jewelry, which I would generally stick in my hair, so when I came down for dinner I looked like a magpie had built its sparkly nest on my head.
âWe could advertise this as a playroom,â Sharon said as she reached the top of the stairs, as though she had heard my memories. I could imagine what she was thinkingâtoy boxes lining the walls, a pink plastic castle, stain-resistant carpetingâand it made me feel protective of the atticâs homeliness. It had always been playroom enough for me with the ancient, creaking wooden floors and dust-covered hatboxes and trunks.
While my mother and Sharon talked about air-conditioning and Pottery Barn furniture, I sat down by one of the windows and looked out over the yard, the way I had so many afternoons when I was little. I didnât remember its being so warm, but it certainly was now; sweat was already trickling down my forehead and I lifted an arm to blot it away.
Next door, the restaurant was open for lunch. I could see people sitting on the porch, the motion of servers walking back and forth. Beyond that, the entire yard had been transformed into a garden with slender paths between the beds for easy passage. It was early in the season, but the vegetables were already growing there; besides the tomato plants by the edge, I could see a small herb garden near the opposite fence, rows of strawberries, vines of squash spreading over the ground, and neat, orderly rows of lettuce, blossoming out of the earth like bridal bouquets. My stomach growled. I was definitely going there to eat sometime soon. I had never been one of those people whose appetite fell away under stress and grief. In fact, my consumption of snack cakes rose in direct proportion to my emotional turmoil.
When I turned away from the window, my mother and Sharon haddisappeared back downstairs, heading for the basement. Looking around the attic, I imagined going through these things, packing them up, sending them off to auction or to the landfill, and it made me feel terribly wistful, as though I were saying goodbye to a part of myself I would never get back.
In front of me was a low, small trunk. Leaning forward, I opened it to find a stack of folded, faded fabric and a wooden box with a sliding top that turned out to be full of dark pebbles, rescued from the gentle smoothing of the water by some curious hand long ago. Below those were an accordion file full of financial paperwork, a stack of envelopes bound together so tightly the rubber band had bitten into the centers of the envelopes on both the top and the bottom, a pile of books, and a few composition books, their covers yellowed and dry. Picking one up, I flipped through the pages. It was a mishmash of things: a listing of clothing comprising a girlâs wardrobe, some poetry, a draft of a letter to the aforementioned girlâs mother with lots of cross-outs and exclamation points, a hastily drawn calendar, and some absentminded doodles. I looked through, smiling, thinking this could have been any girlâs diary, really, from anytime. Substitute high-heeled sneakers and short overalls for petticoats and gloves and it could have been written today, but the dates sprinkled throughout the pages told me it was from 1914. I flipped back to the front cover and there, in a valiant (if failed) effort at pretty penmanship, was my grandmotherâs maiden name: Margaret Brooke Pearce.
Putting the notebook aside, I pulled the next one out of the trunk. This one was labeled four years later: 1918. It was more of a diary than the first notebook, though there were still occasional digressions into the mundane: pages of addition adding up to a teenage budget, a list of girlsâ names and where they were going to college (I felt a little surge of pleasure at this: 1918 and the entire graduating class of girlsâonly thirty, but stillâwere every one of them going to college). In February, I read this entry:
The âflu is here, and the
Gerald A Browne
Gabrielle Wang
Phil Callaway, Martha O. Bolton
Ophelia Bell, Amelie Hunt
Philip Norman
Morgan Rice
Joe Millard
Nia Arthurs
Graciela Limón
Matthew Goodman