Chapters (23)
And she does. And him, midcentury Apollo in a tux, dimpled, devastating smile. The wedding’s a blur: my little family but lots and lots of Jerry’s people—” the Lowells” as my parents call them, as though they were an undifferentiated mass. The Lowells seem unreservedly happy about the whole thing, although my parents contend the Lowells believe Jerry to be marrying beneath him. They say the Lowells think we’re not high-class enough for them; because those Lowells own a cement business, they have their noses in the air. Is anyone taking pictures? Is this occasion something for my parents other than—Martha’s word again—tribulation? Cake in the church basement. Strain. Strain and duty.
But of course there’s a wedding picture, and it’s here my sister’s eyes exactly mirror my mother’s, in that long-ago wedding portrait: these eyes say, these girls knew what they were doing, these girls married to get out. Did either of them know what their eyes revealed, or did they experience their courtships as love untempered by any other motive? Maybe my sister’s trapped in something she doesn’t want, certainly in something she isn’t old enough to manage, but she’s found a way to take the next step. Pregnant means nobody’s going to stand in her way.
And it’s no time before my parents announce that we’re moving—this time someplace entirely new. My father has been transferred and we are going to Arizona. To the desert, like the Israelites. And we do go, but not before Sally has her baby, a beautiful girl named Lisa, born with dark, luxuriant hair. I’m fascinated and repelled by the umbilicus, dark little shriveling casing on her belly. She seems at once the newest and oldest thing in the world, and in that way has some odd connection to my favorite book, in which antique things seem perennially new and strange, even though looking at them also makes them more ancient. The movers tag each box with a number before it goes into the big Mayflower truck. Sally lives in an apartment now, with Jerry and Lisa, but I don’t think I’ve ever been there. I’ll bring my book along in the car, in which I cannot take much. It is good for long trips, since the pictures lend themselves so readily to dream. My favorites are, just now, these great Assyrian horse-men, immense and imperturbable: their huge and noble flanks, their confident, unreadable smiles.