“Me too. Usually I work for my father, but business dropped off some and we had a falling out.” Abe clammed up. “If I don’t want to get canned my first week, I should let you go inside.”
Betty didn’t want to go inside. She wanted to know more about his skyscrapers, his family’s business, his rift with his father.
“Maybe we can talk again soon?” Abe asked. “Real soon?”
She skipped up the steps but turned around and nodded. It was as if he’d read her mind.
Betty fell backward onto her bed and smiled at the ceiling. She couldn’t help it. Had there ever been a more beautiful ceiling? White and smooth like her favorite frosting, by lamplight it glowed a muted amber, as if cast by a thousand familiar sunsets.
There were zero sunsets to count until she could see Abe Barsky again.
Betty rolled to her stomach and rested her chin on fisted palms, kicking her legs like she was swimming a mile. Her smile stretched until her cheeks ached with the tall handsome reality of Abe Barsky. She closed her eyes and imagined his blue ones staring at her, but not as if she were watching from above, as happened with some of her daydreams, but as if she were inside herself looking at him again, at the very moment their eyes met, before either of them had glanced away. She could still smell his aftershave.
He was the one.
Not just a summer beau or a passing fancy. He was her bashert, her intended, sent by God and a summer job.
It had happened this way for her grandparents. Their families owned neighboring farms in the Fruit Belt, so they’d met in grade school. Zaide said he never looked at another girl. That’s when Nannie would always roll her eyes, but when she was sixteen—finished with school and taking in sewing to help her family—she married him.
Heck, it had happened this way for her parents too. Joe Stern met Tillie Feldman the one summer her parents came to South Haven from Chicago. They hadn’t even stayed at Stern’s, but the two met at the arcade, wrote letters for a year, and then eloped.
Maybe true love ran in her family.
Betty scrambled to her feet and grasped the bedpost with one hand, stretching out her arms. It was too late to call Georgia. She walked to her desk, opened the top middle drawer, and retrieved a piece of monogrammed stationery and her favorite pen so she could write to her Barnard roommate, an Italian girl from New Jersey named Patricia San Giacomo. Betty thought she must be worldly and exotic, and she couldn’t wait to meet her.
Someone knocked on the door and opened it. Betty laid her hands by her sides and tapped her legs. What would she write to Patricia when her thoughts were overwhelmed by Abe?
Nannie poked in her head. “Did you have a nice time tonight?” There was no accusatory hint in her voice, but she hadn’t said “with Marv,” so Betty didn’t have to lie.
“Yes, I did.”
“Good. See you in the morning, honey.” Nannie turned and pulled the door behind her.
“Wait,” Betty said. Omitting was the same as lying. And someone might have seen them. “Marv walked Eleanor home, so Abe Barsky walked me home.”
That was the truth, or it was enough of the truth.
Nannie stepped fully inside the bedroom. “It doesn’t seem like Marv to leave you when he asked you to go for a walk with him.”
“I said I didn’t mind. Eleanor had much farther to walk than I did.”
“I imagine you didn’t mind. Marv is a nice boy but Abe’s very handsome.”
“Nannie!” Betty’s cheeks grew even warmer. She contained a smile and hoped her grandmother couldn’t hear her heart pounding or see it forcing its way out of her chest. She wished she could tell Nannie how her whole body had turned hot and cold when she’d looked into Abe’s eyes—how she knew there were things they would say to each other that no one else would understand. That there was so much more to him than that handsome face, just like Nannie had always said there was so much more to her than a pretty one.
“Don’t forget you leave in September,” Nannie whispered.
“But would it be all right if . . . ?”
“If you went on a date? Yes. A date. As long as it doesn’t interfere with work or preparing for the pageant, you have my permission. We want you to have a nice summer, but it’s not the time for something serious, Betty. Don’t go getting carried away.”
“I promise.” She skittered to the door and hugged Nannie hard and fast before she changed her mind. Betty closed the door, then placed the paper and pen back into the desk drawer. She’d keep her reveries to herself a little longer.
Chapter 6
BOOP
Boop focused on the present—Doris and Georgia staring toward the lighthouse, yelps from roughhousing teens on the beach, a rumble in her stomach, Hannah resting her chin in her hand and gazing at Boop as if she was waiting for more bits of the past.
Some bits were not for sharing. “You have a lot to think about,” Boop said. “You should go home and talk to Clark.”
“I will,” Hannah said. “But not yet. I need to figure things out on my own. I’m so sorry I made you remember things you wanted left in the past.”
“I’m a tough cookie. Don’t you worry about me,” Boop said.
Hannah kissed Boop and walked inside.
“Girls?” Boop said.
Georgia and Doris turned around.
“Enough about yesterday. Tomorrow afternoon is square dancing. Get ready to do-si-do.”
“I’m not sure I have the right clothes,” Georgia said.
“Oh, you don’t need anything fancy,” Doris said. “It’ll be fun.”
Georgia rolled her eyes. “Fine.”
“You were brave to tell Hannah about the situation with Marvin,” Doris said.
“It didn’t feel brave,” Boop said. “It felt right.”
Much to her surprise, Boop loved remembering the girl she had been at eighteen. What chutzpah she’d had. What moxie. She’d known exactly what she’d wanted—and hadn’t yet known she wouldn’t get it, so she’d been light and free of constraints. It was a time when her feelings—love and lust and excitement and hope and anger—rushed through her like a snowball pushed down from the top of a hill, gaining speed and weight along the way.
Her footsteps to the bedroom were heavy but quiet, the same as her secrets.
She walked to the windows that had been manufactured to look like original double-hung paned glass to maintain the historic integrity of the house Zaide had built for his bride in 1919. The window trim had been repainted white, and after six years it still popped from the sand-colored walls, as her decorator had promised. When Boop had decided to move from Skokie and live in South Haven full-time, she’d sold her grandparents’ walnut bedroom suite and donated the money to an organization that supported teenage mothers. She’d sprung for light oak beachy and contemporary furniture with clean lines.
She potchkied around her room, ruffling curtains, smoothing the bedspread, rearranging throw pillows, jotting down a grocery list even though the cupboards were jam-packed. Boop sighed. Contentment swirled and settled in with her deep breath.
This is why I’m here.
This was not an existential statement of being, but a practical declaration of resolve. She’d been asking herself, What am I doing in South Haven, with its frigid winters and transient neighbors? Why am I living alone in an old house with a wooden staircase and enough bedrooms for a family?
Hannah needed her to be there. Not forever, but for now. Hannah needed to know some of what happened that summer as much as Boop needed to acknowledge it, even relive it. After her granddaughter was settled and assured, and the girls had gone back to their own homes and lives, Boop would move to San Diego. Until then, she had memories to cherish, circumstances to unravel, and loved ones to nurture.
This time, when Boop left South Haven, she would be traveling light.
Boop pried off a blue lid from a plastic storage box and gently lifted out the itchy wool sweaters knitted by Nannie’s mother, who’d died b
efore Boop was born. Red beads the size of grains of rice were sewn across the front of the navy sweater, and iridescent sequins had been stitched across the beige one. Nannie wore the sweaters on High Holidays, and Boop had tucked them away when she died. She lifted the navy one to her face and inhaled. It smelled like an old sweater. There was a time she’d have detected a hint of talcum powder.
Under the next sweater—a white cardigan Nannie had knitted herself—Boop found just what she was looking for: her childhood tackle box. When she was eighteen it had been the perfect hiding place. As a child, Boop had loved fishing on the Black River with her grandfather. Then she grew more interested in looking for boys than for worms. But Zaide understood and didn’t nag.
Boop walked to the taupe floral chaise—a reupholstered remainder of her grandparents’ bedroom—tucked diagonally into the corner by the window, climbed onto it, and stretched her legs in front of her, not a varicose vein in sight, though her skin was more delicate and sheer than it had once been. She set the tackle box on her lap, the weight of the past pressing on her legs.
Rust embellished the box’s edges—not because it’d been battered to look old, but because it was old. She’d seen things just like it at Eagle Street Market, where someone could buy something like it to transform into a planter or a jewelry case or set it on a windowsill as an element in a vintage lake vignette. They’d make up a story to go along with the box, no doubt, though they wouldn’t have needed to.
Thunder boomed in the distance, so Boop set aside the box, closed the windows, and watched a few cars drive down Lakeshore, away from the beach, when really it was the best time to stay. The lake became unpredictable, rampant with swells, its waves crashing onto the sand as it transformed into something different for the duration of the storm—perhaps living out its dream to be the ocean. Even in the dark, she saw rain roll in from the north. She knew the sheets of water cut through the surface of the lake like a straight-edge razor. The storm would darken the beach from beige to brown and in the morning the sand would be packed tight like brown sugar.
She cradled the tackle box in her arms like a baby, and a long-lost love danced across her heart. His name caught in her throat, as if she’d taken too big a bite of the past.
There would never be an accidental encounter, an explanation, or a second chance. He would never show up in South Haven. He would be eighty-seven or eighty-eight now. The memories were all she had, and this summer she would honor what she had ignored for so long.
The next morning, sunshine slipped through the opening in the bedroom curtains. Boop rose slowly, carefully. She shuffled to the window, pushed one panel left, the other right. She unlocked and pushed on the window sash. The breeze nudged her eyes closed again, and Boop held the sill so she wouldn’t wobble. When she opened her eyes, she saw one boat gliding way out on the lake, set amid blue water with sky to match.
Two kites dotted the sky to the south, way beyond the lighthouse. Boop smiled, pleased she could still see so far down the beach, and as far as the horizon.
Hannah jogged up the street and disappeared from view when she ascended the porch. A few moments later the front door slammed. What she was thinking as she ran, jostling the baby, Boop didn’t know.
Dressed in red twill capris and a light-blue embroidered blouse she’d have favored in the seventies, Boop went downstairs and stood at the threshold of her kitchen. “What’s going on in here?”
Doris swiveled around, showing off her flour-dusted, once-peacock-blue shirt, which was speckled with lemon zest. “Is that a rhetorical question?”
“Come, sit with me, have coffee,” Georgia said. “I’m checking the blueberries for stems.”
Hannah flipped on the hand mixer. “We’re making your Nannie’s blueberry lemon cake,” she yelled over the whir. “Did we wake you?”
Boop chose a mug and poured a cup of coffee. “No, I had to get up to eat cake.”
Hannah tipped back her head and laughed.
Boop sat at the kitchen table with Georgia. “When did you plan this little baking party?”
“No plan,” Doris said. “I woke up earlier and heard . . .” She glanced at Hannah.
“She heard me throwing up,” Hannah said.
Oh.
“And then fifteen minutes later she was digging through the kitchen cabinets looking for something sweet,” Doris said. “So here we are.”
“By then, I was awake,” Georgia said.
Georgia picked stems and tossed blueberries from one bowl to the next. “Why don’t you look happier? Whatever else happens or doesn’t, there’s going to be a baby!”
Boop’s own unplanned and outside-of-wedlock pregnancy was a shanda; her grandparents had been so ashamed. It was something to be hidden. She was to be hidden. For Hannah it was coffee klatch fodder.
“Hannah, come sit,” Georgia said.
Hannah shut off the mixer, balanced the blades on the side of the bowl, and sat at the table.
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s no right or wrong,” Georgia said. “Get married now, later, or never. It has to be right for you.”
“Wasn’t it ever right for you?” Hannah asked.
If Georgia answered, this would officially be the summer that nothing was off-limits.
“All I wanted to be was a doctor. Not a wife, not a mother.”
“I don’t think you ever allowed yourself to want those things,” Doris said.
“Perhaps. But I wanted to be a doctor because I had a sister who died when she was three days old. I never met her. She would have been the oldest, so twelve years older than me. My whole life I just wanted to keep babies healthy.”
Boop held Georgia’s hand. How Georgia had wished there had been a gravesite to visit nearby for Imogen, but her parents had moved to South Haven from Detroit. By the time they had moved away, Imogen might have been married with babies of her own.
One winter around Imogen’s birthday, Boop and Georgia had collected frozen sprigs of fallen pine, tied them with a pink ribbon, and set the bundle on the river, where they saw it resting on the ice until the spring thaw.
“I didn’t get married until I was twenty-two,” Doris said. “My parents thought I was going to be an old maid. I do think good things come to those who wait.”
“You’re old but you’re not an old maid,” Georgia said to Doris.
Hannah chuckled.
“It wasn’t funny back then,” Boop said.
“Do you have regrets?” Hannah asked. “Any of you?”
“No,” Doris said. “I mean, I regret that my husbands died and that two of my marriages failed. So, I guess that’s my answer. But I don’t think of them being regrets as much as being sad reasons for brand-new opportunities.”
“My regret might be not being closer to my nieces and nephews. I spent so many years taking care of children that when it came to my family I only got involved if someone was sick,” Georgia said.
“You were always good to me and Emma,” Hannah said.
“My sometimes granddaughters.” Georgia leaned over and hugged Hannah.
“What about you, Boop?” Hannah asked.
Boop hesitated, but if she meant to finally be honest this summer—with Hannah and herself . . . “I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to go to college and push myself. To be someone in addition to a wife and mother.” Or other than. “But I’m not sorry I married your grandfather if that’s what you’re asking. I wouldn’t have your dad or you or Emma.”
“What do you think you would have become?”
“Your grandmother wanted to be a fashion editor,” Georgia said.
“At a big fancy magazine,” Doris said. “In New York.”
Hannah grinned. “Your grandparents didn’t want you to take over the resort?”
“They never pressured me. Not when it came to my education. Zaide thought he’d run the resort forever. Never talked about retiring. They didn’t count on the whole industry and all the resorts failing in the late sixti
es.”
“What happened?”
“Highways, affordable airfares, summer camps, working mothers.”
“So it would have worked out for you to stay in New York. Magazines didn’t start to tank until the 2000s.”
“Who knows what would’ve happened to me?” Would she have been encouraged or discouraged, redirected? Would she have been able to compete with the other girls? Boop still believed she would have liked New York, and that a future built on her abilities, intellect, and passion would have differed from the one she built on the top of a Magic Chef.
Hannah poured the blueberries into the batter, and the batter into a cake pan. She placed it in the oven and set the timer.
Georgia patted the chair next to her. “Marriage is a big decision, and if all this is a surprise . . .”
“It might be a surprise but maybe this baby is what you need,” Doris said.
Georgia shushed Doris. “Hannah, would you want to marry Clark if you weren’t having a baby?”
Boop should have been the one to ask, but she couldn’t. Even hearing Georgia say it singed her heart.
Hannah slouched. “Probably not now. But maybe eventually. We weren’t talking about kids yet. We both wanted them—but later.”
“No time like the present,” Doris said. “Take it as a sign.”
“Please don’t tell her to take one of the biggest decisions of her life as a sign,” Boop said. “This should be a deliberate and joint decision. You know what? That’s what’s wrong here.”
“What?” Hannah asked.
“This isn’t about a fairy tale, or what happened to me. It’s about you and Clark. No matter what you decide, the baby will be fine. But you have to be happy—really, really happy, Hannah. And frankly, so does Clark.”
“What should I do if I’m really not sure?”
“You should go home and talk it out with Clark.”
“But not until after we eat,” Doris said as the oven timer dinged, and the four women pushed back their kitchen chairs and stood.
Hannah removed the cake from the oven and set it on a wire rack to cool. Boop didn’t bake much—her harmless resistance to one vestige of housewifery—but thanks to Nannie she had all the correct equipment. Doris found the cake knife. Georgia gathered plates and forks and napkins. Boop whisked lemon juice into powdered sugar until it transformed into a shiny glaze.
The Last Bathing Beauty Page 8