The waiter nodded respectfully, because the world rewards confidence even when confidence is ridiculous.
My mother laughed too loudly at everything Lauren said. My father kept bringing the conversation back to how “special” and “visionary” she was. A few family friends had joined us, people from my parents’ country club circle, and they asked Lauren the kind of questions adults ask children when they want to flatter them into performing. “What’s next for you?” “Where do you get your creativity?” “How do you stay so motivated?”
No one asked me anything except whether school was “still going well.”
School was always going well. Teaching was apparently a weather condition, not a career.
At some point between the oysters and the main course, I realized I had barely spoken ten words. It didn’t matter. Nobody had noticed. I could have slipped out of the room and stood in the alley for twenty minutes and they would only have cared when the check arrived.
That thought should have warned me. Instead, I pushed it down, the way I always did.
Then my mother stood up with her champagne flute.
The room quieted. Forks paused in midair. Candles trembled in the reflection of crystal glasses. Lauren straightened in her chair, already smiling before a word had been spoken, because she knew instinctively that praise was coming toward her and had been all her life. She was one of those people who moved through affection the way fish move through water. She didn’t admire it because she never had to question whether it would still be there tomorrow.
My mother looked beautiful in a deliberate way. She had spent three hours getting ready, and you could tell. Her chestnut hair was pinned into a soft twist that made her look younger than sixty. She wore diamond earrings she liked to describe as timeless, by which she meant expensive. Her lips were glossed a perfect rose. When she lifted her glass, the light caught the stones at her ears and flashed.
“To Lauren,” she said, her voice bright and carrying, designed to be overheard. “The creative genius of this family.”
