Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  “Downtown” was far too ambitious a description of New Nineveh’s handful of storefronts and churches. They were arranged in a ring around a central green—an oval of lawn studded with autumn-hued trees, an aged iron cannon, several war memorials, and some benches on which Peggy had so far seen not a soul sitting. A flag fluttered red, white, and blue on its pole; a shaggy pine tree pointed like an arrow toward the sky. On this crisp morning the area was deserted, except for people going home from church: the white wood Congregational building she’d just left, the red-roofed Victorian Methodist church on the south side of the green, the neo-Gothic stone Episcopal church to the east. People chatted on the leaf-covered granite sidewalks and returned to their cars. Walking the green, Peggy understood why no one had lingered. The town was pretty; it would have been a perfect setting for a boutique like Peggy’s. But there was little to do here. Three-quarters of the buildings were either real estate offices or posh antiques dealers—not places that invited casual browsing. The few other stores weren’t the sort that brought in droves: Seymour’s Hardware, the Cheese Shoppe, a small Italian restaurant called Luigi’s, and the Toggery, where two WASP mannequins posed with his and hers camel-hair coats draped across their shoulders. Establishments were shuttered, too—an old coffee shop, a dentist’s office, and a store whose faded gold window-lettering proclaimed: “Star Jewelers, Since 1909.” Taped directly above was a sign: “Come see us at our new location in Pilgrim Plaza!”

  Despite finding long johns at the Toggery, Peggy returned to the Sedgwick House discouraged by the state of the town.

  Annette Fiorentino was in her front yard next door, raking leaves. She greeted Peggy. “What do you do all week? Ernestine says you work in the city.”

  “I own a little bath products shop,” Peggy answered. “Why are you picketing?”

  “You own a little shop!” Annette wore a Baja pullover—a hooded Mexican jacket. Peggy hadn’t seen one since she was eleven and had lived for eight months near the beach in Ventura. The non-Yankee garment made her like Annette that much more. “I’d love to recruit you for our protests,” the neighbor continued. “We picket on Saturdays when the weather is good, more often when there’s a specific threat.”

  “Threat to what?”

  “To our town. To its rural character, its history. To the health of our small local businesses—I’m sure you can relate.” Annette scraped a few leaves off the tines of her rake. “We started picketing when the zoning commission approved Pilgrim Plaza out on Route 202. We want to remind people that once you pave a place over, once you bring in the Star-bucks and the Gap and the McDonald’s, you can’t go back. Please, join us. So far our group is mostly weekend people from New York and people like Angelo and me who moved to New Nineveh from other places. Getting a local on board would be a big coup.”

  Peggy would have loved to help Annette. “Miss Abigail would have a fit,” she told the neighbor sadly, and returned to the Sedgwick House.

  She changed into jeans, tidied her room, set her purse and tote bag at the top of the stairs, and knocked on the ballroom door. As she’d expected, Luke was at his desk, his head bowed over his work. Probably writing poems to that redhead. For someone who claimed never to have been consumed by love, Luke wrote some convincing verse. Maybe he’s just in lust with her, not in love, Peggy told herself, but felt no better.

  “I thought I’d fix Miss Abigail lunch,” she said.

  “She’s taking a nap,” Luke answered.

  “In that case, I’m heading back to the city.”

  Luke lifted his head. “Why?”

  “I feel like I’m”—she didn’t know how to explain it—“in your way.”

  “You’re not.”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses on his shirt. Without them, his eyes had a directness that reminded Peggy of Silas Sedgwick’s commanding gaze in the library portrait. Even more than the people in church, there was something not of this time about Luke. It was hardly a stretch to imagine him in a high-collared eighteenth-century jacket and ruffled dress shirt, exuding that same “my name is my destiny” confidence, presiding over generations of descendants as yet unborn. Except that Luke, Tiffany had said, was unhappy in the world his family had created and which Miss Abigail guarded so ferociously.

  “You asked why I didn’t help Milo yesterday.” Luke replaced his glasses, and the effect was gone. “This is why. When I was ten, my mother got a second-degree burn on her thumb. We were at a clambake. She rinsed it with seawater, wrapped a towel around it, and that was that. My father was an attackman on his lacrosse team at Yale. One time he got hit on the head so hard that he passed out on the field and then came to, brushed himself off, and scored the winning goal on a behind-the-back shot. There are two guiding Sedgwick family principles. Number one…” He counted them on his fingers. “‘If it’s easy, you’re doing it wrong.’ Number two, ‘Pain builds character.’ So my parents didn’t swoop in if I stepped in a mud puddle.”

  Peggy felt sorry for him. “That’s sad. And strange.”

  “It’s the way I was raised.” He spun the chair so he was facing her, not the desk. “Also, I don’t talk for the sake of talking. You need to know this if we’re going to get along. If I’m quiet, it means I have nothing to say. I’ll discuss financial concerns affecting you, but personal issues are off the table. This has nothing to do with you. It’s simply who I am.”

  “I understand.”

  But she didn’t. Brock had been easy. When he was happy, he was happy, and when he wasn’t, she’d cook dinner and hand him a beer and he’d be happy again. She’d never had to decipher the moods of her parents, who broadcast, to the point of exhaustion, each thought, feeling, and, in her mother’s case, worry the moment it came up. Nothing in her experience had prepared Peggy for friendship with a person so reserved.

  She dropped off her rental car and arrived at the apartment to find Bex in pajamas in front of the microwave. “What are you doing out of bed?” Peggy looked around. “Where’s Josh?”

  Bex stretched. “Out with his brother. I gave him a reprieve. Meanwhile I’m so tired of resting I want to run up and down the stairs about a thousand times. How was your weekend?” She kept her eye on the cup of instant cocoa revolving inside the microwave.

  Peggy hit the “pause” button. “Don’t drink that. It’s all chemicals. I’ll make you real hot chocolate. Keep resting.” She placed her hands firmly on Bex’s shoulders and steered her protesting friend back to bed. She fluffed up Bex’s pillows, smoothed the sheets, and stood back so Bex could get in.

  “You’re becoming me, all bossy and full of yourself,” grumbled Bex.

  “I take that as a compliment.” Peggy tucked her in and returned to the kitchen to search the cabinets for cocoa and sugar and cinnamon. Ten minutes later, she was back in Bex’s room with a steaming mug.

  Bex sipped appreciatively. “You’re right. This is so much better. Now, how was your weekend?”

  Peggy sat on the edge of the bed. “Luke and I are friends. That’s what we’re saying, anyway.”

  “I don’t get it. What were you before?”

  “I’m not sure. Hostile business associates, I guess.” Peggy pointed at the mug, and Bex passed it over. The hot chocolate tasted heavenly, like comfort. She passed it back to Bex. “What do you think Luke saw in me in Las Vegas?”

  “He’s your husband. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Right. He’d never say. He never says anything, really.”

  “What do you expect, sweets? He’s a WASP. Withholding, unemotional, wears tweedy jackets, drinks too many gin and tonics. That’s it!” Bex pushed away from her pillow, nearly spilling her cocoa. “Opposites attract. You’re everything he isn’t! That’s what he sees in you.”

  “I don’t think so.” Luke could be warm and funny when he wanted to be. And he had emotions—he wrote poetry. But not to me, Peggy reminded herself. Anyway, what was the point of dwelling on what she and Luke had or hadn’t seen
in each other? This wasn’t a relationship; it was a financial agreement. I will not develop a crush on Luke Sedgwick. “I’m surprised at you, using stereotypes,” she told Bex.

  “All stereotypes have a basis in reality.”

  “So you’re Jewish. I guess that makes you…what?”

  “Oy.” Bex laughed. “Cheap, loud, and demanding. So when can I see this schmancy house of yours?”

  “You don’t want to, trust me. It’s a wreck.”

  “Then would you at least get me a cookie?”

  This time Peggy rolled her eyes, but she returned to the kitchen just as her phone began playing its music in her purse. She answered and was greeted with an earsplitting din punctuated by air-horn blasts and an announcer over a loudspeaker.

  “Hey. I’m in Philly,” her caller shouted.

  “Brock?”

  “Big Eagles-Redskins game tonight. We’ve got about twenty minutes to kickoff and the crowd is going nuts. Must be a full moon.”

  “Brock,” Peggy shouted back, “what are you doing?”

  “How about dinner next week?”

  “We’re broken up,” she bellowed, perhaps louder than necessary, just as Josh came in, taking earphones from his ears.

  “Hi!” Josh hugged her. “Missed you this weekend.”

  “Who’s that?” A beep from Peggy’s call waiting drowned out Brock’s question. It was typical: Either nobody paid her the slightest notice or the entire world needed her at the same time.

  Josh winked at her and went to check on Bex, faraway music still spilling out of his dangling earphones. The call waiting beeped again.

  “I just heard a guy say he missed you,” Brock persisted. “Are you with some other guy?”

  “Yes.” Peggy’s heart beat faster at the half-truth. “It’s over between us, Brock.” She switched to the other call, ending her conversation and any remnant of her former relationship with the press of one small but decisive button.

  The waiting caller was, unmistakably, Miss Abigail.

  “Dear? I’d like your parents’ address in California.” She would be in the den, standing, not sitting, somehow able to hold that two-pound phone receiver to her ear. “I’d like to ask them to Thanksgiving dinner. It’s time we met.”

  Peggy tried to shift mental gears. At least she could hear what Miss Abigail was saying. The Sedgwicks’ old phone got crystal-clear reception. “That’s kind of you, Miss Abigail, but my parents can’t come for Thanksgiving.”

  Thanksgiving. Peggy had not considered what she’d do on holidays. For the past seven years, while Brock worked at some football game or another, she’d had dinner with Bex and Josh at Bex’s parents’ apartment. Peggy roasted the turkey; Bex’s dad, Allen, baked mincemeat pie; her curly-haired whirlwind of a mom, Sue, zipped around trying to locate the gravy boat; her sister, Rachel, who was a vegan, picked at the meal and sulked. For Christmas, Peggy generally traveled alone to Texas or Arizona, wherever her parents had parked their RV. More often than not, Brock worked on that holiday, too, and on New Year’s Day. She spent New Year’s Eve with Bex and Josh, or alone, with a good book.

  “We’ll have them for Christmas instead,” Miss Abigail declared. “They’ll spend the week with us. Their address, please?”

  Peggy thought fast and gave Miss Abigail her parents’ last permanent address, the house they had sold years ago. She hoped Luke’s great-aunt wouldn’t notice the location wasn’t Palo Alto but San Jose, and that the post office wouldn’t send the letter back. Peggy would forge a note back from her mother, sending regrets, and bring it to New Nineveh, claiming Madeleine had accidentally mailed it to her instead of the Sedgwick House. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it would have to do.

  Optimism wasn’t a state of mind in which Luke often found himself. He wasn’t altogether comfortable with the sensation, though it was interesting, almost enjoyable. He wondered at its source but came up with no answer.

  An hour or two after Peggy had left Sunday afternoon, Luke had heard coughing and come upon Abby in the shut-down east addition, trying to drag the dust covers off the furniture. “It’s gone! Lost and gone!” was his great-aunt’s familiar, distressed refrain, but then she’d dropped the search, seeming, blessedly, to forget about it, and had been in a cheerful mood since. Luke was still trying to decide exactly when and how to tell her he and Peggy planned to start fixing up the house without tipping her off that they were already set on selling it. But if her mood held, it might help soften the blow.

  He slept better. He made a couple of daring trades. He wrote two poems with images of bright skies and birds on the wing—poems so sunny, he couldn’t believe they’d come from him. They weren’t any good, but he’d finished them. It was a boon he wasn’t questioning.

  He went from room to room in the Sedgwick House with a legal pad and a gimlet eye, cataloging everything that needed to be fixed or attended to, beginning with the ruffled fungus fanning from the corners of the basement and finishing with the splintery balustrade around the widow’s walk on the roof of the main house. He stayed on the roof awhile, looking out over the garden and then across to the Rigas’ place on Market Road. For much of his life he’d come up here simply for the fun of it, not to check for leaks or to clear birds’ nests from the chimneys. At eight, he’d liked to stand alone, high above it all, Zeus on Mount Olympus with an armful of lightning bolts. He’d spent his eleventh summer at the balustrade, throwing water balloons at passing cars. The summer he was sixteen, he’d lost his virginity up here to a tape of “Margaritaville” with Ann Marie Scoggs, a girl from Torrington High School, she of the tenth-grade cynicism and clove cigarettes. Not surprisingly, his parents and great-aunt hadn’t approved of her, and she couldn’t comprehend them. In August, just before he’d returned to Andover, Ann Marie had told him, “Your conservative shit bums me out, and Jimmy Buffett sucks,” and broken up with him. It had taken him half the year to get over her, but now he looked back on the experience with fondness. If this roof could talk.

  Back on the first floor, he came across Abby in the ladies’ parlor, having a discussion with her cat. “Nonsense.” She held out a hand so a purring Quibble could rub it with his whiskery cheeks. “I’ll find that nest egg and then the only way they’ll be able to take me out of here is through the coffin door—” She stopped talking as Luke came in.

  “Find what?” he asked.

  Abby petted the cat carefully.

  Luke crouched down next to her. “Is it possible you’ve hidden more jewelry around the house?”

  Quibble twitched the tip of his tail and darted from the room.

  Abby chuckled. “All that jewelry was sold long ago. It’s just Elizabeth’s brooch left, and…”

  “And what?” Luke mentally spun through all the jewelry he remembered. There couldn’t be anything of value left. Could there?

  “There’s a box,” Abigail went on. “With a star. From Charles.”

  It all made sense. This was what Abigail had been so keen to find lately. This was why she’d been tearing the house apart, for an obscure gift from her lover Luke had never before heard about. More likely, he suspected, it was Abby’s dementia talking, and there was no box.

  But this was a fortunate break for him. “I’ll tell you what.” The mystery was solved, and he could use it to his advantage: a harmless white lie to appease his great-aunt. “Peggy and I will find the box for you. On the weekends we’ll look for it, one room at a time. We’ll do a little tidying and patching up as we go, too.”

  Abigail’s gaze gave way to her piercing look. “You’re a credit to the family, Luke.”

  Luke felt like anything but. He thanked her anyway.

  Peggy couldn’t have imagined she’d see the day when Brooklyn would become a destination for people who lived in Manhattan. But when the taxi dropped her off for her date with Jeremy at the corner of Bedford Avenue and North Sixth Street, under an orange flag that spelled “twig” in lowercase fuchsia letters, Peggy realized her
simple black dress was as wrong here as it had been in New Nineveh, if for entirely different reasons. Williamsburg was teeming with thrift store girls in brocade coats and lace-up boots and scruffy boys with artfully disarranged Guatemalan knit hats. Peggy decided she hated trying to keep up with trends. She probably always had.

  She hung back on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, took out her vial of emergency Ativan, shook a tiny white house-shaped pill into her cold palm, and swallowed it without water.

  Jeremy was waiting at the bar, absorbed with his electronic gadget. Next to him a group was singing “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” to a tattooed woman in a “You Say Dyke Like It’s a Bad Thing” T-shirt.

  “I hope you weren’t waiting long,” Peggy apologized to her date. She could only imagine how Luke—Luke again; why did she insist on thinking about him?—would react to her being six minutes late, stranding him next to a raucous hipster birthday party.

  “Not a problem.” Jeremy rose and kissed Peggy European style on each cheek. “We’re here now,” he told the hostess, who tossed her blond, waist-length dreadlocks and walked them to their table. Peggy clandestinely wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. She supposed this was one good thing about being a repressed Yankee: Luke wouldn’t subject anyone to an overly familiar Euro-kiss.

  With a jolt, she realized he must have kissed her. She tried to recall how his lips had felt on hers. Was he a good kisser? Did the Yankee restraint hide a passionate heart? The partial poem on his desk had made it seem that way. Staid genes worked hot from your electric charms. He might be with his girlfriend right now. She pushed the unwelcome thought from her mind as Jeremy pulled out her chair.

  It was Luke’s turn to host poker night. At seven o’clock on Wednesday, half an hour before the rest of the players arrived, he ushered Ver Planck into the gentlemen’s parlor. Ver Planck produced two comically oversize cigars. He clipped off the end of the first one with a gold Dunhill cutter and offered it to Luke. “Montecristo A. Best smoke money can buy.”