The Summer Bed

by Ann Brashares

  “No need to be dramatic. We’re all adults.” Her mother had that tight look on her face, like an usher in church.

  Sasha tried not to grumble audibly. “No need to pretend like our whole life isn’t a series of gyrations so Dad can avoid Lila and vice versa.”

  Her mother stopped folding and glared at her.

  Sasha looked innocent. “Or…maybe we do need to pretend that.”

  The glare ticked up to the next level of annoyance.

  Sasha shrugged. “Okay, well, you are in charge of pretending, so just, you know, give me my orders.”

  Why, oh why did she always do this to her mother?

  In anger her mother’s face finally animated. “I don’t get it, Sasha. Why are you sweet to everyone but me?”

  Sasha felt ashamed. She was officially unbecomed. Unbecame. But this was the pattern with her. She provoked and provoked until her mother said one honest thing.

  Holy shit, you’re right. I am feeling a dreadful excitement. Like when a hurricane is coming and it’s gonna level the place. It’s not even Mattie who’s pushing this thing now. It’s Quinn. ????

  Never easy to follow Quinn’s thoughts but always fun to try. Like locating a prairie dog. She disappears and pops up somewhere totally different. But this time, I’ve lost her. WTF is she thinking?

  I wish I could tell you. Nobody takes it harder, feels it stronger than her. Nobody wishes for peace and suffers more when it never comes.

  Well put, sister. (I mean, not my sister. Quinn’s sister.) I can’t stop thinking about what you wrote. How true, how true. It’s fucking looonacy isn’t it?

  We never talked about it. That was what her mother said when Mattie asked if her father knew.

  Mattie sat at the end of the dock, dangling her feet into the pond. There was late-day, sweet sunlight. The sky and the pond were both perfectly pink and smooth as a pearl, except for her kicking it. Her dad and Evie and Sasha would arrive any minute. She wanted to know when they got there, but she wasn’t quite ready to see them.

  It was sick, but sadly believable. Her mother hatches a blond, blue-eyed baby after her affair with her Californian surfing instructor, and she and her Bengali-born husband, according to her, at least, never talked about it.

  Did they ever talk about the affair? Did he know? Based on her dad’s reaction to hearing Jonathan Dawes’s name, it seemed he must have known something. But how much? She’d been figuring it was the cause of their split—the timing and the general feeling of outrageousness supported it—but now she was getting the sense it was just a part of the larger disaster.

  Sometimes Mattie wondered if the absolute most important things were the things they never talked about.

  She heard the car on the gravel. She could tell her father was driving, because the car was going too fast. Her heart thumped along, accelerating as the car slowed down and stopped.

  She’d never been worried to see him before, never felt like she’d had a real secret from him. Not even when she’d come home from camp, bursting with self-conscious importance for having gotten her first period. He was mostly easy and fun with her. He teased, but not too much.

  Maybe he really didn’t know.

  Then again, he was pretty good at not knowing the things he didn’t want to know.

  She sat there frozen, listening, her toes still in the still water. Car doors slammed. Gravel crunched under shoes. Her father threw open the front door of the house with his usual ease of ownership. She imagined it more than she could hear it.

  It didn’t matter that it was a house bought by the grandfather of his bitterly hated ex-wife, renovated by the father of that ex-wife, and inhabited half the weeks of the year by the very woman herself with her newer husband. When her father was there he occupied the place fully, happily, and without compunction.

  “Anybody here?” he called. “Mattie?” He knew Emma was with Jamie staying with friends on Shelter Island tonight and Quinn was working. All the sliding-glass doors were open; he knew someone was home.

  She heard him in the kitchen. She couldn’t make out the quiet footsteps of Evie or Sasha, but she could count on hearing every stomp of her father’s shoes.

  “Matt?”

  She kept her eyes on the line where the pond met the ocean. Would he know when he saw her face? Would he sense something had changed?

  How could she go in there? What would she say? Should she just stand up and walk inside? She couldn’t, but what would they think if she didn’t?

  It turned out she didn’t need to walk in there. There was her father throwing open the sticky screen door of the living room, stomping out onto the damp grass.

  “Mattie, is that you out there?”

  She felt like crying. She couldn’t even figure out how to open her mouth. She turned around and nodded, not sure whether he could see her gesture in the falling light.

  He walked to her, right onto the dock, out of place in his fancy London suit, his shiny work shoes, arms opening early. “Hey, honey. What are you doing out here?”

  Nothing was amiss in his face, his walk, his voice. If there was in hers, he didn’t seem to notice. He stomped out to the end of the dock and put his arms around her.

  He would always come out and get you. He wasn’t complicated; he didn’t check you before he committed himself. He didn’t hold back.

  He was strikingly brave in this way. After all he had been through, all he’d lost and had to lose, she couldn’t understand it.

  Would it change if he knew? Would she lose this? She prided herself on her own rebellious spirit even when it turned reckless, but unlike him, she suspected she was really a coward if it meant losing.

  Her heart ached at the mental picture at Ditch Plains, the treasonous thought.

  He hugged her and then pretended to throw her off the dock. That was their old thing. It was easy to go right back to it. She squealed, she laughed, she tried to throw him in. He pretended to stagger off the end of the dock. But he was big and strong and clever, and she knew by now he never went in unless he wanted to.

  He put his arm around her shoulder as they walked back toward the house. “We’re making hamburgers on the grill. Evie got some kind of special spices. How’s the farm? Did you bring home more yellow peaches?”

  She rested her head against his shoulder as they walked. Tears leaked out of her eyes, but he didn’t notice.

  He was always easy on her. It was easy to love him, easy to be loved.

  He didn’t know, did he?

  And how would it be if he did?

  —

  Within a week or so of the engagement, Jamie’s mother had written eager notes of introduction and congratulations to both of Emma’s parents, and the difference in their responses told an unhappy tale.

  Lila still hadn’t answered hers. “God, I shudder when I see a handwritten note on engraved stationery,” she had erupted when Emma asked about it. “Bane of my childhood. And Mrs. Stewart Hurn? Seriously? Does she not have a name? Em, tell me the truth. Are they country club people?”

  “You could still answer it,” Emma pointed out darkly. “Before they get here for the party.”

  And then, on the other hand, there was her father, who’d not only sent a jubilant note in return but the case of champagne along with it.

  Emma had worried about Lila’s stubbornness out loud to Jamie, and he’d said, “Well, my mom’s still chattering about the champagne.”

  But that was the thing. The contrast was the problem. People with married parents tended to have the reflexive idea that parents reinforced each other, contributed to some grand parental whole. Hers did the opposite. Robert’s gestures always made him the hero, but as Emma got older she understood a less heroic underside to them: he always put Lila in the shade.

  On Friday night:

  “Is J
amie coming out?”

  “Not tonight, Dad. He’s working late. Tomorrow, I hope. He’s going to try to make an early jitney.”

  “Well, we’ll be glad to see him whenever he gets here.”

  Next morning: “We going to see Jamie tonight?”

  “As soon as he gets out of the office.”

  “He works hard, doesn’t he?”

  And then at the actual dinner that night, revered Jamie in attendance, her dad continued to drive her bananas.

  “Marriage is the most wonderful thing in the world.” He put his arm around Evie, who had finally sat down after all the cooking and serving.

  Emma wanted to keep her mouth shut, but she also wanted to throw up. She was in a strange mood, stirred up and raw. The constant challenge by Lila set against the smug complacency of her father, now parading the glory of his marriage to a woman who wasn’t her mother. Neither of her parents seemed to see her at all.

  “Dad, what are you talking about? Isn’t that kind of an oversimplification? You and Mom despise each other.”

  Her dad withdrew his arm and sat up. He looked as surprised as if the fern on the table had stuck out a frond and pinched him. “And that’s why your mother and I are not married,” he replied stiffly.

  “But you were. Obviously. Some marriages are wonderful. Some are clearly not.”

  Jamie looked desperately uncomfortable.

  Her dad was not in the mood for a challenge or even a real conversation. It was the end of the week, his stomach was full, he’d had a couple of glasses of wine. He was in one of his affirmation moods. “Yours and Jamie’s will be wonderful,” he said conclusively, almost like it was an edict.

  God, with her parents it was always a two-front war. “Yeah. If we try hard to make it be,” she said.

  —

  Later that night Emma and Jamie sat at the edge of the patio, outside the circle of light.

  “Why are they doing this?” Emma wasn’t overly suspicious or particularly intuitive, but she had a deep, emerging sadness that she and Jamie were sheltering something special and unusual, a tender sapling trying to get rooted with the promise of digging far and reaching up. And the poison in her past, still regularly mixed and batched by her parents, would kill it. All that promise would just be a thing she and Jamie imagined together once.

  Jamie scooted behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders, kneading the strips and tangles, and she began to melt. “I think it’s supposed to make us happy,” he said.

  “Happy in what way?” she asked. She dropped her chin to her chest. She breathed in the thick scent of cut grass, chlorine, and sunshine fading off the paving stones. She relished the warmth of his body around hers.

  “Celebrating us, us getting married. Taking us seriously, in spite of the fact that we are young and we met in April and nobody actually does.”

  “We do.”

  “We do.”

  “That’s what matters.”

  “That’s all that does.”

  “So why do we have to do this party?”

  He worked his thumbs down her spine. She couldn’t keep up arguing with him much longer. “Maybe we don’t.”

  “We don’t?”

  “Do we?”

  She considered. Mattie wanted to. Quinn wanted to. Why did they want to? Mattie could want it for selfish reasons. To try out some new canapés, get a sexy dress, have some wine, stir up some drama. But not Quinn. Emma trusted Quinn in ways she wouldn’t necessarily concede out loud. For Quinn, who hated parties, never got dressed up, and absorbed everybody’s strife, it was a sacrifice, a slow-motion torture. So why did she want it?

  “Maybe it’s a trial,” Emma said into her chest.

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

  “Maybe it’s the day where everybody is tried. If we get through it, we’re strong.”

  “Strong enough for the wedding?”

  “Strong enough for the marriage. And the wedding too. But I have a feeling if we get this out of the way, the wedding will be all right. You figure you have to be strong to make a marriage work in this place.”

  “In any place.”

  “More so in this one.”

  “You and I will make it through,” he said boldly. “I’m not scared.”

  She flopped face-forward onto the grass. “You probably should be,” she said, muffled.

  —

  Sasha needed to get something out of the way:

  Are you bringing your girlfriend to the party?

  My girlfriend?? You mean Violet?

  Yeah. Francis is a big fan.

  Ah, Francis. I should maybe be annoyed or surprised by that, but I’m not. Mainly, I am not having a boyfriend-like response because she is not my girlfriend. And no, she’s not coming to the party.

  Suddenly he had a more terrible thought.

  Are you?

  Bringing a girlfriend? No. Boyfriend either.

  God, Ray was relieved. It hadn’t occurred to him that she had a boyfriend or would bring a boyfriend, and when it suddenly did, it consumed him with misery and agitation. He was glad he only had to be consumed with misery and agitation for around twelve minutes.

  —

  Quinn saw her mother in the paper goods aisle of the Stop & Shop on Newtown Lane before her mother saw her. It allowed her an unclaimed moment, outside the circulation of their relationship, both of them strangers in a strange place.

  In the space of a moment a story could pass. In front of the paper plates and napkins a world could reveal itself. It happened in her transformation from stranger to daughter in her mother’s eyes.

  Quinn looked wrong here; she didn’t fit. She was a don’t-want-to-believe-your-eyes kind of wrong, like a living whale exposed and drying on open sand, immobile on its side, taking in fate through one large, sentient eye. Or maybe that was just how she felt.

  Lila didn’t want an ordinary kid. That was the thing. She professed disbelief at captain-of-every-team Emma, organizing her books by color. “She’s my rebel,” Lila liked to say of Emma whenever anybody asked where she was going to college. Lila rolled her eyes at Mattie’s fortune in hair products, pink feathered flip-flops, eye-popping micro outfits. Quinn was her hope in this way.

  “What are you doing here?” Lila’s pupils seemed to dilate.

  “Shopping.”

  “I can see that. Why?”

  Lila would have celebrated a vegan, a dreadlocked, faux-leather-wearing, weed-smoking, folk-festival-attending socialist. A girl you could comfortably deploy in the war against your ex-husband. Quinn knew and felt these things. There were times when she wanted to be these things. But Quinn wasn’t that girl. She didn’t fit into Lila’s version of original. She didn’t fit into anyone’s. Her friends were plants and old people; her strongest connections she made with strangers; her arc was noncontinuous. She didn’t belong in a school or an office building and certainly not in the Stop & Shop. Quinn was confounding to her father, probably embarrassing to her sisters. Even Lila, conflicted as she was, couldn’t help that native mother-desire to have her kid fit into something.

  “For the party,” Quinn explained.

  “The thing for Emma and Jamie?” Lila didn’t need to say: You? In this place? For that?

  Quinn stared down at the two columns of plastic cups rolling around her basket. “Yes.” That was the story she’d seen for a moment in Lila’s eyes, the fear of real difference, the genuine article, slouching toward Bethlehem.

  “Quinn, why in the world have you gotten yourself mixed up in this mess?” She dropped her empty basket with a clatter.

  “It’s not a mess, it’s a party.”

  “Okay, it’s a party. Since when do you like parties? You hate parties. I can’t imagine you turning up at this thing, let alone wanting to throw it.”

/>   Quinn stopped on the word, eerily apt. She did want to throw it. She wanted to throw it against the wall, hard, if necessary, and watch it break open. Let it go to pieces if it had to. She couldn’t shy away anymore.

  Maybe it would be a mess.

  And maybe after that they could clean it up.

  —

  Sasha didn’t know how to worry about all the things there were to worry about, so she decided to worry about a dress.

  In a strange burst of serendipity, Emma and Mattie were both home and wanted to go shopping with her. If they had tried to plan it, even weeks in advance, it never would have happened.

  “You already have a dress, Em,” Mattie pointed out as they got into Emma’s car.

  “I know. But I can still help Sasha.” Emma gave Mattie a look. “And you.”

  “You think you can tame the skank sister for introduction to Jamie’s parents,” Mattie suggested.

  Emma laughed, but not that hard.

  Walking along Main Street, East Hampton, amid the Lamborghinis and the balding men with supermodel girlfriends, between two of her three big sisters, Sasha felt her old uncertainties step right along with her.

  Emma and Mattie were tall and she was not. They strode on long legs and she stumbled along with her awkward gait, painfully aware of her wrongness, the turn of her foot. The more she thought about it, the more exaggerated it felt, until she was surprised she could walk at all.

  Emma was always “tall for her age,” until she was just plain tall. Mattie was the same. Even Quinn, built like a twelve-year-old boy, had at least two inches on her. Sasha remembered saying mournfully to Evie once, “I think I might not be tall for my age.”

  Her sisters endlessly ran, raced, and jumped; kicked things, threw things, and rode things. Sasha waited for her foot to go straight, which it eventually sort of did. Except on days like today, when it seemed to curl right back in.

  Sasha wondered, not for the first time, did her sisters ever tease her about it? Not to her face, which was fair game and expected, but behind her back? Did they tell Ray how graceless she was? The old fear meant a new thing to her now.