The Learning Curve by Mandy Berman

Author:Mandy Berman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

10.

LIV’S HOUSE WAS decked out for Thanksgiving, as it was for every holiday. The long dining table was impeccably set, with the fine crystal and a tasteful array of tall, glowing candles, pinecones, fresh clementines, and dried eucalyptus leaves, arranged fastidiously by one of the housekeepers. A fire was going in the parlor, and above the mantel was a giant arrangement of branches with orange flowers blooming from them. These branches were on every surface in the house, in vases so tall they obstructed mirrors and furniture: not only in the parlor, dining room, and kitchen, but also in the library, in the bathrooms, and on the dresser and nightstand in Liv’s bedroom, where they had greeted her upon her arrival earlier today.

When she was very young, Liv never noticed how the flower arrangements changed with every holiday. All of the other houses in McLean looked like hers: sprawling colonials of at least three levels with sloping, manicured lawns out front; in-ground pools and spacious yards out back; tasteful hedging surrounding it all for privacy. All of her classmates in school also had parents who were high-powered lobbyists—or diplomats, or senators, or cabinet members. It was only when she began to read novels that she fully understood the scope of the many worlds outside of her own, learned that most people’s parents did not have jobs that determined, more or less, the trajectory of the free world. She read Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie. She learned about class from the March family, learned that girls like Meg and Jo had to have jobs of their own to support their family, and still they did not have enough money for gowns as nice as the ones that the other girls at the ball had.

And so, though Liv understood by age ten or so that her life was privileged—in comparison not only with the lives she read about but also with the handful of scholarship students from the city who attended her middle school—she did not become particularly grateful for what she had. In comparison with almost everyone she knew, it was the status quo. It was the world she lived in and enjoyed and the world in which she wanted to stay. The thought of losing it, or of not having it at all, seemed preposterous. Her parents had also grown up like this—her father over in Arlington, her mother in Tokyo. Maintaining a certain quality of life was important to the Langleys, because adjusting to a, well, lower-quality life was really not an option.

Nonetheless, Liv felt a certain amount of nervousness when bringing people home with her. In middle school and high school, she went to friends’ houses more often than they came to hers, mostly because she understood that her family was different. The dynamic in her house was not like that of her friends’, the moms there to welcome them home from school with snacks at 3 P.M.; her mother was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.