No writer captures the seasons of our lives better than Judy Blume. Now, from the internationally bestselling author of Wifey and Smart Women, comes an extraordinary novel of reminiscence and awakening—an unforgettable story of two women, two families, and the friendships that shape a lifetime.
SUMMER SISTERS
“An entertaining adult fairy tale … with engaging characters, an intriguing plot and plenty of sex.”
—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“She catches perfectly the well-armored love between longtime female friends. Blume’s characters still tend to hover after the book is set aside, proving that this talented realist continues to do what she does best.”
—The Seattle Times
“You don’t have to be a Blume fan to enjoy Summer Sisters, but if you are, you’ll remember why you loved her books as a child and read them again and again.”
—San Antonio Express-News
“Summer Sisters is a fictional fountain of youth sure to make the reader young all over again.”
—Newsday
“Blume tells a good story, creates memorable characters … and demonstrates an ear for up-to-the-minute vernacular…. Many readers of Summer Sisters who traveled with Blume in their youth will welcome this new opportunity to visit with a writer who now spins provocative tales for them and other grown-ups to read.”
—The Tampa Tribune
“A relentlessly readable book … The strength of this novel is its vivid portrait of teens in the 1980s. Interspersed viewpoints of various characters add interest and depth.”
—Library Journal
“Summer Sisters is not for kids. It is Blume’s third book for adults, coming 10 years after Smart Women and Wifey, both of which were best-sellers…. [And] it’s pretty darn good.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Engaging … sympathetic characters and realistic situations.”
—The Oakland Tribune
“A healthy mix of drama and wry humor … An effortless, enjoyable read … [Judy Blume] is a woman for all seasons.”
—BookPage
“A book for all readers … an adult book with universal appeal.”
—Seventeen
“Blume keeps her story moving … her portrait of an unlikely yet enduring friendship as it changes over time will remind readers why they read Blume’s books when they were young: she finds a provocative theme and spins an involving story.”
—Publishers Weekly
JUDY BLUME’S BOOKS
For Adult Readers
Wifey
Smart Women
Summer Sisters
For Young Adults
Tiger Eyes
Forever …
Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You
Places I Never Meant To Be (Editor)
For Younger Readers, the “Fudge” books
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
Superfudge
Fudge-a-mania
Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great
Double Fudge
For Middle Grade Readers
Iggie’s House
Blubber
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t
It’s Not the End of the World
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself
Deenie
Just As Long As We’re Together
Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson
Picture Books
The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo
The Pain and the Great One
Freckle Juice
To Mary Weaver
my “summer sister”
WITH MANY THANKS to Randy Blume, Larry Blume, Amanda Cooper, and their friends for talking with me about music and memories during long, leisurely Vineyard dinners on the porch. Special thanks to Kate Schaum, dedicated early reader, and to Gloria DeAngelis, Kaethe Fine, and Robin Standefer. Also, to my Harvard connections, Nicky Weinstock, Ted Rose, and Seng Dao Yang (my unofficial guide to Weld South).
Contents
Prologue
Summer 1990
Part One
Dancing Queen
1977–1980
Part Two
Rapture
1982–1983
Part Three
We Are the World
1983–1987
Part Four
Didn’t We Almost Have It All
1987–1990
Part Five
Steal the Night
1990–1995
Epilogue
Summer 1996
Reader’s Guide
Prologue
Summer 1990
THE CITY IS BROILING in an early summer heat wave and for the third day in a row Victoria buys a salad from the Korean market around the corner and has lunch at her desk. Her roommate, Maia, tells her she’s risking her life eating from a salad bar. If the bacteria don’t get you, the preservatives will. Victoria considers this as she chomps on a carrot and scribbles notes to herself on an upcoming meeting with a client who’s looking for a PR firm with an edge. Everyone wants edge these days. You tell them it’s edgy, they love it.
When the phone rings she grabs it, expecting a call from the segment producer at Regis and Kathie Lee. “This is Victoria Leonard,” she says, sounding solid and professional.
“Vix?”
She’s surprised to hear Caitlin’s voice on the other end and worries for a minute it’s bad news, because Caitlin calls only at night, usually late, often waking her from a deep sleep. Besides, it’s been a couple of months since they’ve talked at all.
“You have to come up,” Caitlin says. She’s using her breathy princess voice, the one she’s picked up in Eu rope, halfway between Jackie O’s and Princess Di’s. “I’m getting married at Lamb’s house on the Vineyard.”
“Married?”
“Yes. And you have to be my Maid of Honor. It’s only appropriate, don’t you think?”
“I guess that depends on who you’re marrying.”
“Bru,” Caitlin answers, and suddenly she sounds like herself again. “I’m marrying Bru. I thought you knew.”
Victoria forces herself to swallow, to breathe, but she feels clammy and weak anyway. She grabs the cold can of diet Coke from the corner of her desk and holds it against her forehead, then moves it to her neck, as she jots down the date and time of the wedding. She doodles all around it while Caitlin chats, until the whole page is filled with arrows, crescent moons, and triangles, as if she’s back in sixth grade.
“Vix?” Caitlin says. “Are you still there? Do we have a bad connection or what?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“So you’ll come?”
“Yes.” The second she hangs up she makes a mad dash for the women’s room where she pukes her guts out in the stall. She has to call Caitlin back, tell her there’s no way she can do this. What can Caitlin be thinking? What was she thinking when she agreed?
Four weeks later Caitlin, her hair flying in the wind, meets Victoria at the tiny Vineyard airport. Victoria is the last one to step out of the commuter from LaGuardia. She’d spotted Caitlin from her window as soon as they’d landed but felt glued to her seat. It’s been more than two years since they’ve seen each other, and three since Victoria graduated from college and got caught up in real life—a job, with just two weeks vacation a year. No money to fly around. Bummer, as Lamb would say when they were kids.
“Going on to Nantucket with us?” the flight attendant asks and suddenly Victoria realizes she’s the only passenger still on the plane. Embarrassed, she grabs her bag and hustles down the steps onto the tarmac. Caitlin finds her in the crowd and waves frantically. Victoria heads toward her,
shaking her head because Caitlin is wearing a T-shirt that says simplify, simplify, simplify. She’s barefoot as usual and Victoria is betting her feet will be as dirty as they were that first summer.
Caitlin holds her at arm’s length for a minute. “God, Vix …” she says, “you look so … grownup!” They both laugh, then Caitlin hugs her. She smells of seawater, suntan lotion, and something else. Victoria closes her eyes, breathing in the familiar scent, and for a moment it’s as if they’ve never been apart. They’re still Vixen and Cassandra, summer sisters forever. The rest is a mistake, a crazy joke.
PART ONE
Dancing Queen
1977–1980
1
Summer 1977
VICTORIA’S WORLD SHOOK for the first time on the day Caitlin Somers sashayed up to her desk, plunked herself down on the edge, and said, “Vix …” It came out sounding like the name of a beautiful flower, velvety and smooth, not like a decongestant. Caitlin had transferred to Acequia Madre Elementary School just after Christmas, having moved to Santa Fe from Aspen over the holidays. Everyone in Vix’s sixth-grade class fell instantly in love with her. And it wasn’t just the way she looked, with her pale, wavy hair, her satin skin and deep-set, almost navy blue eyes. She was scrappy, fearless, and had a smart mouth. She was the first to say fuck in class and get away with it. No teacher, no adult, would have believed the words that rolled so easily off Caitlin’s pretty pink tongue. And then there was that smile, that laugh.
Vix was too shy, too quiet to even speak her name. She sat back and worshiped from afar as the others fought over who would get to be her partner, who would share desks with her. So she thought she’d heard wrong when Caitlin asked, “Want to come away with me this summer?”
Vix was wearing worn bell-bottoms and a juice-stained purple T-shirt, her dark hair pulled back into a sloppy ponytail. She had a pencil smudge on her left cheek. As Caitlin spoke Vix could swear she heard Abba playing in the background. “Dancing Queen” … She missed most of what Caitlin said except it had to do with some island in the middle of the ocean. The ocean, for God’s sake, which she had never seen. She was unable to answer, sure this was a trick, a joke. She expected the rest of the class to start laughing, even though the last bell had just rung and the other kids were rushing past them toward the door.
“Vix …” Caitlin tilted her head to one side and the corners of her mouth turned up. “My dad gets me for the whole summer. July first until Labor Day.”
The whole summer. The whole goddamned summer! The music swelled. You’re a teaser, you turn ’em on, Leave them burning and then you’re gone … “I’ve never even seen the ocean.” She could not believe how stupid she sounded, as if she had no control over the words that were coming out of her mouth.
“But how is it possible in this day and age that you’ve never seen the ocean?” Caitlin asked. She was genuinely interested, genuinely surprised that a person could have lived almost twelve years without ever having seen it.
All Vix could do was shrug and then smile. She wondered if Caitlin heard the music, too, if music followed her wherever she went. From then on whenever Vix heard “Dancing Queen” she was back in sixth grade on a sunny afternoon in June. The afternoon some fairy godmother waved her magic wand over Vix’s head and changed her life forever.
At home, Vix asked her mother, “How is it possible, in this day and age, that I’ve never seen the ocean?”
Her mother, who was bathing her youngest brother, Nathan, looked at her as if she were nuts. Nathan had muscular dystrophy. His body was small and misshapen. They had a contraption that allowed him to sit in the bathtub but he couldn’t be left alone. He was seven, sassy and smart, a lot brighter than her other brother Lewis, who was nine, or her sister, Lanie, who was ten.
“What kind of question is that?” her mother said. “We live in New Mexico. Hundreds of miles from one ocean and thousands from the other.”
“I know, but so do plenty of other people and they’ve been to the ocean.” She knew damn well why they’d never been to either coast. Still, she sat on the closed toilet seat, arms folded defiantly across her chest, as she watched Nathan sailing his boats around in the tub, stirring up waves with his arms.
“This is my ocean,” he said. His speech was garbled, making it difficult for some people to understand him, but not Vix.
“Besides, you’ve been to Tulsa,” her mother said, as if that had anything to do with what they were talking about.
Yes, she’d been to Tulsa, but only once, when her grandmother, a grandmother she’d never known she had until then, lay dying. “Open your eyes, Darlene,” her mother had said to the stranger in the hospital bed. “Open your eyes and have a look at your grandchildren.” The three of them were lined up in front of their mother, while Nathan slept in his stroller. This grandmother person looked Vix, Lewis, and Lanie up and down without moving her head. Then she said, “Well, Tawny, I can see you’ve been busy.” And that was it.
Tawny didn’t cry when Darlene died the next day. Vix got to help her clean out Darlene’s trailer, the trailer where Tawny had grown up. Tawny took some old photos, an unopened bottle of Scotch, and a couple of Indian baskets she thought could be worth something. It turned out they weren’t.
She couldn’t sit still. She’d never wanted anything so badly in her life. And she was determined. One way or another she was going away with Caitlin Somers.
“Stop squirming,” Tawny said, tossing Vix a towel. “Get Nathan dried and ready for supper. I’ve got to help Lewis with his homework.”
“So, can I go?” Vix called as Tawny left the bathroom and headed down the hall.
“Your father and I will discuss it, Victoria,” Tawny called back, letting her know it wasn’t a done deal.
Tawny never called her Vix like everyone else. If I’d wanted to name my daughter after a cold remedy, I would have. You’d have thought a person named Tawny would have been more flexible.
She’d been to Caitlin’s house, an old walled-in place on the Camino, just once, in March, when Caitlin had invited the whole class to her twelfth birthday party. They’d had live music and a pizza wagon with a dozen different toppings. Caitlin’s mother, Phoebe, dressed in faux Indian clothes—long skirt, western boots, ropes of turquoise around her neck. Her hair hung down her back in one glossy braid. Some of Phoebe’s friends were there, too, including her boyfriend of the moment, a guy with long, silvery hair, a concha belt, and hand-tooled leather boots. Vix had never been to a party like that, in a house like that, with grownups like that.
She’d brought Caitlin a blank book for her birthday, covered in blue denim, with a silver chain as a page marker. She only hoped it was worthy of Caitlin’s thoughts and feelings. She dreamed about touching her hair, her sun-kissed skin.
She wrote her parents a letter, making a case for letting her go, not the least being Caitlin’s promise that it wouldn’t cost them a penny.
But Tawny didn’t buy it. She claimed Caitlin came from an unstable family. “Just one look at that mother …”
“But we won’t be with her mother,” Vix countered, “we’ll be with her father and he’s very stable.”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody knows. He’s going to call you. You can ask him yourself.”
In the end, it was her father who convinced Tawny to let her go. Her father, a man who looked surprised when he opened their front door to find he had four noisy children inside. A man of so few words he could spend a whole weekend without speaking, but if he did, his voice dropped way low on the last part of every sentence and someone was always asking, What? What’d you say, Dad? But he was never unkind.
She imagined jumping into his arms, hugging him as hard as she could to show how thankful she was, but that would have embarrassed both of them so she said, “Thanks, Dad.” And he mumbled something, something she didn’t get, while he rested his hand on top of her head.
Until then the highlight of her childhood had been the
weekend her father installed a molded laminate shower in the half-bath in her parents’ room. When it was hooked up and working Vix, Lewis, and Lanie all begged to be first to try it out. Her father looked right at her and said, “We’ll do it in age order. Vix gets to go first.”
How proud she was that day! How grateful to her father for recognizing her as having a special place in the family. First daughter. Eldest child. A yellow shower with its own glass door. She’d wanted to stand under the warm water forever. Only later did she realize how crowded their house was, with small, high, north-facing windows, making it dark and cold year-round, even in relentlessly sunny Santa Fe.
She knew next to nothing about her parents’ early lives. Whenever Vix asked her mother a personal question Tawny answered, “We don’t wash our linen in public.”
“I’m not public,” Vix argued. “I’m family. I’m your daughter.”
“You know enough,” Tawny told her. “You know what’s important. Besides, curiosity killed the cat.” But satisfaction brought her back again, Vix thought, not that she’d dare say it out loud. If she did, Tawny would shout, That’s enough, Victoria! So she quit asking questions. What was the point?
Sometimes she tried to imagine Tawny on the day she graduated from high school, boarding the first bus out of Tulsa and traveling as far as her money would take her, all the way to Albuquerque, where, thanks to her typing and shorthand skills, which Tawny reminded them of regularly, she found a job working for a young lawyer. Seven years later she was still working for him. By then she was engaged to Ed Leonard, a Sioux City boy, polite and nice-enough looking, whom she’d met at a dance at Kirtland Air Force Base.
They were married by a justice of the peace when Ed got out of the service. The young lawyer, who wasn’t that young anymore, threw a party for them in his backyard. Tawny didn’t invite Darlene. Didn’t even tell Ed her mother was living.