Vivi peers into the formal living room to the right of the stairs and the dining room to the left, each room with a brick fireplace. Savannah leads her down the hall to a library, which is everything you’d want an at-home library to be. Built-in shelves hold rows and rows of books—the requisite leather-bound kind but also the rainbow spines of popular hardbacks and an entire swath of battered paperbacks. There’s a deep leather armchair where apparently someone has been sitting recently—a copy of Moby Dick lies splayed open on the seat. Vivi can’t help herself; she picks the book up. In the margins are notes in faded pencil.
“I was just revisiting Melville,” Mary Catherine says. “That’s the copy I studied from at Smith, if you can believe it.”
Vivi sets the book down with some reverence now. The library isn’t just for show; it’s the place where Mary Catherine can revisit Melville and reflect on the thoughts she had as a younger person. Vivi understands that she’s in a home where things aren’t put out for show; the furnishings have meaning, provenance. It’s mortifying to compare this home—Savannah’s second home—to the place Vivi grew up, with its wall-to-wall carpeting, crucifixes everywhere, the long, fancy mirror at the end of the hall bought on sale from the furniture department at Higbee’s.
Vivi wishes she hadn’t sold all her books back to the student bookstore at the end of the year. She, too, wrote in the margins （this was a detriment to their resale value） and now she will never be able to revisit her musings; she will never be able to hand off her copy of Franny and Zooey to one of her children and say, I read this at nineteen, let me know what you think.
From now on, she decides, she’s saving her books.
Beyond the library is a huge, wide, bright kitchen, which is many different rooms in one. In front of a row of windows is a harvest table set with ten Windsor chairs. Against the opposite wall is an enormous cast-iron range with an imposing hood; the backsplash tile is painted with pictures of fruits and vegetables labeled in French: haricot vert, artichaut, pêche. There’s a plaid Orvis dog bed in the corner and beyond that a mudroom where Bromley’s leashes hang alongside yellow rain slickers. A straw market basket rests on a simple wooden bench that is probably where good old Ollie Hamilton used to sit to put on his boots.
The kitchen has a square island topped in dark marble. There’s a prep sink at one end and three barstools at the other. Someone has set out a cutting board with a block of pale cheese, a stick of salami, and a dish of purplish olives.
“Alcohol?” Savannah asks. She pulls a bottle of wine from a fridge that seems to hold only wine, and Vivi can tell it’s not the cheap stuff that she and Savannah used to buy at Kroger and drink in the dorms before they went out.
Savannah takes two wine goblets down from a rack over their heads that Vivi hadn’t even noticed and says, “Let me show you upstairs.”
The hallway of the second floor is long, with a barrel-vaulted roof. Doors that lead to bedrooms—or bathrooms? or closets?—are all closed. At the end of the hall is a rounded niche holding the most impressive model ship Vivi has ever seen. This house is like a museum; there isn’t one cheap or inauthentic thing in it.
They ascend another set of stairs to the third floor, Savannah’s floor, the renovated attic. The massive, airy, slope-ceilinged space is entirely white—walls, trim, curtains, king canopy bed. The rag rug is done in vivid rainbow stripes, and hanging on the walls is Savannah’s childhood artwork—finger-paintings, crayon drawings.
It’s a “self-portrait”—Savannah with green hair and red pants drawn like two long boxes—that finally moves Vivi to tears. She brought home school projects—turkeys created by tracing her hand, Easter bunnies with cotton-ball tails, even a tessellation Vivi slaved over for her geometry class in ninth grade—and she’s certain they all went into the trash. Vivi’s family never documented or celebrated itself because neither of her parents believed their family was worth it. They were just trying to survive, and they didn’t even succeed at that.
“What’s wrong?” Savannah asks.
Vivi can’t explain what she’s feeling without sounding petty. My mother didn’t keep my artwork. I have no personal history to display. Savannah will no doubt say she’s envious because Vivi’s parents aren’t “all over” her. Vivi has what Savannah wants: freedom.
“Your mother doesn’t know I’m staying all summer,” Vivi says. “Does she?”