Beneath this selfishness lay deeper circles of guilt. She lied and she stole, and once upon a time she’d done far worse than that. She’d lied to her husband from the moment she met him, and she’d lied to her daughter not fifteen minutes ago, on her way out the back door—“I’m late for my exercise class.” She was late, all right. Two hours late for a one-hour class! The dollars in the pocket of her gabardine coat were twenty of the fourteen hundred she’d received from the Wabash Avenue jeweler to whom she’d taken the pearls and the diamond rings she’d set aside when she emptied her sister’s apartment in Manhattan. At the time, as the executrix, she’d told herself that she was redressing an injustice perpetrated by her sister; that Becky already had too much money coming to her and didn’t need costly jewelry. The theft might still have been forgivable if Marion had followed through on her intention to spend the money on Perry and Clem and Judson, to whom Shirley had left nothing. But after her first “hour” with Sophie, in June, when Sophie had suggested that weekly counseling would be more valuable than a sleeping-pill prescription, and had explained her sliding fee scale and asked Marion if she could afford, say, twenty dollars a week, and Marion had replied that she did, in fact, have a small personal fund at her disposal, there was no more denying the evil of her theft.
Thanks to her running on Maple Avenue, she arrived at the dental office just five minutes late. The parking lot was emptier than usual, the waiting room occupied only by a mother and a boy reading Highlights for Children, apparently unconcerned about the oral discomforts awaiting him. That the mother and her son were Black spoke to the liberalism of the Serafimideses, whose educations had taken them not only to the suburbs but also, as Marion knew, because she’d asked, out of the Greek Orthodoxy of their childhoods; they belonged to the Ethical Culture Society. The receptionist, a paragon of discretion, sixtyish and Greek herself, gave Marion a silent nod of permission to go straight to the sanctum.
Sophie Serafimides was a chair-filling dumpling of a woman with beautiful olive skin and a great volume of crinkly white hair. Although Marion had been struck by her angelic surname when she found it in the Yellow Pages, she’d chosen Sophie for her given name. The attending psychiatrists who’d treated her in Los Angeles had been men of such insufferable male condescension that it was surprising she’d recovered her sanity at all. To have found a female clinician in New Prospect was something of a miracle, and if she’d “transferred” onto Sophie any of her issues with her unloving, reality-avoidant mother, who’d died of liver disease in 1961, fully estranged from Marion, she had yet to become aware of it. Sophie Serafimides was all about reality. She radiated—exemplified—Mediterranean warmth and good sense, which itself could be insufferable, but not in a way for which Marion could blame her.
Nothing pleased the dumpling more than to be brought a fresh dream, but Marion didn’t have any dreams for her today and preferred confession anyway. After hanging up her coat, she sat down and confessed that she was wearing her exercise clothes because she’d had to lie to Becky about where she was going. She confessed that she’d gobbled up—crammed into her mouth, stuffed herself with—six sugar cookies. Sophie smiled pleasantly at these confessions. “Christmas comes but once a year,” she suggested.
“I know you think I’m too obsessed with this,” Marion said. “I know you think it’s beside the point. But do you know what I weighed this morning? A hundred and forty-three pounds! I’ve been starving myself since September, doing my knee bends and my sit-ups, avoiding sweets, and I’ve lost six pounds in three months.”
“We’ve talked about counting things. The way we use numbers to punish ourselves.”
“I’m sorry, but, for a person my height, a hundred and forty-three pounds is objectively a lot.”
Sophie smiled pleasantly, her hands folded on her belly, the ampleness of which didn’t seem to embarrass her. “Eating cookies is an interesting response to feeling overweight.”
“Well, Becky was being a pill—she’s suddenly unbearable. I could handle it if it was just a matter of being irritable and secretive, but Tanner Evans called the house last night, trying to find her, and I didn’t hear her come home until after midnight, and this morning she was up bright and early, which is unusual. She isn’t telling me anything, but it’s obvious how happy she is. And I was thinking about the sweetness of being in love for the first time—how nothing in the world is sweeter.”