“Everytime you open your mouth you hurt someone.” Preston slams his fist on the other side of the bathroom door. I hear him kick his shoes off, two loud thuds hitting the wall. Downstairs I can hear music, people laughing. The Young Traditional’s annual Christmas party is continuing on downstairs at Andrew Haggleton’s parent’s house in Rosemont. I stay pressed against the door. After several Yule punches, I don’t trust that Preston won’t break down this 1920’s era door. He continues on, ranting vile things. Something breaks. It sounds like glass. I hear whispering, a woman’s voice. Chelsea’s urging him to calm down, that there are people listening to everything. Through the door, I hear her mention the word “grief”. 

“Fuck off. Grief doesn’t make you act like feral, wild animal. Andrew’s working on the governer’s campaign this summer. His parents do charity work for Jimmy Carter. Trish is interning at Conde Nast. Future Forbes 500. Now they all think I’m running around with some unhinged bitch. Shes a bitch!” 

A loud slam makes me back away from the door. I pick up my long dress and hide in the bathtub, a beautiful clawfoot reproduction. I spend the rest of the night in there, listening to the the party grow quieter. I sleep in that marble bathroom with my neck crooked into my arm. I creep out when the house is finally quiet. I pad down the oak hallways, past unconcious yuppies and the oil paintings of Andrew’s disapproving ancestors. There’s half drunk bottles of bourbon so rare and expensive it would drive my father to tears. The punch bowl is forming a water ring on top of the antique piano. A guy with no pants is passed out on the chaise, still fully dressed waist up in all Prada. I’m unsure, but I’m confident the head of the Republican Party of Pennsylvannia’s granddaughter is asleep on his crotch. I limp out of the house as the dawn comes. My tartan dress trails behind me in the snow as I slide down the walk to the waiting Uber. There’s only one guy jogging who sees me, and he pretends he doesn’t. I let a few tears slip out once I close the door. When I look I have three missed calls and four text messages, all from my dad. 

• Just checking in. Talked to Grandpop. Flying out Tuesday to make arrangements. 

• Breakfast next week? 

• You’re my favorite daughter <3 Call me. 

• She is looking over you from heaven. Best guardian angel. 

 

I was back from the funeral on a Sunday and back to my old routine on Monday. Classes began again right after New Years. I let Preston get me drunk a few times in between then. Feeling manically hungover was better then feeling like a pit had just opened up inside me. Plus it made me have to put clothes on instead of laying in my bed all day and into the night. He paid for drinks the first round each time, which was his way of apologizing for what he said at Christmas. I didn’t like using my grandmother’s death to succure his affection. But I didn’t want him spending more time with Chelsea because I was wallowing in my “grief”. After the party he had gone to Manhatten and spent four days with her family in their East Village loft. Those photos of them ice skating made me throw my phone into a snowdrift, then I had to explain to my mother why I was weeping in the backyard in only snowboots and a bathrobe. But I bounced back in time to start “Les Amis De Paris”, the class on 1920’s icon’s that people fought to get accepted to. It gave me something to focus on, and it was appropriately timed to a point in my life where I identified most with the subjects of the class. I was a glamourous artist facing tragedy and on a slop leading to minor alcholism. 

Nobody asked me if I was ok. I was relieved. I was relieved to drift from class to class, a body occupying a seat while my mind was a thousand miles away. I was still sitting in a Catholic Church just outside of Chicago, in a front row pew making sure my dad didn’t pass out. She was right there. Laid out, and surrounded by pink roses. She was in a navy dress with a white ruff, pearl earrings. They tried to make her look decent, but she’d lost so much weight by the end she was nothing but bones. I was more thankful to the mortician then I was to the priest, or the grim looking saints, carved in wood looking over us. It’s one thing to deliver some heavy surmon about times to morn, but it was another thing to use her favorite coral lipstick, to sculpt her eyebrows or to use to pink highlight to bring out the peach undertones in her skin. Giving dignity back to the dead should be respected as it’s own religion. I couldn’t take my eyes away from her. We had a similar complextion, her and I. All the granddaughters had that rosey skin, but mine was her specific shade, dusted with my mom’s inherited freckles. All seven of us standing together, you could see where we had inherited her parts. Two got her red hair. Several of us had her nose, her full cheeks. She’d had this beautful, full body that had been passed along, but while my cousins got my grandfather’s long, lean torso, I’d remained stout and round like she had been. Maybe in the 1950s I’d have been grateful for it. But with all my cousins looking like Miss USAs, I was contended to be the Willendorf Venus of the family. As we walked out of the church, I silently let her know that was the only thing I was ungreatful for. That, and maybe the iron liver. That was definately from her, and it was definately going to get me into trouble. 

 

“I told him. Losing someone like that, so horribly can really affect a person. I was suprised you came at all. I’m happy you did. That dress was gorgeous. We were all talking about it after you…went to sleep.” Chelsea stabs at an oyster with her fork. She’s taken me to lunch at Parq, the streets so iced over that they canceled classes that day. I feel like a Make-A-Wish kid. I’m bundled into a huge, camel sweater with my ugly snowboots and barely any makeup. My fingernails have all broken and chipped. Chelsea’s in some expensive, cream number, hair freshly strawberry blonde and matte nails in an almond shape. The waiter’s keep walking past us to look at her. It never passes my mind that they could be oogling us both. I push my gruyere omlette around on the plate. 

“I just found out that morning. I thought if I went to the party I wouldn’t think about it. She’d been sick for a while. Dementia is a real bitch. When I last saw her…” I watch Chelsea clicking away on her phone. Her dealer gets out of class at Drexel soon. She’s been trading her mom’s Valium with him for weeks. I don’t ask what she trades it for. But whatever it is, she looks ethereal and thin. 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s been so busy this week with the Young Traditionals. Ever since Christmas I’ve gotten really involved. Preston’s introduced me to the head of the Pennsylvannia chapter. He’s the cutest old man. You know they do retreats? There’s one in Newport coming up. We should do a roadtrip.” I watch her drone on about the Young Traditionals, that over inflated boy’s club I’d grown to hate. I thought it had just been another party to go to. Turns out Preston’s father, his grandfather, and great uncles had all been YTs. For such a lofty orginization, I never got a straight answer about what they did. Preston said it was a literary club, but I never heard about anyone publishing anything. I was certain half of them, despite being Ivy Leaguers, couldn’t actually read. But they were all rich, and powerful, and the new generation was very, very stupid. Chelsea thrived about men like that. She can look at anyone and trick them into thinking they’re the most importent person in the room. She used to do the same with me before I learned all her tells. Now we play a fun, little game where we each pretend to have a close, confiding friendship. She takes my hand across the table.

“How are you? Really? I know when I tried to kill myself I was in such a dark spot, and that was only me losing myself. Was the funeral really beautiful? I know your dad does the Catholic thing, so the service must have been really powerful. Did she…did they make her look really good? When I walked for Calvin Klein, the girl who did my makeup was a mortician. She was so talented.” I could literally chop my arm off in front of this entire resturant and Chelsea would tell the EMTs she used to model before she tried to stop the bleeding. She doesn’t really have any other stories to tell, but she’s so gorgoeus nobody really notices. A morbid part of me wonders what will happen when she turns forty. The only thing worse then dementia is a forty year old woman who peaked at twenty. 

 

The first Amis we talk about in class is Hemingway. I’m disappointed it can’t be a female Amis, but I press through. It’s not that difficult considering I read most of his work in high school. That’s what I love about liberal art classes in Philadelphia. I can rollerblade through them with the least amount of effort. The sweat I break in class is correcting Preston’s coursework. You can namedrop The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls at a party, and people will act impressed. But the professor will notice if you mix up the plots and themes of the two books. It was exactly what I told him when I was reading his latest paper, over lobster macaroni and cheese he’d stolen from his mother’s last event. He was helping himself to the bottle of Botonist gin I’d recieved as a Christmas present. But I was so numb to everything, I didn’t notice how badly he made Dorothy Parkers. Always too much basil. 

“I thought of a way to cheer you up.” Preston comes back with his subpare cocktails and a huge smile. “It’s something I think our old pal Ernie would approve of. The Haggletons are going to be in the Bahamas for a medical conference. A few of the Young Traditions in Philly thought we’d have a small dinner, to kick off the year. Andrew was so toasted he doesn’t remember Christmas, like, at all. I thought this could be a good restart. You could talk to Trish about Conde Nast. Maybe talk about your grandfather. They’d all be really impressed by that.” 

“Which one?” I pick basil out of my teeth. Its not lost on my that one of my most attractive features to Preston is my predigree. Old money people love kind of thing. Preston pretends to think for a minute. 

“Your mom’s dad. I’m suprised he wasn’t a member of the YTs. Not that your dad’s dad isn’t super cool too, being a professor and everything. Focus on the good stuff though. Fresh start.” Preston kisses me as I make another red-penned note on his essay. Its a fresh, red mark across Preston’s misenterpritation of Hemingway’s views on death. 

 

  I spent most of the party stewing in the corner on one of the Haggleton’s many, hideous couches. This was the second, horrible Christmas party that Preston had tricked me into. The second horrible party that I wasted another, well crafted look on. But this was more agreeduous, as it might be the finest thirft store find of the twenty-first century. Everyone else was in those horrible, safe, sparkly cocktail dresses that second wives wear with their older husbands. I was in an ankle length, 1980’s Vivienne Westwood, black and red tartan with a sweetheart neckline and gold trim. I looked like if Helena Boham Carter was a holiday Barbie. It was glorious, and none of these milk-toast trust fund babies appreciated any of it. So I drank. I drank the Don that Andrew Haggleton’s parents had been saving for their forty year anniversary. I drank the “Yule Punch” that was just fruit punch and Everclear with cranberries floating in it. I even drank the Pappy Van Winkle, sipping it on the balcony when everyone else was chugging it like water. I drank like it had been eight hours since I’d lost a part of my family, and the person I wanted to comfort me was utterly oblivious. He was yuking it up with the salmon pink pants brigade who were putting their feet up on the Haggleton’s antique furniture. The other women at the party just smile, and nod along to the yuking. I notice none of them are Young Traditionals themselves. Women have been allowed sinced 1985, but I doubt there’s been any actual female members. Preston said he hadn’t met any in Pennsylvannia or California, but he was sure there must be a few. I could see in this room all the reasons why there were not female members. None of that seemed to bother Chelsea, who had arrived with another member she has abondoned to talk to Preston. I could hear them in the laughing about some story from when they both lived in California. Then I hear a story that isn’t their’s to tell. Preston’s voice spills onto something private I had told him earlier that night, when I’d been trying to keep it together. I went from Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret, to Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange. 

 

Preston leaves early that morning with his edited paper. I pretend to be asleep as his kisses my forehead. I’m not in the mood to be awake. I know waking up in the mornings means performing the exhausting ritual of Preston undoing his pants and I pretend to enjoy it. He’s only tender with me when he thinks I’m unconcious. I enjoy neither of these two extremes, but it’s been then the third extreme, where I lay alone feeling nothing. I stay in bed until the sun is further up. My dad has been texting me non-stop, so I make coffee and bite the bullet. I know that whatever he says, I can drink it away at the Haggleton’ss later tonight. The phone barely rings once. 

“Wonderful daughter!” My dad’s voice blasts from the speaker. How can he be this chipper, this early in the morning? 

“Happy Friday! Are you busy right now?” 

“No dad, I’m not busy.” I take my coffee to my big, white chair and settle in. Outside it’s flurrying again. Sad, grey slush mixes with spiky sleet from a sadder, greyer, sky. Dad clears his throat in that way he does before we get down to some serious discussion. 

“I’m calling because I was talking to your grandfather yesterday. They’re packing up a lot of things in the house, things that granddaughters might like to have. I could have him put some things aside if you wanted. So if there’s anything specfic, let me know. There’s a pair of coral earrings with a pin that I thought you’d like. Maybe some pearls?” My grandmother did have a fabulous collection of jewelry. Until I met Toddy, she was one of three women I knew whose taste rivaled the Russian czarinas. Every Sunday service was an oppurtunity for her to glitter beneath the stained glass windows. I got a lump in my throat picturing her, bathed in the light coming through the blue partitions that formed the Virgin Mary. I swallow hard while Dad rambles on about what’s been the hot gossip in the Midwest. 

“…so they took care of the ulcer, but I don’t think your uncle will be getting on the four wheelers any time soon. But that’s all I got. Your mom said you and Preston were going somewhere this weekend? A party?” His voice changes in that protective, paternal way. Years later, I would learn to adore it, but at this point in my life all it did was irk me. How dare my dad question my early twenties, dating philosphies? 

“It’s a party for the Young Traditionals, Dad. They’re very importent. A lot of people are connected to them. Powerful people.” 

“Oooh!” Dad coos excitedly. “That IS a party! You should let them know your grandpa knows a couple members. Lots of Notre Dame fellas. They have a big party out in Chicago every year. Your grandpa met that guy on TV there, the one who does the news? The big one…” I cut him off before he can start another ramble. I lie about having class. I’ve been lying to him a lot about being busier then I am. But he either knows I’m lying or he actually falls for it because he hangs up. But he leaves the jewelry issue hanging over my head as I start to get ready for the day. When I go to get my snow shoes, something glints by the window. It catches my eye, a light reflecting from an unseen spot. But all I can find is dampness trying to creep in under the window, sucking in the light and not reflecting it.     

 

“You look really pretty.” Preston takes my hand in the car. Him driving us to the house gives me hope that tonight will be more relaxed. We might actually get there and get back in one piece. He might only have one drink with dinner tonight. He even went home and grabbed a green tie, having seen my dress hanging up on my closet door. I feel like we’re a united front, a wall of ivy growing upward. 

“Are we actually going to eat something tonight?” I tease him, but I’m hoping he says yes. I really need something warm in my stomach tonight. Preston laughs as we make the turn. 

“Andrew called the woman who does the catering for club events. She’s really good. Zach’s bringing wine. I think we’re all going to drink in the study and then go in for dinner. It’s way more chill then Christmas. We all just need a night where we act like grown ups.” I sink back in my seat. I feel victorious. It’s shaping up to be the kind of night I always hope for but never recieve. Some of the houses still have their Christmas lights up, shimmering in a blur as we drive by. White. Green. Red. Icy Blue. Andrew’s parent’s haven’t taken down their decorations either. Mr. Haggleton had custom made reindeer for their lawn, unimpressed by the department store selections. I remember when we came here for Christmas, Preston told me they were designed to look like Scottish elk. Walking past these electric beasts, I feel a drop in my stomach. My heels clicking on the stones leading to the door brings back some unsavory memories. My mind clicks back to the few moments before I locked myself in that bathroom for the rest of the night. 

Zachary Ellis is the only one to give condolences after we’re served drinks. I don’t remember much of him from Christmas, only vauge visions of him bobbing in and out of the room when everything was going down. He’s a Penn grad, and alumni of the swim team Preston lead in high school. Zach’s what the YT’s consider “exotic”, a blended mix of Irish and Jewish Argentinian. He’s also the most interesting to look at, not handsome, but armed with the most beautiful Roman nose I’ve ever seen. The atmosphere is dragging, a bunch of children trying to be dignified in a room where adults usually sit. Zach and I both sink into those horrible, antique chairs once we get a glass of the wine he brought.

“You seem to have survived the keening. Catholic funerals are the worst. I do love an Argentinian do, though.” Zach crosses his legs and I get a peek of a Baroque print sock. Versaces, the most valiant attempt at fashion amid a sea of Brooks Brother’s suits still left from high school. 

“Christmas present?” I ask, pointing at the socks. Zach pulls up a pant leg to show me, a small gold bracelet accenting the daring choice. Its his great-grandfather’s, he tells me. It was his first big purchase when he succured a job in the American trade union. Every Hannukah they still drink a glass of amaro to a little photo of him that sits in the kitchen. I think back to when we were in Chicago, and my dad bought a bag of marizpan pigs from a vendor. I’d wanted nothing to do with them and their stupid pink faces, their squished bodies inside their individual wrappers. Everyone else had eaten them in the car on the way to the cemetary, mine ending up shoved into the bottom of my purse. As I think about that pig, surrounded by several sons of dynasties that act like pigs, Zach is the first to say he’s sorry for my loss. Those exact words haven’t been said by any of my friends, not even Preston. It makes me feel a little fluttery as we go into dinner, staffed by exhausted looking waiters who haven’t been allowed to rest since the holidays. 

Chelsea sits between Preston and Andrew for the rest of the night, pouring them their wine like they’ve had their hands chopped off. She’s in another cream, structured outfit that melts over her prominant collar bones. She’s got barely any makeup on, leaving me looking like a painted doll at the other end of the table. I angrily eat the bland polenta provided to us, because I won’t let her look like the sensible, sober one. Not this time. Zach yelds to the Jewish and Latino jabs from the others to occasionally ask me a question. He’s trying his best to get me to talk, like a concerned family member to a moody teenager. When the questions don’t work, he drags me directly into the conversation. 

“Your grandfather doesn’t work as a professor, does he? I had to read a few articles on the history of Mid-Western trading, and the spelling was similar. Good stuff. For an economics paper, that is.” Zach eats a piece of lamb in a knowing way. Suddenly everyone is staring at me, hungrily waiting for me to whip out my family tree. 

“He does. Life long Chicago-ite, so he was giving a lot of lectures. Now he’s focusing on his next book. But he might start traveling again, now that he’s…freed up. Maybe coming out to UPenn would be a good change of scenery.” I look over at Preston, whose smile lets me know I’ve done something that insults him. Chelsea’s angled in a way to hide the fact she just put her hand on his knee. That look in his face makes me feel ill. 

 

“Stop looking at me like that!” I push Preston with no results, except a wider grin from him. I dragged him outside once I heard the joke leave his lips. At first I didn’t believe it was his voice, so cold and haughty. The way he talked about her was so cruel. He laughs at me again. I’m so drunk he looks like a giant, towering over me. But that also could be from my knees buckling in the cold. I give him another shove, aimming for a snow drift. He only flutters like a leaf in a breeze. 

“I love when your little Irish comes out. It’s so cute. Come on. That was all stuff you told me about your grandma, and everyone loved it. Come on, push me. Push me one more time. For Margaret. Push me for Margaret. She’d love it.” 

“Stop saying her name!” I slap him so hard he loses his breath. I charge him like a wild animal, whaling on him with all the strength left in my body. He stares at me shocked. He looks over my head to see the other party attendents watching us through the window. With him distracted, I knock him backwards into that snowdrift. I wipe my dripping nose as I stand over him. 

“She was not a drunk. She was not a joke. She’s gone. Twenty-four hours. You couldn’t give me twenty-four hours to grieve. Now I’m here with your friends. Your party. My dad has been calling me all night, and I didn’t answer because I thought my BOYFRIEND would be the one to be there after I lost someone. You’re my boyfriend. That’s what a boyfriend does. But you DIDN’T, and you invited HER. I need you and you want people to look at HER.” 

 

“So I’m on the runway, and as soon as I feel the breeze, I know. My skirt is all the way up, in front of all New York Fashion Week. Talk about wanting to die. At least if I did, I’d be in head to toe Donna Karen.” Chelsea laughs loudly to let everyone know she just told a little joke. I’m staring into my Irish coffee, wishing I could just climb into the sunken sofa and vanish. Preston’s green tie means nothing when he’s looking at her like all the other guys, like she’s been plucked from a constellation. It was how people used to look at my grandma. She could sit in the center of a room, surrounded by admirers who each believed they were the only ones she was interested in talking to. Everyone felt importent around her. She had that gift. But nobody ever leered at her the way they do Chelsea. Margaret had been classier then that. A drop of water falls into my cup, rippling in my coffee. It’s happening again. The “one glass of wine” Preston has passed into “one, two, three, four glasses of wine and two whiskey straights then Irish coffee” Preston. He doesn’t see me get up and go for my coat, stumbling along the hallway. I try not to tilt any of the Haggletons of yore that are hanging up, forced to watch again as the night descends into a bunch of oblitorated millenials passed out on their stuff. 

I smoked long before my grandmother passed, but I’d been doing it more since the funeral. A predisposition to lung cancer and strokes in the family didn’t stop me from wrapping my coat around my shoulders and finding my hidden stash. I’d had ciggarettes in every pocket and every purse in Chicago. I’d snuck around the back of the church and smoked in the graveyard when we arrived early to the funeral. So I had no problem sitting cross-legged on the Haggleton’s diving board and sucking in a mouthful of smoke. My lashes were freezing to my cheek each time I blinked. I imagined I looked like a tragic starlet. Garbo at the end of a film where her lover has left her and she has nothing but her smokes or Sharon Stone at the end of Casino where she cries, beautiful even after screaming at Robert De Niro. I loved that movie. I loved the idea of someone buying me things because I told him to. It was much less messy then love, which had only led me to have my ass freezing to the diving board. Above me the sky had cleared, and the stars looked as icy as the earth below them. It was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in days. All of that open air, glimmering above me. The smoke from my ciggarette lazily trailed away from me to the tarp over the pool. I see something moving towards me. Preston must have limped out here to try and entice me back inside. I turn to tell him where he can stick his car keys after marooning me out on the Main Line once again. My eye catches something. A glimmer. A star in the darkness. 

I didn’t stop running until I got to the Rosemont train station. My feet barely touched the frozen ground, the manicured lawns beneath layers of snow. I threw myself onto the train. It was the last one out to the city for the rest of the night. I stumbled on to the last car, curling up in the corner away from the others riding the Media-Elywn line at two in the morning. The ticket taker looks down at my bare, purple feet as I hand him seven dollars. He sees my black rimmed eyes with the streaks running down my face. 

“I’m fine,” I assure him. “I just want to go home.” 

 

She was standing on the edge of the blue tarp. Her hair was long, red like the red she’d had when she was young. She was dressed all in pink, the same shade the mortician had dusted her cheekbones with. She looked as peaceful as she had the last time I had seen her. I had only seen her look this way in black and white, mounted on the walls of the house in Chicago. She was too surreal for color, too beautiful to be standing there in such an earthly place. She walks towards me, weightless across the covered pool. She reaches out her arms to me, as she undoubtly did to comfort my dad when he was young. I would give anything to reach back and feel her hand, her flesh and bone, in mine again. My mouth opens up and spills a thousand apologizes. I know she’s disappointed in me. I know this is not what she imagined for her granddaughter, her first born granddaughter. To be sitting on a diving board seeking comfort in a ciggarette because its warmer then a big house filled with cold people. I lift my face to her, bathing in her warm light. She’s the stained glass window and I’m the church goer. I feel her kiss on my forehead. She whispers softly to me before she evaporates into the butt of my ciggarette, burned so low that it seers my fingers. I’m out the back garden gate that instance, leaving the red ember to die out by the edge of the pool. 

Once on the train, I text my dad. It’s too late for him to read it, but I need him to know. I’d love to have breakfast with him any day of the week. I want the coral earrings that Grandmama Margaret wore all the time. I love him. I adore him. I love him, and mom and every one of my beautiful, infuriating family members. Once its sent, I dig for my headphones. I desperetely need to listen to Dean Martin right now, a favorite of my grandmother’s. I get one earbud in. “Everybody Loves Somebody” plays as I find another gift at the bottom of my pocket. He’s a little squished. His wrapping is wrinkled. A little marzipan pig looks up at me, glimmering under the florescent lights of the SEPTA train. I taste the sweet pinkness all the way home, into bed, and into a warm oblivion. I float away from cream sweaters, and social clubs, and Preston’s false, green tie. I sleep somewhere between the earth and the sky, where a woman sits all in pink, watching the world pass below her.