Making Toast Read Online Free PDF Page A

wanted the casket opened, and, having no practice in such choices, Harris and I said we did—for the pre-service “viewing,” but not for the service itself. Harris, Carl, Wendy, John, and I, and Amy’s and Harris’s friends, the Hales, attended the viewing. Ginny would not. She did not want that to be her last image of Amy. She may have been right. The figure in the casket—her hair done like Amy’s, wearing Amy’s new favorite brown dress and a shawl with tones of brown and red—seemed less our daughter than a semblance. One by one we approached to say our goodbyes. Out of habit, I touched her hair.
     
    Harris buys Sammy a punching bag, an Everlast heavy bag, which hangs on chains from the ceiling in the playroom. When Sammy isn’t using it, I do.
     
    Ginny and I met in junior high school, and have known each other for more than fifty years. Laughing noisily with my friends, I looked up from my desk and saw the new girl, the first elegant thirteen-year-old since the British monarchs. Yet she has remained something of a mystery to me. She is without vanity. When I ask her about this, she says simply, “I was lucky to be born with a beautiful face.” What might sound outrageous or wishful thinking in someone else seems a factual self-assessment.
    She does have a beautiful face, the kind movie directors of the 1930s and 1940s might have looked for. It is not the siren’s beautiful face, or the ingénue’s; it is the face of intelligent virtue into which you read qualities such as competence, endurance, and acceptance of one’s lot, along with a veiled sexiness—the face of the good wife and mother. Claudette Colbert had such a face, as did Joan Fontaine and Irene Dunne. Ginny is more beautiful than all of them. She acknowledges her looks as a way of dismissing their importance. Vanity is inapplicable to her life.
    She has never had a lift or a tuck or a Botox treatment. “My hair and my nails,” she says. “I’m vain about them”—meaning she has them done when she has the time. The subject of self-indulgence comes up with us these days because it is out of the question. Before Amy died, the big decision of our day was where to have lunch. “Our friends live by choice,” she says. “What choice do I have?” The question is asked with a kind of satisfaction, in spite of the horror that occasioned it.
    “I think my whole life has led up to this moment,” she tells me. “When Carl was born, I felt I was coming into my own, to be a mother. It’s what I love to do. I know who I am.” Her motherly decisions are without premeditation, like an athlete’s. When Bubbies starts school, she will take him every day, and not relegate that duty to Ligaya, because she knows that as able as Ligaya is, Mimi will be as close to a mother as Bubbies, Jessie, and Sammy will have from now on. “I’m comfortable doing this,” she says. “And neither of us would have been able to pull it off if we hadn’t been around a lot before Amy died.”
    There are outlets for her. She writes poems from time to time, and takes photographs. She founded a book club with Meredith Brokaw, consisting of some twenty remarkable women who have kept in constant touch since Amy’s death. At a surprise birthday party for Ginny, their toasts were funny and touching, yet all of a piece—tributes to her selflessness. She maintains such friends because, like Amy, she listens to them. If someone tells her something, good or bad, she never tries to top it with a story of her own in those pointless competitions many people enter into, but rather concentrates on the person who seeks her attention. I had always thought of selflessness as a characteristic one learns and adopts, but in Ginny it seems like part of her genetic information. And now, in sorrow, she is in her element. “I am leading Amy’s life,” she says in despair yet comfort, too. After forty-six years of marriage, due to the most painful of reasons, I am getting to know my