“If life gives you lemons,” Elena said, the wrinkles in her jowls coming into focus as she gave me that faux intellectual purse of the lips as the whipped cream on top of her Katharine Hepburn-accented ice cream, “just turn it into lemonade!”
I’d had enough of her platitudes years ago, but this time, I couldn’t pretend like someone had rung the doorbell and I needed to hang up the phone. She was actually here in person, sitting in my parlor sipping Lipton Tea in my grandmother’s Wedgewood cups. I’d already made the fatal mistake of confiding my latest firestorm in her.
Georgianna, I told myself, enduring the town’s biggest bag of hot air even for this courtesy call would be far worse than enduring my youngest boy wanting to become a ballerina.
“Mother!” Harry had scolded me with his own purse of the lips, but without the wrinkled jowls, “a dancer. I shall be a dancer, not a ballerina!”
Men didn’t do such things, Henry said, and then turning on me, he blamed me for our son’s prissy mannerisms, flowery language, fairy hobbies. As he usually did when our boys misbehaved, he left me to repair the damage and went to shoot pool with the “boys.”
Harry on one side of the equation, threatening to run away to his Aunt Gertrude in New York if we didn’t allow him to take ballet lessons at Boston University three days a week, and Henry on the other side of the equation, implying he’d disown our son if he so much as looked at a tutu, did not make for the stable household expected of an Andover matron. I was caught between a rock and a hard place.
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