All the Summers In Between, page 11
“But someone might see me.”
“I have an idea.” Inside the hall closet by the front door, Thea hunted for a large sunhat and the big black Jackie Kennedy sunglasses she used to wear. She dropped both items on the wooden picnic table outside along with brown bags holding their sandwiches. “You can go in disguise.”
They pedaled out of the driveway twenty minutes later, determined to ride the thirty minutes it took to get to the ocean. Thea had a disguise of her own—a men’s baseball hat, aviator sunglasses.
Margot took her hands off the handlebars, singing aloud to Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” coming through the transistor radio attached to Thea’s bike. The lyrics had been Thea’s favorite of the last several years, the ballad unfolding like a bittersweet farewell to childhood. Elton’s voice always tugged at Thea to revisit her own past, and his words filled her with a longing to be young, to be home with her mother, to be a teenager falling in love for the first time. She considered Dorothy and Toto following the yellow brick road to Oz in the movies, only for Dorothy to discover that she had what made her happy all along.
Thea wanted to think that everything she needed to be happy was right here in front of her, too, but she wasn’t sure sometimes.
“Look, I can still ride with no hands,” Margot yelled, sailing along the tree-lined streets. Thea could never do it and still couldn’t, but she loved the gentle glide of the wind across her face. These days she often stood outside while talking to the other moms as Penny rode her bike in the neighborhood; why had Thea stopped riding herself? When Felix asked her recently to bike to town for breakfast at the diner, she’d thought it would be easier to drive, especially with Penny trailing behind. But the smooth tires on pavement, the invigorating speed, the balancing act—all of it brought her back in time. How had she thought she was overburdened at twenty?
“Are you glad you stayed here?” Margot asked, speckles of sun funneling through the stately trees and dappling the roadway. “I forgot how special summer feels out here. I would stay just for that farmer’s strawberry rhubarb pie we picked up.”
Thea felt a tightness unfurl inside her. She’d been consumed by this thought lately—had she made the right choice in staying in East Hampton?—and when the honest answer came to her, it was a comfort. “I am glad, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more of the world like you have.”
“You know where I think you would love? The south of France. We hated glitzy St. Tropez and ended up in an old town on the water named Antibes. They have artists and a jazz festival. I thought of you when I was sitting on the old wall looking out on the water.”
“Did you?” Thea liked the idea, since she had thought of Margot numerous times while walking an ocean beach in East Hampton. “The oddest things would remind me of you too. I was at a yard sale and saw a political button against nuclear war. ‘Hell No, We Won’t Glow.’ ”
Margot laughed. “Do you think if my mother hadn’t left, I would have stayed out here for good?”
“Probably not,” Thea said. “You had so many open doors.”
Margot might have visited more often had her mother stayed, but a quiet country life didn’t suit Margot any more than it had suited her mother. The newspaper woman and her daughter had the mindset of summer people: The “country” was worth visiting only because everyone else from the city and its suburbs were visiting too. They hired locals to keep their floors free of sand and stock their bar carts. They paraded around in designer bathing suits at members-only beach clubs as if that was the entire point of going to the beach. And most of them abandoned it all come Labor Day, as house staff dragged inside overpriced outdoor furniture, installed storm windows, cleaned out the food cabinets, and drained the pool.
They biked in the quiet, the rattle of the spokes spinning underneath them. “Felix made it all worth staying, I bet,” Margot said.
“Sure. Staying out here with Felix’s job has definitely connected us with people I never thought I’d be friends with,” Thea said. “It has surprised me how alike we all are.”
Summer people found Thea’s knowledge of where to go clamming and where to find ponds where kids could catch frogs utterly charming, and rather than hide that she grew up in the area, she often let it “slip,” basking in the attention it brought on her. “What is winter like out here?” some women asked, confiding in her as they admitted how exhausting life was in their busy suburb. Sometimes she’d see those women at the grocery come January, but only the heartiest stayed a second winter. Still, it didn’t matter how long people stayed; all of them were knitted together by their love of summer. Just like the rest of them, she and Felix paid their yearly dues at the Maidstone Club, even if they were heavily discounted because Felix’s boss was on the board, and Thea spent long mornings at the pool talking with other moms about the best swim instructor, the tennis pro worth registering with, and how to barbecue the juiciest steak. Class, it turned out, wasn’t as much of a divider as she’d once thought.
And still. Still. Thea kept up walls with these friends. She never did confide in any of them about the stormier years of her childhood or how she wished she could have finished college or how she hadn’t expected to be a mother so young herself or how she worried she wouldn’t be a good mother and Penny would find a reason to hate her someday or how life could be so incredibly boring one day and colossally fascinating the next. Did anyone else feel as though they lived on the same roller coaster of emotions in a single afternoon, the desire to be everything and to admit that you’d become nothing in the very same breath?
“Do you remember when Penny was born?” Margot steered her bike directly beside Thea, pedaling at the same speed, their legs in sync. “Did you get a gift in the mail? A pretty crocheted dress and winter bonnet. Yellow, with a small lamb sewn onto the pocket?”
Thea did recall. It had come in a small box with a Florida postmark, without a return address. “That was from you? Felix said it must have been from his great-aunt down in Port Charlotte.”
Margot laughed, then reached up to an overhanging oak branch, grabbing a leaf, then letting it flutter out of her hands. “This is what I was trying to tell you. I was here with you, before this mess I’m in now, just not in the normal way.”
Thea scrambled to understand. Why would she keep it a secret? It would have meant something to her to know that Margot was following her life from afar; she’d always assumed she’d simply moved on. “Why didn’t you just sign your name in a card? ‘Congratulations! From, Margot.’ Easy.”
“Because I didn’t have the energy to apologize and bring up all this tension. I just wanted to give you a present and congratulate you, not stir the pot.”
In those early weeks, Thea had been too overwhelmed with new motherhood to question something as trivial as who sent it; she could barely keep up with her engorged breasts. “How did you even know I was pregnant?”
“I went to camp with a lot of women out here. Word gets around.”
Thea gulped the honeysuckle air. Her legs pushed harder to keep the bike moving. It had been easier to think that Margot hadn’t thought of her again after their friendship drifted apart. The knowledge that Margot had wanted to make amends all these years made Thea feel guilty that she hadn’t tried harder herself. But it was different with a friend like Margot; you wanted them in your life, but you didn’t need them. It wasn’t as though they were former lovers rekindling a fire. She and Margot had simply been there for each other at a critical juncture in their early lives, and what they needed then was so different from what they’d probably needed in the coming years. Or even now? What could they even offer to each other now other than memories?
“I wish you would have come to visit—even just to say hello.”
Margot shrugged. “You could have found me too.”
Thea slammed her foot against the pedal with frustration. “I wrote you letters. I called.”
Her friend seemed surprised. “Mother never gave me any letters. That was her way, though: she’d told me the day we packed up our beach house and returned to the city that I should stop talking to you.” Margot parroted her mother’s condescending voice. “ ‘She’s an innocent in this, Margot.’ ”
“You never listened to her before.” Thea couldn’t help her sarcasm; she’d always looked up to Margot’s mother. To think that she’d likely opened Thea’s letters before throwing them in the trash, that she’d read her apologies and pleas for Margot to call her. How weak Thea must have sounded.
Margot did a zigzag in the roadway, hollering behind her. “I know, but I thought it would be better for you, honestly.”
Thea tried to decide if it was true, if she would have struggled with Margot in her life. They might have fixated on their guilt, one or both of them feeling an overwhelming desire to tell—and then what? There was no turning back. But Margot was right. Thea had stopped trying to connect after those first few months too, and it was for one reason, a reason that had popped into her head now: because she’d never truly believed she was good enough for Margot. That entire summer, she’d been waiting for Margot to discard her.
Thea pedaled harder to catch up with Margot, who was gliding down a small hill. When they were side by side again, Thea asked after her family, trying to connect the dots of Margot’s past. “So why did you ice your parents out of your life?”
“Are you really asking me that question?” Margot snapped, their bikes passing by a large red barn, an American flag flapping off the front. A whaling cottage came into view, a tidy picket fence wrapping the property. Slowing down, Margot said: “For a long time, Willy defined me, and I adored him for that. For taking away any of my confusion about how the world should look. Because I liked his view of a well-lived life. It was full of distractions and late nights out and plenty of books and travel, and I needed that. For him to simplify things for me. My parents did nothing but confuse me with their perplexing show of love and hate.”
Willy’s disappearance had been on Thea’s mind this entire conversation. “Have you tried calling your apartment?” Thea pressed. “To see if Willy’s come back?”
“He’s not coming back.” Margot tucked a chunk of her hair into the sunhat. “And anyway, what if I do call, and someone else answers? Someone waiting for me to reveal where I am.”
They’d scoured the newspaper together every morning after it arrived this week, and there had been only one article about Willy, buried toward the back, three-quarters of a column with one new detail. Reporters knew: He’d disappeared from his Park Avenue apartment, his wife vanishing soon after. His body had not been found, and investigators believed he was on the run and wanted for questioning in a possible Ponzi scheme involving a string of restaurants in Miami. “Nonsense,” Margot had slammed the paper shut yesterday morning. “We own those restaurants free and clear. I helped buy them for god’s sake. Can’t they just look up a title?”
It had surprised Thea how easy it had been for Margot to take Willy’s side. Accused of a Ponzi scheme? That was a serious crime. She’d arrived saying that Willy had hurt her, hinting that he might have endangered her, but she seemed to be reversing that stance now, playing the role of supportive wife. And yet, Margot wasn’t doing much to try and connect with him, either. If Felix disappeared, Thea would be frantic, doing everything in her power to try to locate him. But Margot seemed to know something more, and Thea suspected that she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Margot was always good at leaving things out when it was convenient.
“Maybe you should call the police, so they don’t think you did something bad.” Thea didn’t feel thirty saying that. She felt twenty, still the uncertain young adult looking to Margot to prop up her confidence.
But old friends were bound like siblings; there were roles to play, and if she’d been passive in the past, it was hard not to be now.
Margot’s foot slipped off the pedal, and she pushed on. “But if the police know where I am, then someone else can find me. I have this bad feeling.”
“But you could prove to them that you bought the restaurants. You could clear Willy’s name.”
“You’re missing the point, Thea. The feds are looking for one thing, and those goons outside the apartment are after him for another. It’s not the cops I’m scared of.”
A more disturbing thought came to Thea then. Perhaps Margot didn’t actually care what happened to her husband. Maybe after he gave her that giant bruise and she discovered his crimes, she’d decided that the only way to protect herself was to disappear. She would tell an invented tale of scary mobsters chasing after them, when really it was just the feds looking for Willy because he’d broken actual laws. Maybe Margot had too.
Thea sighed. She really hoped she was wrong.
They took a break under the shade of a large pine tree, drinking from a Mickey Mouse–themed thermos that Thea packed in her woven bike basket. Thea wanted to state the obvious: if Margot wasn’t ever going home, where was she planning on going? It was only a matter of time before the harbormaster discovered her sailboat on one of his routine tours of the shoreline. Thea’s daughter had already seen her in the barn. Felix would return tonight, and at some point, he’d find out too. Then she’d be in a marital sparring match of her own.
As they saddled back on their bikes, Margot reached out to steady Thea’s handlebars as she fiddled with her kickstand, seemingly reading her mind. “Don’t worry. I have a plan to get out of your hair. I will hide out in the Caymans until I figure out what is really going on.”
Thea winced at the thought of this far-fetched plan. Margot would sail alone? For weeks? It sounded suspicious holing up on an island in the Caribbean, too. She wished she could trust her friend to be innocent. Then again, Margot had lied to her before. Thea had seen how easy it was to lose yourself in a flash of anger, how Margot’s face had contorted that night when she saw Thea holding the umbrella overhead next to her illuminated pool, the adrenaline they’d both felt that fueled them when they’d needed their strength. Fear was always the first domino in the collapse of rational thinking.
“Do you know how nuts you sound?” Thea exaggerated her cadence to make clear how dubious the circumstances were. “You’re going to sail to the Cayman Islands? Alone? On your father’s boat? Margot, have you lost your mind?”
“Of course not.” Margot lifted her feet off the pedals, suspending them in midair. “I’ve hired a local sailor. I only need you to drive me to the dock in Montauk next Friday at five o’clock. The eighth of July.”
* * *
“For the record, this is a terrible idea.”
Margot laughed. But Thea began planning out how it could work. Felix would return tonight, and Margot planned to take her boat to hide in the next cove. They’d go to the beach on Sunday as a family and watch the fireworks; Thea would attend Midge’s July Fourth barbecue with Felix on Monday, and when Felix left for the train bound for New York on Tuesday, Thea had four more days to help Margot. That Friday, they would say a tearful goodbye, and she would drop Margot at the Montauk dock and hope that Willy’s demons never found their way back to her.
She and Margot walked along the dunes to a point far from the crowds of the public beach and concession stands, the pound of the surf roaring. Margot set up her towel and Thea unrolled hers right beside it. They lay down in the sand, found safer lines of conversation.
Margot said she never did return to Barnard, and that San Francisco wasn’t what she thought it would be back then. She fell in with a group of people living in a mansion in the Haight, a commune of sorts, where everyone had a job like scrubbing carrots or toilets or tubs, and at night, they all cooked elaborate dinners because the owner of the house, a friend of a friend she knew from her Manhattan private school, had just graduated from culinary school. After a year of Margot standing on sidewalks singing peace songs with a hat overturned in front of her, a year of selling her dresses at flea markets, a year of learning how to read the energy of her housemates (her roommate taught her to see auras), Willy came to visit a friend at the house. Their attraction was instant, a physical one that didn’t make sense since his nose was as big as an elephant’s, she laughed, “a true schnoz.”
But Margot was drawn to him, in part because he wasn’t at all like the stoned, flaky men she was used to spending time with. She was so sick of tie-dyed T-shirts she could scream, sick of people trying to pretend that communal living made them socialists. Instead, every one of her housemates, including her, was empty; their auras were blank. Then Willy had shown up in a suit, looking like an ad from Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and he had this blue glow around him. Everyone in the house had heckled him for being square, but it had only made him stand taller and announce: “While all you sorry kids are wasting your life, I’m going to make something of mine.”
Now that was an energy Margot wanted in her life. Willy knew exactly what he wanted; his trajectory was so clear. It made her feel pulled together, like she suddenly had a plane to catch. Two weeks after he arrived, Margot climbed into the passenger seat of his black Mercury Cougar and they’d driven straight across the country to Manhattan. They moved into a studio on Thompson Street, lingering most mornings in bed together, leaving sometimes for picnics or concerts in Washington Square Park. It took seven days for Willy to have his first big idea: He was opening a restaurant. He’d name it Divisadero for the street where they had met in the Haight. Margot gave him a small loan to secure a space and hire a chef, and her mother, feeling a bit enthralled by the change in her daughter, appointed her a Styles editor at the paper. She and Willy got engaged, and rather quickly, they had a New York life.
“It was a relief really,” Margot said now. “All my crystals had lost their energy, and then I could see them glowing again. I was glowing again.”
“Why didn’t you and Willy ever have children?” Thea asked, turning on her side and facing Margot, who was laying on her back with her eyes closed. She and Margot used to promise that they’d be “cool” parents, but now that Thea was a mom, she could see that being cool had little to do with parenting.
