She picked up her tea and took it over to the table. Why did she give up wine for Lent? Polly was more sensible. She had given up strawberry jam. Cecilia had never seen Polly show more than a passing interest in strawberry jam, although now, of course, she was always catching her standing at the open fridge, staring at it longingly. The power of denial.
“Esther!” she called out.
Esther was in the next room with her sisters watching The Biggest Loser while they shared a giant bag of salt-and-vinegar chips left over from the Australia Day barbecue months earlier. Cecilia did not know why her three slender daughters loved watching overweight people sweat and cry and starve. It didn’t appear to be teaching them healthier eating habits. She should go in and confiscate the bag of chips, except they’d all eaten salmon and steamed broccoli for dinner without complaint, and she didn’t have the strength for an argument.
She heard a voice from the television boom, “You get nothing for nothing!”
That wasn’t such a bad sentiment for her daughters to hear. No one knew it better than Cecilia! But still, she didn’t like the expressions of faint revulsion that flitted across their smooth young faces. She was always so vigilant about not making negative body-image comments in front of her daughters, although the same could not be said for her friends. Just the other day, Miriam Oppenheimer had said, loud enough for all their impressionable daughters to hear, “God, would you look at my stomach!” and squeezed her flesh between her fingertips as if it were something vile. Great, Miriam, as if our daughters don’t already get a million messages every day telling them to hate their bodies.
Actually, Miriam’s stomach was getting a little pudgy.
“Esther!” she called out again.
“What is it?” Esther called back, in a patient, put-upon voice that Cecilia suspected was an unconscious imitation of her own.
“Whose idea was it to build the Berlin Wall?”
“Well, they’re pretty sure it was Nikita Khrushchev’s!” Esther answered immediately, pronouncing the exotic-sounding name with great relish and her own peculiar interpretation of a Russian accent. “He was, like, the prime minister of Russia, except he was the premier. But it could have been—”
Her sisters responded instantly with their usual impeccable courtesy.
“Shut up, Esther!”
“Esther! I can’t hear the television!”
“Thank you, darling!” Cecilia sipped her tea and imagined herself going back through time and putting that Khrushchev in his place.
No, Mr. Khrushchev, you may not have a wall. It will not prove that communism works. It will not work out well at all. Now, look, I agree capitalism isn’t the be-all and end-all! Let me show you my last credit card bill. But you really need to put your thinking cap back on.
And then fifty-one years later, Cecilia wouldn’t have found this letter that was making her feel so . . . What was the word?
Unfocused. That was it.
She liked to feel focused. She was proud of her ability to focus. Her daily life was made up of a thousand tiny pieces—“Need coriander”; “Isabel’s haircut”; “Who will watch Polly at ballet on Tuesday while I take Esther to speech therapy?”—like one of those terrible giant jigsaws that Isabel used to spend hours doing. And yet Cecilia, who had no patience for puzzles, knew exactly where each tiny piece of her life belonged and where it needed to be slotted in next.
And okay, maybe the life Cecilia was leading wasn’t that unusual or impressive. She was a school mum and a part-time Tupperware consultant, not an actress or an actuary or a . . . poet living in Vermont. (Cecilia had recently discovered that Liz Brogan, a girl from high school, was now a prizewinning poet living in Vermont. Liz, who ate cheese-and-Vegemite sandwiches and was always losing her bus pass. It took all of Cecilia’s considerable strength of character not to find that annoying. Not that she wanted to write poetry. But still. You would have thought that if anyone was going to lead an ordinary life, it would have been Liz Brogan.) Of course, Cecilia had never aspired to anything other than ordinariness. Here I am, a typical suburban mum, she sometimes caught herself thinking, as if someone had accused her of holding herself out to be something else, something superior.