The High Season

by Judy Blundell

  “Miele dishwasher. Aga stove!”

  “Whoa, after clamming let’s go to your house,” Penny said. “It might be the only place I’ll be cooking this summer.”

  “What?”

  Elena and Penny exchanged a glance. Penny looked away, which allowed Ruthie to notice for the first time that she was upset. No wonder she was cracking nuts as though they were the bones of an enemy.

  “The restaurant closed yesterday,” Elena said. “I mean, we knew it was dicey when the landlord raised the rent so high. In the end Aaron decided he just couldn’t make it through the summer. It’s not his fault.”

  “It is his fault,” Penny objected. “He was a total shit for waiting for Memorial Day weekend to tell the staff. We’re all left flat. All the restaurants have hired already.”

  “Someone will quit,” Ruthie said. “You know chefs. So volatile.”

  “What the fuck do you mean, volatile? Elena thinks if I don’t manage to get a gig, we should sell the rental property and open our own restaurant,” she said. “Elena said I have to follow my dream or she’ll divorce me.”

  “Please don’t talk about me in front of me, love,” Elena said.

  “We went to this place last night in Greenport. Tiny! All this guy—Joe Somebody—serves is oysters and chowder. One fucking good wine list. He closes at eight. Is that genius? I was so happy, the oysters were so cold and briny, the place was packed, I loved the owner. Then I got home and was immediately depressed. What am I doing with my un-wild and precious life, anyway? I wish people would just stop quoting that fucking poem at me.”

  “It’s all a sign you need to do something,” Elena said.

  “Apparently I’ve been so miserable I’ve been impossible,” Penny said, opening the car door and tossing the bag of nuts inside. “I know I can’t be like you and Mike. I can’t be a happy divorced person. Remember that first year after you broke up? Horrible.”

  “I thought I was magnificent.”

  “I’d need you all to hate Elena as much as I did, and it would be exhausting for everyone,” Penny went on. “My father keeps saying I shouldn’t rely on his will to support us. I’m fifty-five years old, and he still thinks I’m on the edge of financial disaster.”

  “You are on the edge of financial disaster, sweetie,” Ruthie said, leaning against her. “We all are. And you’re fifty-seven.”

  “Mike was so supportive,” Elena said. “I mean about the restaurant dream. We just ran into him in town.”

  “I could have killed him, actually,” Penny said. “It was such an Oprah moment, I swear he and Elena both had tears in their eyes. Go for the dream, he said.”

  “He did not. He did not say go for the dream,” Ruthie said.

  “Well, okay, not exactly. He said if you’re trapped in a life that’s not your life, it’s the worst thing in the world.”

  There came a pause. Ruthie distinctly saw Elena step on Penny’s foot.

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean that personally,” Elena said.

  “Mmm,” Ruthie said.

  “He said not to give a rat’s ass what anyone else thought,” Penny added.

  “And he’s seen a rat’s ass, so I’d believe him,” said Ruthie.

  9

  RUTHIE AND JEM unpacked the car, shouldering the totes, cases, boxes, and suitcases into the playhouse, colliding in doorways, calling out from different rooms (“This room is a shriek of pink!” Jem shrieked, when she saw her room. “It’s an intestine!”), bouncing on beds, turning on faucets, and exulting in a well-stocked open kitchen. Outside they dipped their feet into the pool and examined the pool house.

  “Stacks and stacks of towels,” Jem said. “And really good shampoo. My hair is going to smell like a meadow.”

  “It’s a compound,” Ruthie said as they surveyed the view. “We have secured the compound, Captain. And we have a vista.” She swung her arms wide. “Ich bein ein Berlinger!”

  “Mom, please. You are so beyond me-hearties right now.”

  Ruthie knew she was pumping up enthusiasm when the truth was she just felt beleaguered by the day. She’d met a goddess and been ignored by her stepson. Trouble at work that had seemed manageable now loomed, serious. Mike had leaned against the door and suggested a dinner “to talk.” He’d told Penny and Elena that he was trapped in a life that wasn’t his life. She’d been called presentable and dependable.

  Maybe Carole was right. Had the disappointments of middle age, the sorrow of a failed marriage, drained something out of her, what her father used to call her pep? Had she lost so much vitality that a young man could see right through her?

  She’d once been blessed with cherubic cheeks and good skin. Her thirties had been almost indistinguishable from her radiant twenties. Although slightly drier. Not beautiful but pretty, she knew how to talk to men, how to flirt and keep them abuzz. Of course now she knew that her currency had been mostly youth, because now nobody was looking. She saved the sass and crackle for her girlfriends.

  She’d shut all that off because men had shut it off. On the north side of forty, they weren’t leaning closer, weren’t watching her mouth or her ass. They didn’t give a shit if she tossed her hair or cocked an eyebrow. If she was witty they no longer wondered how she’d be in bed, they merely laughed. And it would be a surprised laugh, as though it was impossible for her, at this age, to give them even momentary pleasure.

  Post-divorce you had to buy a good bra and inject things into your laugh lines, and she wasn’t in the mood. Who was she going to flirt with, Lloyd Handleman, the local realtor who kept suggesting they have a martini so she could “take the edge off”?

  Now she was rounding the corner toward fifty. She thought of Adeline Clay, her face taut, her skin glowing, her waist like a twenty-year-old’s (no butter!), her body as supple as if she’d just stepped off the shiatsu table.

  If Ruthie was going to carve a new person out of the old one, she needed more than drugstore moisturizer and outlet shopping.

  She needed Carole’s size eight fat pants.

  “Come on,” she said to Jem. “Let’s invade the big house. I’ll get the key.”

  * * *

  —

  “THERE ARE EIGHT pairs of Wellington boots,” Jem said. “I counted. And two dishwashers.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s a climbing wall in the boy’s room.”

  “Really?”

  “Are you sure we’re allowed to be here?”

  “Carole said it was fine.” Ruthie regarded herself in the full-length mirror. She looked drawn. Was the mirror too used to reflecting the better-looking?

  “Plus this dressing room is the size of my bedroom.” Jem touched a drawer and it slid open silently, revealing triangularly folded silk panties in an array of colors, a line of matching bras in a column next to them.

  “Whoa,” Jem said.

  “Honey, please don’t ogle Carole’s underwear, I feel spooky enough as it is.”

  “Rich people match,” Jem said. “I bet if they lose a sock, they just throw the other sucker out. They don’t even wait for a couple of laundry cycles to be sure.”

  They stared down at the drawer for a moment. Was this the secret that rich people knew? The things most people bought in batches, hurriedly, shaking them out of Gap and Target bags—T-shirts, underwear, socks—were, for the rich, silky secret fabrics that lay against their skin like talismans, reminding them that they did not have to worry about the costs of the ordinary: dry cleaning, orthodontics, lunch. They had the worries of a pleasant life with equally pleasant choices—London for theater this winter, or Turks and Caicos?—so maybe their base level of dopamine was higher than everyone else’s.

  Ruthie closed the drawer.

  “How come I can’t raid Verity’s closet?” Jem asked.

  “Because she’s six.
”

  “Oh. The other one.”

  “Arden. Because you weren’t invited. Besides, she’s twelve.”

  Jem sighed. “I bet she has better clothes than I do already.”

  “Are you okay?” Ruthie asked. “You seem off. Crabby.”

  “I’ve got finals and stuff. And the playhouse…”

  “You don’t like it? How can you not like it? You saw the kitchen!”

  “Everything is so…I don’t know…done.”

  “Are you kidding me? For years you’ve been complaining about sofa beds and now you’ve got a European mattress and it’s too done?”

  “I know,” Jem said. “I’m reverse spoiled.”

  “Nah. You’re just spoiled. My fault. I only want you to be happy, and it’s exhausting.”

  Jem leaned against Ruthie. Ruthie slipped an arm around her. She breathed her daughter in, feeling the humidity-swollen texture of her hair against her cheek. Jem stirred and she hugged her tighter. “Just another second. One day you’ll love me again. But by then osteoporosis will have set in and I won’t be able to hug you without fracturing a bone.”

  “You are a serious weirdo,” Jem said, but she smiled as she pushed her away.

  “So what is it?” Ruthie asked. “This is our best summer squat ever. Why the gloom?”

  “I hate leaving my house. I’m going to spend an entire summer afraid I’ll spill something.”

  “We need the money.”

  “Maybe if all those years you didn’t buy me organic milk and stuff, you would have been able to save money and we’d still have the house in the summers.”

  Ruthie started to laugh, but then got momentarily lost in speculating if all those things they had always spent money on to protect Jem—from growth hormones in cows, from pesticides, from trans fats, from PCBs in plastic (all those expensive wooden toys!)—would add up to enough extra cash to give Jem exactly what she wanted, could keep her in Apple products and purses and vacations for years.

  “Remember when we used to talk about fun things, like Death Eaters?”

  “Mom!”

  “I’m sorry about the pedicure, you can save up for one this summer.”

  “It’s not the pedicure. Sometimes it just seems like…like everybody has money but us.” Jem’s finger trailed along a row of folded sweaters.

  “Well, lots of people do. And lots of people are suffering.”

  “If you mention refugees I’m walking.”

  “That’s exactly what they have to do, walk away from a life—”

  Jem took a step and Ruthie pulled her back. She stroked her hair. Lightly. Held her like a moth, felt her fluttering wings. “Look, aside from cashmere throw envy, we have it pretty good,” she said. “We’re going to have a great summer. Speaking of which, I bumped into Meret’s mom today. Doe’s been doing this teen outreach thing, and Mrs. Bell is bringing Meret and a whole gang to Spork. So you can hang with friends instead of working the kids’ table, okay?”

  “I don’t know if I can come. I’m working tomorrow.”

  “Only until three. You can come after work, with Daddy.”

  Jem set her jaw. “I can choose what I want to do with my time.”

  “Well, sure.” Ruthie peered into her face. “Did something happen at school? Or with Meret?”

  “Why did something have to happen at school?” Jem flung herself away. “I have to pee.”

  “Check out the toilet! It’s Japanese!”

  Ruthie found the pink shirt and white pants. She tossed aside her T-shirt and slipped on the shirt. Silk slipped over her arms and floated around her waist and fit her shoulders and cast a light on her skin as though she was carrying around Carole Lombard’s cinematographer.

  She never wore pink. But this pink was luscious. Inside it she would feel as though she’d burrowed into the heart of a rose.

  She pulled on the white pants, satiny cotton sliding across her skin. She twisted in the mirror. Was that an actual ass?

  “Whoa, Mom.” Jem walked back in. “You look like a whole different person.”

  Ruthie slipped into her flats. “That’s the idea.”

  “Okay, no.” Jem perused the shoes and came up with MANOLO MULE KITTEN HEEL. “Here.”

  Ruthie slipped into the shoes. “Better,” Jem said.

  It was like resolving a painting. If you change a corner, the composition is thrown off. Couture had thrown the rest of her middle-aged self into relief. The bracelet she’d had since college, a plain silver band she’d bought at a flea market in NoHo. And her hair! Carole was right. Everything was wrong.

  “My hair,” she said.

  “You just need product,” Jem said. “And maybe a necklace or a bracelet?”

  “I can’t borrow Carole’s jewelry. Wait, hold on.”

  She dashed to Verity’s bedroom. She found the dress-up trunk and pawed through it, looking for that pretty silver necklace. The trunk was heaped with sequined tutus and costume jewelry, most of it too glittery for a Memorial Day picnic. Feathers flew as she tossed boas and hats aside. Something caught her eye, the dull shine of metal against all that sparkle. She pulled out a man’s watch with a nickel case, one of those knockoffs that looked real if you didn’t look twice. She wound it, and the second hand ticked forward crisply.

  It was a little clunky and she liked the weight of it. She went back to the full-length mirror and posed. The tailored pants said Jackie O on a Greek island, the pink said summer fun. The heels winked flirty. Yet the man’s watch made her look like a kickass Amelia Earhart—grounded, maybe doomed—but with an action plan.

  “Nailed it,” said Jem, and they were friends again.

  From: Ruth Beamish

  To: Michael Dutton

  Jem said you boned with Adeline

  From: Michael Dutton

  To: Ruth Beamish

  WHAT?

  From: Ruthie

  To: Mike

  I meant bonded! BONDED

  …

  oops! Ha ha. Anyway do you think if you r still fixing step etc you could encourage her to come to Spork? I need her. Will tell you why. Fire up that Dutton charm offensive.

  From: Mike

  To: Ruthie

  The Dutton charm is tattered at the edges these days, but ok.

  10

  SPORK HAD ALWAYS been Ruthie’s favorite event of the summer, unlike the gala, which was always fraught with tension as the board ladies made their thrust-knee poses for the photographer, tucking their wineglasses behind their silk tunics. Spork was food held in fingers, people in shorts and hats, and the fizzy kickoff to summer pleasures.

  The Belfry Museum was a hybrid of a place. It was named not for an architectural feature, but for a person, Vivian Clarke Belfry, who in 1972 left three million dollars and her house and barn to her son with the directive to create a “significant museum” to highlight “both local history and visual art” and, incidentally, kick Hampton ass. The historical collection, referred to in official publications as “choice” and by villagers as “dinky,” was housed in a small side gallery. It was built around a few artifacts of Benedict Arnold, who had set up headquarters in Orient during the Revolutionary War. The Belfry family was descended from Arnold’s secretary, who had served the general, been pardoned, and stayed to farm. It was a small collection, including the buttons of a coat reportedly worn by Arnold.

  As in small towns all over the nation, a few dusty relics were enough for a start. An endowment was born, more money raised, staff was hired, a renovation completed by an architect who summered in Orient, and the buttons, tankards, musket balls, and a flintlock rifle displayed to busloads of yawning schoolkids. The Belfry lurched along for decades, open half the year, sleepy and striving, exhibiting watercolors and duck decoy collections, nudged by a succession of de
voted board members who did much of the administrative work. When Ruthie moved to Orient she applied for a job in education and talked herself into creating a new position as chief curator. Three years later the director, an amiable scholar with a tendency to drunkenly topple into bushes at openings, retired. Ruthie took over temporarily and then permanently, after a cursory meeting with a board grateful to have her.

  Since then she’d turned the barn into a modern open space for big projects by contemporary artists, the most notable being when Dodge filled it with vellum cut in undulating shapes that blew in the wind of a hundred or so vintage fans hung on wires, all lit by a ravishing blue light. Titled Heaven, it was ecstatically reviewed by the Times and put the Belfry on the map.

  The trick, as director of a small regional museum, was to be scrappy, to find time to squeeze in some thoughts about Art while you brooded about Money. “Let’s do it frisky, and let’s do it cheap” was her motto, and over the years she’d managed to beg, borrow, steal, recruit, entice, shame, and flatter enough people to increase the small endowment, triple membership, quadruple school visits, start art camp and art classes, and, along with her curator Tobie, mount frisky and cheap shows that got them noticed. She’d hired smartly, fired kindly, and occasionally even kicked Hampton ass.

  Ten years ago the summer picnic had been a desultory affair decorated with potluck pasta salads brought by the board ladies and a large crystal bowl full of lemonade with a few cartons of blueberries dumped in. Ruthie had changed the name to Spork, gotten the local farms and wineries to donate food, and introduced fun to the party equation. She’d ordered Spork T-shirts that became more prized as they grew faded from sun and salt. Now it was one of the main summer kickoff events on the North Fork.

  Ruthie parked next to Gloria’s and Mindy’s SUVs, nestled in Teutonic twinship, but she didn’t see them among the early arrivals. She inspected the tent, joked with the cooks in the food trucks, thanked the purveyors she had charmed into donating wine and beer, and cast an uneasy glance at the sky. It had been a changeable morning, banks of heavy clouds blowing past with occasional pockets of blue, and she hoped the showers would hold off. She greeted a few guests as she made her way into the coolness of the museum and climbed the stairs to the offices.