Object Lessons Read online

  “A DELICATE, FINELY CUT JEWEL OF A STORY …

  Anna Quindlen’s story of Maggie Scanlan’s twelfth year in a Westchester County suburb next to the Bronx is a charming, compassionate little masterpiece—a story so compelling that one wishes at the end that it hadn’t stopped and that one could learn more about Maggie, who, although she doesn’t realize it, is a magic child on the way to being a magic woman …. No man could have possibly spun this strong yet gossamer story of what happens to a child when all the clear boundaries of her existence collapse in a single month …. It’s a fine novel, a brilliant novel, a story that makes one wait eagerly for Anna Quindlen’s next novel.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Warm and wry … Accessible, thoughtful … The novel has a quaint, old-fashioned feel. Decisions made early in life are irrevocable; unplanned pregnancy seals a couple’s fate. It isn’t lure of freedom that pulls Maggie Scanlan, the thirteen-year-old protagonist, but the familiar bonds of her life, the lines drawn ‘in her house, her neighborhood, her relationships ….’ During the summer that the novel chronicles, all these lines are blurred, shifted, or destroyed.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The characters are quirky and vividly drawn …. The writing is lovely, and shows the humor and quiet insight that made Quindlen’s column beloved …. Quindlen is an intelligent and imaginative writer.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Rich in the precisely observed … With a quiet, sure touch, Quindlen carefully fits together the narrative pieces of individual desires, doubts, and development to create a satisfyingly complex mosaic of communal growth and change. There are dramatic events—a death, a fire, a wedding—but the more important activity of this novel takes place within its characters, as they pursue self-knowledge and closer connections with those they love.”

  —Newsday

  “GENEROUS WITH BOTH WISDOM AND COMPASSION.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “A perceptive and appealing account of one summer in the life of Maggie Scanlan, age twelve going on thirteen, idol of her Irish grandfather’s eye, felt to be a kindred spirit by her Italian grandfather and a vulnerable witness not only to her own growing pains but also to those of father, mother, cousins, and friends, not to mention an aunt or two and assorted other acquaintances … Delightful.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Ms. Quindlen manages her score of characters with sure reins on detail and delineation …. [Her] writing is clean and lively, action lines are kept taut, and payoffs are faithfully attended to …. A solid job of storytelling, nicely seasoned with irony.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “The novel itself is an object lesson—a richly developed portrayal of life within an Irish-Catholic family …. It is a triumphant story of overcoming stereotypes and prejudices, selfishness and loneliness, dissatisfaction and betrayal. And finding love …. An accomplished, funny, heartwarming novel about a time and place we all—without regard to age, religion, or region—will recognize.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “There is that warm, settled feeling, like the clasp of a child’s hand while crossing the street, that Anna Quindlen has brought us back home, where human nature—if not forgiven—is understood.”

  —The Detroit News

  “As graceful, humorous, and quietly insightful as her nonfiction … There’s reality in every moment of Object Lessons, and it is both painful and pleasurable to visit those moments through Quindlen’s rendering of a time and place many readers can vividly recall.”

  —Chicago Sun-Time

  ALSO BY ANNA QUINDLEN

  One True Thing

  Thinking Out Loud

  Living Out Loud

  Black and Blue

  How Reading Changed My Life

  A Short Guide to a Happy Life

  Blessings

  Loud and Clear

  Being Perfect

  Rise and Shine

  Good Dog. Stay.

  Books for Children

  The Tree That Came to Stay

  Happily Ever After

  For my mother and my father

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  A Conversation with Anna Quindlen

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  EVER AFTER, WHENEVER SHE SMELLED the peculiar odor of new construction, of pine planking and plastic plumbingpipes, she would think of that summer, think of it as the time of changes. She would never be an imprecise thinker, Maggie Scanlan; she would always see the trees as well as the forest. It would have been most like her to think of that summer as the summer her grandfather had the stroke, or the summer her mother learned to drive, or the summer Helen moved away, or the summer she and Debbie and Bruce and Richard became so beguiled by danger in the broad fields behind Maggie’s down-at-heel old house, or the summer she and Debbie stopped being friends.

  All those things would be in her mind when she remembered that time later on. But they always came together, making her think of that summer as a time apart, a time which could never be forgotten but was terrible to remember: the time when her whole life changed, and when she changed, too. When she thought of herself and of her family, and of the town in which they lived, she thought of them torn in two—as they were before and as they were afterward, as though there had been a great rift in the earth of their existence, separating one piece of ground from the other. Her grandfather Scanlan always referred to life on earth and the life to come as here and hereafter: “You’ve got your here, and you’ve got your hereafter, little girl,” he had said to her more than once. “Take care of the first, and the second will take care of itself.” Sometimes Maggie remembered those words when she remembered that summer. Afterward, all the rest of her life would seem to her a hereafter. Here and hereafter, and in between was that summer, the time of changes.

  Perhaps she saw it all whole because of so many years of listening to her grandfather create labels, calling everything from bare legs in church to the Mass performed in English “the Vatican follies,” lumping all the bullets and the bombs and the bloodshed in his native Ireland under the heading of “the Troubles.” Or perhaps it was because Maggie needed to find a common thread in the things that happened, all the things that turned that summer into the moat which separated her childhood from what came after, and which began to turn her into the person she would eventually become. “Change comes slowly,” Sister Anastasia, her history teacher, had written on the blackboard when Maggie was in seventh grade. But after that summer, the summer she turned thirteen, Maggie knew that, like so much else the nuns had taught her, this was untrue.

  Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn’t hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different. People came to r
ealize, when they talked about those years, that they were years which set one sort of America apart from another. Twenty years later they would speak of that time as beginning with the war, or the sexual revolution, or Woodstock. But Maggie knew it right away; she believed it began with the sound of a bulldozer moving dirt in her own backyard.

  For that was the summer they began building the development behind the Scanlan house. That was the beginning.

  On a June morning, a week after school let out, Maggie came down to breakfast and found her father standing at the window over the sink with a cup of coffee in his hand, watching an earth mover the color of a pumpkin heave great scoops of dirt crowned with reeds and grass into the air and onto a pile just beyond the creek. Maggie stood beside him and pushed up on her skinny forearms to look outside, but all she could see was the shovel when it reached its highest point and changed gears with a powerful grinding that seemed to make her bones go cold.

  “Son of a bitch,” Tommy Scanlan said with an air of wonder.

  “Tom,” said Maggie’s mother, just “Tom,” but what it meant was, don’t swear in front of the children. Maggie’s father didn’t turn around or even seem to hear his wife. He just drank his coffee, making a little sibilant sound, and watched the earth mover lumber back and forth, back and forth, its shovel going up and down and over and up and down and over again.

  A sign announcing the development had stood in the fields behind the house for four years, since before the fourth Scanlan baby had been born. It started out white with green letters. “On this site,” the sign read: COMING SOON. TENNYSON PARK, A COMMUNITY OF HOMES FROM $39,500. “Ha,” said Maggie’s grandfather Scanlan, who knew the price of everything.

  Two men with a post digger had come and put the sign up at the end of the cul-de-sac behind Park Street. After the sign went up, the older children in the neighborhood waited for something to happen, but it never did. For years it seemed to stand as a testimonial to the fact that everything was fine just the way it was, that everyone in Kenwood knew one another and was happy in the knowledge that all their neighbors were people like themselves: Irish, Catholic, well enough off not to be anxious about much except the slow, inexorable encroachment of those who were not their kind. The sign got older and the paint got duller and someone carved a cross into the back of it with a knife and all the excitement about new construction and new people died down. One Halloween the sign got pelted with eggs, and the eggs just stayed there through that winter, yellow rivulets that froze on the white and green.

  Mrs. Kelly, who lived in the house at the end of the cul-de-sac and whose driveway was nearest the sign, was by turns enraged and terrified at the prospect of the development. She said that they had built a development near her sister in New Jersey, split-levels and ranch houses, and the next thing they knew there had to be a traffic light at the end of the street because of all the cars. But Mrs. Kelly’s husband died of emphysema three years after the sign went up, and Mrs. Kelly went to live with her sister in New Jersey, and there was still no development, just the sign.

  Maggie sprang up onto the kitchen counter and sat there, swinging her legs. “Get down,” Connie Scanlan said, feeding Joseph scrambled eggs, although Joseph was really old enough to feed himself. Maggie stayed put, knowing her mother couldn’t concentrate on more than one child at a time, and Connie went back to pushing the eggs into Joseph’s mouth and wiping his little red chin with a napkin after each spoonful, the bowl of egg balanced in her lap. “You heard your mother,” Tommy Scanlan added, but he continued to look out the window.

  “Is that it?”

  “What?”

  “Tennyson Park,” Maggie said.

  Her father looked over at her and put down his cup. “Get down,” he said, and turning to his wife, his hands in the pockets of his pants, he said, “That’s the best-kept secret in construction. They’re digging foundations, you’ve gotta figure cement within the month, you’ve gotta figure actual construction in two. My father hasn’t said anything, my brothers haven’t said anything, and I haven’t heard a word from any of the union guys. But they’re out there today with an earth mover, they’ll have cement trucks by next week.”

  Without looking up, Connie Scanlan said, “Your father doesn’t know everything, Tom.”

  “You’re right my father doesn’t know everything, but he happens to know what’s going on in construction,” Tommy said. “And this is the kind of thing he usually hears about. And being in the cement business you’d think I’d have heard about it, and I haven’t.”

  “Maggie usually hears because she listens to everything,” Damien said in his squeaky cartoon voice.

  Tommy looked down at the second of his three sons, a skinny little boy as angular and jumpy as a grasshopper. Suddenly Tommy grinned, the easy grin that lit his face every once in a while and made him look half his thirty-three years.

  “We’ll keep that in mind, Dame,” Tommy said, as Maggie glared at her brother across the kitchen table, and then he looked out the window again. “Jesus, am I going to catch hell,” he said, and the grin faded to a grim line. “The old man will be on me about this for six months.”

  “I don’t know why everybody calls Grandpop that,” said Maggie. “He’s not that old. Sixty-five’s old, but not that old.” She hopped down from the counter. “Daddy, will you drive me to Debbie’s?” she said, as her father took his white shirt off a hanger bent to hang on top of the kitchen door.

  “What happened to the president’s physical fitness program?” Tommy asked. “She lives just up the street, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Tom,” said his wife, as the baby grabbed at the last spoonful of eggs.

  “The president died,” said Maggie. “There’s no more fitness program. It’s really hot, and Debbie’s mother always drives me places.”

  “You’ll walk,” said her father, knotting a brown tie. “I’m late.” He went into the hallway and took his jacket from over the banister.

  “’Bye,” Connie said, but the click of the door sounded over her voice.

  “’Bye,” Maggie said.

  The Scanlans had lived in Kenwood, a small town on the Westchester border of the Bronx, since Maggie was a year old. It was not really a town, just one in a string of suburbs which had grown up around the city like a too-tight collar. The houses had been built right after the First World War, adequate houses, not grand ones, with a few flourishes—a stained-glass window on a landing here, a fanlight there. There were some center-hall Colonials, some mock Tudors, and a few boxy Cape Cods. Kenwood was no more than a dozen streets surrounding a spurious downtown: a dry cleaner; a drugstore with an attached medical-supply business with bedpans and laced corsets in the window; a real estate office with photographs of houses pinned to a cork bulletin board just inside the door; a hobby shop; and a stop on the railroad line into New York City.

  Maggie’s father helped run a cement company in the Bronx. His office was underneath an elevated subway line and next to the big wholesale vegetable depot. Unlike most of the fathers, who could be found at 7:00 A.M. reading the newspaper at the train station, Tom Scanlan drove into the city every day.

  The pitch of their driveway was too steep, ever since a friend of Tommy’s from high school had done an asphalt job on it, and whenever Tom backed out, his rear bumper bounced up off the street. As Maggie left the house that morning her father was just pulling out of the driveway, and she could see his mouth form the words “son of a bitch” as the back of his car hit the road and then bounced up level again.

  It was hot in the June sun, and bright as a bare light bulb, but Maggie felt cool beneath the maple trees that lined the street, their leaves so green they looked almost black. Their branches hung over all but the center line of the street; in springtime the whirligigs that held their seeds floated down in tiny spirals, and they fell so thickly that the sidewalks were sticky with them, and the lawns grew untidy with seedlings. The trees were so large now, and cast such an indelible shade,
that shrubs only grew in the backyards of the houses in Kenwood, except for the leggy rhododendrons that were planted on either side of the front doors of almost every home. Occasionally there would be talk about cutting down some trees to give the azaleas or forsythia a fighting chance, but most of the adults in the neighborhood had been city kids, and they found themselves incapable of cutting down trees. They tended their lawns with reverence, buying rotating sprinklers and hoses with holes along their lengths so that the water made little arcs of diamonds in the sunshine.

  Maggie felt at peace here, on these quiet streets. She did not think of loving Kenwood, just as it did not occur to her to think about loving her parents, or her brothers Terence and Damien and little Joseph. It was simply her place, the place where she did not have to think twice about how to get where she was going and what to do when she got there. She remembered vaguely that when she was little her house had been that sort of place, too, but it seemed a long time ago. Now her house felt too crowded, too public. Once Maggie had heard her mother say that it was impossible for two women to share the same kitchen. Connie Scanlan had been talking about living in a beach house for a month with her sister-in-law, but the words had stayed with Maggie because she thought they applied to her and her mother as well. The house belonged to Connie. Kenwood, with its scuffed baseball field and its narrow creek and its ring of tousled fields, was Maggie’s home. As she listened to the sound of the earth movers grinding away behind her, a faint shudder shook her shoulders, the feeling her aunt Celeste once told her signified someone walking over your grave.

  She glanced back at her own house, but it looked empty and still, the two white pillars on either side of the doorway grubby with fingerprints. When they had first moved to Kenwood from a two-family house in the northeast Bronx that belonged to Connie’s aunt and uncle, Tommy Scanlan had repainted the pillars every six months or so. But he was tired when he got home from work these days; he worked most Saturdays during good weather, and keeping up with the dirt the children left behind now seemed futile. He was the only one of his friends who had lived in the suburbs before he was married; his parents still lived there, in a big fieldstone house with a gazebo and a fountain in the backyard, in a section of Westchester County a little north of Kenwood, where the houses were so far apart that the neighbors’ windows were only an occasional glint of sunlight through the trees. Tommy had lived there from the time he was fifteen until he got married at the age of twenty. Aunt Celeste had once told Maggie’s mother, when the two of them were drinking beer on the front steps one night, that she suspected the pillars made Tommy feel he had come down in the world.