Bridge of Sighs

mother said, digging in.
    Suddenly energized, she explained how things would be.
Not that different,
she wanted to stress. Better, really. She’d be keeping her studio in town, she assured Sarah, as if this were weighing heavily on her mind. She conceded that Harold didn’t fully understand what she did for a living and would’ve preferred that they partner in the Sundry Arms and share its myriad duties, but in the end he didn’t want her to give up something she loved. He was proud that she’d been able to make a go of it all these years, and he could hire help at the Arms as he needed it, just like always. Of course, Sarah would still spend summers with them on the South Shore. There were always vacancies, and Harold promised to set aside the best apartment for the two of them every June, July and August.
    And this year’s changes, she went on, would be nothing compared with next year’s, with Sarah graduating from high school and heading off to college. Okay, right this minute maybe Sarah felt like she was losing her mother to Harold Sundry, but it was more the other way around. If you really thought about it, it was her mother staring loss dead in the face. In no time Sarah would have a husband and family of her own, whereas she’d be alone in the world. It wasn’t that she regretted the freedom she’d found here these last few years. She’d needed that after Pencil Dick. No, she’d had
all kinds
of fun and didn’t regret
any
of it, but having fun wasn’t the same as having a future. You couldn’t count on fun to last, that was the thing. Sarah understood that you had to make plans, didn’t she? And, if you weren’t very good at making plans—and she allowed she wasn’t—then you had to rely on someone else to do it for you. Harold saw the future clearly, and he made excellent plans.
    Sarah tried hard to focus on what she was saying, but it all came down to words. Her mother was using them, as she so often did, to create a plausible narrative, a story she could live with and embellish, but Sarah had never trusted them. While they’d waited for the pizza to arrive, her mother had shed the nice clothes she’d worn to the restaurant, taken off her makeup and slipped into her robe. In so doing she’d become the very woman in the drawing, and as she talked, the words piling up and running together, her daughter realized she’d been working on this narrative all summer long, all those nights spent pacing in the front room. She’d probably been working on it the morning Sarah had sketched her, catching on paper her sudden loss of confidence, the erosion of her courage, her sheer exhaustion. No wonder she’d felt violated. How cruel that drawing must have seemed. That her mother was at this moment its living embodiment seemed a poor, shabby excuse for what she’d done, and Sarah felt a fissure in herself that she hadn’t even known was there, but that was now widening further. She recalled, too, what her mother had told her that night about her one day becoming that woman herself, and she almost hoped this would come true, because she deserved it. How lonely her mother had been. How brave to keep up a strong front for so long. And how little Sarah had intuited of her fear of growing old and ending up alone.
    Nor did the irony escape her. Wasn’t this searing intimacy exactly what she’d been hoping for this summer? For so many summers? Hadn’t she wanted her mother to tell her what she really thought and felt from the bottom of her heart? When she’d asked for advice about her own future, about whether her feelings for Lou were full and sufficient or somehow lacking, wasn’t this sort of soul baring what she’d had in mind, her mother’s hard-won acknowledgment that one thing was more important than another? Earlier that summer she’d brought up Bobby Marconi without really being able to articulate the question she wanted to ask, yet here her mother was answering it. Passion and independence, she seemed to be saying, were all fine and good, but ultimately not sustainable. In the end it came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise. Hadn’t Sarah known this all along? Suddenly she understood the question she’d really been trying to ask all summer. Which was more important: to love or be loved?
    “Anyway,” her mother finally concluded. With very little help from Sarah, she’d reduced the pizza to a stack of thin edges in the middle of the greasy box, “if