‘Look,’ I said, ‘about what happened. My sister –’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, cutting me off. ‘I’m fine.’ But, as she said it, her voice cracked, just slightly, and she turned her back to us, putting a hand to her mouth. I just stood there, totally unsure what to do but, as I looked at Clarke, I saw she was already digging into the pocket of her shorts to pull out her ever-present pack of Kleenex. She drew one out, then reached round the girl, offering it to her. A second later, the girl took it, silently, and pressed it to her face.
‘I’m Clarke,’ Clarke said. ‘And this is Annabel.’
In the years to come, it would be this moment that I always came back to. Me and Clarke, in the summer after our sixth-grade year, standing there behind that girl’s turned back. So much might have been different for me, for all of us, if something else had happened right then. At the time, though, it was like so many other moments, fleeting and unimportant, as she turned round, now not crying – surprisingly composed, actually – to face us.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Sophie.’
Extract from
That Summer
It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the pharmacy thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger on it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.
The day my father got remarried, my mother was up at 6 a.m. defrosting the refrigerator. I woke to the sound of her hacking away and the occasional thud as a huge slab of ice crashed. My mother was an erratic defroster. When I came down into the kitchen, she was poised in front of the open freezer, wielding the ice pick, Barry Manilow crooning out at her from the tape player she kept on the kitchen table. Around Barry’s voice, stacked in dripping piles, were all of our perishables, sweating in the heat of another summer morning.
‘Oh, good morning, Haven.’ She turned when she saw me, wiping her brow with the ice pick still in hand, making my heart jump as I imagined it slipping just a bit and taking out her eye. I knew that nervous feeling so well, even at fifteen, that spilling uncontrollability that my mother brought out in me. It was as if I were attached to her with a tether, her every movement yanking at me, my own hands reaching to shield her from the dangers of her waving arms.
‘Good morning.’ I pulled out a chair and sat down next to a stack of packaged chicken. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Me?’ She was back on the job now, scraping. ‘I’m fine. Are you hungry?’
‘Not really.’ I pulled my legs up to my chest, pressing hard to fold myself into the smallest size possible. It seemed like every morning I woke up taller, my skin having stretched in the night while I slept. I had dreams of not being able to fit through doors, of becoming gigantic, towering over people and buildings like a monster, causing terror in the streets. I’d put on four inches since April, and showed no signs of letting up. I was already five eleven, with only a few more little lines on the measuring stick before six feet.
‘Haven.’ My mother looked at me. ‘Please don’t sit that way. It’s not good for you and it makes me nervous.’ She stood there staring at me until I let my legs drop. ‘That’s better.’ Scrape, scrape. Barry sang on, about New England.
I still wasn’t sure what had brought me down from my bed so early on a Saturday, aside from the noise of my mother loosening icebergs from our Frigidaire. I hadn’t slept well, with my dress for the wedding hanging from the curtain rod, fluttering in the white light of the street lamp outside my window. At 2 p.m. my father was marrying Lorna Queen, of ‘Lorna Queen’s Weather Scene’ on WTSB News Channel 5. She was what they called a meteorologist and what my mother called the Weather Pet, but only when she was feeling vindictive. Lorna was blonde and perky and wore cute little pastel suits that showed just enough leg as she stood smiling in front of colourful maps, sweeping her arm as if she controlled all the elements. My father, Mac McPhail, was the sports anchor for Channel 5, and he and the Weather Pet shared the subordinate news desk, away from the grim-faced anchors, Charlie Baker and Tess Phillips, who reported real news. Before we’d known about my father’s affair with the Weather Pet, I’d always wondered what they were smiling and talking about in those last few minutes of the broadcast as the credits rolled. Charlie Baker and Tess Phillips shuffled important-looking papers, worn thin from a hard day of news chasing and news delivering, but my father and the Weather Pet were always off to the side sharing some secret laugh that the rest of us weren’t in on. And when we finally did catch on it wasn’t very funny after all.
Not that I didn’t like Lorna Queen. She was nice enough for someone who broke up my parents’ marriage. My mother, in all fairness, always blamed my father and limited her hostility to the nickname Weather Pet and to the occasional snide remark about my father’s growing mass of hair, which at the time of the separation was receding with great speed and now seemed to have reversed itself and grown back with the perseverance and quickness of our lawn after a few good days of rain. My mother had read all the books about divorce and tried hard to make it smooth for me and my sister, Ashley, who was Daddy’s pet and left the room at even the slightest remark about his hair. My mother kept her outbursts about that to a minimum, but I could tell by the way she winced when they showed my father and Lorna together at their subordinate news desk that it still hurt. Before the divorce my mother had been good at outbursts, and this quietness, this holding back, was more unnerving than I imagined any breakdown could be. My mother, like Ashley, has always cultivated the family dramatic streak, started by my grandmother, who at important family gatherings liked to fake horrible incidents if she felt she were not getting enough attention. No reunion, wedding or funeral was complete without at least one stroke, heart attack or general collapse from Grandma at which time everyone shifted into High Dramatic Mode, fussing and running around and generally creating the kind of chaos that my family is well known for.
This always made me kind of nervous. I hadn’t inherited that flair for the stage that Ashley and my mother had, this snap ability to lose control in appropriate instances. I was more like my father, steady and worried all the time. Back then, we had it down to a science: Mom and Ashley overreacting, thriving on crisis, my father and I standing calm, together, balancing them out. Then my father left and, like a table short a leg, things had been out of whack ever since.
‘So are you going?’ That was Ashley, standing in the kitchen doorway in a T-shirt and socks. Just looking at her made me acutely aware of my own height, the pointedness of my elbows and hipbones, the extra inch I’d put on in the last month. At twenty-one my sister is a petite five-four, with the kind of curvy, rounded body that I wish I’d been born with; tiny feet, perfect hair, small enough to be cute but still a force to be reckoned with. At my age she had already been voted Most Popular, dated (and dumped) the captain of the football team and been a varsity cheerleader. She was always the one at the top of the pyramid, tiny enough to be passed from hand to hand overhead until she stood high over everyone else, a bit shaky but triumphant, before letting loose and tumbling head over heels to be caught at the bottom with a sweep of someone’s arms. I remembered her in her cheerleading uniform, short blue skirt, white sweater and saddle shoes, grabbing her backpack to run out to a carful of teenagers waiting outside, squealing off to school with a beep of the horn. Back then, Ashley seemed to live a life just like Barbie’s: popular and perfect, always with a handsome boyfriend and the cool crowd. All she needed was the Dreamhouse and a purple plastic Corvette to make
it real.
Now, my sister just scowled at me when she caught me looking at her, then scratched one foot with the other. She had a good tan already, and on the inside of her left ankle I could see the yellow butterfly tattoo she’d got in Myrtle Beach when she’d got drunk after high-school graduation two years earlier and someone double dared her. Ashley was wild, but that was before she got engaged.
‘No. I don’t think I should go,’ my mother said. ‘I think it’s in bad taste.’
‘Go where?’ I said.
‘She invited you,’ Ashley said, yawning. ‘She wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t want you there.’
‘Where?’ I said again, but of course no one was listening to me. There was another crash as a block of ice fell out of the freezer.
‘I’m not going,’ my mother said solidly, planting a hand on her hip. ‘It’s tacky and I won’t do it.’
‘So don’t do it,’ Ashley said, coming into the kitchen and reaching across me to pick up a pack of frozen waffles from the table.
‘Do what?’ I said again, louder this time because in our house you have to make a commotion to even be heard.
‘Go to your father’s wedding,’ my mother said. ‘Lorna sent me an invitation.’
‘She did?’
‘Yes.’ This fell into the category of whether Lorna, the Weather Pet, was either downright mean or just stupid. She did a lot of things that made me question this, from telling me it was okay to call her Mom once she married my father to sending my mother a framed picture of an old family Christmas card she’d found among my dad’s junk. We’d all sat round the kitchen table, staring at it, my mother holding it in one hand with a puckered look on her face. She’d never said a word about it, but instead went outside and ripped up weeds in the garden for forty-five minutes, handful after handful flying over her head in a massive horticultural tantrum. I believed Lorna was mostly mean, bordering on stupid; my mother refused to even voice an opinion; and because Ashley couldn’t bear to criticize anything about Daddy she said Lorna was just stupid and left mean out of it altogether. All I knew was that I would never call a woman only five years older than Ashley Mom and that that framed Christmas card was what Ann Landers would call In Quite Poor Taste.
So my mother was not with us as we set off for the church that afternoon, in our matching shiny pink bridesmaid dresses, to see our father be bonded in holy matrimony to this probably stupid but quite possibly just mean Weather Pet. I’d felt sorry for my mother as she lined us up in front of the mantel to take a picture with her little Instamatic, cooing about how lovely we looked. She stood in the doorway behind the screen, waving as we walked out to the car, the camera dangling from her wrist, and I realized suddenly why Ashley might have wanted her to come, even if it was tacky. There was something so sad about leaving her behind, all of a sudden, and I had an urge to run back and take her with me, to pull that tether tight and hold her close. But I didn’t, like I always don’t, and instead climbed into the car next to Ashley and watched my mother waving as we pulled away from the house. At every wedding someone stays home.
As we got out of the car at the church, I saw Ashley’s fiancé, Lewis Warsher, heading our way from the other end of the lot where he’d parked his little blue Chevette. He was fixing his tie as he walked, because Lewis was a neat dresser. He always wore shiny shoes and skinny ties in pastel colours. When Ashley saw him, I swear she shrank about two inches; there is something about Lewis that turns my sister, who is tough as nails, into a swooning, breathless belle.
‘Hey, honey.’ And of course they were immediately connected, his arms slipping round her small waist, pulling her close for one of those long, emotional hugs where it looked like he was the only thing that was keeping her from collapsing to the ground. Ashley and Lewis spent a lot of time hugging each other, supporting each other physically and whispering. They gave me a complex, always with their heads together murmuring in corners of rooms, their voices too low to catch anything but a few vowels.
‘Hey,’ Ashley whispered. They were still hugging. I stood there fiddling with my dress; I had no choice but to wait. Ashley hadn’t always been this way; she’d had boyfriends for as long as I could remember, but none of them had affected her like Lewis. For years we kept track of major family events by whom Ashley had been dating at the time. During the Mitchell period, I got my braces and Grandma came to live with us. The Robert era included my mother going back to night school and Ashley getting in the car wreck that broke her leg and made her get the stitches that left a heart-shaped scar on her right shoulder. And it was during the year-long Frank ordeal that the divorce came down, complete with law proceedings, family therapy and the advent of Lorna, the Weather Pet. It was a boyfriend timeline: I could not remember dates, but I could place each important event in my life with a face of a boy whose heart Ashley had broken.
But this was all before Lewis, whom Ashley met at the Yoghurt Paradise at the mall where they both worked. Ashley was a Vive cosmetics salesgirl, which meant she stood behind a big counter in Dillard’s department store, wearing a white lab coat and putting overpriced make-up on rich ladies’ faces. She thought she was something in that lab coat, wearing it practically everywhere like it meant she was a damn doctor or something. She was just coming out of the messy break-up of the Frank era and was consoling herself with a yoghurt sundae when Lewis Warsher sensed her pain and sat himself down at her table because she looked like she needed a friend. These are their words, which I know because I’ve heard this story entirely too many times since they announced their engagement six months ago.
My mother said Ashley missed our father, and needed a protective figure; Lewis just came along at the right time. And Lewis did protect her, from old boyfriends and petrol-station attendants and bugs that dared to cross her path. Still, sometimes I wondered what she really saw in him. There was nothing spectacular about Lewis, and it was a little unsettling to see my sister, whom I’d always admired for being plucky and tough and not taking a bit of lip from anyone, shrinking into his arms whenever the world rose up to meet her face to face.
‘Hey, Haven.’ Lewis leaned over and pecked me on the cheek, still holding Ashley close. ‘You look beautiful.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. Lewis had the arm clamp on Ashley, steering her towards the church, with me following. Even though we were wearing the same god-awful pink fluffy dresses, we looked totally different. Ashley was a short, curvy pink rose, and I was a tall, pink straw, like something you’d plonk down in a big fizzy drink. This was the kind of thing I was always thinking about since my body had betrayed me and made me a giant.
When I was in first grade, I had a teacher named Mrs Thomas. She was young, sported a flip hairdo that made her look just like Snow White, smelled like Lily of the Valley and kept a picture of a man in a uniform on her desk, staring stiffly out from the frame. And even though I was shy and slow at maths she didn’t care. She loved me. She’d come up beside me in the lunch line or during story hour and smooth her hand over my head, saying, ‘Why, Miss Haven, you’re just no bigger than a minute.’ I was compact at six, able to fit neatly into small places that now were inaccessible: under the crook of an arm, in the palm of a hand. At five eleven and counting, I no longer had the sense that someone like Mrs Thomas could neatly enclose me if danger should strike. I was all bony elbows and acute angles, like a jigsaw puzzle piece that can only go in the middle, waiting for the others to fit around it to make it whole.
The church was filling up with people, which wasn’t surprising: my father is the kind of person who knows everybody somehow. Mac McPhail, sportscaster, beer drinker, teller of tall tales and big lies, the latter being told mostly to my mother in the last few months of the marriage. I can remember sitting in front of the TV watching my father on the local news every night, seeing the sly sideways looks he and Lorna Queen exchanged during the leads into commercial breaks, and still not having any idea that he would leave my mother for this woman best known for her
short skirts and pouty-lipped way of saying ‘upper-level disturbance’. She didn’t know the half of it. There had been no disturbance before like the one that hit our house the day my father came home from the station, sat my mother down at the kitchen table right under the vent that leads to the floor beneath the counter in my bathroom and dropped the bomb that he’d fallen hard for the Weather Pet. I sat on the side of the bath, toothbrush in hand, and wished the house had been designed differently so I wouldn’t have been privy to this most painful of moments. My mother was silent for a long time, my father’s voice the only one wafting up through the floor, explaining how he couldn’t help it, didn’t want to lie any more, had to come clean, all of this with his booming sportscaster voice, so agile at curving round scores and highlights, stumbling over the simple truth that his marriage was over. My mother started crying, finally, and then told him to leave in a quiet, steady voice that made the room seem suddenly colder. Two weeks later he had moved into the Weather Pet’s condo. He met me and Ashley for lunch each Saturday and took us to the beach every other weekend, spending too much money and trying to explain everything by putting his arm round my shoulder, squeezing, and sighing aloud.
But that had been a year and a half ago, and now here it was wedding day, the first wedding I was dreading this summer. We walked into the lobby of the church and were immediately gathered up in the large arms of my aunt Ree, who was representing the bulk of my father’s side of the family, most of whom were still upset about the divorce and sided with my mother, family loyalty notwithstanding. But Aunt Ree was ample enough to represent everyone in her flowing pink muumuu, a corsage the size of a small bush pinned to her chest.
‘Haven, you come over here and give your aunt Ree some sugar.’ She squashed me against her, and I could feel the flowers poking into my skin. She’d clamped Ashley in her other arm, somehow getting her away from Lewis, and hugged us both as tightly together as if she were trying to consolidate us into one person. ‘And, Ashley, this should all seem pretty familiar to you. When’s your big day again?’