Alice in Bed Read Online Free PDF Page A

difficult to read,” Mother persisted.
    â€œLogic has never been our mother’s strong suit,” William remarked to Sara.
    Father then said amiably that George Sand’s latest book made his gorge rise. “I don’t think I ever read a thing that reflects a viler light on her personal history. How bestial that woman must be, to grovel spontaneously in such filth.” Such abrupt changes in the conversational weather were par for the course at our house, and visitors were often taken aback. Sara had become very still, looking from face to face to judge the gravity of the quarrel—if it was a quarrel.
    William said, “Whatever you do, Sara, don’t take our father seriously. No one does, you know.”
    Father laughed heartily at himself as he went back to cutting up his meat.

ONE ONE
    1866
    â€œI THOUGHT TONIGHT WAS WORSE THAN USUAL . . . . W HAT DID you think?”
    No need for Sara to explain that she was referring to the dinner party we’d just endured with four other families at Shady Hill, home of the Nortons, her in-laws. (Or, as she preferred to call them, her out -laws.) Over the past few years we’d reached the highest stage of young female friendship, marked by a private code of allusions and jokes quite indecipherable by and surely annoying to others. We were eighteen years old.
    â€œWell, it was certainly Nortonesque ,” I said. “Grace was quite louche about the oysters, I thought.”
    Sara’s laughter rang out like a bell at the notion of her tightly wound, perfectionistic sister-in-law, Grace Norton, being louche. (We would learn that she really was, but that came later.) It was hot and muggy, and we were stretched out on the Sedgwicks’ back lawn in our nightdresses. “After twelve hours of wearing a corset, not wearing one is almost wanton,” Sara said. She could be depended on to make this observation almost every time. “I could melt from sheer pleasure and end up as a little puddle near the azaleas.”
    â€œWe ought to start a society, Sara. The Nightdress Society! Boston does not have enough societies; it needs more .” Of course, it went without saying that Boston had more societies than it had inhabitants.
    So we stared up at the heavens for a bit, exhausting the constellations we knew and arguing over whether the heavenly object above the crown of the beech tree was Jupiter or Mars. Sara insisted briefly that it was the North Star. When we fell silent, the cicadas and tree frogs were deafening. As a small child, I thought this was the sound of the stars twinkling, and I told Sara that this had been a holy thing to me, this tinkling twinkling from deep space, and how crushed I had been to learn the pedestrian truth. (I’d never admitted this to another soul.)
    Sara went quiet and I could feel her taking it in.
    After a while, I said, “It might not be so bad at Shady Hill, if not for the long, drawn-out ordeal of shaking hands with Charles. Why does he do that?”
    â€œOh, I think it is something to do with Italy.”
    â€œHow so?”
    Sara was prone to long, deep pauses, and we were in one now. Finally, flipping over onto her stomach, she pressed her face into the grass and inhaled deeply. It sounded like the wind sighing in the tops of trees.
    â€œWell, Alice, I think I can explain the origin of the long drawn-out hand-shaking thing.” Whereupon she sat up, and, clearing her throat dramatically, began to speak in the cadences of “Nortonese,” our version of the hyper-affected speech of the Nortons. “It is widely believed,” she said, “that this barbarous custom originated when Don Carlos was wending his way through his beloved Italy. Not infrequently, he was seized by an ungovernable passion to visit certain great noblemen, who waited breathlessly to be enlightened on Dante’s Paradiso by this melancholy American of the lugubrious mustache. On one such occasion,