Another time, at a Sunday dinner, Megan had said it was a shame such a nice place sat empty when younger people could really make use of it. The phrasing stayed with Eleanor because of the word younger, which was not a neutral observation but a careful implication, the suggestion that youth conferred a greater right to pleasure, that Eleanor’s diminished physical energy constituted a diminished claim. Eleanor had changed the subject and passed the bread and later, driving home, had felt a low, steady anger that she had not known what to do with.
Megan’s mother had begun asking questions over the course of the following year. Specific questions about the number of bedrooms, the distance to the boardwalk, whether the town got crowded in August, what the property taxes ran. Eleanor had answered them politely because she was polite, and she had found afterward that politeness in this particular context felt uncomfortably close to complicity. Megan’s sister had been similarly curious. The questions had a shape to them, a purposeful architecture that Eleanor could not quite call evidence but also could not ignore. She had done what so many women of her generation do when they are trying not to become the difficult one: she had ignored the tone, changed the subject, and hoped that manners would do the work that direct conversation should have done.
She had been curing herself of that habit for several months before the Friday afternoon that completed the cure entirely.
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