Favorite among what, I should have asked, but I never did.
She died less than a year after her return, and I stood between her parents at the funeral. It was a grim and Presbyterian thing, my first outing in Louisville society. The heavens poured rain from a leaden sky, and through the deluge, Mrs. Baker grasped my hand tight in hers, her black plumed hat drooping to either side of her tightly closed face.
The relief of having her only daughter home from foreign shores crystallized into despair when Eliza fell ill, and then after Eliza died, something shattered in Mrs. Baker. She went on until she couldn’t any longer, and then she died, all broken-hearted after failing to fashion me into any kind of satisfying echo of Eliza.
The judge stood by Mrs. Baker’s gravestone for long hours after the funeral while I sat anxiously in the car. I saw his shape, like a gravestone itself on the hill, and it wasn’t until the shadows grew long and deep that he finally came to the car and we were allowed to go home.
What a broken, brittle people, I thought, discreetly studying his face out of the corner of my eye, and I promised myself I would never be so easy to shatter.
It was like a set of dominoes that Eliza had set into motion with her thin and graceful hand. Anabeth Baker, the hallway ghost with her bruised throat and her desperate angry mouth, spoke of a chain of disaster going back even further, and I decided to be grateful for the most recent generation of Bakers, who seemed inclined to die of broken hearts, worn-out souls, and pleurisy.
With Mrs. Baker gone, I was allowed to attend the local high school, and it was a relief from the oppressive dolor of the house where I lived. Whenever I came home to a stillness in the house that absorbed sound and air like a sponge, I knew to pack up a bag and make my way to a friend’s house.
I at last had friends, and that was, whether she meant it or not, Daisy’s doing. I had a hint of it the night we met, but she needed to talk like other people needed to eat or to breathe. At some point, she realized that it didn’t matter at all what she said, and so she turned into a bubble of fashionable bon mots, non sequiturs, and giddy dizzy excitement. She could drown a delta city with her words, and I was swept up in it, tossed like a broken stalk of flowers into her tide and carried along so neatly that her friends seemed to think that I had always been there.
I was the youngest girl of the set, the baby. When we posed for the society photographers, before those photographers went off to the war, at least, they pushed me to the front with their hands over my shoulders or their arms slung around my waist. The older girls cooed over me, telling me I must remain exactly that small and that sweet.
I smiled wide with my white sharp teeth, and I learned to laugh like the clink of champagne flutes, but even then I never had much interest in sweetness. Eliza Baker was as sweet as candied almonds, and see where it got her. Daisy, as pretty as she was, was never sweet either, though she sparkled so bright it was easy to think she was. It was easy to think that Daisy was many things.
Helen Archer never cared much for sweetness either, and that was why I ended up in the back of the closet with her at the Botleys’ smash in the summer of 1917. The two Botley boys were going to war and Louisville society turned out to see them off. They left, Thomas and Sandy, but it was only Thomas who came back. I saw him years later in New York, and I knew at once that whoever it was who came back with Thomas’s face, it was not him. It came to me that it must be Sandy instead, and I crossed to the other side of the street so there would be no awkwardness when he saw that I knew.
That day in July, there were still two bold Botley boys, however, and they looked very fine in their uniforms and their officer’s bars. The girls were mad for both of them, and they seemed a little mad themselves, sneaking behind the pool house with every girl who would go as the adults pretended not to see.
Curious, I went behind the pool house with Thomas, older, kinder, and more thoughtful than Sandy. He was dashing, with hair like pale gold, and there was an excitement in kissing him, though it came more from his nervy fear about being sent overseas than for his good looks. I kissed some of that fear off of him, and I thought there was a kind of pleasant bitterness to it, like dark chocolate or good tea. It was interesting, but I could never develop a taste for sorrow, so when he started to slide his hand under my lilac frock I pushed him away and ran back into the house.