ALSO BY AYELET WALDMAN
FICTION
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
Daughter’s Keeper
NONFICTION
Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes,
Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
To Michael, as ever
Contents
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Prelude
Part 1 - The First Summer
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Part 2 - The Second Summer
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Part 3 - The Third Summer
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Part 4 - The Fourth Summer
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Coda
Acknowledgments
Copyright
PRELUDE
The flower girl had lost her basket of rose petals and could not bear to have the photograph taken without it. Altogether she had been something of a disappointment in her role. She had forgotten to sprinkle the petals as she walked down the aisle of the church, remembering only once she reached the front pew. Perhaps she had been distracted by the transformation of the nave, the oiled and gleaming oak pews, the glass wall sconces sparkling, their long tapered candles lit for the first time in years, all the shutters on the windows flung open, letting in the light of the golden afternoon. And, everywhere, flowers. Purple and blue hydrangea woven into vines, long swags draped between the rows of pews and across the back of the altar. Shiny brass buckets of lupines and greenery on either side of the twin curved staircases leading up to the pulpit.
The flower girl had been adopted as a toddler from Cambodia and, despite the good intentions of her adoptive mother, had never before been included in this kind of family event. When she finally remembered her assignment, she widened her dark eyes, scooped up a handful of the white petals from her basket, and threw them back up the aisle as hard as she could. They made it no farther than the second row, where they flurried down onto the messy gray topknot of the vice president of the Red Hook Library Ladies’ Auxiliary. There was a burst of laughter, and the bride, measuring her way down the aisle, paused in midstride. The laughter abated. Would the bride be upset at the disturbance of her stately procession, so perfectly executed in last night’s rehearsal? Or would she exhibit the sense of humor reported by the groom to have been what first attracted him to her when they met ten years before?
The bride, honey-haired, with a high, smooth forehead and wide-set eyes the color of agate, hesitated only a moment before she grinned. Anxiously held breaths were exhaled and everyone took up his or her prior occupation. The weepers dug through their purses for bits of crumpled tissue. The pinchpennies resumed their calculations of the bills for flowers and candles. The gossips craned their necks to take careful note of who had and who had not been invited. The young women committed to memory every bead, pearl, strap, button, and length of silk of the bridal gown so they could later describe it in sufficient detail to those who had not been fortunate enough to garner an invitation of their own. The young men toyed with the keys in their pockets and longed for the ceremony to end so they could get to the music and the bar. The children fidgeted. And the older men glanced surreptitiously at their watches, trying to figure out if the ceremony would outlast the rubber game of the White Sox series at Fenway.
Now, after the service, standing on the top step of the pretty white clapboard church, the flower girl wept over the loss of her ribbon-and-rose-bedecked basket, and the bride promised her that the photograph would not be taken until it was found. Two of the groomsmen were dispatched to search inside the church. The lilac-clad bridesmaids went off to hunt among the rose arbors and white stone paths of the church’s garden, where the wedding guests waited in the shade cast by the church’s tall steeple, enjoying the view of sailboats cutting white grooves across the small cove, and ignoring the pastor’s warnings not to crush his carefully tended flower beds. To his wife’s annoyance, the father of the bride insisted on looking for the basket in the bridal couple’s waiting limousine. “But the flower girl was never in the limo,” the mother of the bride said. The father of the bride could not deny this, but nonetheless went to have a look. This was the way of their marriage. Although they were in staunch agreement that she knew best, he would generally ignore her advice.
As for the father of the groom, he had slipped around the back of the church for a much-needed cigarette. When the photographer tried to reassemble the party on the front steps of the church, he appeared to have joined the flower basket in its nuptial limbo. There was some alarm when his absence was noted, primarily on the part of his current girlfriend, who had insinuated herself, some thought brazenly, into the photograph. His ex-wife, the mother of the groom, turned to her younger son, the best man, and said, “Get your father. He’s around back having a cigarette.” To the photographer she said, “We’ll start without him if we have to. Won’t be the first time.”
The photographer busied himself with the bridal couple, adjusting the straps of the bride’s beaded bodice to cover the tan lines from her bathing suit, swirling her long silk train around her feet, and arranging her pearl-edged, tulle veil fetchingly over her right shoulder. He pulled loose a single curl of her blond hair and twisted it around his finger so that it sprang into place, framing and softening the broad planes of her cheek. He spent some time on her lush bouquet, shifting around the purple irises, lobelia, and periwinkle to disclose the lupines, the very last of the season and, he’d been told, the bride’s favorite flower. A few minutes before, he had gotten a fine shot as the couple ran out of the church into a shower of silver and gold Mylar confetti. The confetti caught the late afternoon sun and he’d captured the bride and groom laughing and ducking beneath a winking archway of light. Now, tiny flecks of fire were nestled in the whorls of the bride’s intricately arranged hair and in the tulle netting of her veil. Bright shards of light starred the groom’s shoulders.
Perfect, the photographer thought. The beautiful bride and handsome groom, the family in their finery arrayed against the crisp lines of the white clapboard church, the sapphire sea just visible at the edges of the frame. If only he could get them all to keep still.
“Do we want to take those off?” the photographer said, pointing to the groom’s steel-framed glasses.
The groom glanced at the bride, who nodded. He tried to slip the glasses into his jacket pocket but it was a brand-new pocket, still sewn shut. “Give them to me,” his mother said. He handed over the glasses and blinked his pale blue eyes. Without his glasses on his features looked softer, more boyish, his face gentle beneath his mariner’s tan and peeling nose—even vulnerable—as though his outmoded aviator frames had afforded him a kind of armor, a protective visor. The bride smiled sweetly at his defenseless expression and he gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “Watch her makeup,” the photographer said.
“It’s all right,” the br
ide said.
The father of the bride returned from his pointless search of the limousine, and the photographer found a place for him on the steps, taking care to hide the man’s feet. Early this afternoon, when the father of the bride went to put on his black dress shoes, he had sat on the edge of the old iron bedstead in the bedroom of the family’s summer home, holding them in his hands, and said, “Fuck.”
His wife turned from the mirror, where she was attempting to rub away some of the foundation she’d inexpertly applied to her face. “What’s wrong?”
Wordlessly he held up two black oxfords, almost but not quite identical, the toes of both shoes curving in the same direction.
“For heaven’s sake,” his wife said. There was an obvious observation to be made about his having two left feet, but she forbore.
There had been no time to drive the thirty miles to the closest shoe store, and anyone who might have lent him a pair of dress shoes was coming to the wedding. His wife having vetoed the only other choices in his summer closet (Birkenstock sandals and taxicab-yellow gardening clogs), he wore his tennis shoes with his suit. He would wear the same outfit two days later, but by then his inappropriate footwear would be the least of anyone’s concerns.
The photographer placed the mother of the bride next to her husband. “Smile,” he said, his tone hovering somewhere between affection and reproach. “You’re happy!”
And she was happy, and proud, too. But she was also fretting about getting over to the Grange Hall for the reception before the guests started to show up. Earlier she’d had no choice but to leave the caterer struggling on his own to light the Grange Hall’s balky old stove. He had shooed her away, promising he would either get it working or use the stove in her own kitchen next door. But she was still worried that the passed hors d’oeuvres would not be ready in time for the arrival of the guests.
“Come stand next to me, Dad,” the mother of the bride called to her father, who sat perched on a low stone wall that separated the plain-faced church from the wild summer profusion of the garden.
The bride’s grandfather rose in painful increments and, leaning heavily on his cane, made his way to the bottom of the church steps. The photographer helped him up the steps, and the mother of the bride slipped her arm through his, stilling his tremor with the gentle pressure of her hand. She shifted her hip, as if urging him to lean against her, but he stiffened, uncomfortable as always with any reminder of his infirmity. He was eighty-eight years old, a violinist, once a prodigy of the Prague Conservatory, who had made his debut at age twelve on the stage of Smetana Hall to jubilant, almost fawning reviews. He had performed regularly for more than seventy years, until just a few years ago, when the first symptoms of his Parkinson’s appeared.
A lifetime of performing had given him a considerable formal wardrobe and he owned a second pair of patent leather dress shoes, nestled in a felt shoe bag on the back of his closet door. They were no help to his son-in-law, however, since the old man’s dainty foot barely filled a size 6.
The bridesmaids returned from the garden. “No luck,” said the bride’s younger sister. She winked her left eye, not out of amusement but because there was a speck of pollen or dust caught behind her contact lens. Her unruly dark curls had been woven into a simplified version of the bride’s elaborate hairdo, but tendrils had escaped around her face and neck.
The bride bent over and cupped the flower girl’s chin in her hand. “Baby, we don’t really need it, do we? You’ll still be beautiful, even without your flowers.”
The nine-year-old flower girl, from whom more competence, perhaps, might have been expected, looked wan, her leaf-gold skin sallow against her gown of lavender tulle. Even her thick black hair, cut in the China-chop her adoptive mother insisted upon, looked flat and dry, wisps of it sticking up at odd angles around her head. She was humiliated at having failed so miserably at a task that she had been determined to execute without flaw. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Okay, then,” the photographer said. He turned to the bridesmaids. “Let’s have you three lovely girls stand here.” He motioned them to the second step. Only someone who knew that none of the bridesmaids liked her dress would have noticed the faint reluctance with which they took their places, first the bride’s younger sister, then the bride’s roommate from college, and then her closest friend. The bride had done her best to choose a style flattering to all three girls, one that could, she hoped, be easily worn again, but her sister resented the childish empire waist of the simple dress, purple turned the friend’s handsome face to an active shade of green, and the former roommate was in the seventh week of an unexpected pregnancy and hunched her shoulders to hide the lascivious swell of her breasts.
The groom’s brother returned with his father and a reek of tobacco smoke in tow just as the other two groomsmen sheepishly exited the church and announced their failure to locate the missing basket, whose absence was rapidly taking on, in the photographer’s experienced view, unfortunate symbolic implications for the company. Only the groom’s mother noticed the skunky odor trailing the young men, but in the interest of not slowing down the process any further, she refrained from berating them for smoking a joint in the church.
The flower girl finally collapsed under the weight of her embarrassment and burst into tears. The mother of the groom, who would discover the basket two days later when she went to purge the church of all evidence of celebration, pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wordlessly handed it to the girl.
“Oh, dear,” the bride said. Once again she crouched down next to the flower girl and cupped her cheek with her hand. “It really doesn’t matter, honey,” she said sweetly. “The picture will look fine without the basket.”
From down the row the bride’s grandfather said, “Some people might consider a basket of petals to be a bit de trop.”
The bride glanced at him and laughed appreciatively.
“Here,” said the bride’s sister to the young girl, handing over her maid of honor bouquet. “Hold my flowers.”
When the photographer developed the film—a week later than he originally intended because, after all, there was no rush—he would be troubled by the lack of balance in his composition: the puffy-faced flower girl clutching a long, trailing bouquet, the maid of honor holding nothing. He had missed this disturbing lack of symmetry because he was eager to take the photo, not to mention busy trying to keep as many people as he could between the groom’s mother, in her paisley, and his sister, in a frighteningly clashing pattern of shimmering metallic green. The groom’s mother had worn this red paisley eleven years before, to her daughter’s wedding, and although she had known even then that neither the cut nor the color did her any favors, it would never have occurred to her to waste money on another new dress.
So the photographer steered the groom’s sister to the very end of the row, where she stood, glowering, her yellowed fingers twitching for their accustomed cigarette. She did not bother to conceal her resentment about being shunted aside. She was already furious about what she considered the unacceptable exclusion of her daughters, the groom’s only nieces, from the wedding party. Not trusting her future sister-in-law to choose a dress that would minimize her corpulence, she had declined the bride’s invitation to serve as a bridesmaid, but she was angry that her girls had not been given a role. She didn’t think much of the bride’s excuse—that they were too old to be flower girls but not old enough to be bridesmaids. The groom’s sister had never thought much of the bride, or of her family, and she was only too happy to have had her opinion of them confirmed. However they pretended otherwise, she thought, the bride and her family were nothing more than typical “from-aways,” with their fancy summer cottage and their sailboat that probably cost more than what she earned in a year of honest work. In making this unfavorable judgment she was untroubled by the fact that a year of honest work was considerably more than what she had ever found herself moved to undertake.
Between this
unhappy woman and her mother the photographer inserted the father of the groom and his girlfriend. The girlfriend, whom the father of the groom would leave not a month after the shutter snapped, hooked one arm around her man’s waist and slipped her other hand between the buttons of his stained white shirt, pulling the fabric out of shape. He stared impassively ahead of him, ignoring both her hand on his chest and what he was sure was his ex-wife’s disgusted gaze. In fact, the mother of the groom was not even looking at her ex-husband, distracted instead by the three groomsmen horsing around on the step below her. The young men had started partying last night at the rehearsal dinner; they’d been almost too drunk to set off the fireworks that the groom and his younger brother had driven all the way over to New Hampshire to buy. On the way to the church this morning they had nicked three bottles of champagne from the cases stacked up in the Grange Hall, taken the groom down to the beach, and toasted him over and over, until he’d accused them of trying to get him too drunk to walk down the aisle. And then there was the joint they had just smoked when they were supposed to be searching the church for the flower girl’s lost basket.
“Stand straight and shut up so we can get this damn picture taken,” the mother of the groom said, poking her younger son in the back.
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