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standing in front of the bed with a towel wrapped around his waist and a serious look on his face. Wordlessly, Rose handed him the letter. "My . . . grandmother," she said. The word felt strange in her mouth. "It's from Maggie. She's staying with my grandmother." Now Simon looked even more upset. "You have a grandmother? You see what I mean, Rose? I didn't even know you had a grandmother!" "I didn't know either," Rose said. "I mean, I guess I knew I had one, but I don't know anything about her." She felt like she'd suddenly been plunged underwater, like everything was slow and strange. "I have to . . ." she said. "I should call them." She sank onto the bed, feeling dizzy. A grandmother. Her mother's mother. Who, evidently, wasn't living in some old-age home, the way Rose had always believed, unless they were letting twentysomething vagabonds stay in those places, too. "I should call them. I should ..." Simon was staring at her. "You really didn't know you had a grandmother?" "Well, I mean, I knew that my mother came from somewhere. But I thought she was ... I don't know. Old, or sick. In a home. My father said that she was in a home." Rose stared at the letter, feeling her stomach clench. Her father had lied to her. Why had her father lied about something as important as this? "Where's the phone?" she asked, jumping to her feet. "Hey, hold on. Who are you going to call? What are you going to say?" Rose set down the telephone and picked up her car keys. "I've got to go." "Go where?" Rose ignored him, hurrying to the door, running for the elevator, her heart thrumming in her chest as she ran down the street to her car.
Twenty minutes later, Rose found herself in the same place where she and her sister had stood almost a year ago—on Sydelle's
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doorstep, waiting for admission. She leaned against the doorbell. The dog howled. Finally, the lights flicked on. "Rose?" Sydelle stood in the front door, blinking at her. "What are you doing here?" Her stepmother's face looked strange somehow beneath the glare of the light. Rose looked carefully before deciding that it was just the usual—another eye lift. She shoved Maggie's letter at her stepmother. "You tell me," she said. "I don't have my glasses," Sydelle parried, pulling her lace-trimmed bathrobe tightly around her and pursing her lips at the blank spot on her walkway where Maggie had yanked out the shrub back in November. "Then let me fill you in," said Rose. "This is from Maggie. She moved in with my grandmother. My grandmother who I didn't know was still making sense." "Oh," said Sydelle. "Oh. Urn ..." Rose stared. If her stepmother had ever been at a loss for words, she sure couldn't remember it. But there she was, nonplussed and twitching uncomfortably underneath her face cream and stitches. "Let me in," said Rose. "Of course!" Sydelle said in a strange, twittery voice, and stepped aside. Rose strode past her and stood at the foot of the stairs. "Dad!" she yelled. Sydelle put her hand on Rose's shoulder. Rose jerked away. "This was your idea, wasn't it?" she said, glaring at her stepmother. " 'Oh, Michael, they don't need a grandmother. They've got me!' " Sydelle stepped back as if Rose had slapped her. "That's not how it happened," she said in a quivering voice. "I never thought I could be a substitute for ... for everything you'd lost." "Oh? Then how did it happen?" Rose demanded. She felt as if every cell of her body had been pumped to the bursting point with rage, as if she were going to explode. "Fill me in!" Michael Feller hurried down the stairs, dressed in sweatpants and a white T-shirt, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief. His
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fine hair floating like a mist over his bald head. "Rose? What's going on?" "Well, what's going on is that I've got a grandmother, she's not in a home, Maggie's living with her, and nobody saw fit to mention any of this to me," Rose said. "Rose," said Sydelle, reaching toward her. Rose whirled toward her. "Don't touch me," she said. Sydelle flinched. "That's enough!" said Michael. "No," said Rose. Her hands were shaking, her face was on fire. "No, it's not enough. It's not even a good start. How could you?" she yelled, as Sydelle cringed into a corner of her freshly wallpapered foyer. "I know you neve r liked us. But hiding a grandmother? Even for you, Sydelle, that's a stretch." "It wasn't her," said Michael Feller taking Rose by the shoulders. "It wasn't her idea. It was mine." Rose gaped at him. "Bullshit," she said. "You wouldn't . . ." She stared at her father, his faint gray eyes and high white forehead, her sad, kind-hearted, lost dog of a father. "You wouldn't . . ." "Let's sit down," Michael Feller said. Sydelle looked at Rose. "It wasn't me," she said, in a flat, dull voice. "And I'm sorry . . ." Her voice trailed off. Rose stared at her stepmother, who had never looked less monstrous, had never seemed more pathetic. Her face looked small and vulnerable, in spite of the tattooed lipstick and taut skin. Rose stared at her, trying to remember whether she'd ever heard those words before, whether Sydelle had ever been sorry for anything. She decided that if her stepmother had ever apologized to her, she couldn't remember it. "You don't know ..." Sydelle drew a whispery breath. "You don't know what it was like to live in this house. You don't know what it was like to spend years never being good enough. Never being the first choice, never being the one anyone really wanted. Never being able to put a foot right."
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"Gee, I'm sorry," Rose said, in a snotty voice she could have borrowed from her little sister. Sydelle lifted her eyes and glared at Rose. "Nothing I did was ever what you wanted," she said, and blinked her freshly-stitched eyelashes. "I never had a chance with you or Maggie. Not with any of you." "Sydelle," Michael said gently. "Go on," Sydelle said. "You tell her. Tell her the whole thing. It's time she knew." Rose stared at her stepmother seeing, for the first time, the vulnerability that lay beneath the makeup, the Botox, the diet tips and condescension. She looked and saw a woman who'd left sixty behind her, whose thin body was stringy and unwelcoming, and whose face looked like a cruel caricature, a harshly etched drawing of a woman instead of the real thing. She looked and saw the sadness Sydelle had lived with every day—a husband still in love with his dead first wife, an ex-husband who'd left her, a daughter grown and gone. "Rose," her father said. Rose followed him into Sydelle's living room. The leather couches had been replaced by slipcovered suede, but they were still a blinding white. She sat down on one end, her father sat on the other. "I'm sorry about Sydelle," he began, and looked out into the foyer. He was waiting for her, Rose thought. Waiting for her to come and do his dirty work. "She's going through a really bad time right now," her father said. "Marcia's giving her mother a very hard time." Rose shrugged, not feeling terribly sympathetic toward either Sydelle or My Marcia, who'd never had much time for or interest in her stepsisters, other than making sure they weren't touching her things while she was off at college. "She's joined Jews for Jesus," he said, and looked away. "You can't be serious." "Well, that's what we thought at first, that she was kidding." "Oh, God," Rose said, thinking that Sydelle, who had mezuzahs
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on every door of the house, including the bathrooms, and scowled at every shopping-mall Santa she saw, had to be in agony. "So she's Christian?" Her father shook his head. "We drove up to visit last weekend and she had a big wreath on the door." "Ho ho ho," said Rose cheerlessly. "Rose," her father said, a warning tone in his voice. Rose lifted her head and glared at him. "Now, moving on to more pertinent topics. My grandmother." Michael Feller swallowed hard. "She called you? Ella?" "Maggie wrote to me," said Rose. "She said she's living with this . . . with Ella. So what's the story?" Her father said nothing. "Dad?" "I'm ashamed of myself," Michael finally said. "I should have told you about this—about Ella—a long time ago. He laced his hands around his knees and rocked back and forth, clearly wishing for an annual report or at the very least a Wall Street Journal to get him through this. "Your mother's mother," he began. "Ella Hirsch. She moved to Florida a long time ago. After ..." He paused. "After your mother died." "You told us she was in a home," Rose prompted. Michael Feller curled his hands into fists, planted them on his thighs. "She was," he said. "Just not the kind of home you probably thought." Rose stared at her father. "What do you mean?" "Well, she was in a home. Her home." He swallowed hard. "With Ira, I guess." "You lied to.us," Rose said flatly. "It was a lie of omission," her father said. Clearly, this was a line he'd thought of long ago, a line he'd been rehearsing in his head for years. Michael took a deep breath. "After your mother . . ." His voice trailed off. "Died," Rose supplied.
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"Died," said Michael. "After she died I was angry. I felt . . ." He paused, and stared at Sydelle's glass-and-metal coffee table. "Angry at Mom's parents? Angry at Ella?" "They tried to tell me about Caroline, but I didn't want to listen. I was so in love with her . . ." Rose winced at the pain in her father's voice. "I was so in love with her. And I was so angry at them. Your mother was on lithium when I met her. She was stable. But she hated the way the medicine made her feel. And I'd try to make her take it, and Ella, her mother, would, too, and for a while she'd be fine, and then . . ." He exhaled, pulling off his glasses as if he couldn't bear their weight on his face. "She loved you. She loved all of us. But she couldn't . . ." Michael's voice caught in his throat. "And it didn't matter. It didn't change how I felt about her." "What was she like?" asked Rose. Her father looked surprised. "You don't remember?" "You didn't exactly keep a shrine to her in our house or anything." She swept her hands around Sydelle's spotless living room— the white walls and white carpet, the bookshelves that had never held books, only glass objets and an eight-by-eleven framed shot of My Marcia's wedding. "There aren't any pictures of her. You never talked about her." "It hurt." said Michael. "It hurt to remember. It hurt to see her face. I thought it would hurt you and Maggie, too." "I don't know," said Rose. "I wish . . ." She looked down at her feet in the woven white carpet. "I wish she hadn't been a secret." Michael was quiet. "I remember the first time I saw her. She was walking across the campus at the University of Michigan, pushing her bike, and she was laughing, and it was like a bell going off in my head. She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. She had a pink scarf tied in her hair . . ." Her father's voice drifted off. Rose could remember glimpses, snatches, pieces of stories, a sweet, chiming voice, a smooth cheek pressed against hers. Sweet dreams, dream girl. Sleep tight, honey bun. And everyone had lied by the things they'd told and the things they'd kept secret. Ella had
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lied to her father about Caroline—or, rather, she'd told him the truth, but he hadn't wanted to listen. And her father had lied to the girls about Ella—or he'd told them a tiny piece of the truth and left the rest of it unsaid. She got to her feet, her hands clenched into fists. Lies, lies, lies, and where was the truth in all of this? Her mother had been crazy, then dead. Her father had yoked himself to a wicked witch and had given his daughters over to her care. Her grandmother had vanished down a rabbit hole, and Maggie had gone chasing after her. And Rose didn't know anything, not anything at all. "You just got rid of her. All the time growing up, I don't remember a single picture of her, or any of her things ..." "It hurt too much," Michael said simply. "It was bad enough having to look at the two of you." "Gee, thanks." "Oh, no, I didn't mean ..." He took Rose's hand, a move that shocked her into speechlessness. She couldn't remember her father touching her at all except for the occasional peck on the cheek since that disastrous day when she was twelve and came out of the bathroom and whispered that her period had started. "It was just that you two reminded me of her so much. Everything you did, it was like having to remember Caroline all over again." "And then you married her," said Rose, nodding toward the foyer where, presumably, her stepmother lingered. Her father sighed. "Sydelle meant well." Rose gave a short, barking laugh. "Oh, sure. She's wonderful. She just hated me and Maggie." "She was jealous," said Michael. Rose was flabbergasted. "Jealous of what? Jealous of me? You have to be kidding. When My Marcia is superior in every way. And even if she was jealous, she was horrible. And you let her get away with it!" Her father cringed. "Rose ..." "Rose, what?"
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"There's something I need to give you. It's too late, but still. . . ." He hurried upstairs and came down with a shoe box in his hands. "These are from her. Your grandmother," he said. "She's in Florida," he said. "She tried to get in touch with me—with you and Maggie—for years. But I didn't let her." He reached into the box and pulled out a creased and faded envelope with "Miss Rose Feller" written on the outside. "This was the last card she sent." Rose ran her thumb under the flap, which came loose easily from glue that was fifteen years old. Inside was a card with a bouquet of flowers on the front. The flowers were pink and purple, dusted with gold glitter that sparkled dimly on Rose's fingertips. "HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN," read the silver script above the flowers. And inside . . . Rose opened the card. A twenty-dollar bill and a photograph fluttered into her lap. "TO MY GRANDDAUGHTER," read the words in slanted script. "I WISH YOU LOVE AND EVERY HAPPINESS ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY." Followed by a signature. Followed by an address. And a telephone number. And a P.S. that read, "R ose, I would love to hear from you. Please call me any time!!!" It was the three exclamation points, Rose thought, that broke her heart the most. She looked at the photograph. It was a picture of a little girl—round-faced, brown-eyed, with bangs and two neat pigtails tied with red yarn ribbon and a serious look on her face, sitting on an older woman's lap. The woman was laughing. The little girl was not. Rose flipped the snapshot over. Rose and Grandma, 1975, it read, in the same blue ink, the same slanted script. Nineteen seventy-five. She would have been six. Rose got to her feet. "I have to go now," she said. "Rose," her father called, helplessly, toward her back. She ignored him, walking out of the house. Then she sat behind the wheel of her car, with the card still in her hands, and closed her eyes, remembering her mother's voice, her mother's pink-lipsticked smile, a tanned arm reaching out from behind a camera. Smile, hornyI Why such a sourpuss? Smile for me, Rosie Posy. Smile pretty, baby doll.
