Petty by Design

I was seven years old the first time I understood that my mother kept two sets of rules, one for my sister and one for me, and that the difference was not something I could argue away with logic or tears. We were at the Harringtons' summer house on Cape Maren, a sprawling gray shingle mansion that smelled of sea salt and old money. My sister Corinne was eleven, already tall and golden and effortless in the way that firstborn daughters of certain families are trained to be. She had a silver clasp in her hair, shaped like a small bird with sapphire eyes, and I had asked my mother three times that morning if I could wear it instead. "No, Elena," she had said, not even looking up from her correspondence. "It was a gift for Corinne's confirmation. It belongs to her." That night I found the clasp on Corinne's nightstand while she was in the bath. I did not plan to keep it. I planned to wear it for one hour, just to see how it felt, and then put it back. But Corinne came out early, saw me holding it, and before I could explain she grabbed my wrist and twisted until I dropped it on the hardwood. "You little thief," she said, loud enough for our mother to hear from the hallway. I did not cry. I stood there while our mother appeared in the doorway and looked at me with that particular disappointment she reserved only for me, and I said nothing. Six months later, when Corinne left her charm bracelet on the bathroom counter, I walked it down to the storm drain at the end of the driveway and dropped it in. I watched the gold chain catch the light once before it disappeared into the dark water. It was not the same clasp. It was not the same day. But the debt was settled, and I felt nothing at all. That was the first entry in the ledger I keep inside my head, the one that has never once been wrong about who owes me what. I am twenty-seven now, and the ledger is fuller than I would like. My sister and I have not spoken in four years, not since she married into the Delacroix family and moved to their estate in the hills above the city. My mother died two winters ago, and at the reading of the will Corinne received the Cape Maren house, the sapphire earrings, and our grandmother's letters. I received a savings bond that had already matured and a note that said, "You were always harder to love." I did not contest the will. I did not write an angry letter. I simply wrote her name in the ledger and moved on with my life, which at that time was going very well. I had a job I loved at a small architecture firm downtown, restoring historic buildings along the waterfront. I had an apartment with tall windows and a view of the bridge. And I had David Ashford, who was kind and steady and who had asked me to marry him on a rainy Tuesday in March with a ring that had belonged to his grandmother. David was the second son of the Ashford family, which meant he had the name and the manners but not the fortune. That fortune belonged to his older brother Marcus and to their mother, Eleanor, who had turned the family's shipping business into the Ashford Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funded art museums and music programs and the occasional hospital wing. I had been to the foundation offices exactly once, for a holiday party, and I had spent the entire evening feeling like a piece of furniture that had been delivered to the wrong address. Eleanor Ashford had shaken my hand with two fingers and asked me where I had gone to school. When I told her, she had smiled and said, "How interesting," in a tone that suggested it was anything but. David had squeezed my hand under the table and whispered, "She does that to everyone." But she did not do it to everyone. She did it to me. I knew this because I watched her, the way I always watch people, cataloging the small shifts in their faces and the way they hold their wine glasses. With the museum director she was warm and laughing. With her son Marcus she was crisp. With David she was fond but distracted, the way you are fond of a dog that has been in the family for a long time. And with me she was polite in a way that had edges. I told myself it did not matter. I was marrying David, not his mother, and David loved me. He told me so every morning before he left for work, and he meant it, and that was enough. But the ledger in my head kept a separate page for Eleanor Ashford, and on that page I had written a single line: She is waiting for me to fail. I did not know then how much she had already done to make sure I would.