The Color of Water in July Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Living all around as you do, with your mother . . . ”
    “All around,” Jess thought, was not entirely fair. Her mother was a journalist. They lived in Paris now, before that London, and sometimes Milan. Other people, Jess had noticed, found their itinerant lifestyle interesting, even admirable. People seemed amazed that she could speak French and that she had visited so many far-off places. Not Mamie though, who seemed to see those cities, all of them, as indistinguishable, foreign parts.
    “Well, I just want to remind you, Jess. At Wequetona, there are nice boys from families we know, families we’ve known since your great-grandmother Ada’s time.”
    Mamie was folding pillowcases into crisp squares, matching up the hand-stitched embroidered hems just so.
    “Look around while you’re here, Jess. I don’t want you meeting someone . . . uh . . . in a foreign country . . . Someone who might not . . . quite fit in . . . at the Club, you know.”
    Jess smiled at Mamie in a way that she hoped was pleasant. Jess was used to her grandmother. She knew what Mamie thought, what she cared about. She was old, Jess thought, and as rigid as the stays in her corsets.
    Jess’s mother, Margaret, could never take this kind of thing from her mother. “Mamie!” she would holler. “Just stay out of what you don’t understand, which is most things!”
    But Jess took a more diplomatic approach with her grandmother. “Well, Miss Mamie,” she said evenly, “I’ll try to bear that in mind.” Margaret could never accept how set in her ways Mamie was, but Jess admired Mamie in a certain way. Life with her mother had always been exciting and rootless, in equal parts grimy and glamorous. Mamie represented another way. She knew how she did things, the same way as her mother before her.
    Jess picked up another of the oblong pillowcases, worn to a silky softness from years of use. All the sheets and pillowcases were identical, but some were more than seventy years old. A few had stamped black initials inside, LT and MT , ones that her grandmother and her great-aunt had used when they were girls. Jess loved the way these old ones felt between her fingers, so soft and worn, and yet the warp and weft of the fabric still maintaining its basic strength.
    “I still remember, Jess, my dear daddy standing in the center of the living room downstairs. He pointed up around the balcony. ‘Look how many bedrooms,’ he said. ‘My grandchildren will come here. And their children too.’” She picked up another pillowcase, matched the corners smartly, and laid it on the bed, smoothing it with quick, sure strokes as she spoke. “You will marry well, my dear, and the cottage, someday, will go to you.” She considered her words.
    “Not to your mother, Jess,” she said. “The way she lives . . . ”
    Jess’s cheeks burned. She hated it when Mamie criticized her mother—could never think of the right way to respond. Most often, she said nothing. But this time, she was thinking about Mamie’s words. Why was Mamie so sure that Jess would “marry well”? It wasn’t exactly something that ran in the family, and what did it even mean?
    Losing husbands and fathers seemed to be something that the women in her family specialized in. Her own father was a one-night stand, and Mamie’s husband hadn’t stuck around for long. Perhaps it was understandable, Jess thought, that she had little conception of the married state, nor any reason to think she’d be especially good at it.
    “Well, who knows what will happen,” Jess said. “I may never get married. I’ll just have a career.”
    Mamie peered straight at Jess, over the top of her glasses. “Young women have a lot more choices nowadays. This is a good thing. I just have one piece of advice for you, Jess. Figure out what matters, then hold on to it. That’s how you keep things together. By not letting go.”
    Jess stared out the window of the upstairs bedroom toward the trees, a