“Aimee, I really need mon—”
“Where’s all your drug money? Can’t you use that?”
She heard him sigh.
“My accounts have all been frozen. It has to come from you.”
“Goodbye, Roger,” she said, and tossed the phone onto the bed, where it bounced off and tumbled onto the floor.
“Jesus,” she moaned, bending down to retrieve it from under the minibar.
One of Brian’s innovations had been to add minibars to the guest rooms. “People need more than Manischewitz if they’re going to be stuck with their families,” he’d quipped on an owners’ conference call. The margins on alcohol were great, especially when you included the absurd minibar upcharge, so everyone had acquiesced, even though Louise had said she didn’t understand the need to get drunk in the room when they had plenty of wine in the dining room. Maybe if her husband had faced up to twenty years in an orange jumpsuit, she would have understood the impulse to do a shot or two in private.
Aimee opened the fridge and took a mini Belvedere down in one long swig.
A text message beeped in her hand. Scott this time. That was why she didn’t power off her phone. Because she was still a mother, and mothers didn’t get the luxury of disconnecting.
Everything okay? her boy had written. You were so weird on the phone yesterday.
Scott had been about to set out for the airport when Aimee had stumbled onto the scene of the police tearing up their house. Mercifully, she’d had the presence of mind to call and stop him from coming. Her middle child lived in the library at the medical school and usually had his phone set to silent. Luckily he’d picked up, and she’d mumbled something barely comprehensible about needing to get to the Golden and that he should stay put in Chicago.
He’d clearly been taken aback. But she’d also detected a note of relief. Not having to come home for the weekend meant he had more time to study. Or maybe he didn’t want the family time. Wasn’t their not going to the Golden more often also because the kids had outgrown the nuclear bubble?
What should she say to him now that a day had passed? You could more easily pull the wool over Zach’s eyes than Scott’s. The trouble was, the vodka was already hitting her. She had to correct numerous typos before she was able to respond: Yes, yes. All good. Miss you! Your dad is the Pablo Escobar of Westchester, she added silently in her head.
A knock startled her as she was buttoning up a blouse she knew reeked of schoolmarm. If only she hadn’t had to pack so quickly. Everything besides the one dress that was too tight made her look like a hausfrau with a lifetime membership at Chico’s.
“Mom, you in there?” Oh God, Maddie. More collateral damage from her husband’s terrible judgment. The more she thought about it, there was no way the Hoffs were going to let their son marry the daughter of a criminal. They barely approved of the Glassers to begin with. Sure, Maddie’s father was a doctor, but it was nothing compared to the snobs they hobnobbed with in Palm Beach, titans of industry whose net worth had seven zeroes. The pictures of Benny and Louise dining with the likes of Jackie Mason and Rodney Dangerfield did not impress the senior Hoffs. They prided themselves on getting into social clubs that traditionally excluded their own kind. Meanwhile, the Catskills flourished as a mecca for those excluded from other hotels. A gentiles only sign that Benny had found at a yard sale hung ironically in the management office.
For different reasons, the idea of a Hoff-Glasser marriage had never sat entirely well with Aimee, either. Andrew just didn’t seem like his own man, and her daughter was so fixated on fulfilling THE PLAN (she worshipped at the temple of to-do lists) that Aimee wondered if she would accept a ring from a houseplant if offered at the right time. Aimee worried her daughter was so impressed with Andrew’s family and background that she’d lost sight of how special her own upbringing was. You’re a Goldman, goddammit, she’d want to say. Your grandmother hosted Eleanor Roosevelt! She was invited to the Montreal and Lake Placid Olympics because so many of the athletes trained at the hotel. Your grandfather was invited to the Oscars by Tony Bennett! So what if the Sullivan County Health Department gave our kitchen a C last year? We were once in the Guinness Book of World Records for smoking the largest sturgeon in history!
Despite her reservations, Aimee didn’t believe it was her place to discourage her daughter. If the relationship was bound to unwind, it should be because of what the kids wanted, not because of something out of Maddie’s hands entirely—like a federal crime committed by her father.
So Aimee kept her mouth shut, even as reservations bubbled inside her veins. Louise had meddled in her love life, and it had driven Aimee crazy. Any boy Aimee so much as chatted with, her mother demanded a full recanting. Are you “interested” in this boy? she would ask, studying her manicure to feign nonchalance. Where do his parents live? Is he in graduate school? Is he a serious type, or one of these wild fellas just smoking grass with the staff? “Why don’t you date him?” Aimee had once suggested after Louise had thrust a pre-law bachelor in her face, and Louise had balked. “Now you’re just being nasty. Can’t a mother worry about her only child without it rising to the level of a federal crime?”
A federal crime, Aimee thought. We’ve got that covered now!
Instead of testing her parents with a struggling artist or poet, Aimee had dutifully fulfilled their expectations. Roger was perfect on paper and just as charming in real life. A University of Pennsylvania undergraduate on his way to University of Chicago Medical School—a Jewish mother’s orgasm. And yet Louise hadn’t rejoiced at their coupling. When Louise approved of something, she couldn’t mask the pleasure on her face. There was nothing opaque about her emotional spectrum—all the staff at the hotel were terrified of her facial expressions. A nose wriggle could send a waiter reeling. She had a crippling eyebrow raise that made you feel you’d never made a good decision in your life. When Aimee had told her mother she was going to marry Roger, Louise had pursed her lips, and through them had slipped out, “If you’re sure.” Then had come a perfunctory hug and double kiss. Tears had followed, but it hadn’t been clear if they were the joyful kind.
It was terribly cliché, but Aimee didn’t want her mother to find out about Roger’s crime, because she didn’t want her to have been right all along. To have any reason to say I told you so. Because, historically, Louise had been right about so many things. Aimee did look better with the blond highlights Louise had suggested. Their kitchen in Scarsdale did look bigger when they’d blown out the wall between the pantry and the den. Maddie was putting on weight in high school and needed to cool it on the carbs. Zacky’s arm was broken when he fell playing softball in the Gold Rush game, even though Aimee had been certain he was faking. The list of things her mother had been right about was excruciatingly long.
That childish impulse not to give her mother the satisfaction was not the only reason for her secrecy. Louise was a new widow, her sorrow a cloud that followed her everywhere. And she had to make a major decision about the hotel without her partner. She was an eighty-four-year-old woman who deserved some peace. So it was twofold why Aimee didn’t open up: to spare her mother and to spare herself. Mothers and daughters. Was there any other relationship so achingly complex? It seemed, despite her best efforts, that she and Maddie were destined for a similarly complex future.
“Yes, just a second,” Aimee said when her own daughter knocked again. She quickly put the drained Belvedere bottle in the wastebasket and covered it with some crumpled tissues.
“Hi, honey,” she said, giving her daughter a peck on the cheek. “Ready for dinner?”
“Yep,” Maddie said. She was pouty, lower lip jutting out as if to dare Aimee to ask what was wrong.
Maddie had confided a while back that she thought Andrew might ask them for her hand in marriage over Father’s Day weekend. “He’s chivalrous like that,” Maddie had said. “And when he does ask, you’d better tell
me the proposal plans so I can make sure I have a blowout.”
Roger and Aimee had laughed at the time. The idea that anyone in the millennial generation was still asking for permission was a joke. They were all so entitled and did whatever they felt like doing anyway. If enough people liked it on social media, it was sanctioned.
“Mom, that shirt. Seriously?” Maddie squinted, eyes clearly assaulted by the floral print of Aimee’s blouse.
“That bad?” Aimee tugged at the top button self-consciously.
“Florals aren’t really my thing. I guess it’s good for your age.” Maddie plopped on the bed, picking at a cuticle. Did these children have any idea how awful they could sound? “So, my room smells like mothballs.”
“I’ll buy you an air freshener.” Aimee went to the bureau mirror. The shirt wasn’t that bad, was it? Maddie’s top was white, with holes where the shoulders were meant to be, so Aimee took the criticism with a grain of salt.
“Where? The general store in town sells, like, batteries and stamps only.” Maddie, twenty-nine, could so often sound like a pubescent teen. If Aimee closed her eyes, sixteen-year-old Maddie would manifest, Jansport backpack at her feet, chugging a Diet Coke while complaining about something or other. She may have her shit together more than Zacky did, but at least Aimee’s youngest was always kind and appreciative. He’d wanted to move back home, or at least hadn’t balked when Aimee suggested it.
“We’ll get one from a gas station, then,” Aimee said. She could use an air freshener, too. When she opened her top drawer to put away her undergarments, a moldy cheese smell escaped.
“Like, today, please!” Maddie rolled onto her stomach and began tapping out a text.
Aimee frequently marveled at how different her children were despite being raised by the same parents, loved equally (that was absolutely true), and given the same opportunities. As an only child, Aimee was the single sheet of Play-Doh molded by her parents. She wasn’t just the first pancake, the lumpy one with burned edges; she was the only pancake. She ought not to be surprised by her children’s differences, having grown up alongside the Weingolds: Peter, so serious, often described as fourteen going on forty. Brian, mischievous, the boy who never grew up. No matter how devoted a parent was, at best you were making a difference around the margins.
“Yes, today. I’ll ask Brian. Let’s get down to dinner,” she said, maybe a bit too harshly. She could show her daughter more compassion after springing a Golden weekend on her, separated from the object of her infatuation. None of the Glasser kids had shown much interest in the hotel in at least a decade. How could they enjoy the simple pleasures of the Golden when their father had spoiled them with Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton amenities? They found the place ceaselessly dull—if only they knew all its saucy secrets. But who was Aimee to tell them about all the illicit affairs, the payoffs to the staff to keep things quiet, the pregnancies that had bloomed between staff and guest and the wrong Mr. and Mrs.?
Aimee would love to blame her children’s apathy entirely on Roger, but that wasn’t fair. They brought down the average age by fifty percent, and her children didn’t even have the Goldman last name. When they signed up for activities at the hotel using Glasser, nobody fawned all over them the way they had over her. It was on her to impart family pride, and she’d botched it. Maybe it wasn’t too late. But as a swell of optimism tingled her fingertips, she remembered the reason they were all gathered together.
She wondered if Peter’s children felt differently, and she made a note to observe Phoebe and Michael over the next few days. Had she failed her children by not instilling in them enough pride in their roots? She’d once overheard Scott say to one of his friends that his grandparents owned “some random hotel upstate,” and she hadn’t even bothered to correct him. To tell him and whatever shit he was talking to that the Golden Hotel was a vital piece of their heritage, the resort where thousands of families had bonded, shared laughter, made memories. It had a Wikipedia entry that was three pages long, for God’s sake! But it wasn’t the Atlantis in the Bahamas, where Roger booked them every Christmas break, with its sprawling water park, trapeze camp, and snorkeling expeditions. Yes, you could take out a canoe at the Golden, but there was a good chance you’d get a splinter from the seat and the boat would have at least one patched-up hole.
She and Maddie were almost to the dining room when Aimee asked, “Have you chatted at all with Phoebe and Michael? I feel like I barely know those kids since we stopped coming to the hotel at the same time . . .” They both fell silent, Aimee at least thinking back to the night that had eroded the tradition of joint family stays, a July Fourth barbeque ten years prior that had gone terribly wrong. Amos and Benny had missed the whole thing. They’d claimed they were fifty meters away, dealing with a busted speaker. It could have been a cover to avoid meddling in the family drama. Had Fanny really dropped a blueberry pie in her mother’s lap? Had Louise really said such critical things about Brian out loud? Had Peter called Roger a jerk-off? Aimee was positive she’d seen Phoebe trip Scott with her jump rope. If the fireworks hadn’t malfunctioned, setting off a blaze that forced an evacuation of the hotel and destroying the waterfront pavilion, the two families might have parted ways for good.
After that summer, the families took separate months at the hotel. The Weingolds came in July and saved August for traipsing through Europe. The Goldman-Glassers attended local day camps in July and spent the last two weeks in August at the Golden. The separation had saddened Aimee at first, but she’d reminded herself that it was different than when she was a child. Her kids had one another; so did Phoebe and Michael. They didn’t need to play Brady Bunch.
“I talked to Michael a little. He’s also put out about the mothball stench in his room and concerned the smell will cling to his cashmere. Phoebe is taking pictures of literally everything and posting them with moronic captions,” Maddie said.
“I guess she’s excited to be here, then,” Aimee said, now definitely feeling like a failure.
“Uch, no. She just has to let her followers know where she is every thirty seconds or they’ll put out an APB.”
“Hm,” Aimee said, but her mind was already elsewhere. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Brian Weingold standing with the maître d’, reviewing a diagram of the room. He was tapping various places on the seating chart with the eraser side of a pencil. She felt the flutter in her stomach that seeing Brian always gave her, from the first awareness of her sexuality to today. At her own father’s funeral, she’d had to will herself not to look over at him, knowing her thoughts wouldn’t be appropriate for the occasion.
Why couldn’t Brian deteriorate with middle age like the men in Scarsdale, with thinning hair, pasty skin, and a paunchy waist? Brian had perpetually tan skin, which the sun kissed instead of scorched, the opposite of Roger, who covered himself in SPF100. Not that protecting oneself from melanoma was unsexy; it was more that striping one’s nose with zinc oxide to go from the car to the inside of a store was major overkill. Brian had little scrapes on his forearms and calluses on his fingers that she assumed were from doing manly things like cleaning the gutters or fixing the roof. Again, Roger was the opposite. When something broke in their home, his answer was always to call in a professional.
Today, Brian was wearing perfectly fitting jeans with a blue button-down tucked in. His salt-and-pepper hair hung over his eyes. Aimee chastised herself for feeling so giddy in his presence. She was a premenopausal mother with three grown children, married for more than thirty years. It wasn’t becoming to act like a schoolgirl around Brian, who wasn’t even much of a friend anymore. They rarely saw each other, spoke only a few times a year on the phone about the hotel, and were tied together only through a business interest. Moreover, they were together this week to face the hotel’s existential threat, not for her to flirt.
At that moment, a middle-aged waitress with bright red hair pulled up in a clip approac
hed and whispered something in Brian’s ear. He laughed and squeezed her elbow. Aimee looked away.
“I’m starving,” Maddie said. “Look, Zacky’s already at the table. He looks really upset. Do you know what’s going on with him? He barely spoke on the ride up.”
Aimee froze. She was being forced to lie to so many people. She’d lied to Zach about the police. She’d lied to Scott about Roger being sick. She was about to lie to Maddie about her brother. She would lie to her mother when she inevitably asked where Roger was. If she were Pinocchio, she’d be due for her second nose job. Thank goodness she’d had the vodka. Aimee hated to think what this kind of deception would feel like sober.
“Oh, probably something with a girl. I wouldn’t worry,” she said, and then, overreacting, put a protective arm around her daughter’s shoulders. They were rarely physically affectionate anymore, and Maddie just kind of stared at the hand on her arm like it belonged to an alien.
“All right, I’ll go sit with him and see if I can dig up some info,” she said, and slipped out from Aimee’s hold. Her children might bicker, but they cared about one another.
Aimee’s eyes scanned the dining room, where more than a hundred tables were set with the same carnation pink tablecloths that had been used since her childhood, white napkins fanned on top of white china plates with a green fleur-de-lis design. She did a quick count—maybe only thirty tables were occupied. Around the perimeter, uniformed waiters stood at attention. Aimee recalled the time when the workers hired by her father and Amos had had to perform physical strength tests in order to get the job, like firemen. They’d needed to balance round trays, thirty-six inches in diameter, stacked with at least ten full plates topped with aluminum lids while still making it to the kitchen and back from the farthest table within thirty seconds. The waiters flanking the dining room were probably those same fit boys, only thirty years had passed since their last fitness test. There was one particularly wobbly-looking one at the end of the line whom Aimee wouldn’t trust to handle soup.
Last Summer at the Golden Hotel Page 8