That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Oh, wow.” Daisy gave a dreamy sigh, then looked sideways at Diana and smiled. “You probably think I’m a total country bumpkin.”

  “No,” said Diana, because she could see what Daisy was seeing. “Magic hour. That’s what photographers call it. That light at the very end of the day.” Out of the candlelight’s glow, Diana could see how young Daisy was. No crow’s feet, no age spots. Her hair was still lustrous, her skin still smooth as a pour of cream. She walked with a jaunty bounce, and she looked around at everything—the sky, the buildings, the people—with undisguised appreciation, even wonder.

  Diana, meanwhile, was feeling increasingly desperate, scanning the street for a likely-looking building, a place to escape. There was a skyscraper at the end of the block, a silvery needle that seemed to pierce the sky. “This is me,” she said, quickening her pace. “My apartment’s in the Village, but if I’m only here for a short stay and I’m working in Midtown, I Airbnb my apartment and let the company put me up,” she said, lying glibly.

  “Thank you for doing this,” Daisy said.

  “My pleasure,” said Diana. She was going to offer her hand, but before she could do it, Daisy had drawn her into a hug. Diana smelled her shampoo. She felt her warmth and the strength of her arms. She stiffened as Daisy drew her close, then, without planning it, she found herself relaxing, and hugging Daisy back.

  * * *

  Diana waited in the lobby for ten minutes, until there was no chance that Daisy could still be anywhere nearby. She smiled at the doorman, who nodded in return, and stepped back outside, quietly blessing whoever had come up with a catchall term like “consultant,” which could have been tailor-made for the purpose of pulling the wool over suburban housewives’ eyes.

  The night air was still cool, the sidewalks not too crowded, and she could feel the pavement thrum underneath her every time a train went by. She had a reservation on a ten o’clock flight from Kennedy to Boston, and a seat on the last Cape Air flight from Logan to Provincetown, but there was still plenty of time to get to the airport. Walking would give her time to think and, she hoped, to shake the discomfort that had grown with every moment of her time with Daisy Shoemaker. Think about what you learned, not how you feel, she told herself. When that didn’t work, she tried to stop thinking at all.

  In the airport bathroom, she locked herself in the handicapped stall and unzipped her tote. She’d been watching drag queens for years, observing as they transformed themselves, painting their faces and putting on custom-sewn hip pads and silicone breasts that looked, and felt, almost like the real thing, until they looked completely authentic, more beautiful than most biological women. The older ones would talk about the ballroom scene in New York City in the 1980s, where it hadn’t all been about looking like a beauty queen, with sky-high wigs and mile-long lashes and six-inch platform heels. Back then, there were categories like Executive Boss Lady Realness or Butch Queen Realness, where the goal wasn’t beauty or glamour but authenticity, of being believable, looking like a real female executive or a real straight male, inhabiting the character you were playing so completely that you could walk down Fifth Avenue at noon without drawing a single sideways glance; that you could pass in the real world.

  In the bathroom, Diana removed her drag carefully. She peeled off the false lashes and wiped off the makeup; she slipped out of the suit she’d borrowed from Rent the Runway and folded it, and the blouse, carefully in a garment bag. She pulled on jeans and a plain jersey top and replaced her suede kitten-heel pumps with sneakers. She removed the earrings, zircons she’d borrowed from a work friend, and slipped them in her pocket. She brushed the spray out of her hair, which she’d had done at a blowout bar that morning. When she washed her hands, she avoided her face in the mirror. She felt, for reasons she couldn’t name, as if she might not recognize the woman staring back at her.

  When the plane touched down, at just after eleven o’clock, Diana pulled her leather carry-on over her shoulder and stepped down the three steps of the plane’s staircase. The airport was the size of a small-town post office, and was almost empty at that hour. Outside, two cabs idled at the curb, the drivers standing beside their vehicles, scanning the terminal for passengers. A heavyset man with a thick beard and red hair threaded with silver was waiting, too, leaning against a pickup truck.

  “You didn’t have to come,” Diana said.

  “Didn’t have to,” he said agreeably, reaching for her bag. “I wanted to.” He held the door as she got into the passenger’s seat, and waited until she’d gotten her seat belt buckled before he started to drive.

  “So how’d it go?” he asked, swinging the truck out onto the two-lane road that ran from Route 6 to the National Seashore.

  Diana thought about how to answer. “Okay,” she finally said. “I think it went okay.”

  He didn’t press her, but she could feel his disapproval fill the space between them. Ignoring it, she bent over the phone, tapping out the message she’d send in the morning. Really enjoyed meeting you. Hope we’ll get to do it again soon. I’m getting my next posting on Monday. Will let you know where I land!

  They were silent as he turned up the driveway to the cottage. He pulled up beside the deck and turned the engine off. Diana rolled down the window and took a deep breath, imagining the smell of salt and the feel of the ocean replenishing her, scouring the grime of the city off her skin. “I liked her,” she blurted, then pressed her lips shut. She hadn’t planned on saying anything, and she definitely had not planned on saying that.

  “The other Diana?”

  “Daisy.” Diana’s lips felt numb. “She calls herself Daisy. Isn’t that sweet?” Her voice caught on “sweet.” She’d meant to sound sarcastic, but instead she’d sounded like she was going to cry. Because Daisy was sweet. She was sweet and young and innocent, and Diana was going to come smashing through her life like a wrecking ball. She was going to hurt her, whether she wanted to or not. The wheels she’d set in motion were turning; the train was racing down the tracks, and Diana couldn’t stop it, not even if she’d tried.

  Part Two

  Our Lady of Safe Harbor

  6

  Diana

  After that summer, Diana came back to a world that felt bleared and grease-streaked, gray and dingy, permanently corrupted. For three weeks she felt like she could barely breathe, or eat, or sleep, and when her period came, she fell on her knees on the bathroom’s tiled floor, shaking with relief. Her bruises faded, and she didn’t have any symptoms of diseases unless he’d given her one of the sneaky kinds.

  “Honey, are you okay?” her mom asked, the first night at the dinner table. She’d made Sunday gravy, a sauce that simmered all day long, with chunks of pork shoulder and sausage from the market at Faneuil Hall. It was Diana’s favorite dinner. Or, at least, it had been. That night, all she could do was poke at it and nod, knowing that the lump in her throat wouldn’t allow her to speak.

  After dinner, her sister Kara cornered her in the hall. “All right, what happened?” Kara asked in a low voice.

  “What? Nothing.”

  “You’re walking around with a face like…” Kara made a hideously mopey expression and knuckled fake tears off her cheeks. “So what happened?”

  “Nothing,” said Diana.

  Kara’s expression was not without sympathy. “Older guy? College guy? Married guy?” Her eyes widened. “It wasn’t Dr. Levy’s husband, was it?”

  “No,” Diana said. “He was fine. They both were.”

  “So what, then? It was a boy, wasn’t it?”

  Diana nodded. She knew she wouldn’t be able to tell the truth. Not to her sister. Not to anyone. Let them think that some boy on Cape Cod had broken her heart. It was, at least, a version of the truth.

  Kara sat on Diana’s bed. “It sucks,” she said. “I know. It’s the worst feeling in the world. But school’s going to start again, and there’re plenty of fish in the sea.” She grinned. “The best way to get over one guy is to get under a d
ifferent one!”

  Diana had tried to smile. Meanwhile, she thought, I’ll never have sex again.

  The school year passed in a lurching blur. Sometimes Diana would sit down at the start of class and blink to discover that forty-five minutes had passed and the bell was ringing and she had no memory of what the teacher had said or what material had been covered. Sometimes, the time dragged like cold mud, making the days and hours feel like an endless slog. Her nights were restless, her sleep interrupted by bad dreams. She’d skip two, three, four meals in a row, and then find herself at the refrigerator, gorging on whatever came to hand, once spooning the entire contents of a jar of blue cheese salad dressing into her mouth. Her middle softened. Her clothes stopped fitting. Her grades slipped. Everyone worried.

  Tell me what’s wrong. Her mother asked; her friends asked, her sisters asked. Her former soccer coach asked when he saw her in the hall, and her favorite English teacher from the year before cornered her in the cafeteria. She knew that her mom had called Dr. Levy to see if anything had happened, and she prayed she’d been a good enough actress during those last two days for Dr. Levy to say “no.” “But she’s worried about you,” her mother reported. “So am I. We’re all worried.” Like that was a news flash; like she’d somehow missed the incessant chorus of Tell us, tell us, tell us what happened. We can’t help you if we don’t know what’s wrong.

  Nothing’s wrong, Diana would say. I’m just tired.

  Finally, her mother had taken her to her pediatrician, the man who’d given her Disney stickers and cherry lollipops after her shots. Diana had loved to bite them and feel the candy shatter on her tongue and cling to her teeth.

  Dr. Emmerich shuffled through her chart and finally said, “Your mother’s worried you’re depressed.”

  “I’m not depressed,” Diana said. “I’m fine.”

  He gave her a probing look. “Is it a boy?”

  She shook her head, hair swinging around the soft, pale moon of her face.

  “A girl?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Drinking? Drugs? Too much pressure at school? Anything you tell me is confidential. I won’t tell your parents. That’s a promise. But they’re worried, and I am, too.” He sighed, and put his hand on her arm, gently. “I don’t like to see a girl’s spark go out.”

  Somehow, after all the questions, all the people asking and begging and insisting that she tell them what was wrong, that was what made her start to cry. His hand on her arm; the kindness in his voice, the idea that her spark had gone out. The idea that she’d ever had a spark, and that it had been stolen from her.

  “I’m fine,” she said again, in her robot voice.

  Dr. Emmerich sighed and wheeled his stool away from her, back toward the counter. “I’m going to give your parents the names of two psychologists. They’re both women, and they’re both excellent. Even if everything’s okay, it can be good to have someone to talk to.” He wheeled himself back and looked her in the eyes. “People care for you. They want to help. You just have to let them.”

  But she couldn’t. She couldn’t, because there was no helping her; no fixing her. She was a broken thing, thanks to her own stupidity, her own dumb, naive, trusting nature. And now, for as long as she lived, she’d be hearing those boys laughing at her. She’d remember what had happened; what they’d done. It would be the first thing she’d think of in the morning and the last thing she’d remember at night.

  Tenth grade, eleventh grade, twelfth grade all went by, in the same unhappy gray miasma. Hours felt like they were endless; months passed by with Diana barely seeing the oak tree outside her bedroom window that had once been her preview of the seasons. Now she hardly noticed when the leaves were changing, or when leaves were gone, or when they’d come back, fresh and new and green again. She ate, late at night, until she couldn’t feel anything, stuffing cookies on top of cold chicken on top of ice cream on top of bread. Sometimes she’d eat so much she’d vomit. More often, she’d just stumble to bed and lie there, half-asleep, her stomach aching as much as her heart did.

  College, said her parents. So she went to the University of Massachusetts, where she lasted three semesters. It was the boys that were the problem. She’d be walking across the campus and catch sight of someone whose hair and height reminded her of Poe, or she’d be in the student center, eating lunch, and hear a laugh that sounded like one of the boys from the beach. Her roommates dragged her to parties, but the taste of beer made her gag. Her sisters came and collected her for a road trip to Florida, but the smell of sunscreen made her queasy. After three semesters’ worth of Ds and Fs, her parents had let her come home.

  It’s a waste of money, she heard her father saying wearily to her mom. If she doesn’t want to be there, we shouldn’t make her stay. He’d gotten old in the years since her summer on the Cape. There was a gauntness to his features; hollows under his cheekbones, circles under his eyes. His skin hung loosely on his face, like he’d lost weight he couldn’t afford to lose.

  Diana tried temping, working nights in banks and law firms, entering data into computers, but the problems that had started after her return continued to plague her. She’d sit down with a stack of invoices, then blink, to find that an hour had passed without her having typed in a single number. After a few months, the firms were no longer able to place her, and her mother got her a job working the graveyard shift in the custodial services department at Boston University, cleaning offices and classrooms between ten p.m. and six in the morning. A van picked her up at the distant parking lot where she was allowed to leave her car; a supervisor gave her a mop and a bucket of cleaning supplies at the drop-off point; a different van picked her up in the morning. Her coworkers chattered, talking about their kids or their boyfriends or their husbands. They traded parts of the dinners they’d packed—half a meatball grinder for a Tupperware full of chicken with mole; baked ziti for spicy beef patties. Diana kept to herself, and, after a while, her coworkers left her alone. She didn’t mind doing the dirty jobs—prying chewing gum off the undersides of desks, scrubbing toilet bowls, mopping the men’s room floors. At least she could be alone, with her Walkman earphones plugged into her ears. She would mop, or spray down the mirrors and wipe them clean without ever looking at her own reflection, and, while she worked, she would think about whether she could kill herself and make it look like an accident. The world hurt; every man she saw was a man who could hurt her. Could she drive the car off the road on an icy night and hope the police would think she’d lost control? “Accidentally” step in front of the T?

  She thought about the Dorothy Parker poem:

  Razors pain you;

  Rivers are damp;

  Acids stain you;

  And drugs cause cramp.

  Guns aren’t lawful;

  Nooses give;

  Gas smells awful;

  You might as well live.

  You might as well live, she told herself, and went plodding through her nights and sleeping her days away until, one morning in April, when her parents were both at work, there was a knock on the door. Diana tried to ignore it, but the knocking persisted, loud and ceaseless, like a cold spring rain. She pulled on sweatpants, went downstairs, and yanked the door open, preparing to hurl abuse at whatever inconsiderate delivery person or proselytizer had disturbed her. But it wasn’t a Mormon, or the UPS guy. It was Dr. Levy, dressed in a belted trench coat and leather boots, with a worried look on her face, a look that quickly turned into shock.

  “Diana?”

  Diana looked down at herself. She wasn’t fifteen anymore, and she knew she’d changed since that summer. Her face was a pale, bloated moon, and her hair was long and wild, witchy and untended. Dr. Levy looked different, too. Her hair was sleek. She wore red lipstick and gold earrings and an expensive-looking bag on her shoulder.

  “Can I come in?” She held up a white cardboard box tied with twine. “I brought cannoli.”

  Wordlessly, Diana held the door open. She led
her former employer to the kitchen, a small, cheerful space, with goldenrod-yellow walls and a red-and-yellow floral-patterned tablecloth on the table, and her mother’s prize Le Creuset Dutch oven, enameled deep blue, sitting on the back burner of the stove. “Can I get you something to drink?” Diana asked. Her voice was a rusty croak; her tongue felt thick and balky. “Coffee? Tea?”

  “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  Diana gathered a tea bag, a mug, a bottle of honey, plates for the pastries, forks and napkins, which let her keep her back to her visitor. She turned on the radio to fill the silence with the sound of classical music.

  “How are you?” Dr. Levy asked as Diana turned on the gas beneath the kettle, wishing she’d had time to shower, or at least comb her hair.

  “Fine,” Diana said. Dr. Levy didn’t ask anything else, so Diana didn’t speak again, until she’d made the tea and there was nothing left to do but take a seat.

  Diana sat and groped for the tools of polite conversation. “How are Sarah and Sam?”

  Dr. Levy’s expression brightened. “They’re fine. In fourth grade, if you can believe it. They’re growing up so fast! Sam’s taking saxophone lessons. He can’t really play notes yet, but he can make these noises…” Dr. Levy made a squeaky honk, and Diana startled herself by laughing. “And Sarah’s in Girl Scouts. She’s taking it very seriously. Trying to rack up as many badges as she can.” Dr. Levy looked right at her. “But I came because I want to talk to you.”

  Diana looked down, straightened the salt and pepper shakers at the middle of the table.

  “Your mother tells me you’ve been struggling.”

  “I’m fine,” said Diana reflexively.

  “She thinks,” Dr. Levy continued, as if Diana hadn’t spoken, “that something happened on the Cape. When you were staying with us.”