Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  “How are you holding up? You miss your mom and dad?” Mrs. DiNardo asked.

  I nodded, scratching Muffin (or possibly Mittens) behind its ears. I waited until Mrs. DiNardo had gone back to Dancing with the Stars before easing open her pantry door. I found a half-full bag of marshmallows and a bar of unsweetened baking chocolate and shoved them both into the pouch of the sweatshirt I’d worn with theft in mind. In the refrigerator, I found a few hot-dog buns and added them to my stash. I played with the cat for another few minutes, then got to my feet.

  “Good night, Mrs. DiNardo!” I called. I felt bad about stealing food, but I was sure the DiNardos could afford to replace what I’d taken. On the fourth-floor landing, I crammed four marshmallows into my mouth and chased them with a hot-dog bun. I hid the rest of the treats under my mattress, and supplemented my one-egg breakfasts and dry-tuna lunches with a few marshmallows or a square of the unsweetened chocolate, which was so bitter it made my face ache.

  Every Saturday morning before we left for Weight Watchers, Nana would weigh me. “The trick to staying healthy is never gaining weight in the first place,” she said. I would stand on the bathroom scale in just my underwear and nightgown. “I’ve never weighed more than five pounds more than I did the day I was married,” she told me, sucking in her cheeks and turning from side to side, inspecting herself in the bathroom mirror, moving her body and face through the same series of poses that I’d seen my mother perform a thousand times. “I weigh myself every morning, and if I see that needle creeping up, I cut back.” Cut back where? I wondered. Would she eliminate the single square of chocolate she permitted herself every other night? Would she reduce her afternoon snack from twelve almonds to six? What was left for her to deny herself?

  “So many women my age let themselves go,” Nana lamented one Saturday after the meeting. I was instantly struck by the phrase. While she kept talking, I thought about how it would look: women unbuttoning their jeans and unzipping their dresses, running toward tables full of carrot cake and apple crisp. Their breasts would bounce; the extra flesh of their upper arms would jiggle; their thighs would ripple and shake as they raced toward rivers of butter, plains of prime rib, mountains of mashed potatoes and ice cream and birthday cake.

  I will never forget the look on my mother’s face on that hot August afternoon when my parents came home: first shock, then sorrow, and what looked like a flash of envy that quickly turned into sympathy, and from sympathy to anger. “Oh,” she said, and opened her arms. She felt warm and soft against me, her scent mixed with the unfamiliar tang of bug spray and sunscreen.

  “How about a hug for Dad?” said my father. He tried to smile as I embraced him, but his forehead was furrowed, and his lips were a little white around the edges. I helped them carry their luggage inside and upstairs to where Nana was sitting in the kitchen.

  “Jerry!” Nana said, smiling as she stood, smoothing the fabric of her slacks over her hips. “How was Maine?”

  “Maine was good,” he said. “But, Denise—”

  As if she hadn’t heard him, Nana said, “And doesn’t Daphne look wonderful?” Lowering her voice, she said, “I thought about sending you a picture, but we wanted it to be a surprise.”

  By then my mom had made it upstairs. Holding her duffel bag in her hand, in a voice that was frighteningly quiet, she said, “Mom. We talked about this.”

  “What?” Nana asked. She raised her hands, fingers spread, in the air, an exaggerated look of innocence on her face. “What did I do? Is it a crime to want my granddaughter to be healthy?”

  “Daphne,” said my father, “go to your room, please.”

  I hurried down the hall and closed my bedroom door. Part of me didn’t want to hear them, but a larger part was powerless to resist. I pressed my ear against the seam where the door met the wall and listened to a three-way fight conducted mostly in whispers, with the occasional shout. I heard Nana hissing at my mother, saying, “You of all people know how hard it is to lose weight once you’ve put it on,” and my father growling, “You had no business doing this to Daphne.”

  “Oh, that’s fine for you to say,” Nana said. “You have no idea what it’s like to go through life as a fat woman. No idea at all.”

  I closed my eyes. Had Nana been a fat woman? Was she talking about my mom? Was I destined to be fat, just like my mother? And was it really that bad?

  I pressed the pillow over my ears when the shouting began, my nana yelling at my dad, “You’re not doing her any favors with those food trips of yours,” my father yelling back, “I don’t want her hating her own body! Isn’t it enough that you’ve made your own daughter miserable? Do you have to do the same thing to her daughter?” I was lying on my bed when I heard the door slam, then my father’s tread in the hallway. His face was red, and his hair stood up in tufts, but his voice was gentle, and his hand was warm around mine.

  “How about you and I go for a walk?” he asked. We went to Ben & Jerry’s on 104th Street, where I got the hot-fudge sundae with mint chip ice cream I’d been dreaming about since Nana’s arrival. My father told me stories about their time in Maine: the camper who’d finally learned how to swim after being too scared to even put his face in the water, the canoers who’d gotten lost in a thunderstorm. Finally, he said, “How’d it go with Nana?”

  “I was so hungry,” I said. By then my spoon was clinking against the glass as I scraped up every bit of hot fudge, gobbling it down, even as I heard Nana’s voice saying that sugar was poison, and Valerie, the Weight Watchers leader, talking about how she’d weighed three hundred pounds and how awful that had been. “She only let me have, like, one tiny bite of chocolate for dessert. She threw out all the sugar and all the butter!”

  “She shouldn’t have done that,” my father said. “There’s absolutely no reason to restrict what a growing girl is eating.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You are fine, just the way you are,” he said. “Bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel any differently.”

  I wanted to believe him, but by then, of course, the damage had been done.

  * * *

  At Drue and Stuart’s apartment, with the party continuing behind me, and with Brett lurking somewhere nearby, I finished my water, went back to the bar, asked for a shot of tequila, and slugged it down, feeling my throat burn, along with my eyes. I am going to die alone, I thought. I wanted to go home, back to my safe little nest, to sit with Bingo in my lap and Darshi on the couch beside me, or maybe even back to my parents’ place, away from all these beautiful people who, just by living, made me feel inadequate, at once enormous and small.

  I’d stepped into the hallway and summoned the elevator when I heard a man’s voice, coming from the shadowed corner at the end of the hallway.

  I held my breath and listened. The man was Stuart. His face was toward the wall, his body bent in a protective curve as he spoke intently to someone I couldn’t see. “It’ll be fine,” I heard him say. “I promise.”

  The elevator dinged. Stuart turned around. Quickly, before he could see me, I stepped inside, punching the down button until the doors slid shut. As the elevator descended, I thought about Mr. Cavanaugh’s fidgety impatience, about Mrs. Cavanaugh’s enlarged lips and Mr. Lowe’s transplanted hair. I wondered how many of the guests were faking something—confidence, friendship, maybe even love. I wondered how many had ulterior motives—fame or fortune or just proximity to someone who had both. I thought about the cousins, wondering if Drue had paid for their tickets and hotel rooms, or made generous contribution to their kids’ college funds. I recalled her gorgeous assistant, wondering if she’d been offered a raise right around the time the save-the-date cards had gone out and Drue had recruited her as a bridesmaid. I walked out into the darkness, feeling unsettled, unhappy, a little envious, a little nauseated. And all of those emotions felt familiar, as comfortable and customary as drawing breath. It was the way Drue Cavanaugh had always made me feel.

  I wa
s almost out the door when I heard Drue calling me. “Hey, Daphne! Wait up!”

  I turned around and there she was, hurrying through the lobby in her moonbeam dress with her high-heeled shoes in her hand. When she saw that she’d gotten my attention, she dropped her shoes by her feet, stood up very straight, and declaimed,

  My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps

  To come and waste their time and ours…

  In spite of myself, I smiled. Back at Lathrop, the English teacher who’d gotten us started on Philip Larkin with the poem about how your parents fuck you up had also taught the poem called “Vers de Société,” about the pain of loneliness versus the discomfort of social interaction.

  “I had to get out of there,” Drue announced. “Couldn’t stand it. Come on, let’s go get some French fries! With gravy!”

  “I don’t think you can bail on your own engagement party,” I murmured as my stomach growled.

  “Who’s going to stop me?” Daphne giggled, and I thought, Who ever does? “Besides,” she said, leaning her head briefly on top of mine and exhaling tequila vapors, “I can’t stand any of those people.”

  “Drue,” I said, “you’re marrying one of those people in a few weeks.”

  She wrinkled her nose. If I’d made the gesture, I would have looked like a constipated rabbit. On Drue it was charming. “Meh,” she said.

  “Meh?”

  “Well, not a permanent meh.” She waved her hand. “Stuart’s fine. Just, you know, right now, I’d rather be eating disco fries with you.” As always, I felt my stupid heart lift and swell at the thought of being noticed, being seen, being chosen; the joy of having this gorgeous, wealthy, important person bestowing her attention on me. “So can we?”

  I turned, looking over my shoulder, thinking that maybe Stuart would come looking for his fiancée, or that maybe Drue’s parents would have hunted her down. I saw no one but a drowsy-looking doorman, half-asleep behind half a dozen screens showing security-camera feeds, and an older couple, the man in a tuxedo, the woman in an evening gown, coming home from a night out. And Drue, in her shimmering dress, hair and cheekbones glittering gold, was waiting for my answer, smiling in a way that promised mischief and adventure.

  “Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course,” I recited. Drue grinned. She smacked a noisy, possibly drunken kiss on my cheek and grabbed my hand. “Wait, wait!” I handed her the pair of flip-flops I’d stuffed in my purse, for my own feet, and she said, gratefully, “You’re the best.” Together, we went out into the darkness, Drue chattering about some cousin’s awful boyfriend whose Instagram account had nothing but posts of right-wing political screeds, along with pictures of their elderly Pekingese dressed in holiday-themed hats and sweaters. “It’s like, Trump, Trump, dog, Trump, Trump, some country singer he hates, some football player he hates, and then more Trump, and then the dog again, and you know I like dogs, I do, but honestly…” I was half-listening to her chatter, half-remembering the line of poetry that had preceded the bit I had quoted, about how “sitting by a lamp more often brings / Not peace, but other things. / Beyond the light stand failure and remorse / Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course—”

  Chapter Seven

  On the third Friday in June, I stepped off the ferry in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the very tip of Cape Cod. The air was fresh and sweetly salty; the sky was a deep, scoured blue, ornamented by a few puffy white clouds. A dock extended into the water; motorboats and sailboats bobbed at anchor or crisscrossed on the water, bright sails snapping in the breeze. Waves were lapping gently at the golden, sandy shore, and the forecast called for more of the same: a week of clear, sunny days and crisp, starry nights. Perfect. Because Drue Lathrop Cavanaugh never got anything less than perfection.

  We lingered on the dock, with a member of Drue’s team of wedding photographers crouched down on the wooden boards, taking pictures with her camera and then, at Drue’s insistence, with both of our phones. I’d worn another Leef dress for the trip, a prototype of a garment that hadn’t even been put into production yet, a navy silk dress with a halter-style top and a knee-length skirt that swirled fetchingly in the wind. I’d accessorized with a navy-blue straw sunhat and a red lip, and I’d felt extremely nautical, if not a little overdressed next to Drue, who’d made the trip in cutoff shorts, a faded Lathrop T-shirt, and flip-flops. “I’ll be spending the rest of the weekend in corsets and heels,” she’d explained. “I’m going to dress down while I can.”

  A Town Car collected us and our luggage at the end of the dock and drove us twenty minutes west to the town of Truro, Provincetown’s next-door neighbor, where Edward Hopper had lived and painted, and where Drue’s maternal family had summered for generations.

  “Stuart and I thought about doing it in the Hamptons, but that’s so predictable,” Drue said. “And here, there’s a lot more leeway with what you can do on the beaches. Wait ’til you see the party tonight.” She shimmied in the back seat, smiling.

  Fifteen minutes later, the car rolled up a long driveway lined with crushed white shells and parked in front of a modern, low-slung home clad in silvery cedar shingles. There was a swimming pool and a hot tub in front, surrounded by a deck, rose and hydrangea bushes, pots of pink and red and purple impatiens in bloom, rows of lounge chairs with dark-blue cushions, and blue-and-white-striped umbrellas. Drue led me through the door and up a flight of stairs. “Your suite, madam,” she said, swinging the door open with a flourish.

  I stepped inside. “For real?” I asked, looking around. “For real, for real?”

  “Yep!” She leaned close and squeezed my shoulders. “All yours.”

  The room was enormous, airy and high-ceilinged, with floors of some light-colored wood polished to a high gloss. The king-size bed was dressed in crisp white and blue linens, piled with more pillows than two people (or, really, even four or five people) could reasonably need. To the left of the bed, the bathroom stood behind a wall of smoked glass tinted shades of blue, ornamented with wood carvings meant to evoke waves. Beyond the bed, a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a private deck with a round, white-cushioned daybed, and square planters overflowing with lavender and more hydrangeas and, on one side, a wall of boxwood hedges. Even with the sliding glass door shut, I could hear the hiss and rumble of the ocean.

  “Do you love it?” Drue clapped her hands. “Tell me you love it.”

  I spun around slowly. “It’s amazing.”

  “And look!” Drue led me out to the deck, through a wooden door, painted red, set in the middle of the hedge. Drue opened it. Hidden inside was a hot tub surrounded by lounge chairs, a cocktail table, and a stack of fluffy white towels. “Your bedroom and mine share it.” She gave me a broad wink. “Just put a sock on the doorknob if you’re entertaining.”

  “As if.”

  “Hey, weddings make people romantic! You never know.”

  I spun around slowly, looking from the bay to the hot tub to the mansion where I’d be staying. “It’s incredible.”

  “I want you to be happy.” Drue put her arm around my chest, pulling me back until she could rest her cheek on the top of my head. “I’m so glad that you’re here. That you agreed to do this.”

  I let myself lean back against her, smelling her hair and her perfume. She’s your Kryptonite, I heard Darshi saying… but when Drue said “Thank you,” I felt myself smile. Maybe she really had changed. Maybe I was doing the right thing.

  Below us, the beach was swarming with crews of workers, in the process of erecting a series of tents. The wedding ceremony would be held at a winery a few miles down the road, but the rehearsal dinner tonight, and the pre-wedding photographs tomorrow, would be on the beach. Because there were no fancy hotels in Truro, in addition to taking over the nicest hotel in Provincetown, the Cavanaughs had rented half a dozen homes on the bluff near the Lathrop family seat, where the wedding party and immediate family would stay. Each house had been given a name for the occasion. Drue and I were in Sea Star,
a three-story, four-bedroom house. Our bedrooms were on the second floor, and two more bedrooms were on the ground floor, the larger of which had been turned into a spa/salon/dressing room, complete with massage tables, mirrors, and a reclining chair with a steam machine beside it for Drue’s facialist/bridesmaid Minerva to use. The top floor was one large room, a combined kitchen/dining/living room with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the bay. The caterers had set it up as a hospitality suite, with a rotating buffet of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and snacks in between, not to mention a round-the-clock open bar.

  Stuart and his folks were next door, in a place called Sea Breeze. Drue’s parents and maternal grandparents were in the Lathrop family home, Sea Glass. Other, lesser participants and guests had been assigned to Driftwood, Starfish, and Clearwater (that last, Drue whispered, was on the other side of Route 6 and didn’t even have a water view).

  Back in my bedroom, a wooden bench with a woven seagrass seat stood at the foot of the king-size bed, with a giant, beribboned “Welcome to Our Wedding” basket at its center, with #DRUEANDSTU underneath it. The basket was crammed with goodies, all carefully selected by Drue after endless consultation with me. There were bottles of wine and prosecco, bags of smoked and candied nuts, biscuits and crackers, an assortment of dried fruit, salmon jerky and bluefish pâté, chocolate truffles, each wrapped in gold foil, a hangover-helper kit, which included Advil, Alka-Seltzer, some kind of herbal headache cure, and condoms (“In case any of Stuart’s friends get frisky,” Drue said with a wink). In the bathroom, I knew there would be soaps and scrubs and monogrammed bath bombs, along with razors, toothbrush and toothpaste and mouthwash, hairspray and mousse and bobby pins, and pretty much anything else that a guest might have forgotten to pack. “The nearest drugstore’s back in P-town,” Drue had explained. My gifts were in there, too—I’d made sachets, scented with lavender verbena, tied with curls of silver ribbon, with Drue and Stuart’s monogram embroidered on the front. A heavy-stock card with a schedule of the weekend’s events, with the word WELCOME in gold at the top, was tucked into the basket, between the cheese twists and the bag of dried apricots. I picked it up and read through it. “There’s an app for the wedding?”