I almost waited until just a few days before the tasting to invite my parents. This way it would have been too late and too expensive to make arrangements to get up to Nantucket. There are three ways to get here—a direct JetBlue flight from JFK, which is almost never less than five hundred dollars; a JetBlue flight to Boston followed by a forty-five-minute flight in a plane similar in size to the one JFK Jr. crashed into the Atlantic; or a six-hour drive to Hyannis Port (eight for my parents in PA), where you could take an hour-long ferry ride or a small plane to your final destination. But I knew if I waited, Mom would find a way to come, and the thought of her driving her rickety old BMW all the way to Hyannis by herself, having to figure out which ferry to get on and where to park and hauling her fake Louis Vuitton bags on board, was so sad I couldn’t stand it.
Dad had no interest in coming, which was no great surprise. He hadn’t had an interest in my life, in any life, his own included, ever since I could remember. For a time I wondered if he was cheating on Mom, if he could be the type who had a secret family on the side, his real family, whom he actually loved. One time, when I was in high school, he told Mom he was going to get the car washed. About half an hour after he left I called out to Mom that I was making a run to CVS. Halfway there, I realized I’d forgotten my wallet. I had to turn around in an empty lot, circling the crudely flattened land, the thick forest pulverized to make room for a brand-new housing development, and I discovered Dad, sitting behind the wheel of his car, just staring at the sticky mud. I backed out quick, before he could notice me, and gunned it back home, my heart racing with what I’d just seen, my mind trying to make sense of it. Eventually I realized, there was nothing to make sense of. Dad was ambivalent, simple as that. There was no second family he loved more than us. He might not have loved anyone.
Luke generously offered to pay for Mom’s JetBlue ticket—it was no trouble, really, especially since it was just her—and Mom drove into the city on Friday, using our guest pass to park her car in our garage.
“Will it really be safe here?” She fretted with her keys and pressed lock, the car chirping in response.
“Yes, Mom,” I groaned. “This is where we keep our car.”
Mom ran her tongue over her glossy lips, unconvinced.
I give the Harrisons credit for the patience they have with my mother, for her idiotic attempts to impress them. I’m not that great, I want to tell them. Why do you put up with her?
“Thank you for the tip,” Mr. Harrison had said just that morning, when Mom told him that he should really keep an eye on his portfolio because interest rates are going up. Mr. Harrison was the president of Bear Stearns for nine years before he retired; how that man didn’t tell Mom which way was up I have no idea.
“Anytime.” Mom beamed, and I widened my eyes at Luke, standing behind her. He made the universal relax gesture, pressing his palms down, as though he was trying to shut the full trunk of a car.
We settled on the lobster-mac-and-cheese bites, the mini lobster rolls, the wasabi steak tips, the tuna tartare spoons, the Gruyère bruschetta (“The ‘ch’ in bruschetta is actually pronounced like a ‘k,’” Mom said knowledgeably, even though I was the one who taught her that after I studied abroad in Rome my junior year), the oyster bar, the sushi bar, and the antipasto bar. “That’s for my husband’s side of the family!” Mom joked. Italians who don’t even know how to pronounce “bruschetta.” We are the worst kind.
We would do the tasting for the main course and the cake on Sunday. “It’s simply too much food to take in all at once,” Kimberly declared breathlessly, her thighs spilling over the sides of one of the Harrisons’ lawn chairs. Oh, she could have taken it, all right.
“Can you believe they’re getting married?” Mom gushed to Mrs. Harrison, clasping her hands together, girlishly. I hated when Mom pulled this cutesy shit with my future mother-in-law, who is a simple, serious tomboy, not prone to syrupy displays of affection. The problem is that Mrs. Harrison is too polite not to reciprocate. When Mom gets sentimental with her, it’s excruciating having to watch Mrs. Harrison struggle to keep up, which only intensifies my fury toward Mom.
“It is exciting!” Mrs. Harrison tried.
It was 3:00 P.M. when Kimberly left, when Luke stretched his arms up to the ceiling and suggested we go for a run.
Everyone else was “having a lie-down” at Mr. Harrison’s suggestion. It was all I wanted to do. When I was off the Dukan diet, I was off. No exercise. Wine until I dragged myself to a sleepless night in bed. As much food as I could fit into my shrinking stomach until it was time to starve again.
Mom and the Harrisons retired to their rooms to have their lie-downs while I begrudgingly laced up my sneakers next to Luke. “Just three miles,” he said. “Enough to feel like we’ve done something.”
Luke and I made a left out of the driveway. I was already breathing hard as we broke over the small incline on his street, the ragged dirt road opening up in front of us, sun beating relentlessly on the thin slit of exposed skin splitting the middle of my scalp. I’d meant to grab a hat.
“You happy?” he asked.
“I’m annoyed they didn’t have a better crab cake,” I gasped.
Luke shrugged without breaking his gait. “I thought it was pretty good.”
We kept on. Before I started working out twice a day—barre class in the morning and four-mile run at night—I felt strong as I ran and ran and ran. Now it was like the muscles failed me, my legs heavy when my legs were the one thing that had never been heavy. I knew I was overexercising, grinding myself into exhaustion, but the scale was moving, and that was all that mattered.
“You okay, babe?” Luke asked about half a mile in. He had set the pace, hadn’t slowed when I tried to, when the stitch braided the muscles in my lower left side. I rebelled by falling behind him, wondering how big the distance between us would have to get before he realized something was wrong.
I stopped and stretched my arm over my head. “Cramp.”
Luke jogged in place in front of me. “It gets worse when you stop.”
“I ran cross-country. I know that,” I snapped.
Luke’s hands were balled at his sides—which is the wrong way to run, it wastes energy. “I’m just saying.” He grinned and smacked my butt. “Come on, you’re a survivor.”
This is Luke’s favorite thing to say about me, to remind me. I’m a survivor. It’s the finality of the word that bothers me, its assuming implication. Survivors should move on. Should wear white wedding dresses and carry peonies down the aisle and overcome, rather than dwell in a past that can’t be altered. The word dismisses something I cannot, will not, dismiss.
“You go.” I flung my arm accusingly at the road. “I’m heading back.”
“Babe,” Luke said, disappointed.
“Luke, I don’t feel good!” I made my hands fists now, held them over my eyes. “I haven’t been eating! And now I just shoved eight fucking pounds of lobster-cheese into my system.”
“You know what?” Luke stopped running in place, shook his head at me like a disappointed parent, and laughed bitterly. “I don’t deserve to be treated like this.” He took a few steps away from me. “I’ll see you back at the house.”
I watched him sprint off, plumes of dust billowing at his heels, lobster cheese curdling in my intestines as his stride propelled him farther away from me. I’d never been on Luke’s bad side before, ostensibly because I’d never dared to do anything but charm him. It must sound stupid, but it was the first time I realized that for the rest of my life, till death do we part, it was on me to maintain this veneer’s sparkly, streak-free shine. If Luke noticed so much as a pinkie’s smudge, he would punish me for it. The spin came on so fast, a vibrant swirl of white-hot sun, I actually sat down in the dirt.
After dinner, Luke’s cousin Hallsy came over for a nip of bourbon. “Hallsy?” I’d echoed, incredulously, the first time Luke mentioned her to me. He’d looked at me like I was the one who needed to get a grip.
Hallsy’s parents have a house down the same dirt road Luke and I had just run, and Mrs. Harrison’s parents both have houses on the other side of the island, in Sconset. You can’t ride your sweet little Sunday bike into town without running into a pearled member of Luke’s bloodline.
Hallsy had brought with her a Tupperware container of pot brownies she’d gotten from the busboys, twenty years her junior and still not off limits, at Sankaty Head Golf Club, where all the Harrisons were members. It’s weird, how some people like Mrs. Harrison can grow up with all the money in the world and it’s just so normal to be rich that she doesn’t even realize she has something to flaunt. Then others, like Mrs. Harrison’s very own niece, are so insecure that they have to wear it in contempt on their faces, in the tacky diamond watches on their wrists. Hallsy is only thirty-nine, and already her face is pulled tight as a pair of Lululemon yoga pants across a plus-size girl’s rear. She’s never been married, which she’ll tell you she never wants to be even though she hangs all over every remotely fuckable guy after a single drink, while they gently untangle her Marshmallow Man arms from around their stiff necks. It’s no wonder the only ring on her finger is the Cartier Trinity, what with the way she’s ruined her face and the fact that she spends more time sunning on the beach than she should running on a treadmill. But it’s not just her sunspot-speckled chest and stocky, lazy frame. Hallsy is the type of person others describe as “whacky” and “kooky,” which is just the civilized way of saying she’s a nasty cunt.
Hallsy she loves me.
Women like Hallsy are my specialty. You should have seen the expression on her sci-fi-looking face the first time I met her, when I had the audacity to say that while not everyone in the room may support Obama’s politics, I think we can all agree that he is a supremely intelligent man. The conversation between Mr. Harrison and Luke and Garret waged on without anyone really paying my comment much attention, but I happened to look over at Hallsy to find her glaring at me, waiting for me to notice. “This family doesn’t care for Obama very much,” she said through her teeth. There was a moment between us where Hallsy saw more of me than I will ever show Luke, but I recovered quickly and gave her a nod, like I was grateful. I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the conversation, only swiveling my head from Luke to Garret to my future father-in-law and back again to show how enraptured I was with all the fine points the Harrison men were making. Later, when we went into town for drinks, Hallsy chose to sit next to me in the cab, and at the bar she asked me where I got my hair cut because she was looking for a new stylist. I told her to ask for Ruben at Sally Hershberger, and the corners of Hallsy’s plumped-up lips fought their way upward, against the tide of the Botox. You might think someone like Hallsy would only be inclined to torture someone like me, but if she did that, it would be an admission of her own aesthetic shortcomings. As long as I deferred to her, it was in her best interest to embrace me. It sent the message that there was no need to be jealous or intimidated—she was every bit as desirable as an overaerobicized twenty-something.
Hallsy has a brother named Rand, who is two years younger than Luke and five years younger than Garret, and her parents call him the Boy and say things like “It’s a miracle the Boy graduated from college at all,” even though it’s the furthest thing from a miracle because there is a new dormitory at Gettysburg bearing the Harrison name. Rand was currently following a big-wave tour with his surfer friends in Tahiti. Nell hooked up with him once but couldn’t go any further than making out because she said he kissed like a drunk five-year-old. “He has the fattest tongue,” she said, flattening hers and wiggling it around to show just how disgusting it is. I silently savor this piece of knowledge any time Hallsy lodges a crocodile complaint regarding the twenty-one-year-old model/actress Rand is dating whenever he lands in New York for a few months. She couldn’t be prouder to have a perfectly weathered playboy brother. It raises her stock.
I was sitting at the table on the back porch when Hallsy walked in. Hallsy picked my hair up off the back of the chair and threaded her fingers through it, saying, “It’s the beautiful bride!” I tilted my head up, and she kissed me on the cheek with her lips pumped full of poison. I never let Mom kiss me, and it would have bothered her to see how affectionate I am with Hallsy, even Nell. Fortunately, Luke and I had driven her to the airport not long after he came back from the run I so callously aborted. Mom would have loved to stay—she’d met Hallsy once and the next time I saw her she was wearing a fake diamond horseshoe necklace, a mall stand replica of Hallsy’s—but Luke and I had been the ones to buy her ticket and it cost three hundred dollars more for her to fly back on Sunday. Controlling the purse strings is an empowering feeling right up until I remember it wouldn’t be possible without Luke.
Mr. Harrison came outside with a bottle of Basil Hayden’s and put it on the table next to the bourbon glasses and the brownies. The first time Hallsy brought over the help’s brownies no one told me they were fudgy with pot, and I ate three and had to be put to bed with the spins, one of the loops finally landing me into a sticky spell of sleep that I fought and fought until I woke up at 2:00 A.M. shrieking about a spider dangling right over my head (there was no spider). The whole dream frightened me so much it triggered a charley horse that tore apart my calf. I was howling and gripping my leg, and Luke just stared at me like he’d never seen such a scene in his life. In the morning Mr. Harrison grumbled into his coffee, “What was all that commotion about last night?” It’s the only time he’s ever been annoyed with me, and I haven’t touched a Hallsy brownie since.
So tonight, I caught the corner of Luke’s eye when I stuck my hand in the Tupperware container. “I’m just having one,” I said under my breath.
Luke sighed in a way that made his nostrils look like sideways triangles. “Do whatever.”
Luke hates drugs. He tried pot once in college and said it made him feel dumb. He did go on this weird ecstasy bender with an ex-girlfriend his junior year, where they popped a pill every night for four nights in a row, but that’s where Luke Harrison’s fast life ended. Garret had arrived at the house that afternoon, and he was already on his second brownie. (I did coke with him in the bathroom at the Harrison Christmas party the year before. We both swore ourselves to secrecy from Luke.) Mr. Harrison and Hallsy were nibbling, but Mrs. Harrison kept right with her vodka. I get the feeling Mrs. Harrison has the same attitude about drugs as Luke does—she’s fine with others doing them in moderation, they’re just not for her.
“Did you finally get the honeymoon itinerary all squared away?” Hallsy asked.
“Finally,” Luke groaned, giving me a jokey, reproachful look. Is it really so much to fucking ask that he plan one thing for the wedding?
“Thank you for putting me in touch with your friend,” I said to Hallsy.
“Oh, so you are going to go through Paris now?” Hallsy swallowed the last bite of brownie and burped loudly. Hallsy loves to joke about having no manners, thinks it makes her seem reckless and carefree, like one of the guys. A lot of good that strategy has done for her.
“On the way back,” Luke said, “we fly into Abu Dhabi, spend one night, fly to the Maldives for seven days, then back to Abu Dhabi and then Paris for three more days. It’s not really ‘on the way,’ but Ani really wants to go to Paris.”
“Of course she wants to go to Paris!” Hallsy rolled her eyes at Luke. “It’s her honeymoon.”
“Dubai just seems like Las Vegas to me,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “I need some culture.”
“Paris will be the perfect foil to the beach vacation.” Hallsy sank back in her chair and rested her head in her hand. “I’m just so glad you didn’t decide on London.” She timed the roll of her eyes to the word “London.” “Especially since you might end up living there, which”—she snorted crudely—“good luck with that.”
I started to say how no decision had been made yet, but Luke cocked his head at his cousin, confused. “Hallsy, you lived in London after college
.”
“And it was the worst!” she wailed. “Sand niggers fucking everywhere. I thought I was going to be kidnapped and sold into white slavery.” She jabbed a finger at her hair, the color of six-hundred-dollar highlights.
A laugh gurgled low in Garret’s throat, and Mrs. Harrison pushed her chair away from the table. “Oh dear. I’m getting another vodka.”
“You know I’m right, Aunt Betsy!” Hallsy shouted after her. The brownies were making my brain feel like warm wet soil, ripe for a seed to plant. It clung to that sentence “You know I’m right, Aunt Betsy!” and regenerated it over and over.
“Your mom agrees with me, she’ll just never say it,” Hallsy said haughtily to Luke, who chuckled at her. “Speaking of things she’ll never say.” She swiveled in her chair so she was facing me. There was one lone brownie crumb stuck to her lip, trembling like a hairy mole. “Ani, you have to promise me something.”
I pretended my mouth was full of brownie so I didn’t have to answer her. This refusal was some pathetic attempt to show that her language offended me. Hallsy didn’t pick up on it.
“Don’t seat me with the Yateses at your wedding. For the love of God.”
“What did you do this time?” Mr. Harrison quipped. The Yateses were family friends of the Harrisons, though much closer with Hallsy’s parents as they had a son around her age. A son I’d heard she’d harassed, drunkenly and sloppily, on many occasions.
Hallsy held her hand over her heart and pouted in a way she thinks makes her look cute. “Why would you assume it was something I did?”
Mr. Harrison gave her a look, and Hallsy laughed. “Okay. I sort of did something.” Luke and Garret groaned, and Hallsy rushed to say, “But my heart was in the right place!”
“What was it?” I said, much more rudely than I’d meant to.
Hallsy turned to me, something like a challenge smoldering in her eyes. “You know their son, James?”
I nodded. I’d met him once. Some drinks thing. I asked him what he did, and the prick told me it was a rude question. I didn’t even care what he did, I just wanted him to be polite and return the question so I could brag about what I did.
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