Endless Summer, page 27
Kate is nearly to the beach when she sees a young couple huddled together, obviously trying to make a clandestine escape.
“Blair?” Kate says. Blair is with… Joey Whalen. Surprise, surprise.
“Mom?” Blair says. Her face has always been easy to read and her expression now is one of sheer horror. She’s been caught. With Joey.
Joey doesn’t look caught, however. Joey is too smooth to ever look caught. “Hey, Mrs. Levin, Mr. Levin, Mr. Crimmins,” he says. He spins around and flings his arm open like a game-show host, as though the beach and the fire and the assembled crowd and even the ocean beyond are their grand prize. “Welcome!”
Blair and Joey together—is that such a bad thing? Kate wonders. Joey Whalen is much better suited to Blair’s temperament than Angus ever was.
Joey and Blair dutifully escort the old people with their brittle bones down to the sand.
Blair takes Kate’s elbow. “What are you doing here, Mom?”
Kate wants to say, You are hardly one to be asking questions. But instead, she smiles. “I came to party,” she says, and this sounds so absurd, they both laugh. “Would you fetch me a drink, please, dear, and let your brother and sisters know I’m here.”
“There’s nothing to drink except keg beer,” Blair says.
“That’s fine,” Kate says. “I’ll have a beer.”
“You will?”
“I will.”
Blair returns with a foamy beer in a plastic cup, and clearly she has also made the announcement because soon Kate is surrounded by her children—Tiger, along with Magee, both of whom look happier and more relaxed than Kate has seen them in years; Kirby, who Kate expected to be angry but who instead throws her arms around her mother in what appears to be glee; and Jessie, who’s with an incredibly handsome, upright young man whom Kate recognizes as Pick Crimmins.
The song changes and a cry goes up. The kids form a circle and start dancing. This, Kate knows, is her cue to exit, but suddenly David is on one side of her and Bill Crimmins is on the other and they, too, are part of the circle.
The lyrics announce the obvious: We are family!
Kirby dances in the middle of the circle and everyone cheers her on. She is replaced by Jessie, and Jessie is replaced by Magee.
Magee can really dance. How did Kate not know this?
Magee heads straight for Kate with her arms outstretched.
“Your turn, darling,” David says, placing an encouraging hand on Kate’s back.
My turn? Kate thinks. Surely not. Exalta would never in a million years have been caught in the middle of a circle dancing to a disco song.
It takes only a second for Kate to realize that she isn’t Exalta. She is Kate Nichols Foley Levin, the new matriarch of this gathered family. She is in charge now and she will make her own decisions.
Kate passes her cup to David and dances through the sand to the center of the circle. Her family cheers.
That’s right, she thinks. She may be old, but she still has some surprises left.
Summer of ’89
(Read with Summer of ’69 and “Summer of ’79”)
This novella has never been published!
As soon as I published “Summer of ’79,” the requests flooded in: Please write “Summer of ’89.” I was happy to oblige, because the 1980s were “my” decade, though I do feel like the “true”’80s were 1981 to 1987, my junior-high and high-school years. My sister and I would get dropped at the roller-skating rink; I raced home from the bus every afternoon to watch General Hospital (especially the week that Luke and Laura got married). I mourned the loss of my father in a plane crash in November of 1985; I fell in love for the first time; I played clarinet in the marching band; I was inducted into the National Honor Society, then got in big trouble on a class trip. I worked in Men’s Accessories at Gimbels at the King of Prussia mall and drove to and from work in a 1976 Buick Skylark that I shared with my twin brother. I was voted Most Likely to Succeed. I decided to attend Johns Hopkins and major in creative writing—and while all this was happening, I was listening to the radio, specifically 93.3 WMMR out of Philadelphia. In 1982, I loved Rick Springfield. In 1985, I discovered Bruce Springsteen, thanks to a babysitting job. In 1987, I loved Billy Joel (I spent all night waiting for tickets outside the mall) and Cat Stevens and Elton John.
In the summer of 1989, between my sophomore and junior years at Johns Hopkins (also immortalized as the summer of the Indigo Girls), I lived outside Boston with my aunt and uncle, and I would drive to my family’s house on the Cape on the weekends. I worked at a summer-enrichment program at UMass Boston, where I tutored gifted middle-school students from underserved public schools. What I remember best about that summer is that it rained every single weekend—but in this novella, the sun is shining!
1. SHE DRIVES ME CRAZY
Jessica Levin (rhymes with heaven) endures “planes, trains, and automobiles”—the subway from her Midtown law office to JFK, a flight from New York to Boston, a bus from Boston to Cape Cod—and reaches the ferry to Nantucket with five minutes to spare.
Phew! When the bus got stuck in traffic going over the Sagamore Bridge, Jessie became convinced she was going to miss her boat, and the next forty-five minutes played out like a thriller—would she make it or wouldn’t she?
She would! She’s here! The adrenaline coursing through Jessie propels her all the way to the top deck, where she liked to sit when she was a kid.
She collapses in a molded plastic chair in the midst of what feels like a wild Friday night at the Odeon; she has unwittingly joined party central. Leaning against the railing is some guy in Nantucket Reds, an alligator shirt, and a navy blazer with a can of Meister Bräu in each hand, a boom box wedged between his L. L. Bean moccasins, and a Brat Pack snarl on his face. Jessie overhears a girl in a snug neon-pink minidress call him “Blowman”—no surprise there.
Blowman appears to be a few years older than Jessie; he’s probably a bond trader at Drexel Burnham, where all the criminals work. While she’s assessing him, he catches her eye and offers her one of the beers in his hand.
“You look like you could use an attitude adjustment,” he says.
Jessie glares at him over the tops of her Wayfarers. “No, thank you.”
Blowman recoils like Jessie has tried to bite his nose and she nearly laughs. She loathes all Wall Street types and has made it her job to hold them accountable. She would love to tell Blowman that she has just represented three women in a sexual-harassment case against the investment bank behemoth Arnolds and Major and only the day before won her clients a million-dollar decision.
One million dollars! The decision had been called “landmark” that very morning in the Post. Suddenly, it seems not impossible that Jessie will be made a senior partner before she turns thirty-five. The only thing better than the win is that the opposing counsel was Theo Feigelbaum, Jessie’s boyfriend during her first and second years at law school. The reason Jessie took the case for the three plaintiffs (other than wanting to help out womankind) was that she knew Theo was Arnolds and Major’s in-house counsel and she couldn’t resist going head-to-head with him.
The boom box between Blowman’s feet plays a halfway decent mixtape—Billy Joel, Dire Straits, the Cure. Jessie does need an attitude adjustment, because despite the million-dollar decision and despite slicing Theo as thin as the corned beef he used to love so much, Jessie is filled with leaden dread about the weekend ahead. She’s heading to the island to celebrate her niece’s and nephew’s twentieth birthday; Jessie has been dreaming about the beach, about floating in her mother’s swimming pool and playing tennis against her nephew George at the Field and Oar Club. But the night before, Jessie’s longtime boyfriend, Pick Crimmins, received a phone call with some unsettling news. Now Jessie suspects her weekend will be spent trying to keep her mother, Kate, from committing murder.
And Pick isn’t there to help her. He left that morning for West Berlin, where he’s representing the UN’s Economic and Social Council; he thinks it will be only a matter of months, maybe weeks, until the Berlin Wall comes down.
Jessie sighs. She misses him already. The conflict between East and West Germany might be easier to sort out than what Jessie is facing on Nantucket.
After disembarking, Jessie watches as her fellow passengers are picked up by friends in beat-up Jeeps or frosted-haired matrons in woody wagons or—in the case of Blowman—by a shiny beige Humvee with tinted windows that very clearly has never seen a day of combat. Soon Jessie is the only one left waiting, her weekend bag and her bulging briefcase at her feet. She looks toward the terminal, wondering if she’ll have to go in and use the pay phone. She called her mother immediately after Pick shared his news the night before. But it was late and Kate had just gotten home from an evening out with her friend Bitsy Dunscombe. They had gone for a “Madaket mystery or two” at the Westender, and because Jessie wanted to deliver Pick’s news when Kate was sober, she ended up telling her mother only that she would be arriving the next day on the five o’clock ferry.
Kate might have had three or four Madaket mysteries, Jessie thinks, because it seems she’s forgotten all about her promise that “someone” would drive “all the way to town” to pick Jessie up.
Jessie’s father, David, had died of prostate cancer in January, and Jessie is, frankly, alarmed at how tidily Kate has dealt with her grief. She is having a far easier time of it than Jessie, who still cries several times a week in a stall of the firm’s ladies’ room. Kate, meanwhile, seems lighter, sprightlier, possibly even happier than she’s ever been.
That happiness will be dampened once Jessie talks to her.
Jessie wanted to call one of her siblings to share the burden of what Pick had learned, but Blair is in Paris doing research for her dissertation on Edith Wharton and Tiger and Magee have four little boys ages nine to three, which is the definition of “having their hands full.” So Jessie set aside a months-long grudge and called Kirby out in Los Angeles, where it was still a reasonable hour—but she got Kirby’s answering machine. Despite Jessie’s vow not to speak to Kirby until she issued an apology for what she’d done, Jessie left a desperate message. “Kirby, it’s Jessie, I really need to talk to you. Really, Kirby, so please call me back, no matter how late.”
Kirby had made no secret of the fact that she moved to California to escape her family. How she described them to the fabulous Hollywood people she met wasn’t something Jessie liked to dwell on. She probably claimed she was an orphan.
Was that harsh? Maybe—but Jessie lay in bed awake half the night and Kirby didn’t call back.
Kate has been billing this coming weekend as a “family reunion.” (Do two more troublesome words exist? Jessie wonders.) While it’s true that Tiger and Magee and the boys will be arriving tomorrow, and that George, who is interning for Massachusetts congressman Bill Welby, is bringing his “new girlfriend,” and that Genevieve is spending the entire summer living on Nantucket with Kate, it can’t properly be called a family reunion when neither Blair nor Kirby will be there. Jessie will be the only one of her mother’s daughters present. This feels like a setup.
Just as Jessie is starting to regret not taking Blowman up on his offer of a beer, the family’s rattletrap car pulls into the parking lot—a 1967 International Scout that still somehow runs.
Behind the wheel is… it takes Jessie a second to realize that the person with the hot-pink flattop crew cut, a left ear pierced with safety pins, and a tattoo of a toadstool on her forearm is her niece, Genevieve Foley Whalen.
Things are even worse than Jessie thought.
“Genevieve, hey!” Jessie says, her mind reeling. The hair, the piercings, the tattoo—it’s a lot to take in. What does Blair think about this? Jessie wonders. What does Kate think about it? And why didn’t anyone warn Jessie that Genevieve looks like someone pulled from the bottom of a mosh pit? Jessie has tried to be a good aunt, monitoring the twins’ interests and styles over the years. In middle school, Genevieve was into the Preppy Handbook; she wore Fair Isle sweaters, a grosgrain-ribbon headband, pearl earrings. Then Genevieve fell prey to Madonna fashion—lace hair bows and fifty rubber bracelets. When Jessie saw Genevieve two summers ago, before she started at Brown, she had been wearing acid-washed jeans shorts and a banana clip in her unfortunately permed hair.
“Hey.” Genevieve stares straight ahead, her black-lipsticked mouth in an impatient line.
Jessie is tempted to make a comment about Genevieve’s appearance, but she practices her lawyering skills and considers Genevieve’s motives. Why the piercings? Why the tattoo? Is it just teenage rebellion, which Kirby perfected a generation earlier? Or is it self-loathing?
The twins have experienced their share of upheaval. Blair and Angus split when the kids were in fourth grade and then Blair married Angus’s brother, Joey Whalen. Blair had tried to normalize this—Joey was the brother she should have been with all along, she claimed. He was the charming, outgoing one, whereas Angus was strange, antisocial, and too smart for his own good. This may have been so, but the arrangement left her children with a stepfather who was also their uncle. It had a whiff of incest about it until it was explained to people. (Of course, the same might be said about Jessie and Pick’s relationship, since they are both the half siblings of Blair, Kirby, and Tiger, albeit on different sides.)
An anthropologist would have a field day at their family reunion.
Angus cut all ties with his brother, communicated with Blair only through their attorneys, and refused to ever travel back to Massachusetts. For a while, George and Genevieve flew to Houston on their vacations, but George stopped going his freshman year in high school, saying he’d rather stay home and hang out with his friends. Genevieve, who was proving to be a formidable intellect herself, continued to travel to Houston, where Angus would bring her to work with him at NASA headquarters. He was the space shuttle program’s manager on the Challenger mission that was scheduled to launch in January 1986. Genevieve had gotten special permission to take a week off from school so she could meet Angus in Cape Canaveral and watch the launch in person—from the control tower, no less!
Jessie remembers the whole country’s excitement about the Challenger launch; Christa McAuliffe, a civilian teacher, would be aboard. Jessie was disappointed when they delayed the time of the launch, because she had court at eleven and wouldn’t be able to watch like she’d planned. When her case adjourned and Jessie stepped out into the courthouse hallway, she sensed something wrong. People everywhere were huddled together, crying. A bailiff she’d become friendly with named Moses took Jessie’s arm and said, “Have you heard?”
The Challenger had exploded. All seven crew members were dead.
Jessie hailed a cab and took it back to her Midtown office. She tried to call Blair at home, but the line was busy. Jessie had to remind herself that Genevieve and Angus were physically safe—but what about mentally? Could you watch that kind of epic tragedy in person and survive with your psyche intact?
Apparently, Angus had expressed repeated concerns about launching the shuttle in such cold weather; the temperatures in Cape Canaveral that day had been just above freezing, the delays due to ice. Angus was specifically worried about the rubber O-rings in the solid rocket booster not forming a seal in such low temperatures. But Angus had a reputation for being a nervous Nellie and his superiors at NASA were receiving political pressure to just launch the damn thing, already.
Immediately following the disaster, Angus took a leave of absence from NASA; the following September, he taught classes at Rice University but made it only halfway through the semester before he had a nervous breakdown.
Genevieve, meanwhile, returned home to Boston with a certain macabre celebrity, and she embraced it. Her college essay took the form of a letter from the Challenger project manager to NASA administrators explaining all the reasons why the launch should have been delayed. That essay got Genevieve into Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and Brown.
It was at the start of Genevieve’s freshman year at Brown—and George’s at Babson—that Blair discovered Joey Whalen had a mistress up in Montreal. By the time the twins came home for Thanksgiving, Blair had kicked Joey out and filed for divorce.
George handled this news with the same equanimity he’d displayed his entire life. Some people were just like that, Jessie had learned; they sat in the middle of the seesaw and were unbothered when it tipped one way or the other.
Genevieve, however, slid right off the end and into a figurative mud puddle. She started dating the drummer in a band called Fungus that played the underground punk clubs in Providence and Pawtucket.
“She told me she’s done something to her hair that I’m not going to like,” Blair reported to Jessie over the phone.
“Something like another perm?” Jessie said. She, too, had broken down and gotten a perm and now she looked like Gilda Radner if Gilda had stuck her finger in a socket. “Or crazy like a mohawk?” The phrase underground punk clubs was not encouraging.
“She didn’t elaborate.”
Blair had sounded pretty sanguine as she relayed this news. Jessie said, “Do you think you should go down there overnight, maybe take her to dinner?”
Blair laughed. “She won’t have dinner with me, Jessie. She says I’m the reason she’s so messed up.” Blair sighed. “Boys are so much easier.”
Jessie had wanted to reply that not only was this answer a cop-out, it also sounded disturbingly like something their own mother might say.
Jessie had considered taking the train to Providence to lay eyes on Genevieve herself but she was busy with work and she didn’t want to overstep her bounds, and she came up with any number of other excuses for not making time to see her niece, so this state Genevieve is now in may be partially Jessie’s fault.
“How’s your summer been?” Jessie asks. “Are you working?”
