Read When Madeline Was Young for Free Online Page B

deodorant. Cucumbers, the lone vegetable, graced their conditioner.
    "Mac, sweetheart," Diana said, her voice rising a pitch or two, "this is what people do. They go to funerals."
    "People," I replied into my coffee, "do all kinds of things." I had only the morning before seen a man who had managed to insert, or more probably have inserted, a hardball the size of a grapefruit into his rectum. Not a detail I would have brought up at the breakfast table, or at any time of day for that matter, but an argument, nonetheless.
    "Why are you so stubborn?"
    "Stubborn?"
    She groaned softly--or, rather, she growled. When she does that she shakes her head, setting her dark curls atremble. She is the prettiest of her sisters, their features thick where hers are delicate, their eyes blue with light lashes, hers black, and one of them on a perpetual and ineffectual diet. Diana's springy tresses are her bane and my pride. She has never had any interest, none, in knowing that the wonder of her hair depends on the number of disulfide bonds between hair proteins in their shafts.
    "He's not stubborn, Mom," Lyddie, the firstborn, said. "He just doesn't have pods of well-developed friendship the way we do."
    "He's like the silent guy at the end of the block," Katie said, "the one you'd never suspect would go shoot all the kids in the library. Not that Dad would, but if he did you'd be totally surprised--and then sort of like, 'Oh! I get it.' "
    They had the habit of speaking about me as if I were not present. Tessa, having entered quietly, stared at her sister. "Sometimes, Katie, I swear to God, you say the most imbecilic things."
    "Kate's got a point," Lyddie said, she who was planning to study the law. She then launched into the story the girls seem never to tire of about the time I was watching a video of a new surgical procedure. It was a heart surgery, as I recall, angioplasty perhaps, and while I was watching I guess I was eating a stack of blueberry pancakes. They like to tell how the deep reddish-purple of the berries stained the plate and napkin and my teeth, as on the screen blood spattered the surgeon's gown.
    Lyddie has my aunt Figgy's freckled skin, wavy hair, and the noteworthy bosom. Like Figgy, she is full of fun, capable and shrewd, dead serious when it comes to her goals. She intends to be a criminal lawyer and then a district attorney and eventually a judge. Katie is the youngest, plush and blond, enough bulk to be a good softball player, the Maciver among her sisters who has no enthusiasm for academics. She is a brave girl to have come in her brother's place. Tessa is straight and thin, small-boned like her mother, with a sharp chin and nose, the moodiest of the lot. She reads books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page. Historically, until the older girls' college years, Lyddie mothered Katie. Tessa and Katie fought with their claws. And Lyddie and Tessa slew each other with words.
    At one point, when Diana was still exhorting me to go to the funeral, Tessa leaned over the upstairs railing into our almost entirely open first floor, the great room a drafty three stories, and called, theatrically, "Don't make him go, Mom! Buddy's what, a corporal or a major? How embarrassing for Dad."
    Tessa has the gift--or foolishness--of finding clues where there may be none, of believing, as she noses around in her quarry's psyche, that even if she can't quite pinpoint the mystery, there is indeed something. Buddy's son, not so much older than Tessa, was going to arrive in the U . S. A . in the customary coffin draped with Old Glory. He would be on the tarmac, one of the boxes in one of the rows. Had my mother been alive, I feel sure she would have had a momentary startle, grim satisfaction her involuntary response to this saddest of outcomes.
    "You are president of the Youth Symphony Board," my wife reminded me, "a library trustee, a founder of the homeless