Past Lives - Beyond GoneShe referred to her famous daughters, in one especially emotional moment, as her “four bitching mistakes,” which made me wonder later what they called her in their own piqued moments. Mrs. Elliott—or Lynn, as she preferred—told me how her daughters got their start singing, and how they had been discovered, not at a fair, as the prevailing rumor went, but in the middle of a grocery store named Genuardi’s, on the outskirts of Bryn Mawr.“We always go there to shop because they get the best produce,” she said. “They pull their vegetables in from the farms in Lancaster. Unbeatable.”We were set up in the Elliotts' large drawing room, where I was seated in a chair that seemed to be a kind of covert orthotic, since it quickly and thoroughly numbed my legs and feet, and she, Lynn, had spread herself out in a leisurely pose on a pink love seat on the other side of a long coffee table. She lit a cigarette and used it to invite my questions and conduct the rhythm of her answers.“The girls were being hellish that day, if I remember right,” she said. “Real fussy. It was a full day for me too: bank, library, and grocery store. Graham—that’s my husband—wanted to have some people over for a dinner on Saturday night, so I had to pick up some odds and ends.” She looked across at me queerly, as if she expected some consoling reaction from my end, a raised eyebrow, or a sharp intake of breath at the insolence of her husband. “Well,” she continued, gazing at the arm of the love seat, “I had gotten the girls corralled in the neighborhood of the bananas when Zoe, the oldest, started humming along to the song coming through on the store speakers. Something I didn’t recognize, something old.”“How did Zoe know it then, if you hadn’t played it for her?” I asked. “I mean, did she hear it on the radio, or was it a song she might have found on her own?”She gave me a look of amused pity. “Didn’t you listen? I didn’t know it,” she said. “C.f. my earlier comment: I didn’t recognize the song at all.” She drew an in-between breath through her cigarette.[Buy Strange Symmetry EP]