32

There was her mortgage; there was her property tax bill. There was the fact that she needed new tires on her car. The remains of Sarabeth’s inheritance were supposed to be off-limits for everyday expenses, but as January progressed and her bank account dwindled, she considered making an exception. A thousand dollars—would that be so bad? She didn’t know what else to do. She’d made no lampshades in weeks, and she was losing listeners at the Center; the stalwarts said it was because the book was so long, but she knew better. She was boring.

A new paper store appeared on Shattuck, and it occurred to her that the way back to work might be via design. She loved coming up with new ideas. At least she remembered loving it.

Carta, the new place was called. She went on a day that was strangely warm, parking out front and wondering as she approached the door if they could possibly have anything she hadn’t seen at a dozen other stores. She said hello to the proprietor and sure enough: here were the eye-boggling geometrics she disliked, repeated rows of tiny bull’s-eyes, of dice or perfect daisies. And there were the ubiquitous giant fruits, the tone-on-tone stripes. Hanging near the back, though, was an unfamiliar line, and she went for a closer look: very soft, almost silty sheets in pastel colors, with text printed on them in similarly pale shades. The type was fairly large, about a quarter of an inch high, and on one she saw “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure” and on another “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” and on a third “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Each went on, through the familiar words, to the bottom of the sheet. She sort of liked them.

Paper stores made their money selling things other than paper: fine or silly address books, cellophane envelopes of confetti, expensive beaded picture frames. She fingered a flat plastic box of magnets bearing tiny photographs of pastries: éclairs and petits fours and meringues. The meringues were just the plain white kind, not nearly as good as the chocolate ones she used to make for Lauren and Joe. How they’d loved them! She remembered the two of them at her kitchen table, their legs dangling from her chairs. How were they? Lauren especially: did she know why Sarabeth hadn’t been around? Sarabeth thought of buying the magnets, imagined sending them to Lauren and Joe in an envelope with no return address. Impossible. She left them where they were and returned to the draped sheets of paper.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” “Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it.” “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” She got Gatsby and The Good Soldier, but who was India?

“Do you have a key?” she asked the proprietor.

“A key?”

Sarabeth indicated the sheets of paper. “The authors. The books. Do you know where each passage comes from?”

“Does it matter?” the woman said, and though this was obviously just a nasty woman in a nasty mood, Sarabeth was embarrassed and hurried from the store.

She got in her car and started the engine. Clearly, she had to force herself to do the work she already had. Maybe the problem wasn’t that she had no energy; maybe it was that her old designs bored her. Surely she could deal with that. When audiences asked Joni Mitchell to sing old songs, she said, “People didn’t ask van Gogh to paint ‘Starry Night’ again.” As if she were van Gogh! Sarabeth took comfort in the fact that she knew she wasn’t van Gogh. Or Joni Mitchell, for that matter.

“Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it.” The line stayed with her as she drove home, and she realized she was thinking of The Raj Quartet, which she had read over and over again in her twenties. It was set in India, during the Second World War; two of the main characters were a pair of sisters named Sarah and Susan, and where Sarah was thoughtful and full of reason, Susan was flighty, possibly hysterical. She ended up marrying a terrible guy, what was his name, the military guy who lost his arm….

Sarabeth’s boxed set of The Raj Quartet was on a bookshelf in her bedroom, and when she got home she took out the second volume and flipped through the pages. The military guy, the military guy…he had an inferiority complex because he hadn’t gone to public school back in England. At last she found him, Ronald Merrick. Oh, he was horrible. But pitiful, too.

She went outside and sat on her filthy porch, then went in, found a broom, and swept it off. What it really needed was mopping, or better yet painting, but she sat down again and closed her eyes against the bright sun. Sarah and Susan. Elizabeth and Jane. Dolly and Kitty. Meg and Jo. She’d always been fascinated by sisters in books, especially paired sisters, with their insistent dichotomies: blond and brunette, innocent and experienced, sweet and sour, beautiful and plain.

Creative and smart.

She squeezed her eyes tight and then opened them. The two little girls of the Heidt household had appeared on their patio with Popsicles, and she stood up and brushed herself off and went inside. In the kitchen she filled a glass with water and sat at the table. Anna was in her shoulder bag, and she opened it, thinking that if she were better prepared people might be likelier to come back. She read the chapters she’d read aloud Thursday night, then she skimmed here and there until her eye fell on a passage about Seryozha, Anna’s son. He’d been told, after Anna went away with Vronsky, that she was dead.

Among his favorite occupations was looking for his mother during his walk. He did not believe in death generally and especially not in her death, though Lydia Ivanovna had told him and his father had confirmed it, and therefore, even after he was told that she was dead, he looked for her during his walks. Any full-bodied, graceful woman with dark hair was his mother.

Sarabeth thought of the picture she’d had in her mind, months ago, of a woman walking with a girl, the pair of them like something from a movie; and then she thought of Anna’s suicide.

Anna was going to throw herself under a train. Sarabeth knew this at her core, and yet, here and now, she was surprised by it. This had happened with Madame Bovary, too; she remembered arriving at Emma’s death and realizing that she’d somehow managed not to know it was coming. Suicide, these books were about. Not adultery.

She turned to the end of the book, looking for the scene; she had read Anna only once before, in college. She had to search and search, finally locating it not at the true end but fifty pages shy. Then she read, barely breathing, and at the end she knew two things: that Anna had given Seryozha scarcely a thought as she moved toward her death, and that, as she let herself tumble toward the train’s giant wheels, she was horrified by what she’d done.