Bridge of Sighs

sufficient.
    Maybe everyone was like that. Maybe lies were necessary to survival. When she was younger, such possibilities had been painful to contemplate. But by the summer before her senior year, Sarah had grown used to them. She’d long ago forgiven her parents for their secrets, as well as for the half-truths they first told to themselves and then to her. Of course by that summer she had a secret of her own.
             
     
    T HE REALIZATION that she had one came to Sarah gradually. She suspected it when she left Thomaston in June. By August, she was sure. But did he really qualify as a secret? How could he? She’d only met him once, and briefly, at Ikey Lubin’s. He wasn’t what you’d call remarkably handsome, nor did he seem exceptionally bright or charismatic. In fact, she was at a loss to explain how he’d managed to impress her, unless it was because of Lou, who’d prepared her for someone truly extraordinary. Maybe she’d heard so many of her boyfriend’s stories about Bobby Marconi’s exploits that by the time she actually met him it was no longer possible to take him at face value. That was the only explanation she could come up with.
    Thinking that he might feel like less of a secret if she spoke his name out loud, she brought him up, ever so casually, shortly after she arrived at her mother’s. “It’s like he’s one person,” she said, trying to put her vague sense of the boy into words, “but deep down he’s trying to be another.”
    “Careful,” her mother cautioned. “He sounds like your father.”
    “Five-yard penalty,” Sarah told her.
    Her mother was an avid pro-football fan and the year before had dated a Sundry Arms tenant named Frank, who’d claimed to play for the New York Giants. Well, not exactly
play.
He said he was on something called the taxi squad, the function of which, he stressed, was
not
to drive players to the game. He described being on the squad as a kind of limbo where you might get the call to suit up on any given Sunday, though probably not. Sarah had wondered if her mother might be getting serious about him, but then he’d disappeared, as Sundry Arms men always did, and her mother explained that no, they’d just had some laughs. Now all that remained of Frank were the football metaphors she and her mother used to establish and enforce boundaries. Her mother threw flags when Sarah was too inquisitive about the exact nature of her relationships with various men, whereas she whistled her mother’s disparaging remarks about her father. She let her mother skate when she offered general remarks like “Never trust a man who lives in his head” or “Don’t, whatever you do, marry out of pity.” More than likely these
were
oblique allusions to her father, but not necessarily. However, direct references—“that pencil dick”—drew flags every time. It was a game, of course, but also a means of dealing with important things without making them Important Things. At one level it was an invitation to disclosure, to greater intimacy, but it also contained built-in checks and balances that could be invoked when necessary. Sarah’s mother seemed to want, perhaps even need, to tell her daughter about her Sundry Arms boyfriends, though her partial confessions were often more confusing than illuminating. She wanted her to understand that at long last she was having a little fun, which life owed you, right? And when the time came, she hoped Sarah would have a rich, rewarding sex life. “You’re going to like sex
a lot,”
she said more than once, though she wouldn’t say precisely what she’d like about it. The joys of sex aside, the men actually in her mother’s life mostly offered a large and varied list of male character traits to identify early and then avoid. For this reason she hoped that when Sarah was her age, she wouldn’t still be “playing the field,” though of course she wasn’t advocating marriage either, far from it. More like a life partner, the sort of person you’d be
tempted
to marry. But
anything,
and she did mean
anything,
was preferable to being married to an arrogant, egomaniacal snob. A flag on that one—“Fifteen yards! Unnecessary roughness!”
    Sarah thought she understood her mother’s need to both surrender and withhold information. She felt the same conflicting impulses herself, though their circumstances were different. What her mother needed to share was experience, her long suit. If she could tell her