“Mowing the lawn.”
“I see that. That’s great. Where’d you get the mower?”
Ray braked and dropped the engine into neutral. “I rented it.”
“Seriously?”
He made to look insulted. “I have a job.”
“How’d you get it here?”
“They rented me a trailer.”
“To attach to what?”
He was starting to feel less proud and more stupid. “To the car I rented from a different place.” He threw the engine back into gear and drove off before she could ask him any more questions. The whole thing had, in truth, cost him more money than he made at the Black Horse in a week.
Later when he paused at the pool fence, wiping his face of sweat, Quinn fluttered across the grass and hopped onto the back of the mower. He was pretty sure this wasn’t a two-person vehicle, but she folded herself weightlessly, like a cicada, to perch facing backward. He rode from pond to pool, patio to forest.
He liked her companionship. He turned to look at her. He smiled. It was too noisy to say anything. She held a piece of sprouted grass in her teeth like an old-time farmer, as they drove back and forth, back and forth.
Occasionally she elbowed him in the back. “Not that. That’s clover,” and he veered around.
At the end she hopped off. The silence was more silent after all the noise. The humid, thick smell of grass filled his nose.
“Wait. Why do you have that look?” he asked her.
“What look?”
There was mischief. No question. “That look.”
“Fine,” she said. “Come with me.”
He followed her across the grass to the shed where they kept old bikes and the garden tools. She pushed open the door and he peered into the gloom. His eyes barely needed adjustment to see, so shiny and new it was. A John Deere fifty-four-inch zero-radius mower.
“Shit.”
“My dad had it delivered this morning,” Quinn explained with a smile and a shrug. “It came while you were out.”
Okay, Little Ray. Here goes nothing.
Sasha saw Ray’s text as she heard the door opening downstairs for the first guests, and her heart kicked up another notch.
She stood at the top of the stairs, looking down. You couldn’t call them guests exactly. As arranged, they had come first, fellow hosts, to gather before the Hurns arrived from the airport.
“Hello?” Lila called, opening the front door. You couldn’t really expect her to knock at her own house, could you? Her own great-grandfather’s house. Not with how everything felt right now.
Sasha drew in her breath and took a step backward on the landing, hoping she hadn’t been seen yet. She wanted a moment to observe, to fill her eyes, without having to be looked at.
Lila was first in, looking tall and imperious. But Sasha could already make out faint sweat stains under the arms of her pale linen dress. Her blond-gray hair was a straight, fine bob and her shoes were pointy beige pumps. She wore sheer stockings, and Sasha was oddly riveted by the faded orange freckles that covered her calves and feet and hands and other parts of her skin you could see. For all the times Sasha had imagined Lila, she hadn’t imagined the freckles.
Sasha felt dark in comparison, a dark stranger to freckles.
Next came Adam. He was smaller than she had pictured. Not short, exactly, but he took up less space. His hair was wiry and gray and curled around his ears. He wore a blue blazer and round wire-rimmed glasses like Leon Trotsky.
Then came Ray. She had to steady herself to look at him. He was half a head taller than his dad but didn’t share Lila’s expression. He was bemused, nervous, a little wary. She felt the fast tick under her rib cage. She tried to see him for the separate person he was, tried to see him with calm eyes in clear outlines, but it wasn’t easy. How could he fit all the things she’d felt about him into his one person?
He glanced upward like he knew she was there. He didn’t say anything. Just looked at her, smiled, shrugged a little. He didn’t call her out for spying, but she knew it was time to come downstairs. She kept her eyes on him, smiled knowingly, wary to match his wariness. As nervous as she was, she didn’t take her eyes away.
Sasha came down the stairs just as her dad and mom appeared from the living room. She was aware of the pale green silk of her dress rustling around her knees, the subdued silver of her shoes.
Here we go.
She glanced again at Ray. It was a comfort, having a counterpart. Though she’d had almost no proximity to his flesh, his body, she felt as if the two of them were watching their parents from behind the same eyes.
Robert made the first move. First he shook Adam’s hand, then Ray’s. Meanwhile, Lila reached to shake Evie’s hand, then Sasha’s. Were other hands as sweaty and cold as hers felt? “Hello’s” and “Nice to see you’s” went around.
She was sorely conscious of how red the red of her mother’s dress pulsed next to Lila’s beige, how red her mother’s lips looked compared to Lila’s plain gloss. Again she felt the warring feelings, the cowardice and shame battling. Would Lila approve of her own dress? She would, wouldn’t she? Would she approve of Evie’s? No. She might even laugh about it later.
Even worse, she felt the undeniable force of Lila’s confidence, Lila’s basic sense of belonging. Evie’s dress probably cost ten times as much, but Lila was the one who knew how to do this: how to look, how to act. In her posture alone you could feel that it was still her house, still fundamentally her family, however Robert tried to spin it otherwise.
When they all pulled back and it came time for Robert and Lila to greet each other, they didn’t. Time got slow and thick. Lila cocked her head, pressed her lips together. Robert’s jaw was clamped. He put an arm around Evie. Sasha felt his other hand land on her angel bone, not solidly possessive, as she would expect, but slightly shaky. That rattled her too.
Sasha was nervous to keep looking at him. With Lila in the room, she saw him through different eyes, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
Robert placed his large frame at the place where the foyer opened up to the rest of the house, like it was his and he was the gatekeeper. Lila’s entrance was inexorable, but he was acting like he got to say when.
Sasha cast an eye at Ray and saw her trepidation mirrored there. So united were they, she suddenly remembered they forgot they hadn’t met. As momentous an occasion as this was, nobody appeared to be paying much attention to them. She turned and took a step toward him, put her hand out. “Hi, Ray,” she said.
“Can I get anyone a drink?” Robert boomed. He turned and walked down the three stairs into the living room. And that was that. Robert said when.
How would they greet each other? They wouldn’t greet each other. That was the answer.
All the parents moved through the foyer and into the living room. Ray held her hand for an extra second. “Hi, Sasha,” he said just to her.
Quinn came out from the kitchen. She was wearing an aqua-colored Indian print tunic, her fine, wispy hair neater than usual, with a sprig of jasmine tucked above her ear. A silver dot sparkled in her nose, in spite of her dad’s demand that she not wear it. But her face was troubled, complicated. Her eyes were so far away it looked like they saw a different house, a different party.
She hugged Sasha, even though she’d seen her ten minutes earlier. And then Sasha watched Quinn hug Ray.
When she was little, she’d been jealous when Quinn talked about Ray. She was tormented by envy when Quinn left their old apartment on Eighty-First Street to go back to Brooklyn. She knew Ray was there, and that her loss was always his gain. She knew Quinn loved him. She knew it, and now for the first time she saw it: for a moment Quinn’s troubled, distant face was remade by her tenderness, her comfort with him, and Ray’s face lit up in return. Looking at it from here, Sasha didn’t feel jealous an
ymore.
She saw from the outside what she had, and she felt lucky that in a family like theirs they had it—they both had it. In a family where there was always too much, there was never enough, Quinn was their shared miracle. Her influence over the two of them was as quietly powerful as any. It was because of her that Sasha and Ray understood each other as they did.
It was strange, it was wonderful to have a counterpart.
—
Ray couldn’t remember what Sasha looked like even minutes after he’d seen her. That was why it hit him so hard this time. He was flappable. He was flapped. He worried if he so much as turned a corner, he’d lose her again.
Last time, casually clothed in a darkish hallway, the shape of her seemed partly a function of his heated imagination. Back then she was still a stranger with a stranger’s possibilities.
This time he just gaped, a violent deadlock of desires and inhibitions. Her delicacy and roundness and slenderness were a story justly told by her pale green dress—told better than his overheating brain could muster.
She was talking to Jamie’s sister. He could barely look at her, but he couldn’t look anywhere else.
The inhibitions were not quite holding up their end, were they? He tried to concentrate on what he was saying to Mr. Folkes, their neighbor on Eel Cove Road, but he kept losing track. Mr. Folkes was largely senile, so they, at least, were decently matched.
Sasha/Ray, is that really you? Can the yin of my yang really look like that? Make me feel like that?
An eerie breeze blew across the patio, across the pond. Robert walked by and looked him up and down, and Ray’s inhibitions got back in the game.
—
Just before the party started, Emma had tentatively begun to eschew the whole idea of the trial. She’d had a perilously delusional thought: What if this is actually fun?
She’d felt confident in her peach-pink dress. Jamie had kissed her passionately behind the hedge just before his family arrived. She’d thought, well, maybe it really was their party: to control, to enjoy.
Her sisters had gone all out to make everything look pretty. Jamie’s parents seemed wholesome and friendly. At first.
“Can you say something to the bartender? Don’t let him give my mother another gin and tonic, okay?” Jamie whispered to her urgently as he was drawn past by Grandma Hardy.
Emma looked around. Susan Hurn was standing a few feet from the makeshift bar, tall lime-topped glass in hand, talking animatedly with Evie. Jamie’s father was standing by the pool with her father discussing golf or fishing or home repair or something. Her dad kept gesturing a large movement with his arm.
The clouds to the west were distinctly gray, and an erratic breeze was starting to blow. Party guests were anchoring paper plates and napkins under glasses and bottles.
Emma caught sight of her own mother standing near the house with an untouched plate of food, barely holding it together. Adam was in careful attendance. He felt the danger too, she knew.
It worried her that the Hurns seemed to be snubbing Lila. Was it because of the stupid note on engraved stationery? Had Lila never responded? They must have sensed her hostility to the whole thing. “She’ll come around to it,” she’d overheard Jamie saying to his mother on the phone the night before.
Emma dipped into the house and saw Quinn assembling her flower cake in the kitchen. Mattie, dressed like a pilgrim, relatively speaking, and uncharacteristically shy, was fixing up the buffet. The small contingent of Princeton friends had walked down to the pond.
I wish this was over.
She watched Jamie’s mother take a step toward the bar and order yet another drink from the pimply neighbor kid playing bartender.
What was Emma supposed to do? Was she supposed to take the drink from her mother-in-law-to-be’s clenched hand? A woman with whom she’d so far exchanged all of five sentences? It seemed early in the relationship for intervention and tough love.
Why didn’t he mention his mother was a lush? she thought uncharitably. There had been clues though, hadn’t there? If she’d been paying attention. If she’d wanted to ask. Had he wanted her to?
Emma had always been an uncharitable person, fine, yet she’d never had an uncharitable thought about Jamie before this.
She heard the dreaded clinking of fork on glass. Her father was keeping track of the sky too. This was uncomfortable, but a necessary step in getting the party over with. She cast a wary eye at Jamie. Here goes.
Her father positioned himself in the center of the patio with Evie nearby. He clinked his glass again and guests began to drift over. Jamie set Grandma Hardy up in a sturdy chair and went over to check on his mother. His father had already found a seat for her. Jamie’s sister, Grace, looked apprehensive.
You’re supposed to be the normal ones, Emma mused.
Lila was still backed up against the house, a semi-willing participant. No one wanted to eat her bean salad.
Mattie emerged from the house and steered a wide path around Lila. Quinn came out the sliding-glass kitchen doors carrying her cake, framed in wildflowers, the loveliest offering of all, and placed it on the buffet table. Sasha stood uncomfortably by Evie; Ray stood with Mr. and Mrs. Reese under the shade of the arbor.
Jamie appeared at Emma’s side and reached for her hand. She saw the sweat stains down the back of his shirt and felt a wave of tenderness.
“First, Evie and I would like to welcome our guests,” her father began in a loud, public voice. He reached over to wrap his arm around Evie.
Emma cast an uneasy look at her mother. It didn’t help, her father putting it like that.
“Especially the Hurns, who’ve come all the way from Ohio to be with us,” he went on. Her father didn’t seem nervous, exactly, but he did seem stiff. He talked on about how proud he was of her and Jamie for their commitment to each other and to the great institution of marriage blah blah.
A bit of polite clapping came mostly from the old people in the group.
“Emma, you are a beautiful and accomplished young woman.” He lifted his glass and she lifted hers in return. “Jamie, you are a credit to your family and a credit to our firm.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Usually Emma enjoyed praise of any kind, but this she could do without. Intimate praise for public ears never felt right to her. Anyway, it wasn’t for her and Jamie. It was mostly for himself and for the Hurns.
“I raise my glass to you both.”
There was a lot of clapping and glass raising and corny “hear, hear” kinds of things.
Jamie’s father, Stewart, moved next to Robert. He cleared his throat, waited for quiet. “Susan and I would like to thank Robert and Evie for opening their beautiful home to us.”
Emma waited for him to thank Lila and Adam, but he didn’t. He droned on for a while longer and finished with another groaner:
“And we’d like to thank Robert for giving Jamie this great opportunity at Califax and an even greater opportunity to marry his daughter.”
Robert laughed heartily in appreciation and a few other people laughed lightly in embarrassment. Emma could not even look at her mother. God, this was painful.
Did the Hurns not understand the state of things here? That there was plenty of hostility between the two sides of her family without them getting in the middle and stoking it? Emma cast a desperate glance at Quinn.
Quinn took a couple of brave steps toward the center of the group. “Excuse me, Mr. Hurn, I’m sorry to interrupt. But before you go on, I wanted to say that it’s also my—”
Now it was too late. Lila put her wineglass down so hard on the table it smashed. All eyes switched to her. It was more effective than just clinking a fork.
Lila didn’t even glance down at the pieces. “Stewart, you are mistaken,” she said, moving a few feet out from the wall. Emma couldn’t t
ell if Lila meant to be talking to just Stewart and Robert or to the whole assembly. “About several things.” She stood tall and her voice carried well enough to be heard. She was the witch come to curse the wedding. And yet Emma’s sympathy went with the witch at the moment.
Jamie held tight to Emma’s hand. She felt frozen in place.
“I’m not sure what Jamie told you, but this is not Robert’s house. My grandfather built it on land bought by his father. Yes, you are his guest, but you are also mine. Robert doesn’t own this house and he doesn’t own Emma.”
Jamie tried to say something, but Robert shut him down.
Her dad was seething now, on the slim edge of control. It scared Emma to see him like this. “I’d like to explain,” he kept saying. He wouldn’t even look at Lila; he kept addressing himself to poor Stewart Hurn. Emma could feel the social distress around the patio as her dad started telling Mr. Hurn how he’d bought the house from Lila’s lout of a father before he defaulted and lost it to the bank. Were these poor guests supposed to be listening anymore?
Emma barely heard the content of her father’s words. She heard the pent-up force of his anger, as though he’d been waiting twenty years to release it.
Even Lila seemed to blench in the face of it, but she wasn’t going to bow out. “We were still married then. We bought it from him together.”
Emma could not believe they were having this out here. Could they not control themselves at all? It was exactly what she’d feared and at the same time it was ridiculous and unimaginable.
Now her father did turn to Lila, and Emma had to look away. The rhythm of her heart got behind and couldn’t catch up. There was bitterness and disgust in his manner, to be expected, but there were other parts too that proud public Robert couldn’t have wanted anyone to see. “Were we married? Really? You didn’t act like it.” Emma heard for the first time an unformed, naive kind of pain under his voice.
Most of the guests were politely slipping away, Emma realized numbly. They were trailing down to the dock or into the house. It was too raw, too excruciating to watch.
The Summer Bed Page 17