Chapter 10: Preferred

My mother spent more time getting Sara ready for the luncheon than she’d ever spent getting me ready for anything.

I sat on the stairs and watched her do it. She had Sara in the good gray, the one with the covered buttons, and she was going around her with a lint roller and then with her own hands — smoothing the collar, tucking a piece of the hair (my hair, the color of mine) back behind the ear, tipping the chin up into the light the way my father did in the basement. Except my mother did it in the front hall at eleven in the morning with the door open, because there was nothing to hide.

She was proud of it. She stood back and looked at her work the way she never once looked at me across a room, with plain uncomplicated pleasure, nothing withheld, and she said, “There. Perfect,” and meant it. And Sara said “Thank you, Vanessa” in the low voice that used to be a stranger’s and was mostly mine now, and my mother touched its cheek.

“You could learn something from her,” Mom said, not turning around, knowing exactly where I was on the stairs. “She never gives me a hard time.”

“She’s a vacuum.”

“She’s a pleasure to have in the house.” She fixed her own lipstick in the hall mirror, and Sara stood behind her in the glass, the two of them framed there, and for a second it was a mother and a daughter getting ready together, the easy kind, the kind that liked each other. “Which is more than I can say lately for some people who actually live here. Go put something on that isn’t three sizes too small. People are coming.”

People came. Eleven of them, my mother’s whole circle, out on the back terrace under the good umbrellas, and the star of it was the maid.

I knew every one of them. I’d been passed around their manicured hands like a party favor since before I could walk — look how she’s growing, Vanessa, look at that face — and I knew exactly what they were. A table of women who’d made the same trade my mother made, married the earning and spent the interest, and had nothing left to do at forty-five but drive up somebody’s hill and go sick with envy over her furniture.

I’d spent my whole childhood learning to work them, and I could still see every seam in every one of them, every cheap place they’d had done and every one they couldn’t afford to. What I couldn’t do anymore was make a single one of them look at me.

That was the entire point of the afternoon and everybody knew it. Sara moved among them in the gray dress with a tray, pouring the rosé, remembering without being told that Mrs. Aldous took no ice and that Sasha’s daughter was allergic to shellfish. Gliding, flawless, warm to the touch when she brushed an arm setting down a glass. And the women lost their minds over her exactly the way my mother had banked on.