Blessings by Anna Quindlen

Author:Anna Quindlen [Quindlen, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Retail
ISBN: 9781588362551
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2002-09-22T07:00:00+00:00

Meredith was sawing away at her lamb chop. “Nadine told me that you had a lightning strike,” she said. “And a blackout. That must have been sort of scary.”

“Lightning is more dangerous than most people think,” Meredith’s husband, Eric, said.

Lydia scarcely listened to them. She watched Meredith’s knife go back and forth like a violinist’s bow. “Nadine,” she called. “This meat is tough.”

Sometimes, often, nearly all the time now, she felt as if she’d outlived her own life. Madame Guernaire’s no longer made the cotton blouses she liked so much. The Times no longer ran engagement announcements, and they put divorces in the wedding announcements, as though anyone would want to be reminded on their wedding day that their previous marriage had ended in divorce. And four years ago she had gotten a card from the butcher on Third Avenue who had been sending her meat for fifty years announcing that he was retiring and closing his business. Even the butcher in Mount Mason, who had been hugely and publicly bitter about the meat sent to Blessings from New York—“No difference from what I stock, except that she’s paying a premium, I can tell you that!”—was out of business now. Nadine had to buy meat at the Mount Mason supermarket. The chicken tasted like sponge. And not even like real sponge, the yellow misshapen kind that had once actually lain at the bottom of the ocean and that still could be sent to her, thank God, from the pharmacy on the corner of Seventy-second Street and Lexington Avenue. The supermarket chicken tasted like that horrid manufactured sponge that Nadine used on the dishes.

“You can’t get good asparagus this late in the summer,” she said, picking up a spear with her fingers and then setting it down in disgust.

“Mother, you can get everything all the time now. You can get corn year-round. And tomatoes. Everything is shipped overnight from California or Florida.”

“I don’t call those things you can get in the supermarket tomatoes. I’m surprised you can, with the tomatoes we’ve always gotten here in the summer. Charles is taking good care of the vegetable garden. These are our own tomatoes and our own summer squash. I can’t imagine why Nadine thought we ought to have asparagus in September.”

Sometimes she thought that the world had lost its compass. Peaches were meant to be eaten in the summer, apples in the fall. Her mother had once seen a girl in dark shoes at a lawn party in June in Connecticut and turned away before she could be introduced. Miss Bertram had sent a senior home because she was wearing nail polish. It was clear nail polish, but nail polish nonetheless. Nail varnish, they called it then.

And sometimes now she wondered, improbably, whether the compass had been set askew to begin with. She looked at Faith sometimes, lying on the lawn in the growing dusk with a tent of mosquito netting around her and her Humpty Dumpty rattle in her hand, and wondered what all the old mores really meant.

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