The Whole World Read Online Free PDF Page B

stand within my inborn shape,
expose to all the scaffolding within.
I’ll wait for what my true self most desires
and from all else I’ll to the death abstain.”
    Liv clapped, which embarrassed him even more.
    “It reminded her of her commitment to me,” Gretchen rhapsodized. “It wasn’t a popular choice for her to even have me, never mind give up everything for me. But she did. And she never regretted it.
    “When I was three and a half, she made a decision,” Gretchen explained. “She made a sacrifice of her glamorous life to devote herself to my care. It was—sometimes I think it was too much. She left behind so much!” But Gretchen didn’t sound unhappy about it; she sounded proud to have been worth it. “The trips stopped. The handsome visitors, the cocktail parties. It all just … the tap ran dry.” She blinked and smiled. “From then on she mothered me. The nanny was dismissed.” She described this with a clipped voice, like the existence of the nanny was something on a par with rats in the house, something to be cleared up and ashamed of, something invited by bad habits. “She resolved to fully be my mother and she did it.” She drained her glass. “Sometimes I feel like my life has a dividing line—the life before, where I lived in her wake, sailing through a glorious world, and the life after, where I lived in her arms, thoroughly ordinary.” She seemed equally enamored of both.
    I tried to change the subject; Gretchen ignored me. She said loudly, nearly crowed, “She gave up writing completely. She told me that I would be her story and she would write me . Isn’t that a much nicer way of saying ‘mothering is a full-time job’?”
    Trying to recover from embarrassment, Nick had bent himself over the transcription. He ran his fingertip over the words. Then he got up and went to the library. He returned with a few key photos, and turned them upside down on the dinner table.
    The loopy, flourishy writing that had hand-copied the poem was also on the backs of several of the older photos. They were labeled “Mother” and “Father,” so that writer would be Ginny or Linda.
    But the newer photos, the color ones of a teenaged Gretchen, had a smaller, more careful style of writing on their backs. This was strong, though not certain, evidence that this writer was her mother. It would make sense for her to label the photos she took of her daughter’s friends. That would make the first writer Ginny. I was beginning to like Ginny. She had her mouth open in several of the pictures, laughing out loud. And it was she who had copied the poem. I knew Gretchen would be disappointed again. Liv put out her hand to stop Nick, but he told Gretchen anyway.
    She took it better than I expected. “All right, then, the poem wasn’t Linda’s. So I had an aunt who liked pears. Who doesn’t?” The words were flippant, but her voice was tight.
    Pears. Picasso’s violins. The female figure.
    As if reading my mind, Gretchen defended her aunt’s heterosexuality. “You don’t know Gin. Love affairs with inappropriate men were her specialty. She died in a boating accident on the Mediterranean when I was seven. Mother told me that she’d been with a married man.” She whispered those last two words in an exaggeration of scandal.
    Nick ducked his head. Liv would say that he was a prude. Gretchen’s memories of her mother were full of sexual conversations.
    Still reminiscing, she told us about the Brussels Motel Expo, a temporary building designed only to last through the fair. They’d stayed in a cheap-looking room that was identical to all the others. The layout of the building was also repeated without variation throughout. Gretchen said that, one evening, they walked into the wrong room, interrupting a couple having sex. I winced, embarrassed for the three-year-old walking in on sex, and embarrassed for the fifty-year-old telling us about it. The man threw a shoe at them. Linda and Ginny and the nanny all