Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  It was turning into quite a storm. The rain had started in earnest after Abigail and Peggy had retired to their rooms for the night and Luke had gone up to his study to crunch numbers. Now it was well into the night—early morning, actually—and the wind was hammering cold rain against his bedroom window and lashing the branches of the maple trees, which by dawn likely would be bare. He lay awake in the dark, his mind full of thoughts like ricocheting tennis balls.

  “Did you find it?” Abigail had asked over dinner. Luke had been about to help himself to seconds of Abby’s signature casserole, a childhood favorite, the one made with chicken, celery, mayonnaise, and cheese and topped with crumbled potato chips.

  Peggy had looked up with interest.

  “No,” Luke had answered, distracted. Peggy had cleaned up after their day in the basement and wore a soft pink sweater pinned with the Sedgwick brooch; she looked uncannily at home at the Sedgwick dining table. Still, he’d changed the subject to the water problem in the basement. Peggy might pass for a Sedgwick, but she wasn’t one and didn’t need to know about Abigail’s box with the star. That counted as personal business. He’d had a flash of inspiration that Abby might have hidden her “nest egg” in the same secret spot as the last of the family port, but it was possible, he realized, that Peggy had thought he was getting out the bottle to share it with her. He would have to phrase things more carefully in the future so she wouldn’t think he was attracted to her. That wouldn’t do at all.

  But spending the day with Peggy hadn’t been bad. She’d been a sport about the fungus and had taken him by surprise with the leaf attack.

  Another tennis ball sailed over the net: water in the basement. Luke couldn’t begin to guess how much that would cost to fix. He would probably have to leave the task to the house’s new owner. He mentally knocked twenty thousand dollars off the asking price.

  Still, the sale of the property, if added to his meager investment portfolio, would go a long way toward allowing him a new life, modest but unfettered at long last from his family name and New Nineveh. He would never leave while Abigail was still alive, but eventually…He envisioned his possible future home. A Hemingway cottage in the Florida Keys, a cabin in the Rockies, a sailboat to dock in any port that appealed to him. He’d do his investing during the day and write poetry at night. Nothing to fix, no obligations, nothing to do but figure out who he was.

  But just as he mentally ran to return that imaginary lob, a real and particularly strong gust of wind rattled his bedroom window. He cursed himself for not having brought the rain bucket to the mudroom. Distracted by the leaf fight, he’d forgotten it down on the lawn. He’d had a little fun and now would pay for it. He turned over in his bed with a groan. The bedsprings creaked sharply. His predecessors would sneer at him, wallowing in self-pity over having to venture outside for a bucket and going on about finding himself. You are Luke Silas Sedgwick the Fourth. There is nothing else to know, Silas Ebenezer Sedgwick scolded in Luke’s imagination. Cease this self-indulgent melancholy. And get that rain bucket at once. I fear for your character.

  The fantasy tennis balls fell to the clay and stayed there. Action was the best antidote to worry, and there was an immediate problem to deal with: the infamous three-floor Silas Sedgwick House leak.

  Luke got out of bed in the dark, put on a sweater over his T-shirt and pajama pants, and jammed his feet into his slippers. He padded past his study and then past Peggy’s closed door to the linen closet near the bathroom, where he got the third-floor bucket, set it in the spot where the rain had already soaked through, and descended the new staircase to the second-floor closet where he kept the second-floor bucket, placed it in its spot under the water dripping from the third floor, and went down the final flight to the first floor. It was black as a tomb down here, but he knew the house’s every twist and turn. It wasn’t until the dining room that he turned on a light, startling Quibble, who fled—perhaps toward the mudroom, where Abby kept his food dish. Outside, the wind howled and rain pummeled the house. He strained his ears, and there it was: the tap, tap, tap of rainwater in the front entry. He stood, indecisive. He really should retrieve the bucket.

  No. He’d take a chance, just this once.

  The punch bowl was in the buffet cabinet, filled with folded table linens that Luke stacked neatly on the dining table. He carried the bowl into the foyer and set it on the floor under the hanging lamp. At once the timbre of the drip changed, from tap, tap, tap to tink, tink, tink as it cascaded off the lamp into crystal instead of onto wood.

  Satisfied, Luke climbed the front stairs, avoiding the creaky step. On the top floor he hesitated, and instead of turning toward his own room, he tiptoed up to Peggy’s door. He moved closer and pressed his ear to it, straining to hear…he wasn’t sure what. Perhaps a sign that he wasn’t the only one swatting at mental tennis balls at two in the morning. But the tink, tink, tink of captured rainwater echoed below, and the storm howled above, and Luke’s shame eclipsed his curiosity, and he retreated to his vacant bed.

  The paperweight was the only misstep, and who would notice it? A palm-size dome of glass with the three-dimensional pattern Peggy remembered was called millefiori, it wasn’t the first, second, or tenth object any other Sunday afternoon lunch guest at the Ver Planck family compound would see—not when there were so many other breathtaking things to look at. Such as the sculpture in the corner: a ten-foot heap of tangled, rusted wire out of which reached a single pink-resin arm; or the rug fashioned from loops of wool the diameter of rope; or the art on the soaring walls. From her spot on a geometric red sofa, Tiffany pointed. “That one with the giant blue splotch drives my nana up a tree. She says she could do it herself blindfolded.” She laughed her infectious snorting laugh. Through the wall of glass behind her, a sinuous steel sculpture took the place of honor in a goldening meadow of tall grass that had surely been landscaped to look unlandscaped.

  But Peggy kept returning to the paperweight on the coffee table, and at last Tiffany picked it up and passed it to her. “My mom gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday. Chachi—that’s our decorator—he hates it. Tom made him let me keep it, but when Chachi comes in here he always goes”—she sang—”‘One of these things is not like the others…one of these things doesn’t belong…’ Remember, from Sesame Street?”

  Peggy thought Chachi would sing the same thing if he saw Peggy herself, small and incongruous in her own chair, a gray upholstered spiral whose twin she was certain she’d once seen at the Museum of Modern Art. She clutched the paperweight. It was solid, feminine, comforting.

  “I’m so happy you could come,” Tiffany said. “I’m sure you don’t like to be apart from Luke. You’re separated so much as it is.” She stopped and drew together her eyebrows in concern. “Are you cold? I could turn up the heat.”

  Peggy shook her head. It was overwhelming—the lunch prepared by an invisible chef and served by a housekeeper; this airplane hangar of a house, with its pitched angles and lofty ceilings. Peggy’s parents could park their RV in Tiffany’s living room. Peggy suspected she’d uttered no more than a dozen sentences since she’d driven this week’s rented car up the sweeping driveway and spotted Tiffany waiting for her at the front door, bouncy haired and smiling in pressed jeans and cheetah-spotted needlepoint slippers.

  “Peggy, please.” Tiffany glanced at the wireless baby monitor next to her on the sofa cushion. “I know this place is a little much. It has this effect on people; they kind of clam up and stare. But we have exactly forty minutes left until Milo wakes up from his nap, and then it’s all over. Didn’t you have questions? Please, ask!”

  “I don’t know where to start,” Peggy began. “I don’t know about anything Yankees are supposed to know about. I don’t even understand the difference between Yankees, preppies, and WASPs. I haven’t a clue about prep school or sailing or polo. I’m not descended from Pilgrims, and my family doesn’t live like…” she waved her hand around the room.

  “This,” Tiffany
finished the sentence. “Okay, I’ll tell you a secret. Liddy, Kyle, Topher—they don’t live like this, either. When they come here, they’re appalled. They think it’s all very showy and tacky and new money, just like me.”

  Peggy was shocked. “They say that?”

  The housekeeper glided in with a tray of gemlike cookies and two glasses garnished with twists of orange peel.

  “Ooh, yummy! Thanks, Clea. Try the water, Peggy. It’s infused with citrus and ginger.” Tiffany took a drink as Clea glided back out. “Anyway, no, they don’t say that. They’re too well-bred to talk trash. But they all think I’m a social climber. It doesn’t help that the first time they met me, I was slinging burgers at J. G. Melon.”

  Peggy knew the restaurant. It was on the Upper East Side. “You were a waitress?”

  Tiffany touched her nose, the Charades gesture that meant Peggy had made the correct guess. “They used to meet up there after work on Thursday nights, back when everyone was young and single and living in Manhattan. Well, everyone but Luke—he’d gotten a place in Hartford. Funny…” a faraway look came into her eyes. “You’d think Luke would have left Connecticut the second he had the chance.” She reached for another cookie. “Anyhow, I thought Tom was so hot that one night I made the hostess seat them all in my section. To them, I’m sure, I’m the gold digger who stole their friend. Which, for the record, I’m not. A gold digger, I mean.”

  “How do you know they think that?”

  “I grew up among the Yankees, remember? I understand their ways. Tom says Liddy and Kyle and the others are boring and insular and doubts he’d be friends with them anymore if they hadn’t all grown up together. Except for Luke, who doesn’t seem to buy the old-money-versus-new-money, us-versus-them garbage, either.” She took a miniature meringue from the cookie assortment. “The funniest part is, Luke and Tom have the bluest blood of the bunch.”

  Peggy selected a diamond-shaped shortbread. “They all seem pretty blue-blooded to me.”

  “But they’re not. Not by their own standards. Topher Eaton might wear Nantucket Reds and mix a mean Bloody Mary, but his mother is Argentinian, which hardly makes him a WASP. And Bunny Simmons’s parents belong to the Maidstone Club, but—ever heard of Crazy Carl Kirkendall?”

  “Connecticut’s Carpet King?”

  “Creighton’s dad. Talk about an outsider. People say he had to agree to resurface the school tennis courts before Choate would let her in.” Tiffany slipped a lacy wafer off the cookie tray. “Kyle Hubbard is a swamp Yankee, two generations removed.”

  Peggy took another cookie as well; she couldn’t help it. “Swamp Yankee?”

  “A Connecticut redneck. I’m not saying these things to be mean. Lord knows I have no pedigree. My mom was a stewardess before she met my dad, and now she’s office manager for an orthodontist. My dad was—probably still is, wherever he is—a swimming pool contractor. But Tom is from this ancient Dutch family that settled in New York when it was still New Amsterdam. He thinks it’s hilarious when those people make their cracks about how our car is too flashy or our house is too modern or our son’s name is too trendy, or that Tom is far too interested in making a buck than befits a gentleman.”

  Peggy shifted in her chair. “I would hate it if people criticized me like that.”

  “Trust me. Tom doesn’t care. Neither do I. Neither does Luke, probably because he has the best credentials of all. He’s an authentic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and he went to an approved prep school, and he can trace his roots all the way to the Pilgrims, which means he’s hit the trifecta: He’s a WASP and a preppy and a Yankee. They don’t make ’em like Luke anymore.”

  “But I don’t care about any of those things,” Peggy said.

  “Aha!” Tiffany planted her slippered feet back on the floor. “That’s exactly why he’s so wild about you!”

  Peggy, who had just popped a sixth—or was it seventh?—cookie into her mouth, inhaled a little too sharply and got a crumb in her throat, leading to an eye-watering, face-reddening coughing fit that went on for far too many mortifiying minutes. Tiffany pounded her on the back, exhorted her to raise her arms over her head, assured her she wasn’t choking, because if she were, she wouldn’t be able to cough, and finally, when the fit began to wind down, instructed her to drink some water.

  “Whew!” Tiffany exclaimed after it was all over. “Was it something I said?”

  Peggy laughed feebly.

  “Here’s the thing, Peggy. Liddy and the others, they already assume you’re one of them. Unless they sense you’re trying too hard, they probably won’t figure you out. And if they do, so what?”

  Outside, the golden grass waved silkily. The baby monitor was still silent. If there was a time for Peggy to tell Tiffany the whole story behind her marriage, this would be it. It would be a tremendous relief to have a friend to confide in.

  “What’s bugging you?” Tiffany asked.

  Peggy thought, with a stab of conscience, of Bex. Hadn’t her best friend been remarkably supportive? Hadn’t she listened with interest to Peggy’s tales of the Sedgwicks and their idiosyncrasies, and of the Sedgwick House with its creaks and moans and things that went bump in the night? Last night had been particularly creepy, with the storm outside and ghostly footsteps up and down the stairs. She’d even felt something outside her door—felt it: a silent presence waiting for her. Bex was the only person who wouldn’t laugh when she related the story this evening.

  Yet Bex was in New York, and possibly pregnant. Tiffany was closer to the situation, intimately familiar with the cast of characters.

  “I don’t know”—Peggy spoke haltingly—“that our marriage, mine and Luke’s, will last very long.”

  Tiffany’s eyes lost their glow.

  It was the first time Peggy had seen her new friend unhappy, and she lamented having begun this confession that would now need to be spun out and explained. Too late, Peggy realized that admitting she’d wed Luke for financial gain probably wouldn’t endear her to a woman who’d spent her adult life trying to prove she hadn’t done that very thing.

  Peggy picked up the millefiori paperweight. “We got married quickly, and we’re from such different backgrounds and—”

  She wasn’t at the party, Peggy remembered. Luke had dropped that “she” so casually yesterday. Who else could “she” be but the redhead?

  “—and I think he’s seeing another woman,” Peggy said. Hearing the words aloud made her ill. She hadn’t realized how deeply the idea bothered her.

  Tiffany laughed—a magnificent, snorting giggle. “Peggy Sedgwick, welcome to WASPville. We all think the same thing about our husbands, I guarantee you—me, Liddy, Creighton, Carrie Eaton, all of us. Want my advice?” She leaned forward. “Be really good in bed. No whips or leather, mind you—this, as you know, is preppy sex we’re talking about, very white bread with mayonnaise—but my theory is, if Tom’s happy and satisfied, he won’t want to go anywhere else. Are you with me?”

  “Mummy!” Milo’s distant cry sounded on the baby monitor. “Mummy!”

  Tiffany pressed a button on the monitor and spoke into it soothingly. “I’m coming, baby. Be right there.” She got to her feet and looked at Peggy. “I hope this helped a little.”

  “It’s good to have someone to talk to,” Peggy assured her. “Thank you.”

  Tiffany brushed her hair back from her shoulders and picked up the baby monitor, cradling it as if it were her child. “I’m sure your marriage will be fine, Peggy. I really am. Just remember, people can pretend to be lots of things. But the way Luke looked at you at your wedding reception—after he read the Yeats poem? I’ve never seen him look at a woman that way. That’s why they call it true love, Peggy. There’s not a man in the world who can fake that.”

  TWELVE

  For the next week, Peggy had all the work she could handle at the store. December was approaching, their best sales month of the year, and she spent hours receiving new inventory and restocking shelves in preparation f
or the holiday rush. But even as she tried to keep her mind on her tasks, she’d catch herself ruminating on what Tiffany had said: “I’ve never seen him look at a woman that way.” Each time Peggy replayed those words, the same electric current thrilled through her. It was a sensation both enthralling and repellent, and she reached for it again and again, the way, as a child, she would press her tongue against a loose tooth. Then she’d remind herself that Tiffany, perceptive as she seemed, knew nothing of Peggy and Luke’s business deal, and a soft, smothering gloom would blanket her.

  Worse, she couldn’t understand why she cared whether Luke had a girlfriend or not. I must be lonelier than I thought, Peggy told herself.

  It was good, then, that she had Jeremy.

  On Thursday afternoon, a flicker outside the shop door caught Peggy’s eye, and a deliveryman came in, dwarfed by a floral arrangement wrapped in layers of tissue and protective plastic, a small white envelope stapled to the front. Peggy saw autumn leaves peeking over the top of the tissue paper, and the current electrified her spine again.

  She acted blasé until the man had gone, then she ripped the card from the bouquet and prepared herself: Luke couldn’t, wouldn’t have sent it. The flowers would be from Jeremy; she’d seen him yesterday as well as the day before. She sighed and peeled open the Lilliputian envelope.

  On the front of the card was printed, “Thinking of you.” On the back, in unfamiliar handwriting Peggy assumed was the florist’s:

  Missing you,

  Brock

  So the flowers weren’t from Jeremy after all. Peggy should have been upset that Brock kept trying to contact her. At the very least, she should have been troubled by the redundancy of “thinking of you” and “missing you.” Strangely, she was touched—even relieved. It made sense now why she’d been so blue. She must have subconsciously remembered November was the month she and Brock had met. Today could even be the day.…