“And it’s a shame we even have to,” Alexandra replied. “Don’t you think?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Suzanne said, sounding seasick. “I do think it might be for the best.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Mina said, hearing something flinty come into her voice against her own best judgment. “I’m worried I’ve missed something.”
The woman was, to a startling degree, so much like the daughter, Zoë. Mina wondered if people saw her Jaime in her own face. Whenever she saw Alexandra Barker, Mina thought of the summer years ago when their daughters had been thrown together at a local day camp. She was sure, in retrospect, that Zoë Barker had made Jaime’s life a living hell every single afternoon that summer; it was the first year Jaime had started to gain weight, had metamorphosed from a pleasantly round-cheeked kid into someone who was clearly to develop into a softer, sturdier young woman. And there was little patience around here for that, for a Long Island Italian set of boobs and hips. But Mina could remember showing up on the final day, sitting in the swampy late-afternoon heat at an outdoor basketball court, yammering on about how excited her daughter was that her basketball team had advanced to their “division finals.” She’d felt, she remembered, an almost embarrassing degree of pride, watching her daughter dribble up and down the court slowly, her face bursting with unimpeded elation each time she made a basket. And foolishly she’d thought she might share this feeling with the other mothers. That they might be finding themselves consumed with that same sense of wonder, building up inside them so they felt it like a physical pressure threatening to push out from their cheeks, their hands, their entire bodies, erupting with love for the women their daughters would become. But Alexandra had interrupted to say, Zoë was chosen to play in the All Star Game. This had been treated, liberally, as a relevant contribution to the conversation. And then again, maybe bragging, sure, Mina had mentioned that Jaime’s team might win the championship. And Alexandra had stared at her, had actually pushed her sunglasses up onto her head, drawing her strawlike hair back from her face, exposing her eyes, their incipient crow’s-feet. That, she had said to Mina, is not the All Star Game. She wasn’t chosen for the All Star Game, was she?
Alexandra finally let out a harsh chuckle.
“Well,” she said, “I think the smart money says we should all be lying low for a few months, at the very least. We’re ahead of the curve, really. Deborah here is going to have a mob on her hands next week, trying to do this very same thing. I just think it’s so sad, you know, that we all have to apologize for our way of life. Just because one family has made some serious mistakes.”
Mina wondered if she was ever going to get any smarter, any better at playing along in her own life. Of course it was about Isabel; of course she should have trusted her initial instincts. But they didn’t want to gossip. They didn’t so much want access to the information she had. At least not yet. No; they just wanted to know whether she even had it.
“God,” Suzanne said, “I’d love to know who Isabel’s hired to do this for her. I mean, I assume she can’t be showing up at Bergdorf herself.”
“She can’t be showing up anywhere,” Alexandra said, putting a smug little flip on the final syllables. “I assume she’s holed up in that house for the foreseeable future.”
Mina could feel the woman’s eyes, but she’d turned back to the dress, letting the material pass between her fingers like water from a faucet.
“That’s what bothers me the most!” Suzanne had regained her footing. “She just gets to hide away until it blows over! I mean, to be returning things here. You know, Deborah, I’m sure you must know this about me, I always shop downtown Greenwich whenever I can. You know how important it is to me that the store supports all our local causes. It just feels so unfair to be doing this here.”
“It won’t blow over,” Alexandra said. Her voice was gaining ground, cutting through the air-conditioned hush.
Mina cleared her throat, trying to sound neither anxious nor angry.
“Suzanne,” she said, “I hate to put you out, but I’ve really got to be getting back. I’ve got a gym session at the house at three.”
“I just hope she knows that,” Alexandra continued. “She can’t just sit and wait for him to bully everyone into forgetting it. Though I know that’s worked for her in the past.”
“Alex,” Suzanne began, her voice almost strong enough to constitute a warning, but Mina interrupted her.
“As I said, so nice to see you both,” she said. “But I’ve really got to go.”
Deborah was already in motion, spiriting the box away somewhere beneath the counter, taking Suzanne’s trembling hand between hers and nodding like a metronome at everything she said. And then Alexandra was stalking ahead of them, and Mina was following with Suzanne, and they were all three of them totally exposed, was how she would later think of it, when Lily stepped out from behind a display of evening gowns.
Alexandra probably didn’t recognize Isabel’s nanny. But there was something so brazen in the girl’s stance, in how close she planted herself to their path, that all three of them sputtered briefly, almost stopped where they stood. Mina felt the muscles in Suzanne’s arm go tense, cling to the bone, and she knew Suzanne had recognized Lily.
Mina tried to make eye contact, but Lily wasn’t looking at her. Her eyes were on Alexandra Barker. Even once they’d descended to the ground floor, emerged onto the street, Mina felt certain Lily was still watching them.
NINE
Lily fed the meter, so intent on casing her surroundings that she actually dropped a quarter in an attempt to fumble it into the slot. She left it where it had fallen and turned south on the Avenue.
In the best of times, she found this stretch of road draining. It sloped gently up from the train station, toward the library up on West Putnam and the winding residential districts of Greenwich beyond. It was dotted with sidewalk cafés and the kinds of clothing stores that didn’t play pop music at earsplitting levels. Once or twice per block you’d spot a remaining storefront of Ye Olde Greenwich, as Lily thought of the longer-standing businesses like the old pharmacy.
It was a mommy playground, and by midafternoon all the frustrated energies of these underutilized women had them trolling this street in droves. They prowled the boutiques and the juice bars, quaking with everything they had but could not use. The Ivy League educations they’d been allowed to pursue, matriculating when they did, in the wake of feminism’s second wave. The endless pluckings and bleachings and injectings that left them in a perpetual state of both tranquility (no wrinkles) and surprise (unnatural eyebrow arches) but also seemed to extract their sexuality from them as if by syringe. She’d never seen so many beautiful women who seemed to live life at such a distant remove from their own sexiness. An energy built up in their muscles all morning, as they ran on the “her” treadmill alongside the empty “his” model in their home gyms, built up as steadily as lactic acid. And by early afternoon, when it was still too soon to fetch their children from school—a task most of them outsourced, anyway—they ended up here. They steered from Maje to Saks to Lululemon to Starbucks, touching their fingertips to a cashmere sweater or unfolding a pair of boyfriend jeans, wondering if their daughters would mock them if they tried to wear these.
These women did not scare Lily. They actually amazed her at times—the wives of Greenwich were just so exactly what the rest of the world probably thought they were, at least in their outward habits. But for all their peels and shots, their lifts and tucks, they looked perpetually strained, to her, forever terrified that the one detail they’d forgotten to falsify would be the one to give it away. She never knew what “it” was for these women. It couldn’t just be their age, or the subtle cords of animosity that stretched taut between them and their husbands as they lay in bed at night. And yet they had, quite literally, everything else. She’d never understood what they were so afraid of revealing to their colleagues, for that’s what these women were to one anoth
er, really. These weren’t friendships; these were mutual agreements to aid and abet one another’s tireless campaigns for unspecified triumphs.
Lily turned from the meter and prepared to cross the street midblock, hoping the unnecessary crossing guard posted at the West Elm intersection wouldn’t scream hoarsely at her insubordination, as he often did. She was headed to Brooks Brothers to pick up the boys’ new suits. For the really big nights, evenings when Bob would be speaking on a dais, there were better options on offer. But for local Greenwich evenings, events with a kids’ table that were more likely to send the twins home with grass stains or ripped elbows, it was always Brooks Brothers.
She was thinking about the boys when she saw Mina Dawes hop out of the silver SL parked across the street, smoothing her skirt as she walked toward the curb where Suzanne Welsh was feeding the meter.
As far as Lily had ever known, these two were friendly. There was no reason to believe that it was strange for Mina to be out with Suzanne Welsh, no reason at all to link their afternoon, with all its normal concerns, to what was going on with Bob. So it was one of those moments when Lily had to remind herself that the one thing she had on these women, maybe more important even than the fact that she was smarter than they were—which she firmly believed she was—was her ability to sniff out a fight, her identification with prey rather than predator.
She walked quickly downhill, then darted across the street as Mina craned her neck over the parking meter. By the time Suzanne returned to the car to withdraw an enormous shopping bag from its backseat, Lily was facing away from them, watching them in the darkened glass windows of the empty space that had once been a theater and was now, supposedly, going to be remodeled as an Apple store.
“It’ll just take one quick second,” Suzanne reassured Mina, who was twisting her left hand with her right, feeling her own wrists as if to seek out the pulse. “And then I can run you right home.”
Suzanne’s voice sounded almost frantic, even more anxious than usual, a bit hoarse. Was it possible she had one of the secret smoking habits? Lily had only ever seen a few of them smoke, and these always furtively, at the side gates to someone else’s home. But they all must once have smoked all the time, to keep their appetites sufficiently strangled. When they were living in the city and waiting for these husbands, scanning the crowds each night at the Surf Club, which was always the place Lily imagined all the younger versions of these women. (She’d heard Mina mention the place once.) They must have all been whippet thin and had the most exquisite dark half-moons under their eyes all the time back then, when they were her age.
She followed them into the store, watched Alexandra Barker arrive to meet them, stood so close to them that it seemed ludicrous they hadn’t noticed her presence. But then Alexandra Barker had always been one of those ninnies who put herself at risk precisely because she thought she was so tough, so terrifying. Lily had often imagined running into this woman in the city, on a crowded sidewalk or the subway—both places Alexandra would surely never be—and leaning into her hard with one hip, sending her careening off on unsteady feet like something cast off across the dirty, uneven ground.
She knew a little bit about that family, the basics. She remembered one time Bob had wandered into the kitchen to sit with his eating children, one of the times he’d been dressed and ready before Isabel. “He had to go out on his own,” he’d said of Brad Barker. He’d been talking to Madison. “Everyone talks about that fund like he’s so smart, he’s such a genius. He had no sense of adventure! He could never take any risks with other people’s money, he was too terrified of making the wrong move when he worked with a bunch of other guys. So he goes out on his own where no one’s watching him. Who gets into this business and doesn’t have the stomach for risk?”
At the time, Lily had credited this to Bob’s bluster, his buried jealousy. Brad Barker was, after all, probably the richest man they knew.
But now, watching Alexandra, Lily was thinking how smart Bob was, in his way. How much Bob and Isabel knew about everyone they’d touched, without ever being seen scrambling for the information.
She almost stayed where she was, hidden. She almost let them go without revealing herself. Even as she was acting, having already made the decision, Lily knew that it would be more loyal, better, to remain hidden. But she just couldn’t resist. She was not wired that way, and deep down, she didn’t really think Isabel was, either. She told herself she was considering her options and stooped to examine a bias-cut black dress, floor length. It felt lethal beneath her fingers. She wanted to whip it at them, the opposite of a white flag, but she settled for just waiting until they turned, then stepping out into their path.
Mina caught herself before her face changed, but she couldn’t control her limbs. Her arms retracted, clenched close to her body. Then she kept walking. All three women seemed to ignore the fact that they’d paused upon seeing Lily.
They’d slipped up. If nothing was wrong, then Mina would have waved, bustled over to embrace her. They’d be hoping, now, that she hadn’t overheard their conversation. But she had.
She watched Mina’s back as she disappeared down beneath the top of the escalator. The next time she shows up unannounced, Lily thought. The next time she tries to take a dish from me to carry in to the kids, or act like I don’t know that she’s been trying to push her pills on Isabel. That I know she just wants to be indispensable, to anyone. She’ll remember this, the next time.
WHEN SHE GOT HOME that afternoon, she considered knocking at Isabel’s door, cheering her with the image of Suzanne Welsh’s face freezing, as if she’d just been told her husband had exposed himself on the dance floor at the annual Robin Hood Foundation gala.
But Lena had been waiting in the kitchen with a list of household questions, a lieutenant perturbed by the absence of her captain. Lily did her best to direct the woman, to remind her of which areas needed special attention, but she’d been shaky. Lena’s eyes widened as she saw that Lily was improvising here. That she’d no more been told what to do this week than anyone else had.
“I clean everything,” she said mournfully, before leaving the kitchen.
Lily turned, then, to dinner. She made the kids pasta Bolognese, something else she’d learned to cook during her first few months in Greenwich. Despite the mid-September air outside, she made it. Comfort food, something heavy and warm that would settle in your stomach. Something to push the dread somewhere else for a few hours.
“But if Mom’s sick, why is she still at home?” Matteo said after she’d called them in to eat. “She should go see the doctor. Is she just mad?”
“No one’s mad,” Lily said. “Didn’t I just tell you that?”
“I cleaned my whole room,” Luke said. “If I go knock, I could show her. I put everything away in all its drawers.”
“No one’s mad at you for not cleaning your room,” Lily said again. “No one’s angry at all.”
“You get mad at us all the time for not cleaning our rooms,” Matteo said pointedly, tilting his head and widening his eyes so that he appeared to be giving the fish eye to his bowl of pasta.
“Okay,” Lily said, “enough. Enough! How many times do I have to answer the same questions from you two?”
She pushed her chair back from the table, and both boys looked up in suspended amazement. Matteo held his fork in the air like an offering he’d hoped to surrender.
“We only asked one,” he grumbled. Luke looked from his brother to his nanny with poorly concealed terror. Matteo considered his food with distaste, but in another moment he was humming. She knew he’d begin eating again soon, and that his brother would follow.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” she said, but they’d both sealed their outrage and moved on without waiting for her to beg their forgiveness. The boys were like this; maybe all small children were. They didn’t appear to hold anything against you, they moved through a world that was always the present tense, always shifting around them as if it were a rotating
backdrop on a stage set. But once they’d been hurt by something, the hurt remained forever enshrined in the past tense. You could not heal it, once they’d put it away.
She thought again of Mina’s face that afternoon. Lily could tell the woman was just dying for someone to confirm her place in Isabel’s inner circle, to give her a clandestine wink so they could all draw a clearer line between “us” and “them.” And it had been obvious all week that Mina was afraid of Lily. As she bustled in and out, uninvited, with her trays of prepared salads from Aux Delices, her pastry boxes. As if anyone in this house was eating junk food!
Luke let out a muffled gurgle, his mouth full, and Lily turned to look behind her. Madison was standing there, her body slouched against the door frame.
There was something sinister to Madison’s new awareness of her body these past few months, as though she’d been told by an outside source that she was now at the age when boys would notice what her skin smelled like and whether she led with her hips when she walked. Watching her negotiate the things she hadn’t had before—her coltish legs; the high, insistent globes of her newly rounded ass; the breasts that as far as Lily could tell had sprouted quite literally overnight—felt like watching a child finger a weapon.
It was always running, now, in the back of Lily’s mind—even when she decided not to listen to it, the way she’d sometimes doze on the train in the city but still startle awake for her own stop. The same thought: that the boys were fragile, yes, but Madison was volatile, like something that needed to be kept in a test tube and stored in a safe. That if this had happened when Lily was fifteen, she would have swallowed anything that was handed to her, pressed herself against the first boy who offered, gotten as naked as she could as quickly as she could just to feel another kind of pain.
And yet when she’d slapped Madison’s cheek, it had felt soft and barely able to hold itself together, like the fragile skin that forms on the surface of warmed milk.
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