All the Summers In Between, page 24
This is amazing, Thea thought. They each lifted a greasy slice off a paper plate, biting into it. She wanted to come back to this pizzeria every night of the week. Nothing had ever tasted so good.
Chapter Nineteen
“Every time I look at you, you’re smiling,” said Shelly. The store was empty of patrons that August morning, and even quieter than usual since Margot had off today and Jay was picking up a collection of albums from an estate sale. Thea and Felix had gone out two more times since their first date and she felt lit by a hundred light bulbs.
“It’s like we are the only two people in the world.” She’d been so giddy that she filled an entire sketchbook with drawings. A boy and a girl, simple lines of summer, nothing that could capture how breathless she’d felt when they had that slice of late-night pizza. She’d also finished three sketches for Margot’s mother, dropping them off with her last night; the newspaper woman thanked Thea with an encouraging smile, saying she would review them with her editors in the office on Monday.
Shelly ashed her cigarette into a ceramic dish made to look like a tiny record. “I remember that feeling.” On the turntable was a record by Simon & Garfunkel. The soft voices of the singers drew out every little detail of the night in her mind: how the edges of her body glowed when his grazed against her, the way he opened his mouth with surprise when he laughed at something she said.
Thea spun in the sack-style dress she had sewed at Margot’s house. She wouldn’t have worn something so modern—with its bold geometric print (and imperfect seams)—even a month ago, but now the style, which could be seen every weekend on American Bandstand, gave her the sense that she was stepping out of one version of herself and into another. She couldn’t afford the white ankle booties that Margot had suggested pairing with the dress, so she had put on wedge sandals she had in her closet. “I want this feeling to last forever.”
For the millionth time since last week, she thought of how the music, the intimacy, and the conversation of the nights with Felix had unlocked even more doors into her creative self. How much she suddenly wanted to draw sketches of the record shop, a close-up of the East Hampton windmill, her sister sleeping in her twin bed. A cartoon strip came to her, too. Not a traditional comic, but a farce, one that follows two hippy friends, young women working at a Manhattan corporation, and the scenes that emerge when they collide with strait-laced middle America. She showed the storyboards she’d drawn to Shelly, and while her boss flipped through, Thea gauged her reaction, how Shelly tapped on one of the squares with a chuckle when one of the women wore a belly shirt to a boardroom meeting, the company president asking the room: “Can someone tell me what’s going on?” A scared-looking vice president standing up and saying: “The advertiser said we need to understand them.”
Thea wasn’t sure it was even funny. “It’s my first try, but I was thinking that each week the women would get closer to their full potential, forcing the stiff corporate executives to take them seriously, mirroring this tension between our parents’ generation and ours.”
“You have to get Margot to show her mother this.” Shelly handed her back the storyboards, and Thea slipped them back into her tote bag, thinking that it seemed like a good possibility. If Julianna Lazure liked her floral-designed Dear Virgie logo, with the serious-looking block print lettering, maybe she’d be open to seeing more from her.
At the end of the day, feeling brave from Shelly’s input, Thea decided she’d draft a letter to the local newspaper as well and include some of her drawings. Why not, she thought. It had become her motto.
“See you Monday,” Thea told Shelly, the shop bell dinging as she walked outside to the bike rack. She hadn’t even pulled it out to ride when Shelly stuck her head out the door.
“It’s Margot on the line. She’s hysterical and wants you to stop by.”
Thea balanced over the center of the bike. “What’s wrong?”
Shelly seemed concerned. “Something about her parents.”
With a knowing look, Thea said, “Typical.” Then she hurried back into the shop and borrowed a copy of an old record by Buddy Holly with the song “Everyday” on the flip. The song always made Margot happy when they put it on at the shop; maybe it would cheer her up today.
After a fifteen-minute ride, Thea dropped her tote bag on one of the pool loungers in the backyard of Margot’s house. The housekeeper had sent her here to wait, and Margot eventually emerged from the kitchen doors in a cream satin kimono, her hair pinned into a bun with two chopsticks. There were large red rings around her eyes, her nose the color of fire. She plopped down next to Thea, her cheeks stained with tears.
“Did you see the news?”
“What news?” Thea pulled the Buddy Holly album out of her tote, handing it to her. “I brought you this, by the way. I thought it would help cheer you up.”
“Those bastards at the New York Daily Mirror.” She glared through her watery eyes. “They put this awful photo of my parents in the paper, my mother looking like she might bite my father’s head off, and another picture of Dad and Alexandra McKinnon looking all happy. With the headline: ‘Media Mogul’s Divorce Shakes Industry.’ ”
Bringing the record, Thea thought, was a bad idea; this was beyond the realm of something fixable with music. “Well, is it true? About your dad leaving?”
Margot wiped her nose against the gauzy sleeve of her robe. “Does it matter?”
“Yes it matters. A hurtful headline is different from your family actually falling apart.”
Margot rubbed her foot back and forth on the smooth surround of the pool. “Daddy didn’t come out last weekend, which is odd because he comes every weekend. He didn’t come last night, either. Mother said he was in Washington covering the protests. He is—I saw his report on television. But she was there too. I saw them on TV together.”
“What does your mother have to say about all this?” She shuddered, imagining poor Mrs. Lazure picking up the newspaper that morning and discovering her husband’s betrayal, along with the rest of Manhattan.
“She lied to me. Apparently, Daddy filed for divorce just after Memorial Day. They were waiting for the ‘right moment’ to tell me.”
“Really? That’s awful of them to keep you out of the loop like that. Didn’t they realize how it would hurt you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t think the papers would cover it.” Margot tied her hands together at her back. “But there’s more. My mother said she’s selling the house. This house.”
“Oh, Margot,” Thea said, an image of her friend packing up her sewing machine, her stack of fabrics and album covers. “You love it out here.”
“Want to know the irony of it all? My father bought this house to apologize for a previous affair. Mother was going to leave him, but he said they’d start anew in a house by the sea. We had this one incredible summer. I was fourteen, and we did everything, just the three of us. I remember sitting on the kitchen counter and watching my parents coo over each other as they cooked these grand French-style meals from Julia Child’s cookbook. But he’s done it to her so many times since. Of course it’s with that dumb television reporter, as if she cares that he has a family.”
“Maybe your father will keep the house for you.”
“He doesn’t care about this house either. He’ll buy something else out here, probably with his new girlfriend. I bet he already bought her an engagement ring.”
Thea couldn’t imagine living in a house purchased as a promise of enduring love, but then witnessing yourself falling out of love. There would be emotional triggers in every corner. “But you have another home, an apartment, in the city, right? Someday you can buy your own house out here. We can be neighbors.”
Margot brightened through her tears. They walked the perimeter of the yard, the salt pond flat and glassy in the distance. “This house is my happy place where I keep my horses and swim. Where we celebrate Christmas in winter and my birthday in springtime.”
Thea could relate. As much as she hated living at Dale’s, it was still a place where she could see her mother everywhere.
Thea glanced toward the Walrus’s cottage to their right. He was outside in a button-down work shirt, golden-skinned, hair pulled in a low ponytail, carrying a weed trimmer through the yard. He waved at them, his teeth straight and white. They waved back. “But this house isn’t everything. You said it yourself. There’s a great big world out there. Remember, we’re going to go see it.”
Margot took Thea’s hands. “That’s the thing, Thea. About our move to California. I want to leave this week, tomorrow even. I need to get out of here.” They traveled beyond the rose garden with the large statue of an angel, a vast amount of lawn before they’d step onto the thin slip of sand.
“But what about him,” Thea said, nodding back at the Walrus behind them. She was stalling. Thea couldn’t leave tomorrow. She wasn’t ready. They’d agreed they would go the first week in September, once Cara was back in school, once Shelly and Jay settled into the shoulder season. It was only the first week in August.
“Maybe he’ll follow me out there so we can play music, I don’t know,” Margot said, turning around and walking backward so she could see him again. “Anyway, I can’t be here anymore and I can’t move in with him in the maintenance shed. That’s where I draw the line.”
“Thank goodness you said that.” Thea exhaled. She didn’t want him following them to California, either. The idea of Margot ending up with the groundskeeper felt like something akin to her throwing her life away. No matter what Margot saw in the Walrus, whether she was looking for a daddy or a deft musical partner, Thea knew they weren’t right for each other. Still, she couldn’t leave now simply to get Margot away from him. Thea had to be selfish, even if her friend was in distress and she was asking her to endure it. For her own personal timeline. “There has to be a friend you can stay with?”
“Not unless I can stay with you,” Margot said, shaking her head, then burying her face in her hands. “The house is going on the market tomorrow, and I don’t want to be here when movers pack up all my childhood memories and seal them into boxes. To think, just last week, I thought I was having the best summer of my life.”
Thea felt the same. July had turned to August with so many possibilities opening up for her. She’d started drawing artwork to sell in California, compiling elaborate drawings of animals along with funny snippets of what was going through their heads. Her illustration for the newspaper advice column could be chosen by Julianna Lazure the following week. Thea had a glamorous new friend in Margot, and she had a plan to leave East Hampton. She was moving to the West Coast. Shelly hadn’t even laughed when Thea said she might want to be an illustrator—maybe even an animator—and under her encouragement, Thea decided she’d visit the library to research art schools she might attend in San Francisco, if she made enough money to pay her way.
Then there was Felix, the nicest guy she’d ever met.
Still, happiness could vanish in an instant, and when it did, Thea knew how unsteady it felt.
“The way you feel right now is temporary.” Thea attempted to sound wise. “It will make you stronger. Hardship always makes us stronger.”
Margot waved her off. “I don’t care about being strong.”
As empathetic as she was, Thea knew she wouldn’t leave tomorrow. How would she explain her sudden departure to Felix?
They’d circled the yard and returned to the pool, both of them sitting in loungers. Thea stared into the bottom of the water. “It’s just too soon for me.”
Margot glared at her. “But I can’t stay here.”
Thea wished then that the pool was an ocean, that a big wave would sweep her out to sea. What she hadn’t told Margot, what she couldn’t admit out loud, is that every night this week she had gone to bed with her stomach clenched in knots so tight it felt like a sailor tied them. She couldn’t shake her unease with Margot’s character. Did Margot even have an inner compass? Even with their cross-country route outlined in that road atlas they found in Margot’s parents’ library bureau, would they ever get to Chicago or Denver or San Francisco without drama following?
Thea knew that Margot genuinely cared for her. Giving her the opportunity to try her hand at the Dear Virgie logo was practically philanthropic. But moving up their trip seemed too convenient. Margot would be on the other side of the country before anyone questioned her more seriously about the missing jewelry. By the time investigators landed on her powerful mother’s doorstep, Julianna Lazure would be ready to shut down any lines of inquiry.
“I’m sorry. I can’t go, Margot,” Thea said. “Not tomorrow.”
She flicked her eyes back to Thea, the mascara making a mess of her face. “You can bring Felix. It’s fine.”
Thea was instantly irritated at what Margot was inferring. She sighed, then pulled gently at the hummingbird locket with her fingertips. “It’s not that I don’t want to go. You know that.”
Even with her doubts, Thea cared about Margot too much. But it was true that the timing of meeting Felix had been lousy. Leaving to go to California meant leaving behind the possibility of him. What if he was her one chance at romantic love? If Thea just had a few more weeks to explore her feelings for him, she would know whether or not leaving him behind would be the biggest mistake of her life. Thea continued: “I know you’re upset about your parents, and rightly so—but I can’t turn my life upside down because you need me to. I still have responsibilities.”
Margot wrapped herself tighter in her kimono. “You and your responsibilities. You hate those responsibilities, and no one is making you stay but you.”
Again, it was true. Thea could march home, pack her bags in a jiffy, and drive off into the sunset with Margot tomorrow. But she wouldn’t do that to Cara. While Cara knew Thea planned to take a trip, Thea had presented it as something happening in the far-off future—not an absence as close as tomorrow. “Can you give me at least two weeks? I’ll try to be ready by mid-August.”
“Fine.” Margot rose off the lounger and crossed her arms, her white-blond eyebrows arching into sharp mountain peaks. “But you should know that these next couple weeks will be the hardest of my life, and I’ll always blame you for making me live through it.”
* * *
Thea woke up in her bed the next morning, panicked that she’d overslept. She threw on shorts, buttoned up a floral blouse, and rushed down to cook breakfast. In the kitchen, she found Dale wiping Cara’s nose, her eyes red, her father rubbing her back. There were four empty cereal bowls in the sink, juice glasses cleared from the table.
“We were just talking about some changes around here,” Dale said. “Becky is going to move in here with her son.”
“But we don’t have the room,” Thea protested, shooting her sister a look. Cara ran from the table into Thea’s arms. Outside the kitchen window Thea could see Becky. Her son tossed her a football, the woman catching the pigskin and throwing it back.
“We’ll make the room.” Dale screwed the cap on the orange juice and pushed it away from him, like the discussion was closed, too.
“How could you do this, Daddy?” Cara wailed, and Thea hugged her sister tight while Dale stared out the kitchen window, sighing.
I can’t leave now—I can’t leave ever, Thea thought to herself, even as she knew with all of her being that she had to get out of this house, too.
Chapter Twenty
July 1977
As Thea steered her station wagon along the dirt road up to Eothen in Montauk, she was struck by the fact that there wasn’t one house on the artist’s compound. There were six. One main house—with white planking and white shutters—that sat atop the cliff overlooking the ocean, and five small matching cottages around it. Today was cooler than it had been earlier in July, the ocean whitecapped and rough, and Thea was happy she’d chosen her white button-down blouse and denim bell-bottoms. After she parked the car, uncertain which house to approach to find the woman who had called her on the phone, Thea checked her teeth in the mirror. No food bits. Then she applied lipstick, a pale peach that wouldn’t stand out too much. She wiped it off with a tissue from her glove box and tried a brighter pink instead. She regretted it immediately, quickly dabbing it off and reapplying the peach color.
Thea emerged from her car into the salt air, her long hair blowing about her face. For a second, she considered driving back home where Margot waited; her friend had practically forced her to come to the interview today. She and Margot had stayed up late on the patio last night talking about how Thea wanted to pursue her creative side, what types of art she’d always loved, why it was so scary to put yourself out there. Thea told Margot that while she wanted to meet Andy Warhol, she worried he’d think her drawings too amateur. “At least see what the job is about,” Margot had pleaded, her arm feeling better on her steady diet of aspirin. “You know when you go to a hotel and you try out being a different person for a day? Well, that’s what you’re doing.”
The interview had seemed easier to pull off with Felix in the city; she didn’t tell him anything about the potential job before he left early that morning. She wasn’t sure she’d even get it. Inhaling the crisp ocean air, Thea tucked the portfolio she threw together under her arm. It contained a few of her newer drawings, nothing remarkable, and the realization made her feel like an imposter standing there. Still, she let herself wonder if this job could turn into something worthwhile. An apprenticeship, maybe. Something from her wildest dreams. Maybe she could start out as an assistant and soon enough be helping Mr. Warhol.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Thea thought, walking away from her car so she might slow her thoughts. It wasn’t as though she could really work anyway, since she only had free time when Penny was at camp or school, Dale couldn’t babysit very often, and she doubted the pay would be enough to cover a sitter.
