Love Invents Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

herself buying and selling antiques and reproductions and fakes. For herself in those early years, she bought only sketches from up-and-coming artists and two elegant, witty Limoges boxes, one of a hot-air balloon, one of a white-and-gilt piano with a single black note painted inside. She gave me the boxes instead of a bat mitzvah.
    Margaret was twenty-six, with a nineteen-inch waist and a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, when she met my father. In my version, she looks a great deal like a blonde Vivien Leigh before she lost her marbles. The men she met must all have been married, or losers, or something worse, because she became fond of my father during his twenty-five-minute lunch breaks from Phillips, Kritzer and Kahn, the best firm a young Jewish accountant could join in 1953 (as he told me a hundred times). She let him browse among the antiques as though he belonged there, and let him look at her as though his interest was not absurd. He must have thought she was the answer to his prayers, the shield for his defects: naturally thin, naturally blonde, obviously English (meaning not Jewish), and artistic (meaning sexy) without being hysterical.
    I don’t know what my mother thought. Her bravery had limits; she believed that marriage provided camouflage and safe passport, that she was at risk without it. I don’t say she was wrong. I just wish she’d stayed single a little longer, looked a little further. Sunday mornings I sat in front of the TV, watching cartoons and reading in my pink, pilly robe. I licked the corners of my mouth until they cracked and bled, pressing them dry on a tissue. My father threw
The Saturday Evening Post
across the room, saying I was “just like Aunt Freda, for God’s sake.” When I tired of imagining my own dead body sprawled at the bottom of the front hall stairs, I pictured him crushed to death by Great-aunt Freda and her sister Aunt Dorothy and their brother Uncle Izzy, all relatives I’d never met, left behind in the villages of Poland and the chicken farms of New Jersey.
    *  *  *
    My mother left me alone in the bathroom for about an hour. Finally, I figured out that you had to take the cardboard off before you used the tampon, and after that, my period was boring. I didn’t bleed much, and I didn’t smell too bad. I actually liked the smell of iron and salt. I didn’t keep a little calendar like some girls, so I ruined about twenty pairs of panties that year and took to carrying extras in my schoolbag, along with six tampons, Maybelline Frosted Peach lipstick, Lush Lash mascara, Midnight Pearl eyeshadow, and a Cornsilk compact. I looked in that little mirror constantly and covertly. I stroked my thighs and breasts, shaved my legs every other day. I examined every inch of my face and front, and stole my mother’s pink European gels and aqua creams, sometimes exfoliating, hydrating, and pore-minimizing all in one Saturday night. I used a loofah on all my rough spots and slept on a stolen satin pillowcase to combat premature wrinkling. I bleached the tops of my toes so that when I appeared on the Riviera, Sean Connery would not be disgusted by the sight of my darkly hairy feet. I languished seductively in the bathroom mirror, using the steam and my towel-turban to create movie star cheekbones and attitude. I would not say it to anyone (who would I say it to, even if I’d been willing?), but I thought I had potential.
    In ninth grade, no one cared about what anybody’d done in elementary school. When Frannie Grant,
the
most popular freshman girl, was browsing with her group just one aisle away from me in Woolworth’s she smiled at me, her famous triangular smile, and I picked up a bouquet of mascaras, blackand mink and teal blue, one for each of her friends, and a tray of eleven coordinated eyeshadows, the nearest expensive thing I could grab, and walked out of the store. I put it all into her cupped hands.
    “I have more stuff than I need,” I said. “Knock