Read Online The Pursuit of Alice Thrift by Elinor Lipman - Free Book Online

Frederick.
    We waited. The dispossessed Mrs. Gorman raised her voice and cried, “In January? I’ll catch pneumonia with nothing more than a coat thrown over my shoulders.”
    â€œWhy me?” moaned my mother. “What kind of idiot goes home in the wrong coat?”
    â€œFrederick’s taking care of it,” said my father.
    â€œMaybe we’ll leave now,” I said.
    â€œUnless we can help with the coat mix-up,” said Ray.
    â€œYou’d be doing us a favor if you took some food back to Boston,” said my father.
    â€œNo problem,” said Ray.
    Frederick came back through the swinging door and went straight to the phone. He punched some numbers, tapped his foot, fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and whispered to us, “She knew
exactly
what the problem was: two black Max Maras, same fur trim, different sizes.”
    â€œPolly’s?” asked my mother.
    â€œPolly’s,” Frederick confirmed.
    My mother said, “Let them work it out on their own turf.” She opened the door and said, “Marietta? Polly’s not home yet. Can you just swing by her house tomorrow and swap the coats? I’m exhausted.”
    â€œHers is enormous,” said Marietta.
    â€œ
Maybe
a size ten,” Frederick whispered. “More likely a twelve.”
    â€œCan’t you just roll up the sleeves?” asked my mother. “Or borrow something for the ride home?”
    â€œI can’t believe she could even get into mine,” Marietta whined.
    I left the kitchen and said to Marietta—the bridge partner famous for wearing a size zero and having quadruple-A feet—“I know it wasn’t your fault, but you might consider name tags or a laundry marker.”
    Marietta burst into tears, prompting my mother to do the same.
    â€œYou two aren’t crying over the coats, are you?” I asked.
    My father joined us and demanded to know what I’d said to my mother to provoke this outburst.
    I said, “She’s crying because Marietta’s crying.”
    â€œTake your mother upstairs,” he said. “I’ll drive Marietta home.”
    â€œYou didn’t bring your car?” I asked her.
    My father said, enunciating carefully, “Alice? I don’t think you understand that Marietta lost her own mother last fall, and sometimes when someone’s crying about a lost coat, it’s not about a lost coat at all.”
    How was I supposed to know that Marietta’s mother had died? All I’d ever heard about Marietta was that her life was an endless, frustrating search for clothes and shoes that didn’t fall off her body. I said, “I’m very sorry for your loss. I hope it wasn’t painful or prolonged.”
    Marietta sank a little, so my father propped her up by her bony shoulders.
    He shook his head and mouthed a string of indistinct words that turned out to be
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
    â€œWhich was hell for her and hell for me,” Marietta shouted. “So I haven’t had much time to sew
name tags
in my clothes.”
    â€œAlice didn’t know,” said my father.
    Ray joined us by the coatrack. “Hey!” he said. “I could hear you from the back porch! What are you yelling at Alice for?”
    I told him that Marietta’s mother had succumbed to a long, drawn-out, and debilitating disease, which no one had told me about until now.
    â€œThen take a page from my book,” he told her. “My wife died recently but I know how to conduct myself at someone else’s funeral.”
    My father was trying to console Marietta at the same time that he was signaling Ray to refrain from uttering one further syllable.
    Now barefoot and seated on the stairs, my mother murmured, “It never fails.”
    â€œWhat never fails?” I asked.
    â€œYour social graces,” she said. “Or lack thereof.”
    â€œMaybe Alice is too busy devoting her brain to medical