on the calendar over the kitchen sink. She went from leading a solitary, intermittently extremely solitary, existence to having a live-in niece and six physical therapy classes a week.



      “The instructor said something very flattering today,” she told me the second day driving back from Verona. “He said—he is a charming young man, Elizabeth, you would like him—he said I was naturally very limber and graceful in my movements. I said to myself, heaven knows I am not anymore, but once in my life I was, very limber. When I lived in Turkey I was the best dancer of all the secretaries, and I spoke the best French, which made me very useful—to the embassy, you know—and also popular with the diplomats and military men.”



      She was a liar. Some held that the lies had grown more elaborate and implausible with age, were evidence of the slow onset of dementia. Others held Aunt Sophie had told outrageous lies since she was a little girl; the quirk had only grown more pronounced as her social inhibitions withered away.



      She had, through family connections, briefly worked at the American military base in Wiesbaden after the war. She might have once lived in Turkey, who could say? There was a sad story about a British officer and a broken engagement, which Grandpa sometimes told when Aunt Sophie was not there. She wrote her mother to say that the British officer was going to divorce his wife and marry her, and her mother announced Aunt Sophie’s engagement to all of Baraboo. Her father, by way of his wife’s family, owned the First Bank. They planned a large wedding. But then she came home, still Sophie Mann, and her mother had to find another husband for her. That was how she married Chip, Grandpa says, and produced her one daughter, Elsa. Chip died young, and Aunt Sophie didn’t talk about him. When she was married, Grandpa must have been just old enough to understand what was going on.



      “Very limber,” I agreed.   



      It was very hot in July, and the whole dusty house seemed to stick to you when walked through it. Neither of us slept very much. I started serving dinner late. She would nibble birdlike at English muffins if I made them for her before her therapy, and then in the afternoon we would drink coffee from tiny cups and eat store bought cookies on the porch in the heat. She had heavy, anthropomorphic silver coffee service from her mother, whose pots poured from pursed lips and stood on garland-ringed human legs. She also had an unmatched set of tiny coffee cups, ceramic sheaths without handles that sat in copper sleeves whose handles one could grasp only with a pincer-like thumb and index finger. From Turkey, she said.



      She was very interested in my love life. I had had the same boyfriend all of college, a dependable, chubby poet named Jake, with whom I had had a sad but not too sad break-up in the winter of our senior year. We still talked on the phone sometimes, but we both knew all along, I think, that we didn’t like each other enough for more than that. That is in itself sad, I suppose, the idea of lukewarm romance. None of this satisfied Aunt Sophie. She would question me about Jake, what kind of people did he admire? Was he a romantic or a pragmatic character? I often said I didn’t know. It becomes harder to describe someone, the more time you have spent with them; he was a pragmatic romantic, I said. I sometimes wore a necklace he had given me, two rough silver beads he had made in a metal working class on a sliver chain he had bought. I wore it as a little memorial to my little sadness, and as a reminder of our friendship. Mostly I wore it out of habit. It was the one ornament that I had brought with me, the holes in my ears having suddenly grown very tender last winter and closed up, and it dressed up my jean shorts and tank tops, which I wore most days. Aunt Sophie was convinced that the necklace meant that hearts had been broken, that Jake and I would cherish tragic flames for each other for the rest of our lives.



      Both of Aunt Sophie’s husbands were, my dad says, losers, and she didn’t like to talk about them. But she saw great loves thwarted, smoldering in the breasts of almost everyone she knew. Grandpa, for example, was supposed to have been in love with a Japanese woman when he was part of the occupying forces after World War II. According to Aunt Sophie his mother prevented the match, insisting he marry Grammy instead.



      I lost the little silver necklace one Saturday at the laundromat. I was wearing it when I left the house in the morning, and not wearing it when I got back, and I went back to the laundromat and looked all over the floor and the benches where I had been sitting, and even looked in the washers and dryers I had used. I felt sad but relieved to have lost it, to have let it so unceremoniously disappear. But when I told Aunt Sophie she screwed up her wrinkled face in sympathy and cried. There is something sadder even about the little talismans that other people invest with power than the little talismans that belong to you.



      After coffee she, with her old bones, would nap, carefully arranging herself on her back, but not letting her toes point in, as not to disturb the bolt in her still painful hip. In the evenings I would run, and at nine or ten I would shower, and then at ten or eleven I would make a real dinner. Aunt Sophie showed me where I could still find asparagus in the garden. She pointed out the kitchen window because she couldn’t get down the back steps. My father, and the other uncles with him, I assume, had set up a bank account for my use while I looked after Aunt Sophie. Our combined allowances far exceeded the meager pension checks she was used to living on, and, once she had been made to understand the new financial arrangements, she loaded the grocery cart with lamb chops and steak. Aunt Sophie could come grocery shopping with me because she was willing to push the grocery cart—she was not willing to use her walker in public. I would grill on the front porch, and we would eat on the wicker furniture, our plates in our laps, mosquito candles burning. After dinner, we would make milkshakes, sometimes two rounds a night. Aunt Sophie seemed to have forgotten at some point how properly to feed herself, or lost the will to do it, and had starved in the gentle way of the unattended elderly. That summer she was making up for lost time. I have to keep up my strength, she would say. 



      Aunt Sophie had been distributing her worldly possessions among the young and vital, as she put it, for many years. For my eighteenth birthday she had given me two pairs of gloves, because we both have small hands, and one egg-shaped, Jungendstil brooch that she said was set with emeralds. I doubted the emeralds part, but I did wear the broach in college a lot. It is the size of a sand dollar, with heavy, globular hands of soft metal holding the green stones. In August she gave me twenty-seven mohair sweaters. Before she went to college, from whence, as the only daughter of the owner of the only bank in Baraboo, she was expected to return with an eligible bank-president-to-be, her mother had taken her on a shopping trip to Chicago. There they purchased twenty-seven mohair sweaters, one of every shade.



      She returned in the spring of her freshman year, for reasons that remain obscure, and all the sweaters came home too. She said they were in the attic somewhere, and that they might not fit me because I was bigger in the chest than she had been, but that I was welcome to take them if I liked. I might need them, she said. She observed at the hospital that the lady doctors dressed very well, just like doctors’ wives, under their white coats, and that, as they kept the whole hospital the temperature as cold as an ice box, they wore some very nice sweaters, even in August.  



      There would be a big family party on Labor Day Weekend. We believed she would be turning ninety-one, but the cake would say Happy 90th Birthday, Sophie! According to Grandpa, Aunt Sophie’s mother had disappeared for six months just after the United States entered the War, but she wasn’t married until the following June. And Aunt Sophie, according to my great grandmother, by way of Grandpa, was much too tall until about third grade. This information was already second hand, though; Grandpa wouldn’t enter the world until six years after Aunt Sophie’s birth, or seven years, depending on the date you used. And now there was none left among the living who could verify the story or deny—except, perhaps, for Aunt Sophie herself, but she, of course, one was not allowed to ask. Grandpa and the five uncles and all of their wives and kids would drive out. The daughters-in-law would bring potato salad, and the small children would be given balloons.  



      Aunt Sophie’s fantasies about my future were as difficult to deflate as her fantasies about her own past. Sometimes she thought I should be an opera singer. I do not know why she thought this; perhaps it was an end toward which she herself had once aspired. She told me I would have to go back to Germany for my musical training. Those were her words, back to Germany. It was the only place in the world where they still took opera seriously. Aunt Sophie’s forbearers had, after an abortive revolution in the spring of 1848, arrived here, in the wilderness. They taught their children to read Latin. They did not know how to farm. Aunt Sophie grew up seeped in the lore of the enclave, of Weimar and of wolves. Grandpa’s mother made her take dictation in Sütterlin. She thought opera was perhaps a higher path than medicine, all in all.



      “My Mother, you know, was a student of Liszt.” She would say “I had a very good music teacher when I was a girl, too, Mr. Pratt. He told me with training I might have been a concert pianist, can you imagine that! Right up until, well, let’s see, right up until the bank failed. A concert pianist!” 



      The unselfconscious lies Aunt Sophie told about herself did not needle me, as I know they needled some of the other members, the patriarchs in particular, of our exactingly honest clan. In my home children were neither permitted to lie nor were they lied to; belief in Santa was discouraged at an early age. Aunt Sophie was unconcerned, though, about the real possibilities, the causal relationships, and the plans laid for my future, and for that I was grateful.  



        I didn’t like when she lied about me, though. It felt invasive and too easy. Once we had a neighbor come in, a woman who made something called “twig furniture” in her garage next door, to see if she smelled gas—she didn’t—and Aunt Sophie told her that I was spending the summer in Baraboo to rest my voice. I stiffened but did not correct her. Then another time, in late August, shortly before her birthday, I had a piano tuner come in from Pipersville to look at my great grandmother’s piano. Regardless of whether or not Aunt Sophie would play it, I thought it would give her pleasure to have the instrument in good repair, and that my father and uncles, whose patrimony it was, would not object if I sent them a bill after the fact. It had been raining for two days, chilly, unseasonal rain. The piano tuner was a barrel-shaped man with a perfectly round bald spot, almost like a tonsure, on the back of his head. He was attractive, in that unexpected way of short, muscular men. Aunt Sophie sat in an armchair behind him and watched as he worked.



      “My niece, you know—actually she is my second cousin’s granddaughter but she calls me Aunt and I call her Niece—my niece is a doctor. She is an orthopedist but has taken a leave of absence to look after her Aunt—I took a fall in May, you see—to help me recuperate.”



      I felt compromised. I was reading a murder mystery in a window seat, where I could watch the rivulets of water run down the outside of the glass and then seep through and pool around the unused ash trays on the sill. My hair was wet from a trip to the drug store. I had worn sandals and they had raised big wet blisters between my big and second toes. I ignored Aunt Sophie’s chatter, but after the man left I told her it embarrassed me when she said things about me to other people that weren’t true.  



***



      I can’t blush. In the pseudo-sciences of earlier centuries the inability to blush was sometimes linked to criminal behavior. Dark skinned people, they thought, incorrectly, did not blush, ergo they felt no shame or remorse, ergo they posed a threat to the larger society. Actually, blushing is not linked to skin color but only people’s varying sensitivity to those chemicals, which trigger the dilation of blood vessels and capillaries in the face; plenty of black people do blush and plenty of white people can’t. But my body has a fierce and varied arsenal for announcing physiologically, anxiety, embarrassment, and shame. My hands get clammy, my stomach hurts, and sometimes I get short of breath or hear a high-pitched buzzing in my ears. Sometimes I have to hide in bathroom stalls and count until an episode is past. I was embarrassed at Aunt Sophie’s birthday, first for her, then for myself, then for all of us there. We had the party in a park at the foot of the hill, Union Park, where we always do. The park has a bandstand and half of an Indian mound, the wing and body of what would have once looked like a bird in flight if viewed from an airplane; though, the mound predates air travel by many centuries, the signs say. Perhaps it was an image meant for other birds. The picture is too low and too wide to comprehend from the ground. At eye level it looks like a septic bump or low earthen wall, and in the fifties they ran a county highway through the bird’s left wing and part of his head. In one of my earliest memories I am walking the perimeter, and my father is holding my hand. I was embarrassed first for Aunt Sophie, who wore a shiny choral sheath and jacket that she had worn for her second wedding in 1964. She wore also a large hat and orthopedic shoes. She was delighted with the party, and she took too much potato salad. She was telling my father about the compliments her physical therapist had recently paid. She was thinking of having him over for dinner. He said she was very limber for her age. My father’s face gave nothing away, but I could imagine his mounting contempt—not the kind of contempt one reflects on or airs, the kind so natural it does not merit attention, not even the attention of the person inside of whom it grows. I was embarrassed for myself, too, Aunt Sophie’s ally and special friend. 



     Then the cake came out, white cake with whipped cream frosting and strawberries. It was actually four cakes cemented together with two long seams of cream. My mother had driven out with the individual cakes in the back seat of her car and assembled them at the house on the hill. She was worried there would not be enough to go around; there were twenty-four of us in all. In slices of strawberry arranged like scales or fallen dominos she had drawn a boarder and written across the center a large “90.” In the upper left-hand corner she used red frosting and a zip lock bag to scrawl, “Happy Birthday, Sophie!” The smallest of the cousins were collected back to the table, and we sang as my mother and Aunt Hattie processed the cake to the table from the car.



      “Elizabeth has a real voice,” Aunt Sophie told my father, once we were all seated again, passing paper plates around. “I have encouraged her to study music. I have an ear for these things. Mr. Pratt believed I could be a pianist, and, as you know, my mother was a student of Liszt.”



      Aunt Sophie’s mother was born in 1900.  “Franz Liszt died in 1876,” I said. As soon as I said it I knew it was wrong, not factually wrong, but the wrong thing to do. Around the table the aunts and uncles looked taken aback, embarrassed for me, and my father looked particularly severe. My mother changed the subject, asking if Aunt Sophie ever got a chance to practice, now that the piano in the house on the hill was again in tune.



      Oh, she said, oh not really. Aunt Sophie, too, seemed embarrassed, much to my surprise. One of the smaller cousins, Eric, age ten, full of promise, popped a balloon.  



      Aunt Sophie said she was worn out and repaired to her bedroom, my great-grandfather’s sometimes study, even before the last guests left. I suggested that we take a walk around the bird, allowing my mother to drive Aunt Sophie up the hill and help her mount the front steps, cane in hand, unobserved. After everyone left, and I had taken out the white bags full of paper plates and the plastic bin of soda cans, and the cool of the evening had set in, I knocked on Aunt Sophie’s door. Did she want her Vogues? She had accumulated many decades worth of ladies magazines which she had me move about the house in stacks five or ten years thick. Or a cup of mint tea? Mint had taken over a large swath of our largely untended garden, choking back vines that I believe, from the their flowers, may have once produced squash. I tried to prune it back, collecting rubber banded bundles in the fridge, but we never used them fast enough. She said no, but some half hour later she called from her bedroom and said, yes, please she would like her current stack of Vogues.  



      There is a family tree in my great-grandfather’s study, framed and mounted on the wall. In his long years of able-bodied unemployment, after the table slide factory his father left him went out of business, my grandfather’s father took up genealogy, along with astronomy, violin making, and the rugged life. He was a great admirer of Teddy Roosevelt. The male branches are complete, back to Johann the rope maker, father to Johann the physician, born in seventeen twenty-five. The wives’ names are missing, until “Gräfin Agnes van Boist, Duchess, 1826-1888” who had the misfortune to marry beneath her and flee to America the following night. Aunt Sophie referred to her with a doubled title, “my great-great grandmother, the Duchess Gräfin van Boist.” Under the weight of her two titles, Duchess Gräfin Agnes van Boist learned to kill her own chickens and pull a plow.



      The tree tapers to a point at my grandfather, the only son of an only son. A facsimile of this family tree was given to Grandpa for his birthday last year, with his five sons and their families, like roots of a plant in a too small pot, appended. I imagine it must have been stifling for him, this house. What it was like for Aunt Sophie, I cannot say.



      Grandpa’s mother and Aunt Sophie’s mother didn’t get along, but my great-grandfather insisted that his wife include Aunt Sophie in the after school lessons she prepared for Grandpa. Grandpa’s mother studied English and Classics, and provided for her husband and son by teaching correspondence courses from the kitchen table. It was Grandpa’s mother who, as Aunt Sophie says, kept the larder full. Her Phi Beta Kappa key is still in the silverware drawer. I believe Aunt Sophie spent a great deal of her childhood in this house, under the stern and perhaps unwelcoming tutelage of her mother’s cousin’s wife.



        My own mother has speculated that Aunt Sophie could be the natural daughter of my great-grandfather and his then unmarried cousin, heiress to the First Bank. That would explain the conflicting birthdays. Aunt Sophie’s grandparents, who were also my great-grandfather’s grandparents, would have turned up a groom for their already delivered daughter. My great-grandfather was already married to my great-grandmother then. They too may have colluded to turn up a smart young man, interested in banking, not overly nice. That would make Aunt Sophie Grandpa’s half-sister, and an illegitimate stepdaughter of sorts to his mother, for whom Aunt Sophie cared in the last years of her life. Perhaps they both understood the secret and convoluted relationship by which they were bound. My mother believes Aunt Sophie knows that she is Grandpa’s half-sister, but that Grandpa does not know. My father, my mother says, would also not know, and it would only antagonize him to ask.  



      There Aunt Sophie lay, in what may have been her father’s study, may have been weighted, viscous with meaning. Or maybe not. I was solicitous and she was quite cold, but she let me help her change out of her wedding dress and into her bathrobe.



      She would forgive me my indiscretion; though I couldn’t have said that with certainty then. We would arrive at an uneasy truce, but then in November she would fall again. The piano tuner would be back, adjusted the very lowest octave. He would strike the octave then the fifth then the thirds then the octave again. I would be upstairs in my bedroom folding mohair sweaters. I would have decided to fly by night. And there she would come, hurrying up the walk, a small figure in a large hat, and she would wipe out on the front-stairs, and I would have to stay. She would recover more slowly from the second hip replacement, spending many weeks in the hospital, and refusing sometimes for days at a time to leave her bed. She would become belligerent with the hospital staff, mildly paranoid, and come to depend ever more completely on me. I would bring her treats in the hospital, venison sausage, for which she would develop an insatiable appetite, and a kind of current bread. I would begin an affair with the piano tuner, whom I would ultimately marry. I, too, would develop an interest in furniture made of “twigs.”



      When Aunt Sophie died, she was back in her own home, the house on the hill, reading Vogues from the nineteen seventies. In the real seventies, her daughter was already grown and gone, and she was about to marry her second husband, the mailman, whose mail route she would inherit at his death. I was Easter time. She had only been home from the hospital for a few weeks. I had started sleeping through the night again, suddenly and without explanation, so I was asleep when she went. When I woke up the next morning, the television was still on, and she was cold in her chair. They buried her in the family plot, on a day when the ground was newly soft, and all the lady’s heels sank down into the sod. They buried her between her parents and my great grandparents and, a few rows behind, the Duchess Gräfin Agnes von Boist.



      At night, in the rolling farmland around the Rock River, you don’t see the blights of rural poverty or urban sprawl, but only the dark contours of the ground. I went for a run late, after Aunt Sophie’s birthday, once the air had cooled and she had turned out her light. She claimed that she slept little, but assumed on principle the form of sleep, eyes closed, breathing even, lights out, for a few hours every night. It could be true; the very old sometimes shed their need for sleep. I wore a reflective vest, a birthday gift from my oldest little brother, and, like a disenchanted Hermes, reflective stickers at my feet. Out on the dark county highways the shadows of the corn, early feed corn, with thick, broad leaves, stood half again as tall as me, undulating with the low hills on either side. The air carried the scent of silage, and of dirt. There is something old and reassuring about the smell fertile land. We are safe when the fields are full. 

Laelia’s father steered her across the room. He held champagne in the kind of glass that is supposed to look like Marie Antoinette’s breast, and as he walked, the golden liquid kept sloshing over the edge. “Paul, this is my daughter, Laelia. Laelia, my colleague, Dr. Gibson.” He said. “Laelia just got into Columbia. She dances.” Laelia smiled modestly. “Dr. Gibson” – he paused for effect – “is an actor.” Her dad turned, champagne splashing, and walked away. He always introduced people well.



“Pleased to meet you.” Dr. Gibson had dimples and a tiny southern accent.



“Nice to meet you.” Maybe thirty-five, Laelia guessed. He held himself like an actor, easy posture and a boyish face with a big, ingenious smile. They smiled at each other for a moment.



“Congratulations on Columbia. Do you know what you want to study?”



“Not for sure, but I think I’m going to be pre-med. What kind of doctor are you?”



“Radiation oncology.” Great dimples. “Your dad’s my boss.”



“And you act?”



“Your dad’s kidding. In college.”



She swayed a little to avoid a girl carrying a tray and he stepped closer and put his hand out to keep her from falling. “What kinds of things?”



“Different stuff. *Equus*. A lot of Shakespeare.” Laelia moved toward him again to let the girl pass. “The most fun production I was in was *Twelfth Night*. I liked comedy. What kind of dance are you interested in?” He had nice eyes. Gray.  She looked down and then up again.



“Ballet. Or that’s what I do. But I’m interested in everything.”



“Can I get you some champagne?”



This was the first year her mom let her come to her dad’s New Year’s party, which, according to her dad’s dumb girlfriend, was always a big deal. More people kept coming in, handing her father’s girlfriend their coats, shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, and adding their voices to the murmuring crowd. Laelia had met two doctors, an anthropologist, and now Paul. She smiled into her glass. He was totally hitting on her. She was having a ball.



Laelia always spent the last week of Christmas break in New York City. Her dad took her to late lunches at fancy restaurants, and shopping, and to the ballet. This year there was the Chaconne she wanted to see, and something by Twyla Tharp. And he loved taking her shopping, waiting outside dressing rooms, rolling his eyes. It was a little ritual. Laelia wore black jeans and heels and a sequined gray tunic top her dad had bought her, on her advice, for Christmas. The sequins were tiny, smaller than normal sequins, and arrayed in diagonal lines. It was a little casual, but she was glad she wasn’t overdressed. And she liked the way she looked in heels. Heels and jeans made her look older. Her face, in contrast, looked very young. She wore no makeup because she liked the effect.



The apartment was built to entertain.  People were pressing in on all sides, but the room didn’t feel crowded. The living room was large and bare, just two sleek couches on a wood floor. And house plants. Her dad liked plants. There were orchids, and a few trees in baskets. The ceilings were high, and the whole west side of the apartment was one big window looking out over the river. It was dark outside, and it was very bright in the living room, and the window became a huge mirror.



“Grace, this is my daughter, Laelia. Laelia, this is our chief surgeon and very dear friend, Dr. Palmer. Laelia just got in early to Columbia.” Laelia smiled modestly. “Columbia is Grace’s Alma Mater.” Grace was wearing a black shift that clasped at the waist with heavy heels and heavy eyeliner. You have to be post-menopausal to wear that much makeup. She did it well.



“Well, Congratulations! And you go to school in New York?” She had a low voice for a woman.



“I live with my mother in Boston, actually. I go to school there.”



“I grew up in Boston! What school?”



“Concord Academy.”



“No!”



Laelia’s wasn’t coed until the seventies, probably after Grace’s time. There were still more girls than boys. Laelia didn’t feel especially close to them. The girls at school, the older, artsy set with whom she had naturally fallen in, graduated last year. She knew a lot of ballerinas too, but they were, well, dumb. Dumb, she thought, but weirdly compelling, throwing their bodies around like dice, like bags of fertilizer on suburban lawns. The girls in her classes knew Laelia was a virgin, but in the locker room they afforded her a perverse kind of respect. They admired her. Basically they were nice girls.



Her mom liked the ballerinas. She thought Laelia should have more friends. But she also kept warning her not to slack off just because she had gotten into college, which was insane. Laelia always did well in school. Laelia had done so well on her Latin final that Mr. Arnold gave her a copy of the Aeneid with his annotations in the margins. An early Christmas present, he said. Her mom was irritable. She just seemed exhausted all the time.



“Did you ever have Mr. Arnold?”



“Oh my god,” Grace said, blinking her made up eyes. “Yes. He taught me Latin. He was ancient even then.”



This was the first time her mom had let her drive down alone. Don’t speed. Don’t talk on your cell phone. Call me if you get lost. Her mother was more nervous than her father. She was probably smarter, actually, but her dad was lucky. She was a nurse, and he was a doctor. She had gray hair; he had a new girlfriend. Children liked him. Dogs liked him. He had a green thumb. Laelia drove herself every day from Brookline to Concord for school and then downtown for ballet. She drove stick, clutch out gas in, like a dance, and she was good at it. She drove her mom’s old Saab. She left at seven the day after Christmas — she was an early riser — and drove west through Massachusetts. She stopped once for gas in Connecticut and bought herself a Diet Coke. She drank it in the dirty snow next to the pump, feeling competent and alone.



The caterers were cleaning up in the kitchen, which was almost as crowded as the living room. Guests were waiting in line for the bathroom. Her father and his dumb girlfriend were making out. She was wearing an awful dress, cranberry red. He was leaning against the island and she was standing in front of him, and he was holding her to him and nibbling on her ear. Laelia didn’t think you should kiss ears in public. On principle. Laelia was next. No one ever used this kitchen to cook. She tried to make cookies once, for her father, not for herself, and she couldn’t find a cookie sheet. A bald man left the bathroom rubbing the top of his head.



There were three white orchids on the marble counter. The shower didn’t have a shower curtain. Her dad had lived here for six years. How could you shower every day without a shower curtain? She checked her outfit in the front and the back. There were three mirrors set up around the sink at angles, so you could see all the way around. Her thong, which she worried about, was not peeking out.



She had had two glasses of champagne and a spinach canapé. Three hundred calories, probably. There are a hundred and twenty-five calories in a glass of champagne, something like that. There was Listerine. Throwing up was only gross if someone else saw.



Dr. Gibson sat down next to Laelia on the far couch.



“How are you doing?”



“Good, you?”



“Good.”



Just outside, two other couples were leaning over an enormous flower, amaryllis maybe, arguing about someone named James. Laelia could hear her father laughing in the kitchen.



“So are you going to dance in college?”



“I hope so, yeah.” He wore a white button-down with rolled-up sleeves. He was tan. “Barnard has a dance program. I’d like to keep taking classes there.”



“What’s your favorite ballet?” She laughed. He was teasing. He was leaning his head back against the wall.



“Favorite that I’ve done or favorite that I’ve seen?”



“Both.”



“The most fun thing I’ve been in was probably a hip hop workshop. Don’t laugh. Instead of having a performance we went to a club at the end. They had to sneak me in.”



“How old are you?”



“Eighteen.”



“You’re poised for eighteen.” Laelia was usually good at accepting compliments, but she didn’t know what to say. She shrugged.



“What’s your favorite thing you’ve seen?”



She took a deep breath. She had a good answer. “*Pierrot Lunaire*. It’s this atonal Schoenberg piece, have you ever heard it? It’s a German translation of French poems set to music.” He shook his head but raised his eyebrows. He was interested. “Anyway, there are twenty-one poems, and this guy Ratmansky did twenty-one little ballets. They’re sad and sort of toy-like. It’s really cool. I saw it with my dad last Christmas.” She shrugged again. She was enough shorter than Dr. Gibson that she had to look up. “Where did you say you were from, Dr. Gibson?”



“Washington. Virginia.” He smiled down, “Paul.”



Laelia wondered if he knew he was flirting. She couldn’t tell. He kept holding her eye a second too long. Maybe he flirted with everybody. Or maybe he was doing it on purpose. She was poised.



“Ten.” Some people started counting down. “Nine.” Two buttons of his shirt were open at the collar. “Eight.” He looked professional and clean. He was tan and blond with lots of gold hair on his arm. “Seven.” She wondered if he thought they might. “Six.” She bet she probably could. “Five.” She bet it was like driving stick. Takes confidence. “Four.” She bet she could. “Three.” She stared at him. He had nice dimples. A boyish face. And nice eyes.  “Two.” What long lashes. “Happy New Year!”



In Latin class, Mr. Arnold once told Laelia that she was the namesake of a Vestal Virgin. She said, “I was named for a flower.”



People had started leaving. Someone put on Benny Goodman and a few couples danced in the living room. The sounds of peoples’ voices had changed. Earlier the clamor sounded bright, and now the crowd made more of a murmur. Everyone was sloshed. Her dad was sitting down, and Laelia knew that meant the party would be over soon. His girlfriend was handing people their coats.



Laelia sipped from her fourth glass of champagne. She was standing by Paul. They were standing in the corner by the kitchen, over the amaryllis flower. They had made friends. He kept smiling at her, with his dimples and his big ingenious smile, like the two of them were in on a joke. She kept *Mona Lisa*-ing back at him. Look sexy. Look bemused. She was charming. She was charmed. He wore a tiny trace of cologne.



“Want to dance?” She asked. He offered his hand. This is not so improbable, she thought. I’m interesting. I’m poised.



When you dance with a partner, the man has to know what to do. One, two, back step. There you go. Paul knew how to lead. He indicated direction with pressure on her hip. The girl doesn’t turn on her own. Turn her. Start the spin with your arms. Toss her away from you, spin, and catch. He knew how to do it. He knew how to catch her, too. Some of the other couples had stopped to watch Paul and Laelia. Her heels made her just tall enough for this. She came up to his chin. He was not too tall. He dipped her. Someone clapped. Paul laughed.



“You’re good,” he said.



“You’re good,” she said.



She let him move her across the room and tried to guess what he was thinking. She moved closer as they moved out of what was left of the crowd. She stared at him hard, so he would know that she was staring on purpose. They were standing near the kitchen when the song ended. Paul held onto her for a second, then he bowed.



“Come with me to get a glass of water,” Laelia said. She pulled his hand — she was still holding his hand — to show that he should follow.



No one was in the kitchen. The caterers had gone. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it, then poured him one in the same glass. She jumped up and back onto the black counter next to the sink. She had seen someone do this in a movie once. When he handed her the cup, he moved forward, and she pulled him forward, and, hands on his shoulders, she kissed him on the mouth, and he didn’t pull away. Laelia hopped off the counter and pulled his hand again. There were two doors to the kitchen, one to the living room, and one to the hallway with the bathroom and bedrooms, and if they went into her bedroom no one would see.



“Do you want to go somewhere?” He asked, when he saw where she was leading. He had his arm around her waist. They stopped and whispered in the hall.



“Do you live far away?”



“In Brooklyn.”



“My dad’s about to pass out. It’s okay”







Close the bedroom door. Stand on your tiptoes and kiss him. Let him spin you. Giggle and stand on point. Kiss him again. Reach for the hem of your shirt. Laelia had a ballerina’s body, and she never wore a bra. The watery top came off and trickled onto the floor. Paul reached for her hips. His hands were warm. His lips were touching her ear.



“Do you have a…?” he asked.



She shook her head. “We can—I won’t—.”



“I can think of other things.”



“It’s ok, I haven’t had my period since September.”



“We can—” he stared at her stomach, then her ribs, then he ran his hands up and down her arms and shoulders.



“Are you okay?”



“I’m fine.”



“Maybe we…You’re a beautiful girl.”



Laelia stood up straighter. Her posture was very good. She was not embarrassed.



“Maybe we…”



He should be embarrassed. She didn’t put her shirt back on. She stared at him in the eye.



“I can count your ribs.”







God, the kitchen smelled. Everyone had gone.



Laelia put her hand on her dad’s back. He was gripping the black countertop. There was vomit in the sink, along with cocktail sauce and shrimp tails and a leftover tray of spinach canapés. All of the muscles in his stomach and esophagus were reversing at once and wrenched what was left of the spinach and champagne up and out into the sink. Like revving an engine in neutral. All wrong. His face contorted again, and his body heaved, but a little spinachy mucus was all he brought up. He coughed and spat. “That’s good,” she said, “Shh, shh.”



Paul had to pass through the kitchen to get to the living room to get to the door. He was trying not to look at her, but she was staring at him. And then the front door closed. He was gone.



Her father had vomit all down his stomach. She poured him a glass of water and watched him drink. A pink flower behind the sink had come untied from its stake. She tied it up again. “Come on. There you go.” She led him toward his bedroom.



“I’m fine,” he said, dazed. “Did you have a good night?”



She was taking off his shirt. “I had a good night. Shh.  Shhh.”



Laelia left clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor. She ran her hand over the gash on her shin. She would cry in showers, if she were the kind of girl who cried. She sat in the bottom of the bathtub, hot water streaming down the sides and onto the tiled floor, hot water streaming across her back, and drew her knees to her chest. She wasn’t that kind of girl. She folded and unfolded her limbs. With her left hand she counted the ribs on her right side, and with her right hand, she counted the ones on her left.