That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Of course not,” Diana said, even as Daisy wondered if it was true, if she’d have snatched up any guy with Hal’s education and prospects. It wasn’t something she enjoyed thinking about.

  “I love my husband.”

  Diana nodded, and looked across the table, watchful and waiting.

  “It was just…” Daisy’s boots were squeezing her toes. She shifted in her seat, discreetly easing her right foot partially free. “It was pretty grim, after my dad died. I think if I hadn’t gotten married, I would have felt obligated to live with my mother.” Daisy suppressed a shudder, remembering, in spite of herself, the dark apartment that always seemed to smell like cabbage, even though she’d never cooked it; her mother’s vacant expression as she sat on the couch; and how she’d felt like a wind-up car, frantically whizzing this way and that, trying to distract her mother, to jolly her out of her misery and get her back in the land of the living. The memory of falling asleep every night with the weight of her failure like a lead ball in her gut.

  “So Hal was your escape hatch.” Daisy must have looked startled, because Diana quickly said, “I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. Given what was going on with your mother, it sounds like anyone would have wanted to escape.”

  “Hal’s a wonderful guy,” said Daisy. She had been in love with Hal; completely, head over heels in love. She could remember those feelings vividly. They’d been real. But there’d been more to it. She had wanted a soft place to land, and Hal, who’d already made partner at his law firm, who’d inherited a house and had money in the bank, had been just that landing place. She also had no doubt that her mother was glad to have Daisy’s future settled, to have Daisy be someone else’s responsibility. And Hal had wanted a comfortable nest; he’d wanted ballast, things that could tether him to his responsible, straight-arrow life. A house, a mortgage, a wife and a child; those things could keep him in place and serve as a barrier between his old life and his new one. As to exactly what that old life encompassed, Daisy still wasn’t entirely sure. She’d never asked him much about it. She’d never wanted to, and told herself she didn’t have to push or probe. Thinking about Hal’s history was like walking into a dark room and touching the side of a monster. You didn’t have to do more than sense its contours, its shape and its bulk, to understand that it was bad.

  Diana was looking at her closely, with interest but no judgment on her face, as Daisy said slowly, “I think sometimes, if I’d been a better person, I would have stayed with my mom, and been there for her, and not complained. But I always knew I wanted to get married and have children, and a home of my own. I just ended up doing it sooner than I’d planned.” When she’d told them the news, her roommates had performed something resembling an intervention, sitting her down on the couch, asking, one after another, Are you sure? You don’t think this is all really fast? You’re sure that you know him? Not love him, but know him. Marisol had asked her that, Daisy remembered, and she’d said, Yes, of course I know him, even as she’d thought, How much does anyone know anyone else? And how can anyone be sure about anything? What she’d known then was that Hal was, by far, the best-looking guy who’d ever shown any interest in her; he was handsome and accomplished. She knew no one better would ever come along, and she saw no reason to wait.

  “What about your brothers?” Diana asked. “They were adults, right? Couldn’t they have helped?”

  Daisy felt herself squirming under the other woman’s gaze. She forced herself to sit still. “David was married and living in Kentucky, and Danny was in New York City, but he was in graduate school, so he hardly ever made it home. I was the only one left. And—well, I was the girl. It just felt like the household stuff naturally landed on my shoulders.” With her forefinger, she wiped a bead of condensation off her glass. “The thing is, it wouldn’t have even been for very long. Six months after I got married, my mom met Arnold Mishkin, the guy who lived in the penthouse in her apartment building. He was a retired doctor, so he had plenty of money. A romance for the ages,” Daisy said, trying to smile and not think about how it had hurt to see her mom smiling again, and know that it was this new man, this stranger, who’d done what Daisy couldn’t. “My brother Danny calls them the lovebirds.” She drew herself up straight in her seat, which seemed to be trying to coax her into a slouch, and said, “What’s the best city you’ve ever visited?”

  They talked about Paris, where Diana had spent a whole summer when she was in her twenties, about chocolate croissants and macarons and the best patisseries. Diana mentioned stints in Los Angeles (“terrible traffic”) and Phoenix (“incredible shopping”) and Cleveland (“better than you’d think”). Her hands moved gracefully as she spoke, her voice rising and falling in a way that Daisy found extremely soothing… although, again, that might have been the vodka.

  Diana talked about visits to Tokyo and Rome. Daisy listened, wistfully recalling her own grand plans. When Beatrice no longer needed bottles or sippie cups or an endless supply of chicken nuggets, Daisy had wanted to travel, and Hal had been perfectly amenable. The problem was that his idea of a perfect vacation was not Europe but, instead, a resort with a golf course that could be reached by a direct flight from Philadelphia International Airport, while Daisy wanted to eat hand-pulled noodles in Singapore and margherita pizza in Rome and warm pain au chocolat in Paris; she wanted to sit in a sushi bar in Tokyo and a trattoria in Tuscany; to eat paella in Madrid and green papaya salad in Thailand; shaved ice in Hawaii and French toast in Hong Kong; she wanted to encourage, in Beatrice, a love of food, of taste, of all the good things in the world. And she’d ended up married to a man who’d once told her that his idea of hell was a nine-course tasting menu.

  “Are you close to your brothers?” Diana was asking.

  “Well, David’s still in Kentucky. I only see him once or twice a year. But Danny’s nearby. He and his husband live about an hour away from Philadelphia, and they’re terrific.” Daisy studied Diana’s face for any signs of surprise or distaste at the mention of Danny having a husband, but all she saw was the way Diana’s head was cocked as she listened closely. Of course she’s not a homophobe, Daisy told herself. She’s educated and sophisticated. She lives in New York City and she travels the world. If anything, a gay brother would probably give Daisy cachet instead of being counted against her.

  “Jesse teaches dance, and works in an art gallery, and Danny’s a counselor at a high school in Trenton.” Daisy rummaged around with her toes, searching for her boot, which was now completely free of her foot and had escaped somewhere underneath the table. “And they live in Lambertville, which has this lovely downtown, with all kinds of shops and galleries.” She couldn’t stop herself from sighing.

  “You prefer city living?” Diana asked.

  “If it had just been me, I think I would have loved to live in a city. But Hal had strong feelings about raising kids in a place where they could ride their bikes and have backyards. And I got pregnant a year after we got married.” Daisy sighed again, and Diana looked sympathetic.

  “Was that hard?” she asked.

  “Oh, it was about what I should have expected. Colic. Screaming all night long. Feeling like a failure, because I’d wanted to breast-feed for a year, and Beatrice wouldn’t cooperate. Even when she was six weeks old, she wanted nothing to do with me.” Daisy tried to smile, to make it sound like a joke and not something that had wounded her deeply, something that pained her still. “My mom came for a week, right after Beatrice was born, but she wasn’t a lot of help. And then…” Daisy looked down into her empty glass. “Well, after my mom went home, it hit me.”

  Diana looked at her expectantly, eyebrows raised.

  “That I wasn’t going to get to go anywhere,” she explained. “That the years I probably should’ve spent living on my own, or seeing Europe on a Eurail Pass, or living with three girlfriends in New York, I was already married with a kid, and a husband who’s not crazy about travel.”

  “Couldn’t you travel on your own
? Or with friends?”

  “I could go with friends. I did, sometimes.” She and Beatrice had made a few trips to the Poconos with Hannah and Zoe; they’d done overnight trips in New York. But they’d never gone very far, or stayed very long. “It’s not that Hal wouldn’t let me go. It’s just that he needs me.” If she hadn’t had the better part of that Bloody Mary inside of her, she wouldn’t have said it; and if she’d said it, she would have surely stopped there, but the combination of spices and horseradish and vodka and being in a room full of adults with a new friend who was listening with interest kept her talking.

  “Needs you for what?” Diana was asking. If there was judgment in her tone, Daisy couldn’t hear it. “To take care of your daughter?”

  “Well, definitely that, at first.” Daisy could still picture Hal, shirtless, with the baby in his arms, because the nurses at the hospital had encouraged skin-to-skin contact; Hal pacing back and forth along the upstairs hallway, insistently chanting, “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep,” and with Beatrice’s small pink body pressed against his chest for all of ten minutes, before handing the baby back to Daisy. He’d needed her to manage the baby, and their house, and, eventually, Beatrice’s schooling and her schedule, needed her to remember his father’s birthday and the anniversary of his mother’s death, and set up doctor’s and dentist’s visits and buy groceries and gifts, to drop his suits at the dry cleaners and pick them up again. “Just everything. All of it. Our life. He needed me to run our life.”

  Daisy tried to smile, to shake off the memories of those bad years, the exhaustion born of sleepless nights and busy days, and how it felt when Hal would just hand off the baby, mid-meltdown, so he could go shower and shave. “You’re lucky you never had to deal with any of this.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Diana, rolling her eyes. “Because the world is just so delightful to women who don’t get married or have kids. Nobody ever thinks there’s anything wrong with me, and nobody ever asks if I’ve frozen my eggs, or when I’m going to meet Mr. Right.” Diana raised her glass. “To the grass always being greener.”

  Daisy looked down and discovered a fresh drink in front of her. “To green grass,” she said, and hoped she hadn’t allowed the conversation to dwell too heavily on herself, and her own disappointments. “Did you fire anyone today?”

  Diana touched a lock of her expensive-looking hair, and tucked it behind her ear. “I should have. There’s this one manager. He deserves to be fired, but I think the most I can hope for is getting him reassigned to a place where he won’t do as much damage.” She shook her head. “White guys—especially white guys who are part of a family business—they fail upward, or they move sideways. And they always come out fine in the end.”

  “Ugh, right?” Daisy said. “My husband went to prep school. This place called Emlen, in New Hampshire. I swear to God, those guys…” She stifled a hiccup against the back of her hand. “They hire each other, or each other’s businesses; they give each other’s children internships and jobs. Like, one of my husband’s classmates was down on his luck for a while—he’d had a couple of business ventures that hadn’t worked out, and then he’d had a really horrible divorce. So first, he goes to one classmate’s summer house in Maine for a few months, to lick his wounds. Then he moves to New York City, into an apartment in a building that another classmate owns, where he decided that what he really wants to be is an artist. So he goes back to school for an MFA in painting, while he’s spending the year in the one guy’s New York City apartment, and his summers at the other guy’s place in Maine, and then…” Daisy paused for another sip. “… when he graduates, and has his student show, half the class shows up, and they buy every single painting.”

  Diana was staring at her, eyes wide. “That cannot possibly be true.”

  “Swear to God!” said Daisy. “We’ve got one of his watercolors hanging in our living room.” She lowered her voice. “It’s really awful,” she said, and hiccupped again. She hadn’t realized, until she started speaking, how irritating she found it. If she screwed up her job or her marriage, there wouldn’t be an Old Girls’ Network waiting to catch her and buoy her, with beach houses and New York City apartments and a whole new career when she was ready. “I don’t know, maybe things are changing. Maybe they’ll be better when my daughter’s all grown up.”

  “She’s really putting you through it,” Diana murmured. Daisy had, of course, confided in her new friend about Beatrice’s expulsion. She kept talking, her words coming faster and faster, like someone had pulled out a stopper and released a torrent of frustration.

  “You know, I was so happy when I found out I was having a girl. I thought we’d go to high tea, and the ballet, and get manicures together and go shopping. And she put up with that, for a while. But Beatrice…” Daisy thought of her daughter, sitting tranquilly in her rocking chair, knitting needles clicking. “Well, she’s just always been exactly who she is.” Somehow, there was another drink in front of her. She hadn’t remembered ordering it, but she lifted it and sipped from it gratefully. Diana was waiting, looking at her, but Daisy couldn’t tell her that she and Hal had agreed that they’d have two children. They’d tried for years. Daisy had had two miscarriages, one the year after Beatrice’s birth, just days after she’d found out she was pregnant, the other when Daisy was twenty-five, after she’d passed the twelve-week mark, which had been painful and messy and had left her sad for months. Then Hal had gotten a vasectomy. Daisy had argued against it. We can keep trying, she’d told him. My mom had me when she was thirty-eight! When you’re thirty-eight, I’ll be over fifty, Hal had said, his voice distant. That’s too old for diapers, and waking up in the middle of the night.

  “Sometimes I feel like a failure,” Daisy said quietly.

  “You’re not a failure,” Diana said. She reached across the table and took Daisy’s hand, and her voice was so warm, and her expression so sincere, and maybe it was the drink, the room, the music; maybe it was being in the company of men in suits and ties and women in expensive shoes, or the smell of perfume and the flowers on the bar, but Daisy felt a sob catch in her throat. How long had it been since she’d had someone’s complete attention this way, for this long? How long since she’d felt like she was with someone who could see her, and could see how hard she was trying? At least since Hannah’s death, and that had been nine months ago.

  “Thank you,” she said, and thought of something Hannah had told her once, long ago, about how, for old married ladies like them, making a new friend was the closest they could get to falling in love.

  5

  Diana

  Leave, Diana told herself, in a voice that rang through her head like a bell. Get out of here. Pay the bill, leave the table, get out of this ridiculous bar full of ridiculous rich people, where they have the nerve to charge twenty dollars for a drink. Don’t ask her any more questions. Stop talking to her. Stop falling for her. It was a ridiculous thing to think, that she was falling for Daisy, that she was like some giddy, innocent teenager with her first crush, but there it was, the awful truth: she liked this woman. Daisy Shoemaker, with her earnest face and her carefully done hair and her I-got-dressed-up-for-the-big-city necklace, was very easy to like; she was nothing like the rich, brittle, Main Line trophy wife Diana had been expecting. She was sweet, and forthcoming, and, my God, she was so young! There was barely a wrinkle on her round, full-cheeked face, and her mouth seemed to relax naturally into a smile. She was friendly and funny and cute when she got tipsy, hiccupping and trying to describe the terrible watercolors she and Hal had purchased from his classmate. Diana liked her, and it was almost impossible to think about causing her pain.

  “So what about you?” Daisy was asking. From the way she was wriggling in her seat, either she needed the bathroom or she’d lost a shoe. “Where’d you grow up?” Diana gave her pieces of the truth: that she’d grown up near Boston, that she’d spent time on Cape Cod. Daisy’s face had lit up at the mention of the Cape. Us, too! she’d said
, pleased as punch. We go there, too!

  Diana told Daisy that she’d never been married, but that she was in a long-term relationship. She couldn’t say that she was single. It felt like betraying Michael, and she couldn’t do that. She said that she had two sisters, three nieces and two nephews. She struggled to remind herself that this woman was not a new acquaintance, or a potential friend; she tried, as subtly as she could, to keep the drinks coming and keep the conversation focused on gleaning information about Daisy, and her life, her family. Her brother and her husband.

  She learned Hal had quit drinking not long before he met Daisy, that he’d paid for their wedding, brought Daisy to Pennsylvania, and given her a credit card and carte blanche to decorate his house.

  “He’d bought it before he’d met me, and it was furnished in Early American Empty—”

  Daisy paused, and Diana couldn’t keep herself from smiling.

  “It was such a guy place! He only had furniture in three rooms. There were bookcases in the living room, and the world’s most gigantic TV, and then a bed in the bedroom—no headboard, no chairs, no dresser, just a king-sized mattress and box spring—and two barstools in the kitchen. I think those actually came with the house.”

  “Wow,” said Diana, shaking her head. She had a million more questions, a million things she needed to know, but Daisy had pulled out her phone and was frowning at the time.

  “Oh my goodness, my show’s going to start soon! I need to get going.”

  “I’ll walk with you.” Daisy reached for her credit card, but Diana had hers ready. “Oh, no,” she said. “My treat.”

  Outside, Daisy rechecked the address of the theater where she’d be seeing King Lear. Diana braced herself for the glare of the sun, the crowds and the cacophony of taxi horns, but New York delivered one of those rare, perfect autumn twilights. The air was cool and faintly fall-scented; the sky was a rich, lustrous blue, and everyone seemed to have slowed down enough to appreciate the night’s beauty.