“How was your drink?” he asks Beth.
“Okay.”
“You want another?”
“No, thanks,” says Beth, thinking that she’s had quite enough of his Hot Passion.
“You didn’t like it?”
“I did, I just want to try something different now.”
“How about a glass of wine? You’d like the—”
“I can decide what I want without your help.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll have an espresso martini.”
“You sure?” asks Jimmy.
“Really sure.”
He shrugs his shoulders, acquiescing. He grabs two bottles and inverts them over a stainless-steel martini shaker. “How are the girls?”
“Good.”
“How was Jessica’s game?”
“It was long. They lost.”
“And Soph?”
“She’s upset about a math test, thinks she failed it, but I’m sure she did fine.”
“How’s Gracie?”
“Good.” She misses you. They all do.
“Good.”
“Don’t you want to know how Beth is?” asks Petra.
“Of course. How are you, Beth?”
“Good.”
“You look good.”
“Thanks.”
“I like your necklace.”
She places her hand over her locket. Her face flushes hot. She almost forgot she was wearing it. Before she can respond, Angela is behind the bar again, this time showing Jimmy something on her phone, capturing his interest. She laughs and touches his forearm. Angela’s hand on Jimmy’s arm. Beth could stomach the laughing and the smiling and the flirting and the boobs, but something about that small touch, the intimacy of it, undoes her.
“You okay?” Jill asks Beth in her ear. “You look a little pale.”
Beth nods as she clenches her teeth and swallows. She can’t speak. If she talks right now, she’ll cry. Whatever goal she had for tonight, the goal now is to get out of here without crying in front of Jimmy and Angela.
“You probably just need to eat.”
Beth nods again, rubbing her silver locket between her fingers, disgusted with the foolish girl who put it on a few hours ago.
Jimmy serves Beth her espresso martini and then all three women their dinners. Petra ordered the grouper; Jill, on a sushi kick ever since that April book club, got the spicy tuna roll; and Beth got a burger with fries. Truffle-oil fries.
“How is everything?” asks Jimmy after a few minutes.
“Good,” says Petra. “The food is really good, Jimmy. Who’s your head chef?”
While Petra and Jimmy discuss the restaurant business, and Jill is texting her boys, Beth stays focused on eating and drinking. After finishing her second martini, she notices that she doesn’t feel like crying anymore. She mostly feels numb now, as if a thick layer of fuzzy static is wrapped around her like a cocoon, impenetrable, more effective than a beard or a black sweater.
She’s on her third drink, another espresso martini, when she hears someone yelling her name from behind her. She turns around. It’s Georgia, waving and weaving her way through the crowd, knocking into bodies and glasses and splashing drinks as she pushes toward the bar, leaving a sea of hostile faces in her wake.
“I’m so glad you’re still here!” she says, out of breath. “How’s it going? Where’s the Salt mistress?”
Beth, Petra, and Jill look at each other and then at Jimmy, who definitely heard that. Petra laughs.
“You mean hostess?” Petra asks.
Georgia laughs. “Whoops, yes! And I haven’t had anything to drink yet. Where is she?”
“You didn’t see her on the way in?” asks Petra.
“No, where?”
“Behind you. By the door.”
“Where?”
“The dark, curly hair.”
Georgia stands on her toes and squints her whole face.
“The one in the black shirt,” says Petra.
Georgia shakes her head, still searching.
“The one with the boobs.”
“Ah, got her!” says Georgia. “Bimbo. I never pegged Jimmy for a boob guy.”
Beth presses her hand over her own insulted boobs. It’s true that Beth’s are unremarkable, and Jimmy is more of a leg guy. Beth has great legs, long and toned. She’s always walking, at the beaches, at Bartlett’s Farm, all over New York City before she moved here.
It occurs to her that she’s never heard of a man referred to as an eyes guy or a brains guy or a personality guy. She downs the rest of her martini. Guys suck. Maybe this is a blessing. Maybe she’s better off without Jimmy. No man in the house. Her home will stay clean and organized, and it will smell pretty. And no more fighting. It’s been peaceful since he left. Somewhere in her brain, Marilyn McCoo is singing “One Less Bell to Answer,” a song her mother used to like when Beth was a young girl and that Beth hasn’t heard or consciously thought of since.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with yours,” says Georgia.
“Just wait until she has babies,” says Jill. “Hers will be hanging like the rest of ours.”
The fuzzy numbness of Beth’s martini armor must have a chink in it because that comment punched right through and knocked the wind out of her. What if Angela gets pregnant? Beth thinks about how easily she conceived. Each and every time they pulled the goalie, it was one shot—score! She feels dizzy. The edges of her vision turn dim and blurry. She’s got to get out of here.
“Hello, Georgia,” says Jimmy.
“I’m not happy with you,” says Georgia.
“I know.”
“But I’ll forgive you if Beth does.”
“That’s fair,” he says, looking to Beth for input like he’s looking for an opening in a window, even the slightest crack.
“Beth, you’re looking pale again,” says Jill.
Jill is sitting right next to Beth, but her voice sounds as if it’s coming from way off in the distance somewhere.
“Beth, you okay?” asks Petra.
“I don’t feel well,” says Beth with more air than sound.
“I’ll take her home,” says Petra.
“I’ll stay and have a drink with Georgia,” says Jill.
Petra pays her and Beth’s part of the bill, and Georgia hugs Beth as she gets up.
“She’s a bimbo,” says Georgia.
“Thanks.”
“And you’re a queen.”
Beth smiles.
“And I love your dress.”
“Thanks.”
Jill gets up and hugs Beth.
“You did great. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Beth nods. She looks up at Jimmy before she turns to leave.
“Good night, Beth,” says Jimmy.
“G’night, Jimmy.”
Petra takes her by the hand, and they worm their way through the crowd, leaving Salt. Leaving Jimmy. Leaving him there with Angela. Leaving him feels so wrong. Somewhere beneath the static fuzz and above the Marilyn McCoo song still playing in her head, a voice is screaming, Don’t leave him! Don’t leave! But it’s late, and she’s had enough to eat and more than enough to drink, and she’s had enough of seeing Angela’s boobs and Jimmy’s smile, so there’s nothing left to do but leave.
“Have a good night,” says Angela’s voice from somewhere behind her.
It sounds as if Angela’s smiling, maybe even gloating, but Beth doesn’t know. She’s already out the door, and she doesn’t look back.
PETRA PULLS INTO Beth’s driveway. The house is dark. The girls forgot to flick on the porch light. At least they went to bed.
“You okay?” asks Petra.
“Yeah.”
“You’re too quiet.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to hold it together in front of me.”
“I’m not holding anything. I’m fine,” Beth says, having some difficulty enunciating holding anything. “I’m a little drunk,
but I’m fine. I’m drunk and fine.”
“You guys really need to talk soon and figure out what you’re doing.”
“I know.”
“Drink some water and go to bed.”
“I will.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Beth follows the beams of Petra’s headlights to the front door. It must be a cloudy night because Beth can’t see the moon or any stars in the sky. Outside of Petra’s headlights, the whole world is pure darkness. The air is cool and smells of salt and fish and forsythia. Spring peepers shriek in a loud and noxious chorus all around her, sounding not unlike the techno music from Salt still ringing in her ears. She hears Petra pull away as she opens the front door and turns on the hall light.
She walks upstairs and opens the door to each of the girls’ rooms, checking on them, asleep in their beds. Sweet, beautiful girls. She shuts off Sophie’s computer and tosses her dirty clothes into her hamper; she hangs Jessica’s wet towel on a hook in the bathroom; and she pulls the covers up over Gracie. She walks downstairs and into the kitchen and pours herself a tall glass of water.
Back upstairs, she pauses in the hallway and stares at the pictures on the wall. She looks at Jimmy touching her skirt, and she relives Angela touching his arm, and an anger colored with humiliation rises up inside her, swelling. In another picture, she’s wearing the locket he gave her, the one she’s wearing now that he noticed on her tonight.
She can’t take it. She can’t take one more walk down this hallway, looking at his smiling teeth, his hand on her, the locket around her neck, the lie of their perfect marriage, his deception mocking her every time she walks from the living room to her bedroom, from her bedroom to the bathroom. She’s had enough of this. Enough.
She starts with her wedding picture. She loosens the latch, removes the back plate and the cardboard filler, yanks out the photo, and returns the empty frame to the wall. She does this methodically, breathing hard, with each picture until she has them all in a nice, neat stack.
Sitting on the floor in the hallway, she flips through them. She gets to the most recent one, the one from last summer, and studies it. Some reasonable part of her not affected by the vodka and rum and humiliated anger urges her to put the pictures in a drawer, that she’ll regret what she’s about to do. But she’s too furious and drunk and hopped up on caffeine to hear reason, and she’s tired of feeling like a passive doormat.
The first tear is slow, hesitant, and then deliberate, straight through Jimmy’s smiling face. Then the rips come fast, one after another, after another. There’s no stopping now. She tears and tears until the shreds are too small to rip any further, and now she’s sobbing, hating him for making her do this. She hears one of the girls sneeze. She stops crying and listens, afraid of waking them. She can still hear the techno music from Salt buzzing in her ears, the spring peepers shrieking outside, and she can feel-hear her heart thumping in her chest and pulsing in her fingers, but the girls are quiet. She wipes her eyes and exhales.
She collects the heaps of torn paper, shreds of what was her happy family, and throws them into the wastebasket in her bedroom. She then returns to the hallway and looks at the wall, to witness what she’s done. There. Eight framed, matted pieces of cardboard. He’s gone. There’s no undoing it now. Like his infidelity. This is what is real.
She adjusts two of the frames so that they’re level, flicks off the hall light, and returns to her bedroom. She strips out of her Goldie Hawn dress and slides into her pink, flannel pajamas. She crawls into bed, forgetting the locket still around her neck, facing the side where Jimmy used to sleep with her, her feet restless and her eyes wide-open.
Awake all night.
CHAPTER 10
Everything changed in June, and Olivia, naïve to this time of year on this tiny island, never saw it coming. It started with Memorial Day weekend, when the cocooned and quiet simplicity of her daily life became bombarded on all sides by the rapid and sure-footed influx of invaders. The summer people. It took her a couple of weeks not to feel like she needed to hide inside her home, not to feel threatened or violated by their presence, to regain her composure and reestablish a routine. But after a couple of weeks, she finally exhaled, thinking, There, this isn’t so bad.
And then came July. June did so little to prepare her for July. June is a gently sloping hill in the Berkshires, and July is Mount Everest. The roads are now crammed with mopeds and Jeeps and monstrous SUVs, engine exhausts and radios spewing their pollution into the sweet summer air. The previously desolate, private-feeling beaches are now cluttered with families and their chairs and umbrellas and boogie boards and their picnic garbage and constant conversation, and every rental house is full, every bedroom and driveway, the occupants celebrating their week’s vacation with outdoor parties and cook-outs night after night.
These are the real summer people, and they came by the tens of thousands, quintupling the island’s population. They came by air, and they came by sea, and they came with their kids and their dogs and their nannies and their assistants and their personal chefs and their houseguests. And everyone (except the dogs) brought a cell phone. Olivia imagines the geological shelf that Nantucket sits on, fragile and precarious, and worries that it might actually crumble under the weight of all the tourists and their stuff, causing the island to sink to the bottom of the ocean. A modern Atlantis.
Even the sky is crowded. Commuter planes and private jets from Boston and New York roar overhead every few minutes. All day long.
If she adjusted in June, she’s merely coping in July. She feels a kinship with the other locals, easily identified and distinct from the summer people, like picking out wild horses from circus zebras, even though she knows that the feeling is one-sided. Although she’s earned some level of respect for having lived here through part of the winter and an entire spring, she hasn’t lived “on island” a full year yet. She’s not a real member of the herd. She hasn’t put in enough time. But even after a full year—in truth, even after fifty years—she’ll always be viewed as a wash-ashore, a transplant, never a true local, and absolutely never a native (a person has to be born here to own that title).
She’s made some adjustments already that have become her summer laws for living:
Never go to the beach between the hours of ten and three. That’s when they all go.
Avoid Town at all costs. If you must go, do not drive downtown at lunchtime or anytime after 6:00 p.m. There will be no parking anywhere.
Never go to Stop & Shop anytime Friday through Sunday.
Allow an extra thirty minutes for everything.
She’s written these rules out on a piece of paper and taped it to the wall by her front door, a cute but serious reminder in case she should grow forgetful or cocky. Which is why she’s cursing herself right now, as she stands at the edge of the pasta aisle in front of Newman’s Own marinara sauce near the end of a discouragingly long checkout line in Stop & Shop on a Saturday afternoon.
She needed more coffee and eggs and thought it would be nice to have a salad for dinner without thinking about the calendar or her summer laws. She didn’t realize what day it was until she pulled into the crowded parking lot and knew immediately. She hesitated, thinking she should forget about the salad and go home, but then the woman in the Land Rover behind her honked, urging Olivia to move along, and so she did, thinking, How bad can it be?
That was over an hour ago. She counts the items in her basket. Fourteen. If she reshelves the loaf of bread and the toilet paper (she can get by on what she has until Monday), then she can move over to the express line, but that line is even longer and appears to carry more hostility in its ranks.
“This is taking forever,” mutters the woman in line behind Olivia. “I’m definitely going to be late.”
Olivia’s grateful that she’s at least not in a hurry. She has no beach-portrait session tonight. The family she had scheduled for this evening canceled this morning.
Becoming a professional beach-portrait photographer ended up being far easier than she imagined it would be. First, she did some research by calling around to the other portrait photographers on the island, inquiring about their rates. Then she did the math and figured out that if she could do four sessions a week from June to Labor Day, she’d make enough money to live the whole year. More than enough.
But then she had the problem of how to get any customers, never mind four a week, to hire her, an unknown with no professional training or experience, just a good eye and a natural facility with a camera. To address this rather big problem, she did two small things. First, she printed flyers and posted them all over town—the Visitors Center, Young’s Bicycle Shop, The Bean, the library, the Chamber of Commerce, the Hy-Line and Steamship Authority docks, even here at Stop & Shop. And second, she made sure to set her price at $200 cheaper than the “cheapest” going rate.
The calls and e-mails started coming in, and she’s booked more sessions than she thought possible, four to six times a week, often twice in the same evening. She’s already scheduled one family for Labor Day weekend. The prints are all ordered online through a separate company, so all she has to do is shoot with her digital camera, edit with Photoshop on her computer, and upload the images to the ordering website. Payment is online, by credit card. There are no paper invoices to send, no waiting to receive checks in the mail. She has no overhead other than Internet service. It’s clean and simple.
The women in front of her have calmly been chatting the whole time, seemingly unfazed by the long lines and the increasingly impatient mood surrounding them. One, the natural-looking blonde, is wearing a black cotton tank with no logo, no embellishments, a plain white cotton skirt, and flip-flops, and the other is wearing yoga clothes. No flashy jewelry, no designer labels, their fingernails aren’t manicured, and their purses look like they cost less than $50. Locals.
“Is it weird that I don’t want to hire Roger?”
“No, of course not.”
“He’s done all the others and has always done a great job. I don’t know, I feel like I’m being disloyal, but it’d just be too weird showing up without Jimmy.”