That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Thank you for your time,” she said to the dean, and led her husband into the antechamber, to collect their daughter. She put her arm around Beatrice’s shoulders, pulling her close, and, just for a moment, Beatrice allowed the contact. “Let’s go home.”

  2

  Beatrice

  Class, let’s welcome the newest member of the class, Beatrice Shoemaker.”

  Beatrice stood up, smoothed her pale-blue cardigan, and gave her new classmates the smile she’d been rehearsing—cheerful, but not goofy; friendly but not desperate. “Good morning, Beatrice,” the kids droned. Bea waved, took her seat, and looked around. Her first period, A Block (“It sounds like jail,” she’d overheard her father saying), was ninety minutes of American Literature. Followed by World History, followed by lunch. There were fourteen other kids in the class, a testament to Melville’s “commitment to small, intimate classes where your child can shine.” Beatrice recognized just one girl, Doff Cartwright, a former classmate from junior high. The other kids were strangers, and the school itself was a significant come-down from the Emlen Academy. Emlen had a campus, with a collection of gray granite and redbrick buildings crawling with ivy. It had three senators and a vice president among its alumni, not to mention novelists and journalists and researchers and nuclear physicists. Its motto, serve hoc mundo, meant “we serve the world,” and the dean and the teachers were forever talking about the students’ obligation to give back, to use their brains and skills and their talent to make the world a better place.

  Beatrice had hated it. She’d hated the bright-eyed, well-behaved students who talked endlessly about their resumes and the colleges to which they’d apply. She hated the cold New England weather, the bland dining-hall food, the way the other kids, including her roommate Celia, treated her crafting as a waste of time. She hated, too, how she’d gone from being one of the smarter kids in her grade to average. Not even average, really. Below average. One of the girls in her dorm had won an international piano competition when she was twelve, and a boy on the next floor was the son of the Senate’s minority whip. The level of ambition, the constant scrambling after achievements and prizes, the anxiety and sleeplessness that preceded every exam or paper’s due date, the way the girls’ bathrooms would reek during finals, when the girls who threw up because they were anxious joined the girls who threw up after they binged. All the kids bragged about how little sleep they’d gotten and how much coffee they’d consumed. To Beatrice, it all felt wearying and pointless. Especially because Beatrice didn’t want to run for president or conduct an orchestra or discover a cure for cancer when she grew up. What she wanted to do was crafts. Knitting and needle-felting, mostly, but she also embroidered and crocheted, none of which were skills appreciated or encouraged at Emlen.

  So now she was at this new school, which had been founded thirty years after Emlen and had barely any ivy at all. Melville had a good reputation locally, but it wasn’t a nationally known school the way that Emlen was, and she knew, from the way his lips had tightened in his face and his hands had tightened on the steering wheel when he’d dropped her off, that her father was disappointed.

  Oh, well, Beatrice thought, and tried to ignore the twinge of disappointing her dad. On her left, two boys were staring at her. As she watched, one of them whispered something to the other, and they both sniggered. Beatrice was especially proud of that day’s look: an ankle-length prairie-style dress with many ruffles and a petticoat under its skirt and a loose-fitting cardigan with pearl buttons that she’d bought for six dollars at the Thrift for AIDS shop in Queen Village on top. Her hair had been cut in a chin-length bob and she’d dyed it a silvery lavender over the weekend. She wore knee socks and her favorite canvas Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers on her feet. She dressed to please herself, and to feel comfortable, and if these boys believed that her body was an object that existed for their pleasure, she’d be happy to tell them otherwise.

  On her right, her old classmate Doff had pulled out her phone and had it half-hidden in her lap. Beatrice could see what she was looking up: PLAN B NEAR ME and PLAN B CHEAP and DOES PLAN B ON AMAZON WORK and IS PLAN B ON AMAZON REAL.

  Oh, dear. Beatrice was a virgin. She’d never had sex, let alone a pregnancy scare. The year before, her mother—she still shuddered at the memory—had come into her bedroom one night. Beatrice had just gotten through straightening things up. Her favorite books (Frankenstein and The Sandman and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, the collected works of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti) were in neat rows on her bookshelf. Her lavender-scented candle was burning, she’d made herself a cup of tea, and she was getting ready to sort through her sewing kit when her mom had knocked at her door. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

  Before Beatrice could answer, her mother came and sat down on Beatrice’s bed, in the gray fleece overalls she insisted on wearing around the house (Beatrice thought she would actually die of shame if her mom ever wore them out in public. Twice, she’d tried to sneak the overalls out of the dryer and into the trash, but, both times, her mom had rescued them. “Oh, sorry,” Bea had said innocently. “I thought they were rags”).

  “I want to talk to you about sex before you go to boarding school,” her mom had announced.

  Cringe. “Okay.”

  “Now, I know you’ve taken biology, right?” her mom began, in a strangely upbeat tone, smiling like she was trying to impersonate someone she’d seen on daytime TV. “And sex ed in sixth grade? So you know all the names of the parts, and what goes where.”

  Oh my God, Beatrice thought. Her mom had flour on her midsection and crumbs on her bosom. She’d been making brioche, and she smelled like yeast and sugar. It was like a loaf of bread had invaded her room. A loaf of bread that wanted to talk about sex.

  “And, you know, now that you’ve entered puberty…”

  Beatrice prayed for a tornado, a tsunami, a meteor to crash through the earth’s atmosphere and through her house’s roof and to somehow make her mother stop talking. She prayed for a supermoon to cause the tides to surge and sweep her house away. A hurricane would do nicely. But no meteorological event was coming to save her… and, she realized, her mother was at least as uncomfortable as she was. Which meant that maybe she could have some fun.

  “I wanted to talk to you about the emotional part of it.” Her mother made a point of looking right into her eyes. “When girls have sex, their hearts get involved, too. Whether you want that to happen or not. I think that women are just built that way.” Her mom had a faraway look on her face, like maybe she was thinking about someone she’d had sex with, once. Ew.

  “How do you know I even want to have sex with guys? Or with anyone?” Beatrice had asked, just to make trouble. First her mom had looked shocked, then she’d hurriedly smoothed out her face, which only made it look like she was trying super-hard not to look shocked. Which was exactly what Beatrice knew would happen. Her mom loved to talk about how progressive and accepting she was, how happy she was that her brother lived in a world where he could marry the man he loved. But of course, Beatrice thought smugly, it would be different if it was her own daughter.

  Her mom had cleared her throat, rubbing her hands up and down her fleece-covered legs. “Well, whoever you end up having sex with—if you have sex with anyone—that person can hurt you. I’m not going to tell you to wait for marriage, but I hope you’ll wait until you’re older, and strong enough to handle getting your heart broken.”

  “I’m strong,” Beatrice said. “You don’t have to worry about me.” Get out, she was thinking. Get out of my room and never come back.

  “But I do,” said her mom, clasping her hands earnestly. “I do worry. That’s my job.” She squared her shoulders, like she was getting ready to plow a field or raise a barn. “Do you have any questions?”

  “I do not.”

  “Anything you want to know?” Her mom made another attempt at a smile. “You can ask me anything.”

  How soon can this conversation be over was
the only thing Beatrice wanted to know. “I’m fine. Really. No questions.”

  “Oh, and I wanted to talk to you about masturbation!”

  Oh, no. Beatrice couldn’t stop herself from making a dismayed squeak, which her mother either didn’t hear or decided to ignore.

  “You probably know this already, but masturbation is perfectly natural and normal, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. And if you do it, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a virgin, or anything like that. It’s very important that you, um, know what makes you feel good before you’re intimate with someone else. Sex is about pleasure…”

  Please stop talking, Beatrice prayed.

  “… and you deserve pleasure,” her mom was saying earnestly. “Every woman does. You should be enjoying yourself just as much as the boy. Or, um, the other person.”

  “Or people,” said Beatrice, straight-faced.

  “Or people! Whatever! I just don’t want you to be in a relationship where sex is something you do for the other person. It can be the most wonderful thing in the world, and you should be exploring. By yourself, before you start with other people. Your body is a wonderland!” her mom had said, and she’d actually tried to wink. “And if you don’t know how to have an orgasm on your own, you aren’t going to be able to share that with your partners.”

  Maybe I’m dead already, thought Beatrice, with a kind of faint wonder. Maybe I’m dead and this is hell: my mom quoting John Mayer songs and talking about orgasms.

  “I got you some books…” Her mom had handed her A Girl’s Guide to Her Body and The Care and Keeping of You. “And if you have any questions, I’m here.”

  “No questions,” Beatrice said, very firmly. “Thank you for this instructive interlude.” Her mom opened her arms, and Beatrice couldn’t back away quickly enough to avoid being hugged, and then finally, finally, her mom had departed, leaving only an indentation on the comforter to show that she’d been there. Beatrice had placed the books in the very bottom of her bottom dresser drawer, underneath the sweaters she never wore, and closed the drawer and told herself she’d never look in there, or even in that direction, again.

  “Let’s open our MacBooks to a new Google Doc, please,” said Dr. Argan. “Beatrice, we usually start off on Thursdays with some free writing. Half an hour on the subject of your choice.” The other kids had already started clickety-clacking away, but her face must have looked as blank as her brain felt, because he looked at her kindly, and said, “Tell me who you are. Tell me about your hobbies. Heck, tell me what you did on your summer vacation! Just something so that I can get to know you.”

  Great. Beatrice stared at the cursor, which pulsed evilly and refused to form words on its own. She buttoned and unbuttoned the top pearl button on her cardigan and smoothed her hair behind her ears. She thought about telling the story of sixth-grade art class, how the teacher, Ms. Perkins, had shown them how to use wire and papier-mâché to make a sculpture, and how, almost the instant she’d started bending the wire in the shape of their dog Lester’s body, Beatrice had felt a magical click in her brain, the sense that this, not math or English or being a lawyer or giving cooking lessons, was what she was made for. Ms. Perkins was short, with curly hair and thin lips and pointy ears, one with seven piercings, including one through the tragus. By the end of the year, to her mom’s amusement and her father’s dismay, Beatrice had stopped wearing jeans and sneakers and began finding an aesthetic of her own, one that involved vintage Laura Ashley and Gunne Sax dresses, delicate gold rings, pearl necklaces and embroidered carpetbags and bouquets of tea roses and baby’s breath.

  Beatrice could write about art and fashion. But then she decided there was a different story she could tell.

  “Last year a woman was murdered in the house next door to mine,” she typed.

  There. She was off to a banging beginning. Now for some details. “Every summer I go to Cape Cod with my parents. My father’s father owns a house on the Outer Cape, right on the water. My dad’s brother and his wife and their kids get it for three weeks, then my mom and dad and I get it for three weeks, and for the last part of the summer we’re all together.” When she was younger, that had been her favorite part of the summer. Uncle Jeremy was like an older, grayer, more profane version of her dad. He had a bit of a beer gut (maybe because, unlike her dad, he drank beer), and a skinny, anxious, slightly bucktoothed wife. Every year when they arrived, Beatrice’s mom would hand Aunt Janie a large gin and tonic and lead her to a seat out on the deck, and Uncle Jeremy would coax her father out of his office. “C’mon, Hal. Live a little!” he’d say. Whenever her dad would try to claim that he couldn’t go fishing or to the beach or out to lunch because he had work, Uncle Jeremy would say, “Don’t be such an old woman!” in a funny, quavering voice… and it would work. Her dad would trade his button-down shirts for ancient T-shirts advertising old bands like R.E.M., and sometimes he’d even skip his daily five-mile run and go to the beach, or for bike rides with Beatrice and her cousins Oliver and Tallulah (both were nice enough, with their mother’s unfortunate overbite). Once every summer, at the end of her dad’s designated vacation week, they would charter a fishing boat for the day, and even Aunt Janie would come, after dosing herself with Dramamine and ginger candy. They’d take turns pulling in stripers and bluefish, and her mom would pack a picnic, which they’d eat while the boat was at anchor, rocking gently on the waves. There would be bonfires on the beach, and her grandfather would come for the big barbecue, where they’d invite all their friends and other visiting families, people her dad and his brother had grown up with. The party would go late into the night, with parents stashing the kids in her bedroom, with its two sets of bunk beds. Beatrice could remember being very young, waking up to find her room full of sleeping children, in the beds or curled up under blankets on the floor, hearing laughter, and music, and the splash of one of the dads cannonballing into the swimming pool.

  “Cape Cod is my favorite place in the world,” she typed, and thought about one of her favorite Emily Dickinson poems, the one about how she’s never seen a moor, and never seen the sea, “yet now I know how the heather looks, and how a wave must be.” It was a poem about faith, and not beach vacations, but the line how a wave must be had always called the Cape to mind. For years, her parents had sent her to nature camp and art camp and, finally, the sailing camp in Provincetown that her dad had attended. Beatrice had been prepared to hate it, but it turned out that she loved to sail. Once she passed her skipper’s test, she begged her father to buy her a used Sunfish—“It can be a whole year’s worth of birthday and Christmas and Chanukah presents,” she’d said. He’d agreed. Beatrice had gotten her boat the next year. That summer, she’d spent long days on the water, all alone, tacking back and forth around the bay.

  “Last summer, my dad’s family rented the house out for a week,” Beatrice typed. When Uncle Jeremy had called, her dad had put him on speaker, so Beatrice overheard her uncle’s voice, tense and eager, as he’d said, “They’ll pay us whatever we want. They need a place to put their guests, and they’re trying to rent every house on the street.”

  “Not interested,” her dad had said. “We’ve never let anyone stay there who wasn’t family, and we’re not going to start now.”

  “You have all your Emlen buddies stay there,” Uncle Jeremy argued, and her dad had said, “That’s different. I’m there with them.” Uncle Jeremy’s voice had gotten almost shrill, as he’d said, “It’s twenty thousand dollars, Hal. Maybe that doesn’t make any difference to you. But it makes a difference to me.”

  That was when her dad had spotted her. He’d frowned, walked across his office, and shut the door, but Beatrice guessed that Uncle Jeremy had talked him into it. Instead of going to the Cape for the last week of June, they’d gone to the Bahamas. Her parents had forced her to ride a bike all over the island. They’d eaten conch fritter and her mom had pointed out the pink sand at least four times a day, saying, “Isn’t it beautiful!” with a longing sigh like she
missed the beaches already, even though they were right in front of her. On the last day of their vacation, they’d been packing, getting ready to go to the airport, when Beatrice’s phone had started blowing up, with her friends texting her things like: OMG and DID YOU SEE and THAT’S YOUR HOUSE ON CNN! She’d checked the news, then hurried through the suite’s living room and into her parents’ bedroom, to find her mom sitting about six inches from the TV screen with her mouth hanging open and her dad on the phone with Uncle Jeremy, saying, “I knew this was a bad idea!”

  “The woman who died was an Instagram influencer named Drue Cavanaugh. She’d come to the Cape to get married,” Beatrice typed. “She was murdered on what would have been her wedding day.” Beatrice hadn’t known the dead woman, but she knew her grandparents, the Lathrops, an elderly couple who lived in an enormous house on the same dune as the Shoemakers. The Lathrops would call to complain if Lester ever chased a chipmunk into their yard, back in Lester’s chipmunk-chasing days, and when Beatrice and her mom saw Mr. Lathrop at the post office, or Mrs. Lathrop at Jams, they’d just get a single stiff nod. “WASPs,” her mom had said with a shrug when Beatrice had asked why they were so mean. When Beatrice was little, she’d thought that maybe the Lathrops were actual insects, hiding their wings and their stingers underneath Lilly Pulitzer dresses and Brooks Brothers shirts. Drue Cavanaugh had been their granddaughter.

  Beatrice stared at the cursor for a moment, imagining what Mrs. Hardy, one of the only teachers she’d liked back at Emlen, would have asked. Why are you telling us this story? How do you feel about it? What does it mean to you?

  “I thought about the murder all last year,” she typed. “How I probably walked on the sand, exactly where the dead woman walked. How we’d been swimming at the same beaches, and probably eaten in the same restaurants.”