Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  “That’s so weird,” the deliveryman said. “I’ve never heard of someone getting a dead one. These things could live on the moon.”

  “He just moved,” Biddy said. “He moved his antennae.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Winn.

  But Biddy was sure. The lobster had swept his antennae to the side. As they watched, the long, whisker-like appendages flicked again. “See?” she said.

  Winn nudged the lobster with his toe. It didn’t move. “It’s sick in any case,” he said. “We don’t want to eat a sick lobster.” He picked up the lobster and held it out to the deliveryman. “How about running back and getting us a replacement?”

  “Well,” the guy said, “that might take a while. I have a few other deliveries to make first.”

  “Not necessary,” Biddy said, reaching out and seizing the invalid from Winn. “We have more than enough. Winn, Dicky doesn’t even eat lobster.”

  “But we paid for twenty,” Winn said.

  “I can write you a credit,” the deliveryman said, eying the lobsters, which were slowly migrating off the path and into the grass.

  “Fine,” Biddy said. “That will be fine.”

  “I don’t know,” said Winn.

  “It’s fine,” Biddy assured the deliveryman.

  Agatha and Piper emerged from the side door, Piper catching it before it slammed. Both were in their bathing suits, and the men were, for a moment, too startled to remember to hide their interest in the girls’ breasts and legs.

  “We heard the lobsters were here,” Agatha said. “Can we help?”

  “Good girls,” Winn said. “You can catch the runaways.”

  “You don’t have to,” Biddy said.

  “No,” said Agatha, “we’ll do it.”

  Winn touched Agatha’s elbow. “Sorry about earlier,” he said quietly.

  “What happened earlier?” Biddy asked.

  Winn and Agatha looked at each other. Agatha laughed.

  “I’m afraid I barged in on poor Agatha in the bathroom,” said Winn.

  “Oh, Winn,” Biddy said, “you know the lock’s broken. You have to knock.”

  “It was my fault,” Agatha offered. “I should have—”

  “No,” Winn interrupted, “no, I was careless. I accept full responsibility. Absolutely my fault. I’m not used to so many people being around, that’s all. Won’t happen again.”

  “All right,” Biddy said. “That’s enough, Winn.”

  “No big deal,” said Agatha with an ingratiating wink at Biddy. She bent to catch a lobster, her bikini nestled fetchingly in her butt crack.

  As the deliveryman wrote up a receipt for the price of one lobster, Biddy held the dead or dying crustacean in one hand and, slipping the other into her pocket, found the bobby pin there. She rolled it between her fingertips as the laughing young women collected the other lobsters, scooping them up and daring each other to kiss the rust-colored noses while the creatures flipped their petaled tails.

  THIS IDEA of her father’s to cook a lobster dinner for seventeen struck Livia as ill conceived but also immutable. She accepted, too, that he would want her to be his sous-chef and that she would not be able to get out of it. He received the shucked corn without thanks and sent her around to the outdoor shower with a salad spinner, four heads of lettuce to wash and tear up, and an empty laundry basket in lieu of a colander. Agatha and Piper had been in the kitchen in their bathing suits for some reason, padding around like nudists, and Daphne and Dominique came in from outside as Livia was heading out. Daphne had a red sarong tied below her belly. “Daphne,” Livia said, hefting the basket of lettuce, “you must be really stressed out, what with the wedding being so close and all. So much to do.”

  “Leave me alone, I’m pregnant,” Daphne said sweetly, reaching to accept a glass of iced tea from Piper.

  The shower, a stall of cedar planks around a showerhead that stuck out from the side of the house, was near the back door. Livia turned on the water and picked up a head of lettuce, holding it under the spray while she tore apart the leaves and dropped them in the spinner. She felt the way she always did after she talked about her pregnancy: a little embarrassed and slightly unclean, like she had told a crude joke at a party. The sight of Agatha in her bikini had done nothing for her mood. She found herself imagining Agatha and Teddy together, and, arbitrary though the pairing was, the thought sickened her. She had heard about two or three girls he had been with since the breakup, and she thought of those girls with Teddy, too, fragments and pieces of bodies, the whole too gruesome to contemplate. Teddy was still the lone notch on her pathetic bedpost. She dug her fingers into the lettuce, making ragged rips she knew her father would not like, and then she clapped the lid on the spinner and pulled its cord, yanking as though starting an outboard motor.

  “Teddy got me pregnant”—that was what she said even though the bulk of the blame was hers. Pills either nauseated her or caused insupportable mood swings; diaphragms caused constant infections; she was afraid to get an IUD; the shot had made her roommate gain fifteen pounds. That left condoms. She fell into a habit of chancing a few days around her period when they could skip the part where Teddy picked at the foil wrapper with his thumbnail, tore it open, held the small jellyfish close to his face to see which way it unrolled, and finally applied it, like some ludicrous hazmat suit, to his penis, which all the condom-related exertions of his brain had robbed of some tumescence. Her gamble succeeded for eight months or so and, with discipline, might have lasted longer if she and Teddy had not hit a rough patch, caused, like all of their rough patches, by his attention to another girl. In the relief of their reconciliation, Livia allowed herself to imagine that they were in the green-lit pastures of the safe zone.

  A week after the breakup, she had decided one night to get roaringly drunk alone in her room and dress up in pearls and a party dress. Snow was predicted, but she chose a summer dress patterned with large, old-fashioned roses. From her roommate’s closet she fished out high, spindly heels that would have frightened her had she been sober, especially given the iciness of the brick sidewalks. She could not get the zipper in back all the way up, and, for one moment, as she stretched and strained with one elbow poking toward the ceiling and the other bent behind her, she was overtaken by wretchedness and sat down on the futon to shed a few tears. Then the gin kicked back in, and she was out the door without a coat, teetering around patches of snow toward the Ophidian, a few inches of her spine framed by the V of her undone zipper. Around her, girls skimmed by in their going-out clothes, underdressed for the cold and, like her, catching their heels in the divoted ice and the grooves between the bricks. Each group of girls was a single, shimmering consciousness, like a flock of birds or a school of fish, moving together in an elaborate, private choreography, their sequins and silks tossing back the streetlights. The boy at the club’s door hesitated when he saw her, but she pushed past him.

  She thought she heard him say that Teddy wasn’t there, and she said, “Fuck Teddy,” to no one in particular. She made a tour of the rooms, tripping on the nap of the Persian carpets and the knotty floorboards. Pounding hip-hop filled the clubhouse, at odds with the ponderous, old-fashioned interior, which was all tufted leather, dark paint, carved wood, and grim brass light fixtures. The décor suggested a nostalgic, appropriated Englishness, as though the Ophidian had once possessed faraway colonial holdings. Framed photographs of members, letters they’d written or received, doodles they’d made on cocktail napkins, and other inscrutable ephemera crowded on the walls. “You’re all dead now,” Livia muttered to the class of 1918, “even though you were in the Ophidian.” The club, she thought, was an institution that existed for little purpose other than to select its members. Once you were in, then what? Then you sat around drinking and gossiping until it was time to choose new members, with whom you sat around drinking and gossiping until the time came to choose the next batch. There was no point to it, not really. The Ophidian was a decoy, a façade, a fa
ctory that produced nothing. Her father loved that stupid snake swallowing its own tail. He said it was about self-sufficiency, renewal, and rebirth, shedding skins but persisting, having no beginning and no end. She thought it was about going nowhere, about finding no better option than to devour yourself.

  People were looking at her, she knew, and she leered back at them, at the looming faces she knew or seemed to know. She found herself sitting on the arm of a leather couch and laughing at something the boy beside her was saying. She laughed so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. She took a sip from the plastic cup in her hand and realized it was full of water.

  “This is water,” she announced. “I didn’t ask for water. If I wanted water, I would have asked for it.”

  The boy on the couch looked embarrassed. She wondered how she had ever thought he was funny. “Stephen thought maybe you’d had enough.”

  “Oh, is that what Stephen thought?” She was standing now. The room went quiet around her, and she swung left and then right to get a good look at it. “What?” she said. “You think I’m drunk? Stephen thinks I’m drunk? Well, you can tell Stephen that I’m drinking for two! Know what I mean? But don’t wait for Teddy to tell you and don’t send any cigars!” Water slopped out of her glass and onto her toes. “Shit.” When she bent down to wipe it away, she lost what was left of her balance and tipped forward, arcing toward the oriental carpet. As soon as she hit (or was it before? did she even fall?), she felt a pair of hands on her sides, righting her. One of them zipped up her dress. “Teddy?” she whimpered.

  The hands did not belong to Teddy, though she spotted him then in the doorway, still wearing his coat, flushed pink under his orange hair, staring at her in a way she knew neither of them could recover from. His contempt radiated from across the hushed room, and she could only send back contrition and animal desperation.

  Her rescuer was the despised, vodka-withholding Stephen. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough party.”

  He took her to a back room, and together they went through her phone until they found a soberish friend who agreed to come get her and walk her home. “Bring a coat she can wear,” Stephen said into the phone. “And a pair of boots.”

  As they sat and waited, Livia studying the floorboards and Stephen the ceiling, he said, “I would take you myself, but it wouldn’t look good. Teddy’s my friend. I’m the one who called him. He came here to get you.”

  All the way home, through the falling snow and the purple-orange glow of the streetlights, while the world rattled around her, jarred by each clumsy step she took in her too-big borrowed boots, Livia convinced herself that Stephen would e-mail the next day to check on her, and something would begin, growing out of the snow like a crocus.

  There were e-mails the next day, but none from him.

  LIVIA LEFT HER BASKET of washed lettuce on the deck and went into the kitchen. “Dad?” she called. “What do you want me to do with the lettuce?”

  Her father approached from his study carrying a thick book bound in blue canvas. “BIRDS” was stamped in silver on the spine. “I’ve solved our little mystery,” he said. “Listen.” He flipped to a page he had been marking with his finger and read, “Herons are a large family of wading birds including egrets and bitterns. Egrets are any of several herons, tending to have white or buff plumage.” He closed the book. “That settles it. We were both right.”

  “That book’s out of date, and that definition is vague, anyway,” she said.

  “But egrets are always herons, and white herons are egrets.”

  “But there are white herons that aren’t egrets, too. I don’t know—I don’t remember exactly. I’d have to look it up.”

  “I already looked it up.”

  “That book is old, Dad.”

  “Don’t get upset.”

  “I’m not upset! I just want to be accurate.”

  He looked at her steadily over his glasses as though trying to determine whether she were a heron or an egret. “Me, too,” he said.

  Five · The White Stone House

  Dominique found she was suffering from the classic dual anxieties of the well-meaning guest: she wished to avoid being asked to help with the cooking (Winn by himself was already too many cooks in the kitchen), but she did not want to appear lazy or parasitical. Escape was the only solution, and so she took a bike and struck off. She rode quickly, standing on the pedals, overtaking some local kids in basketball jerseys on low-riding BMXs who hooted at her as she passed, then a solitary guy in paint-spattered pants, riding slowly and slugging from a brown paper bag, and then a large family of day-trippers in a single-file line of descending size, Papa Bear to Baby Bear on basketed rental Schwinns. Ahead, she glimpsed a cyclist with churning, spiderlike legs in black spandex. His torso was a blaze of yellow. “Ah, oui?” Dominique said. “Le maillot jaune?” She lowered her head and bore down, imagining spectators lining the bike path, snowcapped Alps above, a peloton of BMX kids behind her riding serpentines and pushing one another. The rickety ten-speed she had chosen from the Van Meter bicycle jumble jerked side to side as she pumped. She caught him more easily than she had expected, the silver teardrop of his helmet growing rapidly larger until she drew alongside, disappointed. She dallied a little before passing, hoping he would turn to look at her, but he kept his sunglasses fixed on the path’s vanishing point.

  The lighthouse appeared atop a distant bluff, poking up like a solitary birthday candle. In the day, its light seemed feeble and superfluous, a recurring white spark dwarfed and muted by the sun, but Dominique liked the tower’s stalwart shape and jaunty striped paint job. She would ride to it, she decided. She rode a bicycle almost every day at home in Brussels, to and from the restaurant, but she was always having to dodge and dart through fierce swarms of tiny European cars, racing for survival and not pleasure. But this—the air full of salt and bayberry, the sky as iridescent and capacious as the inner membrane of an infinite airship, the slow loosening of her muscles—this was something gorgeous. She needed speed, space, the abrasion of rushing air. Poor Livia was laboring under the illusion of being owed something, some karmic charity, for her pain, but the universe felt no compunction for its cruelties, no sympathy for its victims, especially those who helped misery along with some idiotic bareback sex. Everyone knew, of course; the Ophidian party had become known as “the Baby Shower.” Daphne didn’t seem to have done much to help Livia cope with the situation, but she claimed Livia had been giving her a wide berth, confiding little, taking no interest in her pregnancy or the preparations for the wedding. And Daphne respected other people’s privacy, even her sister’s, a quality sometimes mistaken for a general lack of curiosity. Daphne had told Dominique that during her worst fight with Greyson, the only fight where each had enumerated the shortcomings of the other, he had accused her of not being interested in anything.

  These days the chatter about Livia’s pregnancy seemed to have died down, and for the most part, little Fenn–Van Meter had been swept under the communal Aubusson rug. Dominique had almost forgotten how these families worked, how they were set up to accommodate feigned ignorance, unspoken resentment, and repressed passion the way their houses had back stairways and rooms tucked away behind the kitchen for the feudal ghosts of their ancestors’ servants. She was surprised Winn had not leapt from a bridge or gutted himself with a samurai sword after his daughters got knocked up back to back. Daphne’s condition—she imagined Winn, the old Victorian, calling it that—would be grandfathered into the boundaries of propriety by the wedding, but Livia’s phantom pregnancy, the missing bulge under her green dress at the front of the church, was a void that could not be satisfactorily filled in and smoothed over. Good thing he had the Pequod to take his mind off things, setting out on his quest for membership like Don Quixote without a Sancho.

  Bearing down on the pedals, she shook her head. These people, this pervasive clique, this Establishment to which Winn had attached himself and his family, seemed intent on dividing their community
into smaller and smaller fractions, halves of halves, always approaching but never reaching some axis of perfect exclusivity. As long as Dominique had known her, Daphne had rolled her eyes at her father’s quirks and blind spots, but until the pregnancy, she had done nothing to differentiate her life from his vision for it. At Deerfield Dominique had assumed that college would be Daphne’s time to forge her own way, but then she found herself sitting in her Michigan dorm room, curled up in her chlorine-smelling sweats and watching the snow come down and listening to Daphne natter over the phone about eating clubs and bubbleheaded adventures she had with her new fun friend Piper whom Dominique would absolutely love and fancy charity balls in New York and Greyson, always Greyson. Generally willing to be goaded into competition, Dominique had first tried to turn Daphne against these new people, to reclaim her. “They sound like zombies,” she had said, moving from her bunk to the floor and pulling one arm across her chest, stretching her shoulder. She was always either in the pool or studying or sleeping. The amount of time Daphne seemed to have to get dressed up and drink baffled her. “They sound like exactly the friends your dad would pick for you. Don’t you want to mix it up a little bit? Get out of your rut?”

  “My rut?” Daphne had repeated. “I don’t have a rut. This is me. Whether or not you approve. I like to fit in. I like people I fit in with.” Which of course was what had drawn Dominique to her in the first place, back when she was new and lost at Deerfield. Daphne, so certain of her place in the world, had been the perfect antidote to homesickness. She had been a kind of skeleton key to prep school, and Dominique had taken possession of her gladly.

  “I just worry,” Dominique said, “that you’re selling yourself short.”