Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Read Online Free Page B

would be to his left.
    The car was like a blue mirage. Mary was standing with a man holding blueprints. Not recognizing the car, she thought someone was lost and did not feel like having to offer lemonade while they used her phone to get better directions. “Look,” she said to the man with the blueprints, “I just need to know how many curves will make the driveway seem leisurely but not indulgent and that’s how many curves I want.” Every decision in the house was a danger: it had to look understated and modest while still making other women jealous. It had to be beautiful in a way that seemed effortless, as if it had simply sprouted out of the good earth like an imperfect, perfect flower. There could be no columns or mock Tudor. No leaded windows, yet there ought to be a lot of glass to show that one had servants to do the polishing. The house was to be built of blush-pink bricks freighted in from a particular mill on a particular sea-wracked cliff known for its gentle sunset shade of clay.
    Mary swatted a mosquito on her arm and wiped away the star of blood and body left behind. The blue car stopped and turned up yet more dust and she hated whoever it was in the way she had been trained to hate him—here was a person who was showing off his money and enjoying it, both of which she knew to take as a personal offense. The air cleared as a man stepped out, and Mary saw that the man was her husband. He held the keys like she wasa dog he wanted to trick into coming closer. Here puppy, here stupid dog, I’ve brought you a bloody marrowbone.
    Mary’s body offered her two choices: run at him, swinging her fists, or collapse on the ground. She chose the former. “Has anybody seen you?” she screamed, like he had shown up with a murder weapon.
    “It’s top-of-the-line,” he said, repeating what the salesmen had told him and finding the words less meaningful this time around. “It’s German engineered. You press the gas pedal thousands of times.” Nothing was making sense.
    “You bought this? You bought this without talking to me? Where is our old car?”
    “I don’t know what you have against a nice car.”
    “This is the car driven by African dictators and California dentists. You will ruin me. You will ruin both of us.”
    Still standing there was the man with the blueprints and Mary remembered him, a witness to the crime. She brushed her pale yellow dress off and walked calmly over. “If you could avoid mentioning this to anyone, I would very much appreciate it. My husband doesn’t always think straight.”
    “It’s a beauty,” the man said. “I’d be thrilled if I was you. A car like that?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Well, it’s not for us.” The larger “us.” His kind maybe, which was exactly her point.
    By the time the sun went down she had taken them back to the dealer and picked out a beige Cadillac, three years old, slow and respectable. It was not even completely clean inside. Mary drove. Hugh picked someone else’s dead cigarette out of the ashtray and threw it out the window into the blurring poplars. Mary drove the long way through the center of town so that they would have a better chance of being seen.
    —
    All through Edgar’s high school years, his mother attended to the particulars of social success like a doctor to a dying child, and every year it seemed to exhaust her more. She monitored every aspect—hairdo (round with a small flip at the ends, sprayed stiff), sweater-set shade (pastel), charitable gift sizes (significant without being showy), length of vacation (husbands went for six days, wives and children could stay on for two weeks), books to be discussed in mixed company (anything French or British), proper density of driveway shrubbery (very), race and age of house staff (the paler the better, not older than forty).
    Mary did not gain confidence as time went on. Instead, the more she learned of it, the more intricate the labyrinth became. Wallpaper and lighting were