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the TV dinners without burning herself, how to answer the phone by saying politely, “Baldwin-Kelley residence, Rosie speaking,” and how to soothe her grandmother by going over and wrapping her arms around her. There were hard times, times when Soapie was almost unrecognizable in her grief. One time she picked Rosie up by the shoulders and mashed their faces together and screamed,
“You will not turn into your mother! I will not have it!”
And another time, when Rosie didn’t load the dishwasher correctly, Soapie pulled out all the plates and smashed them one by one on the floor in front of her.
    Who could blame her, though? Rosie remembers feeling more sorry for her grandmother than scared of her. Sometimes she felt like
she
was the one in charge, the one who had to figure out the right things to say and do to keep things smooth. Years later, a therapist pointed out that it was ironic that even though Rosie was the orphan who had lost both parents, Soapie was devoured by such a big sadness that it left no room for Rosie’s grief.
    But—and Rosie insists on this view of things—there were plenty of good things that balanced out the bad: the times Soapie read the
Little House on the Prairie
books, every night, one after the other, and then started again, and how, on summer evenings they’d go out for ice cream, driving in Soapie’s Mustang convertible down to the shoreline. Those were the times when she would talk to Rosie as if she were a confidante, forgetting she was a child. “We’re going to talk human-to-human here,” she’d say and then explain her philosophy of life in great detail. Rosie absorbed it all: politics (Soapie was a feminist liberal who felt the world was doomed), religion (agnostic for the most part, with a nod to the Church of Unflinching Honesty and Living withConsequences), and sex (more trouble than it was worth). And don’t even mention romance. That was for idiots who’d been brainwashed by Hollywood.
    She said that Rosie was going to turn out tough and strong like her, and that people can get through anything if they put their minds to it, if they just goddamned well face things honestly and stop trying to sugarcoat everything. Life was hard, and what was needed—the
only
thing that was needed, in fact—was developing self-reliance so that you never had to ask other people for help.
    And for God’s sake, the human race had
got
to stop its wallowing.
    “Don’t talk about your mother to people,” she said. “If you even bring her up, they’ll always think of you as a pitiful orphan for the rest of your life.”
    But maybe that little speech had come after she’d risen from the couch and transformed herself into the Dustcloth Diva, after she had set up her IBM Selectric typewriter in the office off the laundry room and made housework look almost miraculously amusing—so much so that she was on all the morning television shows, waving her feather duster and winking at the cameras. She took to throwing fabulous parties on the terrace and wearing designer clothes. She was a celebrity.
    There would be no more wallowing, she said, no more talk of how sad they’d been, no more talk of Serena. And that was that.

    Well. But there was other stuff going on.
    At school, in ways Rosie never tried to explain to hergrandmother, being an orphan was far from pitiful. In fact, as the only motherless kid in the whole school, she had rock star status. Teachers let her help in the office, brought her treats, and allowed her to be first in line. She not only ruled several social clubs in the playground, but she had a whole posse of girlfriends who invited her for sleepovers and whose mothers viewed her grandmother as something of a glamorous, eccentric woman who, poor thing, clearly knew nothing about how to raise a happy child. At friends’ homes, she was treated to birthday cakes with pink icing and taken to the kind of Disney movies her grandmother did not see as good for children.
    Rosie