Crossroads

How much money her aunt had and where it might have come from was long unknown to her. Shirley’s apartment was small, but she had charge cards for all the department stores. Her furniture looked inexpensive, but her shoes and jewelry weren’t. She took Becky out for a fancy dinner only once per visit, but she also never cooked a meal. Instead, she and Becky paged through a ring binder wonderfully populated with takeout menus, and anything else Becky needed (milk and cookies in the early years; later Fresca and tampons) was summoned for delivery by a phone call and paid for in cash at the burglar-proof front door. Shirley conveyed, through the way she shuddered at the recollection, her enduring horror at the Indiana farmhouse where she’d foretold her niece’s destiny; the convulsive Maytag in the mud room, with its age-fissured rubber rollers, seemed to have made a particularly traumatic impression. Her own linens arrived clean in brown-paper packages tied up with white string.

Along with the shopping, what Becky most enjoyed about her summer visits was not having to pretend she didn’t care about status and didn’t want a future life in which she had it. Shirley methodically interrogated her about the professions of her friends’ fathers and the size of their houses, and thereby made Becky aware that New Prospect Township wasn’t a Midwestern utopia where everyone was equal, as she might have supposed, but a place where money counted socially and only good looks or athletic prowess could make up for the lack of it. In tenth grade, using funds that Shirley had provided for the purpose, and over her mother’s sour disapproval, Becky had signed up for New Prospect’s monthly formal dancing school, Messieurs et Mesdemoiselles, which her friends all rolled their eyes at but nevertheless attended. Still Clem’s emissary, but also inspired by her aunt’s insight that snobs were insecure and the true aristocracy gracious, she didn’t avoid the greasier and clumsier dancers the way her friends did (although she did notice, and enjoy what it said about her status, that a clumsy boy became even clumsier when she astonished him by picking him as a partner). Inclusiveness, as she practiced it at M&M, was not only gracious but no less valuable than exclusivity was in building popularity—witness the results of the cheerleader election the following year. To be both feared and liked was its own kind of feat, and it struck, in her mind, a happy balance between the two very different people whose example mattered to her.

Between cigarettes, on Becky’s last visit to New York, her aunt had sucked on nasty-smelling medicated lozenges. Despite the July humidity, there was a frog in her throat that she couldn’t get rid of. In hindsight, Becky wondered if Shirley had known what it meant, because she couldn’t keep it in her head that Becky still had two years of high school left, not one. The next summer, Shirley said, just as soon as Becky graduated, she wanted to take her on a grand tour of Europe: London for theater, Paris for the Louvre, Salzburg for music, Stockholm for white nights, Venice for atmosphere, Rome for antiquities. How did that sound to her? “I think,” Becky said, “you mean two summers from now.” Sad to say, she didn’t share her aunt’s impatience. Seeing Paris sounded good to her, but Shirley’s favoritism wasn’t playing well at home, and a grand tour of Europe would be an entirely different level of expense. Also, as Becky got older, the seeds of criticism planted by her mother had grown into an awareness that Shirley was somewhat loony and didn’t have close friends. Becky still loved her and valued her insights. She understood, as her mother didn’t seem to, how much Shirley envied her younger sister for having a husband and a family; how lonely she was. But she and her cigarettes weren’t the companions Becky would have chosen, in an ideal world, for a trip to Europe.