“Is that the case?” her father continued, his eyes fixed to her mother’s face.
“I would like you to put the phone away until we’ve finished our breakfasts,” Isabel said.
When he dropped his phone from a height and let it hit the dining room table, Gran’s sturdy, beloved cherrywood table, the sound was so unexpected—even with all the signals he’d flashed—that the twins responded with almost primal caution. Luke jerked, ready to dive beneath the table, and it was only Madison’s hand on his back that kept him in his chair. Even Matteo, always the more stolid of the twins, showed his hand, looking to his sister with a frantic jerk of his neck.
“You think I’m enjoying this?” Bob said. He leaned forward across the dining room table, his hands in his lap, his shoulders bearing down on his wife. “You think it’ll still be vacation if things continue like this?”
Isabel looked away, out the windows, as if to ignore an embarrassing display of public drunkenness. When she looked back, she picked up her utensils and began cutting her cucumber and tomato slices into smaller and smaller triangles, arranging them in rows on her plate and spearing them in pairs with her fork.
Bob lowered himself back into his seat, smoothed his napkin across his lap. Madison knew that her mother had gifted him those moments, the time he needed to remember that she was the one person he did not scream at. The one person, besides Madison and the boys, who ever got to see him feel tender. Isabel got not just brisk loyalty, the way he spoke to his colleagues, but actual softness. Sometimes she passed by where he stood, and he’d follow her to another room just to kiss the back of her neck, the knob where her spine began.
This wasn’t so unusual, Madison’s father bellowing, using every object in the house to help him make some stressful noise. But not on vacation, and not when her mother had asked for so little.
“I can’t put the phone away,” he said. “I apologize, but now is not the time to fight me on this.”
“Guys,” Madison announced, “let’s go put on our suits.”
She bustled the boys into the kitchen. Antoinette was waiting by the sink, her arms crossed severely over her stomach.
“We’re going swimming,” Luke whispered.
“I would just leave them,” Madison said to Antoinette, waving one hand back toward the closed door. “I wouldn’t go back in until he’s gone out.”
HER FATHER HAD ALWAYS HATED EVERYTHING about that house. The way the carpet felt damp, sometimes, during thunderstorms. The exposure to the beach. The lack of any architectural protection from the wildness of the dunes below, so that if you forgot and left the doors open on the sunporch, the carpet would be sandy for days. It wasn’t the sort of house he’d ever have selected, and certainly not one he’d have kept for decades. He’d tried for years to convince even his own mother to sell her building in northeast Brooklyn, to permit some developer to reimagine it as a sleek, silver column of luxury condominiums looking north toward McCarren Park and, beyond it, Manhattan.
But he’d never have refused this visit, at least not while Gran was alive. They had a standing agreement, Madison’s parents. Bob’s vacations could be as short as they needed to be. If he could take only four days all year away from the city, from the bank, then Isabel wouldn’t say a word. But once he took a vacation, he took it. He didn’t work the whole time, and he never cut a trip short. These were the terms of their agreement. Her father never forgot them, and her mother never had to reissue them.
Madison knew, though, that her father had assumed this year would be different. The house was now legally Isabel’s. This gave him an opening, though he would never ask her outright to sell. Isabel’s grandfather had won the land out here in a poker game in D.C. almost a century earlier. He’d basically built the house so he had an excuse to tell that story, as a shrine to the Berkeley men, and it was of course only natural that Isabel should love it for these very reasons. But Bob had his own ideas of the right sorts of beach vacations for a man in his position: private beaches in Mexico, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas. At the very, very least, a beach house of their own. Anywhere but East Hampton, really.
And so when her father dropped, nearly threw, his phone to the breakfast table that morning, Madison could have told herself that any one of these displeasures was the culprit. All month he’d been walking down the beach to take phone calls, standing at the water’s edge with his khakis rolled up just below his knees. But that morning was such a departure from the normal vacation rules that it insisted upon its own novelty. Madison couldn’t set it aside, though she tried all the rest of the gloomy, humid day at the beach. The only thing her mother had done, in the end, was remind her father of his own promises. And that had never infuriated him before.
The next morning, he was gone. He did not say good-bye to Madison, or, so far as she knew, to the twins.
Isabel kept them there for two more weeks. Antoinette’s grandson, the part-time fisherman, took the twins out on his boat. Madison took a book to the beach each morning and dozed through the afternoons. She missed her own bedroom, where she fell asleep not to the sounds of water but to the rustlings of the false wilderness of Greenwich, the birdcalls her father claimed had so unnerved her when they first moved out from the city to live in the old house. Every so often her door would creak, an hour or four after she’d clicked off her bedside lamp, and her father’s smells—the sweet bite of Maker’s Mark, the choking staleness of nighttime sweat mixed with the morning’s once-fresh cologne—would fill the room, and his coarse cheek would brush against hers. He’d be gone so quickly that by the time she was awake, she’d no longer remember what he’d said.
He had not done this in weeks, maybe months, maybe not all year. She couldn’t remember.
It still felt strange being out on the island without Gran, walking along her stretch of beach without her there to fret aloud over the looming estate across the water, the one the fame-coarsened country singer had bought and immediately accessorized with his own helicopter pad. A few times Madison considered impersonating her grandmother, making the joke to Isabel. Shaking her head and putting the tip of her index finger to her lips, pressing on them, the way Gran had once done as she looked across the bay. But she wasn’t sure this would be funny.
At night, they ate whatever Antoinette brought from town—scallops or lobster, a dessert tart from the French woman who had taken over the local bakery. Without her father there, meals were so quiet that Madison could hear herself chewing each bite of her food, could hear the obtrusive gulp as she tried to swallow. When they left, they flew home from the small airport on Long Island, which was unusual, and they took the plane her father had sent for them, which was unheard of. Her mother never flew the company jet unless he was with them, and then only if he insisted.
The car was waiting when they landed at Westchester County. The boys were carried from the plane to the backseat without waking, and when they pulled in at home, Lily was waiting at the front door, backlit by the lamps in the otherwise darkened foyer. And still no one had said a word to Madison that could serve as any sort of explanation.
She told herself this was just her parents: the electric weather of her father’s moods and her mother’s silences. And those were both harbingers of a sort she’d long ago learned to follow obsessively and to ignore blithely, in equal measure.
THREE WEEKS LATER, Madison came into the kitchen on a morning like any other and found not only the familiar sight of Lily preparing breakfast for the boys, but also the decidedly unfamiliar sight of her mother waiting for the toaster to pop.
Madison remained in the doorway while Lily moved with jerking motions between the sink, the stainless steel center island, and the boys at the breakfast nook. She poured milk over their deep bowls of cereal, smiled down at them as they began to eat. They moved the food from their bowls to their mouths with remarkable efficiency, like battery-powered toys. Madison had always envied them this, the incredible ease with which they approached mealtimes, th
at single-mindedness that allowed them to put aside every earthly concern that wasn’t related to breakfast.
Lily bent at the waist to kiss each boy, brushing her lips to the very tops of their heads where, Madison knew, their hair was the softest. When Lily stood, she pulled a chair from the table for Madison, letting it scrape the floor. Madison’s eye went immediately to her mother, to her tanned shoulders, her sleeveless linen top, but Isabel didn’t flinch. Madison swallowed, and sat.
“Sit down,” Lily said. “Eat.”
Only then did Isabel turn to the table, her children. Her smooth blond ponytail grazed the place between her shoulder blades. The toast announced itself.
“Good morning,” Madison said. She knew, now, what would happen. Her mother would spread peanut butter across five slices of toast. One slice for Madison, two each for the boys. She would then cut Madison’s slice in half, and the two of them would share it. This was familiar—this was a weekend breakfast, what the D’Amico children ate on those rare days Lily was permitted to sleep in or catch the early train to New York, leaving Isabel at the helm. School days were left to Lily—goat cheese frittatas, fruit salad with out-of-season kiwi, red flannel hash with kale. Bagels for the boys, if they wanted them. Her father brought them home from H&H with great fanfare, though Madison knew for a fact they were delivered to the office with no effort at all on his part; even the order itself was placed by one of his secretaries.
Her mother always prompted her not to use that word, to say “executive assistants” instead.
“More milk, please,” Matteo said, reaching out one plaintive hand. Lily rushed back to the table. She knew, just like Madison—who had often done this for him herself—that Matteo preferred to eat all but the final few pieces of cereal and then drown them in fresh milk, picking them out with his spoon. He was more placid than Luke, less easily frightened, but also by far the more finicky twin.
“Lily,” Madison said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Eat something.”
“I’m waiting for my toast.” She permitted herself a tart spin on the very end of the sentence, but even this didn’t get her any eye contact from her mother. Lily placed a halved grapefruit in front of her.
“Eat that, then.”
Isabel brought over the plates of toast, then crossed to the boys and sat down beside them.
Madison looked at the food, looked at her mother, gave up on looking at Lily. Everything in the room felt unbearably slow; the edges of everything shimmered.
She picked up her spoon and her knife and began dutifully to divide the fruit into slits, slipping each fleshy triangle from its spoke in the wheel. Her brothers munched their toast without question.
“Your mother’s going to drive you to school this morning,” Lily said from the sink, where she was washing dishes. What dishes could she possibly be washing? No one had finished eating yet.
“You mean, to the bus.”
“No—she’s driving you straight to school.”
“Why?”
“I’m sorry, do we need a special reason? Is this is a national disaster? Your mother wants to drive you to school, all right? Eat.”
Madison turned once more to her mother, who had always taken great pride in the fact that her children rode the school bus. Isabel despised the mothers who insisted their children be driven to school, as if the buses provided by their elite private schools were no better than the filthy, crime-ridden Manhattan subway—which, Isabel loved to point out, was no longer even filthy or crime ridden. If there was ever a reason they skipped the bus, a late appointment or a faulty alarm clock, it was Lily who drove them straight to campus. Not their mother.
“Where’s Dad,” Madison said. Luke looked up at her, his bottom lip protruding and threatening to undo his entire face.
“We don’t know,” he said gravely. Lily popped the roof of her mouth with her tongue.
“Don’t be silly, sweetheart,” she said. “Daddy’s at work. Where else would he be?”
Matteo turned to his mother for confirmation, and Isabel smiled and put one hand to his chin to snag a stray piece of cereal.
“You know that,” she said.
“He’s been in the city now basically since we got back from Shelter,” Madison said. “He’s still there? Is he coming home anytime soon for, I don’t know, a single night?”
She slid her half slice of toast across the table to her brothers, and Luke jumped on it. Even when I am an adult, she thought, the sounds and smells of toast will make me think of this. Crumbs brushed from fingertips, the inhaling of something warm and comforting that’s been burned. I’ll remember the five pieces of toast and my mother’s mouth fixed in a thin line.
“When everyone’s ready,” Lily said, “let’s meet out by the front door.”
She couldn’t be coming with them, could she? Lily and her mother could not possibly be driving them all to school together, as if they were fleeing some fast-approaching hurricane. Madison entertained a sudden, silly image, the car piled up with luggage on its roof, her mother hunched over the wheel, Lily navigating. The last Range Rover out of Connecticut. A dark, billowing storm in the sky, chasing them down.
Isabel began stacking plates and bowls in silence and carried them to the sink. Madison cleared her throat.
“I might stay late today,” she said. “After school.”
Isabel left the dishes in the sink and returned to the table with a damp paper towel, dabbing at Luke’s chin, at the peanut butter crumbs clustered at the corners of his mouth. She took his shirt with both hands, pinching the seams at each of his shoulders, and with one tug pulled it so that it hung straighter on his wiry frame.
“There’s a football game,” Madison continued.
“That’s fine,” her mother said. “So long as you get a ride home.”
And it was this more than anything else that left the world around Madison unchanged and yet ominous, as though everything in the kitchen had begun to list to one side. No questions, no suspicion from Isabel as to why her Super Bowl–ignorant tenth-grader might suddenly need to go to a football game. That plain fact, that it had been so simple to put one over on Madison’s mother, that Isabel had not required even the basic acrobatics of a massaged truth.
Madison took her plate from Lily’s hands and slid the hollowed grapefruit skeleton into the trash. She resisted the urge to prick at her mother, to insist that she was still hungry, and followed her brothers out into the front hall.
Isabel stood by the door, waiting for Luke and Matteo to shoulder their backpacks.
“Come on,” Isabel said to her children. “Smile like we mean it.” It was her constant refrain, anxiety sheathed in a joke, when the children accompanied her to parties or fund-raisers populated entirely by their father’s underlings. No one asked why this should be a necessary enjoinder on a regular Friday morning.
THEY DROVE PAST THE GOLDEN CURLICUES of the Weillands’ gate and the Kanes’ private course and the Sapersteins’ twisting drive, what could be seen of it before it was swallowed up by their cluster of white oaks. Madison could feel herself as she watched, some fluttering awareness somewhere that she should be paying close attention to something she hadn’t seen yet. The houses, the glimpses sometimes visible from the main road. The small details—the machinery at the front gates and the landscapers’ trucks parked at service entrances and the anomalous silver balloon lodged in a hedge at the edge of one property like a tiny ghost.
She had spent her entire childhood on this same expanse of land in Greenwich, and recently she’d thought she would leave this coast for college. But she knew how she would miss Connecticut. She would miss the shock of greenery when it returned in the late spring, and the way the falling plum-colored leaves from the dogwood trees clogged the pool during the first heavy rains. She would miss entering the house from the east door, leaving boots and parkas heavy with melting snow in the mud room and bursting through the swinging doors into the silver-and-blue kitchen, wh
ich in the after-school hours was as huge and cold and silent as a mausoleum.
She would miss, perhaps most of all, the smell of Connecticut in the summertime. The smell of green, that unbearable moisture in the air, the smell of water somewhere not too far away and of just enough nature to bask in but far too little in which to feel lost. She would miss the smell of the grass and leaves being gathered into massive piles as the gardeners moved methodically across the back lawn, their bodies braced against the slope of the hillside, gathering all signs of summer for one last time before winter took over. She’d been to Los Angeles in summer, and she’d been in winter; it all felt like the same bleached sunlight, hotter and more likely to cause nosebleeds in summer, but otherwise the same. The summer in Connecticut was something lush and alive, something so powerful that to open your mouth outdoors in July was to breathe in the ripeness, the season that hovered just on the edge of rotting.
At the elementary school gates, the boys tumbled from the car without so much as a backward glance, and Isabel remembered only at the last moment to call out to them, to remind them that Lily would pick them up right in this very spot. When they parked at Greenwich Prep a few minutes later, a block away from the main entrance and the logjam of the senior lot, Madison lingered in the front seat. But when she looked at her mother, Isabel was leaning her head against her window, looking toward the bus line, as if the car were already empty. She looked not unpretty but deflated, all color withdrawn from her body.
After a few moments, she turned her head slowly and fixed Madison with the same gaze that usually appeared in response to something rude, an insult or maybe a personal question.
“You’ll be late,” she said, and Madison got out of the car. By the time she had reached the main entrance to campus, her mother had driven away.
Our Little Racket Page 2