She glanced up at the mirror, and found the man at the head of the table smiling at her again.
“Knock, knock,” he said again.
Gracie swiveled to her mother, who nodded back.
“Who’s there?” she said, a little more confidently that time.
“Banana,” he told her.
“Banana who?” she asked. Gracie didn’t know this one either.
“Banana,” the man repeated.
“Banana WHO?!” Gracie said again, letting her voice grow louder that time, getting a little carried away. Doesn’t he know how to play this game? she wondered.
Her mother shushed her.
“Banana who?” she repeated, nearly whispering.
“Orange,” the man said.
Gracie squinted back at him. Maybe he really didn’t know how to play. “Orange who?” she said, just in case.
“Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?”
Gracie smiled at that, all open and wide. She looked around the table. Her neighbors were smiling too: her mother and Mr. Blackman, the pretty girl across the way.
“What’s going on down there?” the lady asked—the one sitting at the other end of the table, her mother’s new boss.
“Just a few knock-knock jokes,” Mr. Blackman said.
“Are they funny, Gracie?” the lady asked.
She nodded her head in quick little strokes, then looked back down into her taffeta lap. She covered up her Valentine bracelet with her free hand. The lady made her a little nervous.
“I’ve got one for you,” the lady said.
Gracie looked up at her shyly.
Everyone at the table did the same: the tall man at the head of the table and the pretty girl across the way; the tiny couple with the straight black hair; her mother and Mr. Blackman too. They looked at the lady like she was the star of the show.
Gracie admired her soft brown hair.
She sneaked another look back at the mirror. She knew her own hair would never be soft.
“Knock, knock,” the lady said.
Everyone turned to Gracie then. It was her turn to be the star of the show.
“Who’s there?” she replied, in her very best voice—hooking an imaginary hank of hair behind an ear.
“Vassar girl,” the lady said, smiling in anticipation.
Gracie turned to her mother fast. She didn’t know what that was.
“Vassar girl,” her mother said, repeating it for her slowly.
Gracie screwed up her courage and said her line: “Vassar girl who?” she asked, but it made her nervous, not to understand.
“Vassar girl like you doing in a place like this?” the lady said, tossing her head back and laughing at her own joke.
Gracie didn’t understand it still.
She looked around the table, surveying the faces of the people there, all groaning with pleasure and laughing along. She studied her mother, laughing and smiling along with the rest. It wasn’t her mother’s real laugh—not the one she used with her, but it wasn’t quite fake either.
Gracie started laughing too.
She wasn’t sure why exactly.
She pretended it was a funny joke.
Look at me, she thought, peeking up at the mirror and taking stock of her laughing face. She looked almost pretty like that—with rosy pink cheeks and bright white teeth, her yellow hair band tied perfectly straight.
Somehow she knew, though she couldn’t have said how, that everyone was laughing just to be nice. Like when Mr. Blackman gave her that coloring book that was too young for her by far, or when her friend Bessy admired the tiny pile of Valentines on her desk at school. It wasn’t lying, she decided—pretending like that, not if it made your friends feel good.
Gracie laughed even louder then.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Betsy Lerner, Jennifer Barth, and Jonathan Burnham for the excellent care they’ve given me and my book.
I’m grateful to my first readers, whose encouragement made it just a little easier to pass the manuscript along: Kathleen Galanes, Andrew Herwitz, Lori Finkel, Tracey Hecht, Mary Haverland, and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.
Finally, I owe a mountain of thanks to Michael Haverland and our inimitable Chiccio. I would never have found the goodness in Emma, much less myself, without them.
About the Author
PHILIP GALANES is a corporate and entertainment lawyer in private practice. He is also an award-winning interior designer of commercial and residential spaces. His first novel, Father’s Day, was published in 2004. He lives in New York City and East Hampton, New York.
WWW.PHILIPGALANES.COM
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Also by Philip Galanes
Father’s Day
Credits
Jacket photograph © Darryl Estrine/Getty Images
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EMMA’S TABLE. Copyright © 2008 by Philip Galanes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition AUGUST 2008 ISBN: 9780061982545
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