Bridge of Sighs

breakfast nook in her bathrobe, in front of a steaming cup of coffee, and in her right hand she held a cigarette, the long ash of which had begun to tip. That was the detail Sarah had been most proud of because it suggested how long her mother had sat there, staring off into space. In another second, the viewer couldn’t help thinking, the ash would fall. Her mother had taken one look at the drawing, another at Sarah, then gone into the bathroom and shut the door. Sarah expected the shower to come on, but it didn’t, and after a few minutes she inquired outside the door if everything was all right. “What you don’t understand,” came her mother’s voice, “is that one day you’ll
be
that woman.”
    In the end, Sarah decided to compromise. She’d draw Bobby Marconi, but not until the end of the summer, by which time maybe it wouldn’t be so important. After all, she knew from experience that moving down to the South Shore was never a clean, smooth emotional transition. For weeks Thomaston’s insular concerns continued to occupy her waking thoughts, her nightly dreams. Sometimes, even in early July, as she moved from one babysitting job to the next, from a summerhouse to the beach and back again, she was still imagining the Lynches’ comings and goings at Ikey’s and her father’s daily routine without her. But then gradually the world would turn on its fulcrum, and even though she still missed her father and the Lynches, her South Shore life would assume its rightful if temporary primacy and feel less like a seasonal aberration. She was always grateful when that happened, when her other life lost some of its power to haunt. It felt like setting down a big suitcase crammed with all the things you loved. You didn’t love them any less, but it was nice not to have to lug them around. And since this was the way of things, why not let nature work in her favor? By August the strong impression Bobby Marconi had made on her might fade. Maybe by then she wouldn’t even want to draw him. Maybe, if she let it, the spell would break itself.

LABOR DAY
     
    L OU’S GOING TO BE one happy boy when he gets a look at you in September,” her mother remarked one morning in early August. Sarah had just stepped out of the shower and was toweling off, unaware that her mother, brushing her teeth at the sink, had been watching her.
    “He’s not going to see me like this,” Sarah assured her.
    “He won’t have to. Trust me.”
    When her mother was gone, she studied herself in the mirror with a mix of pleasure and apprehension. Never before that summer had she spent so much time in front of the mirror. It wasn’t vanity that drew her so much as wonder. Though well ahead of girls her age in emotional and intellectual maturity, she’d lagged cruelly behind them physically. She got her period late, and her figure remained boyish right through her junior year. Her mother had often reminded her that she, too, had been a late bloomer, but she’d always assumed she was just trying to make her feel better. She still felt certain she’d never have the same generous hips and breasts, though there was no longer any doubt that her mother had been right. The girl who greeted her in the mirror each morning seemed frighteningly new. What if her boyfriend preferred the skinny girl he’d kissed goodbye in June? And there was also the ridiculous notion she couldn’t seem to shake, that her belated physical maturity might somehow be related to Bobby Marconi’s unexpected appearance. She knew it was beyond crazy. Her father had made a game of the major logical fallacies and drilled her on them back in junior high, so she knew that just because B follows A, it doesn’t mean that A caused B. But it
felt
as if her body had been waiting for a reason to do what other girls’ bodies had done years before.
    Was it because she was so preoccupied with the girl in the mirror that Sarah didn’t fully register the striking changes in her mother? She’d noticed on arriving in June that she’d lost weight. “I needed to,” she explained, when Sarah remarked on it. But over the summer she lost even more, and her facial features began to look drawn. When she knew she was being watched or photographed, she smiled broadly, sometimes even mugged, but to Sarah it felt wrong, as if her mother were trying to remember what her smile had been like so she could imitate it. When the camera caught her off guard, she looked like the woman Sarah had